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A review of three books: "Evolutionary Psychology", "Origins of Human Nature", and "Nature via Nurture"
Three recent books are bringing evolutionary psychology and
behavioral genetics into the same canalized stream of thought - nature via
nurture has replaced the nature versus nurture debate, making clichéd
arguments out-of-date and frankly just plain annoying. Old egalitarian dogmas
such as "there are no races," "anyone can become whatever they want to become,"
"children are the product of their upbringing," and "there are no differences
between races in intelligence and behavior," have been overturned by ongoing
research, but still promoted by the media, Marxist (and timid) academics, and
government policy wonks.
The first two books I look at here, Human Evolutionary Psychology (by
Barrett, Dunbar, & Lycett, 2002, Princeton University) and The Origins of
Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology (by Bjorklund &
Pellegrini, American Psychological Association, 2002), are straight-forward
academically slanted books that are free of bias, even if they both avoid the
more troublesome subject of racial differences in intelligence. The third book,
Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human (by Matt
Ridley, 2003), is targeted for academic as well as the educated lay reader. It
is entertaining, easy to read, and one leaves with a firm grasp of how nature
and nurture interact in human development. However, Ridley seems to contradict
himself when it comes to racial differences in intelligence and behavior. On the
one hand, he provides all of the evidence that indeed one would expect
differences between races to exist, while he states later on that there are no
racial differences. My hunch is that after putting forth what some would see as
Jensenism, he inserted some paragraphs that would give him plausible
deniability with regard to the racial differences argument. Still, of the three
books reviewed, for the effort required, Ridley's book is a must read for those
interested in the subject, continuing where Pinker left off with The Blank
Slate (see my earlier review).
All three books have an enormous amount of information, so I will cover just a
few of the more interesting aspects in each as they relate to race, evolution
and eugenics.
Human Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychologists have been criticized for looking at human
behavior without considering human development. It is clear from this book and
the next that this criticism no longer stands. The tools used for looking at how
the brain works, along with ethological studies of human behavior in every
culture, has brought these narrow fields more in line with looking at the human
brain from various perspectives - triangulation if you will.
For example, in the culture versus genetic debate, the dichotomies are coming
together into a unified perspective:
"One particularly promising approach to this issue is to regard human sociality
as the product of gene-culture co-evolution, and propose that a form of cultural
group selection led to the evolution of the psychological traits that promote
cooperative behavior between group members, regardless of relatedness. This
suggests that there was selection for specific traits that enabled humans to
function well within groups, both to their own individual benefit and, due to
the very nature of the adaptations, to the benefit of the group as a whole….
"From these results, Caporael et al. concluded that sociality itself, made
salient by designating individuals to groups and allowing discussion between
group members, could account for the altruistic behavior displayed. They argued
that, given the benefits of group-living to humans (predator defense, foraging
efficiency, [and warfare]), selection would favor individuals who were better
adapted to group-living, and that this adaptation took the form of a willingness
to behave altruistically with no selfish incentives toward other group members.
Altruistic behavior, it was suggested, evolved simply because altruistic
individuals were better at group-living, and not necessarily because they
received some return benefit from the beneficiary of their altruism or enhanced
the spread of their genes by aiding close relatives….
"Richerson and Boyd term this 'ultra-sociality' and suggest that the impressive
coordination, cooperation and division of labor observed in modern-day western
society can he traced hack to ancient social instincts combined with modern
cultural institutions."
Group living and group coalition building however was not the same everywhere,
and the evolution of altruism, (and by extension ethnocentrism and xenophobia),
would not be expected to be the same everywhere. Humans, by evolving in
radically varying niches from each other, would be expected to have different
behavioral traits between races or even tribes, depending on the biographical
history of any particular people, race or tribe. I will return to this later.
Eugenics is being attacked now as fiercely as it was fifty years ago. As the
pendulum swings from radical environmentalism towards genetically based
explanations for human behavior, the Left finds it has to talk about the past to
dissuade us from pursuing eugenics in the future. Nevertheless, eugenics has
already returned. As alluded to in The Bell Curve, Human Evolutionary
Psychology states that, "Assortative mating is in fact the human norm, with
spouses tending to be more similar to each other on a range of traits (including
race, religion, ethnic background, and socio-economic status, as well as a wide
range of physical traits such as stature, body build, finger length and so on,
[and especially intelligence]) than they are to the population at large."
What is happening now is that with universal education, and a population that is
far more mobile, people are exposed to other people much more like themselves.
The less intelligent meet up at the factory or retail store, while the more
intelligent meet up at a college or university. The stratification, for the
first time, has been accelerated by mobility and universal education. The one
brake on this, as Matt Ridley points out, "Beauty will put a brake on
stratification by brains." That is, upper income (intelligent) men will give up
brains for beauty in a mate, while upper income (intelligent) women, may often
give up looking for a husband that is as successful as she is, and will not have
children as a result. (The very wealthy males may marry brains and have
children, then divorce or have affairs, for the best of both worlds for their
offspring.) Overall, however, stratification by intelligence will accelerate, as
intelligence is valued by both men and women in a mate. Universal education then
will have the effect of breeding likes, and the difference in average
intelligence will increase as the bell curve begins to flatten.
A corollary to this phenomena can be found when it comes to racial mixing. When
Blacks and Whites mate, it does not have the effect that the egalitarians might
expect. What does happen is those Whites (or Asians or Jews) that cannot find an
adequate White mate will marry down to a Black, thus ridding the White race of
unattractive, low intelligent, drug addicted, or egalitarian leaning Whites.
That is, the very people we would not want anyway are discarded leaving a more
eugenic White race. On the other hand, Whites, East Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews
do intermarry quite readily, and since East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are more
intelligent than Whites on average, this leads again to eugenics for these mixed
marriages, and perhaps will improve the ethnocentrism of the White race (not
good news however for the White racial purists).
Of course, there are those that still deny that there are differences in average
intelligence between races. So how did we get so smart?
"There is now considerable evidence to support the Social Brain Hypothesis. The
focus of most of these studies has been on the size of the neocortex, since this
is the area of the brain that is particularly characteristic of primates as a
whole and which accounts for most of the brain size enlargement that has
occurred within primates. Comparative studies across a range of primate taxa
(including modern humans) show that relative neocortex size correlates with
social group size, the size of grooming cliques (that is, alliances),
males' use of subtle social strategies in mating contests, frequency of social
play and the frequency of tactical deception. These various data suggest that
the extent to which animals can develop and exploit large numbers of complex
social relationships depends closely on the size of the 'computer' they have
available to do the necessary calculations."
So the size of social groups, along with unique habitats or niches, determined
the level of intelligence obtained. Rushton has shown that there is a continuum
from Blacks to Whites to East Asians in a number of behavioral and
morphological traits: intelligence, levels of testosterone, twinning, sexuality,
parental investment in child-rearing, etc. (Rushton 1995). From what we know of
human expansion and crowding, it seems that the sub-Saharan habitat was more
stable in terms of climate, less crowded, with reduced selection for high
intelligence:
"In addition, as Hrdy [1999] points out, infanticide tends to occur as a last
resort; in most cases, individuals who need to drastically reduce parental
investment tend to abandon offspring or farm them out to their extended kin. It
is only under circumstances when these alternatives are unavailable or
impractical that parents resort to infanticide. In late medieval and early
modern Europe, for example, infants were frequently abandoned in foundling homes
set up for precisely this purpose. Parents would often leave identifying tokens
on their offspring, suggesting that they were abandoning their children with at
least the hope that they would some day reclaim them. However, as Hrdy suggests,
this could equally have been a mechanism for allowing parents to avoid facing up
to the fact that, by abandoning their offspring, they were almost certainly
condemning it to death: overcrowding and lack of sufficient care raised
orphanage mortality rates to horrifying levels (in continental Europe and
Russia, they were as high as 53.6 per cent). This pattern of abandonment is
almost unheard of in African societies, both traditional and modern. Here,
fostering of offspring to distantly related kin is the most common means by
which parents reduce investment in their offspring."
Social groups then came under differing levels of selection pressures depending
on numerous differences in climate, population density, habitat instability, the
need for long term planning to prepare for seasonal changes, and dangers from
other tribes - with a need to outwit them. (Note that high intelligence would
not be valuable against pathogen loading as found in sub-Saharan Africa.) So
group size had a great deal of advantages under some conditions, but along with
larger groups came a need to control freeriders:
"This suggests that the problem [of needing higher intelligence] lies not with
the ability to make inferences about sequences of statements, but rather quite
specifically with the ability to keep track of who thinks what about who's mind.
More than four levels of mental state reflexivity seems to put enormous stress
on our cognitive abilities, and may explain in part why humans need such large
brains to support their social groups."
It is a well understood fact that the size of the social group, whether in
dolphins, whales, primates, or humans, requires an increase in intelligence in
order to keep track of group members. Dolphins for example, like humans, form
coalitions (such as males grouping together to rape a female). This coalition
building requires that the dolphins remember which dolphins helped them in the
past, and whom they should help in the future. Human coalitions are similar
writ large, and requires intelligence.
General intelligence or g, may be a combination some modularity in
location as well as being a general trait:
"Although theory of mind has been presented as an archetypal example of a mental
module, the burden of the evidence and opinions that we have reviewed here tend
to reinforce the conclusion… that what often looks like an integrated coherent
cognitive function on superficial first view turns out on closer analysis to be
better described as the emergent property of a composite of several more
fundamental functions. Although we are only just beginning to understand the
underlying neurobiology of the brain, what evidence we do now have tends to
point in the same direction: functions like language and Theory of Mind (ToM) that have been
described as modular seem to have a dispersed construction at the neural level,
involving small groups of neurons in quite different locations. Although it can
legitimately be argued that functional modularity need not reflect anatomical
modularity, nonetheless, the burden of the evidence (and especially that for ToM)
increasingly points towards the suggestion that the more complex kinds of social
cognition seen in humans may have more to do with the integration of a number of
cognitive units during the course of early development than with the existence
of unique highly specialized modules. In effect, humans may differ from other
primates in their social cognitive abilities more by virtue of simply having
'bigger and better' versions of the same general capacities than by having
evolved novel and unique ones."
Ergo, we are not really different from other social animals, but our level of
group formation, along with the use of culture to transfer knowledge from
generation to generation, drove the enlargement of our "executive brains." We
will see later why this also shows that races therefore must differ in average
intelligence depending on the size of the brain.
Finally, the following shows how language diversity has been shown to correlate
with the hypotheses that the Black/White/East Asian racial difference in average
intelligence are due to both group size and differences in habitat (see Rushton
1995), as well as impacting levels of tribalism or ethnocentrism (see MacDonald
1998a, 2002b):
"It is not just ecological knowledge that is adaptive in this way. The rules
that govern the structure of society itself may also be adapted to local
conditions. Nettle examined the size of language groups in West Africa and
showed that the number of speakers of a given language increase with distance
from the equator. In other words, the further from the equator a tribe lives,
the larger it is likely to be. Nettle argued that this is a response to habitat
instability (and indeed, the correlation is better still against measures of
seasonality): in unpredictable habitats, it pays to have a wide network of
people you can call on for help when things get bad. An alternative (but not
necessarily mutually exclusive) explanation is that alliances become
increasingly important when population density is high in agriculturally rich
habitats; being able to differentiate between reliable and unreliable allies
will then be commensurably essential. In a subsequent analysis, Nettle confirmed
the relationship by showing that the number of languages in a country (adjusted
for population size) was directly related to the length of the growing season.
Mace and Pagel reported similar results for North American native languages: the
number of languages spoken in an area and the geographical range of a given
language increased with latitude. More importantly perhaps, when latitude was
held constant, there was greater linguistic diversity in areas of greater
habitat diversity."
Human Evolutionary Psychology covers the subject extensively, and in
keeping with its paradigm, it looks for similarities in humans everywhere to
determine how we are all the same because of evolutionary adaptiveness. While
the book provides substantial evidence that we would expect different races to
vary on average behaviorally, morphologically, and cognitively, it did not
directly address the issue of racial differences. At least they had the honesty
to leave the issue alone, when they have no data to counter the evidence.
The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology
"Whereas mainstream evolutionary psychologists emphasize universals - patterns
that characterize all members of a species - evolutionary developmental
psychologists are also concerned with how individuals adapt their behavior to
their particular life circumstances and suggest that there are alternative
strategies to recurrent problems that human children faced in our evolutionary
past. Such a perspective suggests that individual differences in developmental
patterns are not necessarily the result of idiosyncratic experiences but are
predictable, adaptive responses to environmental pressures."
Developmental psychology interjects the dimension of time into how genes
interact with the environment to produce what we eventually become. Genes are
not simple templates that spit us out at birth, they are interacting with the
environment, under fixed plans that include timing of events throughout our
life, to continuously change us in such a way that we are adaptive to our
current environment - or the closest it can muster given how much our
environment has changed from our evolutionary past.
Evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology are both interested in
determining if our behavior is under the control of domain-general (a blank
slate approach) or domain-specific (mental "for") modules. It now seems that for
most our behavioral repertoire, domain-specific modules dominate. "Each module
is a special-purpose system that is informationally encapsulated (or
'cognitively impenetrable,' in the words of Pylyshyn, 1980), meaning that other
parts of the mind/brain can neither influence nor access the workings of the
module. Fodor did not reject the existence of a domain-general mechanism; in
fact, whereas the operation of these modules is unavailable to conscious
awareness, their output eventually becomes available to a central information
processor, although the activity of this domain-general mechanism does not
affect the domain-specific modules. Although Fodor's idea of domain-specificity
in human cognition has been challenged, it is the dominant perspective of
cognitive psychology today, and we are confident that many, if not most,
important aspects of human cognition are domain-specific."
Five domains of social life have been proposed: "attachment, reciprocity,
hierarchic power, coalitional group, and mating. Each general area follows its
own developmental course, is governed by neurohormonal regulators (opiods and
oxytocin for attachment; testosterone for hierarchic power), and has social
algorithms associated with it to achieve specified goals (e.g., proximity
maintenance and protection for attachment). These algorithms have evolved to
deal with recurrent social problems infants and children have faced over the
millennia."
When it comes to human behavior then, we can expect recurrent themes to run in
our species, "Modern humans, in both information-age and hunter-gatherer
societies, cooperate and compete with members in their own group and with people
from outside groups. In fact, warfare of one type or another is a characteristic
of all human groups. The only other mammal that displays behavior at all similar
to that of human war parties - attacking and killing members of another group of
their own species - is the chimpanzee, suggesting that the roots of warfare run
deep in our species' genetic history."
So again, do we expect to find differences between races when it comes to
ethnocentrism, warfare, or group coalition building? One just has to look at the
tribalism in Afghanistan (the Pashtuns) to understand just how xenophobic some
races are over others. The Semitic races, with their high population densities,
seem to have evolved strong kinship bonds and hostility to outsiders. "Those
individuals who could deal with unpredictable changes in climate and habitat
were the ones who reproduced and became our ancestors. Variable environments
suggest variable behavioral strategies, making any claim that ancient humans
followed any signal lifestyle invalid."
Moreover, this is true for intelligence. The Middle East was beset by group
conflict, and the ability to form tight coalitions meant survival. For Northern
Europeans and East Asians, in sparsely populated habitats under the harsh
conditions of glaciers, it meant coalition building for cooperation against
nature rather than other people, plus a high level of intelligence for planning.
So where human races evolved under differing climates, habitats, and the
evolving cultures, human behavior under selection pressures also had to change.
Evolution dictates that the habitat or niche that members of a species inhabit,
will determine how members of that species will change in order to maximize
reproductive success. "[V]ariation is at the very core of Darwinian theory, and
so any evolutionary account that views variability among individuals as simply
noise is likely missing some important points. According to developmental
psychologist and behavioral geneticist Sandra Scarr, evolutionary psychologists
have applied Darwin's idea of natural selection to understanding human nature
but have virtually ignored variation. A notable exception is Gottlieb, who
considered the study of individual differences to be a defining principle in the
study of development."
Where we have individual differences then, we will also find racial differences
because under varying ecologies, different groups or races will select different
behaviors from the natural variance that exists. For example, if Whites found
themselves in a sub-Saharan climate over a long period of time, there is enough
genetic variance existing to slowly select for increased melanin and they would
become darker in complexion. Moreover, the same with intelligence, as the brain
is a very expensive organ to maintain in terms of calories. In a
non-technological environment, it might easily be advantageous to reduce general
intelligence if it is not needed for increased survivability. We may never
completely understand how races have differentiated themselves under their
unique ecologies, but we do know from all available data that the differences
are real and not cultural but genetic.
For example, for differing races, there are innate average differences in
intelligence, behavioral characteristics, responses to disease, and morphology.
The reason these differences are not environmental is that "evolution does not
permit easy environmental modification of characteristics that are essential for
survival. Rather, important aspects of social, emotional, and cognitive
development are highly canalized and are not much influenced by the vagaries of
parenting behavior. It would be a short-lived species that had an extended
childhood and a narrow range of parental behaviors necessary to rear a child to
adulthood."
Behavioral geneticists place heritability of intelligence at between 50 and 60%,
and personality at about 50%, with the remaining variability unexplained. As
children grow up, the shared family environment diminishes as each individual
engages the world on their own terms, their genes interacting with their
environment, to complete the development of the young adult - and on into
adulthood. Parents, teachers, the community, etc. do not determine the final
product. "[S]hared environments have only small effects on intellectual
development…. The human brain continues to gain weight into the third decade of
life, and neurons in the associative areas of the brain are not fully myelinated
until adulthood. This slow growth provides humans with the flexibility to make
many changes within their lifetimes."
Myelination, or the growth of fatty tissue around axons, is a key component in
general intelligence, and is under strictly genetic control. It also, along with
general brain size, does not occur until adulthood is approached. This is the
reason that as the brain develops under genetic control, the heritability of
intelligence increases from about 40% in childhood to 80% in adulthood, while
the shared environment (social economic status, educators, preschool enrichment,
educated parents, etc.) decreases in its contribution to intelligence.
Most studies and programs have been targeted at children, primarily minorities,
to try to improve their educational performance. As a result, under enrichment
programs, it appears that they are more intelligent than they eventually will
become. That is, the apparent intelligence is enhanced the younger the children
are, only to fade away, as they grow older. Traditionally, institutional racism
has been blamed for minority intellectual failure, rather than recognizing that
as people grow older, intelligence shifts from environmental malleability in
children to genetic/non-shared environmental interactions later in life. Genes
not only play an important part of how the brain develops, but they also play an
important part in how young adults will seek environments that enhance their own
personal motivational drives.
"Young children actually learn some things, such as language, faster than
adults. The decreasing ability to acquire a second language with increasing age
(much past 8 or 9 years) reflects a loss of plasticity for this skill….
Plasticity is often more easily seen in situations in which children who
experienced deprivation early in life demonstrate subsequent reversibility of
those effects. Although psychologists and educators earlier in this century
deemed such reversibility unlikely, both human and animal work has clearly shown
that reversibility is a reality."
"These results reflect the remarkable resiliency of children to the effects of
early deprivation, but they also demonstrate that there are limits to
intellectual plasticity. The more time children spent in the deprived
environment, the less able their brains were to change, at least by age 6. (Of
course, children who had spent more time in the orphanage had spent less time in
their adoptive homes. Perhaps the negative effects of the early deprivation will
be reversed when they spend more time in their adoptive homes.) Nonetheless, the
overall impression of these findings is that, given proper stimulation, children
can overcome the effects of an early negative environment. Young brains are not
like tape recorders, recording everything for posterity. Rather, young brains
are pliable. Were children born with more mature brains, or if development
proceeded more rapidly, the mental, social, and emotional flexibility of young
children would be severely compromised. This behavioral and cognitive
flexibility is perhaps our species' greatest adaptive advantage, and it is
afforded by the prolonged period of mental (and thus brain) inefficiency."
The above reflects astonishing new facts with regards to how children develop
and mature: 1.) whether their environment is rich or poor, deprivation has to be
extremely severe to have a negative impact later in life as the genes interact
with the environment to build the adult brain; 2.) individuals, based on their
genetic lottery, will follow their own individual development, within normal
ranges of human behavior. Or, in the words of developmentalists, "Individual
differences in any of these modules may make children more or less sensitive to
the target information (e.g., facial characteristics and vocal stimulation).
Such endogenously based individual differences will then interact with a child's
exogenous environment to yield a particular pattern of development. The process
is still an epigenetic one, and the modules are still domain specific and
universal. However, acknowledging such individual differences implies that
behavioral-genetic analyses need not be incompatible with an epigenetically
based theory of evolutionary developmental psychology."
When it comes to general intelligence, or g, the differences are
not due to multiple "modular" intelligences residing in each of us, with some
excelling in one area and others in something else. "Candidates for
domain-general mechanisms, accounting for both individual and developmental
differences, include speed of processing; Piagetian-like cognitive structures;
working memory; inhibitory mechanisms; attention resources; and general
intelligence, or g. In fact, evidence exists that cognitive tasks
that load heavily on the g factor of psychometrically measured
intelligence, despite having very different surface content, activate the same
specific neural area in the frontal cortex of the adult human brain. This gives
us the somewhat paradoxical finding that an aspect of general intelligence is
modularized." That is, intelligence is modularized in terms of location, but not
made up of a bunch of modules of varying talents and skills. People who are
intelligent tend to be intelligent in all areas that are subsumed under what we
call general intelligence. But lower level, and evolutionarily older brain
modules like face recognition, folk psychology (women excel at sociability or
empathy), or folk physics (men excel at throwing a football or a spear, as well
as being able to track animals in unknown terrains and find their way back to
camp), are more modular in function and located in specific areas of the brain.
Again, back to what we would expect with regards to the intelligence of
different races that evolved under varying environments. "Under what conditions
should domain-general versus domain-specific abilities evolve? Domain-specific
mechanisms will be favored when environments remain relatively stable, with
individuals facing recurrent problems generation after generation. For Homo
sapiens, characteristics of social organization, such as male-male
competition, female care for and provisioning of young, kin recognition,
reciprocal social interactions, and aspects of mate selection, likely remained
relatively stable over evolutionary time. As a result, we should expect
domain-specific mechanisms to have evolved to deal with these classes of
problems, and evolutionary psychologists have devoted much time to demonstrating
exactly this. In contrast, domain-general mechanisms will be favored when
environments are unstable and the nature of the problems individuals face varies
over generations. Under these circumstances, flexible, decontextualized
problem-solving routines would be most adaptive. For example, we noted in
chapter 2 that the environment in which humans evolved was characterized by
frequent and noncyclic changes in climate. This would have resulted in
unpredictable changes in habitat, requiring individuals to be able to respond to
situations unlike any their recent ancestors faced. It is exactly in such
situations that flexible, domain-general mechanisms would be favored."
That is, we would expect domain-general mechanism like general intelligence,
ethnocentrism, religiosity, agreeableness, etc. to vary not only within a
population group, but between population groups under different environments.
Differences between individuals within a racial group provides nature with a
flexible mechanism to select for certain combinations of traits that will vary
on average to allow a race to survive under different environments. East Asians
will select for intelligence, Semites will select for ethnocentrism, Nordics
will select for moral universalism, etc. The same differences seen between
individuals will also be seen as differences, on average, between races. If
individual differences did not exist, the trait under consideration would go to
genetic fixation, like face recognition or "street smarts" - or well functioning
modules found in most normal people. We will revisit this issue when Ridley uses
Lewontin's argument against racial differences below.
Finally, The Origins of Human Nature has some revealing information on
programs like Head Start and Bush's No Child Left Behind:
"The findings presented above indicate that extra prenatal stimulation in one
sensory system can affect adversely later learning in another system. Related to
this issue is the question of whether an early learning experience in infancy
can interfere with later learning….
"Formal education is a novelty for Homo sapiens, a cultural invention
only thousands of years old at most, and only in the past century has a majority
of humanity received even moderate levels of schooling. Yet, within some
cultures, children begin formal education during the preschool years. Moreover,
some of the discoveries relating to infant and fetus learning have resulted in
movements to push formal education back to the crib and, in some cases, to the
womb. The evolutionary developmental perspective taken here, however, suggests
that imposing formal education on children before they are biologically "ready"
or "prepared" to learn will have few positive consequences and may have some
negative effects. Surprisingly, there has been little systematic research on
this socially important issue. There are a few notable exceptions, however.
"In one study, researchers Marion Hyson, Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, and Leslie
Rescorla compared the effects of early high-academic versus low-academic
preschool programs on middle-class children's school-related behavior in
kindergarten. Children were given tests of academic skills, social competence,
emotional well-being, and creativity at the end of their prekindergarten program
and again toward the end of kindergarten. High-academic prekindergarten programs
stressed adult-directed instruction, whereas low-academic programs did not but
instead followed a 'developmentally appropriate' curriculum. There were no
significant differences in academic ability either at the end of prekindergarten
or kindergarten between the children who attended the high-academic and
low-academic programs. A small difference was found for test anxiety at the end
of preschool, with children attending the academically oriented schools showing
greater test anxiety than children attending the developmentally appropriate
programs. Correlational analyses revealed that mothers who scored high on an
adult-instruction scale tended to have children rated as lower in creativity.
(Mothers' belief in adult-instruction positively predicted children's
performance on an academic skills test in preschool, but this relation
disappeared in kindergarten.) Also, the greater the emphasis a preschool placed
on adult-directed practices, the higher children's school-related anxiety.
Finally, children who attended the developmentally appropriate schools were more
likely to have a positive attitude toward school than were children who attended
the high-academic programs.
"Hyson and her associates cautioned that most of these effects, although
statistically significant, were small in magnitude. Nevertheless, in general,
there were no long-term benefits of an academically oriented preschool program
and some evidence that such programs might have negative consequences (e.g.,
greater stress). Based on these findings, Hyson and colleagues concluded that
there seems to be no defensible reason for encouraging formal academic
instruction during the preschool years. Rather, for most children from
middle-class homes, cognitive development and creativity can best be fostered in
a developmentally appropriate preschool program that considers children's
limitations as well as their abilities. In the opinion of these researchers, 'it
may be developmentally prudent to let children explore the world at their own
pace rather than to impose our adult timetables and anxieties on them'."
A person has to wonder if anyone in Washington is paying attention to the latest
research, or if they just don't care as long as they are reelected. The evidence
is now overwhelming and clear, children do not need enrichment programs to do
well in school and to succeed in a technological society - they just need the
right genes so that they can naturally develop into a productive member
of society.
Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human
This brings me to Matt Ridley's new book, with another example of how many of
today's authors, when it comes to the issue of racial differences, will side
step the issue with simplistic rationalizations. Ridley does a very good job of
showing why racial differences should be expected throughout the book. But he
never confronts the issue of human races directly - except to imply that racial
differences just do not apply to humans, but do apply to other species - a very
strange instance of attributing human uniqueness for a scientist. (There is
so much in this book that deals with evolution and behavior genetics that I will
only cover a few important parts that do not take to much space to review.)
Ridley starts out by discrediting the latest attempt at dismissing the
importance of genes in determining who we become. Some experts and laymen alike
have grabbed onto the recent news that humans only have about 30,000 genes, to
claim that this means we do not have enough genes to determine our natures, it
must be nurture that makes us who we are. Of course this is absurd at face
value, because the nature-nurture debate was never determined by speculation
with regards to exactly how many genes it takes an organism to be flexible
behaviorally versus determinate. Ridley explains that:
"This was the making of a new myth [that 30,000 genes are too few to make us
genetically determined in many ways]. In truth, the number of human genes
[expected] changed nothing. Venter's remarks concealed two massive
non-sequiturs: first, that fewer genes implied more environmental influences;
and second, that 30,000 genes were 'too few' to explain human nature where
100,000 would have been enough. As Sir John Sulston, one of the leaders of the
human genome project, put it to me a few weeks later, just 33 genes, each coming
in just two varieties (such as on or off), would be enough to make every human
being in the world unique. There are more than 10 billion ways of flipping a
coin 33 times. So 30,000 is not such a small number after all. Two multiplied by
itself 30,000 times produces a number larger than the total number of particles
in the known universe. Besides, if fewer genes meant more free will, that would
make fruit flies freer than people, bacteria freer still, and viruses the John
Stuart Mills of biology."
While writing this review, an article in the August 22, 2003 issue of Science
entitled "Gene Counters Struggle to Get the Right Answer," explains how
complicated the gene-protein-timing interaction is and what this means to an
organism: "genes that code for multiple proteins or genelike sequences that code
only for RNA….hidden genes….dark matter, seemingly geneless regions in a genome
that might contain hidden coding sequences….One gene can yield multiple proteins
or even be transcribed into RNA rather than a protein….pseudogenes—[that]
artificially inflate gene numbers….etc."
Ridley explains, "If a single gene could make thousands of proteins, then
listing human genes would be only the very beginning of the task of listing the
number of proteins they could produce. On the other hand, such complexity made
nonsense of the argument that the comparatively few genes in the human genome
meant the genome was too simple to explain human nature, and so people must be
the product of experience instead. Those who argued this way were suddenly hoist
with their own petard. Having argued that a genome of 30,000 genes was too small
to determine the details of human nature, they would have to admit that a genome
which could produce hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of different
proteins had easily enough combinatorial capacity to specify human nature in
excruciating detail, without even bothering to use nurture."
Ridley goes on to explain that in nature, social behavior is very flexible and
that habitats determine how a species will eventually behave, with little
reliance on the genetic make up of the species. That is, no matter how similar
any two genus, species or racial taxa are to each other, with regards to
behavior, there is enough genetic flexibility to alter behavior. So it is with
human races, we evolved different levels of innate intelligence and different
frequencies of genetic alleles that make us different on average in behavioral
traits such as conscientiousness. Change any human group's habitat, social
structure, climate, food source, or need for defensive action against other
humans or dangerous prey, and genetic frequency changes will follow over time. Every race
or population group has their own particular history that has molded their
cognitive and behavioral postures to help them survive, and it is the wide
latitude of behavioral types within races that has provided this
flexibility to be expressed differently on average by each race.
As Ridley puts it, "The same is not true of social behavior. By and large,
ethologists have found very little phylogenetic inertia in social systems.
Closely related species can have very different social organization if they live
in different habitats or eat different food. Distant relatives can have very
similar social systems by convergent evolution if they inhabit similar
ecological niches. Where two species show similar behavior, it tells you less
about their common ancestor and more about the pressures of the environment that
shaped them."
Humans, like other organisms, do not have a "set of genes" for making a
particular human type, including differences. Rather, there is a loosely defined
set of regulatory genes that turn off and on during one's life based on timing,
helping us mature into successful adults:
"Small changes in the promoter [genes] can therefore have subtle effects on the
expression of the gene. Perhaps promoters are more like thermostats than
switches. It is in the promoters that scientists expect to find most
evolutionary change in animals and plants - in sharp contrast to bacteria. For
example, mice have short necks and long bodies; chickens have long necks and
short bodies. If you count the vertebrae in the neck and thorax of a chicken and
a mouse, you will find that the mouse has 7 neck and 13 thoracic vertebrae; the
chicken has 14 and 7 respectively. The source of this difference lies in one of
the promoters attached to one of the hox genes, Hoxc8, a gene found in both mice
and chickens whose job is to switch on other genes that lay down details of
development. The promoter is a 200-letter paragraph of DNA, and it has just a
handful of letters different in the two species. Indeed, changes in as few as
two of these letters may be enough to make all the difference. The effect is to
delay the expression of the Hoxc8 gene slightly in the development of the
chicken embryo. Since development of the vertebral column starts at the head,
this means the chicken goes on making neck vertebrae longer than the mouse….As
the hox [gene] story illustrates, DNA promoters express themselves in the fourth
dimension: their timing is all. A chimp has a different head from a human being
not because it has a different blueprint for the head, but because it grows the
jaws for longer and the cranium for less long than does the human being. The
difference is all timing."
Ridley then explains that with universal education, with reduced differences in
environmental influences, the differences between students are now due to
heredity, not to nurturing. For decades now, we have seen that Jews far exceed
Whites, and Whites far exceed Blacks in educational attainment, and in the case
of Blacks, all kinds of environmental explanations have been put forth to try
and dispel any genetic belief in causation, but to no avail. All of the research
points to genes rather than the environment, and the egalitarians have given up
trying to show environmental causation, and have fallen back into purely
defensive positions. These include calling anyone who broaches the subject of
genetic racial differences as racist, or stepping around the subject altogether
by not really addressing it - as Ridley has done.
As Ridley explains the Left's tactics of denial: "Anecdotes aside, [Bouchard]
was gathering real, quantitative information on similarity [between identical
twins]. By the time he published, his data were all but impregnable to Farber's
criticisms. Not that this impressed the establishment. His critics still charged
that he was proving nothing but his own assumptions. Of course these people
resembled each other - they lived in similar middle-class suburbs of similar
cities; they swam in the same cultural sea; they were taught the same western
values."
All kinds of adoption studies, twin studies, longitudinal studies, etc., from
numerous countries around the world, are showing without a doubt which aspects
of human nature are genetic versus environmental. Were we actually more
enlightened 100 years ago about human nature than we are now? Ridley observes
that:
"What about intelligence? The debate about the heritability of IQ has been
scarred by controversy since its inception. The first IQ tests were crude and
culturally biased. In the 1920s, convinced that intelligence was largely
hereditary and alarmed at the thought of excessive breeding by stupid people,
governments in the United States and many European countries began to sterilize
mental defectives to prevent them from passing on their genes. But in the 1960s
came a sudden revolution, as in so many other debates. From then on, even the
assertion of heritable IQ led to vitriolic campaigns of denunciation, assaults
on your reputation and demands for your dismissal. The first to suffer this
treatment was Arthur Jensen in 1969, following his article in the Harvard
Educational Review. By the 1990s, the argument that society was segregating
itself by assortative mating along intellectual and therefore racial lines -
asserted in The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray -
provoked another wave of rage among academics and journalists.
"Yet I suspect that if you took a poll of ordinary people, they would hardly
have changed their views over a century. Most people believe in 'intelligence' -
a natural aptitude or lack of it for intellectual pursuits. The more children
they have, the more they believe in it. This does not stop them from also
believing in coaxing it out of the gifted and coaching it into the ungifted
through education. But they think that there is something innate.
"The studies of twins reared apart or together unambiguously support the idea
that although some people are good at some things and others are good at other
things, there is such a thing as unitary intelligence. That is to say, most
measures of intelligence correlate with each other. People who are good at
general knowledge tests or vocabulary tests are usually good at abstract
reasoning or at tasks that involve completing number series. This was first
noticed a century ago by a follower of Galton's, the statistician Charles
Spearman, who dubbed the common factor g for general intelligence.
Today, a measure of g derived from correlating different IQ tests
remains a powerful predictor of how well a child will do at school. There has
been more research on g than on any other subject in psychology.
Theories of multiple intelligence come and go, but the notion of correlated
intelligence just will not go away."
So back to the differences between races in intelligence. Numerous studies are
showing that East Asians have larger brains than Whites, and Whites have larger
brains than Blacks. The difference in average brain sizes correlates with racial
average intelligences - 105, 100 and 70 (in sub-Saharan Africa) - respectively.
But is the brain size-intelligence correlation a just so story as Stephen
Gould tried to claim? Ridley replies:
"The one physical feature that does clearly predict intelligence is brain size.
The correlation between brain volume and IQ is about 40 percent, a number that
leaves much room for the small-brained genius and the big-brained dullard but is
still a strong correlation. Brains are composed of white matter and gray matter.
When, in 2001, brain scanners reached the stage that people could be compared
for the amount of gray matter in their brains, two separate studies in Holland
and Finland found a high correlation between g and volume of gray
matter, especially in certain parts of the brain. Both also found a huge
correlation between identical twins in volume of gray matter: 95 percent.
Fraternal twins had only a 50 percent correlation. These figures indicate
something that is under almost pure genetic control, leaving very little room
for environmental influence. Gray matter volume must be 'due completely to
genetic factors and not to environmental factors' in the words of Danielle
Posthuma, the Dutch researcher. These studies bring us no closer to the actual
genes of intelligence, but they leave little doubt that the genes are there.
Gray matter consists of the bodies of neurons, and the new correlation implies
that clever people may literally have more neurons, or more connections between
neurons, than normal people do. After the discovery of the role of the ASPM gene
in determining brain size through neuron number, it is beginning to look as if
some of the genes of g will soon be found."
Ridley does point out that living in extreme poverty can have a detrimental
impact on learning. However, what type of environment is extreme?
Certainly not in the urban ghettos. In the United States, even the poorest
children have been shown to have adequate nutrition. It would seem this level of
deprivation is what we have seen in Communist orphanages like Romania or China,
or massive starvation in Communist North Korea. In the United States, even among
middle class Blacks, their children do poorly in school on average, no doubt due
to regression to the mean as well as affirmative action redistribution of income
from Whites and Jews to Blacks. The genetics of intelligence just will not go
away.
Over just the last few years or so, research has concluded that genes, not the
environment, rules as a person ages, quite contrary to what we would expect
given the older static concept of genes. Ridley states:
"The second surprise hidden in the average figures is that the influence of
genes increases and the influence of shared environment gradually disappears
with age. The older you grow, the less your family background predicts your IQ
and the better your genes predict it. An orphan of brilliant parents adopted
into a family of dullards might do poorly at school but by middle age could end
up a brilliant professor of quantum mechanics. An orphan of dullard parents,
reared in a family of Nobel Prize-winners, might do well at school but by
middle-age may be working in a job that requires little reading or little deep
thought.
"Numerically, the contribution of 'shared environment' to variation in IQ in a
western society is roughly 40 percent in people younger than 20. It then falls
rapidly to zero in older age groups. Conversely, the contribution of genes to
explaining variation in IQ rises from 20 percent in infancy to 40 percent in
childhood to 60 percent in adults and maybe even 80 percent in people past
middle age. In other words, the effect of being reared in the same environment
as somebody else is influential while you are still in that environment but does
not endure beyond the period of shared rearing. Adoptive siblings do have partly
similar IQs while living together. But as adults their IQs are wholly
uncorrelated. By adulthood, intelligence is like personality: mostly inherited,
partly influenced by factors unique to the individual, and very little affected
by the family you grew up in. This is a counterintuitive discovery exploding the
old idea that genes come early and nurture late….
"The story of IQ contains a very clear example of this phenomenon. Called the
Flynn effect, after its discoverer, James Flynn, it is the remarkable fact that
average IQ scores are rising steadily at the rate of at least five points per
decade. This shows that the environment does influence IQ; it implies that
compared with our grandparents we are all teetering on the brink of genius,
which seems unlikely.
"Nonetheless, something about modern life, whether it is nutrition, education,
or mental stimulation, is making each generation better at IQ tests than its
parents. Therefore, one or two nurturists (but not Flynn) argued triumphantly,
the role of genes must be smaller than had been thought. But the analogy of
height shows that this is a non sequitur. Thanks to better nutrition, each
generation is taller than its parents, but nobody would argue that therefore
height is less genetic than was thought. In fact, because more people now reach
their full potential stature, the heritability of variation in height is
probably increasing."
Over an over again, the genetic importance of genes is overwhelming the radical
environmentalists. Is it any wonder that they continually fall back on
criticizing the research of behavior geneticists, while providing no research of
their own? All they have been able to do is provide new and ever more convoluted
speculations as to why Blacks are less intelligent than Whites - but no proof is
ever forthcoming. When their theories fail after testing, they turn to new
theories, while genetics marches on at an ever-increasing pace. Even some of the
more absurd promises are still conjured up, as if they were still valid:
"By the mid-1920s Watson was convinced not that conditioning was a part of how
humans learned about the world but that it was the main theme. He joined a
growing academic trend toward enthusiasm for nurture over nature and made an
extraordinary claim: 'Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own
specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one of them
at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select -
doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race
of his ancestors.'"
Ridley has done a superb job of explaining how genes can shape a population
group's phenotypic traits with only slight variation in the actual genes. A
similar example discussed includes a fascinating case of variability with the
different fish in Africa, where in several lakes, different species have each
adapted to particular niches in each lake, and the habitats have determined how
the different races of fish have evolved to take advantage of the differing
environments. For example: there are three lakes with three different species of
fish (species A, B and C). Within each lake, there are three
different habitats, to be occupied by that specie's races (habitats x, y and z).
As it turns out, the fish "races" that occupy habitat x behave and look more
alike than they do their own species that occupy habitats y and z. And the same
goes for those fish races that occupy habitat y and habitat z. It is not the
genetic similarity that determines how the fishes have reshaped themselves; it
is the habitat that creates the final product. Ridley drives this point home
very well. So what does he say about human races?
"Though he stressed the influence of the environment, Boas was no extreme blank-slater.
He made the crucial distinction between the individual and the race. It was
precisely because he recognized profound innate differences in personality
between individuals that he discounted innate differences between races, a
perspective that was later proved genetically correct by Richard Lewontin. The
genetic differences between two individuals chosen at random from one race are
far greater than the average differences between races. Indeed, Boas sounds
thoroughly modern in almost every way. His fervent antiracism, his belief that
culture determined rather than reflected ethnic idiosyncrasy, and his passion
for equality of opportunity for all would come to be hallmarks of political
virtue in the second half of the century, although Boas himself was dead by
then….
"Seen from outside the species, human races look remarkably similar. To a
chimpanzee or a Martian, the different human ethnic groups would barely deserve
classification as separate races at all. There are no sharp geographical
boundaries where one race begins and another ends, and the genetic variation
between races is small compared with the genetic variation among individuals of
the same race, reflecting the recent common ancestor of all human beings alive
today - little more than 3,000 generations have passed since that common
ancestor lived.
"But seen from inside one race, other human races look extremely different.
White Victorians were ready to elevate (or relegate) Africans to a different
species, and even in the twentieth century hereditarians frequently sought to
prove that the differences between blacks and whites were deeper than skin and
were manifest in the mind as well as the body. In 1972 Richard Lewontin disposed
of most serious scientific racism by showing that genetic differences between
individuals swamp differences between races. Though a few cranks still believe
they will find a justification for racial prejudice in the genes, the truth is
that science has done far more to explode than to foster the myth of racial
stereotypes."
This is the sum total of his rebuttal of racial differences. Can it stand up to
scrutiny? Hardly, he is just recycling the same old Marxist canard that Boas,
Lewontin, Rose, Kamin and Gould have been spouting. The logic is so easily
rebutted it must have pained Ridley to present it. For example, there is also
more variance in stature within a race than there is between races. But does
anyone claim that there is no genetic variance between the average heights of
Pygmies versus Bantus? There is also more variance in intelligence between
children born to the same parents than there is between some races - such as
Ashkenazi Jews and Caucasians. Does that mean there are no differences in the
average intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews and Caucasians?
How about breeds of dogs? I would venture the same statement could be made:
"there is more genetic variance within any breed of dog than there is
between any
two breed (races) of dogs." So what? That tells us nothing about the
differences between breeds. It only tells us that someone counted up specific
genetic alterations, and that there is a lot of variety even among closely
related organisms.
Remember, Ridley started out telling us that it did not matter if humans had
30,000 genes or 100,000 genes, there is plenty of genetic information for humans
to have a high degree of heritability in morphology, intelligence, behavioral
traits, and in responses to disease and medical treatment, as well as specific
genetic disease. So why would he then claim that similarly, because we have a
lot of genetic variance between individuals, there cannot be genetic differences
between races in the frequency of specific alleles? The list could go on and on,
with varying degrees of comparison, but it is all quite useless. The amount of
variation in the genetic code for any organism, whether it is between members of
the species, close kin, or subspecies (races), tells us absolutely nothing about
the resultant phenotypic characteristics and the amount of variability that
exists on any particular trait.
If a trait has been found to be of universal value under all types of habitat,
eventually it will go to fixation. If traits such as intelligence, stature or
extroversion have varying value under different ecological conditions, then the
trait will not go to fixation to allow for changes in the average for the group
or race to acquire under selection pressures. What this means is, that we would
expect there to be racial differences in the average expression of any trait
that has an open-ended need to change under ecological stress - such as being a
fast sprinter or a long distance runner (the genes for these two versions of
fast-twitch versus slow-twitch muscles have now been identified).
Ridley has one other statement that expresses his capitulation to political
correctness:
"After half a million years, technological progress is steady, but very, very
slow until the Upper Paleolithic revolution, sometimes known as the 'great leap
forward.' Around 50,000 years ago in Europe, painting, body
adornment, trading over long distances, artifacts of clay and bone, and
elaborate new stone designs all seem to appear at once. The suddenness is partly
illusory, no doubt, because the tools had developed gradually in some corner of
Africa before spreading elsewhere by migration or conquest. Indeed, Sally
McBrearty and Alison Brooks have argued that the fossil record supports a very
gradual, piecemeal revolution in Africa starting almost 300,000 years ago.
Blades and pigments were already in use by then. McBrearty and Brooks place the
invention of long-distance trade at 130,000 years ago, for instance, on the
basis of the discovery at two sites in Tanzania of pieces of obsidian (volcanic
glass) used to make spear points. This obsidian came from the Rift Valley in
Kenya, more than 200 miles away.
"The sudden revolution of 50,000 years ago at the start of the Upper Paleolithic
is clearly a Eurocentric myth, caused by the fact that far more archaeologists
work in Europe than in Africa."
Oh really? What proof does Ridley have for this statement? None apparently, he
makes no reference for this assertion. Could it not also be possible that 50,000
years ago, under extreme ecological stress, humans in Europe and East Asia took
a giant leap forward in intelligence and creativity because they had to for the
sake of survival? There is very little evidence that sub-Saharan Africans ever
had an advanced culture, a written language, domestication of animals and
plants, or utilization of the wheel even though it was brought to them by others
several thousand years ago. From all indications, sub-Saharan Africans have a
low average intelligence, and there is no environmental explanation for this
fact other than they evolved in an ecological niche that did not require a
higher degree of cognitive development. Of course, Ridley would never discuss
these issues openly and honestly. But why not? Actually, Ridley explains why but
just doesn't see the irony.
In Human Evolutionary Psychology they state: "one of the most puzzling
features of humans is their apparently unique willingness (as a species) to
conform to the communal will rather than individually striking out on their own.
In fact, for two decades or more, a minor industry within social psychology
devoted itself to empirical studies of just these kinds of effects. Why humans
should be so unusually susceptible to these kinds of social pressures remains
the deepest and perhaps most intriguing mystery in the whole of human
evolution."
Likewise, Ridley states, "Conformity is indeed a feature of human society, at
all ages. The more rivalry there is between groups, the more people will conform
to the norms of their own group. But there is something else going on beneath
the surface. Under the superficial conformity in tribal costumes lies an almost
frantic search for individual differentiation."
And of course, Ridley like all people is trying desperately to differentiate
himself from others by being on the cutting edge of genetics, but like all human
tribes, he has succumbed to conforming to the group norms of Western society: he
must deny any differences between races because that position is the
moralizing god of liberalism. He has obeyed the papal stance on
egalitarianism, and will go no further to unshackle himself from group
membership - it is still too strong. To do so means isolation, censorship, and
even criminal charges in many European countries under newly enacted hate speech
laws against discussing racial issues.
While concluding my review of Ridley, I started reading Original
Intelligence: Unlocking the Mystery of Who We Are by David & Ann Premack,
2003. In discussing the evolution of humans, they shed some additional light on
our transformation from hunter-gatherers to modernity.
They state first that humans are genetically 98.4% similar to chimpanzees, 80%
similar to flatworms, and 60% similar to sponges and that "Obviously, there is
no linear relation between genes and intelligence: the chimpanzee does not have
98.4% of human intelligence, the flatworm 80%, or the sponge 60%." They
point out, as does Ridley and others, that we are now finding that differences
are not due to genes as much as to "the work of regulatory genes, which have an
effect out of proportion to their numbers. By suppressing or activating major
metabolic pathways, pathways that have multiple branches, even a single
regulatory gene, can have an overpowering effect on development."
Now let's return to Lewontin's assertions about human variability. The assertion
that there is more genetic variation between individuals than between races was
made decades ago, when everyone thought that evolutionary change was caused by
genetic mutations, and that humans could not have divided up into races with
dissimilar gene frequencies because there just wasn't enough time. Now we know
that evolution has far less to do with mutations than it does with changing the
regulation of the genes. The old Marxist arguments no longer hold under the
newer paradigm that differences come about from the interaction of ecological
stress on differing races. So let's look at a different view of change in
differential averages in intelligence.
Premack & Premack take a slightly different view of what happened during the
Upper Paleolithic revolution 50,000 years ago in Europe. During this period,
hunting became highly efficient because of increased intelligence, and food
sources were utterly destroyed over time, and the prospects were extinction for
humans as well as their prey. But humans rebounded in a novel way: at least in
this part of the world, we began domesticating plants and animals. "In other
words, he invented a new technology. The cognition that originally had imperiled
him, now save him."
This new technology brought about the inventions of writing, economics (to
inventory crop ownership, etc.), the state, church and armies to defend
territories as the population continued to increase. Humans were again under
extreme ecological stress as they went from egalitarian hunter-gatherer
tribalism to vast empires. Now, the process of agriculture relied on "causal
reasoning, on recognizing that seeds grow when planted in the ground…."
Once we had fully developed the written word, and a written history, the human
mind slowly acquired the ability to form complex plots, scenarios, rules,
divisions of labor, etc. Intelligence was now of primary importance for
individual as well as group evolutionary strategies. But where were the
sub-Saharan Africans and other extant hunter-gatherer races during this period?
They never left the evolutionary stage of hunter-gatherer. They were stuck in
the past.
This now turns Jared Diamond's argument on its head (Guns, Germs, and Steel:
The Fates of Human Societies. Norton, 1997). He argues that all races are
equally intelligent, but some discovered technology because of where they lived.
But it is more likely that where they lived, drove their intelligence higher
because they had to or become extinct. They had become too fecund to exist as
they had in the past.
But some even went further. The Greeks and the Jews introduced universal
education, and the ability to read, interpret, and ponder highly complex text
became an asset and a valued commodity in a world where most people remained
illiterate. The Greek civilization died out, but the Ashkenazi Jewish study of
the Torah, along with selective breeding of male Torah scholars with the
daughters of rich merchants, introduced the first eugenic breeding program that
has given the modern day Ashkenazi Jews a phenomenal average verbal intelligence
of 127 (with an average overall intelligence of 115) (MacDonald 2002b). (Also
see recent research by Richard Lynn that shows a somewhat lower average IQ for
Ashkenazi Jews - but still higher than any other race.)
I have reviewed Ridley by focusing on the book's deceptions because they needed
to be clarified. But there is much that I have not covered. It is very well
written, and it is one of the most intriguing books on how genetics is changing
how we look at evolution and behavior. Be sure to read the book, and see for
yourself how he vindicates the probability that there are indeed racial
differences in average intelligence, and in fact these differences have been
observed for over 100 years now and have not changed.
Matt Nuenke,
September, 2003
Transtopia
- Main
- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
- Introduction
- Principles
- Symbolism
- FAQ
- Transhumanism
- Cryonics
- Island Project
- PC-Free Zone