← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Esoterist
Thread ID: 18685 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2005-06-16
2005-06-16 14:06 | User Profile
[url="http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/em_clima.html"]http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/em_clima.html[/url]
Climate and Intelligence: Comment on Lynn
Edward M. Miller Department of Economics and Finance University of New Orleans New Orleans, La. 70148, USA E-Mail [email="emmef@uno.edu"][color=#0000ff]emmef@uno.edu[/color][/email]
Mankind Quarterly, Vol. XXXII, No. 1/2, Fall/Winter 1991, pp. 127-132 Posted with permission of Mankind Quarterly, Institute for the Study of Man, 1133 13th St., N. W., Suite C-2, 20005 (Telephone 202-371-2700).
Lynn is not the first to argue that the benefits of intelligence were greatest for those populations living in cold climates during the Ice Ages (for an early exposition see Huntington 1924, Chapter IV1). It is common to argue that the impetus for the enlargement of the brain size "during the era of Homo erectus was due to an expansion out of the tropics and into cool regions where ingenuity and flexibility of behavior were more necessary for survival" (Campbell 1976, p. 324). More recently, Calvin (1991) has argued that human intelligence was strongly selected for in cold areas during the Ice Ages, although without recognizing that this hypothesis had implications for the geographical distribution of intelligence. If conditions in the colder regions were such that there was strong selection for intelligence as to lead to the emergence of a new species (Homo sapiens), it is plausible that this selection for intelligence would also have led to a cline for intelligence, in which intelligence increased as one moved towards the frigid regions. 2
Physical anthropologists (Coon 1965, 1982, Krantz 1980) have examined the distribution of many traits and found that clines existed in which they varied with either climate (body size and shape, nose shape, hair type) or latitude (skin color). The characteristics for which clines in skin color and other external characteristics are argued to exist are the characteristics traditionally used to delimit one race from another. Thus the existence of a cline for intelligence such that intelligence increased with winter temperature would explain the racial variations in intelligence.
These cold climate adopted races are the modern day Caucasians and Mongoloids, with the Mongoloids usually considered to be the more cold adaptated. This is another way of reaching the Lynn's conclusion that adaptation to different climate requirements explains differences between races in intelligence.
There is a general principle here. A theory to explain human intelligence growth will normally imply that some populations were subject to more such selection than other populations. Thus the theory will have testable implications for the differences in intelligence between populations. One way to test theories of the emergence of intelligence (or other characteristics for that matter) is to see if their implications for the distribution of intelligence among existing populations corresponds with observation.
Lynn discusses the intellectual demands of large animal hunting and keeping warm in the cold as needs that led to intelligence being selected for. There are two more climate related variations in hunter-gather strategies that may have contributed to the growth in intelligence, the need to store food, and the abandonment of a migratory way of life.
Binford (1980) has documented two empirical regularities in the behavior of hunter- gathers which may be of evolutionary significance. One is that there is a systematic relationship between the extent to which societies store food and the effective temperatures where they live. Those in colder climates do more food storage, presumedly due to the problem of "over-wintering." in colder climates. He reports that food storage is practiced only (with exceptions) in societies whose growing seasons are less than about 200 days.
Although Binford didn't deal with the intelligence required for the different strategies, the intellectual requirements of strategies do appear to differ. High intelligence has a greater benefit in climates where food storage is useful. First of all, intelligence increases the likelihood that the required storage techniques, such as drying, will be discovered. Secondly, successful use of storage involves looking ahead to the period of shortage, and postponing some consumption in order to store the food. Success with a food storage strategy requires ability to delay the gratification of eating available food. The ability to delay gratification appears to increase with intelligence. In experiments where children were forced to choose between a small candy bar now or a larger one later, the ability to delay the gratification increased with chronological age (and presumably with intelligence as measured by mental age) and also with IQ (Mischel and Metzer 1962). With intelligence contributing to the ability to delay gratification, the genes for intelligence would be more strongly selected for in climates where survival of cold winters necessitated food storage.
Once scarcity starts, it is necessary to ration the stored food. Mastery of the arithmetic needed is facilitated by intelligence. More complex social rules, such as eating only food stored by your family, may be required to facilitate storage. Higher intelligence appears to be needed in a society storing food than in one where hunter-gathers find sufficient food for the day and eat it soon afterwards.
Another systematic difference found by Binford was between effective temperature and the extent to which hunter-gatherers were nomadic or settled. Fully nomadic cultures were most common near the equators and diminished into the temperate regions, only to increase again as the arctic was approached. He reports ( p. 14) that "'fully nomadic' strategies characterize 75% of the hunter gatherer cases located in a fully equatorial environment. . . ; high mobility is also found in 64.2% of the cases in semi-tropical settings. In warm temperate settings we note a drastic reduction of hunter-gathers who are 'fully nomadic' (only 9.3%), and in cool temperate settings the number is still further reduced (7.5%). Then as we move into boreal settings the number of fully nomadic groups increases slightly (11.1%), and in full arctic settings it increases drastically (reaching 41.6%)." None of the sedentary hunter-gathers were reported from the tropical and semi-tropical regions.
Part of the relationship may derive from food storage. It is hard to sustain a nomadic lifestyle if one has extensive food stores to be moved.
High intelligence appears less useful in a nomadic band that frequently relocates. The burden of carrying artifacts from camp to camp prevents the development of any but minimal handicrafts. A highly specialized tool used for a single purpose may not be worth carrying (making the intelligence needed to invent and use such a tool of little value). Any shelters built must be of a simple form, since they will soon be abandoned.
In contrast, in a settled form of life, artifacts could be accumulated. The basis would be set for the discovery (if intelligence permitted) of the planting of specific food crops or the domestication of animals. With the ability to store artifacts, more elaborate handicraft industries can emerge. Intelligence is likely to be more of an asset in the production of such handicrafts than in simple hunting and gathering.
Lynn, after drawing attention to Torrence's finding that people in Northern latitudes make more tools and more complex tools than those in the tropical and subtropical latitude, suggests that this may reflect the benefits of carrying on more activities in northern latitudes. However, smaller tool assortments in the tropics may also be due to the inconsistency of a large tool assortment with a migratory lifestyle (i.e. a cost rather than a benefit consideration).
Colder temperatures increase the advantages of a well built permanent home over a simple shelter, and are hence more likely to lead to permanent settlement. In colder climates permanent houses and fancier clothing are needed for protection from the cold. The construction of these require higher spatial intelligence. It is necessary to visualize how different building materials will fit together to provide a house, or to visualize how different pieces of material will fit together to make a garment. Tests of the ability to visualize how such pieces can be combined to make designated objects are frequently used in intelligence tests, creating a presumption that intelligence (and visual and spatial abilities in particular) would be an asset in the construction of such artifacts.
Lynn devotes much attention to the benefits in cold climates of having genes that lead to intelligence. He devotes no attention to the possible cost of these genes. Yet an important question is why everyone doesn't have the genes that lead to high intelligence, since high intelligence would appear desirable to all.
For instance, after devoting much attention to demonstrating the correlation between head size and intelligence, and also noting the Beals, Smith, and Dodd (1984) finding that head size increased with latitude, he interpreted the correlation as being due to greater benefits of intelligence in northern areas. Another possibility exists. The brain, an organ which consumes a disproportionate amount of the body's energy (about 20%) also produces a disproportionate proportion of its heat. In warm climates disposal of this heat could be a disadvantage of the genes that led to high intelligence. In cold climates, this extra heat would be an advantage. In effect, a secondary function of the brain is as heat production. Energy is used to support a larger brain, rather than being wasted through shivering. A byproduct of the larger brain is higher intelligence, a fitness increasing characteristic. This implies that the optimal brain size would be larger in cold climates even if the benefits of intelligence were equal in all climates.3
Intelligence and basal metabolism are correlated (for documentation see Miller 1991). If this correlation arises because some genes both increase basal metabolism and raise intelligence, these genes would have been preferentially selected for in colder climates, creating a correlation between other characteristics that reflect adaptation to high latitudes (such as skin color) and intelligence.
Finally, it should be noted that because of the low (but clearly positive) correlation between brain size and intelligence, the differences between races in brain size can explain only a small portion of the observed differences in intelligence. Thus, the genes that determine differences in intelligence appear to be many more than those that determine brain size. However, differences in the frequencies of the genes that determine brain size may be good indicators of the extent to which populations have been selected for intelligence.4 [center][img]http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/images/rainbo.gif[/img]
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References
Kenneth L. Beals, Courtland L. Smith, and Stephen M. Dodd, "Brain Size, Cranial Morphology, Climate, and Time Machines," Current Anthropology, Vol. 25 (June 1984) No. 3, pp. 301-328.
Lewis R. Binford, " Yellow Smoke and Dogs' Tails: Hunter Gatherer Settlement Systems and Archaeological Site Formation," American Antiquity, Vol. 45 (January 1980) No. 1, pp. 4-20.
William H. Calvin, The Ascent of the Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence, (New York: Bantam, 1991).
Bernard G. Campbell, Humankind Emerging, (Boston: Little, Brown 1976).
Jun Hatazawa, Rodney A Brooks, Giovanni Di Chiro, and Stephen L. Bacharach, "Glucose utilization rate versus brain size in humans," Neurology, Vol. 37 (1987) pp. 583-588.
Ellsworth Huntington, The Character of Races, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924).
Richard Lynn, "Ethnic and Racial Differences in Intelligence: International Comparisons," in R. Travis Osborne, Clyde E. Noble, and Nathaniel Weyl, (Editors) Human Variation: The Biopsychology of Age, Race, and Sex, (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 261-283.
Edward M. Miller, "Climate, Basal Metabolism and Intelligence," Working Paper, Department of Economics and Finance, University of New Orleans 1991.
Walter Mischel and Ralph Metzer, "Preference for Delayed Reward as a Function of Age, Intelligence, and Length of Delay Interval," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol 64 (June 1962) No. 6, pp. 425-431.
R. Torrence, "Time budgeting and hunter-gather technology," In G. Bailey (ed) Hunter-Gatherer Economy in Prehistory: A European Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). [center][img]http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/images/rainbo.gif[/img]
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Footnotes
1This slightly simplifies Huntington's theory since he felt the extreme cold of the Arctic regions or Siberia was not conducive to mental development and he attached high weight to the selection that occurred as populations migrated into the areas vacated by the retreating glaciers.
2 Although in the current paper Lynn argues that Caucasians have roughly the same intelligence regardless of where they live, in an earlier paper (Lynn 1978), he reported that the Caucasoid people inhabiting the southerly latitudes from Spain through the Middle East to India scored lower than those with origins in Northwest Europe, evidence that clines in intelligence roughly parallel those in climate.
3 Although it is plausible that larger brains consume more energy and produce more heat than smaller brains, Hatazawa et al (1987), using positron emission techniques, found a very strong negative correlation between brain size and energy use per unit volume, sufficient to eliminate any positive correlation between brain energy use and brain size. 4 Or the differences in brain size may reflect selection for factors that have little to do with intelligence, such as ease of passing a birth canal in a pelvis whose design is determined by considerations of locomotion.
[the 'icey' white personality from the african perspective]
[url="http://www.afriqueonline.com/Pages/B.S.Blasters/AfriRace.html"]http://www.afriqueonline.com/Pages/B.S.Blasters/AfriRace.html[/url]
Let's go back to the beginning . . . about 200,000 years before Christ. Prehistoric men and women had been living on the plains of Africa for more than three million years, developing tools, forming communities, building small huts, hunting, gathering food and creating the roots of human culture.
About two hundred thousand years ago some of these early people began to move north into Europe and west into Asia, probably following herds of animals during the warm spells between Ice Ages. As the Ice Ages returned again and again, these people were trapped in a frozen Eurasia very different from the warm, fertile plains of Africa.
No longer could they walk outside without covering their naked bodies from head to toe to keep from freezing to death. No longer could they sleep out under stars on a warm summer night, pick abundant fruit hanging from the trees or hunt herds of African animals so huge that they took days to stampede past.
These early humans were forced into frozen caves, huddled around fires for warmth, trudging through snow and ice to find food and fighting their neighbors over scraps of meat that it no longer made sense to share.
These Africans living in Eurasia began to lose their societies based on sharing and "we first", these were twisted into Eurasian cultures based on individualism and "me first".
Over thousands of years, the melanin that had protected their dark skins from the burning African sun began to fade from their complexions; their skin became a light yellowish pink.
The tightly curled black hair which had protected the brain so well from sunstroke grew limp and stringy, sometimes turning strange colors; red, brown or even yellow.
Healthy nostrils designed to exchange large amounts of cooling air in the lungs during hot, tropical days became pinched and narrow nostrils designed to preserve body heat in a frozen wasteland. Their lips shrank to almost nothing.
Five thousand years ago the Eurasians (Europe and Asia are one continent, in case nobody has noticed) were still living in caves, but progress still flourished on the African continent.
Africans had developed the world's first great civilization in the land of Kemet, known today as Egypt. For the first time mankind organized itself on a massive scale, building temples, cities and pyramids that could not be rebuilt today despite amazing modern technology.
Without machines, without engines, without concrete and without computers, African people built pyramids so huge they can be seen from earth orbit with the naked eye. The great wall of China, built thousands of years later, is the only other man made structure of this magnitude.
Thousands of years before the birth of Christ, Africans in Kemet made amazing developments in science, agriculture, commerce, religion, philosophy, education and government. A coin-operated holy water machine thousands of years old has been excavated in Egypt, only one of many amazing artifacts of the world's first great civilization.
Through trade and conquest, knowledge and the ideas of civilization spread out of Egypt and the fertile crescent to the whites living closest to Africa. First the Greeks, and then the Romans formed societies whose architecture, philosophy and cultures imitated concepts taken from Egypt.
Learned African scholars and tutors were brought in to endarken barbaric Eurasians, with mixed results (the name Aesop means "Egyptian"). Greeks and Romans organized their societies enough to conquer and colonize large areas of Eurasia and Africa, including Egypt itself.
White backlash by primitive tribes of Eurasians against African cultural influences in Greco-Roman society caused savages from the north to overrun Rome, resulting in the Light Ages; a thousand years of European ignorance compounded by savagery.
Only one group in Europe made significant strides in mathematics, navigation, philosophy, invention and learning during this time period; the Africans who had taken over southern Spain.
Five hundred years ago Eurasian barbarians swarmed out of the north once more, this time spreading over the whole earth. They were successful because they were quick to adapt to technology, raw materials and concepts stolen from other cultures (gunpowder, the printing press, spices and pasta from China; metallurgy, mathematics, Christianity and navigation from Africa).
Europeans took control of the earth, spreading their greed-based culture using gunpowder and religion. They murdered millions of people and enslaved millions more, wiping out whole cultures that stood in the way of their conquest.
Sexual interaction with the conquered people, especially African people, quickly showed that the penis would not be as effective a weapon as the gun or the bible had proven to be. The children of interracial sexual contacts tended to have African features: good tightly curled hair, dark skin, strong noses and lips, instead of non-black features like stringy hair, pale complexions or thin lips.
2005-06-16 17:06 | User Profile
The simplistic notions of climate being the instrument of differentiated intelligence between the races has been shown to be only partly true if at all.
For example, we can observe the African Negro as being generally intellectually slower, and their people have developed very few innovations which would have advanced their civilization. Some claim this is due to the warmer climate which required few challenges of the mind in order to survive.
However, if we observe the Indians of Central and South America we can discover these people were able to developed civilizations which were far more advanced than anything in Africa. If we were to accept the climate theory of intelligence, then the inhabitants of the New World living in a similar enviornment would have resulted in similarly intellectually slower people on par with the Negro. Of course, we all know this is not the case. Mayans and Aztecs built large pyramids and the Mayans in particularly had developed mathematics of a far greater nature than the Africans. Why would this happen if climate were the determing factor of intellectual growth?
However, there is one difference. This is the lack of large meat eating predators of human flesh. In the New World there are one or two depending on the location. In the far North there are several varieties of bear, but to the South there are a few large cats, and some fairly large bears.
However, in Africa, there are several species of large cats, hyenas, crocs, snakes, and hippos. All capable of reducing the human population. Not to mention, humans reducing their own population as well as tropical diseases attacking humans. On top of this are cultural attitudes towards intelligence. Even today, some people distrust or dislike intelligent people, and I doubt this attitude was any different in a tribal society.
2005-06-16 17:45 | User Profile
*Over thousands of years, the melanin that had protected their dark skins from the burning African sun began to fade from their complexions; their skin became a light yellowish pink.
The tightly curled black hair which had protected the brain so well from sunstroke grew limp and stringy, sometimes turning strange colors; red, brown or even yellow.
Healthy nostrils designed to exchange large amounts of cooling air in the lungs during hot, tropical days became pinched and narrow nostrils designed to preserve body heat in a frozen wasteland. Their lips shrank to almost nothing.*
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Granted, this may be a plausible explanation for differences between the Caucasian and Congoid races.
But what of the Mongoloids? The Yellow race occupies latitudes from the equator to the poles but has adapted to climatic challenges without such dramatic constitutional variations.
And if cold weather is the ultimate determinant of human quality shouldn't Esqimaux and Lapps dominate the right end of the Bell Curve?
2005-06-17 01:27 | User Profile
To answer your Q about Europeans and Asians, study the following:
[url="http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/em_gene.html"]http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/em_gene.html[/url]
Basically, whites and northern asians/mongoloids are more similar than dissimilar; both belong to the North Eurasian and Circumpolar culture area. (Also, Eskimo score as expected on culture-fair IQ tests.)
"The [genetic study] results here are surprizing since the Northeast Asians (including Japanese, Koreans, northern Chinese) and American Indians are found to be relatively close to the geographically distant Caucasoids, rather than to the Southeast Asians, who are much closer. This is not what many might have guessed from either the geography or from the similarity of the populations in appearance. Interestingly, detailed inspection of the trees, and the distance matrices show that the Southeastern Chinese (i.e. Hong Kong and vicinity) group with Southeast Asians such as the Filippinos, rather than with the Northern Chinese. Such an outcome is not impossible. One could imagine the early Middle Eastern population giving birth to a group that moved eastward into Southeast Asia and then on to Australia and New Guinea. Later the Middle Eastern population might have given birth to groups that became the Caucasoids, Northeast Asians, and American Indians."
Also study this:
[url="http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/em_pp.html"]http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/em_pp.html[/url]
2005-06-17 04:08 | User Profile
Check out this site [url="http://anthro.palomar.edu/adapt/adapt_4.htm"]regarding skin color variation[/url] as a defence mechanism for folic acid and vitamin D depletion by too much/little sun. Theory is that folks in the north need lighter skin to allow in more sunlight which our bodies use to produce vitamin D. Darker skin in sunnier regions is to protect against folic acid depletion. Mothers who took supplements and got high doses of folic acid in their diets while pregnant produce healthier babies. Perhaps this also lends to intelligence? Also, it is suspected that Eskimos and other Nordic nomads have a darker skin tone than say Europeans becaus of the amount of vitamin D in their diets from fish. Therefore they do not need as much sun as other northerners.
[QUOTE=Howard Campbell, Jr.]*Over thousands of years, the melanin that had protected their dark skins from the burning African sun began to fade from their complexions; their skin became a light yellowish pink.
The tightly curled black hair which had protected the brain so well from sunstroke grew limp and stringy, sometimes turning strange colors; red, brown or even yellow.
Healthy nostrils designed to exchange large amounts of cooling air in the lungs during hot, tropical days became pinched and narrow nostrils designed to preserve body heat in a frozen wasteland. Their lips shrank to almost nothing.*
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Granted, this may be a plausible explanation for differences between the Caucasian and Congoid races.
But what of the Mongoloids? The Yellow race occupies latitudes from the equator to the poles but has adapted to climatic challenges without such dramatic constitutional variations.
And if cold weather is the ultimate determinant of human quality shouldn't Esqimaux and Lapps dominate the right end of the Bell Curve?[/QUOTE]
2005-06-17 17:43 | User Profile
However, if we observe the Indians of Central and South America we can discover these people were able to developed civilizations which were far more advanced than anything in Africa. If we were to accept the climate theory of intelligence, then the inhabitants of the New World living in a similar enviornment....
Didn't those American civilizations develop at high altitudes, under cooler conditions?
2005-06-17 17:51 | User Profile
[QUOTE=mwdallas]However, if we observe the Indians of Central and South America we can discover these people were able to developed civilizations which were far more advanced than anything in Africa. If we were to accept the climate theory of intelligence, then the inhabitants of the New World living in a similar enviornment....
Didn't those American civilizations develop at high altitudes, under cooler conditions?[/QUOTE]
True for the Inca, but the Maya raised up huge cities from nothing but jungle.
And they did it using only stone tools.
Just damn.
2005-06-28 03:22 | User Profile
An interesting comment about the climate/IQ controversy can be read on the free section of Mankind Quarterly.
Meisenberg, Gerhard, "IQ Population Genetics: It's not as Simple as You Think," Vol. XLV No. 2, Winter 2004, pp. 185-210 [Full Text, pdf].
[url]http://www.mankindquarterly.org/winter2003_meisenberg.pdf[/url]
2005-06-28 04:22 | User Profile
So the real solution to negro stupidity is to send them wandering in some cold location and check how they are doing a hundred thousand years later :punk: