Imagine if we took 100 randomly selected humans from the Earth today, and a random 100 of our ancestors from 2 million years ago, and placed all 200 on a random part of the Earth 1 million years ago (equally close in time to when both species lived so neither has a home team advantage).

Who would win in the struggle of survival?

Probably modern humans would, but you might say that proves little because we’re only one lineage that just happened to become uniquely adaptable.

Now imagine if we tried the same experiment on a hundred different randomly selected species, ranging in type from insects to reptiles to plants to large mammals.

Would there be a consistent trend for the modern version to outcompete its archaic ancestor, or would it be totally random, or would perhaps the ancestors win in most cases.

Of course such an experiment can not be done, it would prove whether evolution was progressive, random, or regressive.

Kanye West has recently been banned from social media for saying “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” (defcon 3 is what he meant).

In my opinion, among gentiles, anti-Semitism is a sign of schizophrenia while philo-semitism is a sign of autism.

But unlike many black Americans who simplistically blame white supremacy for all their problems, or QAnon Americans who imagine bizarre Satanic cults, West at least is smart enough to know which group really has power in America, however recklessly lumping them all together in a way that incites hatred is reprehensible. Already, a major bank has told West to take his money elsewhere and Adidas is being pressured to drop him as a partner, and Forbes must decide whether he remains a billionaire.

So what is his IQ? He reminds me a lot of commenter Loaded in that his mental illness makes him seem way dumber than he is. Back in October 2018, West claimed to have seen a psychologist and obtained an IQ of 133, which he equated to the 98th percentile (to be precise it’s the 98.6 percentile).

This actually sounds quite plausible. Forbes proclaimed West’s net worth to be $2 billion, crowning him the richest black of his generation. Assuming there are about 8 million blacks in generation X, if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and lifetime earnings, we’d expect West’s IQ to be 77 points above the black American mean of 88 (U.S. norms) (one in 8 million level), but since the correlation is more like 0.5, we’d expect it to be 0.5(77) + 88 = 127 (only 6 points below his self-reported score).

Another reason for thinking West is high IQ is the quality of his lyrics. In 2000 he wrote a song about his professor mother but refused to release it until he could perform on Oprah’s show. After five long years of trying to get on her show, he finally got his wish.

The song contains the following stanza which I thought was quite clever:

My mama told me go to school, get your doctorate
Something to fall back on, you could profit with
But still supported me when I did the opposite

Sadly, despite his moments of genius, Rushton would have likely considered West to be genetically inferior. Even though Rushton “would imagine that a lot of these black entertainers are very intelligent”, he believed the early time period (200,000 years ago), when Africans branched off the evolutionary tree meant they were cursed with other deficiencies like oversized genitalia, and so even though an individual might contradict the racial stereotype in one area (West has a high IQ), he would likely regress to his racial mean in other areas (West is mentally unstable which Rushton viewed as a primitive trait).

Unlike, another black billionaire Oprah, West does not have a huge hat size:

Indeed West’s brain may even be smaller than Donald Trump’s, which means he likely doesn’t have the cognitive reserve to protect his IQ from neurological attacks like the bipolar he claims to have:

Assuming West really did score 133 on an IQ test in 2018, his IQ has likely since declined (at least when unmedicated). In an edited out scene from his recent Tucker Carlson interview, West claimed there were fake children in his home sent to sexualize his own kids. One of these fake kids was the child of a business associate and West knew the child could not be hers because it was so much smarter than her. LOL

I had recently discovered that that people who took both the old GRE and the old SAT (circa 1990) had a verbal old SAT distribution of:

mean: 510.1 (SD = 107.7).

Because the SAT distributions if all 17-year-old Americans had taken the SAT would have been 376 (SD = 102), this implied GRE takers had a mean IQ of 121 (SD = 15.4) (U.S. norms).

Unfortunately this led to ridiculous results like the 95th percentile of the GRE population being at the 99.9 percentile of the general U.S. population. Clearly college admission tests are not normally distributed so we must look at the observed distribution, not the theoretical normal one.

And so I looked at Ron Hoeflin’s Omni sample norming of the Mega Test, where seven Mega Test takers reported scores on the old LSAT.

Then by pairing the Mega and LSAT scores by equal rank in the sample, we get the following equivalencies.

Now to put these numbers in perspective, a 630 was 92nd percentile (among LSAT takers) in 1960 and 725 was the 98th percentile, in 1974 (source: Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, by Robert Bocking Stevens).

From here we might conclude that the 95th percentile of the LSAT population was around 700, which equates to an IQ around 138 (99.5 percentile in the general population). (Note: I’m being 8 IQ points more generous than Mensa, which equates the top 5% of the LSAT population with the top 2% of the U.S. population and thus IQ 130).

This kind of makes sense, because if we assume that roughly 10% of Americans pursue post-grad degrees, and almost 100% of the very brightest do so, then the top 5% of those taking post-grad admission tests should be the top 5%/10 = top 0.5% of Americans as a whole.

Many high IQ societies accept scores from the GRE, LSAT and other graduate school admission tests. For example Mensa, which requires you to be smarter than 98% of Americans (for your age group), will accept you if your LSAT score is higher than 95% of LSAT takers. But how does Mensa know that being smarter than 95% of LSAT takers is equivalent to being smarter than 98% of Americans? I don’t think they do, they just know that since the LSAT population is smarter, one’s percentile among the LSAT population underestimates one’s percentile among Americans, but conservatively assumed the underestimation is small to avoid admitting unqualified people. So to Mensa’s credit, they probably erred on the side of maintaining standards (instead of profits) and rejected LSAT scores below the 95th percentile, even though many of those people likely qualified.

I can’t find much data on the IQ distribution of LSAT takers, but assuming they’re roughly equivalent to GRE takers (both tests are for admission to post-bachelor degree schooling), then the following is relevant:

In a sample of people who took both the GRE and the SAT (circa 1990), the mean GRE and SAT verbal was 510.1 (SD = 107.7) and 518 (SD of 104.7) respectively. Rare norming studies show that if all Americans took the SAT circa 1983, the mean and standard deviation (SD) would have been 376 and 102 respectively, which means that on an IQ scale (mean 100; SD 15) they had a mean verbal IQ of 121 (SD 15.4).

Now assuming the same for the LSAT, the 95th percentile (+1.66 SD) equates to an IQ of:

1.66(15.4) + 121 = 26 + 121 = 147

So when Mensa was screening out anyone with LSAT derived IQ scores below 130, they were also screening out everyone with IQs below 147!

Several years ago, Oprah returned to her old stomping grounds of Baltimore Maryland (where she spent her twenties looking for love in all the wrong places) and was interviewed by a nice blond reporter.

The difference in brain size could not be more stark.

Oprah was there to play the daughter of Henrietta Lacks. In the excellent HBO film, Oprah’s character is informed by a white journalist that the medical community had turned her mother’s miraculous cells (nicknamed Hela cells) into one of the most valued commodities in medicine, and the family didn’t get anything.

I was reminded of Ayn Rand who argued Middle East oil belonged to America because they discovered it and extracted it, so without them it was worthless.

Sadly, I suspect by the same logic she’d feel that Hela cells belong to white people, and not Henrietta Lacks and her heirs.

Despite about a six standard deviation difference in cranial capacity, Oprah and Cher have always got along well. Because Cher’s brain is literally several times smaller than Oprah’s, she needed Western beauty, a great body, a great singing voice and musical talent to become rich and famous.

Oprah didn’t have those advantages, but her huge brain gave her the adaptability to turn situations around to her advantage. The essence of intelligence.

The two women recently reunited for the premier of the Oprah produced documentary Sidney, but the two women, they go back.

Oprah always respected Cher because Cher, like Lady O, is a celebrity, so back in 1993, Oprah was shocked when some nerdy kid in the studio audience name Jeremy had the nerve to tell Oprah he would not date Cher because she was too old for him. Oprah was so indignant she ordered a staffer to get Cher on the phone.

In one of the great moments in TV history, Cher actually did call and ripped the kid a new one. Good times!

[The following is a guest post and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person]

Humans can be narcissistic; I don’t need a degree to tell you that. That’s something that most people figure out just from interacting with members of their species. Unfortunately, this narcissism has seeped into our research of life sciences and has had profound effects on the way we conduct said research, and I believe these effects are the most apparent within the current debate on animal consciousness and intelligence.

Humans have two bad habits, prescribing anthropomorphic traits to animals and things. The other is hyper skepticism to the idea that anything that isn’t human could be conscious and feel something the same way humans do. Unfortunately, the former has resulted in incidents like at the Berlin Zoo, where a gorilla named Bokito broke out of his enclosure and beat the shit out of some dumbass who thought the aggressive behaviors the gorilla was displaying towards her were friendly (“Gorilla Goes on Dutch Zoo Rampage,” 2007). The latter has led to enormous animal abuse, like whaling practices and dog fighting.

There is massive debate and research on whether animals are conscious or intelligent in the way that we are. I’m not going to regurgitate the entirety of this debate; if you’re interested in going further than what I have presented here, I suggest the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on animal consciousness as a start. In this post, I will give an example that I believe characterizes this debate the best! And nothing, I think, does this more than the ongoing feud between Dr. Marino and Professor Paul Manger (“We discovered that whale and dolphin brains produce lots of heat. Why it matters,” 2021).

Note** I wrote this almost a year ago, and some of the citations that were originally here were no longer in existence. One was a podcast that interviewed Marino and Manger about this topic and their papers. If you want to see the whole debate, just take Dr. Marino’s or Manger’s paper and put it in google scholar, and you can see who else has cited their papers. From there, just look for Marino/Manger in the list that pops up.

So, to put things simply, Manger believes that many of the supposed complex behaviors Dolphins and other Cetaceans exhibit have been overstated by the researchers documenting them and are not actually that special or impressive compared to other species. Moreover, he believes his hypothesis proves that Cetacean brains are built for thermogenesis, not intelligence. He also maintains that this caused increased encephalization during the Archaeocete-Neocete transition (Manger, 2006), (Manger, 2013). While Marino believes she is not overstating any perceived intelligence of cetaceans and that Manger is simply ignorant of the literature (Marino et al., 2007).

Now, I know a little about Neuroscience, but I won’t pretend that I am as competent as these two are in comparative Neurobiology. Admittedly I can’t tell which one of them is bullshitting because they both accuse the other of being dishonest or ignorant of the Neurobiological data on Cetaceans. But, as the smug fence sitter, I am, I have found some problems with both of their approaches to this kind of research.

If you read Manger’s 2013 paper I cited previously; you’ll quickly notice a pattern when he starts going down the list, “debunking” each example of supposedly complex cognition. His criticisms can be summed up as “Other, less encephalized animals do it too, so it can’t be that complex or special at all.”. And when he can’t just handwave it away with that argument, he instead will claim that it doesn’t align with the Archeocete-Neocete transition.

I can’t fault him for not seeing the irony in his criticism because he’s just trying to defend his hypothesis and is not an “anthropocentric individual .” At least, as far as I know. But what’s hilarious about all this is that he undermines his entire point in his hyper-skeptic frenzy. Because if none of those behaviors like tool use, the ability to count, or cooperative hunting are particularly impressive or cognitively demanding, what the hell makes Primates unique? I mean, all of the abilities mentioned above can be done by multiple species of invertebrates, and they all have “primitive” neurological systems (Carazo et al., 2012), (Gross et al., 2009), (Pierce, 1986), (Alloway, 1979), (Vail et al., 2013), (Mikhalevich & Powell, 2020).

Meaning it can’t be due to the structure of the Nervous System because the behavior that makes said neural architecture important is present across virtually all orders of life! This problem leads to my other issues with his critique. One is his claim that the absence of a prefrontal cortex means Cetaceans are dumber or lack abilities associated with the said region. This is puzzling because areas of the cerebral cortex are not demarcated by morphological differences but by function, and said functional localizations vary significantly between individuals, minute by minute (Sporns et al., 2005), (Uttal, 2014). So to suggest that the absence of a prefrontal cortex means Cetaceans are incapable of higher-order thought is complete asinine bullshit, and I’m pretty shocked someone of Manger’s caliber would make such a mistake.

Furthermore, his critique of their “language” capabilities seems wanting. The idea that it takes a long time for these dolphins to learn the language doesn’t really help his case because it takes a long time for humans too, and if you’ve ever been on the internet, like ever, some adults still haven’t mastered their language even after decades of using it. He goes as far as saying that dolphins don’t even understand when objects disappear, but this was later refuted after adjusting the settings of the experiments to match more closely with their natural marine environments (Johnson et al., 2014).

I’m not here to shit on Manger, I may cover his paper in more depth in the future, but I simply want to draw the relation between anthropocentrism and his thesis mentioned earlier. His skepticism is so exaggerated that you almost have to wonder if Manger even believes other humans are conscious. After all, that is the burden this side of the aisle must be ready to take on if you think it is impossible to understand the mental states of other organisms. I mean, everyone interacts daily with members of their species and never really questions whether that person genuinely has consciousness or not. We just assume this is the case, and we base our interactions, which are sometimes Machiavellian, upon the perceptions of other people’s mental states. Maybe it is better to go with this intuition and not be afraid of anthropomorphizing “lower” species.

However, the problem with that and Marino’s side is that, as scientists, we have to base our beliefs on empirically reasonable grounds. Unfortunately, she has not provided ample evidence suggesting that cetaceans are as conscious or intelligent as they appear. Moreover, just as I wouldn’t say that Manger believes we can’t ever know if animals are conscious, I also wouldn’t say that Marino has entirely made up her assertions that Dolphins have human-like cognition. But sometimes, she can go a little far, like in her interview on the All things wild podcast, where she suggests a group of orcas is “culturally conservative” when you could equally assert that they are too dumb to adapt to a changing environment.

But no one wants to say that because humans are not rational creatures. We all enjoy going by just our common sense and intuitions, and even our coldest logic is still directed by emotion. To me and many others, it’s as obvious that animals, like cetaceans, have minds as it is that my neighbor has one, but that’s not empirically provable (yet). And, of course, this is in direct conflict with how we ought to operate in science which we often like to see as an objective lens through which we use to decipher the world around us. At the same time, this conflict poses a severe problem for people who want to toss intuition aside because you end up arriving at ridiculous conclusions. Ultimately, we may never know “what it’s like to be a bat,” but maybe in the future, when cognitive science becomes more developed, we will (Nagel, 1974). But for now, we must sit back and wonder whether animals have consciousness.

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:

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.

As long-time readers know, my independent research has found that the Flynn effect, when properly studied, has only been about 1 point a decade on the Wechsler in Northern America, and not 3 points a decade as Flynn had claimed.

But why should anyone believe me, a nobody blogger, over one of the greatest psychologists of the 20th century?

Because I’ve found some research in support of my claim. A study where the original WISC, which was normed in 1947, was given to a fairly representative sample of American kids circa 1967.

Source: Pasewark, R. A., Sawyer, R. N., Smith, E., Wasserberger, M., Dell, D., Brito, H., & Lee, R. (1967). Concurrent Validity of the French Pictorial Test of Intelligence. The Journal of Educational Research, 61(4), 179–183.

If the Flynn effect were 3 points a decade, we’d expected kids tested on a 20-year-old test to average 6 points above the U.S. mean of 100, but instead they only averaged 3 points above 100, consistent with a Flynn Effect of 1.5 points per decade.

Richard Klein has long claimed that the archeological record shows an abrupt increase in sophistication about 50,000 years. Before 50,000 years ago Sapiens behaved more or less like Neanderthals and were largely confined to the continent of Africa with few complex tools and zero representational art. After 50,000 years ago, we suddenly colonized every continent except Antarctica, killed off all the Megafauna living outside Africa, drove all other human species to extinction, and filled our camp grounds with stunning works of art. Klein believed that such a massive rapid change could only be explained by a brain mutation making us smarter.

I on the other hand have argued Klein had it backwards. Getting smarter didn’t cause us to leave Africa. Leaving Africa (and facing the cold) selected for higher IQ.

However new research may clarify this issue once and for all. Scientists have discovered a major mutation in Sapiens that may have made us smarter than Neanderthals. Of the 19,000 genes in the human genome, only 96 protein encoding mutations separate us from Neanderthals. One of these alters the TKTL1 gene which affects the brain’s cortex, especially the frontal lobe.

Proving this mutation played a causal role in brain growth, Dr. Anneline Pinson and her team injected the Sapien version in animals as different from us as mice and ferrets and watched in awe as it caused their brains to grow more neurons. Next, with consent from the mothers, they looked at human fetal brain tissue from aborted babies and after snipping out the TKTL1 gene from the cells using molecular scissors, the number of progenitor cells giving rise to neurons declined.

Lastly, they edited Sapien embryonic stem cells to either have have the Sapien specific mutation or the ancestral version carried by Neanderthals and apes, put them in a chemical bath and coaxed them into becoming a blob of brain tissue called brain organoids or mini brains, and found the Sapien version produced more neurons and scientists suspect, this may explain why our brains are spherical and Neanderthal brains are elongated.

The next questions I have are, exactly when did this mutation occur and how many IQ points is it worth. In the early 2000s there was much excitement in the HBD community about microcephalin mutations supposedly causing major differences in IQ. Now that’s all gone. Too often genetic variants are found to have trivial effects.

However neuroscientist Laurent Nguyen thinks this might be a big deal, recently telling the New York Times “This is really a tour de force. It’s remarkable that such a small change has such a dramatic effect on the production of neurons.”

Of course ethical standards prohibit scientists from editing the embryos of actual future children just to see how it affects their IQ, though perhaps some government might do this in secret.

But with nearly eight billion people on the planet, and only 6 billion nucleotides in the human genome, odds are there might be someone out there who by chance, has the Neanderthal version of the TKTL1 gene. That person needs to take a brain scan and an IQ test.