Posted on September 6, 2018

Dysgenics and Low Creativity: Why China Can’t Save Civilization

Lance Welton, Unz Review, August 25, 2018

Unfortunately, this is not what research by a young Chinese psychologist has found. In a study published in 2016 in the leading journal Intelligence, Mingrui Wang presented some shocking — and counter-intuitive — findings. Even despite the one child policy, there is dysgenic fertility in China. [Evidence of Dysgenic Fertility in China, by Mingrui Wang et al, Intelligence, July-August 2016]

The Chinese researcher and his team explored the relationship between intelligence, education-level and fertility, using a large sample from the China Family Panel dataset, which is highly representative of the Chinese population. They found that among the cohort born between 1951 and 1970, the correlation between general intelligence and fertility was -0.1, very similar to that found in Western countries.

Between 1986 and the year 2000, the Chinese lost 0.31 IQ points per decade and between 1971 and the year 2000, the Chinese lost 0.75 IQ points.

The researchers also discovered that education level is negatively associated with fertility in China. And the negative correlation between fertility and both IQ and education level is stronger among females than males.

In other words, though the Chinese have an average IQ of 105 according to Richard Lynn, and despite their introduction of the One-Child policy, they are suffering precisely the same process as the West. The most intelligent females are not selecting for the most intelligent Chinese males or, indeed, any males. As in the West, they are dedicating themselves to their education and then their careers, meaning they are simply failing to pass on their genes at all.

In addition, the strong cultural tradition in China — especially in the low IQ countryside – of desiring sons rather than daughters, leading to selective abortion, is dual-edged. The more intelligent Chinese, living in the cities, are more likely to content themselves with having a daughter. And the more intelligent she is, the more likely she is to have no children, leading to the elimination of her (intelligent) parents’ genes. {snip}

Slightly less intelligent women are spending all of their twenties dedicated to their careers, only have children in their thirties and not having very many. The least intelligent Chinese women — too low in IQ and impulsive to use contraception — are, it would seem, having excess children even despite the fines and the risk of heavy-handed Communist Party officials (illegally) trying to compel them to have abortions. {snip}

In addition, the one child policy never even applied to China’s non-Han ethnic minorities. These groups are overwhelmingly rural-dwelling and they have lower IQ than the Han. {snip}

This decline is made all the more perilous due to research, led by a Japanese psychologist called Kenya Kura, which has shown that Northeast Asians are genetically less intellectually creative than Europeans. {snip}

However, they note that scientific innovators tend to combine very high IQ with an optimally low level of collectivism, low social anxiety and low fearfulness of the new. In other words, they have high “Openness-Intellec t”, as psychologists term this trait. This psychological profile means that they can think outside the box and don’t care about the offence to vested interests which their new idea will almost certainly result in.

This is why, maintains Kura, it is the West that generated the Industrial Revolution, rather than more intelligent Northeast Asians. The West is indeed the Goldilocks Zone for genius.

{snip}