Some folks think HBD can be divided between HBDers like Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, Frost, Cochran, Clark & Jayman and anti-HBDers like Gould, Richard Klein, Chomsky, Steven Jones.

But the real division is not between those who think races differ in IQ and those who don’t; it’s between those who think important cognitive evolution more or less stopped in the Paleolithic, and those who think it speeded up in the last 10,000 years. In the former group I would put not only Gould, Klein, Chomsky, Jones, but also perhaps Rushton, Lynn and Jensen.

In the latter camp, I would put Frost, Jayman, Clark and Cochran.

This is why Native Americans, like our very own “Deal with it”, are so important. They split off from other Northern Eurasians around the time some say intelligence stopped evolving, and most of them remained hunter-gatherers until discovered by Columbus. So if their IQs are similar to those of whites and Northeast Asians, it implies intelligence pretty much stopped evolving in the Upper Paleolithic (with rare exceptions like Jews). But if their IQs are much lower, it implies the neolithic transition and civilization played a major role in the evolution of IQ.

I prefer to believe the former. I love the idea of a nice clean split between biological evolution and cultural evolution. It’s much more romantic to think the modern mind emerged from the wilderness to create civilization than it is to think modernity created the modern mind. Early white settlers may have felt the same way and this partly led to the red man being sometimes valorized as a Nobel savage, reminding Europeans of their own hunter-gatherer roots and thus not dehumanized as slaves as others were.

Now most research suggests that on a scale where white Americans average IQ 100 and fully black descendants of U.S. slaves average 80, Native Americans average 86. Native Americans scoring so close to black Americans suggests very little evolution took place from the time we left African 70,000 years ago, and the time Native Americans split off about 15,000 years ago, and the REAL leap forward occurred, not because exposure to the ice age, but because of events that followed like the neolithic transition, the invention of cities, states, literacy and numeracy.

But not so fast. Native Americans live in abysmal environments. Indeed by some estimates, they are as far below African Americans in socio-economic status as black Americans are below whites. Could cultural deprivation, and not stunted evolution, help explain their low IQs?

Consider the following study:


And yet despite having limited English and living on a reservation, when you eliminate Picture Arrangement (they probably didn’t understand the instructions) their Performance IQ was 100 (U.S. norms). Only 2 points below the U.S. white mean. And notice this study was published only seven years after the WISC-R was normed, so even the most extreme estimates of the Flynn effect would have only inflated their performance IQ by 3 points.

Despite approaching white levels on Performance IQ, their verbal IQs averaged in the mildly retarded range though this can be blamed on their limited English.

At the very least, one might argue that at least Performance IQ stopped evolving in the Upper Paleolithic.

Reference: Hynd, G. W., Kramer, R., Quackenbush, R., Conner, R., & Weed, W. (1979). Clinical Utility of the WISC-R and the French Pictorial Test of Intelligence with Native American Primary Grade Children. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 49(2), 480–482.

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