I was watching Charlie Rose tonight and he was interviewing Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic who won widespread praise for his article The Obama Doctrine.  It’s amazing how much access Obama gave to this reporter and I suspect it’s because Obama was nervous that his tumultuous relationship with Bibi Netanyahu was alienating the Jewish community, so he bends over backwards to be nice to Jewish journalists.

During the interview Goldberg said that Obama has very little patience for people who are not as smart as him, and while Goldberg concedes that Obama’s very, very smart, he thinks Obama considers himself to be very, very, very smart.

Since an IQ of 100 is average intelligence, I think an IQ of 110 makes you smart, and an IQ of 120 makes you very smart.  Thus it follows that an IQ of 130 makes you very, very smart, while an IQ of 140 makes you very, very, very smart.  So if both men were familiar with the IQ scale, Goldberg might rate Obama 130, while Obama would rate Obama 140.

Yesterday Rose had on Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin who talked about her relationship with Obama.  Even before Obama was president, he wanted to meet Goodwin to talk about her book Team of Rivals, to understand how Lincoln could have staffed his cabinet with former adversaries.  The book is credited with causing Obama to choose his former rival Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State.

While Goodwin could see Obama becoming a full-time writer and intellectual, she was more analytical about his intelligence than others.  She said writers often write huge books because they can’t say things simply and for all of Obama’s skills as a communicator, she felt he couldn’t master the most important one of all:  How to talk in sound bites in our fast paced media age.  That takes a different kind of thinking, Goodwin explained.

I’ve sometimes thought verbal IQ could be divided into two sub-categories: writing IQ vs talking IQ.  Obama delivered brilliantly written speeches but his real time debate performances against rivals as diverse Alan Keyes, Hillary Clinton, and Mitt Romney, were often panned.

I now believe Neanderthals had an IQ of at least 85, not 70 as I had estimated earlier.

Why at least 85?

According to this article, until about 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals were more technologically advanced than AMH (Anatomically Modern Humans).

This suggests their IQs were higher than the AMH who lived before the upper Paleolithic.

Before the upper Paleolithic, I suspect all AMH resembled Bushmen, pygmies, and Australian Aboriginals, and I would guess these have a genetic IQ of 80, so Neanderthals were likely at least 85 to have had better tools

But why did Neanderthals suddenly fall so far behind?

It seems the shape or position of their larynx prevented fully modern speech so they never acquired the advanced language that AMH enjoyed.

This also may explain why AMH was also so primitive before 50,000 years ago, yet suddenly so advanced after 50,000 years ago, despite no noticeable change in brain size. Perhaps prior to around 50,000 years ago, the AMH larynx resembled that of Neanderthal’s in its form or position.

Perhaps scholar Richard G Klein was right about a genetic mutation causing behavioral modernity, but instead of a mutation in the brain, as Klein argues, it was a mutation in the neck.  This mutation produced fully modern speech allowing us to pool our huge brains and share ideas, creating a collective intelligence that was far smarter than any one individual.

It would also explain why Neanderthals stayed so primitive, despite having such big brains. It may even explain why shortly after the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, brains suddenly started shrinking after millions of years of explosive growth.  Advanced language and the huge cultural knowledge it had produced, had made individual genius redundant, and huge metabolically expensive brains, a pointless and expensive liability.

Seldom has one theory so parsimoniously explained so many mysteries.

In order to test my hypothesis, we would need to see neck bones from AMH prior to the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, to see if they resemble Neanderthal’s.

For more on this, start watching at 6:48 in the below video

And at 3:30 of next video:

Commenter MeLo asked about the IQs of dolphins.  According to Wikipedia, the tucuxi dolphin have an encephalization quotient of 4.56, meaning their brains are 4.56 times bigger than the statistically expected brain size for an animal their size (not to be confused with simple brain size/body size ratio which is a less accurate measure of intelligence).

The EQ of dolphins is larger than that of chimps (2.4) and they have IQs around 35, but smaller than that of Homo erectus (6.0), who likely had an IQ around 55.  This suggests an IQ around 45.

To put these numbers in perspective, modern humans have an EQ of 7.61 (far and away the highest in the history of the World, if not the galaxy, and in some countries, our average IQ exceeds 100).

But the fact than IQ as high as perhaps 45 could have evolved independently in a lineage so divergent from humans is strong evidence that evolution is progressive and that intelligence is the ultimate adaptation: an ability to adapt itself.

And indeed, few animals have had to adapt as much cetaceans whose ancestors first adapted to the oceans, then evolved into successful land animals, only to have readapt to ocean life.  Few organisms have travelled such a transformative evolutionary path, making dolphins especially evolved, adaptable and intelligent.

Because evolution is so incredibly progressive, I predict that if humans go extinct, and the earth remains intact, within 10 million years there will be another species, at least as intelligent as we are.  It seems dolphins have already made it up to IQ 45 and chimps and even crows are not far behind; it’s only a matter of time before one of their descendants hit 100.

Because evolution is progressive and intelligence is perhaps the ultimate adaptation.

A while ago I took IQ and brain size data mostly reported by Richard Lynn and attempted to correct it to show the IQs and brain sizes the races would have if they all enjoyed First World 21st century living standards.  I called these corrected values, genetic IQ and genetic brain size, though in fairness, many actual anthropologists would call it pseudoscience.

The problem was that the IQs Lynn reported for Bushmen, Pygmies and Australoids were so incredibly low (even after correcting for their low human development index) that I was left with a very steep slope for predicting a population’s genetic IQ from its genetic  brain size.  The absurdity of this steep slope became apparent when I tried to extrapolate the trend beyond humans and predict the IQ of chimps from their cranial capacity (about 498 cc if adjusted for their small size), and got an estimated IQ below zero!

I decided that the problem was that Lynn’s IQ data for Australoids, Bushmen and pygmies simply isn’t credible.  You can’t give conventional IQ tests to people still living in hunter-gatherer societies and expect to get good results and there’s no credible evidence that any extant human race or ethnicity has a genetic IQ below the 80s. So after removing these three outliers, we get the following line of best fit predicting population IQ from population brain size.

Now when we predict the IQs of chimps from their cranial capacity we get 26, which is within 10 points of actual laboratory research suggesting an IQ of 35.

[Update January 1, 2017: An earlier version of this article included an estimate for anatomically modern humans that has since been removed]

[Second update January 1, 2017: An earlier version of this article underestimated the IQs of Australoids]

[Third update January 1, 2017: An earlier version of this article underestimated the IQs of H. erectus and chimps]

[Fourth update January 1, 2017: An earlier version of this article overestimated the IQs of Australoids]

[Fifth update Jan 3, 2017: Australoids, Capoids, Pygmies, and Neanderthals have all been removed because of lack of quality evidence]

[Sixth update Jan 17, 2017: Homo erectus and chimpanzees removed because of technical questions]

Below is a rough ranking of 16 different populations by estimated genetic IQ.  I should note that many scientists consider all human races to have equal genetic intelligence, and the below numbers would be considered pseudoscience.  All IQs have been rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 for aesthetic purposes.

Ashkenazim Genetic IQ 110

East Asians Genetic IQ 105

Whites Genetic IQ 100

Arctic people Genetic IQ 95

Southeast Asians Genetic IQ 95

Native Americans Genetic IQ 90

Pacific Islanders Genetic IQ 90

Dark Caucasoids Genetic IQ 90

Congoids Genetic IQ 85

According to wordpress statistics, when I founded this blog in 2014, about 9,773 unique visitors stopped by sometime during the year.  At the time I wasn’t famous, so the fact that nearly 10,000 people a year were already reading my blog was a huge thrill!

Then in 2015 the unthinkable happened. A mind blogging 140,844 people read my blog!  Well, I’ve peaked I thought.  It’s all downhill from here.

Then in 2016 a STRATOSPHERIC 334,202 people read my blog.

I’d like to thank each and every one of you!

Happy New Year!