The following is from http://www.neoeugenics.com/
Matt Nuenke's review of Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley. September,
2003
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arguments out-of-date and frankly just plain annoying.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 the
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 he 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 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,
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 it also plays 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 deny that it
applies to humans, but does apply everywhere else in other organisms.
(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 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 one static 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 species or lake, there are three
different habitats, to be occupied by that species 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 between any two dogs than there
is between any two breeds (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 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 of human intelligence, the
flatworm 80 percent, or the sponge 60 percent." 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 of
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 was 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
.
|
