Many people, including eminent biologists, struggle with the concept that some life forms are more evolved than others.  It’s not particularly controversial to say humans are more evolved than Australopithecus africanus, because the latter is extinct, and thus humans are the product of an extra two million years of evolution.

Much more controversial is claiming that one extant life form is more evolved than another.  This is because many scientists view all extant life as not a linear chain of ancestors to descendants, but rather cousins who are all parallel forms of time tested evolutionary success.

When creationists say to biologists “if humans evolved from apes, why aren’t apes still evolving into humans?”, the biologists laughs at the creationist’s ignorance, and says humans did NOT evolve from apes.  Rather humans and apes share a common ancestor.

But what few biologists grasp is that humans really did evolve from apes (in the popular sense of the term).  True, we did not evolve from any extant ape like gorillas or chimps, but if we could clone our ancestors, most people would describe them as apes.

Of course the scientist would say:

Well technically, the common ancestor is no more genetically related to modern apes than it is to a human.

That’s true if you measure genetic relatedness by neutral DNA, which, because it changes at a consistent rate, serves as a molecular clock measuring time since divergence from a common ancestor, but it’s perhaps false if genetic relatedness is measured by substantive DNA, which changes as a function of selection pressures.

Who is most evolved?

In order to determine who is more evolved than who, you need to look at the evolutionary tree.  If you’re the first branch, and you don’t do anymore branching, then you are less evolved than higher branches.

At the highest taxanomic level, there are just tree domains of life: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota.  Humans are eukaryotes and thus are more evolved than bacteria, which branched off prematurely:

Among eukaryotes, there are at least three major divisions: plants, animals and fungi.  Plants branched off the evolutionary tree first, making them less evolved than us animals:

Among animals, us chordata are most evolved:

Among chordates, us mammals are most evolved:

Among mammals, us primates are tied for the most evolved:

Among primates, “homos” are most evolved:

Among homo, we see that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals are tied for most evolved:

Among Homo Sapiens, it seems Northeast Asians and Arctic Asians are tied for most evolved.

Of course this is uncertain because it seems Sfroza somewhat arbitrarily divided humanity into nine races (I prefer a three race model).  A different classification scheme might have resulted in a different race being more evolved, though the same criticism applies to almost every phylogenetic tree.

Does more evolved mean superior?

Scholar J.P. Rushton is quoted as saying that from an evolutionary perspective, superiority can only mean adaptive value, if it even means this.  Humans are perhaps the most evolved animal on Earth and we are arguably the most adaptable, but there are also very unevolved life forms that are extremely adaptable too, like cockroaches for example.

But if evolution is all about trial and error, life that emerges later should, on average, be more adaptable than life that appears earlier, and yet cockroaches, one of the oldest forms of life, has stood the test of time.

How do we resolve this paradox?  One possibility is that the more primitive organisms benefitted from coming first and thus monopolizing the low hanging fruit: those ecological niches that were easiest to adapt to.  More complex newer life forms might be more adaptable in principle, but all the good real-estate has been taken.

 

 

Way back in 1980s, when many North Americans were first learning about East Asians through weird and exotic comical stereotypes in movies like Sixteen Candles:

It was against this backdrop that scholar J.P. Rushton proclaimed “Orientals” the most advanced of the three main races, in part because they diverged from the human evolutionary tree more recently than the rest of us.

“One theoretical possibility is that evolution is progressive, and that some populations are more advanced than others,” said Rushton.

At the time of Rushton’s ground breaking research, DNA science was in its infancy.  Now a quarter century later, it seems Rushton was right.  Research from 2013 shows East Asians are a genetically very young race, suggesting they might be genetically less primitive than the rest of us:

The study also found that Europeans had more harmful mutations than Africans did, due to their race being “diluted” twice over 30,000 years ago which caused “bad” mutations to build up in the European population.  Bustamante calls this a “genetic echo.” Most Non-Africans descended from a small group of migrants who left the African continent 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.

The study also revealed that Native Americas showed less genetic diversity than Europeans.  Its proof that the part of the world they lived in was the last to be settled.  They are descendents of the Yakruts of Eastern Siberia who entered North America about 10,000 years ago.

The researchers study proved that life did start in Africa with Africans having the greatest amount of genetic diversity, followed by Middle Easterners, then Europeans, South Asians and finally East Asians.

 

I recently posted evidence that in the U.S., the average black can out-bench press the average white, and that blacks dominate elite body building.  Despite this evidence, many readers insist that whites are stronger than blacks because of their muscle fibres and because no black has ever won the World’s strongest man competition.

However I recently stumbled upon an article from the May 7, 1984 issue of Jet magazine which claims that from 1938-1953, a black named John Henry Davis was known as the World’s Strongest Man.

According to The Complete Encyclopedia of African American History (page 717), in 1948:

The first black heavyweight lifting champion in the Olympics was John Davis, of Brooklyn.  He had thoroughly established himself in the field in 1941 when he set a record of 1,005 pounds for three lifts.  Davis was Olympic champion again in 1952.  Once called “the world’s strongest man,” he was the first weightlifter known to hoist 400 pounds over his head, a feat he accomplished in the 1951 National AAU senior championship in Los Angeles.

 

A video of big brained Oprah arm wrestling Jewish Rosanne Barr:

According to HBD, blacks are the most masculine, aggressive and athletic race, so I was surprised to discover a large subset of HBDers (on the internet) who believe whites are stronger than blacks.

One reason they believe this is because of Allen’s Rule, a theory claiming that body types evolve to become more linear in warm climates and more rounded and compact in cold climates. Round forms, having smaller surface area to volume ratios, are thought to freeze less easily. There’s also Bergmann’s Rule which asserts, for similar reasons, that body size evolves to be large in cold climates and small in warm climates.

Thus, it’s assumed that blacks evolved to be tall and small (good for warm climates) while whites evolved to be short and big (good for cold climates).  A short and big physique is then presumed to be good for weight-lifting.

The problem with this view is it’s too simplistic.  Allen’s Rule and Bergmann’s Rule are not the only factors that influence the evolution of physique.  There’s also Rushton’s rule, which argues cold climates select for less masculine, dominant and sexual traits.

One reason Allen’s rule makes sense to people is their image of black physiques comes from Third World African countries where malnutrition is rampant.  Of course people in those countries are especially skinny, but when you compare blacks and whites reared in the same country, blacks are heavier, despite being a bit shorter.

The average male American white age 20-39 is 70.4 inches tall and 193.5 lbs.

The average male American black age 20-39 is 70.1 inches tall and 202.4 lbs.

See table 6 and table 12.

The average black American can bench press more than the average white American

Of course weight and strength are not the same thing.  In order to compare the races in strength, I found a study of police officers which compared the bench pressing ability of black and white officers, both at the time they were recruited, and after years on the job.  The study found that upon recruitment, the average white man could bench press 84.2 kg (standard deviation = 21.2), the average black could bench press 95.1 kg (SD = 24.6).  In other words, black men are 0.51 SD stronger than white men.  If we convert strength to farmilliar IQ scale, where the white mean is set at 100 and the white SD is set at 15, then white men have a (sex adjusted) SQ (Strength Quotient) of 100, and black men have an SQ of 108.

Both races improved after years of on the job training, but the gap remained.  Black women could also bench press more than white women, both at recruitment, and especially after training in both groups.

Blacks dominate American body building

What happens when we move from the average and look at the extremes? Here’s a list of the top 15 body builders of all time.  For apples to apples comparison, I excluded all the non-Americans, to make a list of the top AMERICAN body builder’s of all time:

1. Ronnie Coleman (Black)
2. Arnold Schwarzenegger (White)
3. Kai Greene (Black)
4. Phillip Health (Black)
5. Flex Wheeler (Black)
6. Johnnie O. Jackson (Black)
7. Lee Haney (Black)
8. Lou Ferrigno (White)
9. Kevin Levrone (Black)

So blacks are only 12.6% of America, but 78% of the top body builders in American history.  And this is what we should expect.  The nature of the bell curve is such that if black men are 8 points higher than white men in SQ, they should be dramatically overrepresented among those with the most extreme SQs.  This is analogous to how American Jews (with IQs 10 points higher than U.S. whites) are greatly overrepresented among Nobel Prize winners.

World’s Strongest Man

There is a major anomaly however.  As blogger Racerealist told me, nine Americans have won the World’s Strongest Man competition, and not a single Black was among them.  Indeed not a single Black has won from any country.

If the average black is stronger than the average white, and if top black body builders outcompete top white body builders, why has there not been a single black among the World’s Strongest men winners?

There are several possibilities:

1) It’s just a statistical anomaly caused by small sample size.  Most well nourished blacks live in America, and only 9 Americans have won.  Once 20 Americans have won, we might see several blacks included.

2) The average white is weaker than the average black, but there might be certain white ethnic groups that are especially strong

3) whites have lower mean strength but might have a greater standard deviation; however the police study above did not find this, and it fails to explain why black dominate body building

4) whites dominate strongest man competitions because they’re not athletic enough to do anything else, while the strongest blacks play lucrative sports like boxing, football and basketball instead.