Ride 'Em, Jesus!
Mike Riggs | June 17, 2008, 11:46am
For those of you who can't get by without your daily dose of H&R irreverence, here are some fascinating cultural artifacts:
"A Supreme Court in Georgia ruled that high school biology teachers were permitted to continue using the term 'evolution' when teaching their classes. However as a compromise, they must now refer to dinosaurs as 'jesus horses'." -Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live, Weekend Update
What better way to turn a concept with frightening intellectual implications into a testament to the beauty of free markets than selling tee-shirts?
Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey on the Young Earth Creationist's love affair with the dinosaur. Managing Editor Jesse Walker on the secret lives of Creationist dinosaur parks.
Shout out to Chevans for the Digg link.
thoreau | June 17, 2008, 3:00pm | #
Intelligence almost certainly does have a large genetic component. The problem is when social darwinists start making generalizations about ethnic groups. There's also a social/environmental component to cognitive abilities, or at least the cognitive abilities that we measure when we ask people to perform tasks in a particular setting. Given that mean IQ scores for different groups have been known to change over time, it's hard to disentangle genetic and environmental factors,
at least for group comparisons.
Also, human history strongly suggests that groups (unlike individuals) probably do not vary too much in the genetic components of cognitive ability:
1) As much as we like to point to the intellectual contributions of various civilizations over time, even in the advanced civilizations of the past most people lived in villages, and only a small subset of the population got to participate in the cultural, intellectual, and scientific innovations that we point to. Which is not to say that villagers don't have to be tech-savvy (any skilled craftsman maintaining tools has technical aptitude), just that you can't point to the intellectual products of a particular civilization as evidence that the members of that group (and their descendants) have better genes.
2) For all of the cultural differences between groups, most farmers in villages have faced a lot of similar challenges in their daily lives, and hence probably faced similar selection pressures. Ditto for fishermen and herders. And farmers, fishers, and herders account for most of the recent ancestors of most modern humans.
3) The ethnic groups that we think of today are large conglomerates of people with different histories and selection pressures: Within an ethnic group you will find people descended from farmers, herders, city dwellers, villagers, craftsmen, traders, etc. And going back through several centuries of an individual's family tree you'll probably find all sorts of ancestors from all sorts of social strata, inter-marriage, etc.
It's plausible that we might find different genes with intellectual significance if we compared, say, an isolated population that spent millenia farming with an isolated population that spent millenia herding. However, if that population was not isolated, and over centuries of changing economic circumstances went through different phases and migrations, then it's likely that the modern members of that group are descended from a variety of individuals who faced a variety of selection pressures.
So color me skeptical that evolution has much to say about intellectual differences between groups, at least when we're talking about large ethnic or racial groups with complicated histories.
