With all due respect, it seems like you're taking offense to the hereditarians and using the vernacular "dumb" where I don't believe they do. Perhaps their ethnography is impoverished and therefore their theorizing for why IQ differences have emerged incorrect. It would be interesting to read better informed theorizing for these differences. Surely the Bushmen have evolved a type of intelligence that as you say is different than what is measured by IQ and similar tests. Nevertheless, IQ remains a useful measure of the type abstract reasoning that is predictive of many positive modern outcomes at the individual and group level. Isn't this broad result something that should be dispassionately considered by anyone interested in understanding the different rates of modern economic and social development around the world?
I think we have done great damage to our ability to understand the world and its diversity by conflating IQ with all types of intelligence and conflating that with intrinsic human worth. The latter conflation is rightly considered repugnant, and the emotional response leads us to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I disagree with "Surely the Bushmen have evolved a type of intelligence ... different than what is measured by IQ."
There are a few possibilities:
1.) IQ only measures performance on IQ-test-like activities and not other cognitive skills.
I think this is implausible; there's a lot of evidence from Western countries that "practical" non-school-like skills, such as those involved in mechanical jobs or in the military, correlate with IQ tests.
2.) IQ scores correlate with a wide range of cognitive skills *in countries where going to school is the norm*, but they are obviously inapplicable for hunter-gatherers who have never been exposed to pencil-and-paper tests.
Under this hypothesis, you would expect things like:
*if you can detect any inter-individual variation at all between hunter-gatherers on an "IQ test", the better scorers should also be better hunters
*if you came up with a hunter-gatherer-style problem-solving challenge to give to Westerners, the Westerners who did best would also have higher IQs on traditional tests
Following the chain of logic back upwards from Scott's recent post through Emil's post he links, wouldn't it be good to clarify how much of the correlation in (1) is due to "syndromic retardation"? I expect a shallower slope if you remove the syndromic dysfunction group.
(I do agree with you in expecting some positive correlation between IQ and local signifiers of wisdom/prowess in a group of hunter-gatherers, whether or not you could validly compare cross-culture, and whether or not that would be a similar correlation as between IQ and Western practical skills.)
The thing about the hunting challenge is that it involves more of a physical factor than the IQ test. Since hunting involves stamina and athleticism to some degree, using it as a test for intelligence on peoples who haven't hunted for a living in say at least 3,000 years will not be likely to show a positive correlation with intelligence. So there could be many Westerners or East Asians who are bad hunters yet good at IQ stuff. There's a lot of academically challenged world class athletes, and a lot of physical-fitness challenged scientists( although obviously some lucky ones are proficient in both).
Having lived or worked with indigenous peoples on three continents, and having known several Nobelists, I found they share at least one tangible characteristic of intelligent people: they could all perform and/or explain extremely complex matters in extremely simple ways.
Our IQ tests are not as broadly applicable as its advocates imagine them to be, but their predictive value remains high for parameters that we deem highly significant.
There's nothing "intuitive" about modern mechanics to the human brain. Just because most schools don't teach "Auto 101" doesn't mean your standard Western education of mathematics/physics isn't extremely applicable to understanding the intricacies of a car. And neither correlates at all with the skill of hunting game in the Kalahari.
Impressive though the skills you've documented in this post are, none of them are evidence of Bushmen being about as intelligent as Euros. It's mostly a matter of being able to keep up with the physical demands of hunting, and an ability to copy what works from your elders. Not coming up with novel solutions to old problems, nor coming up with new solutions to old problems. Cool and useful though that grass filter is, it's nowhere near as cool nor as useful as a fucking waterwell, which produces vastly more and noticeably cleaner water. So much so you can actually build permanent settlements, and eventually even cities. The white and yellow races of Man started building those in the fucking Neolithic era. Hence why when Euros settled there in the 17th Century, they built the most developed and sophisticated state in the history of the continent.
Every one of us is only smart about our own world. This essay made me think of pilotage navigation and the cognitive faculties needed to use the sea and rivers, not just for fishing but for trade and movement. The inferential evidence for humans doing it is ... old. Older than Homo sapiens. In fact, all that fish protien has likely played a key role in the evolution of our brains, so no ancient people fishing, no Bell Curve of any sort.
This shows just how stupid "cold winters theory" is. People like Lynn, Frost, and other "HBD" thinkers have clearly not read the ethnographic literature. What's more, polygenic scores have now shown that cold weather hunter-gatherer lifestyles had NO IMPACT on IQ or any measure of genetic inherent intelligence. Only agriculture in cool, rainy climates seems to have selected for IQ.
However, it does not disprove that IQ is useful. IQ pretty clearly correlates with success not just in abstract jobs like banking, law, etc., but also in very nitty-gritty and hands on tasks in the military. That's reason to believe that high IQ Europeans would also be quite competent, if raised from birth in that lifestyle, as hunter-gatherers. On the other hand, I don't know whether a Khoisan child raised from birth in a European context would be very good at the jobs of our society.
The response to Bushmen should be asking why groups can degenerate so drastically, questioning how much of it really is purely hereditary, and asking whether you're missing a key piece of the puzzle.
With all due respect, it seems like you're taking offense to the hereditarians and using the vernacular "dumb" where I don't believe they do. Perhaps their ethnography is impoverished and therefore their theorizing for why IQ differences have emerged incorrect. It would be interesting to read better informed theorizing for these differences. Surely the Bushmen have evolved a type of intelligence that as you say is different than what is measured by IQ and similar tests. Nevertheless, IQ remains a useful measure of the type abstract reasoning that is predictive of many positive modern outcomes at the individual and group level. Isn't this broad result something that should be dispassionately considered by anyone interested in understanding the different rates of modern economic and social development around the world?
I think we have done great damage to our ability to understand the world and its diversity by conflating IQ with all types of intelligence and conflating that with intrinsic human worth. The latter conflation is rightly considered repugnant, and the emotional response leads us to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I disagree with "Surely the Bushmen have evolved a type of intelligence ... different than what is measured by IQ."
There are a few possibilities:
1.) IQ only measures performance on IQ-test-like activities and not other cognitive skills.
I think this is implausible; there's a lot of evidence from Western countries that "practical" non-school-like skills, such as those involved in mechanical jobs or in the military, correlate with IQ tests.
2.) IQ scores correlate with a wide range of cognitive skills *in countries where going to school is the norm*, but they are obviously inapplicable for hunter-gatherers who have never been exposed to pencil-and-paper tests.
Under this hypothesis, you would expect things like:
*if you can detect any inter-individual variation at all between hunter-gatherers on an "IQ test", the better scorers should also be better hunters
*if you came up with a hunter-gatherer-style problem-solving challenge to give to Westerners, the Westerners who did best would also have higher IQs on traditional tests
Following the chain of logic back upwards from Scott's recent post through Emil's post he links, wouldn't it be good to clarify how much of the correlation in (1) is due to "syndromic retardation"? I expect a shallower slope if you remove the syndromic dysfunction group.
(I do agree with you in expecting some positive correlation between IQ and local signifiers of wisdom/prowess in a group of hunter-gatherers, whether or not you could validly compare cross-culture, and whether or not that would be a similar correlation as between IQ and Western practical skills.)
The thing about the hunting challenge is that it involves more of a physical factor than the IQ test. Since hunting involves stamina and athleticism to some degree, using it as a test for intelligence on peoples who haven't hunted for a living in say at least 3,000 years will not be likely to show a positive correlation with intelligence. So there could be many Westerners or East Asians who are bad hunters yet good at IQ stuff. There's a lot of academically challenged world class athletes, and a lot of physical-fitness challenged scientists( although obviously some lucky ones are proficient in both).
Why is it repugnant?
Having lived or worked with indigenous peoples on three continents, and having known several Nobelists, I found they share at least one tangible characteristic of intelligent people: they could all perform and/or explain extremely complex matters in extremely simple ways.
Our IQ tests are not as broadly applicable as its advocates imagine them to be, but their predictive value remains high for parameters that we deem highly significant.
There's nothing "intuitive" about modern mechanics to the human brain. Just because most schools don't teach "Auto 101" doesn't mean your standard Western education of mathematics/physics isn't extremely applicable to understanding the intricacies of a car. And neither correlates at all with the skill of hunting game in the Kalahari.
Impressive though the skills you've documented in this post are, none of them are evidence of Bushmen being about as intelligent as Euros. It's mostly a matter of being able to keep up with the physical demands of hunting, and an ability to copy what works from your elders. Not coming up with novel solutions to old problems, nor coming up with new solutions to old problems. Cool and useful though that grass filter is, it's nowhere near as cool nor as useful as a fucking waterwell, which produces vastly more and noticeably cleaner water. So much so you can actually build permanent settlements, and eventually even cities. The white and yellow races of Man started building those in the fucking Neolithic era. Hence why when Euros settled there in the 17th Century, they built the most developed and sophisticated state in the history of the continent.
Every one of us is only smart about our own world. This essay made me think of pilotage navigation and the cognitive faculties needed to use the sea and rivers, not just for fishing but for trade and movement. The inferential evidence for humans doing it is ... old. Older than Homo sapiens. In fact, all that fish protien has likely played a key role in the evolution of our brains, so no ancient people fishing, no Bell Curve of any sort.
This shows just how stupid "cold winters theory" is. People like Lynn, Frost, and other "HBD" thinkers have clearly not read the ethnographic literature. What's more, polygenic scores have now shown that cold weather hunter-gatherer lifestyles had NO IMPACT on IQ or any measure of genetic inherent intelligence. Only agriculture in cool, rainy climates seems to have selected for IQ.
However, it does not disprove that IQ is useful. IQ pretty clearly correlates with success not just in abstract jobs like banking, law, etc., but also in very nitty-gritty and hands on tasks in the military. That's reason to believe that high IQ Europeans would also be quite competent, if raised from birth in that lifestyle, as hunter-gatherers. On the other hand, I don't know whether a Khoisan child raised from birth in a European context would be very good at the jobs of our society.
Fascinating!
I'm also always fascinated by the tendency of scientists to just grab their favorite measurement tool and apply it to explain basically everything
The response to Bushmen should be asking why groups can degenerate so drastically, questioning how much of it really is purely hereditary, and asking whether you're missing a key piece of the puzzle.
Fair. Reread with an open mind