Last Christmas I asked for the book Straight Talk about Mental Tests by Arthur Jensen and today was so beautiful I just sat by the lake all day reading it. I highly recommend this book to my readers. Unlike Jensen’s other books which are written for people with graduate degrees, this book is written for laymen, and while some readers may want something a lot more up to date, it’s remarkable how little the science has changed since 1981..

But one passage in particular caught my attention. It was about racial differences in Piaget tests. Piaget tests are remarkably good tests of IQ even though they come from a totally different branch of psychology and were not created with IQ in mind. Jensen writes:

This is the first time I ever heard of Arctic people scoring higher than whites on Piaget tests. Why didn’t Lynn mention this in his book? Instead he claimed that on a scale where whites average 100, Northeast Asians average 105 and Arctic people average 91. However if what Jensen says is true about Piaget tests, they would seem to be right up there with their Northeast Asian cousins and averaging 105 which makes sense given their huge brains and cold ancestral environment.

If true, this is excellent news because it suggests that an average IQ of 105 was present in the common ancestor of Arctic people and Northeast Asians which would mean the fully modern human mind pre-dated civilization.

This is the exact opposite of what scholars like Cochran, Harpending, John Hawks, and Peter Frost argue, which is that adaptive evolution increased a hundred fold in the last 10,000 years or so. Instead it is more consistent with what Gould and Richard Klein’s view that important evolution essentially stopped in the Upper Paleolithic.

From an Ayn Randian perspective, I find it far more romantic to think that after thousands of years ice age, triumphant man emerged fully modern from the wilderness to create civilization, then to think we were savages transformed into humanity by the modern world.

I like the idea of biological evolution reaching an end point and then cultural evolution taking over, but until Jensen’s uncited claims are verified, no strong conclusions are justified either way.