Steve Sailer: "The Atlantic" Interview

The Atlantic's unpublished Q&A with me.

As I mentioned in regard to The Guardian, I only let journalists interview me if they let me post the interview. So, here’s the email interview I did with Ali Breland of The Atlantic back in August before his August 20, 2024 article about me, “The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ.”

Breland of The Atlantic: The prevailing wisdom on IQ is that the various factors that affect intelligence are too complex to reduce to an inheritable trait. You seem to disagree with this. If you do, can you walk me through how you disagree?

Sailer: No, that’s not the prevailing opinion among human intelligence researchers. It may be the conventional wisdom among superficial journalists, but the scientific study of intelligence over the last 160 years has made impressive progress. As Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker tweeted in 2015:

Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN'T apply to IQ: huge n's, replicable results. But people hate the message.

On my part, I see no reason to disagree with the moderate mainstream scientific view that human intelligence is influenced by both nature and nurture. 

I find implausible your extremist theory that only nurture affects IQ, which you apparently subscribe to due to your mistaken perception that it is “the prevailing wisdom.” In reality, surveys of academic experts on human intelligence in 1988 and 2020 found sizable majorities supporting the idea that both nature and nurture play a role in explaining variance in individual IQ. 

(The latter paper in Intelligence, which surveyed experts in 2013-2014, ranked my blog as the most accurate media source on intelligence, with a rating of 7.4 on a 1 to 9 scale, while the New York Times scored only 3.8. Sadly, The Atlantic was not rated by the experts. I must admit, however, that in the decade since then, I’ve been surpassed by quite a few online sources. Psychometrics is cognitively challenging and I’m past my prime.)

I don’t see strong reasons to assume that intelligence is all that different from a trait like height, which is clearly driven by both genes and environment. For example, two national basketball teams that almost upset the mighty 2024 United States Olympic Dream Team were South Sudan (in a pre-Olympic exhibition match) and Serbia (in the semi-finals). 

Why are these two small countries good at basketball? One reason is because both the Dinka and Nuer tribes of South Sudan and the mountaineers of the Dinaric Alps in the Balkans are among the tallest humans in the world on average. 

Why are they so tall? It’s not obvious: Serbia is not rich and South Sudan is very poor. Apparently, they’ve evolved to be tall.

On the other hand, why are young adult South Koreans roughly a half-foot taller than their great-great-grandparents and have surpassed the Japanese in average height? South Korean genes haven’t evolved much in a few generations. The answer isn’t certain, but obvious nurture candidates are that contemporary South Koreans are, compared to their ancestors, better fed, they enjoy better public health, and, more speculatively, that better transportation leads to more outbred marriages.

Similarly, young South Koreans score quite a bit higher on cognitive tests today than their peasant ancestors did in the post-Korean War era. Presumably, that’s due to some of the same reasons they are taller, plus cultural changes like, say, more education, more cognitively stimulating media, and modern South Korea’s notoriously test-prep-crazed culture.

You assert “the various factors that affect intelligence are too complex to reduce to an inheritable trait.” That only makes sense under the assumption that I am some sort of extreme reductionist, but, obviously, I’m not. In truth, I strive for a realistically complex understanding of how the world works. 

I would advise anybody looking for an introduction to how to think about the conundrums raised by IQ research to read my FAQ on IQ in my new anthology Noticing.

And read my Substack.

Breland: More specifically, I am curious to understand exactly what you think the links are between Black people and crime, and Black people and IQ. In your interviews, you have said that it's probably genetic. Can you explain what you mean?

Sailer: The black homicide victimization rate, as reported by the CDC, can’t possibly be all due to genes because it skyrocketed during the last week of May 2020 following the death of George Floyd. 

The black traffic fatality rate also rose extraordinarily during the “racial reckoning,” both likely due to the sudden triumph of the Black Lives Matter movement over the police. As the New York Times recently reported, a mere three years after I pointed it out in June 2021, the long-enduring rise in traffic deaths that began in June 2020 was likely due to the cops retreating to the donut shop in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s demise.

Traffic stops are one way the police can discourage motorists from carrying illegal handguns – what I call “point-of-use gun control” in contrast to the more-often advocated “point-of-sale gun control.” When the cops stop proactively policing, people drive worse and pack more illicit heat, and more people die.

You can see the extraordinary impact of both the more gradual Ferguson Effect of 2015-2016 and the insanely instantaneous Floyd Effect of 2020-2021 in CDC data on black deaths by homicide and by motor vehicle accident.

In June 2020-December 2023, white traffic fatalities were up 9 percent vs. June 2010-December 2023, but black traffic fatalities were up an incredible 78 percent. 

Similarly, white homicide victimizations were 17 percent higher, but black homicide victimizations were 71 percent higher.

Evolution happens faster than many assume, but it definitely doesn’t happen that fast.

Instead, what happened was that American elites responded to the delusions of the Great Awokening by switching the ideological environment under which cops and criminals work. During the triumph of the Black Lives Matter worldview, many thousands of incremental blacks died.

Do different ancestral groups have different behavioral tendencies in the modern world. 

Sure.

Once again, the Olympics provide evidence. Over the last eleven Olympics going back through the 1984 Los Angeles summer games, 87 of the 88 slots in the finals of the men’s 100 meter dash, the race to determine the World’s Fastest Man, have been filled by sprinters with at least one parent who is of majority sub-Saharan ancestry. (The exception is China’s Su Bingtian, who won his semifinal in 2021.)

Similarly, for the 20 NFL seasons from 1994-2023, all 32 teams have begun the season starting blacks at both cornerback spots.

Why? 

Nature or nurture? Or both?

When confronted with amazing imbalances like these, it seems likely that both nature and nurture are working in sync.

What about the extraordinarily high rates of gun homicide victimization among young black men (mostly at the hands of other young black men)?

I would especially point out the huge difference in homicide rates between two comparably poor groups, young black men and young Hispanic men. 

My guess is that blacks could do a lot better at not shooting each other so much if they tried harder. Maybe they’ll never be able to cut their homicide rate as low as that of Hispanics, but if they got it down to only twice the Hispanic rate, America would be a better place. But few asked blacks to do better during the Great Awokening. Instead, American elites concentrated on concocting excuses for blacks to blame their problems on whites, which obviously isn’t helping black lives matter:

-You have said that it’s incorrect to call you a white supremacist. Can you explain why, and how you'd describe yourself instead? 

Of course I’m not a white supremacist, as you have libeled me with no good evidence. How many dozens of times over the decades have I endorsed “equal protection of the laws” as demanded by the 14th Amendment?

Read my book. If The Atlantic were the serious magazine it was for 150 years, it would be reviewing my book Noticing rather than siccing a hit man to tar me. 

What am I? I’m a public-spirited realist who believes the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking.

Breland: And would you describe yourself as someone who supports race science?

Sailer: I support science.

I’ve been an aficionado of the human sciences since I was 13 in 1972. I was closest to the conservative social scientists like James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, but also admired the liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the socialists like Christopher Jencks.

When I decided to switch from marketing research to journalism a quarter of a century ago, it was obvious that one weakness of contemporary journalism was a lack of intelligent coverage of the implications of the human sciences for social policy. Because I’m not easily intimidated, I took on that role.

Breland: On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, you’ve said you couldn’t make public appearances or speeches until last year. What do you think has changed recently allowing you to make these kinds of appearances?

The more interesting question is why did American elites go so nuts from 2013-2023, the decade of the Great Awokening, that an intensely reasonable pundit like myself was more or less banned from public appearances?

Asking why am I not banned anymore is very much like asking why the black homicide victimization rate is finally coming down after going up so much during the Great Awokening’s Black Lives Matter craze. 

Both were manifestations of the madness of the times. We appear to be drifting back toward sanity.

I’m all for it. 

I’m pro-sanity.

Breland: Would you mind walking me through how you think IQ is reducible (or at least most reducible) to genetics. I understand the correlation of it showing up at different means in different races and appears to be hereditable between generations, but is there some set of identified genes that specifically explains?

Sailer: You keep using the word “reducible” to imply that I am some sort of simplistic reductionist. In reality, of course, my views are complex, well-informed, sophisticated, even-handed, and driven by the latest science.

There are a number of highly informative recent books you could read about how behavioral genetics works, such as Russell Warne’s In The Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence. But I’d recommend Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery, which I reviewed here.

For admission against interest, please see this 2017 Vox article by the elderly Richard E. Nisbett, the extremist Eric Turkheimer, and the quite liberal Harden with the hilariously embarrassing title of “Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ.”

They assert:

Murray’s premises, which proceed in declining order of actual broad acceptance by the scientific community, go like this:

1) Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is a meaningful construct that describes differences in cognitive ability among humans.

2) Individual differences in intelligence are moderately heritable.

3) Racial groups differ in their mean scores on IQ tests.

4) Discoveries about genetic ancestry have validated commonly used racial groupings.

5) On the basis of points 1 through 4, it is natural to assume that the reasons for racial differences in IQ scores are themselves at least partly genetic.

Until you get to 5, none of the premises is completely incorrect.

Okay!

They then assert that while, sure, Murray is more or less right about 80% of The Bell Curve’s most controversial argument, the burden of proof is on him, not them, to prove the last 20%: that Herrnstein’s and his plausibly moderate theory that both nature and nurture matter in explaining racial gaps in average IQ is more sensible than the Vox authors’ obviously implausibly fanatical theory that only nurture could possibly explain 100% of the gap.

As I wrote in 2017:

A much more reasonable suggestion would be that Occam’s Razor currently favors the hypothesis that some of the IQ gap is genetic in origin, but the subject is extremely complicated and it could turn out to be different.

It’s also possible that there is something we don’t understand at present about this dauntingly complex subject that makes a reasonably final answer not possible, a little bit like how Gödel’s incompleteness theorems came as a big surprise to mathematicians and philosophers such as Bertrand Russell.

In any case, we’ll learn a lot more about this subject over the next couple of decades due to the ongoing advances in genomics. …

But, right now, it sure seems like the wind has mostly been blowing for a long, long time in Murray’s direction and there’s not much reason to expect it to suddenly reverse in the future.

Breland: On the white supremacist bit, I am not trying to lay a trap and catch you in some sort of compromising rhetorical position. I am genuinely curious about how you think about the variation that you see between races.

When I was 9-years-old in October 1968, I saw my first college football game: #1 USC vs. #13 Oregon State at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Both teams had All-American running backs.

 In the first half, Oregon St.’s 250 pound white tailback Bill Enyart pounded into the USC line with his massive upper body strength. But in the second half, the speed of the Trojan tailback overwhelmed the Beavers defense, as he rushed for a career high 238 yard and USC’s 17-13 victory. 

That superstar was named, of course, O. J. Simpson.

You may have heard of him.

In the 56 years since, I’ve assumed that African-Americans tend to be faster on average than white-Americans. I don’t see much reason to believe this is due to blacks training harder at sprinting than whites. My impression is that a whole lot of Americans, white and black, like football and want to succeed at it.

Americans watch an enormous amount of football on TV. The black-white running speed gap is evident every weekend. Has this led to apocalyptic white-on-black race riots? Are white Americans driven insane with vicious rage that they don’t appear to be as innately fast, on average, as black Americans?

Nah. 

Even though Americans care a huge amount about sports, we appear to be okay with clear-cut racial differences in running ability.

The assumption by white progressive intellectuals that evidence for intellectual gaps between races on average would automatically lead to Nazi-like genocidal urges strikes me as more telling about the craziness of white progressive intellectuals. 

In contrast, most American sports fans are okay with racial differences in sports talents.

Breland: Are you ever worried about falling into a kind of data determinism? Your cornerback point for example is something that's been debated a lot but there's no clear way to explain it with data viewed through a race science lens. The skillsets it requires are not that different then being a receiver, which is a relatively whiter position. 

Personally, I believe, that following the data rather than a pre-conceived ideological theory is a good thing, not a bad thing.

But your dogma might vary.

The reasons why blacks tend to be better than whites at cornerback seem pretty obvious. Receivers need to be good at running precise routes and at have outstanding eye-hand coordination, which the races appear to be pretty similar at. In contrast, cornerbacks need outstanding “athleticism,” such as running backward, making quick cuts, and then leaping to knock the pass away, which blacks appear to have an advantage at on average.

I’d strongly recommend you read one of Barack Obama’s favorite books, The Sports Gene by Sports Illustrated reporter David Epstein. (Forgive its simplistic title: obviously, there are many genes that influence sports outcomes.) You can read my 2013 review of it here.

To become educated about cornerbacks, I’d recommend this Sports Illustrated article, which I wrote about in 2017.

“The White Cornerback: NFL players past and present open up about race at the position”

The NFL is a melting pot, with Liberian linebackers, Australian punters, German receivers and Cameroonian tackles. But the diversity ends at one position—it’s been 14 years since a white player has regularly started at cornerback.

By Michael McKnight April 26, 2017

A lot of the article focuses on a white guy named Donny Lisowksi who only got in one preseason game for Seattle a few years ago, despite being extremely fast: 4.38 seconds in the 40 yard dash, compared to 4.56 seconds for Seattle’s All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman.

I like this article because I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about Richard Sherman in regard to the Cornerback Question. Sherman, one of the highest paid defensive players in the NFL, is a bright guy who is quite quotable. …

On the other hand, it’s not clear that Sherman is a uniquely great athlete, despite all his success at the NFL position most demanding of “athleticism.”

I saw Richard Sherman play in high school in the division championship game for Compton Dominguez vs. Sherman Oaks of Notre Dame (my old school). On the first play of the game, Notre Dame’s white quarterback Garrett Green ran a draw and outraced Sherman (and the rest of Compton’s Division I-bound secondary) 80 yards for a touchdown.

Compton went on to crush Notre Dame 41-14, although Sherman didn’t stand out in that game. As a wide receiver on offense, Sherman averaged a huge 30.7 yards per each of his 28 receptions that season. But Compton had a whole bunch of outstanding athletes, including another (minor) NFL player Jeron Johnson, and didn’t need to involve Sherman in the offense during that championship game.

In contrast, Green was pretty much a one man team, at quarterback and cornerback, for outgunned Notre Dame. (After a self-sacrificing career as USC’s 3rd string QB, he’s now a senior VP for a real estate development firm.)

That spring Sherman went on to win the triple jump in the California state track meet and be voted California high school athlete of the year (runner-up was Colin Kaepernick). …

I suspect that injury susceptibility is a racial difference almost as important as speed. My impression is that before blacks took over big time sports, coaches and sportswriters assumed that speed correlated with slenderness. It seems like a pretty natural thing among whites, and it was pretty surprising when blacks had a lower correlation between speed and skinniness. …

Back in the 1970s, there was a saying in corporate America that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. NFL coaches get fired all the time, so they tend to be extra cautious about some NFL coaching traditions. Nobody ever got fired for punting on fourth down and nobody ever got fired for starting a black cornerback.

This doesn’t mean that IBM made bad mainframe computers. But this prejudice probably sold a few more computers for IBM.

Similarly, no lefthander has been allowed to play catcher in major league baseball since the 1980s, but nobody seems to have a persuasive reason why.

There probably wouldn’t be many left-handed catchers if there wasn’t a prejudice against them, but there likely would be a few. But handedness isn’t at present an identity politics category, so almost nobody notices and nobody cares except a few Little League parents.

On the other hand, race very much is an identity politics category about which we are supposed to be concerned about prejudice, but, as we can see with cornerbacks, that doesn’t apply to whites

Breland: Even if you accept a race realist answer, there's no clear way to explain why the tight end position is mixed along racial lines via hereditary traits.

Sailer: Tight end requires more upper body strength while cornerback requires more lower body speed and agility, so NFL tight ends are more white, such as Taylor Swift’s beau Travis Kelce, than are cornerbacks.

These questions aren’t terribly complicated, but nobody seems to answer them in the American media. So thanks for bringing them up.