The Problem of the Bushmen

The principle challenge bedeviling the attempt to bring nations and peoples out of poverty is the seemingly intractable problem of how to even out the great disparities in wealth among the various nations on Earth. For every South Korea and its rapid rise from poverty, there are half a dozen like Uganda or Bangladesh that remain mired in poverty in spite of any number of programs and billions of dollars in aid thrown at the problem.

The most popular explanation for differences in economic development between different nations and people discounts genetic factors. Nations are helped or handicapped by their geographic location, it is believed, location that shapes human destiny without handicapping the genes of the people who live there.

Jared Diamond, in his best-selling book Guns, Germs, and Steel, is one of the leading proponents of this theory. Diamond offers compelling reasons why the technology and disease load of Europeans made them able to conquer distant civilizations and not vice versa. The technology did not come from the superior intellect of the Europeans, but from accidents of geography. In the book, he discounts entirely the role of inherent genetic differences between populations. As an example, he anecdotally states how intelligent he found the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and how they are just as curious and inventive as any that he’s met elsewhere. Based on his interactions with these lively, interesting people, he makes the observation that the Papuans are likely even more intelligent than Europeans.

IQ studies, however, have shown that the average IQ in New Guinea is eighty-four. How is this so? How can these individuals appear so highly intelligent to a man such as Diamond, how can they survive in a realm of constant internecine war, cultivate a diverse group of crops, manage a complex set of tools and language, and yet suffer an average IQ that would count them as mildly retarded in a European population?

read the rest:

http://theopinionator.com/Politics/bushmenproblem1.html

Just the idea is enough to cause some people to want to hurl firebombs and equally incendiary words.

There are some things we do know. IQ is largely a function of what you're exposed to; few people have their IQ decrease with age (until senescence, at least), and it's possible to crank some aspects of IQ with training. The IQ tests I've taken have either measured verbal knowledge, math reasoning, or spatial manipulations; any IQ test is, at best, partial. Moreover, Diamond has a keep appreciation for different cultures. Many such have trouble comparing cultures, since all they can do is non-judgmentally appreciate.

Diamond's GGS begat the later "Collapse", because it was obvious that he didn't actually quite show what everybody said he proved in GGS. Geography is a precondition for technological advancement, but not sufficient: given sufficient food, sufficient exchange with others, etc., and you can still have a relative dud (by most standards) of a civilization. On the other hand, you can also have a relatively isolated group do some outstanding things.

For example, the European Middle Ages saw a huge amount of advancement in Europe, sometimes taking things transmitted to them through Muslim lands from truly distant countries and finding uses that neither the originators, nor the Muslims, thought of, while at about the same time the 'brilliance' of Islamic civilization was peaking and about to start seriously waning. Same genes, same trade ties, but the culture and utilization of resources altered. In both cases the peasants had hellish lives; but in one case the scholars were after knowledge; in the other, they wanted to make their lives easier. This was unpredictable, given knowledge of anything but culture--and not the culture of the entire 'civilization', but of the class most likely to innovate. Perhaps Collapse can account for it, but I vaguely remember thinking as I read it that Diamond didn't come close. There's this unquieting sense that he managed to account for some pretty important preconditions for a nice civilization, and some pretty important conditions at the time of a civilization's flowering that can lead to its undoing, but that there's still something that he can't say: There's no claim that creating all the preconditions *must* create a flourishing civilization if the other conditions are met. Just that they're necessary, most of the time. His books end, still begging the real question. There's no hint that it's genetics, however.

I remember being taught that not all 'cognitive universals' are truly universal, or learned by members of different cultures at the same rate. So Wolofs came to 'quantativity' late, if the research I read about was valid. Why this was so was unanswered; presumably the researcher wanted tenure.

On the other hand, that there are some genetic differences between 'races', for all their similarities, is also hard to argue against. Meso-Americans do better with certain diets; Europeans learned to deal with lots of starch and sugar millennia ago, and have much lower rates of diabetes than the people more-or-less indigenous to the SW US and Mexico, all things being equal; this has to be accommodation of the Mexican group to their diet, and recent accommodation by Europeans to theirs (in the last 10k years). Some blacks have greater sodium retention, whether due to conditions from the Middle Passage or where their ancestors originated. Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans have differing average proportions of the two types of muscle in their leg muscles, but those groups have been separated by 50k years or so. There's some evidence some proteins targeted by drugs vary by race. Some genes affecting brain development--it's still unclear what they do--have a geographic distribution showing that they innovated, and spread, at different times after emigration from Africa. Since the difference between us and more primitive species of Homo is putatively developmental, the latter are scary findings. But only moderately so.

What the author fails to show any evidence for is a rather different experiment from the one he suggests. Take me and a San and put us in wilderness, the San will probably live, and I might well die, since a San is trained to survive on his/her own and find food. If I don't die, I'm likely to produce a more comfortable dwelling, given my training. But both depend crucially on training. The real test would be to take two groups of European neonates (for example) and two groups of !Kung neonates, and cross them: give a European + !Kung group the same training in, say, a hypothetically color-blind Wichita school system, and a different European + !Kung group the same training in San folkways. Develop tests for both sets of people, and administer them. Searching for such differences one would, of course, pair either the !Kung and probably either Europeans or S. American indians (or any one of those with Aborigines), since they're probably among the oldest and therefore divergent pairings. But the test would have to be run soon--many Aboriginal groups are near extinction, under Euro-Asian pressure; and the Bantu have pretty much laid claim to just about the last San homeland, finishing what amounts to a long-term (1500 years) genocide campaign.

But in the absence of such a test--which would have to be replicated quite a few times, but won't ever be conducted even once--the default assumption has to be that any differences are vanishingly small. Snazzy statistical analysis might tease the differences out of data, but first we'd have to eliminate a lot of confounds that currently can't be eliminated.

Edited to correctly abbreviate "Guns, Germs, and Steel" as "GGS", not "GSS".

That's an excellent post. You should be a contributor to Gene Expression. Of course we can't run your hypothetical experiment since we're talking about humans, but it amounts to an interesting thought experiment.

Re: international development, I've often thought the easiest and cheapest way to affect change in Africa would be to provide iodized salt. It would be as close to free as any aid program comes and would virtually eliminate the iodine deficiency cretinism that affects millions throughout the continent. It's obviously just one step, but it's so easy and with such obvious benefits I can't believe it hasn't yet been done.

You wrote, "Same genes, same trade ties, but the culture and utilization of resources altered."

Have you read Wade's book? It's not at all clear that the Europeans did possess the same genes at the time of the Renaissance that they did a thousand years earlier. For example, recent studies have shown that Ashkenazi Jews underwent intense pressure for many generations that pushed their IQs to the point where they average 3/4 of a standard deviation higher than white Europeans. It is possible that the Europeans themselves were undergoing similar, albeit less intense, selective pressures at the same time. Wade notes a similar genetic change that has been under selection in East Asian societies that has been linked to increased brain wattage.

human cultural differences are cultural, not genetic. Since "IQ" is itself a cultural artifact, I question whether one can use it to establish genetic differences among populations, or whether establishing such differences in that way is useful. It is simpler to infer that the differences are cultural, that is, the results of acculturation from infancy. Since human cultures also have a strong xenophobic "tendency", it would appear difficult to actually test the null hypothesis by cross-raising populations of infants identically. For this reason, I find the whole issue somewhat questionable. Of course I realize it is folly to expect it to change.

However, it does seems to me that that the obvious and correct way to study human genetic variation is to examine it directly, since we now can do that. If in doing that one finds differences that seem relevant to issues of general and special intelligence of certain types, then you have a factual basis for discussion. Absent that, it all seems a bit unscientific, to put the kindest interpretation on it.

That said, it seems reasonable to think that environmental pressure could and would affect what we call intelligence in various ways, and that could and would affect a breeding population's statistical genetic structure, and so on. But none of that tells you anything of predictive value about any individual anywhere or anywhen.

all the differences are cultural; and any differences would, of course, be statistical in nature. That's why I'd structure the experiment, unlike the guy quoted in the OP, to look for divergences from that null hypothesis, and for my saying the test would have to be repeated for different cohorts. I've seen lots of research that just says the null hypothesis isn't wrong; most of it isn't publishable.

A null hypothesis is just the bull's eye. There are lots of lower-level things disconfirms this particular kind of null hypothesis. But we keep the null hypothesis because there's no clear alternative. It's a useful heuristic device, assumed true even if badly dinged.

The problem is that it's only been dinged for lower-level things--percentage of types of muscle tissue, predisposition (statistically defined, of course) for hypertension or diabetes; and we know that there's a genetic component to language, Specific Language Impairment (SLI) tells us that fairly clearly. And twin studies have shown that a lot of higher order cognition is also somehow genetic or development based on pre-birth factors. But even the stats for lower-order things like diabetes were and are subject to all sorts of confounds and problems. So it's no wonder that there are quibbles and argumentation about the twin studies, and even defining exactly what cognition is can be a bit of a problem. Then again, if you go back to 1350 you'd find physicists working in terms of culturally-imposed units of weight, and they'd all be assuming that weight was a primitive; to say that weight is useless because it's culturally determined, and seems to vary by place and context, doesn't get us very far. If we know enough about the conditions a weight was determined in, we can work out the mass and do some nifty calculations (even if they are purely Newtonian); the null hypothesis was that problems with weight weren't idiosyncratic, but regular, and could be determined, 'weight' did measure *something*. Even for all the problems, weight is good enough for lots of things. I figure IQ tests are like weight.

The really serious problem is that we don't have the genome sequenced for enough individuals to readily spot the lower-order things we know to be true, and their distribution--and even that might not let us know how the difference is actually implemented in adults. Same for SLI--even if we knew the specific genes, that wouldn't tell us what to look for in the fmri scans of those affected by it, and we'd still have to figure out how the structural or biochemical differences surface as the behavior indicated by SLI. So I agree--ideally we'd go from first principles. But for now it works the other way 'round--just as we knew the gas laws before we could derive them using statistical mechanical methods, and categorizing the macro-level phenomena gave us insight into what the low-level processes were.

There are actually some interesting questions and possibilities still for exploring group-level linguistic and cognitive differences that might exist, but which the well defended null-hypothesis says must, by definition, be pointless. But that's always what happens when the null hypothesis is defined as true. The research can't be done, even with blunt measurement tools that might allow us to refine them, because (a) the research before was agenda-driven and abused, and (b) the modern research is assumed to necessarily be agenda-driven and of necessity abused. (Speaking personally, I'd love to know about some linguistic differences: there's one that's undescribed in the literature that's been driving me and my wife crazy--my father and I have it, it's a sharp reduction in the amount of recursion I allow in embedded clauses; after one 'cycl'e, the sentence is complete gibberish, and no amount of explaining the grammar helps me in the least. Now, how common is this in "Irish Americans"? Europeans? Some other group that's lurking in my ancestry? World-wide? The question cannot be asked, because this particular null hypothesis is sacred.)

It's a messy business, not well understood, fascinating, and very personal. "IQ tests are like weight" is a good description, perhaps a bit kind to IQ tests, but the right idea. All measures have a certain arbitrariness about them, and they should be dealt with in a skeptical and utilitarian way, not taken as fundamental structures.

I personally think that, on the one hand, we should be less taboo-ridden in discussing these issues, I mean what is more important? And the other hand we should disconnect that discussion COMPLETELY from any considerations of the worth and legal status of particular fellow humans.

from any considerations of the worth and legal status of particular fellow humans."

I whole-heartedly agree.

Too bad it'll never happen; even academics that know they should keep them separate have trouble implementing the idea.

useful an indicator of intelligence as trying to measure the IQ of a westerner by dumping him in the New Guinea forest with nothing except his pecker to keep him company and seeing how well he was able to survive.

But an effective IQ test is not culturally biased. It's relatively simple to come up with one that is culturally appropriate. Give the professionals a little credit.

How could it not be biased? If it were biased, how would any member of the culture that produced the test be able to tell? Is there some sort of objective measure one can apply to test cultural bias, or is it that one just "feels" that a test is unbiased?

http://www.liberalartsandcrafts.net/contentcatalog/social/bias.shtml

http://www.wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBias.html

http://academics.hamilton.edu/government/home/government_375/sp97/Race&Testing/rt4.html

There are many more. One might be able to make the case that it is possible to make an IQ test that is not culturally biased but your assertion that it is relatively simple is certainly not true and it is "the professionals" who say that. Think about it - most of these studies are talking about individuals who at least were living in the same country and they found rampant cultural bias in IQ testing. Now we are going to take a test developed by westerners and administer it to a bushman? That is preposterous on the face of it. There is little agreement on how to DEFINE intelligence in one culture, let alone measure it across cultures.

I think that's the whole point. Intelligence, as it has been defined in so-called "civilized" society, involves a whole bunch of things that are meaningless to a hunter gatherer society. As Wade points out, there is no point to have Newtons and Einsteins in a hunter gatherer society, while the mental ability to do mathematics, on the other hand, has been very useful throughout history. If you were to take me and put me in the Kalahari with no resources other than my brain, I would almost certainly die. If you were to take my son and the son of a !Kung bushman and raise them in a !Kung tribe, Wade would say that the !Kung child would be better adapted through hundreds of generations to that environment, regardless of upbringing. Physically, he would be better able to handle heat, extreme sunlight, and thirst and mentally he would learn more quickly about herbs and tracking. In that context, my son would be the slow, maladapted one.

However, that's not what's happening. What is happening is that tribal cultures are being forced to join the settled societies of the world and not vice-versa. Just as my genes are poorly evolved to survive in the Kalahari, I have a tremendous advantage when it comes to living in a densely populated society where I meet strangers on a regular basis and my society no longer practices internecine warfare.

when the few remaining hunter-gatherers are much in demand for their specialized skills ...
Nature abhors monocultures.

Such as when civilization collapsed from our inability to regulate our numbers and manage our resources wisely.

People who can do the village agrarian thing might look a lot "smarter" some day too. I suppose it would depend on how many of us are left, how much of technical culture get "saved". But it is stimulating to contemplate how much of what we "know" would be utterly useless in a post-petroleum-collapse period. Unfortunately, I won't be around for that, but I do hope to watch part of the transition.
:hi:

Granted, the weeds are a bother, but the feeling of digging in the dirt, improving the soil, watching the plants grow, harvesting the produce ... well worth it.

Bushmen aren't as dumb as this guy thinks. Remember N!Xau, the star of "The Gods Must Be Crazy"? For the first movie he was paid a few hundred dollars. He was so ignorant of currency he let it flutter away in the wind. By the time the director planned a sequel, N!Xau had wised up. He demanded several hundred thousand dollars, so he could build a house for his wives and children.

The write in the OP foolishly confuses what the people in a culture know and what their culture is what what the people in a culture could know and what their culture could be.

The null hypothesis (that there are no cognitive differences), however, is little better founded than his (spurious) assertion that differing skill sets shows cognitive differences. The null hypothesis is taken to be correct simply because no attempts at a serious empirical challenge has been brought against it; this is completely different from having no serious empirical challenges brought against it. That the challenges haven't been brought is reasonable; there are so many confounds that producing the evidence would be tough, not to mention the 'political' environment. Consider the 'Bell Curve' folks, who tried such a challenge; while they inevitably ran afoul of not considering all the possible confounds, they more seriously ran afoul of politics. But the other side--that since no evidence has been brought, it shows the default assumption is correct--is just as foolish. It may be good public policy, but it's lousy science.

Hahahahahahahaha

But seriously, history doesnt prove that white people are special.

any given color or teeth shape or hair-cross-section shape are special, if you want to actually draw a probably valid generalization.

But I don't think you're arguing against the guy's contention.

Of course they are special if by special you mean specially adapted to their specific environment. Human populations in Africa and Europe have evolved a lactose tolerance, Africans and Mediterranean populations have independently evolved malarial resistance, and populations have evolved to deal with everything from high altitude to a lack of winter sun. One has to be blind not to see that people of West African decent are superior sprinters, or East Africans are superior distance runners or Europeans have superior upper body musculature. This is not a description of individuals but of a bell curve value within certain populations.

And none of this says anything about the worth of individuals. The problem remains, however, that the hunter-gatherer tribes are unfortunately being forced to conform to so-called civilized society and not the reverse. Thus, the problem of how to intigrate the Bushmen is not so simple as giving them their immunizations and making sure they have a good kindergarten teacher.

the post I was replying to was simply wrong.

"But seriously, history doesnt prove that white people are special."

I took this not to mean things like mutations for skin color or teeth shape, but sort of the race's 'character'. Whatever that might mean.

"I took this not to mean things like mutations for skin color or teeth shape, but sort of the race's 'character'. Whatever that might mean."

Yes, I don't know what that means either, especially since a cultural character is mutable over time. For example, are Danes bloodthirsty Vikings or are they peaceful socialists? Did the change from bloodthirsty Viking to peaceful socialist occur because of cultural changes or because the peaceful sort kept their heads down and farmed and traded while the violent elements of society got themselves killed at a younger age? Or maybe some combination of the above.

(Speaking as a guy of Danish ancestry who is neither bloodthirsty or a socialist, but hopefully peaceful.)

There is no such thing as race, it is a cultural fiction rooted in economics (the need for slaves, slaves have to be "different" from us non-slaves) and human xenophobia. There are, to be sure, breeding populations, of greater or lesser isolation, but the range of variations among humans is remarkably small, and the notion that you can say much of anything deep about any human based on surface characteristics and the culture and geography of their ancestors is crap.

From a fellow descendant of bloodthirsty vikings.