I don’t follow basketball, so I hadn’t heard of Emeka Okafor until now:
The 6’10″, 252 pound star center on the U. of Connecticut’s national championship basketball team (men’s division) is probably headed to the NBA a year early because he’s on track to graduate in three years with a 3.8 GPA in Finance. He scored 1310 on the SAT. He is the son of Nigerian immigrants (his father is working on his third master’s degree), but was born in Houston.
Impressive. But here’s Steve Sailer’s real point:
Ever since the great Hakeem Olajuwon burst on the college basketball scene in 1981, seemingly heralding a tidal wave of African talent, the number of African star basketball players has proven disappointing. Most have come from the elite (for example, Duke’s Luol Deng is the son of a former Sudanese cabinet minister), with only Manute Bol coming from the poor masses. My impression is that poor people in Africa are significantly shorter than either rich people in Africa or African Americans, and thus haven’t contributed many big men to the game.
And here’s where his point gets a bit uncomfortable:
I suspect that many of the same conditions that cut down on the height of Africans also hurt their IQ scores, which tend to average a full 15 points below those of African-Americans. As I wrote recently, a UN report pointed to several vitamin and mineral deficiencies in the diet of poor Third Worlders that can significantly cut the national IQs of poor countries.My point is that the average IQ found in African nations of 70 looks partly environmental. Things like nutritional deficiencies, infections, lack of mental stimulation, etc. probably contribute at least partly to the gap between Africans at 70 and African-Americans at 85. (Since African-Americans are only about 17-18% white, according to the latest studies, white genes are unlikely to explain all this gap.) Some of these environmental problems are not particularly daunting. Steps like iodizing salt would certainly cost billions of dollars, but definitely not hundreds of billions and probably not even tens of billions of dollars. If iodizing salt and fortifying grains with iron, steps taken decades ago in America to eliminate cretinism and other health problems, would raise the continent’s average IQ from 70 to, say, 75, that would be a wonderful first step. Certainly, nobody else has come forward with a more constructive suggestion about what to do about Africa.