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.

On Defining Genius

My wife and I are watching Celebrity Traitors, and we’re frequently amused by how often the other participants refer to Stephen Fry as a ‘genius’. Stephen Fry is not, of course, a genius. He’s very knowledgeable, and quite intelligent, but not a genius. The overuse of the term genius tends to happen when people are too generous about what a genius actually is. It’s a bit like a dwarf claiming a person of slightly above average height is a giant. So, anyway, my sweetheart and I proceeded to pause Celebrity Traitors and discuss what constitutes a genius. “Fear not”, I said, “the Preface in my book The Genius of the Invisible God, and one of my letters in Dear Treasured You, briefly discusses this very thing.” 😊

So, I emailed it to my sweetheart, and thought it might be of interest here too. This is how I view ‘genius’.  

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Excerpt from Dear Treasured You......

I don't think it is the case that a person is a genius. I think genius is a cosmic, metaphysical force - like love, beauty, justice, grace, mercy, joy and fulfilment - it's something greater than us that we tap into. Genius seems to me to be a comment about not just the within, but the without too - it's a term that rightly confers glory on individual accomplishment, but alongside which shines light on qualities that transcend the immediacy of the achievement. You can commend individuals for permanently changing the way that humanity perceives the world, and the high praise and regard is fully deserved. But in doing so, we are also, in a sense, giving them credit for discovering something that appears to be already existent but awaiting discovery. Shakespeare took playwriting to a level never surpassed before or since; Darwin helped revolutionise biology, Einstein did the same with physics; and Mozart did the same with music. But while there's no doubt that these minds, and many like them, have made huge contributions to our world - those contributions seem more like revelations that tap into something more ineffably profound and mysterious than the constituent parts of the contributions themselves.

I believe each of us can pursue our own excellence of self and draw profoundly from the well of potential within us, which involves the gradual bringing out of human qualities that most people believe are reserved for a few hundred special people. That is the scent of genius that we are forever following in the trailing winds of its mysteries. The art of words, numbers, visualisation and music convey deep truths about reality, and form a body of shared experience around which intellects and artists revolve.

Here's an interesting corollary of the above point. Many of the geniuses of yesteryear - in poetry, philosophy, art, literature, music and film - did not acquire the status of 'genius' until years (sometimes centuries) after their work was produced. It's as though humanity had to grow into its own shoes in recognising the wider picture that surrounds the genius of the contributions. We think we have uncovered genius when we come across talents like Shakespeare and Einstein, who can give exhibition to such extraordinary human qualities – either with brilliant use of language, or mathematical formulae in science, or something of that kind. But while it is true that some people are endowed with higher mental acuity and greater vision than others, genius is vast enough and prevalent enough to encourage the greatest exploration of the brilliant potential inside yourself. This might be the strangest paradox about genius; its provenance belongs without, but it can only be personally cultivated from drawing out the greatest potential from within.

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Excerpt from The Genius of the Invisible God.....

One of the ways I define genius is that the average, good and great producers of their craft do what others might be able to do with similar time, effort and creativity - whereas the genius produces craft that nearly all others would never produce with similar time, effort and creativity. In other words, a genius operates not by doing more within a dimension, but by dipping his or her toe into a new one that others didn’t see existed. Given the same tools, time, and imagination, the genius extracts results that the rest of us couldn’t even conceive were possible. When you consider real geniuses – like Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, da Vinci, Shakespeare, Mozart, etc - you’ll notice that where other intelligent and creative people improve upon what is, the genius taps into a profound landscape that reflects what could be - and makes it real before the world even has conception or language for it.

Engaging with the mind of a genius – if one is encouraged to pursue it to the maximum potential - is rather like sensing the gradual enlightenment as one watches the glistening night sky turn into a beautiful sunlight next morning. For ourselves as we watch the light illuminate the sky, the hours may seem like a long hunting trip; times of fighting the cold wind and steep climbs are interrupted with intoxicating moments of suspense and delight at what one finds when the uniformity of space and time is jolted by a new perspective, as we get more enthralled by the object of our chase.

I believe that the closer we can get to feeding our own genius and developing our potential, the more we will start to see that the world is full of philosophical cheats and deceptions – many of which begin as honest enquiries and steadfast endeavours. I use the term ‘feeding our genius’ because in this book I am going to speak of genius as being more than just a qualitative part of a human’s abilities – for I believe that whatever ‘genius’ we possess internally, either through inspiration or perspiration, is always being fed by a bigger form of genius out there in the conceptual landscape. We are always extrapolating from bigger things than ourselves.

William Burroughs drew a distinction in art between tonal and nagual art. The tonal universe is the more empirically predictable cause-and-effect universe, whereas the nagual is the less foreseeable, intractable elements of reality that burst through unannounced and beyond the radar of prediction. Burroughs saw the nagual as more unpredictable and harder to creatively construct than the more predictable and manageable patterns of the tonal. As he reflected, "For the nagual to gain access, the door of chance must be open".

Whether it be the painter with his formulae of form and colour applied to a canvas, or the writer with the congregation of words to paper, the true ‘genius’ of creativity is not in the person doing it, but it is being continually re-crafted by tapping into something transcendent of the self. This isn't a scientific viewpoint, it is an artistic feeling. Norman Mailer once suggested that William Burroughs was "possessed by genius" as opposed to ‘being’ a genius or even ‘possessing’ genius. The dynamic spontaneity of ‘genius’ is nagual according to Mailer and Burroughs, and to be possessed ‘by’ genius is to tap into something altogether special and grander than ourselves. At first glance, it might seem like something that finds itself located in the collective nature of human minds, in that we share it, and all, in our own way, seek to take possession of it. But even the collective human minds are obtaining the genius from somewhere much grander than themselves - it is too grand to be contained merely within the human species, stupendous as it is, nonetheless.

The Circuit Board Of Mental Excellence

Minds are perhaps best thought of like circuit boards - and a coherent, consistent, accurate worldview is represented by a set of small lights that all stay illuminated in conjunction with truth and facts. Information, in the form of propositions, is like enlarging the circuit board, and increasing the assembly of data circuits and the copper that delivers electricity to illuminate the lights.

The size of the light display depends on the dimensions of the worldview, which itself primarily depends on the time, effort and intellectual rigour put in to the process of building a larger and larger circuit board that can facilitate an ever-increasing light display. A genius polymath may have a light display about the size of a football field; a highly intelligent polymath may have one about the size of a tennis court; and an average person may have one about the size of a small back garden.

Now here's the key thing. You can increase the dimensions of the light display by learning more, and by increasing the connectivity of your mental artillery - and to some extent, most people do this on their life journey. But what they don't do enough is stand back and check the light display to see how many of the bulbs have gone out. Nor do they step back and observe clusters of light patterns that have gaps because the additional bulbs required to illuminate the pattern more comprehensively are missing.

A large, light display with all the bulbs illuminated is extremely rare - but it ought to be the primary objective for anyone who strives for truth, facts, proficiency of reasoning and excellence of mind. The beauty of the light display is that its consistency of illumination is exhibition to the fact that one's ideas, thoughts, views and propositions fit nicely into the rest of the circuit board of experience. If you keep getting things right, the new beliefs operate consistently with the structural workings of the circuit board, not disrupting the electricity to other items on the board. But if you get things wrong, and introduce faulty viewpoints into the equation, you disrupt the electricity flow, both to local illumination clusters, but also to isolated bulbs elsewhere in the display.

Naturally, given the complexity of the mind, and the complexity of everything there is to know, and the near infinite ways to perceive reality, this is a really epistemologically intractable model of analysis. But it isn't that difficult to identify practical examples of how the malfunctioning of the circuit board may occur, as most people host mutually contradictory or incongruent ideas, especially due to identity-based dispositions, cognitive biases, emotional self-preservation and propensities for over-simplicity.

For example, suppose you're a Christian with a fairly comprehensive understanding of scripture, but because of your upbringing you've been infected with the cultural virus of young earth creationism, with a limited recourse for correctives. The cluster of lights pertaining to Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics is going to be affected as the connection between the conductors supplying the electrical power will be shorted. The high current flow of falsity will put out some of the theological lights, and prevent other bulbs from being added to the cluster. This will mean others see you as a Christian with inadequacies in several areas of discourse - especially when it comes to Biblical interpretation of text and other related areas of science and how the edifice operates and functions - which will have a corollary effect on the consistency of your worldview, and on the impression and influence you have on the world as a Christian.

Here's another example. Suppose you're quite economically and politically astute, but you become duped into believing that there is a systematically unfair gender pay gap in the UK, or that price controls on housing might alleviate the shortage. As with the first example, your circuit board will be negatively impacted, lights will go out in various areas across the display, and there will be patches in the clusters that never get the bulbs required for a full illumination of the pattern. You might start believing that price controls in other areas of the economy will start to do some further good; or you might start over-exaggerating the extent to which climate change alarmism is fruitful; or you might take your eye of the principles behind the law of least effort; or you might develop too much a victim-mentality, and so forth.

I could offer loads more examples, but I think the gist of this is crystal clear: there is always a price to pay for bad ideas, false beliefs and inadequate reasoning - and these things infect; first at the individual level, then at the familial level, then at the community level, and then more widely across societies and even nations as falsehoods spread memetically.

By equal measure, though, there are always rewards for building a prodigious circuit board that provides the power to a fully illuminated light display that consistently, coherently, factually and truthfully supports the ideas, views and beliefs associated with all the major and minor subjects, and the interconnectedness between them all. In fact, I'll take it further: there is no better way to live, and no more rewarding and no more necessary and no more morally and intellectually compelled pursuits for any human being.

Let's Face It, Human Intelligence Is Boltzmannian As Well As Gaussian

In terms of how intelligence is distributed across the nation, people often assume a normal distribution - the familiar Gaussian bell curve of intelligence - because that’s the shape used in IQ scoring. But that curve is constructed, not discovered. IQ tests are norm‑referenced: the scoring system forces the results into a bell curve so that 68% fall within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% within two, and 99.7% within three. That’s a property of the measurement, not necessarily of the underlying phenomenon.

If instead we look not at measured cognitive ability but at applied intelligence - the extent to which people actually use their cognitive potential - the distribution across the UK seems to me far more skewed. In fact, it resembles something closer to an exponentially decaying curve. Not a literal Boltzmann distribution (which applies to particles in thermal equilibrium), but a curve with the same shape: heavily weighted toward the lower end, with a long, thin tail of high performers.

The analogy is this: if the y‑axis is number of people and the x‑axis is degree of applied intelligence, then very few people sit at the extreme high end, a moderate number occupy the middle, and a very large proportion cluster toward the lower end. Replace particles with people and energy with cognitive engagement, and I think you get a surprisingly good metaphor for everyday experience.

So, for example, on a scale of 1–100, where 1 is very low applied intelligence and 100 represents the most brilliant minds, my experience suggests that the vast majority of the UK population sits below 50, with a very large proportion below 25. Roughly - and these figures may need slight adjustment, but not much - the distribution might look like this:

1–25 (50%) 
26–50 (30%) 
51–75 (15%) 
76–100 (5%)

This is not a bell curve. Compare it to height or weight. Height is approximately Gaussian because most adults fall between 4ft 9 and 6ft 7, with relatively few outliers. Weight is more skewed, but still clusters around a central tendency. Applied intelligence, however, does not seem to follow the same pattern. And although democratic and egalitarian instincts encourage people to believe otherwise, everyday observation suggests a very different landscape.

What makes this even more interesting is that many skewed, exponentially decaying distributions in human behaviour arise from biased random walks. A random walk occurs when outcomes are shaped by many small, independent influences. For example, take nightclub attendance in Norwich city centre in 2016. Suppose there is a group that regularly parties down Prince of Wales Road, averaging to some value n.

Over a month - say July - each member may or may not go out. If someone goes out, that’s a step to the right (+1). If they stay home, that’s a step to the left (-1). Over time, these independent decisions produce something resembling a random walk. But because exogenous factors exist - post‑Christmas fatigue, hot summer weekends, bank holidays, major events - the walk becomes biased. The result is a distribution that may look bell‑shaped but is not perfectly symmetrical.

Applied intelligence behaves similarly. It is influenced by countless factors: motivation, environment, education, culture, opportunity, personality, stress, health, and so on. These influences do not push equally in both directions. They bias the walk toward lower engagement. And unlike height or weight, there is no natural “restoring force” pulling people toward the mean.

This is why applied intelligence ends up looking like a skewed distribution rather than a Gaussian one. Not because intelligence itself obeys thermodynamic laws - it doesn’t, of course - but because human behaviour often follows power‑law or Pareto‑like patterns, where a small minority produce most of the high‑end output. The curve is steep on the left and thin on the right because cognitive engagement is limited, unevenly distributed, and subject to many downward‑pulling influences.

The upshot is, measured intelligence is Gaussian because the scoring system enforces it. But applied intelligence - the degree to which people use their cognitive potential - is not. It is heavily skewed toward the low end, shaped by biased behavioural dynamics, and resembles an exponentially decaying curve far more than a bell curve.