Which race of human beings has the highest IQ

1. What the headline numbers say — and which sources report them

A number of influential reviews and data compilations report mean IQ differences: for example, Rushton and colleagues summarized studies that showed East Asian children averaging about 110, White children about 102, and Black children about 90 in some childhood samples ^[1], while other contemporary summaries used by commentators report Asian American ≈108, White non‑Hispanic ≈103, Latino ≈94, and African American ≈91 ^[2]; other datasets and bloggers likewise claim gaps on the order of one standard deviation between some Black and White U.S. groups (≈15 points) ^{[3] [5]}.

2. Why those numbers are controversial — measurement, selection, and artifacts

Critics emphasize that IQ tests are culturally loaded and correlate strongly with literacy, schooling, and other socially patterned skills, meaning population differences in test performance may reflect environmental disparities rather than innate differences ^{[6] [7]}; methodological problems such as Flynn‑effect timing, selective samples in adoption studies, attrition, and unadjusted socioeconomic confounds can create or exaggerate apparent group differences ^{[8] [6] [7]}.

3. The hereditarian claim and the counterarguments

Some researchers argue for partial genetic explanation, pointing to correlations between brain size and IQ and to cross‑study patterns they interpret as consistent with genetic models (e.g., reviews citing brain‑size correlations and historical mean differences) ^{[1] [9]}. Opponents counter that modern genetic analyses find no evidence of diversifying selection on intelligence between major continental groups and that heritability estimates are population‑relative and do not imply between‑group genetic causation; the Wikipedia summary highlights that advances in genomics have broadly undermined claims of genetic race differences in intelligence ^[10].

4. Transracial adoption and admixture studies — mixed evidence and reanalysis

Transracial adoptee studies are often cited as decisive tests: some reports claimed East Asian adoptees raised by White parents scored above White averages while Black adoptees scored below ^{[9] [8]}, but careful reanalyses identify Flynn‑effect timing, selection bias, and attrition as major confounders and argue that corrected data reduce or eliminate those gaps, suggesting environment accounts for much of the observed variation ^[8].

5. Scholarly consensus and practical meaning

Contemporary reviewers and researchers emphasize that race is an imprecise social construct, that no biological markers reliably map to traditional race categories for IQ explanation, and that observed group score differences are heavily mediated by social, educational, and health inequities; several peer‑reviewed studies show substantial mediation of group differences by socioeconomic and home environment variables ^{[7] [10] [6]}. Thus while some aggregated datasets list higher mean IQs for East Asian samples, mainstream scientific caution forbids claiming a racial hierarchy of innate intelligence based on the available, contested evidence ^{[2] [7] [10]}.

6. Bottom line — a direct answer grounded in the reporting

If the question is which socially defined “race” appears highest by reported mean IQ in many prominent compilations, those compilations typically place East Asian or Asian American groups at the top of the averages ^{[1] [2]}. If the question is whether any race is proven to be innately higher in intelligence, the evidence is contested: methodological artifacts, environmental mediators, genomic analyses, and reanalyses of adoption studies prevent a confident claim that genetic racial differences explain average IQ gaps ^{[8] [7] [10]}.