I actually don’t care for Derbyshire, and didn’t care for the article in question. I do like Steyn, and the only reason I ever click to National Review is to read Steyn when he’s there.
Steyn is right about one thing. If National Review eliminates everyone who has anything interesting to say, like Derb, like Coulter, at some point there is no particular reason to read them at all. I actually stopped reading them years ago after they pulled the plug on Coulter. I obviously don’t agree with everything she has to say, but she is, like Steyn, always worth the price of admission. Almost no one else at NR these days aside from Steyn catches my attention at all.
I don’t agree with the premise of the Derbyshire article. Having worked with rural Appalachian whites who were diagnosed as retarded - back in the day when they used that word - because they were so severely culturally deprived that they could barely speak intelligibly and lived one step above chimps, if that, I think the black problem is basically cultural. Granted, the gene pool by now may not be at its greatest, so some of the raw material isn’t good to start with (just as among the Appalachian whites, many of whom were in fact the product of multi-generational incest). But if blacks learned standard English and thus could master the concepts for math, and were expected to behave in society just like everybody else, I think you’d see the supposed IQ difference disappear in a couple of generations.
However, Derbyshire wrote an interesting article, and it could provoke a good discussion. Steyn was absolutely correct in his comments on it.