Scientific research on IQ riles anti-racists

The hatred has turned against an Asian, heterosexual man for the first time. So far, only white, heterosexual men have been the target of the attacks. But a petition demanding that the Vice President of Michigan University, Professor Steve Hsu, be removed from his post has been signed by more than 500 university members, including 100 professors. Hsu is accused of racism and sexism.

The initiator of the petition, Kevin Bird is a doctoral student himself and calls himself a “democratic socialist”. He has welcomed the Black Lives Matter mass protests and tweeted that he was proud to be an American for the first time in a long time, given the arson and destruction of “monuments of white supremacy”.

Hsu has become the target of the unprecedented anti-racism craze because of his research. He is a physicist and writes on a variety of topics on his blog. Of course, many posts deal with physics, but innovations in computer science are also presented, such as neural networks, artificial intelligence and quantum computers.

Hsu himself has been an anti-racism activist, because he has criticized the politics of affirmative action in higher education. In the US, Asians get the best grades, followed by whites, again followed by blacks. In the context of “equality” and “diversity”, the aptitude tests at universities are made massively more difficult for Asians, but much easier for black people in order to represent the demography of the US in the student body.

Racist discrimination against Asians is happily accepted by the left, presumably because Asian educational success refutes the myth that the American educational system has disadvantaged non-whites.

Hsu’s publications in the field of intelligence research and genetics has attracted the most criticism although his expertise is undisputed: the Chinese government employed him as a consultant for the so-called genome-wide association studies (GWAS).

Many of the findings are not politically correct, but are based on a broad base of facts. This shows that high intelligence is a rather masculine quality – which explains the lack of female Nobel Prize winners. His notion that intelligence is primarily the result of genes, is also under attack.

For 40 years now, a consensus has been established in psychology that it is primarily heredity that determines whether people are clever or stupid. Identical twins who grew up in separate parents’ homes are more similar in their intelligence than ordinary siblings who live under one roof. Adopted children also resemble their biological parents in intelligence more than their adoptive parents.

However, such approaches show that genes influence IQ, but not which genes are involved. In recent years, this research gap has been closed by the GWAS mentioned above.

This research approach creates databases with the genome of hundreds of thousands (mostly white) people. Their intelligence can be estimated from the biographical data on the highest educational attainment.

Computer analyses are used to investigate which genes occur more frequently in persons with above-average intelligence and less frequently in less intelligent individuals. Candidate genes can be identified, but their influence on intelligence is only considered certain if it can be confirmed that the gene mentioned is activated in the brain tissue. A gene that is associated with higher intelligence, but is active in liver tissue, for example, could be a coincidence – or an indication that proteins that are produced in the liver play a crucial role in the maturation of the brain.

Conversely, a person’s genetic makeup can be used to create a polygenetic score that can roughly predict a person’s IQ. The accuracy of this score is higher for whites than for populations of different skin tones – which suggests that there are differences in the intelligence genes.

However, these differences alone cannot prove that Africans are less intelligent than Asians. Different genes can also lead to the same overall intelligence, just as 6 + 4 and 7 + 3 result in 10. The equality dogma which maintains that there are no such differences, has nevertheless been uprooted by these findings.

Hsu was founder and CEO of SafeWeb, which pioneered SSL VPN technology which later become standard in commercial-grade firewalls. He is also a founder of Genomic Prediction, a company that develops technology for advanced genetic testing. Based on his research results, Hsu predicts that one day he will be able to create people through genetic interventions whose intelligence far exceeds that of Albert Einstein.

Such predictions may or may not be true – but according to anti-racists they do justify a petition to fire Hsu.