From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Tue Aug 28 2001 - 11:18:29 MDT
Damien Sullivan wrote:
>
> 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.
Except that diseases typically cause high fevers, which themselves can
cause brain damage, thus a high disease environment created a
simultaneous selection pressure for people who can retain their
intelligence even after suffering from x many fever causing diseases in
life. This would invariably cause greater brain evolution than not
living under such conditions.
Furthermore, I don't see in Diamond's book where he said what you
attribute to him. Is it in another publication of his?
>
> 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.
Which reflects my statement about disease incidence providing selection
pressure FOR intelligence.
>
> Also leading to the conclusion that my Irish ancestors should have been
> genetically smarter than my Jewish ones, the Mideast invented agriculture
> first.
The mideast was exposed to more disease for far longer than Ireland.
Smallpox originated somewhere on the Assyrian/Indian trade routes back
in the second millenia BC. Furthermore, one must distinguish between
types of agriculture: herding and farming. Those involved in herding are
more likely to be exposed early on to disease, since most diseases
resulted from DNA trading between virii and bacteria typical of human
and domesticated animals (i.e. the "Spanish Flu" of the 1920's for
example, was the result of crossing over of swine flu virus DNA to human
flu virii, and the smallpox virus is thought to have evolved from its
harmless cowpox cousin, which was used as the first smallpox vaccine).
Since the hebrews were herders for most of their history, nomadic or
otherwise, it stands to reason that they would be under greater
selection pressure from diseases for greater brain complexity than an
Egyptian or Assyrian farmer whose life focus is on wheat or oats with
only a few domesticated animals used for labor saving purposes.
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