---
title: "Race and intelligence"
chunk: 2/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:16.114269+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Pioneer Fund and The Bell Curve ===
In 1937, Draper founded the Pioneer Fund with the mission "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". This fund would become a central driver of research into race and intelligence. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group, and numerous scholars have criticized it for promoting scientific racism, eugenics and white supremacy.
As the desegregation of the United States gained traction in the 1950s, debate about black intelligence resurfaced. Audrey Shuey, funded by the Pioneer Fund, published a new analysis of Yerkes' tests, concluding that black people really were of inferior intellect to white people. This study was used by segregationists to argue that it was to the advantage of black children to be educated separately from the superior white children. In the 1960s, the debate was revived when William Shockley publicly defended the view that black children were innately unable to learn as well as white children. Arthur Jensen expressed similar opinions in his Harvard Educational Review article, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?," which questioned the value of compensatory education for African-American children. He suggested that poor educational performance in such cases reflected an underlying genetic cause rather than lack of stimulation at home or other environmental factors.
Another revival of public debate followed the appearance of The Bell Curve (1994), a book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray that supported the general viewpoint of Jensen. Many of the references and sources used in the book were advocates for racial hygiene, whose research was funded by Pioneer Fund and published in its affiliated journal Mankind Quarterly. A statement in support of Herrnstein and Murray titled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," was published in The Wall Street Journal. The Bell Curve also led to critical responses in a statement titled "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" by the American Psychological Association and in several books, including The Bell Curve Debate (1995), Inequality by Design (1996) and a second edition of The Mismeasure of Man (1996) by Stephen Jay Gould. 
Some of the authors proposing genetic explanations for group differences have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, which was headed by J. Philippe Rushton until his death in 2012. Arthur Jensen, who jointly with Rushton published a 2005 review article arguing that the difference in average IQs between blacks and whites is partly due to genetics, received $1.1 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. According to Ashley Montagu, "The University of California's Arthur Jensen, cited twenty-three times in The Bell Curve's bibliography, is the book's principal authority on the intellectual inferiority of blacks."
Additional books by psychologist Pioneer Fund board member Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen titled IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality, where they try to find a correlation between national IQ test scores and the size of a country's economy, also fueled the debate, with several researchers criticizing their conclusions. On July 27, 2020, the European Human Behavior and Evolution Association issued a formal statement opposing the utilization of Lynn's national IQ dataset, citing various methodological concerns. They concluded, "Any conclusions drawn from analyses which use these data are therefore unsound, and no reliable evolutionary work should be using these data."
On 24 January 2026, the New York Times reported that a group of fringe researchers with a long history of racist pseudoscience had used deception to access protected NIH data. The group, which included Bryan Pesta, Jordan Lasker, John G. R. Fuerst, and Emil Kirkegaard and was funded in part by the Pioneer Fund, used the data "to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart. Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories an air of analytical rigor.” These papers sparked a new wave of online disinformation about race and intelligence. Pesta, the only one of the group to hold a university position, was fired from Cleveland State University because of this scientific misconduct.

== Conceptual issues ==

=== Intelligence and IQ ===

The concept of intelligence and the degree to which intelligence is measurable are matters of debate. There is no consensus about how to define intelligence; nor is it universally accepted that it is something that can be meaningfully measured by a single figure. A recurring criticism is that different societies value and promote different kinds of skills and that the concept of intelligence is therefore culturally variable and cannot be measured by the same criteria in different societies. Consequently, some critics argue that it makes no sense to propose relationships between intelligence and other variables.
Correlations between scores on various types of IQ tests led English psychologist Charles Spearman to propose in 1904 the existence of an underlying factor, which he referred to as "g" or "general intelligence", a trait which is supposed to be innate. Another proponent of this view is Arthur Jensen. This view, however, has been contradicted by a number of studies showing that education and changes in environment can significantly improve IQ test results.
Other psychometricians have argued that, whether or not there is such a thing as a general intelligence factor, performance on tests relies crucially on knowledge acquired through prior exposure to the types of tasks that such tests contain. This means that comparisons of test scores between persons with widely different life experiences and cognitive habits do not reveal their relative innate potentials.

=== Race ===