What Nathan Cofnas Got Wrong About Human Intelligence

 

Jason Arday may have been exposed as a deceiver, but Nathan Cofnas, the man who helped expose Arday, gets his interpretation of human intelligence wrong. Cofnas has built his reputation on saying that genetic differences contribute to average differences in cognitive ability between human populations, and that the evidence suggests that environmental factors do not fully explain group differences in cognitive test performance.

He is referring to, among other things, Harvard’s Students for Fair Admissions case, which showed that black students were about 12–14% of the class at the time, but under pure SAT + GPA admissions, black representation would fall to around 0.7%. That part is correct. But Cofnas used the 0.7% figure to argue that if admissions were based only on merit, black representation would collapse, therefore the gap is partly genetic.

It’s true that black representation would severely diminish as things stand, but there is no evidence that the gap of these selected groups is anything other than environmental. The error Cofnas is making is like saying that children who grow up near airports have worse sleep, so they must have genetically inferior circadian rhythms. Or it’s like saying that people who can’t afford pianos are worse at piano playing, therefore they’re genetically less musical.

When environments are equalised, the gaps shrink dramatically, and in many cases all-but disappear. For example, black African immigrant students in the UK outperform almost every demographic group academically, which undermines the genetic‑deficit hypothesis. There are plenty of studies that show an environmental performance gap between what are wrongly labelled ‘races’, and that when the environment changes, the gap shrinks or vanishes. Moreover, the Flynn effect shows that IQ scores rose in the UK by approximately 30 points across the 20th century, mainly because the environments changed, especially around lifestyle and nutrition, like what happened to the Dutch and height.

And it would be very easy for Cofnas to find this out, so I’m not sure why he misinterprets performance gaps under unequal conditions as genetic differences under equal conditions. Modern genetics, neuroscience, and developmental psychology are against him here. If a group can outperform under different environmental conditions, then the indication is that it is not genetics at play.

Lastly, and what I’d say is the most compelling reason to reject the genetic factor, is that lower IQ in people with different skin colour or ethnicity is not what we’d expect genetically from an evolutionary standpoint either, as there is no reason to expect lower cognitive ability in any human population, save for environmentally. Genetic differences in cognitive ability between human populations would require long isolation and strong selection, and human groups have simply not been isolated long enough, nor subjected to the kinds of selection pressures, that would produce such meaningful genetic differences in general intelligence.