The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.
The American scientist Michael H. Hart in his book Understanding Human History, which is available online as a pdf file, supports the “cold climate” theory for evolution of high IQ. It essentially says that the further north you get the higher the average IQ becomes. Perhaps in order to survive the cold winters you needed elevated intelligence to plan ahead. In my view, the correlation between IQ and climate is too strong to be coincidental. The climate theory is almost certainly partly correct, but it may need to be modified here and there. Ashkenazi Jews during the Middle Ages evolved high IQ in a process that had very little to do with climate.
The cold climate theory predicts that Northeast Asians (Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and to some extent Vietnamese) should have higher average IQs than Southeast Asians and Indians, which is correct. It also predicts that Europeans should have higher IQs than Middle Easterners and North Africans, and much higher IQs than sub-Saharan Africans, which is also correct. However, it also predicts that there should be slight differences in mean IQ within Europe itself, even if you discount recent immigrants who are not Europeans, genetically speaking. These differences are smaller than the ones we encounter if we measure Europeans vs. Africans, but they do exist and they are not necessarily without practical significance.
Italians are sometimes listed with a slightly higher average IQ than the Irish, despite the fact that Ireland is much further north. Yet according to Dennis Mangan’s blog, the 100 plus mean IQ for “Italians” is primarily based on data from northerners; southern Italians have a lower mean IQ. If true, this could partly explain why the northern third of Italy has produced many more notable scientists, including Nobel Prize winners during the twentieth century, than the southern third has. Accidental or not, northern Italy has received the highest percentage of Celtic and Germanic genes, but perhaps northern Italy was smarter even in Roman times.
This still leaves the case of Ireland. I asked Michael H. Hart about this. He answered that winters may be milder in Ireland (which is warmed by the Gulf Stream) than they are in northern Italy. There are also other important factors involved which could outweigh the slight differences of climate: There has been a substantial “brain drain” out of Ireland in the last few centuries, especially to the USA. The same thing happened in Italy, but to a lesser extent. Probably no other European country had as large a percentage of its population emigrate to the US as did Ireland. In addition, over the past few centuries there was a “brain drain” from Ireland into England, too. This occurred from Scotland as well.
IQ is a very important, and perhaps the single most important, variable, but there are others, too. Switzerland does have high IQ, but it outperforms other high-IQ countries because of its high degree of order combined with economic and political liberty, a very rare combination.
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I have heard the claim that according to the cold climate theory for the evolution of high IQ, the Nordic countries should excel in the sciences, yet their countries were “backward” until the modern era. This can easily be explained by postulating that science is first and foremost the creation of urban, literate cultures. This does not mean that non-literate peoples cannot have important insights into nature or astronomy, as proven by the Neolithic astronomers of Europe or the Polynesians who navigated across the vast Pacific Ocean, but it is very hard to establish long-term scientific continuity in the absence of written sources.
Since Scandinavians during the Early Middle Ages (the Viking Age) were largely illiterate it was impossible for them to make major contributions to science at that early point. In the later Middle Ages they gradually became assimilated into the mainstream of Christian European civilization until a critical mass of scholarly knowledge had been absorbed. According to this hypothesis, Scandinavians should produce the first significant scientific figure during the Renaissance period, and the likelihood of this happening was greatest in the region that was closest to the European mainstream and had the highest level of urbanization. This figure did emerge in the shape of Tycho Brahe, who came from the Kingdom of Denmark, born in southern Sweden. He was the greatest astronomer in the pre-telescopic era in Europe and perhaps in the world. As soon as it was possible for them to do so, Scandinavians thus produced an individual who outperformed the best astronomers in the Middle East and Asia.
Denmark and (southern) Sweden were for a long time the most important regions within Scandinavia because they were the most densely populated regions. In order to produce great achievement you don’t just need smart people, you usually need a cluster of smart people. If you have a goat herder with very high IQ sitting on an isolated mountain top somewhere this only makes him a clever goat herder. Total population matters as well. Norway is roughly the size of England, but with less than ten percent of the population. The Nordic countries do not have a sufficiently large population base to dominate the sciences; with a small population and high IQ they will make substantial contributions, often disproportionate to their small size, to the sciences but usually not dominate them. You could for example successfully claim that Swedes per person did more than any other nation on Earth to create modern chemistry.
With a roughly similar IQ and all other things being equal, the rate of excellence within the Nordic countries should be highest in Denmark and southern Sweden and slightly lower in more sparsely populated Norway and Finland. In the latter countries, it should be highest in urban regions such as the Helsinki area and the southwestern coast of Finland and the Oslo Fjord and perhaps the Bergen region in Norway, which corresponds well to observed reality. This does not contradict the cold climate hypothesis; the northern peoples have consistently outperformed people to the south once they have achieved a sufficiently high degree of urbanization.
I don’t quite believe in the “distance is dead” maxim, but it is nevertheless true that physical location is less important today than it was in the past. Thanks to modern communication technology you can now effortlessly stay in touch with people who live far away from you. This still doesn’t do away with the need for networks where you can receive creative inspiration as well as criticism of your ideas.
City-states have traditionally been among the most dynamic entities in history, from ancient Mesopotamia and Greece to Renaissance Italy; their Achilles’ heel is that they are often too small to effectively defend themselves against military aggression from larger political entities. City-states enjoyed some lasting success when they formed alliances, for instance the medieval Hansa in northern Europe. Even within countries, Western European cities enjoyed much greater liberty and self-rule by medieval times than Chinese ones did at the same time.
51 comments:
@fjordman. guess you have probably been watching hjernevask. my cousin has told me about the show. we need to have something like that on here in the u.s.! does this mean that political correctness is finally dying in norway?
Fjordman needs to read (or read again) Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel."
The first chapter puts to rest all of these arguments. To summarize:
Tests of cognitive ability, like IQ tests, tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence.
Our cognitive abilities as adults are heaveily influenced by the social environment we experienced during childhood.
Diamond then goes on the argue that the primitive tribesmen of New Guinea are probably smarter on average than Westerners, for the following reasons:
Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies, where infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations were historically the major cause of death. The genes that were passed on were for those people who could escape these diseases. In contrast, the main cause of mortality in New Guinean history are murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food. Those who survived to pass along their genes were the more intelligent New Guineans.
Western children spend much of their time being passively entertained by electronic media. IN contrast, New Guinean children spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something. Almost all studies of child development emphaisze the role of choldhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental developemnt, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation.
The same two genetic and childhood developmental factors are likely to distinguish hunter-gatherers and other members of technologically primitive societies from the members of technologically advanced societies in general.
So, Fjordman, in truth, the question is not why the current Norsemen are smarter than the benighted residents of the tropics, but rather why they are stupider.
Gordo: When it comes to IQ, Dimanond's book is a scientific fraud. He specifically states that he wrote it to dispel "Eurocentrism," that is, anything people of European origins might have of pride in their historical accomplishments. The Western Multicultural oligarchs loved his book because he provided them with a seeming scientific basis for their ongoing dispossession of whites.
MinneapolisTom: I barely watch TV these days. It's all junk, anyway. No, PeeCee is still alive and well, but I can see a few visible cracks in the walls of censorship here and there, yes. That program sounds OK.
An interesting theory, but it has a flaw. Why is it that Jews have an above average IQ than many other people. Yet they evolved in a warm climate?
For the record, 1/4 of all Nobel Awards (especially in the true Sciences) have been awarded to Jews.
Idiotic theory. Romans and Greeks were far more intelligent than the northern barbarians. Sub Saharan Africans who get to eat properly and attend school, perform extremely well in our Universities. Same with Middle Easterners. If you remove the constraints of their pathological religion, there will be a new renaissance in the southern hemisphere of our world.
Findalis said: "An interesting theory, but it has a flaw. Why is it that Jews have an above average IQ than many other people. Yet they evolved in a warm climate?"
It's Ashkenazi Jews that have a high IQ, not all Jews. Not Jews from North Africa or the ones that remained back in Judea after the Romans trounced the place.
Ashkenazi Jewish IQ evolved in Germany and Eastern Europe where they experienced certain, unique selection pressures (as well as some genetic introgression of European genes, albeit not a great deal). See: A Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.
Diamond as quoted by TPFKAG: "Tests of cognitive ability, like IQ tests, tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence.
"Our cognitive abilities as adults are heaveily influenced by the social environment we experienced during childhood."
Absolute rubbish.
Our childhood cognitive abilities are affected by family environmental factors, but the science clearly shows that adult IQ is very much inherited genetically, all things being equal (clearly not getting the best nutrition is not optimal, but it is unlikely that this alone accounts for the IQ differences between, say, Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans).
Read up a bit on the results from such studies as the Colorado Adoption Project just to find out how much Diamond was b*llsh*tting you.
Ex-Dissent said: "Sub Saharan Africans who get to eat properly and attend school, perform extremely well in our Universities."
Only some do, but not all. You are only considering a small minority that actually makes it (can make it) to university. The average sub-Saharan African, even well-fed, would not do well at univeristy.
That doesn't mean that the appalling levels of nutrition don't need to be fixed in Africa. People would, of course, do a lot better intellectually with the correct nutrition, especially during developmental years.
Ex-Dissident said: "Romans and Greeks were far more intelligent than the northern barbarians."
Fjordman already explained that to you. It has to do with population size (and urbanization).
(Sorry, in my last comment I referred to you as "Ex-Dissent". I meant "Ex-Dissident".)
Excellent article.
Findalis: I specifically mentioned in the text that Ashkenazi Jews represent a special case since their high IQ had very little to do with climate. I merely said that for tens of thousands of years, the cold northern winters were the most important driving force behind the evolution of human intelligence. I didn't say that climate was the only or the only possible force behind human evolution.
I think we can distinguish several separate phases: The first and most important phase was the selection for high IQ due to climate, especially during the last Ice Age. As the ancestors of anatomically modern humans left Africa, only those who stayed for a long time in the cooler regions of northeastern or northwestern Eurasia developed high IQ. Those who stayed within tropical regions did not.
There was another phase of different evolutionary pressures with the rise of agriculture and settled, urban communities. With this came new infectious diseases as well as an entirely new diet, which the human body had to adjust to. Not all of these changes directly affected intelligence, which is why the Paleolithic era was arguably more important for the evolution of high IQ than the Neolithic era. However, it is likely that the new lifestyle in towns and cities and the rise of urban civilizations also affected the mentality of the people who lived there.
The case of Ashkenazi Jews is unique because it was not triggered by climate, as in the Paleolithic era, nor by a new diet or different settlement patterns, as in the Neolithic era. When you say that "Jews" are smart you are not being very specific. What you mean is that Western Jews have a very high average IQ, which is true. Middle Eastern and African Jews have a substantially lower IQ than whites, which very strongly indicates that the high IQ of Western Jews is the result of evolutionary pressures in the European diaspora of the post-Roman era. Put bluntly, Jews were nothing special until they were transplanted to Europe.
Ashkenazi Jews evolved high IQ in Europe during the medieval and early modern era due to social pressures that restricted Jewish males to a range of financial occupations that required high intelligence. Put another way, European Jews evolved high intelligence in response to the social environment, not the climatic or natural environment. This represents a new chapter in human evolution. It is also unique because of the sheer speed of it, where an entire ethnic group evolved perhaps 10 IQ points more in the space of little more than one thousand years, or roughly one IQ point per century. This in all likelihood represents the fastest rise of genetic intelligence for any ethnic group on the planet since the emergence of anatomically modern humans in Africa. If we assume that the first Homo sapiens sapiens who left Africa had a mean IQ of 60 or 70, and modern Europeans have roughly 100, this means that Europeans and Northeast Asians evolved higher IQ at a rate of little more than one IQ point per millennium, just one-tenth as fast as Ashkenazi Jews.
At the twenty-first century we have emerged at not just a new chapter of human evolution, but perhaps an entirely new book, that of deliberate genetic engineering. We can now directly tamper with our own genetic code, with all the potential advances and pitfalls this entails.
I left some comments over at Mangan's place http://mangans.blogspot.com/2010/02/claims-about-human-biodiversity-and.html that are directly relevant to this discussion, so I republish them here.
The idea that climate could somehow be related to the culture and mentality of different peoples has an ancient pedigree, going back to the Greek geographer Strabo via medieval China and the Middle East, long before any coherent theory of evolution or knowledge of genetic mutation had been developed. Cicero, a Roman orator in the first century BC who had received a Greek philosophical education, alluded to the already established theory of climate and its influence on people’s mentality: Allegedly, the subtle air of the region of Attica in central Greece, which includes the city of Athens, produced brighter people, while the thicker air of Thebes in Egypt explained the proverbial dullness of the Thebans.
Geographers have discussed climate and its relationship to culture since ancient times. The main source of this within the Western tradition was the Hippocratic treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places from around 400 BC, which attributed a population’s character to the winds, water sources and soil of its locale, as well as to diet etc. This connection between climate and the mentality of different peoples flourished during the Enlightenment.
In the mid-eighteenth century, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert in their Encyclopédie took the great French political thinker Montesquieu to task for his famous discussion of climate in The Spirit of the Laws (L’esprit des lois) from 1748 because they claimed that it added nothing new to “such familiar topics.” Climatologists of the nineteenth century studied the distribution of climates over the globe and applied climatic considerations to biogeography. Following the Hippocratic dictum that “races are the daughters of climate,” Victorian anthropologists of the colonial era ascribed virtues such as intelligence to the effect of the temperate European climate.
I believe that the disparity in IQ levels amongst the various ethnic groups has a lot more to do with nourishment and types of diets, and less to do with prowess in the field of hunting and the ability to gather food. Besides, agriculture has been around for several thousands of years, eliminating the need for mass scale hunting as the only means of survival. It’s also a well established fact that the human brain only started to see rapid development once man started eating protein rich bone marrow. Diet also plays a big part in the animal kingdom where carnivores are more intelligent than herbivores. Even today studies show that children who receive a nutritious diet outperform children who don’t. Diet has big impact on the way humans behave, ever witnessed children been given too much candy? They’re like crazed adult speed junkies.
Yes, the cold climate was probably very challenging for the first individuals who migrated north, but I believe the hot climate experienced by the people who stayed put and chose to live closer to the equator was equally challenging. There seems to be a misconception among some in the northern hemisphere that a high temperatures/high humidity environment is an easy environment to survive in, but that’s not necessarily the case. Think it is easy living in the Sahara, outback Australia or in Death Valley, USA? People die within hours as a result of lack of water in these hot and arid environments. And up through history droughts and tropical diseases have decimated countless human settlements in the more temperate parts of the world.
Another flaw in the cold weather theory presented here is that far-east Asians on average have a higher IQ than Caucasians, but even so large areas of far-east Asia has a tropical/sub tropical climate. Singapore which is one of the most successful countries on earth, and millions of miles ahead of Norway when it comes to education and infra structure is practically right on the equator. How can that be?
"Tests of cognitive ability, like IQ tests, tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence."
If that was true, I'd be learning-disadvantaged, not a member of MENSA.
According to an article in the New Scientist magazine, some 2.5 million years ago our ancestors’ brains expanded from a mere 600 cubic centimeters to about a liter. This coincided with the onset of an ice age. Biologists David Schwartzman and George Middendorf of Howard University in the USA have hypothesized that our modern brain could not have evolved until the Quaternary ice age started about 2.5 million years ago. Climate researcher Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany has found that even today the ability to dissipate heat should restrict the activity of people in many tropical regions. The small-brained Homo habilis would have been able to cool off. A small drop in air temperature would have been needed for Homo erectus to be able to support its bigger brain.
In many cases, evolution can be driven by a combination of push and pull factors. Did humans evolve larger brains because we had to or because we could? The relative unimportance of heat stress in cooler Europe made possible the development of larger brains that were impractical or had negative short-term payoffs in much hotter Africa. This lifted the brakes on expansion, but there has to be something driving the increase. Surviving the cold winters in northern Eurasia probably constituted a major driving force, in addition to the need to outcompete the neighbors.
The honey bee originated in eastern tropical Africa several million years ago and expanded into Eurasia in at least two different migrations. One of these led to Western European honey bees and the other to Asian honey bees. Bees living in temperate climates faced fundamentally new problems, especially cold winters. This led to evolutionary changes in social behavior. They needed to choose nest sites that would protect them from the cold weather, store much more honey, and form a winter cluster, a tightly packed clump of bees that conserves heat. In a 2008 study from the University of Illinois, the American entomology professor Charles Whitfield together with Amro Zayed concluded that approximately 10 percent of all protein-coding genes in bees underwent positive selection in that process of adaptation. “The way the honey bees survive in temperate regions is sort of the way humans do,” Whitfield says. “They have a shelter. They store resources.” Not needing to survive in such cold weather, African bees store less food and reproduce more.
According to authors Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending in The 10,000 Year Explosion, “The history of honeybees parallels the history of humans in an interesting way – both involved expansion into a new environment with a drastically different climate followed by strong selection and adaptation.”
They further state that “There were at least two streams out of Africa 50,000 years ago, one northward into Europe and central Asia, and another eastward around the Indian Ocean to Australia, New Guinea, and parts of Oceania. There is no trace of any creative explosion in populations derived from the southern Indian Ocean movement, who brought and retained Neanderthal-grade technology and culture.”
We don’t know for sure why Homo sapiens sapiens displaced the Neanderthals in Europe, where the latter had successfully managed to survive in the challenging climate for tens of thousands of years. One possibility is that anatomically modern humans carried with them from Africa a germ or parasite that was relatively harmless to them but dangerous to Neanderthals. Another possibility is that modern humans, who were physically lighter than Neanderthals, enjoyed an advantage after they developed weapons to be used at a distance by consuming less energy while hunting the same prey. A popular, though unproven, hypothesis is that anatomically modern humans carried mutations that gave them an edge in social and verbal communications. If we picked up advantageous genes from the Neanderthals through interbreeding while replacing them this would be supremely ironic. Whatever the cause, we did eventually replace them so we must have enjoyed some crucial advantage over them.
Genetic changes allowed for important human cultural and technological developments after 40,000 BC that hadn’t been possible in 100,000 BC. The archaeological record clearly stands out from anything seen for hundreds of thousands of years prior to this. We see finer stone tools and the use of high-quality stones from more distant sources, which indicates some form of trade. They used bone and ivory as well, in contrast to the Neanderthals. New types of light, high-velocity weapons appeared such as javelins and eventually the bow and arrow. These were more efficient for hunting. Anatomically modern humans hunted small game and fish with newly devised tools such as fishhooks and nets, which widened their diet. While the use of fire was apparently known to archaic humans and to the Neanderthals it was now employed more efficiently and eventually used for making small ceramic figures. Burial with associated rituals, a distinctly human activity, had sporadically been done by the Neanderthals but became much more common during the Upper Paleolithic.
At Dolni Vestonice, located in what is now the Czech Republic, archaeologists have found the remains of five structures marked by mammoth bones, blocks of limestone and postholes. In Russia and the Ukraine, where natural shelters such as limestone caves were rare, we see dwellings that used many mammoth bones and must have required considerable planning and effort.
The most visible aspect of the Upper Paleolithic is the creation of the first real sculptures and the first elaborate cave paintings, made with carbon black or ochre. This is when we encounter the so-called Venus figurines in northwestern Eurasia, small statuettes of naked women with exaggerated hips and breasts. The most famous of these is the 11.5 cm high Venus of Willendorf from about 23,000 BC, discovered near Willendorf in Austria. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice from ca. 27,000 BC constitutes arguably the oldest known piece of ceramics (fired clay) in the world. Two kilns were found on the site surrounded by numerous fired ceramic fragments, but most of the recovered objects show thermal cracks and ceramics at this early date had no practical purpose besides art, at least as far as we know.
The earliest known pottery vessels for practical use have been found in northeast Asia, in northern China and Japan, starting from about 16,000 BC. Interestingly, this is thousands of years before we see evidence of agriculture in this region. It is notable that the earliest uses of ceramics either for art or for practical purposes have been found in northwestern and northeastern Eurasia. This is also where we encounter the peoples with the highest mean IQ today, if we exempt Ashkenazi Jews who developed their high IQ in historical times through a process that had nothing to do with climate. This strongly indicates that selection for elevated intelligence in the cold northern regions was well underway already during the Upper Paleolithic era.
The oldest Venus figurine so far discovered in Europe is the Venus of Hohle Fels from 34,000 BC or slightly before, unearthed in 2008 in southwestern Germany, yet this tiny statue was carved out of the tusk of a woolly mammoth, not made from fired clay. This figurine may be the first example of figurative art, meaning art that is supposed to resemble a real person or object. At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last Ice Age, early humans were carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world. A bone flute made from the radius of a griffon vulture found at the Hohle Fels Cave dates from the same time period. Music and sculpture – different expressions of artistic creativity – were apparently emerging in tandem among early modern humans in Europe.
This jump from abstract art to representative art might reflect a leap in the cognitive capacity of the human brain itself. Some experts think that it might have gone along with a leap in the complexity of human language. The oldest traces of man-made art or symbolic objects, created by anatomically modern humans in Africa before they left that continent, date back to 75,000 or 100,000 years ago and can be seen in places such as the Blombos Cave in South Africa. However, this art was abstract and consisted of geometrical designs engraved on pieces of red iron oxide. It is sometimes cited in support of the hypothesis that there was no “Great Leap Forward” after 50,000 BC, only gradual change, yet these early examples are nowhere near as complex as those from 40,000-10,000 BC, made by Cro-Magnons (anatomically modern humans and the ancestors of modern Europeans) in the non-glaciated regions of central and southern Europe.
kritisk_borger: Singapore does very well, yes. However, that is because most of the inhabitants are recent immigrants from the north. It normally takes a long time for evolutionary pressures to work. The case of the Jews was very fast, but it still took a thousand years. Evolution can work even faster, but then under the extreme selection pressures for instance associated with a deadly plague of some kind.
Almost all of Southeast Asia is currently settled by the descendants of people who came from China. They displaced the earlier dark-skinned low-IQ peoples who inhabited this region, and from whom derive the Australian Aborigines, precisely because they had evolved higher IQ by not living in a tropical environment. Yes, the long, cold winters were a powerful force behind the evolution of high IQ, as people needed to plan ahead to survive the winter. This wasn't the case in the tropical areas, which is why anatomically modern humans who left Africa but stayed in hot regions did not evolve high IQ. Only those in Eurasia, especially northeastern and northwestern Eurasia, did.
The reason why the Mayans were able to produce an urban civilization of medium-level sophistication in the tropical rainforest was because their genetic ancestors had endured thousands of years of selection pressure for higher IQ in northeast Asia before they crossed the Bering Strait. Likewise, the Inuits/Eskimos have lived in cold environments for thousands of years, but not quite as long as Europeans. For this reason they have an IQ in the low 90s. This is higher than among other Native American peoples and indicates that these selection pressures continued after they had crossed the Bering Strait. Read Understanding Human History.
Obviously, it will be pointless to debate differences among native Europeans of 98 vs. 102 in IQ if we are displaced by people with a mean IQ below 90 or even below 80. They will forever be incapable of maintaining a sophisticated society. Yes, my people have a high IQ by global standards, as do the English, the Swedish, the Dutch and the Germans, but what good does that do us if we are addicted to Socialism and our authorities support ethnic cleansing of us in our homelands?
A people cannot successfully maintain their cultural heritage if they do not maintain their genetic heritage as well. That is probably the most important lesson for whites in the twenty-first century, or even in the third millennium. These two entities can never be entirely separated. That does not mean that we cannot appreciate what is good in other cultures. However, eating Chinese food does not make me Chinese, any more than a Korean becomes German by listening to Beethoven.
Actually about 1/2 of Ashkenazi Jews or European Jews have Sephardi Jews roots (as my own family does). In fact during the Dark and Middle Ages, the leading thinkers in the Jewish Community were Sephardic Jews (specifically Spanish Jews).
The Jewish Community of Spain arrived in the 1st Century BCE from Egypt and Israel.
While some Jews were forced into the field of finance, the majority were in fields other than finance (Butcher,Baker,etc...).
Other factors including the long standing tradition of literacy and education to all social classes. Perhaps that idea of literacy is the true gift the Jewish people gave Europe and the US.
In hoc signo vinces
Travelling from one side of a major northern British City to the other by public transport there was not much indigenous intelligence on display but ample signs of regression.
Sorry Fjordman, but you are contradicting yourself here. In your original post you claim that cold weather is the only determining factor in the increase of IQ in the human race and you use a lot of examples to prove this thesis. But then later on in a reply to your original post you do a complete 180 and claim that the increase of IQ among Ashkenazim Jews can’t be explained by this theory and you go on to admit that this increase was more likely a result of social factors rather than cold weather. But even so you completely dismiss individuals who argue that social factors play just as an important role, as for instance weather, in determining IQ levels in humans.
And by the way, the majority of the people in Singapore are Malays who came from the surrounding areas which also has a tropical climate. There are also large groups of Indians and Chinese in the country.
India has a subtropical/tropical climate and the southern part of China has a subtropical climate. Ever been to Hong Kong? It’s like walking around in a big oven.
Even Japan has a subtropical climate in the southern part of the country, and the Japanese consistently score higher than Caucasians in IQ tests.
It's unfortunate, Fjordman, that your only comeback to my quotes is an ad hominem attack on Jared Diamond. At least Eileen O'Connor provides a link to some studies which tend to back up her claim.
And I thought you were an intellectual, Fjordman ...
Unfortunately Eileen, you don't recognize that the IQ test itself measures "western" intelligence, not the intelligence needed to survive in a hunter-gatherer society.
This is a very interesting topic.
"However, it also predicts that there should be slight differences in mean IQ within Europe itself, even if you discount recent immigrants who are not Europeans, genetically speaking."
Yes there are. However...
Come on, Fjordman!! I don't care if Northern Europeans are Nordicists. I would even encourage you to be Nordicist, I certainly wouldn't like you less for it.
The same is valid to Americans of Northern European descent.
But what I would like you to do is to leave your Nordicist outside when you're taking the whole of Europe into account.
I have no problem with those Nordicists who want Norway or Sweden to be Nordic. I have a problem with those who want all of Europe to be Nordic. Or that they feel entitled to treat non-Nordic Europeans as if they were somewhat inferior in Southern and Central Europe itself.
ITALIANS HAVE AVERAGE HIGHER IQs THAN MOST NORTHERN EUROPEANS.
"Yet according to Dennis Mangan’s blog, the 100 plus mean IQ for “Italians” is primarily based on data from northerners; southern Italians have a lower mean IQ."
Come on!!! Who cares!??! Do you really think that Milan or Turin or Florence are in Northern Europe or that it is somewhat Nordic?
Meanwhile, I was not able to see where Magnan said that the high IQ of Italians is just due to Northern Italians.
What was written there is that Southern Italians have lower IQs in average than Northern Italians, which is completly normal. Due to...
1) The Climate thing.
2) Southern Italy in historical times has been somewhat disfuntional while Northern Italy has been a thriving centre of European Civilisation, thus attracting the best of Europe, while the South didn't attract much and did not develop much.
3) While the Central and Northern Italian genetic landscape is virtually almost all European, the Southern Italian genetic landscape has almost half of genes from the Eastern Mediterranean, like below average intelligence Greeks and Turks if we consider the average to be the average European intelligence.
STILL, NORTHERN ITALY IS NOT NORDIC NOR IN NORTHERN EUROPE AND IT HAS A GREATER AVERAGE IQ THAN MOST OF NORTHERN EUROPE
High IQ is not entirely genetic. A great part is. But the rest is environmental, that is, it has to be stimulated. And in Northern Italy, the Netherlands, the U.K. and in most of Germany, IQ was "actually" stimulated much more than it was in Southern Europe. This is something that comes from a while back in time.
Not only that, up untill sometime ago, the more sucessfull someone was (intelligence is a factor), the more descendents they would have.
I think this can explain the high IQ for the centres of European culture in the last 500 years:
Northern and Central Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, England.
And the Scandinavian countries would only have higher IQs because of the same reason, IQ is much more stimulated. (Much harsher Winters / Protestant culture versus simplistic Catholic culture)
And thus, in evolutionary terms the genetic and environmental factors mingle. Genetic IQ peoples can be further stimulated to increase their IQs and them have more descendents and then stimulate them more and then... a population like this would have an higher IQ.
Other objections to the climate reason, which exists but is not the only one.
Well, Jews tend to have higher intelligence than the peoples surrounding them.
Why aren't inuits/samis more intelligent?? They are quiet less intelligent, aren't they?
Why aren't Bolivians who live in high mountains with few oxygen and who survive harsh winters, why don't they have an higher IQ?
And Singapure is mainly inhabited by non native Chinese. And I guess it is a meritocratic state.
"There is no trace of any creative explosion in populations derived from the southern Indian Ocean movement, who brought and retained Neanderthal-grade technology and culture.”"
Very interesting. So, Fjordman, are they dumber than Africans? Can we finally prove that evolution can also mean involution?
I've heard that native Australians were less intelligent than Africans, but I have never seen a real study. And meanwhile, Africans stayed for much more time in Africa so, they seemed to have envolved more than Australians.
P.S. - Fjordman, I like your comments much more than I liked your post.
Bad Joke: Gordon's "Western Intelligence" must be the 40 points that separate Westerners from intelligent New Guineans.
It's interesting to note the distribution of megafauna (elephants and rhinoceri)and of carnivores that commonly eat humans (African lions, and compare it to the distribution of humans whose ancestors survived the ice age. When the ice age forced humans to develop the intelligence necessary to kill animals whose only defense was thier size, the elephant and rhinocerous became extinct in Europe, North America, and Northern Asia. Northern Asians came to southeast Asia very early, and have almost exterminated the megafauna there. They came later to India, so the Indian megafauna is not as close to extinction as that of southeast Asia. Africa remains inhabited by people whose ancestors did not endure the ice age, so megafauna is still abundant in Africa.
Potentially, the most dangerous carnivores should be the brown and grizzly bears of the far north; they are the biggest and strongest terrestial carnivores, and their need to store up energy for hibernation gives them the biggest appetites. The biggest, strongest, potentially most dangerous cat is the Siberian tiger. The bears and tigers of the far north very rarely attack humans unless they are provoked. Tigers and leopards in India occasionally become man eaters, and the lions and leopards of Africa are much more likely to be man eaters. The reason appears to be that among human populations that survived the ice age, humans are, because of their intelligence, the most dangerous predator. Bears and tigers had to avoid humans to survive. Among human populations who did not survive the ice age, humans were never particularly dangerous to anything bigger than a man, and were an easy source of food for lions.
Rick S.
Are Northern Europeans more intelligent than Southern Europeans? First we have to define Northern and Southern Europe, which can be done by language groups.
I define Northern Europe as the Germanic, East and West Slavic, Baltic and Finno-Ugric nations. Added to these are the Northern European diaspora nations of Russia, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Southern Europe consists of the Romance, South Slavic, Greek, Albanian and Maltese nations, plus the overseas S. Europeans in Argentina and Uruguay.
In Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations there are IQ data (2006) from 27 Northern European nations, all of which fall between 96 and 101 except for two notable outliers, Ireland at 92 and Lithuania at 91.
The 17 Southern European nations all fall between 90 and 98, with the singular exception of Italy at 102. If we exclude the 3 outlier nations, the N. Euros have about a 5 IQ point edge over the S. Euros, or about one-third of a standard deviation.
Other international comparisons, like the TIMSS science and math tests and the PISA science, math and reading tests, show the same pattern: Northern European nations consistently outperform Southern European ones.
So the answer is yes, the N. Euros are more intelligent than the S. Euros. I think the general public are beginning to pick up on this fact.
;)
Meanwhile, genetics stubbornly refuse to act as we expect them to.
Let's leave some of the puzzle pieces to G-d - and just do what is right for our respective nations, and let's avoid taking a page from the deranged humanists' book of analyzing the un-analyzable.
Jeppo. You claim that Northern Europeans are more intelligent because of the climate. I believe that if there is such a big difference, it is because Southern Europeans did not have so priviliged lifes as the Northern Europeans.
Let's consider the Southern European Nations: In the Soutwest we were to buisy being kicked and kicking the moors and in the Southeast, they were too busy being kicked or kicking the turkish invaders.
Not to mention that in a region of Northwestern Europe stimulation was much greater than in the Southeas or Southwest of Europe.
And guess who's the only Southern European people who gets a living like that of Northern Europeans: Without much opression and with much stimulation? That's right! Italians! Which, by mere chance happen to be at the same level or above much of your "Northern Europe", probabily except the German lands, the Netherlands, Switzerland and England.
If you can attack my argument, I'll agree with you.
By the way, I'll not talk about Classic times because you'll all say that you were too busy climbing trees or whatever, but I'll say that Portugal and Spain started the discoveries and conquered the world, just after kicking the muslims out... as Fjordman says: A contribution that is not proportional to their numbers.
And your New Jersey shore is on the same level of the John Stewart's Tea Partys are stupid.
Afonso,
I think we have to take the national IQ numbers with a grain of salt. For example look how much better the Lithuanians did on the TIMSS math test than the Italians, despite their alleged IQ of only 91 compared to the Italians alleged 102.
But if you look at the larger pattern, it's clear that N. Euros generally score higher than S. Euros on any number of tests; Lynn and Vanhanen's, TIMSS, PISA, etc. That's the point I was trying to make. I'll bet the North Chinese test higher than the South Chinese as well, that's just the way it is.
BTW the Jersey Shore reference was just a joke, or didn't you see the little winky face?
;)
kritisk_borger: No, I did not contradict myself. You didn't properly digest what I wrote. If we use the past 60,000 years, after anatomically modern humans left Africa, as a starting point then a cold climate was the single most important factor for about 50,000 years of that time. With the beginnings of agriculture and urban civilization came other kinds of evolutionary pressures, too, although climate still mattered. Put simply, throughout most of human prehistory climate was the single most important factor in determining genetic intelligence and therefore the one we consider first. If you want to find out whether person X has high or low intelligence then the first thing you ask is "Did your genetic ancestors live entirely within a tropical climate?" If the answer to that is yes then he is statistically unlikely to have high IQ. Notice that I didn't say whether or not he lives in a tropical region today. The Chinese in warm Singapore may have an IQ of 100 plus now, but that's precisely because their genetic ancestors did not live in these hot regions for tens of thousands of years.
Regarding Indians, it has recently been established that modern Indians are a mix of two very different genetic groups: One of them is haplogroup M, with lineages spread among India, Africa, New Guinea and Australia. They probably constitute descendants of the first anatomically modern humans who left Africa and traveled across the Indian Ocean all the way to Australia some 40-50,000 years ago. Notice that they stayed within hot and near-tropical regions the whole time after leaving Africa. Therefore, according to the cold climate theory, they did not evolve very high IQ. And they didn't.
The other group contributing to the modern Indian gene pool were light-skinned Caucasians coming from the northwest, perhaps in several distinct waves, the latest of them being the spread of Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit from northeastern Europe. This thesis is supported by the fact that those Indians with most genes in common with Middle Easterners, Central Asians and Europeans are disproportionately found among traditionally upper-caste individuals and speakers of modern Indo-European languages such as Hindi.
In order to explain why Brahmins dominated Indian life for so long we can stipulate that they had an IQ advantage over the bulk of the population, and they had this because they had received the highest number of genes related to intelligence from the northern peoples. According to this model, the peculiar Indian caste system originally evolved as an IQ preservationist strategy because a smaller number of high-IQ Indo-European speaking Caucasians ruled over a more numerous pre-established tropical population.
As I said, the IQ of the various populations in Southeast Asia depends upon how recently they arrived from the cooler regions of northeast Asia. Even Jared Diamond admits that most of Southeast Asia was probably originally settled by dark-skinned peoples who more closely resembled Australian Aborigines or certain New Guinean populations than the Chinese-derived peoples who live there today.
Comparative linguistics and archaeology created by European scholars have indicated that the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to the Maoris of New Zealand, was settled by peoples who initially left Taiwan and the southern coast of China about five thousand years ago. These findings have been vindicated by recent genetic studies. The pathologist Robin Warren (born 1937) in 1979 discovered the bacterium Helicobacter pylori at the University of Western Australia together with physician Barry J. Marshall (born 1951). In 2005 they shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. Thanks to their work, peptic ulcer disease is no longer a chronic, frequently disabling condition, but a disease that can be permanently cured.
Infection of the stomach by Helicobacter pylori is ubiquitous among humans, but genetic diversity in H. pylori decreases with geographic distance from East Africa, the assumed cradle of anatomically modern humans. Like humans, simulations indicate that H. pylori seems to have spread from East Africa around 58,000 years ago.
Two prehistoric human migrations reached the Pacific. One reached New Guinea and Australia and a second, more recent, migration extended through Melanesia and from there to the Polynesian islands. These migrations were accompanied by two distinct populations of Helicobacter pylori. The first split from Asian populations 31,000 to 37,000 years ago and, in concordance with archaeological history, remained largely isolated thereafter among Australian Aborigines until the European colonial period. The second spread with a migration that started with peoples speaking Austronesian languages from Taiwan after 3000 BC. It spread throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean as the development of better outrigger canoes enabled them to travel across wide spaces of ocean.
The native Australians lived next to the Pacific Ocean for tens of thousands of years, but as far as we know never explored it, not even to nearby New Zealand. The Polynesians did this because they were the descendants of Chinese people with much higher IQ than Australians, and therefore possessed the minimum intelligence necessary for such great explorations.
Gordon: My attack on Jared Diamond was not ad hominem, it was entirely appropriate. He specifically states that he considers it "morally loathsome" to consider the possibility that one ethnic group can have a higher genetic intelligence than another ethnic group, at least if this implies anything positive for white Europeans. This is logically speaking meaningless and invalidates his conclusions. You cannot, scientifically speaking, refuse to consider alternative hypotheses that describe observed reality better than your preferred hypothesis just because you don't like the alternatives.
Imagine if I throw a stone in the air, watch it fall down and conclude that it's because the stone loves dirt and wants to kiss the ground. Yes, I've heard about Mr. Newton's alternative hypothesis about universal gravity, but I consider gravity to be morally loathsome and refuse to consider it. "Gravitationists" are considered to be the most evil people in existence and are banned from polite society. Would you consider this to be good science? Well, that's what Mr. Diamond does.
Fjordman writes, "A people cannot successfully maintain their cultural heritage if they do not maintain their genetic heritage as well. That is probably the most important lesson for whites in the twenty-first century, or even in the third millennium. These two entities can never be entirely separated. That does not mean that we cannot appreciate what is good in other cultures. However, eating Chinese food does not make me Chinese, any more than a Korean becomes German by listening to Beethoven."
This is a very fine principle, and I wholly support it.
But then you wrote, "This does not contradict the cold climate hypothesis; the northern peoples have consistently outperformed people to the south once they have achieved a sufficiently high degree of urbanization."
But what would you say to someone who used this statement to argue that the whole world ought to be Nordicized? What if someone else decided that we ought to Ashkenazi Judaize the whole world for the same reason? If you regard either as a bad idea, against which standard are you judging? Certainly not "performance" since, as you say, Northern peoples outperform Southerns. If that is not your only standard, what other standard is there and whence did you get it?
It is here that we traditional Christians and Jews tend to part ways with secular conservatives and ethnic nationalists. Traditional Christians preserve nations because the existence of nations is part of a higher order to which we submit. It doesn't matter if my own nation is the smartest, dumbest or just average; I am loyal to it because that is right and good as revealed by God. But secular conservatives conserve no such order. They are loyal to their ethne because...well, just because. And if they are pressed to justify it, they cite things like intelligence which they, as Gordon implies, just so happen to like. No reason or rationale (ironic?); just naked assertion of their will.
Of course, Gordon and Diamond are guilty of exactly the same metaphysical crime: Why, Gordon, are New Guinean children who "do something" all day better than videogame playing European children? And why doesn't videogaming count as "doing something"? And whence your standard for what "doing something" means? etc.
Gordon writes, "Unfortunately Eileen, you don't recognize that the IQ test itself measures "western" intelligence, not the intelligence needed to survive in a hunter-gatherer society."
To make this argument work, Gordon, you'd have to negate not only the concept of intelligence but also the concept of good or truth in general. After that, it's hard to see what would be "wrong" about Eileen's position or what "truth" she might have failed to "recognize" in having taken it. So you'll end up having to "respect" her position as being merely "different" than your own, in a way very similar to your demand that "hunter-gatherer" intelligence be recognized as merely "different" than whites' intelligence. In other words, you'll lose the argument.
There has to be a standard if we're to have any conversation or communication at all, and that standard has to be universal and objective if our conversation is to have any meaning at all. By any standard of intelligence that is universal and therefore objective, the hunter-gatherers lose.
Note, this is not necessarily true of quality of life. There are certain depravities that are above the simple hunter-gatherer and devastating to advanced European man, just as there are certain sins that enslave adults but do not tempt children.
Maybe Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs because they ate a lot of cold water fish(herring and cod) which are full of Omega 3 oils. Eating these foods during pregancy and adolescence causes the formation of more neurons and neuronal connections in the brain.
Also coupled with that was/is the mandatory study of Torah from an early age thus training the brain. And Jews were doing rabbinical mathematics for centuries before Maths became commonplace.Then they were not allowed to practice many professions so became merchants and bankers, thus developing their monetary,negotiating, managerial and trading skills.
Fjordman; Ok, so the focal point of your thesis is that people living in colder climates, over time (thousands of years), will develop higher IQ’s than those living in warmer climates. When I pointed out earlier that large portions of China, Japan and India are in a subtropical/tropical climate zones and that a large percentage of the populations in these places score relatively well on IQ tests (close to Caucasians and in some cases even better) you interpret this as a result of human migration patterns that occurred several thousand ago. Your explanation is that individuals with higher IQ’s migrated from the colder northern regions several thousand years ago and settled in the southern regions and this is the determining factor for the overall high IQ’s that is found today in these areas.
If the cold weather argument is accurate and holds any water at all one can assume that the IQ of people living in colder climates increase more rapidly than those living in warmer climates. But that also means that over a large period of time humans moving from colder climates to warmer climates would experience a slowdown of their IQ’s developments, or perhaps even have it reversed? The further north you live the faster your IQ grows, right?
Let’s for arguments sake say that the ancestors of the people who currently inhabit the subtropical regions of China, India and Japan, moved to those regions about 15 000 – 20 000 years ago (I don’t know if this is true or not, but let’s for arguments sake say that it is), what effect would this move have on these individuals descendants? Surely the warmer climate would mean that their descendants IQ’s wouldn’t develop as fast as that of their fellow human beings living in the colder climate zones in the northern hemisphere. If this is the case then surely there should be a distinct disparity in the IQ levels of these two groups of people?
But this is not the case. There is no distinct disparity. The Japanese score above the Caucasians and the Asians don’t follow that far behind them.
Like I mentioned previously;
“I believe that the disparity in IQ levels amongst the various ethnic groups has a lot more to do with nourishment and types of diets, and less to do with prowess in the field of hunting and the ability to gather food. Besides, agriculture has been around for several thousands of years, eliminating the need for mass scale hunting as the only means of survival. It’s also a well established fact that the human brain only started to see rapid development once man started eating protein rich bone marrow. Diet also plays a big part in the animal kingdom where carnivores are more intelligent than herbivores. Even today studies show that children who receive a nutritious diet outperform children who don’t”
I still believe that diet has had a bigger impact on IQ levels than cold climates.
According to this theory, the natives of Patagonia should have been as smart as the Scandinavians. Yet Darwin was appaled by their lack of cultural development.
In hoc signo vinces
A interesting modern example or area for research maybe the impact and success of the small population of Italian immigrants in Scotland. Despite the disruption to this group during WW2 they went on to have a large impact and influence on Scottish society and culture (particularly from the sixties to the present) way beyond their numbers, their disproportionate success is surprising.
Jeppo, I know Northern Europeans score higher averages in IQ tests than do Southern Europeans.
However, I don't think it is genetical and I am trying to make that point because in ever IQ ranking that I've seen, Italy scores higher than most Northern European Nations.
You see, when I try to argue this reasonably and people make their best to deny it and ignore it, it is a little boring and irritating.
The peoples of South and Eastern Europe have not been as much stimulated in the last 300 to 500 years as have been the peoples of Northwestern Europe. It can be explained by this. If you are not stimulated for a while, your mind will be numb. The difference is cultural/educational, not genetic.
"it's clear that N. Euros generally score higher than S. Euros on any number of tests. That's the point I was trying to make. I'll bet the North Chinese test higher than the South Chinese as well, that's just the way it is."
Yes, its clear they score in average higher than Southern Europeans.
I've heard that there is a considerable genetic difference from Southern to Northern China, I don't know enough of Chinese History to say that it is genetically or to say that it is not genetically.
However, in Europe, I think it is pretty clear that it is not genetically.
So, what annoys me in your points is that you don't advance with theories or argumentation but still disregard my side of the question, ignore high Italian IQ (the only place in Southern Europe where there is some tradition of stimulation) and on top of that you make silly jokes.
Maybe I over reacted but man, you were being a pain in the ass.
Jeppo and others,
It's just appaling that people writes about what they dosen't know, as you are making statements about northern europeans or nordics as others called them.
Europe has THREE basic races and this do not have an ethnolinguistic basis. as seen here we have also the same ethnic background in the whole continent, tinted by arabs, turks or mongols in some place but essencially the same.
Now people are slowing beginning to talk about it again but much of what is know today was already known in the 1920's anthropologists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard writting about IQ and immigration long before DNA made things much easier.
So before talking bull educate yourselves.
@Fjordman
People tend to forget that the climate thesis is based in scarcity and how a better IQ made people's decisions better. While the real far north was really a wasteland (making IQ more useless) southern scandinavia is fertile (making IQ more useful) how about north africa? Why the scarcity there didn't bring their IQs up? Or was it the arab conquest that wiped out IQ gains?
Another thing people talks about how negro blood affected iberian genepool lowering IQ but i do not read about IQ raising by jewish assimilation ( i do not belive in either) why is it?
How about scandinavia? Is there some info on how Lappish admixture intereacted with Nordic blood in the far north. Are these half-bloods in the far north as intelligent as southern scandinavians?
Rocha: No, I haven't seen much good data regarding the Lapps/Sami people, but the question is intriguing, yes. We know that sheer numbers can be a factor in itself when it comes to generating potentially useful mutations. I am willing to consider the hypothesis that in very cold and sparsely populated northern areas, the small demographic numbers could act as a break on the evolution of high IQ.
pragensis said: "According to this theory, the natives of Patagonia should have been as smart as the Scandinavians. Yet Darwin was appaled by their lack of cultural development."
Patagonia's not actually all that cold. The average extreme in winter is only 29.5F (-1.5C). There's a warming effect there from an ocean current.
kritisk_borger said: "Besides, agriculture has been around for several thousands of years, eliminating the need for mass scale hunting as the only means of survival."
The advent of agriculture and the large, permanent settlements that followed (including urbanization) have resulted in a whole new set of selection pressures on the human genome, including on those genes that affect the human intellect.
Do please read "The 10,000 Year Explosion" to get a fuller idea of the effects of agriculture on human evolution. I can't recommend it enough.
kritisk_borger said: "Another flaw in the cold weather theory presented here is that far-east Asians on average have a higher IQ than Caucasians, but even so large areas of far-east Asia has a tropical/sub tropical climate. Singapore which is one of the most successful countries on earth, and millions of miles ahead of Norway when it comes to education and infra structure is practically right on the equator. How can that be?"
The high Asian IQs are found in East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, & Koreans) who evolved in cold climates and in more recent times have migrated southwards. The majority (74.2%) of people in Singapore are of Chinese descent.
The Poster Formerly Known as Gordon said: "Unfortunately Eileen, you don't recognize that the IQ test itself measures 'western' intelligence, not the intelligence needed to survive in a hunter-gatherer society."
The American Psychological Association concluded in 1995 that IQ tests are not biased against people of African descent any more than they are biased against (or in favor of) people of European descent. I think it unlikely, therefore, that IQ tests are biased against any other group, Africans and Europeans having quite a different evolutionary history. Modern IQ tests have eliminated all the "cultural questions" like what is a regatta (or whatever that question was back in the 50s).
General intelligence is something real and measurable and there are differences in average intelligence between differing human populations due to differing gene frequencies as a result of their different evolutionary histories.
It's not something to get upset about or take personally, it's just how it is. We would be one extraordinarily odd species if evolution had NOT acted on us!
bartholomewscross said: "But secular conservatives conserve no such order. They are loyal to their ethne because...well, just because. And if they are pressed to justify it, they cite things like intelligence which they, as Gordon implies, just so happen to like. No reason or rationale (ironic?); just naked assertion of their will."
Well, I think you just haven't been listening closely enough to us secular conservatives who are informed about HBD.
I want to conserve my ethny (and my race) because they are MY FAMILY. They are most closely related to me. They share the most genes with me, therefore I am driven to defend them. (I also would like to see all ethnies of the world preserved because I think HBD is cool. But, if push comes to shove....)
Like you "it doesn't matter if my own nation is the smartest, dumbest or just average." I want my ethny/nation/race preserved because they are my family. The only reason I ever talk about differences in intelligence is because certain forces in the world (politicians and politically correct people) want to populate my country with peoples unrelated to me, many of whom also happen to have appalling low intelligence levels (amongst other characteristics which I view as deficient).
But I don't want to have 50 million Japanese people settle in the U.S. either even though they have, as a group, a higher IQ than my own race. I don't want the U.S. to become East Asian any more than I want it to become Mexican.
Afonso and Rocha,
Look, I was merely responding to Fjordman's point about the cold climate theory predicting that there would be slight differences in IQ between Northern and Southern Europeans.
So I went to the chart from "IQ and Global Inequality" (not "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" as I erroneously wrote in my first comment), divided the Euro-majority nations listed into 27 Northern and 17 Southern ones, and posted a summary of the results here.
If you don't like the way I divided the various nations into Northern and Southern blocs, then by all means feel free to come up with your own definitions.
As for Italy being an exceptionally high average IQ nation, well that's certainly what Lynn and Vanhanen's data show. But Italy doesn't do well on the TIMSS tests, and on the PISA tests they finished well below the OECD average in math, science and reading.
PDF of the 2006 PISA tests
Sure it was a silly joke to bring up the TV show "Jersey Shore" in this context. But that was the whole point! Lighten up, dudes.
Jeppo,
Just want to point that these were not my definition it was the definition of physical antropologists in the 1900's to 1950's i do not doubt there's a small difference in IQ but there's more important thing when the difference is small. Thigs like culture and even religion affect the use of IQ.
Or even the bell curve in IQ. Asians tend to have a flatter bell curve but a higher medium, that made people theorize that that was the reason for their backwardeness in the XIX century. They lacked stupid people but lacked genious too.
Now i have to admit that you ended being a scapegoat but the thing is that when we talk about IQ i feel a certain hostility towards latins, maybe that's because of mexicans (whom i do not consider latins but mestizos), specially iberian latins (France is latin but nobody calls Quebec latin america)... Writting in foruns and even TV theres "la leyenda negra" everywhere in WASP reaction to us. So i'm sorry if i overeacted.
Eileen wrote,
"They share the most genes with me, therefore I am driven to defend them."
So just having the greatest number of common genes with someone else "drives" you to defend him or her?
But there are many, many people who share your heritage. Why aren't they driven to the same position?
And it's no use citing liberalism (if it weren't for multiculturalism/liberalism, etc. everyone would agree with me). Where did liberalism come from? How could genes which are programmed to defend other similar genes ever come up with an ideology (or "meme," right?) that accomplishes exactly the opposite purpose?
bartholomewscross said: "So just having the greatest number of common genes with someone else 'drives' you to defend him or her?"
Exactly. (Well, more precisely to favor that person.)
bartholomewscross said: But there are many, many people who share your heritage. Why aren't they driven to the same position?
Well, most of them (too many of them) don't share enough of my genes.
It's easier to understand this if you look at the flip-side first.
Peoples who are inbred -- I mean people who practice endogamy, like Afghanis or Iraqis who practice cousin-marriage -- support/defend their relations (even what we view as distant relations) more strongly than we do because they are each more genetically related to each other on average than anyone in Western societies.
In Afghani society, your wife is not only your wife, she's probably also your cousin. That makes your kids not only your kids but ALSO your cousins. Your brother's wife is ALSO your cousin -- and so your nieces and nephews are ALSO your cousins.
Imagine the affection you have for your nieces and nephews (if you have any -- replace some other family members if you don't). Then imagine the affection you have for your cousins. Now ADD that affection together and direct it towards a single individual.
See what I'm getting at?
Now imagine endogamy (cousin marriage, for instance) being practiced over scores or hundreds of generations. Try to picture how much more all the members of that group are related to one another than those in a society who don't practice endogamy. Then you'll start to understand why some peoples, like the Afghanis, have no time for liberalism or political correctness.
The opposite is true for most Western societies. We, on the whole, haven't been marrying our cousins to any large degree for several hundred years. The genetic/familial bonds between Europeans are much looser than in other societies.
You don't need -- nor do we have -- genes that program for liberalism (although there are certain personality types that fit better with liberalism than others). We just have quite loose genetic relatedness.
Which is a good thing on the one hand, because it probably enables neat things like democracy and societies with little nepotism. On the other hand, it probably produced liberalism which is no defense at all against people who think like this.
What I see here , is that the 'scientism' crowd denies (sometimes vehemently!) that there even EXISTS, let alone believe, the Divine 'Ethnic Interest' of YHWH God ['You ALONE of all the nations of the earth, have I known"-Amos 4:2] and the confirmation of that Election, by the Advent of the Kinsman-Redeemer, i.e. Christ, who came ONLY to save 'his own' [ Matt. 1:21, John 15:16]...
While the few that believe that set of above-iterated facts, they then deny that GOD has any sort of 'ethnic interest'- which of course, belies the entire Christian/Biblical doctrine of the Incarnation, anyway! One Man for One Ethnos, One Race, One Redeemer, One 'brother'- bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, etc. From Adam [Gen. 3:15, John 1:1ff.] on down!
The reason why Whites are superior is not due to Evolution alone, but to Divine Election, Divine Incarnation, and Divine Affinity. When YHWH God looks in Jesus' face, he sees the Ethnos of Adam, and thus of Adamkind. We once knew that in the West, and practiced it, before the bolshevik ideology of race-mixing became a certain political ideology's main thrust to destroy their enemies [Gen.3:15, John 8:44] faith in their own Election; and, subsequently, to bolster the false 'ethnic interest's' tool of Genociding Christendom, by those who HAVE NO affinity with the Tribes [Jas. 1:1, Heb. 13:10, I Pet.1:1] even going so far as to note it themselves, if only as a 'Thirteenth Tribe.'
And that, of course, is why no one will touch it in this 'semitically correct' era of an Obamanation.
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