From: Brett Paatsch (bpaatsch@bigpond.net.au)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 23:21:18 MDT
Emlyn writes:
> Damien B wrote:
> > Nah. Pinker and other sources indicate that the risk of being
> > murdered in pre-state cultures is *outrageously* high. An
> > American male has 1 chance in 200 of being murdered (this
> > clearly elides location and sub-culture, but still). Check out
> > the graph in Pinker's THE BLANK SLATE, chapter 3: the
> > Jivaro, 60% chance, the Huli a mere 20%.
>
> In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jarod Diamond makes an argument
> at one point that "primitive" societies actually select better for
> intelligence because of, among other things, the high likelihood
> of being murdered (and so, presumably, the usefulness of
> intelligence in avoiding murder). He posits that hunter gatherers
> are probably more intelligent on average than sedentary 20th
> city folk, as a result.
>
> I'm not sure if I buy the argument, but hey :-)
I wonder which IQ test that would be, Stanford Binet, Weschler?
In one of Diamond's earlier books, "Rise and Fall of the Third
Chimpanzee", I think, but I don't have it handy, he also postulated
that those groups of people that lived in the coldest, harshest, least
hospitable environments also tended to be smarter.
I guess they didn't *start out* smarter. At least in respect to habitat
selection :-)
Brett
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