The title of Gavin Evans' new work, Black Brain, White Brain: Is Intelligence Skin Deep? (Jonathan Ball), is seemingly problematic. Surely, we all know the answer to that question? Evidently not. Spend a few moments with this valuable and indeed welcome work and it becomes quite clear that there are a lot of supposedly learned folk out there who, frankly, should know better."The reason I wrote it," Evans says, "is that there's been a revival of race science, mainly by evolutionary psychologists."One such catalyst was Nicholas Wade, science editor at The New York Times, whose 2014 book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History was very well received. In its review, for example, Scientific American gushed that Wade's "real lesson should not be lost on us: a scientific topic cannot be declared off limits or whitewashed because its findings can be socially or politically incendiary".Evans, a journalist of more than 30 years, was, however, not that impressed."What this book was saying," he says, "was that Africans had evolved to be over-trusting, not-too-bright tribalists, the Chinese evolved to be authoritarian, the Finns evolved to be violent drunks, the English evolved to be enterprising, and the Jews evolved to be good for business."Another celebrated "scientist" dealt short shrift by Evans is Stephen Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist and "virulent proponent" of the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus ideology.There are many others, Evans says, but Wade and Pinker were "the two big ones". And, he argues, their findings are not all that original."These revivals come in waves. The last big outbreak was whenThe Bell Curve came out [in 1994]."Before that it was the psychologist Arthur Jensen, who in 1969 argued that programmes to boost the IQ scores of black Americans would fail for "genetic" reasons."So, every 20 or 30 years, it seems to raise its ugly head again," Evans says.He suggests that there is an "urban mythology" that genes can explain everything, that a "genetic determinism" has kicked in."As a result, people interpret social phenomena in genetic terms. Like IQ scores. IQ scores differ between populations - there's no question about that - so pseudo-scientists provide a genetic explanation."They all acknowledge that their problem is that they haven't found any genes for what they claim because none exist. There have been various quests for genes for intelligence but they've all drawn a blank."Much of Black Brain, White Brain is devoted to attacking the conceits of IQ. Evans argues that "intelligent quotient" and intelligence are not the same thing, and that there are forms of intelligence that have little to do with IQ.IQ testing, he writes, "has done far more harm than good" and has been "used with devastating effect to rank individuals, population groups and races on the false assumption that what it reflects is intelligence and that this is biologically hard-wired".The danger with such thinking, he says, is that it affects the way we regard one another."If you believe that poor people are poor because they're unintelligent and have a low IQ, rather than that they've got a low IQ because they're poor, then you're likely to believe that there's not much point in trying to raise people up or improve them."In fact, a lot of the policy prescriptions coming from these kinds of people is that there's no point in remedial education because the people are under-performing because they are below par on intelligence."'Black Brain, White Brain: Is Intelligence Skin Deep?'; Jonathan Ball, R240..