About 200,000 years ago all humans were archaic bushmen, and given excellent nutrition in those days, these had an IQ around 67.
By 70,000 years ago, a few of the Bushmen had wandered out of Africa. Some of them wandered South towards India and Australia where they remained in warm environments and thus didn’t change much. A few headed North into the middle east. When the first winter hit; there was massive devastation as the bushmen struggled to adapt. 99% could not and in just a few months, the population dwindled down to almost zero. Only a few geniuses survived since they had the intelligence to make fire, sew boots, and build clothing and shelter. The children of these genius survivors of the first Middle-eastern winter were the first non-white caucasoids, and 70,000 years ago, these had an IQ of 77, which at the time, made them the smartest modern humans in the world.
A few of the non-white caucasoids tried to enter Europe where they were confronted by neanderthals. The non-white caucasoids were taller and faster than neanderthals, but scrawnier and weaker, so physically it was a wash. But neanderthals had the mental advantage, having had their wits sharpened by tens of thousands of years in Europe. Realizing they were no-match; the non-white caucasoids hid in the forests of Europe where they were exposed to even colder winters than they experienced in the middle east. By 50,000 years ago, they had evolved into the first whites, who at the time had a mean IQ of 86.
Packing an IQ of 86, they emerged from the forests of Europe ready to take on the neanderthals who also had a mean IQ of 86. But the whites had something the neanderthals lacked: language. The neanderthals were brutally slaughtered.
With their wits sharpened by killing off virtually all the neanderthals, about 30,000 years ago some of the whites had the confidence to enter the freezing Northeast Asia. Some of the brightest non-white caucasoids decided to join the trip too. When the caucasoids entered Northeast Asia, they were confronted by a blizzard so extreme, they couldn’t even see. Virtually everyone died except for a few geniuses who figured out how to adapt, as well as some caucasoids blessed with a rare skin mutation that protected their eyes from the blizzard. Since the geniuses and and the people with the skin protection were the only survivors, they mated and their children were the first Mongoloids. At the time these had an IQ of 92, making them at the time, the smartest people in the world.
By 10,000 years ago, the ice age began to recede. Thanks to the ice age, the mongoloids and caucasoids were now all smart enough to discover agriculture, however only the non-white caucasoids had both the brains and the fertile soil to make it happen. Once the non-white caucasoids invented agriculture, their population exploded and they suddenly produced freak high IQ mutations humanity had never before known. This raised their IQ by 13 points to 90, making them virtually tied with the mongoloids as the smartest people on Earth.
Packing an IQ of 90, they created the first civilization, and went around the world spreading agriculture. When the whites, mixed with the non-white caucasoids, they too inherited these new agriculture induced mutations, raising their IQs from 86 to 99. When the genes spread to East Asia, IQ jumped from 92 to 105; however the gene never spread all the way to the Americas, so those mongoloids stayed at 92.
When the genes spread to sub-Saharan Africa, average IQ jumped from 67 to 80, but some “black people” such as the capoids and the australoids, were too geographically remote to get the mutation, so these stayed around 70.
However ironically, just as the agriculture gene was making everyone 13 points smarter, agriculture itself was so unhealthy that brain size and complexity shrunk dramatically from malnutrition. Everyone who got the 13 point genetic boost also got hit by a 20 point decline caused by malnutrition.
However by the 20th century, nutrition had skyrocketed. Brains got bigger, people got taller, and those lost 20 IQ points came flowing back. This is known as the Flynn effect. However in the third world, nutrition still hasn’t come close to recovering.
Joburg average June-July temperature = 39.4 F.
London average January temperature 41.4 F
Rome…45.5 F.
GET OFF YOUR FUCKING INTELLECTUAL ASS.
Interesting but see the chart in my previous post for the relevant temperatures
it isn’t interesting, because it isn’t true.
39.4 F is the average low not the average. the average low in London and Rome is lower although only by a degree or two.
It’s somewhat deceptive to compare the night-time lows, as the days are much much warmer in Johannesburg.
The overall average temperature in the coldest month in Johannesburg is the about the same as the overall average throughout the year in York. Berlin similar.
okay well humans have been using fire for FAR longer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans
clothing also earlier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing#First_recorded_use
so all you’ve got right now are shoes…
shoes………..the reason we survived. only the “geniuses” could make shoes, apparently. who knew?
There’s a difference between some rag & warm insulated clothing. Sewing is relatively recent
you’re saying that people, who had been wearing animal hide and fur before, somehow became retarded and only the ‘geniuses’ would make the leap to sewing? knowing how to wear and make hide clothes requires lots of smarts. smarts humans already had. they were already hafting and everything before they left Africa.
you’re hanging your hat now on sewing?
most bodyheat is lost through one’s head, speaking of hats. a simple hat would have gone much further than sewing.
‘70,000 years ago’
This is your timeline for the geniuses “sewing.” Sewing arose ~30k years ago.
…
All of this stuff seems cobbled together while ignoring the facts.
Much simpler explanation is that humans already had the smarts when they moved wherever they moved. They adapted, not because of rapid bottlenecks blah blah blah, but because they were already smart.
even shoes weren’t around 70k years ago. so these geniuses somehow survived without sewing or shoes….
And building sturdy insulated shelter that can survive a snow storm? No easy task
Building a better mouse trap is not that hard. it’d be one thing if humans had not come up with the mouse trap before leaving. but that’s not the case…
I sometimes wonder if this blog is a subtle joke…
Lol, well it is.
And not that subtle
Pumpkin, read this (very important): http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/racial_variation_in_some_parts_of_the_skull_involved_in_chewing/
And this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture
Jaws got smaller as folks moved north but cheekbones got more prominent
Did you read carefully?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16485300
Refer to the table 3:
http://www.femininebeauty.info/ethnic-comparisons/face-front
“Jaws got smaller as folks moved north but cheekbones got more prominent”
You just need to explain why East Asian have stronger jaws than Europeans.
Astor,
What is highest education you ever achieved? What size of bike helmet do you wear? Have you ever done IQ test on yourself? What is your IQ score?
Get a feeling that you might not be very high on any of them,
Oh, really? And you based on that feel to it?
My IQ is between 105-110, I never measured the circumference of my skull, but I am a descendant of northern Italians, by chance my IQ to be higher than yours, redneck.
‘Once the non-white caucasoids invented agriculture, their population exploded…’
Minor tangent here —> Indirect parroting of the party line re: the invention of agriculture. Agriculture was a wash for humanity until very, very recently. Everybody remembers/knows Jared Diamond (citing Lee)—>
One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”
No agriculture, no class inequality. No agriculture, no widespread malnourishment. How many hunter-gatherers die from famine and starvation? Very few. How stooooopid does a people have to be to die from such? Probably pretty stoopid.
More importantly and back on point….hunting and gathering takes smarts. There are a ton of hunt-gather strategies. That’s why it’s ludicrous to say that human beings were just so flabbergasted by the cold that only the ‘smart’ survived. They had developed a lot of smarts to survive already.
‘Thanks to the ice age, the mongoloids and caucasoids were now all smart enough to discover agriculture, however only the non-white caucasoids had both the brains and the fertile soil to make it happen.’
Also untrue. Sub-Saharan Africans had the smarts to create agriculture.
‘ On the African continent, three areas have been identified as independently developing agriculture: the Ethiopian highlands, the Sahel and West Africa.’
These are non-white caucasoids?
According to michael hart, non-white caucasoids from west asia introduced agriculture to black Africa. They did not invent on their own, according to him.
On the other hand, in my opinion, once they were allegedly given agriculture their genetic IQs jumped from 67 (bushmen level) to 80 which is more than enough to have invented it since some australoid types invented it despite having a genetic IQ around 73
The reason agriculture took so long to emerge is the very climates that are good for agriculture lacked people who were smart enough to think of it
Only after the most recent ice age did you get the right IQ in the right climate & it occurred multiple independent times
‘According to michael hart’
According to consensus, it developed independently, so he’s in the minority.
There is no consensus:
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2013/07/farming-was-so-nice-it-was-invented-least-twice
And it wouldn’t mean much if there was. Science is not a democracy
“The Revolution developed independently in different parts of the world, not just in the Fertile Crescent.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution#Agriculture_in_Africa
Independent development is the current paradigm.
And yes, scientific consensus does mean something. Argument from authority is only a fallacy in deductive reasoning. We are not engaged in deductive reasoning. We are engaged in inductive reasoning. Expert opinion does, in fact, increase the probability of a proposition being true, so long as the expert’s opinion is on or within his area of expertise.
Science is the collection of such arguments. X observed A and recorded it as A, I observed A and recorded it as A — I combine X’s opinion on a matter with my own, and so on and so on for peer review. Because human beings are only capable of interpreting observation and forming opinion (no one has ever perfectly described the metaphysical world apart from our senses), that is the best we can do.
Expert opinion does, in fact, increase the probability of a proposition being true, so long as the expert’s opinion is on or within his area of expertise.
So in order to be intellectually consistent you should argue that that black-white IQ gap is at least partly genetic since a famous anonymous poll of educational psychologists found a majority thought it was
And I have yet to see a poll showing the majority of agriculture experts anonymously believe it emerged independently among sub-Saharan Africans
‘So in order to be intellectually consistent you should argue that that black-white IQ gap is at least partly genetic since a famous anonymous poll of educational psychologists found a majority thought it was’
A phrase like “partly genetic” is almost meaningless. But, yeah if the current consensus is X, then that is support for that position. And I haven’t ever argued that there wasn’t some genetic component to the gap — whether that genetic component consists of reacting better to different environments or if it’s just a set ranking is hard to say.
‘And I have yet to see a poll showing the majority of agriculture experts anonymously believe it emerged independently among sub-Saharan Africans’
Sub-saharan Africa is typically given as one of the regions where agriculture independently developed.
This history of yours just underestimates humanity as a whole. Humans were smart from the jump.
If humans were smart from the jump, why didnt we invent agriculture for the first 190,000 years of our existence & why didn’t we invent civilization for the first 195,000 years?
‘If humans were smart from the jump, why didnt we invent agriculture for the first 190,000 years of our existence & why didn’t we invent civilization for the first 195,000 years?’
Life quality was better in hunter-gatherer society, my guess.
life in an agricultural society pre-modern probably sucks. less leisure time, less equality, less fun, less health. people who rely on agriculture starve like idiots…
Life quality was better in hunter-gatherer society, my guess.
But civilization is what ifentifies humans as intelligent. By your logic any animal could be considered just as smart; they just choose not to modernize
‘But civilization is what ifentifies humans as intelligent’
I think civilization is what makes studying the past easier/possible. I don’t think it’s the main marker of human intelligence. Self-awareness, consciousness, language, etc. are what mark us as intelligent.
Living in very big groups with complex social rules, too. Chimp groups are like 50. Human groups, even nomads, get up to the hundreds.
Humans, generally, are smart. Humans, generally, can adapt very well. That is why you can’t give an individual the same or even a too-similar IQ test twice. That’s probably why the Flynn effect is real — if IQ is measuring assimilation/adaptation to a culture, then these gains are just the result of humans generally being smart.
The reason why we look at incidents like the potato famine or Jamestown and think ‘cold climate’ must take high IQ is because we are products of a society built around agriculture. Humans who have lived their lives in nature can survive it no sweat. Overcoming nature does not take super smarts.
‘any animal could be considered just as smart’
No. Those animals don’t possess what humans possess. They also probably won’t do as well in as many environments as humans, generally.
Must admit I’m have trouble finding evidence for a consensus that agriculture emerged independently among sub-Saharan Africans. I found one source that said it didn’t but maybe they have an agenda:
Agriculture was developed independently in five regions of the world, and all of them can be linked to the macro-haplogroup K, and even more specifically to haplogroup MP (except China which is NO).
– The Fertile Crescent (Levant + Mesopotamia) : haplogroups R1b and T (+ E1b1b, G2a and J)
– The Indus valley : haplogroups L and R2
– China : haplogroups N and O
– The Americas : haplogroup Q
– New Guinea : haplogroups M and S
I think you might be confusing consensus with Wikipedia
No, I’m not.
http://books.google.com/books?id=wjOyxUzKWLAC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=did+sub-saharan+africa+developed+agriculture+independently&source=bl&ots=pzQCyqsxEm&sig=Ot2IHUwQojvWSAQsz7W_0Zjq0t8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=leKAVPLxB4_moATU3YCgAQ&ved=0CFAQ6AEwCTgK#v=onepage&q=did%20sub-saharan%20africa%20developed%20agriculture%20independently&f=false
That’s a textbook. 2012.
Your source is a forum post.
It’s such a consensus that the only link you can find is some obscure textbook. LOL! And you didn’t even link to the relevant page; just an overview of the book.
In any event, Michael Hart offered a coherent rebuttal:
In neither Europe nor India was agriculture developed independently. It has been
suggested that it was invented independently in tropical West Africa and/or the Sudan,2
but the chronology makes this highly unlikely. We know that agriculture was being
widely practiced in the Fertile Crescent by 9 kya, but it was not practiced in tropical
West Africa until about 5 kya. In the intervening millennia, it had spread to Egypt
(about 8 kya) and to Ethiopia, and from there across the Sudan, reaching the western
Sudan about 7 kya.
‘It’s such a consensus that the only link you can find is some obscure textbook. ‘
It’s not obscure. It’s in use at several universities… Lol indeed at you even typing ‘obscure’ after relying on a forum post…up is down, left is right, etc. etc.
‘In any event, Michael Hart offered a coherent rebuttal:’
It may be coherent in the sense that he has indeed said something, but what he said is not the consensus.
and it’s not the only link or textbook out there to support it….
the fact that there is a textbook with such information that is recent should be evidence of its popularity and acceptance. sheesh.
Whenever man domesticated animals, the animals became more stupid but more obedient compared to the wild population (dogs, cows). If man domesticated itself with religion and culture, then man should have become more stupid but more obedient.
With that said, all this talk of agriculture increasing or decreasing iq can only be solved by comparing encephalization quotients. Other body parts have decreased in size but became more efficient like the human digestive system.
Where is the evidence that non-white Caucasoids “went around the world spreading agriculture”? It’s possible that the ancestors of Europeans did get agriculture from the Middle East, because they both cultivated dry grains and Europe isn’t too far from the Middle East and the Mediterranean is both part of Europe and the Middle East. But it’s less clear that Asia’s wet-rice cultivation, which involves flooding plains and multiple steps of transferring seedlings, came from a general idea of agriculture from came from somewhere else. Maybe it did. At any rate, the human groups that went over the Bering thousands of years ago did not bring agriculture with them (if they were farmers, they would have been smart enough to stick with poor quality grains over the slim possibility of catching small rodents by wandering North into a blizzard–half a loaf of bread is better than none). So these Native Americans invented agriculture on their own–and in fact, they arguably made the greatest contributions to world agriculture–where would we be without corn in all its varieties, without potatoes and french fries and so forth? Actually, most of us wouldn’t even be around but for the population explosion caused by the high-caloric value of corn and potatoes, post-1600. Even more amazing is how the Native Americans came up with corn. We know the wild-type varieties from which cultivated grains and vegetables were developed. Except for corn. Even modern geneticists have not figured out where corn came from, and cannot pinpoint a wild-type plant from which corn was developed. My take-home point is that those Indians or Native Americans or whatever you want to call them were pretty darn smart. They didn’t need the pre-agriculture IQ genes to develop corn and adapt it to pretty much every climate they encountered, from the plains of Massachusetts to the near-desert of New Mexico to the highlands of Peru. Nor did they need the IQ genes that might have come from population explosions elsewhere–Incan and Mayan civilizations emerged completely independently of any other civilization. The Mayan calendar is one of the most accurate ever invented. Maybe corn cultivation did produce a population explosion that led to rare IQ mutations, maybe not. Probably didn’t matter–they’d already created corn!
My analysis was brief & oversimplified. I think non-white caucasoids did spread agriculture to a lot of populations & spread high IQ mutations to even more, but certainly mongoloids created agriculture independent in the Americas & possibly Asia too
Native americans accomplished a lot overall; but no more than non-white caucasoids & less than whites & East Asians
Which ‘Natives’ do you mean?
“Where is the evidence that non-white Caucasoids “went around the world spreading agriculture”?
Most of the agricultural plants grown in Europe and Africa are derived from plants native to the middle east.
it is indisputable that peoples native to cold climates have the largest heads in the northern hemisphere. this is true of the Inuit and of Mongolians, both of whom are quite poor and un-accomplished as peoples.
in the southern hemisphere: Tasmanians and Fuegians are both extinct, but I assume the Tasmanians did NOT have large heads. there are photos of Tasmanians, are there photos of the putatively GIANT Fuegians?
the large head is a direct adaptation to cold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen%27s_rule
the brain is an energy hog. it generates a lot of heat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate#Biochemistry
so higher intelligence may be a “spandrel”. a bigger head usually means a bigger brain. and brain volume does have a significant correlation with IQ scores. but then again the Irish have big heads and were categorized by Lynn as a low IQ population. today the Irish have a higher standard of living than the British and score as high on IQ tests. (thank you Ron Unz.)
Fuegian
Tasmanian
an irishman with a huge head
in fact the cleverest two guys i knew in school were both Irish Catholics.
and i din’t go to a Catholic school.
nor did i live in a Catholic dense municipality.
the Jews i went to school with were UN-impressive but super “motivated”.
another super smart guy had a smallish head. he was a Quaker.
look at all those GINORMOUS headed Irish…
AND!
in Western Ireland…the poorest, most backward, most likely to speak Irish part of Ireland!
of course perhaps pp might claim it’s the Irishman’s fondness for drink.
it’s not a myth. Ireland is one of the best places in the world to open a liquor store. but i doubt it’s genetic either. even Plomin has said alcoholism has a negligible genetic component.
drink a bottle of Chartreuse pp, and see God.
it’ll cure your atheism and temperance simultaneously.
stat crux dum volvitur orbis!
Jensen made the opposite argument. That a large head is disadvantageous everywhere but it’s especially disadvantageous in warm climates because it overheats like a lightbulb
So not only did warm climates not select too much for high IQ according to Jensen, but they especially selected against big heads which indirectly selected against IQ
As for Inuits having lower accomplishments than expected from their brain size; i think because they were isolated from the rest of humanity & had limited genetic variation, the only way they could evolve enough IQ to survive the cold was through huge brain size. Lacking post-agriclture mutations for brain efficiency there brains had to be extra big to reach the same IQ that a smaller more efficient brain could reach.
they do have huge heads, but the correlation between brain volume and head size is much less than perfect. do they also have huge brains?
Elephants have big heads. End of argument.
See, all else being equal big brain is good. And all else being equal, big head means bigger brain. The key here is ‘all else being equal’. An example for you lastly, if you take a tasmanian and a european, all else is NOT equal.
bears have big heads.
triceratops had a big head.
what do Danish schools teach?
consistency is not pp’s forte:
1. she claimed cold by itself has no effect on intelligence, then she claimed it did.
2. she used SAT scores to estimate the intelligence income relationship, then claimed the SAT was just a test for rich kids.
3. she claimed the Flynn effect is due to nutrition AND that “genetic IQ” has declined according to measures of reaction time. why would IQ be affected by nutrition and reaction time unaffected? NO explanation. pp is a racist moron.
but she is right in a sense about the bushmen from what i’ve read. they are to the human tree like Albanian is to the Indo-European language family tree. BUT this does NOT mean than the original humans looked like bushmen. it just means the Bushmen are descendants of the original humans without any radiation. they’re one branch-less branch of the human family tree.
1. she claimed cold by itself has no effect on intelligence, then she claimed it did.
I think I’ve consistently claimed cold is a major correlate of population IQ, but it does not explain all the group differences. But cold combined with geographic isolation or ancestral population size combined with nutrition explains virtually all the major group differences.
. she used SAT scores to estimate the intelligence income relationship, then claimed the SAT was just a test for rich kids.
That’s because the SAT gave much bigger IQ differences between the rich & poor than even i was expecting.
3. she claimed the Flynn effect is due to nutrition AND that “genetic IQ” has declined according to measures of reaction time. why would IQ be affected by nutrition and reaction time unaffected? NO explanation.
Why is brain size affected by nutrition & reaction time not? Why is spatial IQ affected by nutrition & verbal IQ not? When nutritrients are scarce, our physiology evolved to prioritize
it may be worthy of note that both northern Europeans and Fuegians are/were very tall and robust in comparison to the Inuit who tend to be short and shaped like weebles in accordance with Allen’s rule. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeble
and of course it’s not just Neanderthals.
there are homo erectus (neut. pl. homina erecta?) all over the old world including the cold north…
and yet…
modern humans developed in the warmest part of Africa.
given the examples of other top level predators like lions and tigers and wolves…
it seems that work isn’t what selects for intelligence.
what selects for intelligence is leisure.
one daft anthropologist has even gone so far as to suggest that language and the huge human brain are like the peacock’s tail, the result of sexual selection. the girls just can’t resist the guys with a good rap.
a map of homo erectus sites
Jensen mentioned that homo erectus was too stupid to adapt to the freezing cold of north east Asia
Also homo erectus probably had fur. By contrast humans adapt at the behavioural level (we make a fur coat ) so you can’t compare
OBVIOUSLY one can compare.
why did AMHs evolve in the warmest part of Africa from homo erectus and not in the colder places where homo erectus lived?
this disproves the your un-theory.
Speaking of “genius”
An anecdote of Feynman in response to Willy Fowler saying quasers would be supermassive stars:
“´Feynman immediately rose, astonishingly, to say that such objects would be gravitationally unstable. Furthermore, he said that the instability followed from general relativity. The claim required a calculation of the subtle countervailing effects of stellar forces and relativistic gravity. Fowler thought he was talking through his hat. A colleague later discovered that Feynman had done a hundred pages of work on the problem years before. The Chicago astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar independently produced Feynman’s result—it was part of the work for which he won a Nobel Prize twenty years later. Feynman himself never bothered to publish. Someone with a new idea always risked finding, as one colleague said, “that Feynman had signed the guest book and already left.””
Effort effort effort.
why did AMHs evolve in the warmest part of Africa from homo erectus and not in the colder places where homo erectus lived?
Probability. H erectus was far more numerous inside Africa than out which increased the odds of a rare mutation (for language?) occurring there
this disproves the your un-theory.
Hardly. Neanderthals who had larger brains than AMH & were more technologically advanced until 45,000 years ago evolved in Eurasia . AMH did not catch up until we had spent about 20,000 years outside Africa & even then, our advantage was probably language, not IQ
small populations evolve more quickly than large ones.
pp’s has no theory at all.
pp has a very very low IQ.
thenceforth pp should be referred to as “Anne Elk”.
she surely looks like John Cleese in drag.
small populations evolve more quickly than large ones.
Mutations spread through small populations faster, but when there is extreme selection from the cold and everyone lacking high IQ mutations dies, that matters little:
http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/abstract/S0169-5347(13)00232-2
Small populations evolve faster via genetic drift. Big populations evolve faster via natural selection because there’s more variety to select from. Duh.
LOL, kill de white people, you’re wrong about intelligence being sexually selected. Criminals today leave behind more kids than average and criminals have lower intelligence on average. Based on pure sexual selection, iq would be chosen against. That means intelligence was selected for because of lower mortality rates.
i’m not wrong moron, because i never said it was.
anyway…
criminals TODAY…
get it?
TODAY.
Human sexuality hasn’t changed. The economic situation has.
There is a technological, society, IQ co evolution. High technology requires more intelligence to use. Societies that rewarded people for their ability to use these technologies evolved higher iqs. So communism would fail because it doesn’t reward high iq with resources. Capitalism or any meritocratic system is fantastic at evolving smart people-better than an iq test in the long run, since it will never optimize on error.
that explains why there’s been a negative relationship between fertility and intelligence since industrialization.
thanks for clearing that up. you’re a genius.
No. This explains how resources are allocated. Since the 19th century there have been enough resources for everyone, ruining this virtuous cycle.
In fact, lower tfr has typically been the case of the upper classes. It’s just that the death rate used to be much more important and dominated number of grandchildren had (which is a better measure).
ArcGiant is right. TFR was always lower for the intelligent. It’s seen even in guppies. Lower iq’s had higher child mortality rates until recently.
‘No. This explains how resources are allocated.’
No it doesn’t. None of that makes sense. Hunter-gatherer life would select more harshly for spontaneous ability to learn and get food —- there’s no singular process to rely on to get food. Every day is an improvisational leap of one kind or another. More decision-making. More self-reliance — not less.
Again, all of this is easily resolved — simply — if IQ simply measures a certain culture and its attendant assumptions. That’s why the Flynn effect appears —> it’s not because ancient Greeks were utter retards, it’s because the tests are a gauge of assimilation into a certain culture. Of course bushmen would score low. They operate in an almost alternate universe.
as I said, critics — even smarmy-smarties — don’t understand Interstellar. how often do you see pop-scientists issuing self-corrections?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interstellar_followup_movie_science_mistake_was_mine.html
From the Slate writer:
Well said.
Scientific inaccuracies shouldn’t prevent anyone from enjoying a story unless it’s posing as a documentary or historical film about some aspect of science. Even if the science in Interstellar was perfectly presented, that doesn’t make it a good movie.
His knee-jerk reaction to the science was swiftly corrected. His knee-jerk reaction to the story will also be corrected with time and a chance to think.
Same thing happened with 2001.
2001 took an idiosyncratic narrative approach that leaves much to the imagination. Nolan’s linear narrative was complicated, and circled back on itself, but was still a recognizable plot.
‘2001 took an idiosyncratic narrative approach that leaves much to the imagination. Nolan’s linear narrative was complicated, and circled back on itself, but was still a recognizable plot.’
Hindsight-critique. Many reviewers at the time that it was a very unimaginative movie.
The point is that an unconventional film narrative is more likely to be initially misunderstood by both critics and audiences, and so more likely to be subject to later revisionism (both higher and lower).
Nolan’s story in Interstellar is complicated, not mysterious. I predict its trajectory will be more like that of Inception, a film which hasn’t seen its reputation improve in the four years since it was first released. Reviews were, and still are, mostly positive, but also remain wildly mixed as to the film’s importance.
the “point” is…
i suspect Martini has no article of clothing which isn’t camouflage.
I suspect you think quite a lot about what I’m wearing.
Macaca, it’s no one fault if you can’t afford to buy a movie ticket on occasion and so feel left out of the discussion. Get a job, and then you’ll be able to pay for both travel and prole entertainment.
Kubrick on 2001:
Interstellar doesn’t have this unconventional narrative. The story is complicated, but not so mysterious as to force viewers to construct their own narrative.
Swanky has tried to solve this problem by giving Nolan’s film a completely made-up narrative that has no relation to what’s on screen.
only proles go to movies, moron.
just like only proles eat at McDonald’s and wear camouflage.
you’ve never had a real job in your life Pinky.
you have no idea what one is.
Nobody holds your lack of gainful employment against you, Macaca. Everyone realizes that even unemployed men still need entertainment and that you’ve chosen to haunt HBD sites for yours because the cost is low and the sites are open for comment 24 hours a day.
‘Swanky has tried to solve this problem by giving Nolan’s film a completely made-up narrative that has no relation to what’s on screen.’
It’s not a problem. The interpretation works and your remaining critiques are trivial. The problem is that you’re treating what is mysterious as ‘plot holes.’ You blow past the fact that there are posited deux ex machina beings who make the WHOLE movie possible who are never explained and we never really learn much about them. Kubrick is mysterious with visuals in 2001. Nolan is mysterious with words and implications.
The Shining has a straight-forward plot. Yet it met with similar reactions.
when at first you don’t succeed…
LIE
LIE
AGAIN
i’m thinking this is projection on Martini’s part.
his comment are awfully LONG.
Well, I can write. What looks laborious to you comes quite easily to me.
as i’ve said before, i work in the warehouse of a recently acquired subsidiary of a Fortune 500 industrial distributor.
i make above the median in wages for a white male my age and my level of education, etc. it’s not much, but i don’t need a lot. and it’s a real job.
you on the other hand…
Warehouse, huh? They pay you quite well, do they?
verbiage comes easy to most…
there’s no need for security guards in a warehouse full of cutting tools and abrasives etc.
OBVIOUSLY.
do you even know what industrial distribution IS?
have you ever had a real job in your life?
No need for a security guard in a warehouse full of cutting tools? Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’m sure they keep you around for some reason.
although i should say i consider myself lucky in comparison to most Americans in that i have a REAL job. especially considering my UG major was math.
i’d say 80% of the “jobs” in the US today are BULLSHIT.
and i was especially lucky because i got the job through a relative.
Hahaha ! Lucky indeed. “Say, Phil, you wouldn’t happen to have anything around your warehouse that my ne’er-do-well son might be able handle, do you?” “Well, Biff, we could assign him to guard the cutting tools.” “Perfect, he likes his time on the computer. My wife and I can’t even get him out of the house to go see a movie.”
projection!
One thing which has to be remembered is that Africa has been the site of significant climate change over the last two million years. Many scientists who study hominid evolution consider that climatic change in Africa to be a significant factor in hominid evolution. Some of the comments above – particularly by Macaca – read like the commentators believe Africa has maintained the same hot, muggy environment over the last few million years.
A challenging, changing environment – which doesn’t always have to be cold – and competition with other hominids were probably the two most important factors driving the evolution of the hominid brain in the line from Australopithecines to modern humans. Africa had those two things.
Macaca asks why one of the Eurasian subspecies of Homo erectus didn’t evolve into the more intelligent hominid (rather than one of his cousins in Africa) if cold climate is responsible for increased intelligence among some northern races of AMHs. It’s a good question, one which I’ve also wondered about. The Eurasian continent certainly always provided more space and climatic variability than Africa, and presumably more challenging environments during the nearly two million years Homo erectus was on the Eurasian landmass. One would think two million years would be enough time to evolve significant differences in such a different environment.
Perhaps the explanation has to do with hominid competition within Africa. The population density and genetic variability outside of Africa might not have been built up high enough yet to provide that competition and so some evolutionary stasis was reached. The tool kit for Homo erectus changed a little, but not as much as one would think over nearly two million years. I don’t think the Acheulean tools changed much at all over hundreds of thousands of years.
Neanderthals also ranged over a wide landmass for a long period of time and were remarkably successful, but they weren’t densely populated, and it doesn’t appear they competed directly with other hominids on a regular basis until AMHs showed up.
The density and genetic diversity of hominids in Africa might have more than made up for the lack of climatic variability until AMHs were able to build up sufficient densities outside of Africa to change that. Just speculation, of course, but it seems reasonable.
The density and genetic diversity of hominids in Africa might have more than made up for the lack of climatic variability until AMHs were able to build up sufficient densities outside of Africa to change that.
Correct. It more of less comes down to the same reason why Europeans perhaps evolved more IQ than Arctic people, despite the latter having a colder climate. It’s climate in combination with genetic variation that caused the biggest population IQ differences, not climate alone. Both northern erectus and arctic people had small populations that were geographically isolated from novel mutations.
This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read.