At 08:56 05/07/2005 -0400, you wrote:
A few points, Keith. One is that it is always a little dangerous to try to link particular physical characteristics, like brain size, to intelligence and then assign superior intelligence to a particular people.
I don't think any biologist would doubt that brain size (compared with body mass) is a fairly sure guide to intelligence. However, this is something that non-biologists have enormous resistance to accepting and is still highly controversial. This general effect is significant, of course, when comparing between species, but not necessarily between individuals. Several so-called geniuses have had small heads, so it is said, but these instances have been rare. (I've forgotten who these were supposed to be -- Anatole France and Voltaire come to mind.)
It kind of smacks of the kind of thing Phillip Rushton, a Canadian psychologist (or whatever), tried to do when he argued that the longer the penis the less intelligent its bearer was likely to be. Some African groups had long penises, and Rushton therefore deemed then less intelligent. That they were also much taller than other people was deemed irrelevant. When it comes to brain size, we mustn't forget that Neanderthals had larger brains than we do. Were they more intelligent? I don't think so.
Most of the brain is taken up with body senses and control and Neanderthals were, quite simply, larger than us. (They might also have had more nervous and brain tissue devoted to muscle control -- their bone thickness suggest far greater muscle development than humans.) What seems to be important as regards applied intelligence is the relative size of the frontal lobes as compared with the rear cortex but, as far as I know no calibration has been possible yet in the case of Neanderthals where only skulls remain. It is very possible that Neanderthals were just as intelligent as Homo Sapiens (in the sense that we term intelligence today) but died from a disease that their genes were susceptible to and ours weren't. Like you, I personally don't think they were as intelligent as us and died out because we were much more efficient at hunting, etc, because we were already trading long-distance for better quality flints and wood and they didn't. (Recent finds contradict earlier beliefs about their lack of intelligence -- they were, in fact, skilful at making stone tools and some scientists think that we actually learned some of these skills from them, although most think that tool-making arose indepedently in the two species.) Certainly no traded objects have been found at Neanderthal grave sites but far more evidence is needed yet to be sure.
Personally, I think that intelligence is a rather randomly distributed thing.
I agree. Geneticists consider that the development of the brain in the foetus is due to well over 1,000 genes. The random re-arrangement of this number when sperm meets egg make it unlikely that there are huge differences between any human baby at birth, anynore than there are huge differences in physical abilities between most people. What happens during the first few months and years of a child's life -- when millions of brain cells die if not used -- is much more important. However, as in the world of highly competitive sport today, where marginal differences in physical abilities win Olympic medals, I would suggest that the same might apply now in terms of marginal differences brain size in the increasingly competitive world of business and technology.
Based on their performance, the three most intelligent people I've known or observed were a little black girl in the Sao Paulo slums, a hotel clerk in Delhi and an Indian in the Yukon. Perhaps the apparent intelligence of the Asians you mention is more a thing of social organization than absolute IQ. In terms of social organization, my three very smart people never had much of a chance, although the little girl I observed in Sao Paulo did hit the newspapers for the kinds of things she was into as she matured.
It may be culture that's more important in the general social environment of a particular culture. Orientals certainly have a stronger sense of family than Europeans so that if, for example, one member of a family hits upon a good business idea then all the family, however distant, are drawn in by a sense of obligation. Fei Xiaotong's book, "From the Soil" is good on this. (His research stems from before the Chinese Revolution and his books were banned from the universities during the Communist regime until a few years after Mao Zedong's death. And, of course, a great deal of the revival of Chinese business since then has been due to a relatively small number of expat Chinese returning from Singapore and elsewhere in Asia. Fei Xiaotong had long since become 'respectable' again and died not long ago, one of the most revered scholars in China.)
When it comes to the peopling of the Americas, there is an increasing amount of evidence that early peoples arrived via various routes and with various gene pools. The best book I've read on the matter is Elaine Dewar's "Bones". Dewar, a journalist, spent a lot of time interviewing anthropologists and archeologists on the matter. In addition to the Bering Straits, routes included across the Atlantic from Europe, across the Pacific, and even across the Atlantic from Africa. Sites like Monte Verde in Chile and the footprints in Mexico suggest that man not only came to the Americas much earlier than was believed a decade or so ago, but stayed.
It would seem very likely that man had also arrived earlier than 11,500BC in America by crossing across the Atlantic from France along the edge of the ice cap at about 20,000BC but this contingent seems to have died out. The latest research about "Mexican Man" is fascinating, whether he started across the Pacific from north-west China or from Indonesian isalnds at around 40,000BC. Of course, the evidence may not be substantiated to everyone's satisfaction.
Keith
Ed
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: [email protected]
- Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 2:53 AM
- Subject: [Futurework] The smartest people became Americans
- 754. The smartest people became Americans
- In posting No 750." The smartest people on earth" I put forward the argument held by some evolutionary biologists that the smartest people on earth come from a comparitively small area of Korea, Japan and north-east China. Today, people from this region have larger brain sizes and score higher on (Western authored) intelligence tests than Europeans. These people are also pretty smart economically and industrially, by far the most of the engineering innovations of pre-Industrial Revolution Europe having come from China originally.
- They are probably smarter because they are the descendants of the leading edge of migratory man which left Africa via Ethiopia about 85,000 years ago and ended about 40-30,000 years ago when it bumped into the ice cap in north-east Asia. Forced by population pressure from behind, early man would have passed through a wide variety of environments as he went along, and then up, the Asian coastline, his mental abilities being successively refined by the different viscissitudes along the way. Since 30,000BC, the high intelligence of those early migrants has probably become diffused somewhat when the migration largely stopped, man spread inland and intermarriage started taking place throughout Asia.
- But when the ice cap had finally retreated to its minimum at about 15,000-10,000BC a further migratory route opened up. This was between the north-east peninsula of Asia and Alaska, along the edge of the ice cap across what is now known the Bering Sea. From there man migrated down the western coast of America and then inland, populating the whole North American continent. This race of early man is known as Clovis Man and has been widely believed among anthropologists to be the first appearance of man in the New World..
- It now appears that the intelligence (and courage) of early man in north-east Asia was such that he had already made a migration across the Pacific Ocean! This would have been at about the time further northward progress was blocked by the ice cap barrier at around 40-30,000BC. Such a suggestion would have been inconceivable until recently, but evidence is now revealing that there are remains of early man at around that date living in Mexico. Professor Matthew Bennett's evidence, briefly described in the The Times article below, remains to be tested and will no doubt be fiercely debated by those who hold to the Clovis Man-only lobby.
- I only have one comment to make on this. No evidence of man's presence earlier than about 11,500BC has yet been found on the broad mass of the North American continent so it seems likely that those who established themselves in Mexico, very smart though they undoubtedly were, became extinct through some overwhelming environmental circumstance or other. Otherwise, they would have spread into America itself. If Professor Bennett's evidence is more widely accepted -- and it appears to have had some substantiation already -- then the search will now be on for the fossilised bones of this Mexican Man. Then, with luck, DNA analysis can add to the evidence.
- Perhaps the heading of this piece is a misnomer. Perhaps it should have been: "The smartest people became Mexicans" but then, considering that present-day Mexicans are now migrating -- legally and illegally -- into America (once again preferentially along a coastline!) at the rate of above one million a year, and that President Bush has recently persuaded Congress to accept a free trade treaty with Central American countries, then Mexicans can be considered Americans. And perhaps even vice versa. Or at least part of America will when, as seems possible from the higher birth rate of Hispanics, the United States divides into two distinct cultural regions mainly speaking Spanish and American respectively.
- Keith Hudson
- <<<<
- FOOTSTEPS IN TIME THAT ADD 30,000 YEARS TO HISTORY OF AMERICA
- Lewis Smith
- Discovery by British scientists adds 30,000 years to the human history of a continent
- The discovery of human footprints, preserved by volcanic ash, have put back the likely date that the American continent was colonised by Man by almost 30,000 years, British scientists say.
- The prints, found by the scientists at the edge of a lake in Mexico, are thought to be about 40,000 years old. Their discovery upsets the widely accepted theory that Man first reached America across a land bridge, now covered by the Bering Sea, 11,500 years ago. Casts of the footprints reveal that a community of Homo sapiens lived in the Valsequillo Basin, near Puebla in central Mexico. Their feet ranged in size from those of small children, aged about 5 or 6, to adults who would have fitted size eight shoes.
- The prints were found at the bottom of an abandoned quarry and were preserved in volcanic rock. From the size of the prints, researchers from Liverpool John Moores University and Bournemouth University estimated that the adults ranged in height from 3ft 9ins to 6ft. Almost 270 prints were found at the site, two thirds of them human and the rest from animals including mammoths, an extinct species of camel, prehistoric cow and deer. The Liverpool and Bournemouth team discovered the footprints in September 2003 but have only recently had confirmation of their age from scientists at Oxford University. Dating techniques included radiocarbon dating and optical stimulated luminescence.
- Until now it was widely believed that Clovis Man was the first human to set foot on the continent at the end of the last Ice Age. Previous academic research has suggested, however, that human occupation of the American continents may have begun several thousand years earlier.
- The footprints are the first evidence of earlier colonisations and would suggest that the first settlers reached the West Coast from Japan or other Pacific Ocean communities.
- Professor Matthew Bennett, of Bournemouth University, said yesterday: "Our evidence of humans in America 40,000 years ago is irrefutable."
- He accepted that there would be resistance to the theory that the original migration was not over the Bering Sea. It is quite controversial. "They are not very happy in North America. They are very wedded to the idea of colonisation 11,500 years ago."
- The Times -- 5 July 2005
- >>>>
- Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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