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Via Matthew
Every now and then, I notice someone, often an anthropologist, saying that human cognitive capability just has to be the same in all populations. According to Loring Brace, “Human cognitive capacity , founded on the ability to learn a language, is of equal survival value to all human groups, and consequently there is no valid reason to expect that there should be average differences in intellectual ability among living human populations. “
There are a lot of ideas and assumptions in that quote, and as far as I can tell, all of them are wrong. First, you really need to note that populations today sure look as if they differ in average intellectual ability. They vary a lot in measured IQ: almost three standard deviations from lowest to highest. Some pairs of populations show big differences in scholastic results, and interventions to the tune of tens of billions of dollars haven’t had much effect.
Populations vary tremendously in the fraction that contributes original work in science and technology – and that variation mostly agrees with the distribution of IQ. Which is what you would expect, really - the fraction that exceeds a high threshold drops rapidly as the population mean decreases.
Nobody knows exactly what drove the evolution of human intelligence. That includes Loring Brace. In particular, nobody knows that it was just one factor, and certainly nobody knows that it was just one factor that was effectively uniform worldwide. Mind you, even that wouldn’t be enough.
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