With Halloween only weeks away, I have to share one of the most terrifying images of my childhood.  When I was a little kid (I’m now in my 30s) I was already really interested in evolution, but in all the books on the subject I had leafed through, nothing scared me or captured my imagination as much as this image.

I wish I could credit the artist, but it’s from a 1979 TIME-LIFE book called Early Man by F. Clark Howell and the editors of TIME-LIFE books.

It terrified me because it depicts the more evolved australopithecines killing off the primitive Australopithecus robustus but it captured my imagination because it shows Africa in all its glory.  There was such beauty in living in Africa millions of years ago, at the dawn of humanity while the setting sun subtly colors the rocks on the hills.  The open fields and endless landscape, on a lonely planet with only a few scattered Stone Age tribes on just a single continent.

In the picture, the more advanced tribe adapts the situation to their advantage by using lighter but sharper rocks, while the monkey tribe gets much less bang for their buck by draining their energy with heavy blunter weapons.

Intelligent behavior = low cost/benefit behavior.

With Halloween only weeks away, the topics on this blog are getting darker.  I find it fascinating how art imitates life, even when the artists don’t understand the life they are imitating.  I doubt the writers of the original Friday the 13th movies (released in the 1980s) understood the concept of heritability, let alone the fact that heritability increases with age, and yet their main character, the iconic hockey mask wearing machete wielding killer, Jason, was a perfect example of exactly that.

In the late 20th century, it was discovered that genes explain about 45% of the IQ variation in childhood, 65% of the variation in adolescence, and about 80% in later maturity.  Family environment explains about 35% of the IQ variation in childhood, and near zero by later adulthood.  Meanwhile chance environment explains about 25% at all ages.

The character of Jason was born with extremely bad genes for IQ, a genetic condition called hydrocephalis, where there is too much cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, causing the head to swell and deform.  Yet despite his extremely bad genes, growing up he would have scored above 60 on IQ tests because his mother was constantly teaching him and getting him to participate in educational activities like summer camp.

The late actress Betsy Palmer was brilliant as Jason’s all American mother; the ultimate summer camp mom

However the problem with trying to educated people beyond their genetic ability, is that as soon as they are placed in a novel situation, they can’t adapt, and their learning and training is useless.  For Jason, that novel situation was going swimming one evening at Camp Crystal Lake.

Not intelligent enough to remember how to swim, he almost drowned and was washed to the other side of the lake.  When he came out of the water, in the unfamiliar wilderness, he could not adapt by finding his way back to the camp, let alone to his grieving mother.  So he simply lived in the woods like animal, for decades.

So he started with a great environment (being raised by an attentive all-American mother) which artificially propped his IQ up above 60, but because his genetic ability was so low, when faced with a truly novel problem (nearly drowning and washing up in an unfamiliar part of the woods), he turned the situation to his disadvantage, by getting stranded in the woods for decades and becoming a feral child, losing his capacity for speech.

So what started as extremely bad genes being propped up by a good environment (attentive mother) became extremely bad genes in an extremely bad environment (living like an animal in the woods).  This is a classic example of the gene-environment correlation increasing with age: bad genes create bad environments, even when they start with good environments.

This shows that while a good cultural environment can raise IQ scores, it can’t do much to raise real intelligence.  Because if real intelligence was being raised, why do genetically dull people from good environments see their IQs drop with age?  It’s not that the effects of environment fade, it’s that environmentally enhanced IQs were never real to begin with, which is precisely why they can’t maintain their good environments.

By the time Jason was in his 30s (my age), not only had his low genetic IQ destroyed his cultural environment (living in the woods devoid of all culture) but he had finally destroyed his biological environment, as his violent behavior caused someone to sink a machete into his head, physically damaging his brain.

Such damage from the physical environment, like the cultural deprivation of becoming a feral child, damaged his IQ score, but unlike cultural deprivation, the biological insults destroy real intelligence, and not mere test performance.

Jason was born with a genetic IQ of perhaps 40, but because of a loving mother (good environment) he had a phenotypic IQ of over 60 in childhood.  But because the phenotypic IQ was artificially propped up by an environment he could not adapt to his advantage, his environment precipitously declined, until his IQ was as low as his genetic IQ.

For comments unrelated to my latest post, Canadian provinces ranked by IQ, please post here.

Please post here about any topic at all.

Commenter JS was interested in how Canadian provinces ranked by IQ so I decided to look into this.  In 2013, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) test was administered to a sample of more than 32,000 Grade 8 students from across the country.  Scores were given in reading, math, and science, but I decided to focus only on reading and math, since those are the basics, and resemble the familiar U.S. SAT scores so often used as proxies for IQ.

In researching the PCAP, I learned that each subscale was normed so that the distribution for all Canadians has a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100.  However by 2013, the mean Canadian reading score had drifted up to 508 and the mean math score had drifted up to 507 (I assume the SDs had remained at 100).  Assuming the correlation between reading and math scores is 0.67 (as it is for the SAT), I calculated that the composite score (reading + math) would have a mean of 1015 and a standard deviation of 182.76.  For each province, I converted the reading, math, and composite score into a Z score relative to the distribution of all Canadians.  These Z scores were then converted to IQs by multiplying by the IQ SD of Candians, and adding it to the mean Canadian IQ.

To determined the IQ mean and SD of Canadians, I noted that on a scale where the mean and SD for all Americans is set at 100 and 15 respectively, Canadians average 104.5 (SD = 13.4) and white Americans average 103.4 (SD = 14).  But on a scale where the mean and SD of white Americans is set at 100 and 15 respectively, Canadians average 101 (SD = 14.36) and all Americans average 96.36 (SD = 16.07).  The first scale is known as U.S. norms, while the second is known as U.S. white norms.

Discussion

The vast majority of Canadian provinces average IQs below the U.S. white mean (100, U.S. white norms)  However because high IQ provinces like Ontario and Quebec are the most populous, the average Canadian is smarter than the average white American, and is substantially smarter than the average of all Americans (96.35 U.S. white norms). Only one Canadian province (Manitoba) falls below the overall U.S. mean, though only by 1 point.

The 8 point IQ gap

Toronto: One of the most vibrant cities in the World

With a mean IQ of 103 (U.S. white norms) it comes as no surprise that Canada’s smartest province is Ontario, since this province is home to both the nation’s capital (Ottawa) and its most populous city (Toronto).

While Canadians like to think of ourselves (correctly in my opinion) as a much less socially stratified country than the United States, there remains a shocking 8 point IQ gap between the mean IQ of Ontario (103, U.S. white norms) and Manitoba (95, U.S. white norms).  It’s unclear if this gap is cultural or biological.  The  most obvious explanation is economic selection.  The brightest folks migrate to the richest and most powerful province (Ontario), leaving the less intelligent behind in Manitoba.

Manitoba: The province Canada forgot

Unlike the skyscrapers and busy streets that adorn Ontario, Manitoba is full of dreary run down shacks cursed by terrifying Northern lights.

One can drive for hours in Manitoba and not see a single person.  Sometimes the only thing scarier than not being able to find human life in Manitoba, is actually finding it:

Low IQ Manitobans who can not achieve wealth or status, will get pleasure from the simple things in life, like enjoying the Northern lights, or gazing at the sun rise.

While Manitoba is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, it is also a land of great poverty:

Manitoba is a land of great beauty and serenity.  A place where you can turn off the noise of modernity and get in touch with your sense of awe and wonder.

And while it appears to be the least intelligent province in Canada, the average Manitoban is about as bright as the average American.