On Sat, Aug 11, 2001 at 01:39:44PM -0700, Party of Citizens wrote:
> Are there sound, scientific, a priori reasons for saying that there are no
> race differences in intelligence due to nature-genetics? What are they?
Jared Diamond gave an excellent argument as to why we should expect Europeans
to be genetically less intelligent than Native Americans, many Africans, New
Guinea highlanders, and aborigines. For millennia Europeans have been
farmers, with their survival not terribly limited by intelligence. The
primary cause of death was disease, meaning that the primary selection
pressure was for disease resistance.
The other groups mentioned, as hunter-gatherers (or mixed farmers and
foragers) actually had to think about finding their food: learn about
countless varieties of plants (witch knowledge in Europe), ditto for the
animals, along with behavior, breeding and migration patterns, and tracks.
Stupidity would have a strong correlation with collecting less food, which in
a small group would be obvious, and would probably lead to having fewer
children, at least for males.
Of course, Europeans had the same behavior until only a few millennia ago.
But with "being ravaged by plague" replacing "need brains to gather food" at a
fairly intense level, we could expect some decline in European intelligence
due to random drift.
The same could be said of many Asian peoples, only even more so, since the
Chinese for example have been agricultural and plague-ridden for longer than
northwest Europeans.
Also leading to the conclusion that my Irish ancestors should have been
genetically smarter than my Jewish ones, the Mideast invented agriculture
first.
The neat thing about science is that it doesn't always give you the answers
you expect. Now if we could only test this theory somehow...
-xx- Damien X-)
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