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Algernoq comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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Maybe Africa is smarter despite the score... I just realized there's another reason why a chart like the above wouldn't answer this question:
We have to ask "Might being under really tough selection pressures actually make a population smarter than they appear?"
First half of my point: Say we accounted for all the details and we discovered that a particular group had been through it all. You have to wonder how the hell they survived. More intelligent people more likely to survive hard circumstances, aren't they? Maybe it depends which circumstances. But my thought is that a population of people that's been surviving something really, really hard might end up having it's genes influenced by natural selection, so that there are way more bright people. Second half of my point:
Combine this with another thing that affects IQ and you'll see where I'm going with this:
If a person has depression, for instance, that can lower their IQ score 30 points until the episode of depression ends. They might have a lot of IQ points in there that we can't see because their IQs are suppressed by stress - not permanently damaged, just suppressed.
If stress can lower your score substantially, then a population might require a larger reserve of intelligence if it is going through something awful. What if you're depressed AND at war AND survived starvation, AND weren't schooled, etc. To be able to accomplish an IQ score of even 85 might take a genius after going through all that. So, they could have a population of geniuses over there, and we wouldn't know. Because we, over here in civilized land, have no idea where to even begin guessing what AMOUNT of IQ suppression a combination of factors so terrible would have, especially because they'd probably multiply each other.
So, if we looked at a population that had been through a heck of a lot, and they don't score very well, does that mean that they're dumb (as in born that way, or permanently stuck there), or that they are, in fact, super smart (say, IQ 140) but that the EXPRESSION of that is suppressed because they're so ridiculously stressed out?
So, we could look at this another way: What IQ would it take to go through all the hell an African has gone through and survive it?
Why would you think this? Intelligence is metabolically expensive, and pays off only in the long run (consider how much of a life you can 'waste' getting an education). Putting people into a resource-pressured poor quality environment would seem to select for more immediately useful traits like aggression or growing up very quickly (and hence, investing in poorer quality body parts or less of them, like being shorter).
If there were a lot of resources on average but the environment fluctuated a lot, then there might be evolutionary pressure for intelligence: but this does not describe Africa too well and better describes very northern countries like Scandinavia where you can freeze to death but agriculture or fishing etc still yield lots of food. The book does discuss this theory and run some regressions in its favor. (I've always been a little dubious: it seems to me that it largely depends on European countries for most of its value...)
One example: the population is Ashkenazi jews, and the environment is the racist world we live in. It's not clear how much is cultural and how much is genetic, though.
What? If you have in mind things like the Holocaust, remember that the causation goes the other way around. Success breeds resentment, rather than resentment breeding success. Jews are a market-dominant minority, and across the world market-dominant minorities are subject to violence and resentment.
Jewish intelligence is likely due to their particular economic and social position in the middle ages, where they had long-range trust networks that facilitated moneylending and trade, as well as a religious prohibition from marrying with the locals that meant they would specialize more towards their ecological niche. (And it seems likely that they picked that niche because it was a particularly pleasant one, not that they were forced into it by oppression.)
Thanks, it's good to know about market-dominant minorities.
I'm not sure what to do with this information...it seems to accurately describe the situation but is also very disturbing, for two reasons: First, it sounds like blaming the Jews, in that if they were a model (politically-weak) minority instead of a market-dominant minority they wouldn't have been scapegoated for Germany's economic problems, which is terrible (but I'm pretty sure you just are trying to describe the real world, with no value judgments whatsoever meant). Second, I am apparently one of the oppressors of today. Most Americans don't think much about the poor people who make the stuff they buy, or who get exploded by the weapons their military develops.
"Is" doesn't lead to "should", and there's no legal obligation to seek out opportunities to save lives, and I don't have enough power now to make a meaningful difference, but it's really hard to say "I don't care what other people think; I'm going to do what I want!", when every normal American day I burn enough money to support a few impoverished families. If I gave up some luxuries, I could save peoples' lives, but if I give in to that it means the end of my dreams, and would not necessarily do the most good. Most people choose not to think about these things.
Is it time to jump off the slippery slope? I falsely equate being selfish with being evil, because it feels like the cost of embracing selfishness is, to quote Steven Pressfield, to "wind up alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to." But, being unselfish ends with my death with nothing meaningful changed, and refusing to choose, while easy, is a non-option. I need to not die, and to know the meaning of life, and I want to help others to the extent possible. Owning my place in the real world is painful but seeking oblivion through distracted and unhealthy living, because of my unwillingness to own my place as a subordinate fiend, is worse.
The Ashkenazi Jews are still a small population, though. And intelligence may be an reproductive advantage in their niche, but that's only one niche. If you don't like the example of the Holocaust, consider the Khmer Rouge going after anyone who seemed intelligent.
The Khmer Rouge were dramatic, but I'd bet money that simpler forces have played a greater role in the evolution of intelligence since the Neolithic. As you say upthread, intelligence is metabolically expensive, and it seems likely that it shows some fairly steep diminishing returns in a subsistence farming environment -- particularly since its gains there are distributed over large populations. If a mutation gives you a chance of dying in a childhood famine and a much smaller chance of coming up with an agricultural innovation that might save your kids (and the rest of your village, but your mutation doesn't care) from dying of childhood famine, it's no advantage from a gene-centered point of view.
(On the other hand, if being good at Torah study is sexy in your subculture, then sexual selection might make up the difference.)
That's true comparing chimps to humans. I am not sure that's true comparing an IQ70 human to an IQ130 human.
Why wouldn't it be? Some of that increase might come from gains in efficiency, but precisely because brains are metabolically expensive, I'd expect most of the low-hanging efficiency gains in mammalian brains to be mined out already. Brute-force gains are limited by more than just energy, but I'd expect most architectural improvements to come with energy tradeoffs, too. When you get right down to it, something's got to do the computing.
Is there any evidence for it?
Is there any evidence against it? Not to play reference class tennis here, but given the choice between magic efficiency gains and continuing a curve that we can project out from the lower primates, the latter seems like the more reasonable null.
It seems like a relatively straightforward empirical question whether BMR correlates with IQ. I have no idea if it does, but maybe somebody who knows more neuroscience will chime in?
I would definitely expect metabolic cost to vary with brain size or neuron count or something, but AFAIK that varies relatively little between humans (compared to humans vs other primates). It's much less clear that better software or architecture is also more expensive.
No, not really. You can point to increased number of neurons, increased brain energy consumption, etc. for humans compared to primates very easily. I don't think you can point to the same thing for IQ130 humans compared to IQ70 humans. I don't have any hard data, but it doesn't seem to me that all the extra-smart people have unusually large heads and eat more than usual.
I don't buy the argument that the evolution must have optimized for intelligence already. The ability to e.g. hold a complicated structure in your mind wasn't particularly valuable for a pack of proto-humans in the African savannah.
If there was no metabolic difference between building an IQ70 brain and an IQ130 brain, why would there be any effects from micronutrient deficiency?
Remember, expensive isn't limited to adult basal metabolic rates, there are other ways to be expensive; for example, a better brain could suck up tons of iron, iodine, and protein in childhood, requiring lots of meat and fat and seafood, and if a fetus or child's metabolic needs are not met, whups, there goes some myelination (fat), some non-cretinism (iodine), some energy and lassitude (iron and protein)...
Also cranial capacity is in fact correlated to iq
Well, hypothetically, if we have a chip fab, and it has a "micronutrient deficiency", it can produce noisier circuits that don't consume less power, or which would even consume more power.
It would seem that there are some basic requirements which need to be met to build the brain correctly, requirements that are proportional to the brain volume, with no gains from exceeding those requirements. One could further hypothesise that those requirements are met in almost all "IQ130" brains.
Sure. Chip fabs probably even have 'micronutrient deficencies' in a very similar way - if you can't get enough of the exact right exotic element or mineral for say doping semiconductors, the engineers can probably work around it but won't get as power-efficient or fast a chip. (Now I'm imaging correlating chip fab 'brain damage' to global commodity prices...)
I don't think deficiency in dopants can ever arise, though, as they're used in incredibly tiny amounts.
For micro-nutrient deficiencies the issue is often not so much with obtaining the micronutrient as with the lack of craving for it. We can smell iodine, but we don't crave it when deficient, so we didn't have seaweed and the like as a high value spice which everyone craves.