HHere’s a thought experiment. Imagine two widely separated human groups living for thousands of years in different cultural and ecological environments. A population faces constant cognitive challenges, such as an endless need to cope and overcome natural and human threats. The other group is largely protected from these environmental dangers, with the greatest challenge being simply surviving endemic disease. In which population would there be more selective pressure for greater intelligence?
This is the reasoning used by biogeographer Jared Diamond to explain why “modern Stone Age peoples” (like those of Papua New Guinea, contacted relatively recently) are likely more intelligent than Eurasians. Briefly, in the introduction to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond suggests that for countless millennia, the minds of New Guineans have been naturally selected to successfully cope with unpredictable events such as rampant tribal wars, natural disasters, food supply, etc. In contrast, Eurasians have long been protected from these constant environmental pressures through the large-scale adoption of agriculture and the rise of centralized states. In the densely populated peasant societies of Eurasia, Diamond reasons, natural selection will therefore have focused more on disease resistance than intelligence.
Diamond does not develop this idea in detail, but rather deploys it as a device, a throwaway refutation of long-standing “biological” claims about the superior intelligence of Europeans. Ironically, in doing so, Diamond challenges the established anti-racist consensus (articulated with force by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould), that natural selection shaped the human body but not the modern human mind. Diamond shows how easy it is to question this liberal assumption: after all, why should natural selection only work to adapt human beings’ bodies to local environments and not their brains? It is certain that environmental challenges will also shape human cognitive behaviors in ways that improve survival and reproduction.
In a nutshell, this illustrates the real reason why many liberal critics fear discussing evolved human differences: it would inevitably lead to the belief that these differences are not just superficial, but also extend to the brain and behavior humans. If the debate can be stopped before it begins, we are less likely to slide down this slope of social division.
This is not an idle concern. The late controversial psychologist Philippe Rushton used the same argument as Jared Diamond but came to the opposite conclusion: In Rushton’s evolutionary narrative, Eurasia presented a far more cognitively demanding environment for expanding human populations, providing the initial impetus to the high IQ scores recorded, for example, by East Asians today.
by Rushton Breed, evolution and behavior (published the same year as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s incendiary study of intelligence, The bell curve) has been the subject of severe attacks in academia. He embodies the liberal fear of Darwinian reasoning; In it, Rushton (sometimes using cherry-picked data) posits that evolved genetic differences are the ultimate cause of modern racial inequality and racial disparities in social phenomena such as crime, employment, wealth, and poverty. school success.
Even among avowed human evolutionists, Rushton’s thesis has provoked harsh condemnation: in a scathing criticism, sociobiologist David Barash said: “Rushton argues at length…that by combining many small turds of variously tainted data one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact the result is just a bigger than average pile of shit.
Barash concluded: “Bad science and virulent racial prejudice flow like pus from almost every page of this despicable book. » (It should be noted that Barash himself faced similar censorship for his evolutionary stance on human behavior – for example, being described as a misogynistic apologist for the biological “naturalness” of rape due to his own research into differences in male and female behavior.)
Jewish IQ and genes
Equally critical responses welcomed speculation about a genetic-biological aspect of the so-called “Jewish genius.” Ashkenazi Jews (Jews who settled in Europe after leaving the Middle East during the first millennium), although they represent only a tiny 0.19% of the world’s population, constitute more than 20% of all Nobel Prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing Awards, have the highest SAT scores of any religious or ethnic group and represent 23% of students at prestigious Ivy League universities and 30% of Ivy professors. In every country with a significant Jewish population, Jewish performance in high-achieving, high-paying careers has only increased in recent decades.
What is going on? As Jon Entine notes in The Children of Abraham: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People, there is no evidence that high IQ was written in the genes of the early Israelites. During the first millennium BCE, the Jewish population was at times as numerous, or even more numerous, than the citizens of ancient Rome and Athens, but its intellectual contributions were not comparable. While the Jews wrote the Bible, a singular and lasting contribution, the Greco-Roman world revolutionized art, science and literature. What changed? Evolutionary pressures, Entine argues.
In The 10,000 year explosion, anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harending argue that enhanced intelligence is an evolved response to the specific conditions Jews faced in medieval Europe. In short, they suggest that for approximately 1,000 years, Ashkenazim were forced into intellectually demanding occupations, such as money lending, due to the religious prejudices of the Christian majority. Moreover, the study of the Talmud, at the heart of Jewish practices in the diaspora, gave priority to literacy. These cultural trends, combined with endogamous (group) marriage practices, fostered the natural selection mechanism for enhanced verbal and cognitive abilities among European Jews. The thesis was widely advanced in their highly controversial article, The natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence (and discussed in detail in Jon Entine’s book, The Children of Abraham: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People).
Elsewhere in The 10,000 year explosion, and in an argument reminiscent of Diamond, Cochran and Harending speculate that the growth of large agricultural populations in Eurasia, in addition to selecting for disease resistance, also increased the psychological passivity of those forced to live in close proximity from others and to face the daily chore of farming. The flip side of this reasoning, however, is that human populations that do not have such a history of “self-domestication” will also not have the same set of evolved psychological behaviors. This potentially leads, the authors suggest, to difficulties adapting to modern urban life.
The liberal objection to such speculative research is obvious: it suggests that inequalities to some extent reflect differences between populations and human biology. The victims of injustice (or rather their genes) are partly to blame. This is a fascinating theory, but heavily criticized by some as an example of what Stephen Jay Gould described as: Darwinian “just like that” narration: biological fairy tales that could be used to justify almost any form of social inequality as a product of the intertwining of genetics and history.
Genetic Warriors
Another example is that of the Maori. “warrior gene” hypothesis. To briefly summarize the controversy: a small-scale genetic study focused on addiction demonstrated an apparently higher frequency of an implicated genetic allele in modern Maori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) compared to non-Maori participants. The specific allele, MAO-A, had previously been dubbed the “warrior gene” due to its apparent association with aggressive behavior in rhesus macaque monkeys, with other monoamine oxidase (MAO) genes also linked to various disorders. behavior, notably depression, mental retardation. and risk taking.
In attempting to explain this apparently higher prevalence of MAO-A among Māori, the epidemiologists who led the study, Rod Lea and Geoffrey Chambers, hypothesized that the gene may have been positively selected during travel. oceanic and tribal wars which would have characterized ancestral Polynesian migrations. across the Pacific. They supported this hypothesis by emphasizing the “warrior tradition” recognized in historical and modern Māori culture. Predictably, this hypothesis was later reported in popular media as claiming that contemporary Māori carry a “warrior gene”, making them prone to violence, crime and risky behavior (although Lea and Chambers have denied this connection).
Were their speculations sound? Impossible to know, hence its dismissal by some as a “just like that” hypothesis. Like other controversial theories about evolved cognitive and behavioral differences within human groups, the warrior gene hypothesis has also been subject to legitimate scientific criticism due to questionable methodology and insufficient evidence. Liberal critics are clearly right to fear the potential social fallout from such ideas becoming widely accepted: certain communities being stigmatized as inherently aggressive or criminal, for example, or incapable of adapting to modern life, or a hierarchy of groups humans intrinsically more or less intelligent.
Jon Entine is the founding CEO of Genetic Literacy Project, and winner of 19 major journalism awards. He has written extensively in the popular and academic press on agricultural and population genetics. You can follow him on Twitter @JonEntine
Patrick Whittle holds a doctorate in philosophy and is a freelance writer with a particular interest in the social and political implications of modern biological science. Follow him on his website patrickmichaelwhittle.com or on Twitter @WhittlePM