THE DISCOURSE OF AMEN-RA, LORD OF THRONES on defeating the
"whites".
Thou hast struck off the heads of the
Asiatics, and their children cannot escape from thee. Every land illuminated by
thy diadem is encircled by thy might; and in all the zone of the heavens there
is not a rebel to rise up against thee. The enemy bring in their tribute on
their backs, prostrating themselves before thee, their limbs trembling and their
hearts burned up within them."
Campaign against "white" Mittani in parts of Lebanon:
"He is a king valiant ... Naharin which its lord had deserted out of fear
... I hacked up its towns and villages and I set fire to them ... I carried off
their inhabitants ... also their herds of cattle ... I felled all their
plantations and their fruit trees ...I had many vessels ... built on the
mountains of God's Land in the neighborhood of the Lady of Byblos ... then on
that mountain of Naharin, my Majesty erected my stela, carved out of the
mountain on the western side of the Euphrates.."
Conquest against and tribute from "white" Palestine:
"Tribute of the princes of Retenu, who came to do obeisance ... to the
souls of his majesty... Now every harbor at which his majesty arrived was
supplied with loaves and with assorted loaves, with oil, incense, wine, f[ruit]
---- abundant were they beyond everything ...
Tribute from 'white' Lebanon:
The chieftains, lord of Lebanon, construct the royal ships in order that people
may sail south in them to bring all the marvels of the "Garden" to the
palace. LPH. ... The chieftains of Retjenu (Retenu) who drag the flagpoles by
means of oxen to the shore, it is they who come with their dues to the place
where his majesty is, to the Residence in ...... bearing all the fine products
brought as marvels of the south and being taxed for tribute annually as (with)
all bondsmen of his Majesty."
Operations against more 'white' 'Troglodytes':
"Then my Majesty made them take their oaths of allegiance as follows: never
again shall we do anything evil against Menkheperre (another name for Thutmose
III), may he live forever ...
Then my Majesty had them set free on the road to their cities*). They went off
on donkeys for I had seized their chariotry. I captured their inhabitants for
Egypt and their property likewise." [W. Helck transl. by B. Cummings
(1982), `Urkunden der 18. Dynastie', `Egyptian Historical Records of the Later
18th Dynasty']
"His majesty proceeded northward, to overthrow the Asiatics (Mntyw-Stt).
His majesty arrived at a district, Sekmem (Skmm) was its name. His majesty led
the good way in proceeding to the palace of `Life, Prosperity, and Health (L.P.H.,'
when Sekmen had fallen, together with Retenu (Rtnw) the wretched, while I was
acting as rearguard." [Breasted, `Records', Vol. I, Sec. 680]
Time of Seti the Great - Presentation of Syrian Prisoners and Precious Vessels
to Amon
"Smiting the Troglodytes, beating down the Asiatics (Mn·t·yw), making his
boundary as far as the `Horns of the Earth', as far as the marshes of Naharin
(N-h-r-n)." [Ibid., Vol. III, Sec. 118;]
"Slaying of the Asiatic Troglodytes (Ynw-Mn·t·yw [Menate, Manasseh]), all
inaccessible countries, all lands, the Fenkhu of the marshes of Asia, the Great
Bend of the sea (w'd-wr)."
Booty seized from "white" Caananites:
".... 340 living prisoners; 83 hands; 2,401 mares; 191 foals; 6 stallions;
... young ...; a chariot, wrought with gold, (its) pole of gold, belonging to
the chief of `M-k-ty' (as the land around Jerusalem was called); .... 892
chariots of his wretched army; total, 924 (chariots); a beautiful suit of bronze
armor, belonging to the chief of Jerusalem; .... 200 suits of armor, belonging
to his wretched army; 502 bows; 7 poles of (mry) wood, wrought with silver,
belonging to the tent of that foe. Behold, the army of his majesty took ....,
297 ...., 1,929 large cattle, 2,000 small cattle, 20500 white small
cattle." [JBRE, `Records', Vol. II, Sec. 435; See also the following
sections.]
Tribute from "white" Assur/Assyria
"The tribute of the chief of Assur (Ys-sw-r): genuine lapis lazuli, a large
block, making 20 deben, 9 kidet; genuine lapis lazuli, 2 blocks; total, 3; and
pieces, [making] 30 deben; total, 50 deben and 9 kidet; fine lapis lazuli from
Babylon (Bb-r); vessels of Assur of hrrt- stone in colors, ---- very many."
"Tribute of the chief of Assur: horses ---. A ---- of skin of the M-h-w as
the [protection] of a chariot, of the finest of --- wood; 190(+x) wagons --- ---
wood, nhb wood, 343 pieces, carob wood, 50 pieces; nby and k'nk wood, 206
pieces; olive oil, ------.." [BREASTED, Vol. II, Sec. 446, 449]
"Whites" put to slave labor in Egypt.
from Project Guttenberg full text of:
A HISTORY OF EGYPT FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PERSIAN CONQUEST
BY JAMES HENRY BREASTED,
II, 760-1, 773. 2 II, 761.
Inscription
"the Asiatics of all countries came with bowed head, doing obeisance to the
fame of his majesty."
book text:
"Thutmose's war-galleys moored in the harbour of the town; but at this time
not merely the iceaUh of Asia was unloaded from the ships; the Asiatics
themselves, bound one to another in long lines, were led down the gang planks to
begin a life of slave- labour for the Pharaoh (Fig. 119). They wore long matted
beards, an abomination to the Egyptians ; their hair hung in heavy black masses
upon their shoulders, and they were clad in gaily coloured woolen stuffs, such
as the Egyptian, spotless in his white linen robe, would never put on his body.
Their arms were pinioned behind them at the elbows or crossed over their heads
and lashed together ; or, again, their hands were thrust through odd pointed
ovals of wood, which served as hand-cuffs. The women carried their children
slung in a fold of the mantle over their shoulders. With their strange speech
and uncouth postures the poor wretches were the subject of jibe and merriment on
the part of the multitude ; while the artists of the time could never forbear
caricaturing them. Many of them found their way into the houses of the Pharaoh's
favourites, and his generals were liberally rewarded with gifts of such slaves;
but the larger number were immediately employed on the temple estates, the
Pharaoh's domains, or in the construction of his great monuments and
buildings."
------------
Flipping around
the dubious "race war" approach, ancient
Egyptians warn against cowardly, treacherous "whites" comparing them
to destructive thieves and reptiles.
"The Instruction for King, Merikare takes a similar tone for peoples in the
north (Lichtheim 1973: 10404):
Lo the miserable Asiatic (white),
He is wretched because of the place he's in:
Short of water, bare of wood,
Its paths are many and painful because of mountains.
He does not dwell in one place,
Food propels his legs,
He fights since the time of Horus..
He does not announce the day of combat,
Like a thief who darts about a group.."
"Asiatics (whites) are both cowardly and pitiful, leading a marginal
existence, constantly fighting but with nothing ever settled. They are also sly
and ultimately treacherous, attacking without warning. This passage
characterizes Asiatics as both primitive and threatening.. In this case, the
passage reflects Egypt's combination of colonial domination and outright
military conflict.."
Merikare goes on (Lichtheim 1976: 103-104)
"The Asiatic [white] is a crocodile on its shore
It snatches from a lonely road,
It cannot seize a populous town."
"Along the same lines, the Prophecy of Neferti (c. 1950 BC) portrays
Asiatic immigrants as a flock of rapacious birds descending on Egypt, taking
advantage of civil wars of the First Intermediate Period (c. 2150 - 2050 BC) to
infiltrate parts of the rich Egyptian delta (Lichtheim 1973: 141):
A strange bird will breed in the delta marsh,
having made its nest besides the people..
All happiness is vanished,
The land is bowed down in distress,
Owing to those feeders,
Asiatics who roam the land..
--Stuart Tyson Smith. (2003) Wretched Kush: ethnic identities and boundaries in
Egypt's Nubian empire. Routledge, pp. 28-31
RAMESES II. SLAYING THE "whites" BEFORE RA, THE TUTELARY DEITY OF THE
GREAT TEMPLE OF ABÛ-SIMBEL..
Wicherts, J. M., et al. Evolution, brain size, and the national IQ of peoples
around 3000 years B.C. Personality and Individual Differences (2009), SCIENCE
(in press 2009)
[b]ABSTRACT In this rejoinder, we respond to comments by Lynn, Rushton, and
Templer on our previous paper in which we criticized the use of national IQs in
studies of evolutionary theories of race differences in intelligence. We
reiterate that because of the Flynn Effect and psychometric issues, national IQs
cannot be taken to reflect populations’ levels of g as fixed since the last
ice age. We argue that the socio-cultural achievements of peoples of Mesopotamia
and Egypt in 3000 B.C. stand in stark contrast to the current low level of
national IQ of peoples of Iraq and Egypt and that these ancient achievements
appear to contradict evolutionary accounts of differences in national IQ. We
argue that race differences in brain size, even if these were entirely of
genetic origin, leave unexplained 91–95% of the black-white IQ gap. We
highlight additional problems with hypotheses raised by Rushton and Templer.
National IQs cannot be viewed solely in evolutionary terms but should be
considered in light of global differences in socio-economic development, the
causes of which are unknown. [/b]
[b]1. Introduction [/b]
In our previous paper (this issue), we criticized Kanazawa (2008), Templer
(2008), and Templer and Arikawa (2006) on the basis of the fact that these
studies were concerned with evolution but ignored changes over the course of
evolution in the variables of interest. Our central point was that the use of
national IQs in studies of the evolution of intelligence is problematic because
national IQs have not been constant over the course of the twentieth century
(Flynn, 2007) and so cannot be taken simply to reflect the level of general
intelligence or g of peoples that lived thousands of years ago. We showed that
current-day national IQs are strongly confounded with the developmental status
of countries and argued that it is rather likely that the Flynn Effect is not at
the same level of development across the globe. We are delighted to have a
chance to discuss our work with Drs. Lynn, Rushton, and Templer and thank them
for their comments.
Lynn (this issue) dismissed the Flynn Effect as relevant for the study of the
evolution of race differences in intelligence and asserted that these
differences have been constant over the course of millennia. Rushton (this
issue) discussed neither the Flynn Effect nor any potential trends in
life-history traits, but rather raised the possibility that race differences in
brain size may explain global differences in IQ and development. Templer (this
issue) claimed that we failed to appreciate the big picture of evolution painted
by Lynn and Rushton. In light of space limitations, we discuss here neither the
validity of Lynn and Vanhanen’s national IQ estimates (see Wicherts, Dolan,
& van der Maas, in press) nor several additional lines of evidence discussed
by the commentators.
It is noteworthy that the commentators have expressed hardly any arguments
against our main assertion that national IQs cannot be used to test evolutionary
theories without a consideration of relevant confounds. The use of national IQs
in the study of evolution assumes that the level of g of peoples are constant
over time, which they do not appear to be... ...((snip))
[b]2. IQ avant la lettre [/b]
We doubt strongly whether western IQ tests have the same substantive meaning
across the globe. Templer claimed that the construct validity of national IQs is
supported by their correlation with means in national scholastic achievement
surveys. However, such ecological correlations do not warrant conclusions
concerning the measurement invariance of IQ tests across national groups. For
instance, national IQs also correlate about |.85| with fertility rate, but this
does not mean that IQs can be taken to measure the number of offspring of
individuals. It is completely unclear whether national IQs reflect differences
between contemporary populations in terms of the average level of g (Wicherts et
al., in press). Because the Flynn Effect does not appear to be explainable in
terms of g (Rushton, 2000; Wicherts et al., 2004), it is even doubtful whether
the current-day IQ levels of populations reflect the average level of g of these
populations a couple of decades ago.
Because the content of IQ tests is typically from the twentieth century, it
is even more doubtful that national IQs can be projected back to our ancestors
who lived 5000 years ago. Lynn and Vanhanen’s (2006) data may suggest that the
Dutch currently outperform the Egyptians by 19 IQ points (100 versus 81) and the
Iraqi by 16 points, but this cannot be taken as evidence for the claim that the
peoples who populated areas close to the Netherlands in 3000 B.C. were more
intelligent than the peoples who constructed the Pyramids of Cheops or who
developed the first civilizations in Mesopotamia. On the contrary: suppose that
the average IQ ‘‘avant la lettre” of ancient populations can be gauged by
the ability to build buildings that last for millennia, to develop scripture,
arithmetic, astronomy, and art, and to successfully administrate an empire. In
terms of these indicators of IQ ‘‘avant la lettre” of peoples, the average
intelligence of peoples living in areas corresponding to present European
countries in 3000 B.C., will turn out to be relatively low (i.e., these peoples
did not evidence many of these abilities), while the average intelligence of
Egyptian and Mesopotamian peoples will turn out high.
This appears to contradict the evolutionary theories by Lynn, Rushton, and
Kanazawa, because Egypt and Mesopotamia are relatively warm and quite close to
the ancestral environment. Lynn (this issue) asserts that present Africans have
hardly satisfied Baker’s (1974) criteria for a civilization, but this applies
equally to inhabitants of present day Europe around 3000 B.C. More importantly,
the ancestors of the peoples who laid much of the groundwork for western
civilization now have average IQs around 82 (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2006).
Contemporary Africans average IQs around the same level (Wicherts et al., in
press), so the supposed low level of IQ of Africans should not be cause for
concern that they lack the necessary intelligence to do so. ...((snip))
[b]3. Brain size [/b] Rushton (this issue) claims that global differences in IQ and development
can be explained in terms of (race) differences in brain size. Rushton (2000)
has gone to great lengths to show that race groups differ on average in terms of
brain size, with Whites averaging 1347 cm3 and Blacks averaging 1267 cm3. The
mean difference may appear impressive, but it is virtually meaningless without
knowledge of the typical spread of brain size within populations, which is
around SD = 130 cm3. So the Black-White difference in brain size is
approximately 80/130 .6 SD units. Rushton’s figures are based not on
contemporary MRI measurements of white and gray matter volume, but rather on
outdated external or postmortem cranial measurements. Given the correlation
between cranial capacity as measured externally and intelligence of around .20 (Rushton
& Ankney, 2009), the Black-White gap in brain size cannot explain much of
the IQ gap. Even if cranial capacity had a causal effect on g, then the
Black-White gap in brain size cannot explain more than: .6*.2*15 = 1.8 IQ
points. If we were to believe that the IQ gap between Africans and European
Whites is 33 IQ points (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2006), then the brain size gap
could explain a staggering 1.8/33 = 5% of the IQ gap. Thus, even under these
terms, 95% of the IQ gap is left unexplained by brain size.
With a correlation of .33 between brain volume and IQ as based on modern
techniques (McDaniel, 2005), the gap in brain size can explain only 2.98 IQ
points or 9% of the IQ gap. However, we are not familiar with studies that used
modern methods to measure brain size in both European Whites and Africans, and
we are not familiar with any studies of the heritability of IQ and/or brain size
among Africans. Although race differences in brain size are in line with Rushton’s
hypothesis, his hypothesis fails to impress us. The gap in brain size is much
too small to explain the IQ gap, there is no indication of whether the (genetic)
relation between brain size and IQ holds for African Americans or Africans, the
causal relation itself is a matter of opinion and further research, and there is
no reason to suppose that the race gap is environmentally insensitive, as
Rushton and Ankney (2009) acknowledge. Another problem with the brain size
hypothesis lies with the fact that sex differences in brain size are larger than
race differences, yet studies involving representative samples, broad cognitive
test batteries, and sound statistical methods consistently fail to show a clear
sex difference in g (Dolan et al., 2006; Keith, Reynolds, Patel, & Ridley,
2008; Van der Sluis et al., 2006). ...((snip))
[b]4. The Big picture [/b] Templer (this issue) asserts that we fail to see the ‘‘big picture [. .
.] that Blacks average a lower IQ and all that goes with it and are prone to
HIV/AIDS”. According to Templer, this may be due to higher levels of
testosterone among Blacks. Testosterone is hypothesized to affect many r-K
characteristics and to underlie sex differences in longevity. This is an
interesting hypothesis, but it does not appear to fit empirical data. For
instance, on average males have higher levels of testosterone than females, yet
they have larger brain sizes (Rushton & Ankney, 2009) and they do not live
longer than females. Also, we are not familiar with empirical support of a link
between 2D:4D ratio and total IQ.
Templer stresses the conceptual similarities between theories by Lynn,
Rushton, and Kanazawa. This is an interesting assertion because Kanazawa and
Rushton have opposing views on why Africans have evolved lower intelligence.
Kanazawa (2004) explains the low intelligence of Africans by claiming that the
ancestral environment of subtropical savannahs was very stable and predictable
and hence required little intelligence to survive in. Rushton (2000), however,
reasoned that ‘‘predictable environments are an ecological precondition for
K-selection [and that] subtropical savannahs [. . .] are generally less
predictable” (p. 231). Kanazawa’s (2008) study is flawed because it claimed
support for two opposing accounts. Templer claims that the ‘‘potential of
national IQs as explanatory variables” is demonstrated by correlations of
national IQ with variables like GDP, adult literacy, and life expectancy. A
glance at the correlation matrix in our primary paper shows that other variables
associated with development have the same explanatory power as national IQ.
For instance, the correlations reported by Templer (2008) are easily
replicated by replacing national IQ with Proteins g/day/capita, child mortality
rate, or secondary school attendance. This means that these variables have just
as much explanatory power as does national IQ. Templer claims that we fail to
see the forest for the trees, but he appears to be staring only at global
differences in IQ and development from the perspective of the evolutionary
accounts to which he subscribes. Evolutionary accounts of race differences in
intelligence are easy to formulate. The plausibility of such accounts depends on
the empirical support for specific predictions, and the exclusion of competing
accounts. The ecological correlations involving national IQ are open to many
interpretations. Templer’s big picture strikes us as a one-sided view on the
nature of global differences in IQ, health, and development. ...((snip))
[b]5. Conclusion [/b] Templer and Rushton hardly discussed the relevance of temporal changes in
the variables of interest, although Templer did express his doubt that the Flynn
Effect is possible in Africa. Lynn claims that the Flynn Effect matters little
because of global differences in brain size and the development of civilization.
Rushton claims that differences in brain size underlie global differences in
development and IQ. We are not impressed by their arguments.
------------------------------------------- Related pages:
http://knol.google.com/k/mainstream-academic-research/bogus-biodiversity-theories-of-kanazawa/3q8x30897t2cs/45
Nile Valley studies http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=egyto&thread=15&page=1
Egypt- a tropical civilization http://knol.google.com/k/mainstream-academic-research/tropical-peoples-developed-one-of-the/3q8x30897t2cs/30#
Mesopotamia- an arid tropic civilization http://knol.google.com/k/mainstream-academic-research/mesopotamia-a-tropical-arid-tropics/3q8x30897t2cs/31#
http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA190&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=1#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
--------------------------------
African images: racism
and the end of anthropology. By Peter Rigby
Re-analyses of J.P. Rushton's crime data. Zack Z. Cernovsky, Larry C. Litman;
Canadian Journal of Criminology, Vol. 35, 1993, pp 31-36
EXCERPT:
quote:
"Introduction
In a recent article in this Journal, Rushton (1990) presented his statistical
analyses to document his view that crime frequencies follow his model of racial
differences in behaviour. Rushton reports that he collected his data see Table
1) from international criminal police archives, calculated a one-way analysis of
variance (ANOVA), and concluded that "the races differ significantly in
crime production".
Rushton's (1990) choice of method, the ANOVA, alone, does not offer information
about the magnitude of the racial differences. The term "significance"
is used differently by statisticians than by laymen. The statistical usage can
include minute and practically irrelevant trends as long as the chosen
criterion, such as p < .05, is met. Information about the size of the effect
is needed to decide whether a finding is practically relevant, likely to be
replicated, and whether it provides solid support for a theory of racial
differences. In fact, Rushton's Table 2 (see Table 1 in this paper) shows that
most (21 of 24) of his standard deviations exceed the size of the mean rates.
This indicates that crime rates within each racial group are extremely unstable:
the rates vary excessively from country to country. Thus, even a fleeting visual
inspection of Rushton's tabular data by a statistician suggests that race might
not be a good predictor of crime rates. The present paper presents a statistical
evaluation of the size of the racial differences in crime rates by re-analyzing
Rushton's data (those shown here in Table 1). [TABULAR DATA 1 OMITTED] Method,
results, and interpretation. Rushton's data were used to calculate t-tests
between the racial groups (three separate tests for each of the four variables
on the 1984 data and a similar set of tests for the 1986 data). The t-values
were subsequently converted into point biserial coefficients (using a conversion
formula from Welkowitz, Ewen, and Cohen 1982), i.e., a special type of the
Pearson Correlation Coefficient (r). The results are summarized in Table 2.
One-third of the coefficients fail to reach a common criterion of significance
(p [is less than or equal to] .05, 1-tailed). The majority (70.8%) of the
coefficients are of low size or nonsignificant. Two of these have negative
signs. Only seven coefficients could be described as of moderate size (r >
.30). No high correlations were obtained. This indicates an absence of strong
relationships in the direction predicted by Rushton.
When the coefficients are squared to obtain estimates of variance shared by race
and crime, the proportions (see Table 3) are remarkably low and fail to sustain
Rushton's (1988; 1990) theory.
Since homicide is the most serious crime, Rushton's conclusions about racial
difference should be supported by major and consistent trends in homicide data.
The correlations between race and homicide, however, are very small and only one
is significant. Rushton's theory performs very poorly on this criterion,
especially with respect to the Mongoloid/Caucasoid differences.
Using the z-score conversion procedure, the average value was calculated for all
24 coefficients in Table 2: the average was .24 (or .23 when the eight
coefficients from the column of the "total" crime frequency were
excluded). This average value suggests that the overall association between race
and crime rate, in Rushton's data, is weak: only 5.8% of the variance in the two
variables is shared. This is not enough to consider using race as a predictor of
crime incidence in practical forensic settings or to justify genetic
speculations. "
Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean
Author: Michael Levin
Westport, CT.: Praeger, 1997. Pp. X + 415.
Book Review
The Western Journal of Black Studies
by L. Keita
Although the question of race has been an important sociological issue ever
since the development of anthropology as a study of different human groups,
contemporary philosophy has had relatively little to say about the topic.
Interestingly enough though, three of the luminaries of Western philosophy did
write about race as if those human groups that distinguished themselves both
geographically and phenotypically constituted natural kinds in terms of
temperament and intellect.
This amounted to the view held by Hume, Kant, and Hegel that the different
branches of humanity were distinguishable not only phenotypically but also
temperamentally and intellectually. Kant and Hume associated the dark
pigmentation of persons of African origin with cognitive deficiencies, and Hegel
wrote disparagingly of the natural temperament of Africans as explanatory of
their cultures. And even long before Kant's time the Greek philosopher Aristotle
argued about race along essentialist lines. Aristotle inferred in a priori
fashion that the dark pigmentation of the Africans of ancient Egypt and Nubia as
signaled cowardice. (Aristotle, "Physiognomics", 812a).
Discussions on the important issue of race, though ignored by contemporary
philosophers for the most part, have been an integral part of social science
discussion. The main debate centers on whether "race" is some sort of
natural kind or is a mere social construction. If race were just social
construction then essentialist arguments associating phenotypical
characteristics with behavior or cognitive dispositions would have no
ontological grounds to stand on. On the other hand, if races could be
established scientifically, that is, as natural kinds, then possible inferences
about dispositional and behavioral characteristics could be drawn about the
members of the different racial groups. This has been one of the more popular
approaches to the issue of race within the general context of Western
quantitative psychology and physical anthropology.
The interesting point about Michael Levin's Why Race Matters (the title
suggesting a play on the 1993 text Race Matters authored by social theorist
Cornel West) is that it is written by a philosopher and that it seeks to extend
the tenure of the old essentialist argument on race. Levin's thesis is that
empirically observable phenotypical traits that differentiate the so-called
races macroscopically are casually connected with dispositional traits such as
intelligence and temperament. Of course, this thesis is hardly novel given its
long-standing tenure in the research paradigms of orthodox Western quantitative
psychology. Perhaps the best known of these efforts is that of A. Shuey (1996)
who
reported that the average measured IQ gap between "blacks" and
"whites" in American society is approximately 15 points, or in the
parlance of quantitative psychology, one standard deviation. It was claimed that
the average score of persons of European extraction is set at 100 points, while
those of African ancestry approximated 85 points. While some geneticists,
biologists, and psychometricians explain this average difference as due
primarily or exclusively to environmental causes, nativists such as Levin offer
a mainly biological explanation.
But merely to state this supposed fact would not satisfy epistemologically.
Further explanations are needed and this is what Levin suggests:
"speculation has long focused on the different pressures exerted by African
and Eurasian climates. Survival in the colder climates of Europe and Northern
Asia requires technologies unnecessary in Africa: clothing has to be fabricated,
fires sustained, food hunted and stored....
Planning is less adaptive in warmer climates where food is easier to get and
spoils when stored" (p. 136). Consider too: "Like the cheetah's supple
spine and the horse's hoof, the levels of intelligence of the different races
were responses to environmental pressures--as were the values embraced by
different groups" (p. 177).
Levin's reasoning here is causally essentialist and cannot be supported by the
facts. First of all the climatic argument is patently fallacious for the
following reasons. Neanderthal man, the European representative of Homo erectus,
though resident in Europe and other colder regions for at least 300,000 years
(the archaeological claim is made that the Neanderthals became extinct
approximately 40,000 years ago), was not as cognitively evolved as those members
of Homo sapiens, who migrated from Africa to Europe and Central Asia 30-40,000
years ago.
But these African members of Homo sapiens were themselves evolutionary
descendants of African varieties of Homo erectus. If the colder climates of
Europe and northern Asia were more evolutionarily challenging than the warmer
climates of Africa then one would have expected Homo sapiens to emerge in those
environments and not in the tropical ecologies of Africa. Furthermore, if the
northern ecologies and climates of the world were more challenging and
evolutionarily selective then one would have expected that the European and
north Asian descendants of resident Homo erectus (Neanderthal and others) would
have been the colonizing migrants into Africa and other tropical regions of the
globe. But the reverse has occurred.
Again, the argument that the colder climates of Europe and northern Asia
produced more cognitively evolved branches of humanity than those derivative
from the wanner climates cannot be sustained given that the world's first
civilizations (on the assumption of the Eurocentric definition of civilization)
emerged in tropical and sub-tropical regions. And we have no proof that the
originators of such civilizations migrated from the colder climates of the
Eurasian landmass into tropical and subtropical regions. The African
civilizations of ancient Nubia and ancient Egypt developed in tropical and
subtropical regions, so too the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Harappan (the
Indian sub-continent).
The only possible exception to this trend is the civilization of China. But even
here the site of origin of this civilization is not fully in the temperate zone.
Levin also errs in his explanatory thesis in that there are regions of Africa
where Africans have lived for several thousand years where the climatic
conditions are very clearly subtropical and even temperate at certain times of
the year. The climates of southern Africa extend beyond the tropic of Capricorn
and approximate the climates of European and west Asian territories such as
Greece, Turkey, and Iran. Thus if cold climatic conditions constitute the
necessary conditions for environmental challenge - the ultimate leitmotiv of
human evolutionary change - then one would have to argue that some members of
the African branch of humanity were also subjected to climatic conditions
similar to those of Europe and temperate-zone Asia. Levin expresses an ignorance
of geography when he fails to recognize that there are parts of Africa within
the tropical zone where the temperatures are quite temperate on account of
altitude. One refers, for example, to the highlands of Kenya, Ethiopia and the
plateau regions of West Africa.
Putting aside for the moment questions about the nature of intelligence and
whether IQ tests do measure intelligence, I want to demonstrate now that Levin's
claim that there is a strict causal connection between IQ and race - as defined
by Levin--is false. Levin puts it as follows: "When `race' is
operationalized geographically, generalizations about races acquire clear
empirical meaning.... To say the mean intelligence of whites exceeds that of
blacks is to say that the mean intelligence of people of European descent
exceeds that of people of African descent. Every such generalization may be
false, but they are uniformly meaningful" (pg. 21). For Levin
"intelligence" is determined by
quantitative scores on IQ tests regardless of the environmental or genetic
components of such scores. This is curious given that most of the discussion on
IQ testing is concerned with examining the basis for interracial or interethnic
differences in reported scores. Levin writes: "should the black and white
intelligence polygene turn out to be identical, and there is a mean difference
in intelligence due entirely to environmental factors, all that would follow is
that blacks would be on average as intelligent as whites if both were raised
identically.... It would not follow that blacks are as intelligent" (pg.
38). In fact this approach to the question of intelligence as a phenotypical
trait is tantamount to equating "intelligence" with
"education" or "training." Yet most of Levin's text is
concerned to argue in favor of "intelligence" not only as phenotype
but as phenotype linked causally to genotype. There is a world of
difference between these two positions.
But I return to my original counter claim against Levin: race and intelligence
are not causally connected. I refer to international comparisons of IQ scores as
reported by psychometric testing. According to arch-nativist Richard Lynn (1978)
the IQ scores of southern Europeans is a full standard deviation lower than that
of the average score of northern Europeans. According to Lynn the reported
average IQ of Spaniards in Spain is 87. We are also informed that in Yugoslavia
and Greece respectably some tested school children scored 89 in both instances.
Lynn also reports that Italian immigrants to the United States scored 84 while
their Swedish counterparts scored 102. To compound the north-south IQ gap in
Europe we are informed again that Portuguese immigrants to the
United States scored 83, a score lower than that registered by African Americans
in general. Of similar interest too is the fact that when children of northern
and southern European immigrants were tested with non-language tests along with
other children of European ancestry the IQ gap remained the same. Children of
northern European descent scored 97, those of southern European descent
scored 85, while those of less recent European ancestry scored 98.
Thus it would seem that the IQ gap is not based on race after all, but on
something more akin to exposure to levels of modern technology and education.
According to convention all Europeans are classified as belonging to the
so-called Caucasoid race, yet there are significant differences between the
scores obtained from northern Europe and those from southern Europe. The main
difference observable between northern and southern Europe is not race but
rather level of industrialization and modernization in the technical sense.
Lynn's article not only deals with the IQ scores of Europeans but also with
those of Asians and Africans. For example, Lynn states that "In India,
there is a considerable literature on intelligence testing.... All the mean IQs
lay in the range from 81 to 94, the overall mean being about 86" (p. 269).
Yet "a small sample of 25 postgraduate students at the University of
Calcutta, who took Raven's Test produced an incredibly low mean IQ of 75"
(pg. 269). Curiously enough the inhabitants of India are considered "caucasoid."
For persons of African origin Lynn reports that the scores range from 75 (Ghana,
Jamaica) to 88 (Uganda, Tanzania.) One might want to compare such scores with
those of West Asians: Iraq (80) and Iran (low 80's) (Lynn, p. 269).
The scores form East Asia are to be somewhat qualified given that no scores are
reported from mainland China where the vast majority of East Asians live. As
Lynn put it: "Little is known about the intelligence levels of Mongoloids
in their homelands. The majority of studies have been made on Chinese and
Japanese immigrants to the United States" (pg. 272). Lynn reports a score
of 99 for
Chinese ethnics from Hawaii and scores of 107 and 114 for Chinese and Japanese
subjects in Vancouver respectively. But there is the current belief among some
psychometricians (Murray, Rushton, et al.) that East Asians are naturally more
intelligent that Africans and Caucasoids. But I have pointed out that the vast
majority of East Asians have not been subjected to IQ tests. Furthermore, the
Eskimos who are considered members of the same racial complex as east
Asians score between the ranges of 70 and 85. This is hardly proof of Mongoloid
intellectual superiority.
There are two other well-discussed aspects of the IQ controversy that Levin
discusses with little epistemological care. These two topics are the "Flynn
effect" and "identical twin testing." The Flynn effect (1987) is
based on the research conducted by James Flynn which states that there have been
great intergenerational increases in IQ reported over the recent years. For
example, Flynn noted that between 1949 and 1974 the IQ scores of French persons
increased 21 points. Similar kinds of increases were noted for Japan, Germany,
and Austria. In fact, Flynn remarked on the same phenomenon for fourteen
nations. Clearly, genetic factors could not be at work here. We can attribute
the increases in IQ purely to environmental changes (schooling and other kinds
of cognitive exposures).
Levin does recognize the Flynn effect (pg. 128) but dismisses an environmental
explanation for the "black-white IQ gap" with the unproven claim that
since "black" and "white" environments have been converging
the racial IQ gap may well be genetic. But Levin has not proven that the
sociological environments of blacks and whites have been converging. Levin even
argues that if the IQ gap does not change over time for both blacks and whites
this difference means "that the race gap is due to genes" (p. 129). It
is difficult to follow Levin's reasoning here. What is at stake here in the
discussion is the impact of the environment in determining IQ scores. The
explanation offered for intergenerational differences in IQ scores is
necessarily environmental, that is, over time environments change for the same
racial group. But then Levin illogically rejects this possible explanation for
the black-white IQ gap by claiming that there are no environmental differences
between the sociologies of blacks and
whites.
But we know that there are evident environmental and sociological differences
between blacks and whites in the United States and elsewhere. In fact the only
way in which possible cognitive differences between blacks and whites could be
properly evaluated is for sufficiently large samples of black and white
monozygotic (identical) twins to be randomly adopted by black and white
households across all socioeconomic levels. Thus each pair of black and white
twins will be adopted at birth individually by one randomly chosen black family
and one randomly chosen white family. But again, even if such an experiment were
possible, what guarantees do we have that the identical twins have all been
randomly distributed throughout society?
This brings me to the very issue of research done on identical twins reared
apart as a way of determining the effect of the environment on IQ scores. Levin
does refer to the different studies done on monozygotic twins reared apart (p.
97) but does not shed much analytical light on the issue. The most extensive of
these tests (as cited by Levin) are those carried out by Pedersen (1992), Burt
(1966) and Bouchard (1990). The average estimate of [h.sup.2] for these studies
is .80 with the average difference between IQ scores being put at 7 points.
All this is interesting but it does not shed much light on the questions
concerning race and IQ. After all, if monozygotic twins reared apart are reared
in environments that are sociologically similar then the significance of
reported IQ differences loses explanatory importance. What is significant though
about monozygotic twin studies are the reported individual ranges between tested
twins. I argue that if there are a significant numbers of monozygotic twin IQ
scores that demonstrate tested gaps of approximately 15 points -- the
approximate black-white gap in the United States and some parts of Africa, then
the hereditarian thesis is cast in doubt.
Psychometrician Arthur Jensen (1972) offers some data on this in the paper
"IQs of Identical Twins Reared Apart". Jensen offers details on 4 twin
studies. One of the studies discussed is that of Burt's (1966), but this
research has been mired in controversy so I shall not use it in my analysis. Of
the
sixty-nine (69) pairs of twins tested by Shields (38), Newman et al. (19) and
Juel-Nielsen (12), ten (10) pairs of the sixty-nine (69) had gap differences of
at least 15 points. This number amounts to approximately 14 percent of the
total. This is significant. If one restricts the analysis to Shields and Newman
the percentage increases to 18 percent approximately. We note that the Juel-Nielson
study was carried out in Denmark where social equality is an ideal aimed at.
This explains why in this study the largest IQ gap registered is 12 points.
Levin's thesis, though mainly about the issue of intelligence and race is not
exclusively so. He extends his racial thesis to the question of values and human
behavior. Levin puts it thus: "The races simply differ in abilities,
behavior, and standards of evaluation" (p. 163). Levin's sociobiological
approach to human decision making is once again evident when he writes:
"The separate
evolution of blacks and whites, which appears to have produced cognitive and
temperamental differences, makes it possible, indeed likely, that behaviors and
norms pathological for whites are not pathological for blacks, and that
identical behaviors and norms have different functional significance for the two
races" (p. 186).
In the section on values Levin seeks to expound on this thesis with references
to interracial differences in criminality and cultural attitudes. The goal here
is to argue once again for an essentialist theory of race not only in terms of
cognitive abilities but also in terms of values. But again Levin, though
avowedly empiricist in orientation, fails to be exhaustive in his analysis.
Obvious proof of my claim here is that there are societies of persons of African
origin where crime and acts of violence are extremely rare. The crime rate is
extremely low in rural communities of persons of African ancestry in Africa and
the Americas. It is the sociological argument that explains why the descendants
of peaceful rural African Americans are often involved with the law in the
urban, high unemployment areas of North America.
In the discussion on values Levin once again appeals to the environment to
explain "the strong individual dominance drive" among Africans (p.
140) and a supposedly cooperative and democratic European temperament. Levin
writes, "Recall the hypothesis that conditions in northern Eurasia strongly
favored cooperation" (p. 168). In fact Levin's analysis is totally
erroneous: it is African society that has been criticized, as being incompatible
with the individualism required of market economies. It is in Africa and other
areas of the African world rather than in Europe that the idea of the extended
family, with its concomitant principles of cooperation and altruistic
obligation, is held to be widespread. But I do not make an essentialist argument
here. Human social relations are determined maximally by the principle of
sociological contingency: individualism and anomie are rampant in large urban
areas while cooperation and altruism are more common in the rural areas of
whatever continent. So again, Levin's thesis fails for lack of persuasiveness in
terms of empirical evidence and analysis. In this regard Levin's speculations on
the supposed differences in free will capacity between "blacks" and
"whites" cannot be supported either scientifically or theoretically.
Of interest too are Levin's attempts to justify his arguments about the
cognitive abilities of individuals of African ancestry by claiming that there is
no evidence of creative, intellectual production from such persons in history.
Levin writes that "the absence from Africa of advanced material culture is
more
than an accident is confirmed by the failure of post-colonial Africa to sustain
the technology left by whites" (p. 120). Levin is wrong in his claims about
"the absence of material culture in Africa" and the fact that there
are problems with technology transfers in Africa cannot be attributed to genetic
causes. There are places in Europe where there are serious problems with
technology transfers and maintenance as in countries such as Greece, Albania,
and Bulgaria. And there are countries in the African world where basic
technologies such as electricity, telecommunications, roads and so on are
efficiently maintained. Ready examples are Kenya, Senegal, Barbados and
Botswana.
The problems of technology facing the African world have nothing to do with
genetics but with the complex of relations between the industrialized nations
and their ex-colonies within the context of the capitalist world order. Levin's
ignorance of the history of civilizations is again evident when he writes
"no important discovery, invention or world leader emerged from Africa. The
art, music, architecture, literature, and political history of Eurasia owe
virtually nothing to Africans" (p. 194). In response to those who would
claim that the architectural, cultural, and technological influences of ancient
Egypt and Nubia, as African civilizations, on the Eurasian world easily refute
the above assertion, Levin states without any elaboration and with reference
only to some obscure pseudo-anthropologist (Baker, 1974) that "the
Egyptians were not black" (p. 194).
But the originators of the world's first qualitatively path-breaking and
influential technological civilizations were the ancient Nubians and Egyptians,
both of African racial origin. Levin also fails to recognize that the Moorish
architecture of southern Spain is of African origin, and that the originating
and creative impulses for contemporary Euro-American music and art are also of
African origin.
But I want to elaborate further on Levin's lack of knowledge of Africa's
anthropological and historical past with respect to the ancient Egyptians and
Nubians. Levin's illogical reasoning on this issue goes something like this:
Persons of African origin are incapable of producing any form of genuine
civilization. The ancient Egyptians produced forms of genuine civilization.
Ergo, the ancient Egyptians were not persons of African origin. The problem with
this unsound argument is that Levin's first premise is empirically false.
The Greek historian Herodotus specifically refers to the ancient Egyptians as
"black-skinned and woolly haired" both sufficient phenotypical
characteristics for membership in the African race. Other Greek writers such as
Aristotle also make reference to the physical characteristics of the ancient
Egyptians and Nubians, contrary to Levin's assertions. Levin writes: "Africanists
cite scattered reference to blacks in Herodotus to support a Nubian origin of
Greek religion, but ignore Aristotle's silence about Africa. Why should
Aristotle have lied, but not Herodotus?" (p. 195). Despite the strangeness
of this proposition, Aristotle did not lie for we find in his "Physiognomics"
the following:
"Too black a hue marks the coward as witness Egyptians and Ethiopians and
so does also too white a complexion as you may see from women" (Vol. VI,
812a). In Book XIV of Problems Aristotle makes reference to the hair form of
Egyptians and Ethiopians: "Why are the Ethiopians and Egyptians
bandy-legged? Is it because the bodies of living creatures become distorted by
heat, like logs of wood
when they become dry? The condition of their hair supports this theory; for it
is curlier than that of other nations, and curliness is as it were crookedness
of the hair." (Book XIV, p. 317)
What Levin fails to recognize is that just as there are no reasons why eyesight
and hearing capacities might differ on average between individuals of the
different geographical racial groups, so too with the human cognitive faculties.
Once the biological threshold of Homo sapiens was reached in Africa there was no
further need for evolutionary pressures to yield groups of individuals with
significantly differing cognitive capacities wherever they migrated on earth.
The cognitive capacities of Homo sapiens Africanus were adequate enough to
ensure survival not only in tropical Africa but also in temperate Eurasia and
the frigid Arctic. I repeat the proof of this thesis that I established above:
Homo sapiens Africanus was in no way cognitively disadvantaged with respect to
the Neanderthal human types that had been resident in the cold climates of
Eurasia for at least 300,000 years -- a time span much longer than the entire
period for which Homo sapiens has existed.
In sum, Levin's text should be understood as not much more than a repetition of
the traditional arguments on the issue of "race differences" in
intellect, temperament and physiological capacities. I do not deny that the
world's environments have selected for gross human physiological traits such as
pigmentation, hair form, epicanthic eye folds and so on, but once Homo sapiens
Africanus emerged with the capacities for language (all languages necessarily
derive from the first African languages), and conceptual thought (necessary for
the first art works and Neolithic technology) the selecting influences of the
world's environments were rendered redundant with respect to human cognitive
capacities.
What this means is that Levin's argument concerning racial differences with
respect to intelligence, temperament and value choice cannot be supported. His
quasi-inductivist thesis that the present average IQ scores of some groups of
persons of African descent is explained by a supposed dearth of African
creativity over time, I have shown to be fallacious. Levin's text, in essence,
is just another instance of that persistent ideological strain in Western
thought which claims that persons of African origin are deficient in the
important intellectual characteristics that define the human species.
The reason for the persistence of this specific ideology is that it is required
to maintain the idea of the Eurocentric racial caste system established at the
dawn of the modern era to justify the economic division of labor required by the
captivity of Africans in the Americas, the captivity and colonization
of Native Americans in the Americas, and the colonization of Africans in Africa.
The forced labor of Africans in the Americas and Africa had to be justified by
an ideology that claimed that persons of African origin were less cognitively
capable than Europeans. If it were admitted that IQ scores reflect only
sociological differences between groups then the social stability of the racial
caste system invented by modern Eurocentric discourse would be seriously
undermined from an intellectual standpoint. Something similar was at work in the
European invention of the concept of the naturalness of hierarchies of ancestry
required for the stability of Europe's feudal orders: aristocrat and serf were
distinguishable ancestrally purely on the spurious concept of "blood."
The politico-economic situation of the post-Civil Rights era in the United
States and that of post-colonial Africa are highly unstable in terms of the
division of labor established at the origins of Modern Europe. The economic
"success" of modern Europe springs from the exploitation of African
labor (in the Americas and Africa) and the resources of Africa by the
entrepreneurial administration of European capitalism. The racial ideology that
made the wealth and success of Europe possible is now being challenged. It is
the defense of that racial ideology that explains the popularity and notoriety
of theorists such as Eyesenck, Jensen, Shockley, Murray, Lynn, Murray, and
Levin.
I have argued above that the racial ideology emphasizing the cognitive
limitation of persons of African descent is fallacious. I established the
following:
1) The idea that the colder climates of Eurasia were more challenging than those
of Africa thereby leading to a more cognitively evolved branch of Homo sapiens
is false. Neanderthal man existed in Europe for at least 300,000 years but was
no more cognitively evolved than the incoming Homo sapiens Africanus.
2) IQ test results do not establish cognitive differences based on race since
Southern Europeans, West Asians, South Asians, Eskimos, and others register
scores similar to those of persons of African descent. It is evident that IQ
scores reflect particular sociological environments than otherwise.
As a final note: the apparent seriousness of the text is marred by a frivolous
"hypothetical address by the President of the United States of America to a
Joint session of Congress and the American People" supporting Levin's
theses on racial differences in intelligence and temperament, and three
nonsensical appendices. There is also an inexcusable grammatical error in the
first line of page 147.
References
Aristotle. "Physiognomics" in Minor Works, trans. W.S. Hett. London:
Heinemann, 1963. It should be noted that the editor of Aristotle's Minor Works
and Problems expresses doubt whether these works were authored by Aristotle
himself. In any case they do reflect in this instance empirical observative the
Greeks made of the African phenotype of the Egyptians and Nubians.
Problems, trans. W.S. Hett. London: Heinemann, 1970. Flynn, J. 1987.
"Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure."
Psychological Bulletin 101: 171-191.
Jensen, A. 1970. "IQs of Identical Twins Reared Apart." Behavior
Genetics 1. 133-148.
Lynn, R. 1978. "Ethnic and Racial Differences in Intelligence:
International Comparisons." In Human Variation: The Biopsychology of Age,
Race, and Sex, eds. R. Travis Osborne, Clyde Noble, and Nathaniel Weyl. Eds.:
261-286
Shuey, A. 1966. The Testing of Negro Intelligence, 2nd ed. New York: Social
Science Press.
Mises Daily: Monday, August 20, 2007
by Gene Callahan
[IQ and the Wealth of Nations, by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen. Praeger, 2002,
298 pages.]
-----------------------------------------
IQ and the Wealth of Nations attempts to make a serious, scholarly case for the
thesis that the great variation presently observed in the per capita wealth of
the nations of the world can be explained largely as the effect of the
differences in inherited mental capacity existing between prosperous and
impoverished countries.
Further, the authors suggest that this "intelligence gap" can only be
closed quite slowly, if at all, so that efforts to aid the poor of the Third
World must accept "that the gap between rich and poor nations will
inevitably persist for the indefinite future" (p. 196). Therefore, they
conclude, "the world needs a new international moral code based on the
recognition of significant national differences in human mental abilities… The
populations of the rich countries may have to accept that they have an ethical
obligation to provide financial assistance to the people of the poor countries
for the indefinite future…" (p. 196).
If the authors central contention is correct and if they have drawn the right
policy conclusions from their theory, then the consequences are indeed profound:
the hoary and long moribund notion of "the white man's burden" gains a
new lease on life (although, per this work, it will have to be re-christened as
"the white and East Asian man's burden"), and the inhabitants of the
Third World are destined for lives of perpetual dependency, fated never to reach
the age of majority or real independence. Since the implications of this book
are so profound, it seems appropriate to scrutinize its contents carefully, to
see if the arguments it presents hold up under critical examination. And so we
shall proceed.
Lynn and Vanhanen launch their case by reviewing several rival suggestions about
the chief causative agent determining the widely differing levels of prosperity
evidenced by the nations of the world. While they grant some alternatives a
degree of plausibility, such as the economic argument for free markets, allowing
that they may describe contributing factors working alongside their own horse in
the race, of others they are entirely dismissive. For instance, in considering
Jared Diamond's thesis that geographical contingencies have been of primary
importance in determining the course of economic history, they write,
"[His] theory has a number of obvious weaknesses. First, in sub-Saharan
Africa there are wild plants that could have been domesticated, such as sorghum,
millet, yams, and rice, and wild animals that could have been domesticated, such
as guinea fowl, zebras, giraffes, buffalo, and wildebeests. The reason these
animals were not domesticated is because people did not put effort into
domesticating them" (pp. 3-4). The authors apparently picture precolonial
Africans as sitting around on the stoops of their housing projects, drinking
their forty-ounce cans of malt liquor, and waiting for the white man to finally
arrive with their welfare checks.
But Lynn and Vanhanen do not seem to have actually read the author they are
"critiquing," for Diamond has pre-answered their complaint at some
length. I will only cite a few excerpts of his answer, but those should be
sufficient to demonstrate our authors' sloppy scholarship. On the question of
the African buffalo, which is not only a different species from the
(successfully domesticated) Asian water buffalo but is in an entirely different
genus, Diamond writes: "But the African buffalo is considered the most
dangerous and unpredictable large mammal of Africa. Anyone insane enough to try
to domesticate it either died in the effort or was forced to kill the buffalo
before it got too big and nasty" (1999, p. 171). And what about the zebra?
"Africa's four species of zebras are even worse…. Zebras have the
unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even
more American zookeepers each year then do tigers! Zebras are also virtually
impossible to lasso with a rope…" (1999, pp. 171-172). Wildebeests are
similarly unsuitable for domestication.
And what of the other five species that our authors' chastise Africans for not
domesticating? As extensively documented in Diamond's book, every single one of
them — sorghum, millet, yams, rice, and guinea fowl — were domesticated by
Africans, along with cowpeas, peanuts, cotton, watermelons, and bottle gourds!
Given that no new African species have been successfully domesticated since the
mass arrival of Europeans on the continent, it is likely that Africans
domesticated every suitable species at hand! The authors' claim that they
"did not put effort into [it]" appears to be nothing more than
anti-black propaganda. The authors also note the "east-west axis of
approximately 4000 miles from Senegal and Guinea to Ethiopia and Somalia"
(p. 4), as if Diamond had not addressed that challenge to his theories at all,
when, in fact, he takes it quite seriously.
"The authors apparently picture precolonial Africans as sitting around on
the stoops of their housing projects, drinking their 40-ounce cans of malt
liquor, and waiting for the white man to finally arrive with their welfare
checks."
After reviewing alternative explanations for the differing wealth of nations,
Lynn and Vanhanen proceed to expound the superiority of their own thesis. They
offer their evidence for the importance of inherited factors in determining IQ,
but here seem to commit a elementary statistical error. They cite a study
concluding that the IQ correlation between identical twins raised separately is
.75. But then, "assuming that the test has a reliability of .9… the
corrected correlation between the twin pairs is .83" (p. 24). It is true
that a test only 90% reliable could understate a correlation by 10%. But it
could also overstate it by a similar amount. Why conclude that the high end of
the error range represents the true figure, other than the fact that it bolsters
one's preconceptions?
Nevertheless, there is apparently considerable scientific evidence that genetic
factors are a quite significant influence on an individual's measured IQ.
However, the authors erroneously leap from their (perhaps defensible) contention
that about 80% of an individual's IQ is dependent on genes to the non sequitur
of asserting that the same percentage of genetic influence can be assumed for a
nation's mean IQ. They fail to realize that, even if within a culture the bulk
of IQ variation is due to genetic endowments, it might also be true that the
variations between cultures arise predominantly from environmental
circumstances. I offer an analogous, but perhaps less loaded, situation, which I
hope is sufficient to demonstrate this point. Imagine two countries, Freedonia
and Sylvania, in each of which it is found that the range of skiing ability
existing within that nation's population is largely explained by inherited
traits. Even so, if it is the case that Freedonians live in snowy mountains,
while the Sylvanians inhabit a steamy jungle, the best explanation for the
existence of a large gap in skill between the mean Freedonian skier and the mean
Sylvanian skier is likely to be environmental.
Lynn and Vanhanen are also guilty of positing "heredity" and "the
environment" as completely independent variables. Although at times it may
be convenient to isolate the influence of these two abstractions, the reality is
that they are inseparable sides of a single coin: changing environmental
conditions deeply impact genetic developments, just as organisms with novel
adaptations alter their own surroundings.
If we examine the prospects of a typical Western European woman around 800 AD,
it should be apparent that securing a mate with a high IQ conferred minimal
benefits: she, her husband, and their progeny were all fated to be peasant
farmers, living lives in which a strong back was likely to be more useful than a
nimble mind. But, as urban life in Western Europe revived, trade and commercial
acumen grew in importance, and intellectual pursuits gained in esteem, it became
increasingly advantageous to choose an intelligent spouse. Therefore, the
relatively high average IQ found in that region today may be more the result
than the cause of the growing complexity and material well-being characterizing
recent, Western European social life.
And, if the interplay of circumstances and intelligence is thus conceived, the
fact that the leading edge of human civilization has thrust forward now in one
area among one people, now in another region embodied by some other nation, is
far less mysterious than it should appear to Lynn and Vanhanen. How, using their
theory, can they explain that three of the four "cradles" of
civilization appear as low-IQ locales in their data, and, therefore, as
improbable torchbearers in mankind's advance?
"Lynn and Vanhanen are also guilty of positing 'heredity' and 'the
environment' as completely independent variables."
The authors' hypothesis that it was the challenges to human survival presented
by cold, northern winters that resulted in higher IQs in Europe and East Asia is
also inconsistent with the inconvenient locations of the first civilizations.
Every foundational culture — the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the Indians,
the Chinese, the Incas, the Mayans — arose in an area where winters were
either mild or essentially non-existent, whereas, per our authors' proposal, we
should expect that civilization would first appear in Scandanavia, Siberia, and
Canada. But in the recalcitrant world of historical reality, those places were
quite the latecomers to civilized society, and their entrance therein did not
take place until the influence of the tropical and semi-tropical trailblazers
made its way to their laggard climes.
Lynn and Vanhanen attempt to support their contention that western IQ tests are
culturally neutral by correlating several nations' mean IQs with studies of the
same populations' mean reaction times. The time it takes a test subject to
respond to a light flashing, they argue, surely is not culturally dependent.
However, their own data here seems to weaken, rather than bolster, their case.
While it is true that the rankings of the four sample countries are the same in
both tests, the lowest national IQ they present is 59% of the highest, but the
best mean reaction time is only 10% better than the worst. To me, that suggests
that current IQ tests significantly over-estimate whatever basic variation in
mental acuity exists between the inhabitants of different regions of the planet.
Another item that ought to prompt the thoughtful reader to question the very
large discrepancy in intelligence that the authors assert to exist between
various human sub-populations is the extraordinarily low average IQs assigned to
many African nations. For example, the authors claim that the mean IQ in
Equitorial Guinea is only 59, well shy of the threshold score of 70 below which
the testee is classified as mentally retarded. Anyone who has spent significant
time with an American or a European whose IQ is that low (as I did for a year
while assisting in a special education program) can attest that such an
individual is not capable of independently managing his own life, and will
require constant caretaking to get on in the world.
How could an entire society where the average member has so little ability to
cope with reality possibly endure? The most obvious answer is that an IQ of 59
has a quite different significance when measured for a westerner than it does
for a central African. If that were not the case, the plain fact of the
continued existence of the people of sub-Saharan Africa would seem to be
something of a miracle. It is undeniable that the inhabitants of central Africa
managed, somehow, to survive there for millennia while living outside of
supervised care facilities, and have even increased in number after their
collision with European peoples. Their lives may have required cognitive skills
quite distinct from those most useful to Europeans or East Asians, but those
skills are still exhibitions of intelligence, albeit intelligence directed
towards dealing with the unique environmental challenges they faced. If that is
the case, then it is no surprise that they perform poorly on an IQ test devised
with a different set of mental capabilities in mind.
Lynn and Vanhanen are also guilty of a very selective use of historical data in
defending their thesis. They state that "the populations of sub-Saharan
Africa cannot be expected to match the rates of economic growth achieved
elsewhere in the world" (p. 180); however, quite to the contrary, over
recent years GDP growth in Africa has been significantly higher than the world
average. Ireland appears in their tables as one of the lowest IQ countries in
Western Europe, yet it now ranks fourth in the world in per capita GDP, its
recent burst of prosperity lifting it well ahead of the United Kingdom, despite
the much higher IQ level ascribed to the latter nation.
"How, using their theory, can they explain that three of the four
"cradles" of civilization appear as low-IQ locales in their data, and,
therefore, as improbable torchbearers in mankind's advance?
To be fair, the authors' IQ figures are almost a decade old; perhaps the Irish
underwent a recent boom in intellectual ability as well? Isn't it more probable
that the program of economic liberalization the Republic instituted shows that
the benefits of freedom can more than offset any genetic handicap a country may
face?
Our authors further assert that "the impact of national levels of
intelligence is confirmed impressionistically by the contrast between the rapid
development in the second half of the twentieth century of the nations of East
Asia, with their high average IQs, and the poorer economic performance of the
nations of south and southwest Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa"
(p. 23).
They seem unaware of the principle that a change in circumstances cannot be
explained by a causal factor that was constant before and after the change, but
only by a new causal influence. If, as Lynn and Vanhanen contend, IQ is
primarily determined by genetic inheritance, then it follows that East Asians
must have had above-average IQs for quite some time prior to 1950. Therefore,
that factor is a very poor candidate for explaining the dramatic leap in their
prosperity that has occurred since that date.
A much more plausible hypothesis is that the most crucial aspect of recent East
Asian economic history is that most of the region more or less embraced free
markets, while many Africa and Latin America countries were seduced by the
alluring but empty promises of socialist propagandists, and succumbed to the
temptation of the apparently easy path to prosperity offered by foreign aid. (To
be fair to the authors, as I noted above they do acknowledge capitalism as an
important factor in prosperity, and explain the discrepancy between the high IQs
found in Eastern Europe and China and those regions' lagging economic
performance by pointing to their socialist past.)
The authors also appear ignorant of the law of comparative advantage. In light
of what they see as the important and long-lasting "intelligence gap"
separating the rich and the poor nations, they declare that, in the low-IQ
countries, "we should expect many … individuals to be unemployed and an
economic burden" (p. 161). If they understood the principle of comparative
advantage, they would realize that even the least-endowed individuals, so long
as they are able to perform any work at all, will have something of value to
offer their more capable brethren.
$14
"Whether or not some nations truly suffer from an ineradicable intelligence
deficit, their best path to follow is the one of freedom."
Once the universal applicability of this fundamental finding of economics is
recognized, it is clear that, even if the primary claim of IQ and the Wealth of
Nations about the existence of important, genetically grounded differences in
the average intelligence of nations is true, the policy recommendations the
authors draw from that claim are still unfounded. Every non-invalid person,
however paltry was the inheritance bequeathed to him by his genetic forebears,
can engage in mutually beneficial exchanges with his fellow humans. Therefore,
it is clearly preferable, both economically and morally, to encourage and aid
the impoverished to discover what they can contribute to society, rather than
patronizing and demoralizing them by promoting the belief that they have nothing
of worth to offer others, and can only be sustained through the pity of their
betters. Whether or not some nations truly suffer from an ineradicable
intelligence deficit, their best path to follow is the one of freedom.
In short, IQ and the Wealth of Nations is a severely flawed book, falling far
short of presenting the indisputable case for the primary importance of
genetically determined intelligence in deciding the economic performance of
nations that Lynn and Vanhanen claim it offers. It may still be true that
inherited mental capabilities are crucial for explaining the relative difference
in various countries' prosperity. But if this book represents the best evidence
that can be marshaled for that thesis, then we have good reason to doubt it.
Gene Callahan is studying at the London School of Economics. He is the author of
Economics for Real People. Send him mail. See his archive. Comment on the blog.
For Callahan's critique of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, see "The
Diamond Fallacy."
Read more: Does IQ Determine the Wealth of Nations? - Gene Callahan - Mises
Daily http://mises.org/daily/2677#ixzz0oUPt3ZAv
============================================
SOME WEAKNESSES OF JARED DIAMOND'S GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL
Mises Daily: Monday, March 28, 2005
by Gene Callahan
--------------------------------
Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the
Last 13,000 Years is a fascinating and quite readable speculation on the
relationship between geography and history. He has assembled a cornucopia of
interesting facts and plausible insights concerning the course of events over
the last 13,000 years. The result is well worth reading, despite the fact that I
think the ambition of his main thesis reaches well beyond his actual
achievement. That discrepancy is due, I believe, to Diamond's having little
understanding of what history actually is.
The critique of Diamond's conception of history I offer here is based on the
view of the historical enterprise put forward by such philosophers of history as
R.G. Collingwood, Ludwig von Mises, and Michael Oakeshott. They share the view
that history consists in the effort to identify the particular, past
circumstances that make intelligible the subsequent occurrence of other, unique
events. Any attempt to explain the human past by reference to general laws or
broad patterns is, in this view, a distinctly separate way of comprehending the
past from that offered by history. Furthermore, any effort to discover such
"laws of history" faces inherent obstacles that prevent it from
achieving the sort of success that, for instance, physics has in describing
universal laws of matter and energy.
Diamond's work falls within the broad class of theories purporting to detect
universal historical laws, and are therefore subject to the same criticisms that
Collingwood, Mises, and Oakeshott directed against his intellectual
predecessors. His attempt to discern typical patterns in humanity's past is not,
in and of itself, absurd or doomed to failure. The main problem with his
enterprise is that he seemingly is unaware of what sort of investigation creates
the truly historical past. As a result, he proposes substituting his own
"geographical past" for the genuinely historical past.
While Guns, Germs and Steel offers many interesting and plausible suggestions as
to how geography may have influenced human history, his apparent ignorance of
the discipline of history leads him to propose replacing true historical inquiry
with a "scientific" hunt for the "ultimate causes" of
historical events. Diamond's central error, besides being of interest to anyone
concerned with historical methodology, also has broader political implications,
which run as an implicit secondary theme through Guns, Germs and Steel, and are
made more explicit in his recent book, Collapse. I will address the subject of
policy in the conclusion of this article.
Diamond's Thesis
Diamond's central conception is that the course of history, broadly speaking, is
not determined by individual actions, cultural factors, or racial differences,
but by the environmental circumstances into which different groups of people
accidentally wandered. More specifically, those groups that happened to wind up
in places that offered a variety of plants and animals suitable for
domestication, and that made acquiring domesticated species and new technologies
from other societies relatively easy, wound up having a decisive advantage over
groups located in environments lacking those features. As a result, when
geographically advantaged societies encountered groups not so blessed, the
outcome was inevitably that the former conquered or absorbed the disadvantaged
culture. Thus it is geography, claims Diamond, and not greater inventiveness, a
superior culture, or racial differences that is the "ultimate
explanation" of why, for instance, Europeans came to rule the Americas
rather than American Indians ruling Europe.
Some of Diamond's critics have accused him of excusing past atrocities, wars of
aggression, genocides, and other crimes. They believe his thesis implies that
the perpetrators of such acts are off the hook, since "geography made them
do it." In answering that charge, Diamond quite correctly distinguishes
between understanding why some event occurred and justifying the actions of the
people involved. As he notes, "psychologists try to understand the minds of
murderers and rapists ... social historians try to understand genocide, and ...
physicians try to understand the causes of human disease" (pg. 17). Yet
none of them are trying to justify murder, rape, genocide, or disease—indeed,
their attempt to understand them is often motivated by the desire to prevent
them.
Naturally, no conscientious scholar makes a controversial and sweeping claim,
such as attributing to geography the primary causal role in history, without
presenting a fair amount of supporting evidence. In fact, the bulk of Diamond's
book relates historical events meant to demonstrate the soundness and
explanatory scope of his claim.
Diamond's Evidence
In order to make his thesis plausible, Diamond must show that there were
crucially important geographical differences between the homelands of those
societies that wound up as conquerors and those that turned out to be the
vanquished. He has exerted tremendous ingenuity in attempting to do so. I
believe that he has succeeded to some extent, although it is a much more limited
accomplishment than he ambitiously claims to have achieved.
The main historical outcome that Diamond seeks to explain is that the
descendants of the people who 13,000 years ago occupied Eurasia[1]came to rule
over such a large portion of the Earth's inhabitable land. Why wasn't it
American Indians or sub-Saharan Africans who colonized Europe, rather than the
reverse?
Diamond asserts that it was the combination of the Eurasians' superior
technology, and of the various diseases that they carried proving massively
lethal to many of the other people they eventually encountered, that led to that
outcome. (Thus, the "guns, germs and steel" in the title of the book.)
He calls those facts the "proximate causes" of the present Eurasian
dominance of the world. But, quite understandably, he is not satisfied to halt
his inquiry at that point. Why, he goes on to ask, did Eurasians come to possess
better technology than did the inhabitants of the other continents? And why did
Europeans carry germs so deadly to American Indians that many Indian nations
were wiped out in advance of any direct contact with Europeans (through disease
transmission from Indian tribes that did have direct contact with colonists),
rather than the Europeans falling in droves to diseases they contracted from
Indians?
To answer the first of the above questions, Diamond begins by noting that the
pace of technological development in a society depends heavily on its ability to
create a food surplus. That enables the emergence of producers who can
specialize in craft manufacture, because once a society reaches a situation in
which the labor of one person can supply more food than is needed simply to keep
him alive, some members of the group do not need to devote themselves to
procuring sustenance. And a food surplus generally only comes about once a
society learns to deliberately produce its food, rather than relying on finding
it naturally produced and then hunting it down, digging it up, or picking it.
Diamond makes a convincing case that, given enough time living in one place, all
modern humans (meaning homo sapiens) will tend to figure out how to domesticate
any of the indigenous plants and animals that are suitable for agriculture. (For
example, there are nine widely separated places on the globe—the Fertile
Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, the African Sahel, tropical West
Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea—where food production seems likely to have
arisen independently.) However, it happens that Eurasia was blessed with far
more species suitable for domestication than any other continent. Of today's
major food crops, more originated from there than anywhere else. Of the fourteen
mammals over 100 pounds that humans have domesticated, every one of the
"major five" (cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses) is Eurasian in
origin. Nor is it the case that Eurasians were simply more clever than the
residents of other continents at learning how to domesticate the local flora and
fauna—despite the fact that they eventually came to occupy every inhabitable
continent, and despite all of the advances in technology and the increased
understanding of breeding techniques that have taken place in recent centuries,
European colonists have domesticated no new species of major agricultural
importance in any of the lands they came to conquer.
Diamond also contends that the "east-west axis" of Eurasia, as opposed
to the "north-south axis" of the Americas and Africa, made an
important contribution to Eurasian's current global dominance. Because Eurasia
extends mostly from east to west, it provided a vast area of roughly similar
climatic conditions over which a multitude of societies could share agricultural
innovations. The result was an enormous, integrated area of agricultural
practices and common crops stretching roughly 6000 miles, from Ireland to Japan.
In contrast, the crops and the agricultural economy developed in tropical West
Africa could not spread south into the Mediterranean climate of South Africa or
north into the Sahel. The species domesticated in the Andes never reached
central Mexico, nor visa-versa, because they were useless in the intervening
tropics of Central America. Although Mexican corn eventually was cultivated in
eastern North America, it took millennia to spread to there, because of the two
regions' different climates and the arid stretches separating them.
It is not terribly difficult to imagine that an advantage in food production can
result, over time, in a technological advantage as well. But how can Diamond
account for the diseases that Europeans carried to distant shores being so much
deadlier to the locals than the diseases they carried were to Europeans? Quite
cleverly, it turns out.
He launches his explanation by suggesting that epidemic, or "crowd,"
diseases, such as influenza, measles, smallpox, and bubonic plague, cannot
easily sustain themselves among small bands of hunter-gatherers. They will tend
to wipe out the entire population, which, unfortunately from the point of the
microbe causing the disease, wipes the microbe out as well. It is only among
large populations of humans, in close contact with other populous groups nearby,
that epidemic diseases have a chance to persist over long time-spans, both
because the likelihood of a few individuals having natural immunity to the
disease is greater, and because the microbe can shift back-and-forth between
neighboring populations, surviving dormant in a group that has recently built up
immunity to it until it can jump to another, more susceptible neighboring
population.
But where do such microbes come from? They can't conjure themselves into
existence out of thin air once a sufficiently dense human population emerges.
No, Diamond argues, they come from the only place they plausibly could—they
are mutations of microbes that evolved to survive amidst dense populations of
other mammal species, specifically, among the herd animals, a number of which
humans domesticated and came to live with in close quarters. Therefore,
agriculture provided the necessary conditions for the survival of epidemic
diseases among humans, and animal domestication, especially of herd mammals,
supplied the source of microbes able, through natural mutation, to make the
relatively small adjustment from being hosted by cows or pigs to being hosted by
humans. As a result, when Europeans first encountered American Indians, it was
the Europeans, and not the Indians, who carried the deadly crowd diseases.
Diamond illustrates the patterns he has detected with a number of historical
examples, including less familiar ones such as the Austronesian expansion, from
Taiwan to the Philippines, then to Indonesia and Malaysia, and on westwards to
Madagascar and east across the Pacific, eventually reaching Hawaii and Easter
Island. Given what we have examined so far, Diamond's work suggests the
following, quite sensible ideas:
1.
When two societies first encounter each other, the one that is more
technologically advanced will frequently conquer or absorb the less advanced;
2.
Advances in technology depend heavily on a food surplus, and, therefore, on
agriculture;
3. The degree to which agriculture could be practiced in any location, before the
advent of world-wide commerce, depended heavily on what species were locally
available for domestication or could be acquired from neighboring cultures
sharing a similar climate;
4.
Agriculture and the domestication of herd animals are also prerequisites for the
emergence of epidemic diseases among humans; and
5.
Therefore, agricultural, herding societies will carry deadlier germs than will
hunter-gatherers or people that farm only plants.
But Diamond is not satisfied with merely having discovered certain factors that
frequently have been influential in humanity's past. Instead, he aims to
transform the entire discipline of history into a natural science that discovers
deductive-nomological [2]explanations, one that determines the "ultimate
causes" of historical events, rather than mere "proximate
causes," such as the actions of people or the ideas that they held. In
adopting that grandiose project, Diamond turns what would have been an
enlightening and sound exploration of some common historical patterns into a
deeply flawed attempt to reform a subject he does not really understand.
For example, in his effort to squeeze the course of real events into his
conceptual scheme and thereby demonstrate his "laws," Diamond often
has to put a good deal of spin on historical episodes. In attempting to explain
why the Vikings did not successfully colonize the New World, while the Spaniards
and the Europeans who followed in their wake did, he writes, "Spain, unlike
Norway, was rich and populous enough to support exploration and subsidize
colonies" (pg. 373). But this declaration simply brushes over the fact that
Norway did successfully explore the North Atlantic, and did successfully
colonize the Faeroe Islands and Iceland. If Diamond were true to his project of
turning history into a deductive-nomological science, he ought to proceed to
formulate a quantitative law governing just how far from the mother country a
colony can survive, given any particular amount of wealth and any number of
residents in the colonizer. However, simply to state that requirement is to
expose the attempt to stuff human history into a deductivist framework as the
absurdity that it is.
Another instance of forcing the facts to fit the theory is Diamond's "law
of history" asserting that agricultural societies will inevitably come to
dominate their non-agricultural neighbors. He ignores the multitude of instances
where settled farmers were conquered by nomadic horsemen: the Hittite conquest
of the ancient Middle East, (possibly) the invasion of Greece by the Dorians,
the successive movements of the Celtic and Germanic people across Europe, the
Aryan migration into India, the Turkish conquest of much of the Moslem world
that began in the 11th century, and the vast Mongolian conquests of the 13th and
14th centuries.
In fact, such examples led both the political theorist Albert Jay Nock and the
economist Murray Rothbard to suggest a typical pattern in history nearly the
opposite of Diamond's. They hypothesized that states arise when some nomadic
people, who have been repeatedly raiding a nearby society of relatively peaceful
farmers over an extended period, come to realize that it is more profitable to
settle right in the farming community as rulers, enabling them to continually
raid the productive population in the form of taxes. (See Nock, 1935, and
Rothbard, 1978.)
I don't wish to enter here into disputes as to how the state came to be, or as
to whether the pattern noted by Diamond is more or less common than that
detected by Nock and Rothbard. I don't contend that such counter-examples make
nonsense of Diamond's observations, much less that they demonstrate a "law
of history" such as "nomadic horsemen always will defeat settled
farmers." But they do show that the complexity of history defies attempts
to deduce universal laws from its complex patterns. It is only by "cherry
picking" his examples that Diamond can defend his claim that he has found
"ultimate causes" in history.
Diamond also glosses over the divergence between his hypothesis that a lead in
food production and subsequently other technologies is the "ultimate
cause" of one civilization's dominance over another, and the inconvenient
fact that the first region to develop agriculture, animal husbandry, and writing
was the Fertile Crescent, roughly located in what today is Iraq, Syria, and
Turkey. None of those countries are dominant powers in today's geo-political
scene. He attempts to explain this anomaly by noting the environmental
degradation of the relatively fragile ecology of the Near East due to extensive
human exploitation of the area's natural resources, such as the almost complete
deforestation of the region that occurred as its residents cut down trees for
timber and to clear land for farming. He declares that, as a consequence,
"with the Greek conquest of all advanced societies from Greece east to
India under Alexander the Great in the late fourth century B.C., power finally
made its first shift irrevocably westward" (pg. 410). Diamond fails to
explain exactly how, if this shift of power was "irrevocable" and was
an inevitable result of human damage to the Near East's ecology, power, as well
as the cutting edge of scholarship, shifted back to the Near East during the
first six or seven centuries after the fall of Rome.
After all, if Alexander's triumph was merely a "proximate cause" of
the waning dominance of southwestern Asian culture, while the "ultimate
cause" was environmental, then it should have been impossible for the
region to ever regain its former glory. Nevertheless, many centuries after
"power" had scurried "irrevocably westward," the territory
ruled by the Muslim caliphate exceeded that of the grandest empires of the
ancient Near East by perhaps an order of magnitude. Nor is it obvious that
Alexander's triumph over the Persian Empire had anything to do with the
ecological state of affairs in the Near East – it seems, by truly historical
accounts, to have been primarily due to Alexander's brilliance and tenacity as a
general. (See Green, 1992, for more on this point.) And it would seem ludicrous
to contend that the "ultimate cause" of Alexander's conquests was some
environmental advantage held by Macedon, a late-to-develop and resource-poor
backwater of the Greek world.
Diamond Does Not Comprehend the True Character of History
I believe that Diamond's desire to transform the practice of history stems
chiefly from the fact that he understands neither the nature of the material
from which the historian launches his inquiries, nor what the historian's task
is in relation to that material. Diamond has reverted to the view of history
held by 19th-century positivists, who believed that the historian is presented
with a collection of "historical facts," and that his job is to
discover the "laws" or "historical forces" that explain
those facts.
For example, Diamond declares that, since the "whole modern world has been
shaped by lopsided outcomes [in clashes of different cultures] ... they must
have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who
happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few
thousand years ago" (pg. 25). Yet he neither refutes the idea that
historical contingency can offer adequate explanations in this regard, nor does
he defend his insistence upon "inexorable explanations" of the human
past.
Now, despite the recent emphasis in the philosophy of science on how all facts
are "theory laden," there is a sense in which it is true that the
natural scientist does have the facts to be explained presented to him as a
given starting point for his investigations. A certain star just does produce a
certain spectral pattern. There may be disagreement as to what the pattern
means, or even as to whether it is significant, but there it is. If some
astronomer doubts it is so, he can re-create the pattern for himself. Compound A
and compound B just do produce a certain amount of heat when combined. The
chemist skeptical of the fact as reported can combine them herself and make her
own measurement.
But no similar facts are given to the historian. Instead, he is faced with
certain artifacts that have survived into the present, and which he takes to be
signs of past events that are not present before him, events that it will never
be possible to re-create. Nor can the surviving pieces of evidence of past
happenings be taken at face value. A text purporting to describe a battle may
have been composed to glorify the victor or excuse the loser. A politician's
memoirs may have been written with an eye to making him look good to future
generations. The inscription on a statue may have been re-inscribed at the
behest of a ruler jealous of his illustrious predecessor's accomplishments. The
historian is always presented with a collection of initially ambiguous and
often, on their face, mutually contradictory pieces of evidence, on the basis of
which he attempts to determine what the facts really were. The "facts of
history" are not the starting point of his inquiry, but are instead its end
product. As Collingwood notes, "The fact that in the second century the
legions began to be recruited wholly outside Italy is not immediately given. It
is arrived at inferentially by a process of interpreting data according to a
complicated system of rules and assumptions" (1946, pg. 133).
To denigrate historical inquiry because it does not mimic the natural sciences
in attempting to discover universal laws is to declare that there is no value in
simply determining what really happened in humanity's past. Setting aside, for
the moment, the question of whether it is even feasible to formulate "laws
of history," a question that we will address below, I contend that the
effort to discover the historical past is worthwhile in its own right, even if
there is another discipline that could discover historical laws. To learn what
really occurred in the past is to understand how we came to be where we are
today. The knowledge gained through historical inquiry enables us to see how the
myriad decisions and actions of our predecessors, the ideas they held, the
ideals to which they aspired, the gods they worshipped, and the demons they
feared, all combined to create the world in which we find ourselves today.
Lacking an understanding of what real historical research consists of, Diamond
winds up doing "scissors and paste" history. His approach fails him in
at least the one instance he discusses with which I have the most familiarity:
the story of the QWERTY keyboard. He declares "trials conducted in 1932
with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our
typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent" (pg. 248). If that
were really true, then the fact that no company employing large numbers of
typists, and wishing to double their productivity while at the same time making
their jobs much easier—surely a profitable move!—chose to break with
convention and switch to this efficient keyboard layout is astonishing.
But we can contain our astonishment. It turns out that the study Diamond cites
was severely flawed, showing no evidence of using a genuine control group or
random sampling to choose participants. Furthermore, it was conducted by none
other than August Dvorak, the inventor of the purportedly more efficient
keyboard, who, holding the patent to his design, had a large financial stake in
proving the superiority of his model. Later, independent studies did not confirm
Dvorak's outlandish claims. (See Liebowitz and Margolis, 1996, or my summary of
their findings.)
Diamond also periodically employs the long discredited idea that there is a
significant division between "human history" and an earlier time,
before the invention of writing, called "pre-history." To the
contrary, as Collingwood puts it:
"A consequence of the error which regards history as contained ready-made
in its sources is the distinction between history and prehistory. From the point
of view of this distinction, history is coterminous with written sources, and
prehistory with the lack of such sources. It is thought that a reasonably
complete and accurate narrative can only be constructed where we possess written
documents out of which to construct it, and that where we have none we can only
put together a loosely assemblage of vague and ill-founded guesses. This is
wholly untrue: written sources have no such monopoly of trustworthiness or
informativeness as is here implied, and there are very few types of problems
which cannot be solved on the strength of unwritten evidence" (1946, pg.
372).
Diamond opens his book with a question asked of him by Yali, a New Guinean whom
the author met while undertaking biological research on the island: Why is it
that Europeans have so much more "stuff" than New Guineans? He laments
that most professional historians "are no longer even asking the
question" (pg. 15). It doesn't seem to occur to him that the reason for
that might be that it is not an historical question. If history consists in
showing how the occurrence of some unique event in the past is made intelligible
by the particular circumstances that led up to it, then it is categorically
unable to address such questions as "Why are Europeans generally wealthier
than New Guineans?" As Oakeshott says:
"[The] alleged task is to discern [an historical event's] 'true' character
by coming to understand it as an example of the operation of a 'law of history'
or a 'law of historical change.' In order to perform this task [the historian]
must equip himself with such a 'law' or 'laws.' And he is said to do this in a
procedure of examining (and perhaps comparing) a number of such occurrences and
situations and coming to perceive them as structures composed of regularities.
But this, also, is clearly a mistake: no such conclusion could issue from such a
procedure. What this 'historian' needs and what he must devise for himself is a
collection of systematically related abstract concepts ... in terms of which to
formulate 'laws.' How he may set about this enterprise we need not enquire ...
But what is certain is that they cannot be laws of 'history' or 'historical
change' because they do not and cannot relate to the circumstantially reported
situations he designs to explain, but only to model-situations abstracted from
them in terms of these 'laws.' In short, the distinction between such a
model-situation (explicated in terms of regularities) and a circumstantially
reported situation is not a difference of truth and error; it is an unresolvable
categorical distinction" (1983, pp. 81–82).
In the same vein, Mises notes, "The notion of a law of historical change is
self-contradictory. History is a sequence of phenomena that are characterized by
their singularity. Those features which an event has in common with other events
are not historical" (1957, pg. 212).
Diamond does not comprehend the nature of historical inquiry, rendering his
attempt to replace what he has failed to understand with his own brand of
"scientific history" badly misguided. Nevertheless, I believe that he
quite usefully has described a number of common patterns in human affairs. The
economist Tony Lawson calls such patterns "demi-regs," by which he
means "a partial event regularity which prima facie indicates the
occasional, but less than universal, actualization of a mechanism or tendency,
over a definite region of time-space" (1997, pg. 204).
But Diamond fails to realize the contingent nature of all such regularities in
the social world. As Lawson notes,
"in the social realm, indeed, there will usually be a potentially very
large number of countervailing factors [to any particular cause] acting at any
one time and/or sporadically over time, and possibly each with varying
strength.... [And] the mechanisms or processes which are being identified are
themselves likely to be unstable to a degree over time and space.... Indeed,
given the fact of the dependence of social mechanisms upon inherently
transformative human agency, where human beings choose their courses of action
(and so could always have acted otherwise), strict constancy seems a quite
unlikely eventuality" (1997, pp. 218–19).
One of Diamond's chief motivations in writing the book under review seems to
have been to discredit racial explanations of the course of history. However, if
he had comprehended the true character of historical explanation, he would have
seen that he was battling a chimera. Race can no more substitute for genuine
historical understanding than can geography. How could it possibly explain the
concrete particularities of history, when the past presents us with Germans as
different as Johann Goethe and Adolf Hitler, Jews as dissimilar as Karl Marx and
Ludwig von Mises, Irishmen as far apart as James Joyce and Gerry Adams, Chinese
as divergent as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse Tung, blacks like George Washington Carver
and Idi Amin, and so on.
Conclusion
Mises categorized the type of history Diamond proposes as
"environmentalism." He said of it, "The truth contained in
environmentalism is the cognition that every individual lives at a definite
epoch in a definite geographical space and acts under the conditions determined
by this environment." But, he goes on to note the flaw inherent in all
attempts to regard the environment as the "ultimate cause" of
historical events: "The environment determines the situation but not the
response. To the same situation different modes of reacting are thinkable and
feasible. Which one the actors choose depends on their individuality"
(1957, pg. 326).
Diamond, I believe, has discovered some very interesting "demi-regularities"
in the human past. But he has not realized that, quite apart from the search for
such demi-regs, there is a different and quite legitimate discipline called
history that concerns itself with discovering the particular antecedents of some
unique going-on that explain its occurrence, based on critically analyzing
artifacts from the past that have survived into the historian's present.
As I mentioned in the introduction, Diamond's mistake is not merely of concern
to scholars. The view that "vast, impersonal forces" largely determine
the course of history, whether those forces are taken to be "the material
conditions of production," as in Marxism, or geographical circumstances, as
in Diamond, naturally suggests that individuals can do little to affect their
own future. As a logical consequence, in order to improve the lives of those who
have been dealt a poor hand by those forces, it seems necessary to counteract
them with another vast, impersonal force, namely, the State. Huge international
programs intended to redress the arbitrary outcomes brought about by historical
forces are recommended. The cases of countries with few geographic advantages
but relatively free economies, such as Japan, prospering, and those of nations
blessed with natural resources but ruled by highly interventionist governments,
for example, Brazil or Nigeria, lagging behind, are easily dismissed as
anomalies by those who are convinced that human action plays an insignificant
part in history.
While Diamond's book is filled with valuable insights, it is not, as he would
like to believe, the first step in the reformation of history along more
"scientific" lines, but only another interesting vantage point from
which to contemplate humanity's past. Furthermore, the policy implications of
his overreach are a danger to both human welfare and freedom.
––––––––
Gene Callahan is studying at the London School of Economics. He is the author of
Economics for Real People. Send him MAIL, and see his Mises.org Daily Articles
Archive. Post Comments on the blog.
References
Collingwood, R.G. (1946) The Idea of History, Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press.
Diamond, J. (1998) Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the
Last 13,000 Years, London: Vintage.
Green, P. (1992) Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography,
Berkely, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press.
Lawson, T. (1997) Economics and Reality, London and New York: Routledge.
Liebowitz, S. and S.E. Margolis (1996) "Typing Errors?" Reason
Magazine, June issue.
Mises, L. von (1957) Theory and History, Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises
Institute.
Nock, A.J. (1935) Our Enemy the State.
Oakeshott, M. ([1933] 1985) Experience and Its Modes, Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
— (1983) On History, Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell Publisher Limited.
Rothbard, M. (1978) For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.
Africanist archaeology and ancient IQ: racial science and cultural
evolution in the twenty-first century
Scott MacEachern
World Archaeology. (2006). Vol. 38(1): 72-92 Race, Racism and Archaeology
----
Abstract
Over the last two decades, a number of psychometric researchers have
claimed that very substantial
differences in intelligence exist among modern human racial groups, as
these groups are traditionally
defined. According to these researchers, African populations suffer severe
cognitive deficits when
compared to other modern humans. Philippe Rushton, particularly, places
these claimed mental
deficits in an evolutionary context, advancing environmental explanations
for such deficits and
asserting that such cognitive differences existed prehistorically as well.
Such substantial cognitive
differences should be evident in human behavioural patterns, and thus in
the archaeological record.
Archaeological data can thus be used to test these claims about human
evolutionary development
and modern human cognitive difference. Examination of the archaeological
record does not support
the claims made by these researchers. This suggests that regional
differences in IQ test score results
should not be ascribed to variations in human evolutionary development.
---------------------
EXCERPT
Behaviour, selection and African environments
There are three basic elements in Rushton’s theorization of human
difference. First, he
amasses a large amount of material on physical, behavioural and social
differences
between the groups that form the popularly accepted triptych of human
races: ‘Negroids’,
‘Caucasoids’ and ‘Mongoloids’ (Rushton 2000: 17–183; see also
Rushton and Bogaert
1987: 265–8). The scope of these topics is very wide: it includes
material on brain size, IQ
(and related) test scores, dental development, speed of sexual maturation,
age of first
intercourse, life span, number of sexual fantasies, penis size, number of
multiple births,
permissive attitudes toward sex, aggressiveness, law-abidingness,
‘mental durability’,
AIDS rates, cultural achievements and much more. Most striking, and most
relevant for
this paper, is Rushton’s (2000: 133–7; see also Rushton and Skuy 2000)
acceptance of
Richard Lynn’s (1991b, 2003; Lynn and Vanhanen 2002: 197–225) claim
that the average
IQ test score of African populations is approximately IQ¼70. In the
psychiatric literature,
this correlates to a state of borderline mental retardation (American
Psychiatric
Association 1994), implying that the great majority of African people
living today suffer
some degree of cognitive deficit, ranging from mild to very severe.
Rushton ranks the three
races on the basis of these assembled characteristics (Rushton 2000: 5,
119, 148, 152, 162,
166, 168, 171, 214).
He has stated on many occasions that this is a straightforward scientific
description of
humanity, but it is clear that any taxonomy describing Africans, for
example, as less
intelligent, more promiscuous, less altruistic, more aggressive, less law
abiding,
investing less effort in child-rearing and less culturally developed than
Europeans
or Asians – as Rushton’s taxonomy does – is also a ranking of
fundamental human worth.
Rushton’s accumulation of these data and the uses that he makes of them
have been
very stringently critiqued (see, for example, Brace 1996; Czernovsky 1995;
Graves 2002b;
Lieberman 2001; Peters 1995), and that critique need not be repeated here.
However, it
should be noted that the sources, characteristics and quality of his data
are diverse, and
often of extremely low reliability. Rushton’s use of late Victorian
travel pornography
(‘French Army Surgeon’ 1896) as a central reference on human sexual
characteristics and
behaviours is perhaps the most egregious use of poor-quality data, but it
is very far from
being the only one. His data on racial differences in intelligence test
scores is taken from
wildly disparate sources ranging over the last century (Rushton 2000:
38–9, 135–7),
including sources using techniques that even advocates of IQ testing have
dismissed as
‘primitive’ and unreliable (Jensen 1988). Many of his demographic data
– on longevity and
reproductive rates, for example – have been subject to large-scale
fluctuations even within
populations and in relatively short periods of time, making it unlikely
that such
comparative measures have any evolutionary underpinnings.
The second element in Rushton’s theorization of racial differentiation
involves
accounting for the biological basis of the data accumulated. He
hypothesizes that the
‘Mongoloid’, ‘Caucasoid’ and ‘Negroid’ racial groups have been
subjected to different
natural selection pressures over evolutionary timescales, and that because
of this these
racial groups have evolved different life-history strategies. This
hypothesis makes use of
the r-/K-selection schema, developed by MacArthur and Wilson (1967) as a
method of
modeling density-dependent natural selection. The consequences of these
different
reproductive strategies are, according to Rushton, to be found in the data
on physical,
behavioural and social differences between races amassed in earlier
sections of the book. In
the formulation used by Rushton, r-selected species, adapted to unstable,
rapidly
fluctuating environments, evolve reproduction strategies with prolific
production of
offspring and relatively low parental investment in individual offspring,
while K-selected
species, adapted to more stable environments, produce relatively lower
numbers of
offspring but invest more care in each. Rushton (1987, 2000: 199–216;
see also Rushton
and Bogaert 1987) then claims that ‘Negroid’ populations, in
particular, are more
r-selected than are ‘Caucasoid’ populations, which are in turn more
r-selected than
‘Mongoloid’ populations. In essence, Africans are held to invest
bodily resources more
heavily in sex and impulsiveness/aggression, while Europeans and Asians
are supposed to
invest such resources more heavily in intelligence, altruism and
restraint. While Rushton
does claim that ‘Negroids’ are only relatively r-selected, the data
that he amasses give the
impression of very substantial differences between these racial groups, an
impression
eagerly seized by racists around the world.
It might be objected that a concentration on ‘Negroid’
characteristics, vis-a`-vis those
of the other major races, imputes an unfair racializing subtext to
Rushton’s work, because
he situates the three major races along an r- to K-selected continuum:
‘Negroids’ –
‘Caucasoids’ – ‘Mongoloids’. However, in practice (see below),
‘Caucasoids’ and
‘Mongoloids’ are lumped together as temperate-/cold-climate races
against the tropically
adapted ‘Negroids’ throughout this work (e.g. Rushton 2000: 199, 262).
In other writings
(Rushton and Horowitz 1999), Rushton speculates upon temperamental
differences that
might disadvantage ‘Orientals’ in scientific and cultural achievements
vis-a`-vis ‘Whites’.
In the theories of modern racial scientists, the higher IQ scores of
‘Mongoloids’ cannot be
held to imply significant intellectual superiority over ‘Caucasoids’.
This element of Rushton’s work has also been strenuously critiqued
(Anderson 1991;
Graves 2002a, 2002b; Silverman 1990; Weizman et al. 1990). There are very
serious doubts
about the utility of the r-/K-selection model as an explanation for
behavioural differences
among and especially within animal species, especially when the concept is
generalized far
beyond its origins (Boyce 1984; Stearns 1992). There exist many cases in
which the
predictions of this theory do not hold (Graves 2002a: 66–7), and a
number of characteristics
of Rushton’s three racial groups – most notably body size – do not
fit the model.
The linkages between r-/K-selection and the characteristics that Rushton
associates with
those different forms of selection are quite unclear (Weizman et al. 1990:
4–5). Finally,
Rushton has never satisfactorily established the environmental
circumstances in which his
different racial groups were exposed to these different selection
pressures. It is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that Rushton turned to an r-/K-selection model
because of a fairly
impressionistic resemblance between that model and his image of
‘racial’ variability, and
that he then tuned the model to fit his assumptions.
It is at this point – when we begin to speak about the ancestors of
modern humans as
evolving populations in particular environments – that
palaeoanthropology and archaeology
become important to Rushton’s account. He claims that ‘Negroid’
populations
differ from ‘Caucasoids’ and ‘Mongoloids’ because the former
evolved only in tropical
Africa, while the latter groups moved out of Africa into colder climates (Rushton
2000:
199, 217–33, 262–4). There are two components to this explanation:
tropical African
environments are less stable and less predictable than are temperate and
cold environments
(thus favouring r-selected strategies of prolific reproduction and low
parental
investment in offspring), and in addition temperate and cold climates
posed cognitive
demands upon ‘Caucasoid’ and ‘Mongoloid’ populations not
experienced by those
peoples living in balmier climes. It should be emphasized that only the
first of these
components involves r-/K-selection theory; the second derives in large
part from speculations
about the evolution of intelligence published by Richard Lynn (1987,
1991a).
(Lynn (2003: 141), in fact, seems to be claiming that modern Africans are
cognitively
unchanged descendants of the hominids that occupied Africa 250,000 years
ago.) This
bipartite explanation is supplemented by archaeological data that Rushton
claims support
his thesis.
Less attention has been paid to this last component of Rushton’s model
than to other
elements of his work (but see Graves 2002a: 71–4; Lieberman 2001: 79),
in part because
there are so many other obvious targets for criticism in his work and in
part because most
of this critique has come from psychologists and biological
anthropologists. It remains,
however, central to Rushton’s accounting of difference between his three
racial groups. He
is concerned with producing an integrated explanation of the differences
between those
groups, and to do this using r-/K-selection theory he must account for the
origins of these
differences in an evolutionary context. This requires engagement with
archaeological and
palaeoanthropological data. There is also a long tradition of appeals to
environmental
differences in racialist descriptions of African peoples. In almost all
such cases, Africans
are held to be cognitively disadvantaged, either because African
environments are so
benevolent that they provide a reduced cognitive challenge to African
populations (cf.
Herder 1968: 297; Kant 1997 [1775]: 46), or because those environments are
so hostile to
humanity that they inhibit the intellectual development of those
populations (cf. Cornelius
de Pauw in Duchet 1969: 123). Rushton’s explanation uniquely combines
elements of both
of these models.
His approach shares another characteristic with many eighteenth-century
accounts of
human racial variation: it treats continental land-masses as
undifferentiated geographical
units, each characterized by a particular set of prevailing environmental
conditions. Thus,
African environments are collapsed to subtropical savannas, which are
prone to
unpredictable droughts and ‘devastating viral, bacterial, and parasitic
diseases’ (Rushton
2000: 231), while Europe and Asia are similarly characterized as cold (but
predictable) arid
tundra and glacial landscapes.We are never told why all African savannas
are supposed to
be prone to unpredictable droughts or the reason for believing that
tropical and
subtropical plant foods are going to be available year-round (Rushton
2000: 228). We are
not told why dispersed tropical foragers should be prone to devastating
diseases that are
now associated with higher-density, agricultural lifeways (see, for
example, Armelagos
et al. 1991; Barnes 2005; Tishkoff et al. 2001). We are never told why
Rushton believes that
‘Mongoloids’ evolved in Siberia (Rushton 2000: 229), rather than
further south in Asia.
We are never told why environmental predictability is characteristic of
temperate and
Arctic climates, while unpredictability reigns in Africa. (Apparently, the
only sort of
seasonality that Rushton recognizes is that between summers and winters;
the equally
predictable and often very challenging cycling between wet and dry seasons
in many areas
of Africa is unknown to him.) Examples could be multiplied. Rushton simply
asserts that
racial evolution took place as he says, without providing evidence.
His archaeological and historical evidence is a similar mishmash of
unsubstantiated
assertions and obsolete ideas. At various points, Rushton claims: that
natural brush
fires would have been unknown in Eurasia during glacial periods, and
because of this
human production of fire would have been more challenging there than in
Africa; that
clothing and shelter were unnecessary for prehistoric African populations;
that Middle
Stone Age Africans could ‘barely’ be considered big game hunters
because they lacked
bows and arrows; that the greater numbers of known Cro-Magnon sites in
Europe
indicate that those people were more successful than those same MSA
Africans; that
‘Mongoloid’ populations entered the New World between 40,000 and
24,000 years ago
(as part of a classic evolutionary just-so story that purports to explain
the lower IQ test
scores of Native American peoples); and that Africans and south-east
Asians never
developed agriculture (Rushton 2000: 224–33). He further (Rushton 2000:
142) makes
use of John Baker’s (1974) racist and unsystematic list of twenty-one
‘criteria for
civilization’ – which begins to evaluate cultural advance by scoring
the amount of clothing
that people wear and ends with criteria like ‘some appreciation of the
fine arts’ – in
order to dismiss African and American cultural achievements. Again,
examples can be
multiplied.
In the early 1990s, as today, exposure to an introductory university
course in world
prehistory would equip an undergraduate to dismiss such a farrago of
elementary errors
and distortions. Rushton’s account of human cultural development is one
that
systematically valorizes cultural developments in Europe and (to a lesser
extent) Asia,
while denigrating such developments by peoples of Africa, the Americas and
Australia,
with no serious attention paid to the quality of his data. His sources for
these claims
derive only to a minor degree from archaeologists and
palaeoanthropologists, but come
rather from Richard Lynn and Edward Miller, respectively a psychologist
and an
economist, who share his views on race and the racial inferiority of
Africans. It would
be more surprising to see such claims promulgated in what is supposed to
be a
legitimate study of human behaviour if they were not so common in other
parts of the
book as well.
Race, reason and reality
Race, Evolution and Behavior makes use of an obsolescent, Eurocentric
model of human
cultural advance, one that assumes a ‘creative explosion’ particularly
in Europe at
approximately 35,000 years ago, simultaneous with the appearance of modern
humans in
that area and well before equivalent developments anywhere else on the
globe (Rushton
2000: 225). There is no evidence that Rushton comprehends recent
archaeological research
in different areas of the world or the effects that differences in
research intensity can have
upon our understanding of cultural developments world-wide. However, his
book has one
very significant strength: the great claims made within it are testable
archaeologically.
Such testing does not merely involve disproving the archaeological claims
to be found in
his text. That is a trivial exercise, one that could be carried out with
an up-to-date
introductory textbook. Instead, we can use archaeological data – with
which, after all,
archaeologists claim to be able to speak authoritatively about the human
past – in order to
assemble an account of African history that can then be compared with the
expectations
generated by Rushton’s model.
One particular fact makes such testing possible: the magnitude of
behavioural, intellectual
and social differences claimed by Rushton to exist between the three
racial groups is
very great indeed. There is no great subtlety in the picture of human
racial variation that
he paints. This is probably most striking for IQ test scores, as noted
above. If African IQ
test scores indicate an average IQ¼70, as indeed they appear to (Lynn
1991b; Lynn and
Vanhanen 2002), and if IQ test scores are an accurate reflection of the
general intelligence
of individuals and populations, then we would expect African populations
to be
characterized by various degrees of cognitive deficit, with borderline
mental retardation
compared to other human populations as the representative intellectual
state on the
continent. We would further expect that such significant inferiority in
the average mental
functioning of an entire continent’s population would have substantial
social and cultural
consequences, and that those consequences would be expressed in the
material traces of
the populations involved.
Rushton himself assumes that to be true. He frequently explains modern
cases of
poverty, conflict, social disruption and disease in Africa as the
consequences of human
evolutionary history on the continent, just as the late-twentieth century
economic success
of Japan and the Asian Tigers is supposed to be due to the evolutionary
history of
‘Mongoloids’. Similarly high levels of difference are evident in the
other measures he uses.
Rushton makes use of r-/K-selection models that were, after all,
originally developed to
compare the reproductive strategies of different species, and his
definition of ‘race’ appears
to be more or less equivalent to ‘subspecies’ (Rushton 2000: 305). He
is not especially
forthcoming on what cultural characteristics we might expect of a
population with an
average IQ of 70. In an editorial, he notes that an IQ of 70 equates to a
mental age of 11,
and says that 11-years-olds can, with supervision, drive cars, work (as
child labourers) in
factories and (as child soldiers) go to war (Rushton 2004). However,
presumably they
cannot design those cars or factories, or plan the wars that they find
themselves involved
in. Gottfredson (2003) claims that people with IQ less than 100 are
incapable of carrying
out any sort of sophisticated managerial task, including acting as
merchants or bureaucrats;
this implies that such people capable of such tasks would be quite rare in
African
societies generally (comprising less than 3 per cent of the population)
and essentially
absent in some countries.
Some proponents of IQ tests, and of racial differences in intelligence,
have noticed that
the results of IQ testing in Africa (and in other areas of the world)
actually pose a
substantial challenge to the validity of those tests. The idea that the
average intelligence of
Africans is severely decreased relative to that of people in other parts
of the world simply
does not accord with the experience of people who have worked on or even
visited that
continent. It is as if Rushton, Lynn and their colleagues were claiming
that all Africans
were actually only four feet tall. If such a claim is made, and one is
asked to choose
between doubting the evidence of one’s own eyes in Africa and doubting
the calibration of
the ruler used in measurement, most people will doubt the ruler. The
problem is even
greater than this, in fact, because testing for some African countries
gives average IQ
scores of well under 70 (for example, Congo-Zaire¼65; Equatorial Guinea¼59;
Ethiopia¼63; Sierra Leone¼64; Zimbabwe¼66) (Lynn and Vanhanen 2002:
202–4,
217, 225).
Psychometricians have proposed a number of ingenious explanations in order
to get
around this problem. Arthur Jensen (1998: 367–9), the dean of this
research, claims that
African-American individuals with low IQ scores tend to be more socially
adept than
Euroamericans with the same IQ scores (because retardation in the latter
cases is more
likely to derive from organic damage), so leading observers to
overestimate the intellectual
capabilities of the African-Americans in question. This has then been
generalized to the
African case: Africans are supposed to be cognitively disabled, but this
fact is not apparent
because of their social and verbal skills. This seems extremely unlikely:
any substantial
contact would presumably pierce that facade of verbal skill, and the fact
that many such
interactions take place in languages and cultural settings not native to
one or both
participants would seem to indicate that verbal/social skills cannot be
determinative. In
addition, this sort of post hoc explanation undercuts the relationship
between IQ test
scores and the general intelligence factor (g) that is supposed to be
reflected in those scores:
IQ test scores appear to mean something very different in terms of human
functionality in
Africa than in other parts of the world. In any case, consideration of
archaeological data
allows us to compare cultural achievements in Africa with other areas of
the world,
without the distortion supposedly inflicted by verbal/social skills and
over evolutionarily
significant time spans.
African history
To a degree, it seems grotesque that one must, at the beginning of the
twentyfirst
century, marshal evidence for African potential for cultural progress
through time.
Rushton’s model of race, behaviour and intelligence is a profoundly
archaic intellectual
construct, one that has more affinities with Victorian assumptions of the
inferiority of the
lesser breeds than with anything more recent. At the same time, Africanist
archaeology
itself for a long time shared many of those assumptions, particularly
expressed by an
unwillingness to accept evidence for indigenous African cultural advance
(see the articles
in Robertshaw 1990). Thus, the roots of various kinds of sophisticated
behaviour –
agriculture, iron-working and state formation are the best known – had
to be sought
beyond the continent. Over the decades in which Rushton and his colleagues
were
refurbishing old theories of African intellectual and cultural
inferiority, archaeologists
working on the continent were developing very different models of the
continent’s
history. These models do not require that African culture history exactly
mirror historical
developments in other areas of the world in some unilinear evolutionary
progression
(Fuglestad 1992; Neale 1986; Stahl 2005b), but they do indicate that
African history is
entirely comparable to that of other regions and other continents in terms
of the human
capabilities that it evokes.
Rushton (2000: 217–34) notes the palaeoanthropological debates about
modern human
origins, and accepts some form of an ‘Out of Africa’ model in his
book. Such a model
provides him with a well-defined, simple origin narrative for modern
humans, as well as a
mechanism for moving them beyond Africa to the cognitive challenges of the
non-African
world. He does not consider the evolutionary advantages that might allow
modern
humans to expand beyond the African continent into areas in many cases
already occupied
by other hominids. He does not explore in any detail the relationship
between biological
and behavioural evolution in moderns, saying only that blade technology
appeared in
Africa at 100,000 BP (itself an erroneous claim) but hastily adding that
Africans at that
time were not much advanced beyond their forebears (Rushton 2000: 225). As
noted
above, he accepts that significant behavioural advances among modern
humans occurred
especially in Europe, and to a lesser extent in Asia, around 35,000 years
ago.
Archaeological research over the last two decades provides a very
different picture.
The linkage between such developments and occupation of Europe has been
systematically
broken down, as evidence for advanced behaviours among humans has been
found in
earlier sites and in sites well beyond that continent. Many of these data
have been derived
from African contexts (see Brooks and McBrearty 2000; d’Errico et al.
2003; Henshilwood
and Marean 2003; Marean and Assefa 2005). Thus, we have a series of
sophisticated bone
harpoon points, presumably used in composite weapons, at Katanda in Zaire
and dating
to more than 75,000 years ago (Brooks et al. 1995; Yellen 1998); evidence
for symbolic
behaviour and advanced tool production – engraved bone and ochre,
perforated shell
beads, worked bone tools – at Blombos Cave in South Africa at c. 75,000
BP (d’Errico et al.
2001, 2005; Henshilwood et al. 2001, 2002); advanced composite tool
technologies, long
distance acquisition of raw materials and probable symbolic behaviour in
southern
African Howieson’s Poort assemblages, dated to c. 75,000–65,000 BP
(Ambrose 2002;
Deacon and Wurz 1996; Wurz 1999); and bead production at Enkapune ya Muto
in
Kenya at c. 41,000 BP (Ambrose 1998). It is likely that much of this
behaviour has
significantly earlier roots; for a more extensive discussion, see Brooks
and McBrearty
(2000) and d’Errico et al. (2003). Even figurative art, a phenomenon
very frequently
associated with late Pleistocene archaeological occurrences in Europe,
occurs at Apollo 11
cave in Namibia, where it is dated to 25,000–27,000 BP – that is,
contemporary with early
European rock art (Vogelsang 1998).
It would be wrong to assume that the appearance of technologically
sophisticated
artefacts is necessarily coterminous with the appearance of complex
behavioural,
symbolic or conceptual systems, in Africa or elsewhere (Wadley 2001). Such
systems may
not manifest themselves in persistent material culture (or in any realms
of material
culture at all), and the cultural meanings of particular technological
systems will quite
probably vary drastically across space and time. The definition and
detection of behavioural
modernity among hominids is an extremely complex topic (Henshilwood and
Marean 2003), and not one that can be treated in detail in this paper.
However, the
examples above very strongly indicate that Africa played a central and
continuing role in
the appearance of such behavioural modernity, a role at least as important
as that played
by temperate Eurasia.
Africa’s role as the birthplace of humanity is widely accepted today, by
the general
public as well as by archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists. However,
this acceptance is
often accompanied by the assumption that the continent has been a cultural
backwater in
more recent times. Thus, even an avowedly non-racialist account of human
history
(Diamond 1998: 98–101, 186–7) finds it necessary to provide an
explanation of African
cultural lag, especially in agricultural development. Diamond provides a
rather deterministic
explanation of plant and animal domestication based to a large extent upon
the
geographical orientation of the different continents. An east-to-west
Eurasian transect of
approximately 8900 kilometres, between Brussels and Shanghai, is
paralleled by a similar
transect across the African Sudanian and Sahelian zones, between Dakar and
Djibouti, of
about 6600km. Diamond’s model locates the early success and continuing
influence of
Near Eastern domesticates in the ease with which they could spread across
the long reach
of Eurasia, but does not explain why similar success did not attend
Sudanian-Sahelian
agricultural systems. (It seems unlikely that a 2300km difference in
east–west distances
actually produced the different Holocene continental histories that
Diamond thinks exist.)
Diamond tends to underestimate the diversity and sophistication of African
agricultural
systems, despite a much deeper understanding of African history than that
possessed by
Philippe Rushton.
Discussions of domestication processes in Africa suffer from the
fragmentary nature of
archaeological data – especially in the tropical forests of Central
Africa – but the earliest
firm evidence for sub-Saharan African plant domesticates dates to just
after 4000 BP in
both Africa and India (Neumann 2003). This implies African domestication
of millet,
sorghum and cowpea during the fifth millennium BP. This is certainly later
than was the
case in many other areas of the world. On the other hand, the variety of
indigenous
African plant domesticates is very striking indeed, comparable to that
from earlier centres
of domestication in the Near East and probably exceeding the diversity of
plant
domesticates in East Asia and the Americas (Harlan et al. 1976), and there
is no evidence
that the inspiration in their development came from beyond the continent.
This parallels
the situation in New Guinea, another tropical area often assumed to be a
cultural
backwater but that now appears to be a centre of domestication in its
region (Denham
et al. 2004).
Economies based in large part upon animal domesticates, especially cattle
and caprines,
seem to be significantly older in the Sahara and sub-Saharan West and
Central
Africa, dating to the eighth millennium BP and afterward (Gifford-Gonzalez
2005: 200;
Marshall and Hildebrand 2002), and there is accumulating evidence that
Saharan
populations played a significant role in cattle domestication in the
early-/mid-Holocene
(Bradley et al. 1996; Grigson 1991; MacHugh et al. 1997). A stable and
eminently successful
pastoralist adaptation, based upon animal domesticates, the exploitation
of wild
plant and animal resources and eventually domesticated cereals, and
capable of supporting
populations of significant size and complexity, can hardly be dismissed as
unsophisticated.
African experiences with domestication seem entirely comparable to those
of other
areas in the world – and rather innovative compared with, say, the
agricultural record of
Europe.
The ability independently to develop state-level societies was another
capability
traditionally denied to Africans by European authors, who tended to look
for inspiration
beyond that continent and especially in the Mediterranean Basin and
western Asia
(Delafosse 1912, I: 207; Desplagnes 1906: 544–6; Murdock 1959; Palmer
1936). Probably
the most developed example of this attitude was Charles Seligman’s
(1957: 10, 43)
‘Hamitic hypothesis’, which traced virtually every cultural advance in
sub-Saharan Africa
to light-skinned immigrants from the north and north east, or to later
contacts with
Semitic populations.
Again, research across the continent over the last three decades
decisively disproves this
point of view. The literature on this topic is expanding rapidly: there
is, however, no doubt
that complex polities in the Nile Valley (O’Connor 1993; Welsby 1998),
in West Africa
(Gronenborn 2001; Holl 1985; MacEachern 2005; McIntosh 1991, 1999;
McIntosh and
McIntosh 1984), in North-east Africa (Curtis 2004; Fattovich 2000;
Munro-Hay 1993), in
East and Central Africa (de Maret 1999; Kusimba 1999; Schoenbrun 1999;
Sutton 1993)
and in south-eastern Africa (Huffman 1996; Pikirayi 2000; Sinclair et al.
1993) were indeed
African, developing according to their own internal logics. The social and
political
hierarchies, the external relations and the economic and trading systems
of these states
were entirely comparable with those of similar polities on other
continents, and were
frequently recognized as such by European visitors before corrosively
racist views of
Africans had time to develop (cf. Brooks 1993; Northrup 2002). They did
not appear in
isolation – indeed, neither did states in other parts of the world,
including Europe – and,
again, they were not mirror-images of states in those other regions (cf.
McIntosh 1999).
The culture history of the continent is one of change and development
comparable to that
of Europe and Asia, one where particular cultural systems – the
development of external
symbolic systems, agriculture or states, for example – occur in
particular areas, which in
turn affect neighbouring regions in different ways. This paper provides
only an extremely
cursory survey of those data, on a limited number of topics, but more
broad-based
examination (cf. Stahl 2005a) would provide the same results. Such results
provide no
basis for the differentiation of homogeneous continental blocs of
humanity, still less for
the ranking of those blocs one against the other.
Interpretations
We are thus presented with a problem. The picture provided by African
archaeological
data is entirely incommensurate with claims by Rushton and his colleagues
that African
populations suffer severe cognitive deficits or other behavioural
disadvantages when
compared with human populations from Europe and Asia. There is no evidence
in those
data that Africans as a continental population suffer from the degree of
mental retardation
that would be indicated by an IQ of 70, or from any degree of mental
retardation at all.
Both of these data sets are internally consistent: IQ test scores for
African populations do
indeed yield an average IQ of roughly 70, while the archaeological (and
historical)
evidence indicates that Africans have the same cognitive and cultural
abilities as people
living in other regions of the world, over evolutionary time spans and
today. How may we
reconcile these results?
A number of possibilities present themselves. In the first place, one
might claim that the
most intelligent people in African societies (perhaps the 3 per cent of
the population with
IQ scores greater than 100, as indicated by Gottfredson (2003)) have acted
as a tiny
‘cognitive elite’, themselves almost entirely responsible for African
cultural advances. The
existence of such an elite would lead to an overestimate of the cultural
and behavioural
similarities between Africa and other continental regions. This seems
unlikely on a number
of levels. It implies drastically different intellectual arrangements in
African societies than
in societies in other areas of the world, and there are no archaeological,
ethnographic or
other data indicating that such differences exist. It would also divorce
IQ test scores from
social and cultural consequences to an extent resisted by psychometricians
on both
theoretical and practical grounds. It should be noted that neither Rushton
(2000) nor
Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) accept this explanation, because they claim that
there is a good
correlation between IQ, behaviour and cultural indicators on both a
continental and a
national level.
In the second place, we must remember that the evidentiary basis for many
of these IQ
tests is extremely weak, and in some cases the data are presented quite
selectively. Some of
the tests, like the Army Beta administered in the 1920s to South Africans,
are known to be
severely culture-bound. Claims made by Lynn (1991b; Lynn and Vanhanen
2002) and
Rushton (2000) about the intelligence of different groups of South
Africans also ignore the
very significant debates about mental testing in South Africa during the
twentieth century
(Dubow 1995: 197–245), and the fact that much of this debate involved
the IQ test scores
of (usually Afrikaans-speaking) ‘poor whites’. A sense of the quality
of reporting of these
tests comes from Lynn’s (1991b; see also Lynn and Vanhanen 2002: 219)
description of
tests administered by Owen (1989) on different ‘racial’ groups in
South Africa as ‘[t]he best
single study of the Negroid intelligence’. Owen himself (1989: 60,
62–8) indicated
significant problems with these tests, many involving language
difficulties experienced by
the African test-takers, and did not assign IQ scores for the results.
Similar kinds of
problems, where authors’ cautions about test circumstances are ignored
by Lynn and
Vanhanen, exist in a number of the other African cases. At the same time,
it is unlikely
that straightforward bias could explain all of the test score results in
question.
A third possibility also presents itself, one derived from another realm
of debate about
IQ test results. The African case is not the only circumstance in which
unaccounted-for
differences exist in IQ test scores across cultural boundaries. James
Flynn (1984, 1987,
1998, 1999; see also Dickens and Flynn 2001) has documented a steady rise
in IQ test
scores from the late nineteenth century onward in countries where
longitudinal data exist,
an increase now widely known as the Flynn Effect. (Longitudinal data are
unfortunately
available almost exclusively from Western countries.) Depending upon the
test, this rise
varies from less than 10 points to as much as 20 points per generation,
with the greatest
increase in ‘culture-reduced’ tests like the Raven’s Progressive
Matrices. This effect is both
reliable and predictable: it also indicates significant gains in
intelligence over a period too
short for any evolutionary effects to come in to play. Explanations for
the Flynn Effect
vary and none appears completely satisfactory, but there seems little
doubt that it is due to
some combination of environmental and cultural factors at play in Western
societies,
factors that remain significant even on tests where cultural influences
are supposed to be
largely excluded.
Taken at face value, the Flynn Effect implies that the average North
American adult
living about a century ago would have had an IQ of approximately 75 in
modern terms, a
value closely comparable to that derived for twentieth-century African
populations by
Rushton, Lynn and their associates. Mid-nineteenth-century North Americans
would
have been even more deficient mentally. This is a nonsensical result, and
is widely accepted
as such; no North American believes that our great-grandparents were
mentally deficient.
As two enthusiasts for racial comparison in intelligence testing, Richard
Herrnstein and
Charles Murray, said a decade ago in The Bell Curve:
"Whether one looks at the worlds of science, literature, politics, or
the arts, one does not
get the impression that the top of the IQ distribution is filled with more
subtle,
insightful or powerful intellects than it was in our grandparents’ day.
. . . No one is
suggesting, for example, that the IQ of the average American in 1776 was
30 or that it
will be 150 a century from now.+ -(Herrnstein and Murray 1994: 308–9)
In this case, Herrnstein and Murray are absolutely right. Moreover, the
evaluative criteria
used by Herrnstein and Murray to judge this claim involve the examination
of cultural
accomplishment, as does the present paper. This is the only way to test
such claims for
societies before the invention of intelligence tests. The fact that
similar nonsensical results
concerning Africans are widely promulgated in the psychometric literature
may indicate
simple ignorance of African societies or a more pernicious readiness to
place Africans
below other human populations in a ranking of inherent human worth.
The Flynn Effect is a measure of IQ test performance across a substantial
cultural
divide, with biology held more or less constant. This divide exists in
time: it looks from the
early twenty-first century back toward the late nineteenth century. The IQ
testing that has
taken place in Africa since the 1920s has taken place across a comparable
cultural divide,
one from economically and politically dominant Western societies and test
designers to
African societies and individuals in almost all cases at significant
economic, social, cultural
and/or political disadvantage. In this case, the cultural divide exists
both in time (because
the tests have been administered since the 1920s) and in space. The
parallels between time
and race have been remarked upon by Flynn (1999: 14–15; see also Dickens
and Flynn
2001). It may well be the case that depressed African IQ test score
results are best
explained by a combination of obvious test bias and the subtle and
additive environmental
differences that produce variation in even ‘culture-reduced’ tests
like the Raven’s
Progressive Matrices, in a geographic analogy to the Flynn Effect. The
archaeological
data would seem decisively to contradict the claim that these differences
stem from
reduced cognitive potentials in African populations.
Conclusions
This paper presents the juxtaposition of two data sets, one archaeological
and one
behavioural and psychometric. It is now a commonplace in the comparative
psychometric
literature to claim that low IQ test scores among African populations
indicate severely
diminished average intelligence among those populations. Rushton (2000)
places these
claims in a behavioural and evolutionary context, one paralleled by
similar explanations
applied to poor and relatively powerless populations in other parts of the
world and
supplemented by data of other kinds. Rushton’s model posits quite major
behavioural
differences among the different continental populations, and especially
between tropical
African populations and the inhabitants of temperate and Arctic Eurasia.
The magnitude
of these differences is such that they should be detectable
archaeologically, and indeed
Rushton presents archaeological evidence that he believes bolsters his
case. His archaeological
interpretations are for the most part obsolete and/or erroneous.
However, Rushton is probably correct in claiming that such a magnitude of
racial
differences should be demonstrable archaeologically. Archaeological data
provide an
independent test of his hypothesis, one not subject to the obscuring
effects associated with
modern mental testing and interpretation. Examination of archaeological
data on the culture
history of African populations, and comparison of those data with data
from other parts of
the world, yields no evidence for the behavioural and cognitive
disparities claimed by
Rushton. African cultural history is entirely comparable with that of
other regions of the
world, not in terms of lockstep evolutionary schema but rather in the
evident sophistication
with which African populations have met the challenges of their physical
and social
environments through time. To interpret the conflict between these two
data sets, it may be
useful to examine possible confounding factors in the behavioural and
psychometric data.
The behavioural data are quite variable and often of poor quality, but it
is striking to note
that the field of intelligence testing is grappling with a phenomenon
analogous to continental
differences in IQ test scores – the Flynn Effect. In both cases, testing
across cultural
boundaries yields results that systematically disadvantage populations
culturally removed
from our own, results that on their face defy logic. It is now up to
intelligence researchers to
identify the confounding effects in their tests, and let archaeologists
and other researchers get
back to looking at the Africa that actually exists today, and existed in
the past."
Related pages: Egypt-
a tropical civilization
http://knol.google.com/k/mainstream-academic-research/tropical-peoples-developed-one-of-the/3q8x30897t2cs/30#
