Nubian
Pyramids (Wikicommons - Petr Adam Dohnalek). In classical
antiquity, contacts with black Africans were largely with Nubians, a people who
already enjoyed a high level of material culture.
A
decade ago, Jason Malloy noted a curious fact: the ancient world did not see
sub-Saharan Africans as less intelligent, despite the existence of other
stereotypes, like macrophallia (Frost 2009, see comments; Thompson 1989). A
stereotype of low intelligence is recorded in only two Greco-Roman texts, to the
best of my knowledge. One is a reference by Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 AD) to the
Greek physician Galen (129-210 AD). The statement attributed to Galen does not appear in any of his works, at least not in those that have survived, and may be a false attribution.
We
have seen that Negroes are in general characterized by levity, excitability,
and great emotionalism. They are found to dance wherever they hear a melody.
They are everywhere described as stupid. ... Al-Masfiüdi undertook to
investigate the reason [for this]. However, he did no better than to report on
the authority of ... al-Kindi and Jalinus [Galen] that the reason is a weakness
of their brains which results in a weakness of their intellects. This is an
inconclusive and unproven statement. ... The real reason is that ... joy and
gladness are due to the expansion and diffusion of the animal spirit. Sadness
is due to the opposite. (Hunwick 2005)
The
other is the Christian parable of the Ethiopian woodcutter. The desert monk
Arsenius (350-445 AD) recounted how an Ethiopian went out to gather wood. When
the burden became too heavy, he put it down and continued to gather, but now
his load was even heavier. So he put it down and gathered even more (Wallis Budge
1907). This parable is from late antiquity and may reflect the growing influx
of black slaves into the Middle East during that period.
It
seems, then, that low intelligence was not attributed to sub-Saharan Africans during
classical antiquity, at least not often enough to become a stereotype. This
stereotype would emerge later, during late antiquity and even more so during
the Islamic period (Lewis 1990, pp. 46-47, 92-97).
I
suspect there were two reasons:
-
mean intelligence was probably lower in the Mediterranean world during
classical antiquity, perhaps in the low 90s. This would be consistent with the
apparently smaller size of its "smart fraction," in contrast not only
to Western societies in later times but also to ancient Greece in earlier times
(see July 13 post). In Roman society, intellectuals seem to have largely been
isolated individuals. They did not come together to hold regular conferences or
publish journals. While there were elementary schools, the ludus litterarius, there were no institutions of higher learning,
only private tutors. The difference in mean intelligence with sub-Saharan Africa
would have thus seemed smaller.
-
contacts with dark-skinned Africans were initially most frequent with Nubians,
who under Egyptian influence already enjoyed a high level of material culture
and were thus already being selected for cognitive ability. Contacts with
peoples farther south developed later, with development of the African slave
trade. This trade seems to have slowly but steadily increased in volume during late
antiquity and, subsequently, the Islamic period (Frost 2008).
Civilization and
intelligence
So,
beyond a certain point, does civilization actually select against intelligence?
The short answer: yes, in some cases.
Now
for the long answer. First, increased intelligence comes at a cost:
The
brain requires about 22 times as much energy to run as the equivalent in muscle
tissue. The energy required to run every bodily process comes from the food we
eat. Human brains are three times larger than our closest living relative, the chimpanzee,
and use up to three times the energy, but the two species have the same
metabolic rate. (Welsh 2011)
Because
of that high energy cost, any excess intelligence is under strong negative selection
and will decline noticeably—even over a few generations. Positive selection becomes confined to a minority of the
population as a civilization develops and moves toward specialization of labor,
i.e., the most difficult intellectual work is done by a minority while the majority
performs menial tasks.
Nonetheless,
we have examples of advanced civilizations, notably in East Asia from ancient
times and, later on, in Western Europe, where mean intelligence was and still is
quite high. Those civilizations likewise had specialization of labor. So what
made them different?
It
seems to have been a process of internal demographic replacement that Gregory
Clark described with respect to England and Ron Unz with respect to China. The
mean intelligence of an entire population will steadily rise if two conditions
are met:
1.
Fertility is higher in higher social classes.
2.
Class boundaries are sufficiently porous that the resulting demographic surplus
of these classes can move downward and replace the lower classes.
Historically
and cross-culturally, these two conditions were far from universal. In many
societies, surplus members of the upper class preferred to remain unmarried and
wait for a suitable high-status niche to open up. It was shameful to "lose
caste" and enter a niche lower on the social ladder. Nor was fertility
universally higher in higher social classes. In some cases, the rich and
powerful had fewer children because they could count on other means of support
for their old age. In other cases, they tended to congregate in towns and
cities, where infant mortality was higher. Finally, greater sexual access to
women often failed to translate into reproductive success because of
infertility due to STDs or because of a culture of debauchery and indifference
to married life.
Conclusion
With
ancient DNA and polygenic cognitive scores, we can now understand history in a
new light. Mean intelligence has risen and fallen during the time of recorded
history, and not simply because of migrant influxes. The people may have been
the same, and yet they really weren't:
Since
it looks like there has been significant evolutionary change over historical
time, we're going to have to rewrite every history book every written,"
said Gregory Cochran, a population geneticist at the University of Utah.
"The distribution of genes influencing relevant psychological traits must
have been different in Rome than it is today," he added. "The past is
not just another country but an entirely different kind of people” (Wade 2006).
References
Clark,
G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief
Economic History of the World, 1st ed.; Princeton University Press:
Princeton,
Hunwick,
J.O. (2005). A region of the mind: Medieval Arab views of African geography and
ethnography and their legacy. Sudanic
Africa 16: 103-136 https://org.uib.no/smi/sa/16/16Hunwick.pdf
Lewis,
B. (1990). Race and Slavery in the Middle
East. Oxford University Press.
Thompson,
L.A.(1989). Romans and Blacks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
China's
TFR before and after introduction of the one-child policy (Chaparro and Kulkarni 2015). Did
that policy really change anything?
The
European world has entered "demographic autumn"—on the one hand,
fertility rates have fallen below replacement level; on the other, non-European
immigration has risen progressively. These two trends can have only one
outcome.
A
similar demographic autumn is developing in East Asia. In some ways the situation
is worse—fertility rates are at their lowest here. The record is held by the provinces
of northeastern China, which have a total fertility rate of only 0.75 children
per woman (Wang 2018). South Korea has an estimated TFR of 0.96, and a
significant number of those births are to immigrant mothers from Southeast Asia
(Haas 2018). Japan is doing better only by comparison, with a TFR of 1.4.
As
for China as a whole, the rate is officially 1.6 and unofficially 1.05; the
authorities revise this statistic upward to include second children who go
unreported because they are illegal under the one-child policy (Wang 2018).
That policy was scrapped in 2016, yet those second children still seem to be in
hiding. Do they really exist? Did they ever? The Chinese government is stuck in
a classic quandary: what do you do when you realize you've not been telling the
truth?
The
truth is that China’s TFR is half of what it needs to maintain its current
population. This should be no surprise. In fact, it’s in line with what we see
in Taiwan (1.1), in Singapore's Chinese community (1.1), and in Malaysia's
Chinese community (1.3). Looking back, one can wonder whether the one-child
policy ever had much impact on the TFR (Chaparro and Kulkarni 2015). The decline
seems to have deep roots in modern Chinese society:
China
faces an intractable and protracted demographic crisis driven by millions of
individual family planning choices made by its increasingly wealthy and
urbanized population. Policies restricting births imposed by the authorities
have played only a contributing role in the drama. Similar aging trends can be
seen throughout East Asia, especially in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong — territories that never had the types of legal restrictions imposed upon
mainland Chinese couples.
[...]
The current relaxation of family size restrictions is simply too little, too
late. Before the policy was completely abolished in 2013, the Chinese
government relaxed the one-child policy by allowing 11 million couples in which
both spouses had no siblings to have two children. However, by May 2015, only
18 percent of eligible couples had taken advantage of the opportunity. This
shows to what extent China's declining fertility is driven by personal
considerations, as opposed to public policies.
In
October 2015, the country's National Health and Family Planning Commission
estimated that some 90 million families would qualify for the new, two-child
policy. By the end of the year, however, only two million families had applied
for permission to have a second child. China Daily conducted a survey in 2016
which showed that nearly 60 percent of working mothers do not want a second
child, citing time and energy needed to raise it. Other concerns of the women
included career risks, the pain of childbirth and little faith in their
marriages. (O'Reilly 2019)
This
problem is made worse by the gender imbalance: fewer girls than boys are being
born. China now has 33 million more males than females. Finally, there is no
reason to believe that the decline will stop at one child per woman.
Stumbling into the
future
China's
workforce is already shrinking, and the total population will begin to shrink before
the mid-2020s.The decline could be
offset by pro-natalist measures. For instance, men and women could be
encouraged to remain in rural areas and small towns, where conditions are
better for family formation. To deal with the shrinking workforce, there could
be measures to phase out low-paying jobs through automation and robotization.
Of course, there must first be a willingness to act. Unfortunately, such
willingness is far from evident, to judge by the current denial and inaction.
China
will stumble into its demographic future, with one ad hoc solution after
another. One of them may be immigration: "[China] currently hosts some
900,000 legal migrants and untold numbers of illegals, most of them factory
workers from Vietnam. Also, desperate Chinese bachelors, unable to find Chinese
mates because of the gender imbalance, are increasingly marrying Cambodian or
Vietnamese women" (O'Reilly 2019). This is not to say that immigrants will
be actively recruited. As is already the case, most will come illegally, being
lured by jobs and empty housing. The onus will then be on the authorities to
act—in the face of opposition not only from the business community but also
from the migrants' home countries, many of which provide Chinese industry with
valuable raw materials.
The
solutions will ultimately depend on the ideological environment. Westerners often
believe that the Chinese are intensely nationalist. In reality, there is a
range of views within China, with the majority supporting civic nationalism.
This is not coincidentally the view that the government promotes, partly out of
conviction and partly to co-opt Tibetans, Muslims, and other minorities. Meanwhile,
younger, university-educated people are moving toward the globalist consensus
that reigns in the West.
One
such person is Yinghong Cheng, who went abroad to study and is now a professor
at Delaware State University. His latest book has a chapter titled "Racism
and Its Agents in China" (Cheng 2019). In it he argues:
As
an ideology, racism or racial discourses do not exist for their own sake or by themselves
but always reflect power relations that may be addressed in other social
hierarchy-based or identity-related discourses. In China today, racial thinking
can appear in various discourses addressed to the political and ideological
needs of the party-state, cultural and intellectual elites, and ordinary
citizens: nationalism, patriotism, statism, social Darwinism, Han Chauvinism
(or Hanism), non-Han ethno-nationalism, populism, and the Chinese
civilizational supremacism in general (associated with the traditional
ethnocentrism of China). (Cheng 2019, p. 241)
Elsewhere,
he describes Hanism as “an ultra-ethnic supremacism” that “comes close to
racism in its way of essentializing differences in a condescending manner”
(Cheng 2019, p. 264). “The anti-Qing Hanist racism and a racial hierarchy of
the world are the twin of the discourse of race in modern Chinese history. Like
any other racial discourse in the world, they reflect power relations in
reality but construct imaginary orders for a racially ideal—or “natural”—world”
(Cheng 2019, p. 16). “… the Han political and intellectual elite exploited the
social science disciplines of history, archaeology, and ethnology to establish
the centrality of the Han blood and ancestors …” (Cheng 2019, p. 7).
Cheng
overstates his case when he describes racism as an ideology that always
reflects power relations. This is untrue if we examine its core value:
preference for one’s kind. Throughout history and prehistory, humans have cared
a lot about their kith and kin, even to the point of sacrificing their lives—and
this has been no less true in simple societies with no elite or ruling class.
Indeed, the oldest societies were essentially clans of related individuals. Furthermore,
kinship is key not only to human life but also to the lives of organisms
incapable of having ideas, let alone an ideology.
Please
note: I'm not arguing that kin preference is innate (although that argument can
be made). I'm simply saying that it predates ideology and has long been the
main organizing principle of society. Perhaps it's now obsolete. Perhaps it’s
time for us to become self-defining individuals in a global marketplace. That’s
the mainstream liberal argument. But that’s not Cheng's argument. He is arguing
that kin preference always was wrong, and now we finally have a chance to get
rid of it for good—by eliminating the "agents of racism." How this
elimination is supposed to happen is not discussed. Indeed, he never applies to
himself the sort of painstaking analysis he applies to others.
In
all this, Cheng’s thinking is strangely ahistorical. If kinship has always been
the basis for human society, perhaps there is a reason. Perhaps it has been the
best way to organize social relations. Or perhaps not. Could we at least have a
debate without being accused of base motives? Or being eliminated?
A
big problem here is cargo-cult reverence for the West, and this reverence
extends to the individualism and globalism that has become so dominant in North
America and Western Europe, particularly in elite circles. Cheng denounces
China for not doing enough to follow their example, while quoting Chinese
writers who point to the resulting problems. If that model of society is already
problematic in the West, where it has existed for a longer time, has deeper roots in
the culture, and has greater chances for success, why should it do better in a
country like China?
Cheng
further reveals his ahistoricism when he argues that racism suits elite
interests. Yes, it did back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
when elites were nation-based. But they haven’t been that way for some time.
Elites no longer have a national conscience, particularly in the West. Their
self-interest now pushes them to liquidate the nation-state, notably by
outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and by insourcing low-wage labor for
jobs that cannot be outsourced in construction, agriculture, and services. It
is this two-way movement—and not "racism"—that is steadily increasing
the Gini index, the most common measure of the gap between the rich and the
poor.
Do
China’s elites still have a national conscience? One can wonder. Unfortunately,
this question goes unanswered in Cheng's book. Only nationalism is seen as
problematic in the new China, and only nationalism is viewed as serving elite
interests. Yet globalism, too, exists within a context of power relations. It,
too, serves certain interests.
As
China's working population continues to shrink, will the elites push for higher
wages so that labor may be used more sparingly? Or will they keep wages down by
bringing in migrant labor? Which scenario is more likely if policymaking is in
their hands? And which scenario will get better coverage in the Chinese media?
References
Chaparro,
R. and K. Kulkarni. (2015). Does high population growth help or hurt economic
development? Cases of China and Pakistan. International
Journal of Education Economics and Development 6. 162.
10.1504/IJEED.2015.070629. https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJEED.2015.070629
Busts
of Greek philosophers (Wikicommons, Matt Neale). Did the Ancient Greeks have
the highest mean IQ of any human population then and since?
Francis
Galton argued that average intelligence had been much higher in ancient Greece
than in modern England. He came to this conclusion after comparing the
proportion of eminent men in Athens of the fifth century BC with the proportion
of eminent men in the England of his day:
It
follows from all this, that the average ability of the Athenian race is, on the
lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own-that is,
about as much as our race is above that of the African negro.(Galton 1869, p.
342)
This
high ability was then presumably lost:
We
know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this marvellously-gifted
race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly lax; marriage became
unfashionable, and was avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished
women were avowed courtesans, and consequently infertile, and the mothers of
the incoming population were of a heterogeneous class. (Galton 1869, pp.
342-343)
If
we accept Galton's reasoning, Ancient Greeks had the highest mean IQ of any
human population, something like 120 or 125. By comparison, Ashkenazi Jews have
an estimated mean IQ of 110. But was Galton right? His calculations were
criticized at the time, specifically for underestimating the number of Athenian
citizens. He consequently revised his calculation downward to 1.5 grades
higher, i.e., a mean IQ of 115 to 119 (Challis 2013, p. 56).
That's
still impressive. But higher IQ doesn't necessarily imply higher innate
intelligence. Conditions in ancient Greece may have simply been better for
intellectual discussion, such activity being respected as an activity in its own
right. By comparison, intellectual discussion was much more circumscribed in
the ancient Middle East, where it was confined to specific people who performed
specific duties, most often writing and copying texts at the request of others.
Admittedly,
this explanation does not exclude a genetic one. If the cultural environment
favors intellectual development, it will tend to reward the most promising
people with reproductive success. A scribe is thus praised in a Jewish wisdom
book from the second century BC: "Many
will praise his understanding; it will never be blotted out. His
memory will not disappear, and his name will live through all generations.Nations
will speak of his wisdom, and the congregation will proclaim his praise.If
he lives long, he will leave a name greater than a thousand."Book of Sirach [39.1-11].
In
the ancient world, 'leaving a great name' did not mean being written about by
historians but rather having many illustrious children to carry on the family
name long after death. Intellectual ability thus co-evolved with a supportive
cultural base. Indeed, we humans have co-evolved much more with our cultural
environment than with our natural environment (Hawks et al. 2007).
A new yardstick
Galton's
conjecture can now be tested with two new research tools:
1.
Ancient DNA. Large quantities of
genetic data have been collected from ancient human remains and are now being
made available to researchers. This year, the Reich lab at the Harvard Medical
School released over 2,000 ancient genomes, including 30 from ancient Greece.
2.
Polygenic cognitive score. Some gene
loci are associated with differences in educational attainment. By examining
the variants at these loci and by adding up the ones associated with higher
educational attainment, we can calculate a polygenic score that correlates with
mean IQ (r = 0.98).
By
examining 102 ancient genomes, a research team led by Michael Woodley of Menie
was able to chart the evolution of cognitive ability in Europe and Central
Asia. His team found that genetic variants for higher educational attainment
gradually increased in frequency from 4,560 to 1,210 years ago (Woodley of
Menie et al. 2017). Now, with newly released data from the Reich lab, he is
leading a research effort to look specifically at ancient Greeks. The results
are still preliminary, but they indicate a progressive increase in the
polygenic score from Neolithic to Mycenaean times, followed by a decrease.
When? We don't know because we lack post-Mycenaean data (Woodley of Menie et al.
2019). More to come ...
This
is a promising avenue for research. In particular, we need:
-
A larger sample of modern Greek genomes. This should not be difficult.
-
Samples from post-Mycenaean times to the end of Ottoman rule. Was Galton right
in placing this cognitive decline during the ensuing Hellenistic and Roman
periods? Or did it happen over a longer span of time?
The
final published paper should explain at greater length the research team's use
of a restricted polygenic score, i.e., a polygenic score based only on those
genetic variants that seem causally related to high educational attainment, and
not simply associated with high educational attainment. This approach is
acceptable if a third party had identified these variants; otherwise, there is
a risk of focusing on those variants that support Galton's hypothesis.
Another
point: in the presentation of his new project, Woodley of Menie spoke
repeatedly about population replacement at various times in the history of
ancient Greece (Woodley of Menie et al. 2019). Yet the current thinking is that
immigration was historically unimportant in Greece. Present-day Greeks are
largely descended from the Mycenaeans, with some later introgression by Slavic
tribes and other peoples (Gibbons 2017; Stamatoyannopoulos et al. 2017).
This
research is especially exciting because the Reich lab released ancient DNA data
not only from ancient Greece but also from elsewhere. History may end up being
seen in a new light. For instance:
-
Rome probably went through a similar increase in mean intelligence, followed by
decline. When did the decline begin? During the collapse of the fifth century?
I suspect earlier, perhaps in the third century. The barbarian invasions were both
a cause and effect in the collapse of Roman civilization.
-
The Enlightenment was due only in part to things like the invention of the
printing press, the voyages of discovery, and the founding of universities.
These were subsidiary causes that resulted from and supported a more
fundamental change: a steady increase in the smart fraction of European
societies—the proportion of people who enjoy reading, writing and, above all,
thinking.
References
Angel,
J.L. (1950). Population size and microevolution in Greece. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 15: 343-351.
doi:10.1101/SQB.1950.015.01.031
Woodley
of Menie, M.A., J. Delhez, M. Peñaherrera-Aguirre, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard.
(2019). Cognitive archeogenetics of ancient and modern Greeks. London Conference on Intelligence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UES_tpDxz9A
Nubians
(Wikipedia). After the last ice age, brain size decreased in
Europeans and East Asians. In western Europeans, this trend continued until
some time before 1800. No decrease is observable in a large series of crania
from Nubia.
In
my latest paper I argue that northern hunting peoples were the first to break
free from the cognitive straitjacket of hunting and gathering. Because women at
northern latitudes had few opportunities for food gathering, they took on new,
more cognitively demanding tasks, like garment making, needlework, weaving,
leatherworking, pottery, and kiln operation. This increase in task complexity,
led by women, provided these peoples and their descendants with the mental
toolkit for later developments: farming, more complex technology and social
organization, and an increasingly future-oriented culture (Frost 2019).
That
paper left out a key piece of evidence. As these northern hunting peoples
expanded southward into the temperate zone, they must have had excess mental
capacity, especially the women, who were now redirected toward the cognitive
demands of food gathering and, later, farming. Cognitive demand also decreased
for men, who no longer had to store huge quantities of spatiotemporal
information for tracking game and finding their way home. On the other hand,
men put some of this excess mental capacity to new uses, by exploiting many of
the technologies that women had pioneered.
So
is there evidence of decreased cognitive demand after the last ice age? According
to a study by Maciej Henneberg (1988), brain size steadily shrank from the
Mesolithic to modern times, on the order of 9.9% for men and 17.4% for women.
This is consistent with the reduction in cognitive demand being greater for
women than for men.
Henneberg
ignored the sex difference, preferring to attribute the decrease in brain size
to a corresponding decrease in body size for both men and women. This
explanation has been challenged by John Hawks, who reanalyzed Henneberg's data
and showed that the decrease in body size explains only one-fifth to
one-seventh of the one in brain size. He also showed that the declining ratio
of brain size to body size did not affect all human populations. In fact, it
can be securely demonstrated only for Europeans and Chinese. Indigenous
southern Africans and Australians may have had similar declines, but the sample
sizes are too small to conclude with certainty. No overall change is seen in
the one case where we have a large cranial sample from a non-Eurasian population
(Nubians):
A
large series of crania from ancient Nubia covers the period from roughly 3400
years ago to 600 years ago [20, 21]. Samples show a slight trend toward
decrease in the major length, breadth and height measurements from Iron Age
(Meroitic, external cranial module 145.2) to Medieval (Christian, external
cranial module 143.9) times, but the intermediate series of crania (X-Group,
external cranial module 147.1) is somewhat larger in these dimensions than
either of the other groups. In this context it would be misleading to speak of
a reduction in cranial vault size in this region. (Hawks 2011)
A recent reversal
This
trend reversed itself at some point in time, apparently before the 1800s. Jantz
and Jantz (2016) and Jellinghaus et al. (2018) found an increase in brain size
from at least 1800 in Germans and 1820 in white Americans. When I asked John
Hawks, he attributed this reversal to improvements in nutrition and a reduction
of childhood disease. That, too, was what I thought, initially.
But,
then, the reversal would surely have been stronger in women than in men. If
brain size had decreased twice as much in women, shouldn't the rebound have
been twice as strong in women? Yet this is not what we see in the brain size of
Americans born from 1820 to 1990: "Both sexes changed, but female change
was less pronounced than male change" (Jantz and Jantz 2016).In Germans born between 1800 and 1950, no
clear sex difference was observable in the magnitude of this change over time
(Jellinghaus et al. 2018).
Both
Jantz and Jantz (2016) and Jellinghaus et al. (2018) are skeptical that these
changes could be explained by improvement in nutrition or reduction of
childhood disease. Infant mortality is a good proxy for both, and it did not
begin to decline until circa 1900. At the very least, the increase in brain
size should have accelerated during the twentieth century, yet it didn't
(Jellinghaus et al. 2018).
Conclusion
Our
knowledge on this subject comes largely from Maciej Henneberg, who concluded
that brain size had decreased in all human populations and that this decrease
continued into modern times. Both conclusions have been disproven. The decrease
did not affect all human populations, and it had already reversed by 1800 in
northern Europeans, as shown by two recent studies on white American and German
samples. Perhaps the reason lies in changing patterns of natural selection. After the last ice age, northern hunting peoples had excess mental capacity, particularly the women. This excess capacity enabled them to create and exploit new and more complex social environments—farming, towns and cities, civilizations … It was still more than what was needed, however, and a long-term decline set in. Then, in early modern times, this decline reversed in western Europeans, and brain size once more began to increase. Why? Perhaps this is related to evidence, summarized in my last paper, that mean intelligence steadily rose in western European societies during late medieval and early modern times.
Hawks'
study is the only comprehensive critique of Henneberg's work. Unfortunately, it
has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. When asked why, he replied:
"I did not feel it was necessary to pursue formal journal publication for
this, because I did not think it fit well into the journals at the time."
When asked why he had removed a post on that study from his weblog (it was put
up in 2012 and taken down in 2017), he answered: "I used to have a section
on my blog for research manuscripts that were in prep, but I decided to
discontinue this as I became involved in more collaborative work."
Is
there another reason? I can understand not publishing a post because other work
is more pressing, but why delete an existing post? What made it less blogworthy
by 2017?
The
study in itself seems uncontroversial. Indeed, it leads to the amusing
conclusion that European brains got smaller while Nubian brains remained
unchanged. But talk about "smaller brains" can trigger some people,
and John Hawks is already viewed with suspicion because of his work with Henry
Harpending and Greg Cochran. Henry once told me—not long before his untimely
death in 2016—about the mounting pressures he was facing to discontinue his
research. Have similar pressures been brought to bear on John Hawks? One may
wonder. The last three years have seen a remarkable escalation of deplatforming
and outright violence in the name of "antiracism." When Steve Sailer
(2019) charted the number of New York Times articles that mention the word
"racism," he found that this number took off during the mid-decade,
rising from 291 in 2011 to 2,353 in 2018. The mentions also changed
qualitatively, becoming much more vociferous.
Today,
John is a tenured professor, yet he is now much more reticent to say what he
thinks than when he was a graduate student. His example should be sobering. The
pressure to be "correct" doesn't end when you get tenure.
References
Frost,
P. (2019). The Original Industrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for
Cognitive Ability? Psych 2019, 1(1),
166-181 https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010012
Hawks,
J. (2011). Selection for smaller brains in Holocene human evolution. arXiv:1102.5604 [q-bio.PE] https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.5604
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