It starts with claims about low-IQ Africans and just takes off from there.

It all started when an Africa-based research team decided to challenge and prove wrong a very long-standing claim in Western circles about low IQ levels in African countries. Instead of continuing to argue about it, they decided to put these claims to the test. They conducted a large-scale IQ assessment in Lagos, Nigeria, with a mixed bag of participants over the age of 16.

The results were not what they wanted and are what's going viral.

As it turns out, those "Western circles" were right all along.

According to the data they shared, the average score came in around 73, with a median just under 70. More than half of participants actually scored below 70. These are numbers that are way below the average.

Those researchers are probably wishing they never took on this challenge.

But, in all fairness, the people who took the test aren't living in the same conditions as someone growing up in a highly developed, tech-heavy environment. Access to education, quality of schooling, and nutrition likely play a role in how someone performs on something like this and in life.

However, that doesn't erase the very low results, and it does point to real problems in parts of Africa.

Aside from the education issues and poor nutrition, some of this may come down to language. That's what an American philosophy teacher who spent over a decade teaching at African universities says.

Halcyo Initiative:

I am an American who taught philosophy in several African universities from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South Africa. When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the continent or its people, but I began learning quickly. I noticed, for example, that Africans rarely kept promises and saw no need to apologize when they broke them. It was as if they were unaware they had done anything that called for an apology.

It took many years for me to understand why Africans behaved this way but I think I can now explain this and other behavior that characterizes Africa. I believe that morality requires abstract thinking—as does planning for the future—and that a relative deficiency in abstract thinking may explain many things that are typically African.

What follow are not scientific findings. There could be alternative explanations for what I have observed, but my conclusions are drawn from more than 30 years of living among Africans.

My first inklings about what may be a deficiency in abstract thinking came from what I began to learn about African languages. In a conversation with students in Nigeria I asked how you would say that a coconut is about halfway up the tree in their local language. "You can't say that," they explained. "All you can say is that it is 'up'." "How about right at the top?" "Nope; just 'up'." In other words, there appeared to be no way to express gradations.