In the third edition of this series, I use the DeSilva (2021) data-set explore human brain size from 11,700 years ago to about the first World War. The data-set has 704 crania in this period and these range from 907 cc (Morton specimen from the early 20th century) to 1,859 cc (Bristol 2 specimen from about 750 years ago).

The total sample in this era has a mean of 1324 cc with an SD of 156. This is a major reduction from the 1459 cc mean found in the Upper Paleolithic so I must side with those scientists who say the brain has shrunk since the ice age (at least phenotypically).

Why did the brain suddenly start shrinking after 4 million years of growth?

The most obvious reason is malnutrition. The transition from hunters to farmers damaged our height, health and life span, so why not our brain size (and intelligence) too? But the good news is these declines reflect our phenotypic plasticity. The fact that we still have the genetic potential to be tall, smart and big brained is proven by the speed with which these traits have come roaring back with the advent of 20th century nutrition. Indeed my analysis of 21st century military records suggests that at least in America, brain size has reached 1418 cc. This is almost as big as our Paleolithic ancestors and what little shortfall exists, can probably be explained by us being more genetically gracile than our muscle bound stone age forerunners who needed those extra 40 cc to coordinate their ample bulk. It’s well known that brain size better predicts intelligence when body size is adjusted for.

In part 1 of this series I examined the average brain size of Sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic (300 kya to 50 kya). In this article, I look at the Upper Paleolithic (50 kya to 12 kya) and once again I turn to DeSilva (2021) data-set ( considered the largest known data-set of directly measured ancient human crania)

The 115 specimens in this time period ranged from 1117 cc (Coobool creek, 14 kya) to 1775 cc (Grothes des infants 4, about 28 kya). The mean is 1459 (SD 143), vs 1452 (SD 129) in the Lower Paleolithic. Although it’s likely that brains got bigger as Sapiens left the tropics and headed North in the Upper Paleolithic, the observed difference here is not statistically significant.

Commenter Melo (meLon Musk) recently linked to a paper arguing that the brain size of H Sapiens has been stable for hundreds of thousands of years. Already aware of the paper, I had emailed the lead author and he replied “You might download the DeSilava data set from their paper – it is open source. As far as I know, it has the most complete cranial volume data set (directly measured volume).”

Of course analyzing such an enormous data set is overwhelming so I decided to start with Middle Paleolithic brains (300 kya to 50 kya). There were 17 Sapiens skulls in the data set from this time period and these ranged from 1100 cc (Manot Cave specimen) to 1590 (skhul 9 specimen) with a mean of 1441 (SD 127). When I remove the two oldest specimens from the sample (the Jebel Irhoud pair which some argue are proto-Sapiens not fully Sapiens) the mean and SD increase slightly (1452, 129 respectively).

Overall, these brains look pretty damn big, especially since Sapiens hadn’t even lastingly left the tropics yet, but I’ll reserve judgement until analyzing other time periods.

George Soros is part of the Silent Generation, one of the 58 million Americans born from 1925 to 1945.  In 2013 it was estimated that Jews are 3.3% of U.S. adults, if Jewish is defined as having at least one Jewish parent or being raised Jewish, even if you now have another religion.  Only 55% of this 3.3% is Jewish by religion.

We don’t know how many Americans were Jewish in Soros’s day, but in 1957, 3.2% of Americans 14 or older were Jewish by religion, and assuming even back then, Jews by religion were 55% of the Jewish population, then the total Jewish population was 5.8% of America.

Assuming they were also 5.8% of the Silent Generation, that’s 3.4 million U.S. Jews. Before giving away the bulk of his fortune in 2017, Soros was the second richest Jew in his entire generation behind only Sheldon Adelson, putting Soros at the one in 1.7 million level.

On a scale where all Americans average IQ 100 with a standard deviation of 15, White Americans average 102 to 103 (goes up with the very immigration Soros endorses) and an SD of 14.5 and Jewish Americans about 10 points higher than whites. The top one in 1.7 million is 4.87 SD above the mean on a normal(ized) curve so if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and life time earnings, we’d expect Soros to be 71 IQ points smarter than the average U.S. Jew so 113 + 71 = 184.

However since the correlation between IQ and life time earnings is “only” about 0.5, we’d expect him to be 113 + 71(0.5) = 149 which is about where I’d expect him to be based on listening to him talk.

Of course with a correlation this imperfect, we can expect a huge band of error around this estimate. For example, Soros is not just rich but exceptionally well educated so guessing his IQ from only money and race may underestimate him. But then most Jewish decabillionaires are highly educated so including this statistic was too redundant to justify the effort.

You can get a good sense of a person’s IQ by watching them on Charlie Rose because Rose asks complex g loaded questions that inspire his guests to rise to the cognitive challenge. Soros shows high IQ by predicting the internet would be as revolutionary as the printing press (I don’t recall many old people being that prophetic in 1995). He also says “that’s right” in response to many of Rose’s comments which shows he can quickly digest and evaluate ideas.

Even though the traditional media is doing its best to ignore the Epstein scandal and social media is distorting it with QAnon crap, there exists one woman with the intelligence, courage and integrity to do real journalism on the topic and that is Whitney Webb.

Webb has spent hours interviewing Epstein’s accuser and researching the case in general and produced a book that is available on amazon.

I have not read it but she says it’s extremely long and she explains where she got all her information.

Here’s an interesting podcast where she discusses her explosive research. She comes across as a bit of a rube, but she’s still arguably the best Epstein journalist there is (though she has little competition given how reluctant more established journalists are to touch this topic).

I have to say though after listening to the podcast I am more confused about the Epstein case than I was before. She mentions everything from Iran Contra to Organized Crime and even name checks Bob Rubin (LOL) and Roy Cohn.

My sense is that Epstein is a fairly unique case of an intelligence agency blackmailing elites, but she makes it sound like all elites are constantly blackmailing each other and have been for a long time. If this is true, it sounds like it takes even more IQ to get to the top in America, because there are so many traps.

One of the great mysteries of recent evolution is why did the skin of Europeans and Northeast Asians become white? The traditional answer is that in colder climates, you need less protection from the sun so selection for dark skin becomes relaxed or even reversed because dark skin blocks too much vitamin D from the much less potent Northern sun.

One problem with this explanation is that arctic people, despite being further North, retain dark skin, and white skin didn’t become common in Europe until 12,000 to 6000 years ago, despite people living there for roughly 40,000 years.

One theory is that the less vitamin D rich diet imposed by agriculture meant Europeans suddenly needed to absorb vitamin D through their skin to compensate.

But I may have discovered another explanation. White skin appears to have emerged around the same time the human brain suddenly started shrinking (after 4 million years of growth). Now I’ve argued that most of this brain shrinkage was caused by the malnutrition of agriculture and we’ve recovered most of the lost brain mass with improved modern nutrients (giving rise to the Flynn effect).

However not all of our lost brain mass has come back, leading me towards a popular explanation pushed by several prominent scholars: Domestication. It’s well known that domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild ancestors.

It seems that the high IQ required to survive the cold Northern Eurasian winters had driven European and Northeast Asian brain size to ridiculously huge levels, but they couldn’t make full use of all that brain mass because they were still wild animals who would rather fight and bite than work as a team. Thus evolution sacrificed a tiny bit of individual brain mass (mostly from regions unrelated to cognition) to create a cooperative collective intelligence so powerful it would one day split the atom.

What does this have to do with white skin? Well, just as the animals they were domesticating would have white patches, perhaps white patches started showing up on Northern Eurasians. This may have inspired sexual selection for white skin against which the white patches would be invisible.

I suspect an even higher level of domestication occurred in India, but the intense sun killed off people born with white patches so skin remained dark.

Alex Jones is being sued for $150 million for his claims that the Sandy Hook shooting never happened and that the parents are a bunch of actors.

It will be interesting to see how much money the jury awards the parents for all the pain and suffering Jones has caused these victims of a tragedy, and how much Jones is ultimately forced to pay. He claims to have a negative net worth, but court documents show that at his peak, he earned 9 figures a year selling crap to his low IQ audience.

I wasn’t planning on doing a third norming of the KAMIKAZE but after a commenter enquired about it, I discovered there was a lot more data to work with.

I now have 20 cases of KAMIKAZE takers reporting Wechsler IQs and the correlation between the two tests is 0.54 which is surprisingly low given how g loaded the WAIS-IV arithmetic subtest is.

It’s likely not the case that the correlation is depressed by range restriction, as the KAMIKAZE takers (mean 131; SD 16.5) were slightly more variable in their Wechsler IQs than the U.S. population (mean 100; SD 15) though this could be because these are self-reported Wechsler scores taken at different years which introduces new sources of variance.

One possibility is that Arithmetic is highly g loaded but math isn’t and the reason for that could be that math is much more dependent on education and practice, while Arithmetic is something few people practice, especially since the advent of calculators.

Another possibility is that the correlation is dragged down by the unreliability of self-reported Wechsler scores, my not correcting KAMIKAZE scores for age, and the fact that Wechsler and KAMIKAZE were not taken at the same time.

Nonetheless, when KAMIKAZE and Wechsler scores are both listed from highest to lowest, we get the following equivalencies:

As discussed here many times, some psychologists speculate that autism is extreme male brain and that schizophrenia is extreme female brain. If this theory is correct, we’d expect the least autistic, and thus most socially intelligent men to be in touch with their feminine side, and it’s hard to think of a more socially intelligent man than Bill Clinton.

Although Clinton was arguably the smartest President of the 20th century, he is unarguably the most socially gifted President of any century. I remember seeing him on Donahue around age ten and predicting he’d be the next President because I had never before seen a talk show host as brilliant as Donahue be so dominated by their own guest. Donahue was blown off the stage and relegated to the back of the studio while Bill took over the show fielding questions from the studio audience.

It may be hard for young readers to relate to this because the Bill we see today is a shadow of his former self. Cognitive decline seems to be more acute in those from lower class backgrounds like Clinton

But in the late 1990s Chris Mathews and other pundits would gush every night about how Bill Clinton was the greatest political genius anyone had ever seen.

But one night Mathews said something especially interesting. Unlike most men, Clinton had no male heroes. He didn’t look up to war heroes and other great men of history like other Presidents did. It seemed Bill’s only heroes were women (something I can relate to). Hillary in particular who he would constantly praise for her incredible intelligence even though his own IQ was arguably much higher.

The reason Bill identifies so much with women is also the reason he’s so politically gifted: extreme female brain. The opposite of autism. Indeed so female is Clinton’s brain that when he ended his Presidency, he was in talks with major networks about hosting his own afternoon lady’s talk show, though talks broke down when the free market failed to offer him Oprah money. The New York Times wrote:

There is a delicious symmetry in Clinton’s exploring the idea of a daytime syndicated talk show: the man who brought Oprah-style psychobabble and misty confessions to politics taking the next step and actually transmogrifying into Oprah.

Being the opposite of autistic also made Clinton a big hit with the ladies, despite his mediocre looks. He had game and could charm any woman into the bedroom.

Although many men with extreme female brains are either too schizophrenic to get women, or become gay and thus don’t want them, there were probably many like Clinton who were just feminine enough to have brilliant social skills and intuition, which historically allowed them to breed prolifically. This explains why gays have not self-selected themselves out of the gene pool, despite not reproducing. They are a spandrel for the socially brilliant lady’s men like Bill Clinton.

A reader sent me the following email:

Hello Mr. Pumpkin,

I took the WAIS IV on 2016, and I got a FSIQ of 121 (GAI of 125). I was 23 years old at the time.

My verbal comprehension index was 130, with a 13 on similarities, and a 16 on both vocabulary and information. My perceptual reasoning index was 115, with a 12 on block design, a 14 on matrix reasoning, and a 12 on symbol search. On the working memory index I scored a 96, and I got an 11 on arithmetic, and a 7 on digit span. Lastly, on my processing speed index I got a 124, with a 17 on symbol search, and a 12 on coding. 

I was given no interpretation, but I did note the wide discrepancy between VCI and WMI, which is more than 23 points. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. 

Do my scores mean I am just an average person, and that I only got a 130 on VCI because I like to read a lot and I am in a PhD program in cognitive neuroscience? I did not struggle in college, and in my masters I found the classes too easy. I have only one publication, and another in progress. 

I am also concerned that before I took the WAIS IV, I had administered the matrix reasoning subtest of the WISC IV to several children as part of a research study, and that my 14 on matrix reasoning is highly inflated. Would there be a practice effect between matrix reasoning of WAIS and WISC? 

No I don’t think you’re average at all. The mere fact that you can handle a PhD program in a field as g loaded as cognitive neuroscience strongly suggests you’re at least IQ 115. Although your reading habits might have artificially increased your verbal IQ, you mentioned in another email that English is your second language which might have artificially decreased it.

On the other hand your score on Information and Vocabulary are both one standard deviation higher than your score on Similarities suggesting you are better at verbal knowledge than verbal thinking. Assuming this is signal not noise, it might be be because your reading habits give you an unfair advantage, or it simply might mean you have a really good long-term memory. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter for the reason explained above.

As for interpretations, I agree that you likely have ADD given your relatively low Working Memory index. Your relatively high processing speed suggests you’re not autistic.

As for your Matrix reasoning score being inflated by exposure to the children’s version of the test, perhaps subtract 0.5 from the scaled score, as that seems to be the practice effect:

In another email, the reader asked:

I also have another question. Why do you subtract points from scores due to the Flynn effect? Does it mean the obtained score is inaccurate? Or is it to present complete info?

Because your IQ is supposed to reflect where you stand compared to U.S./U.K. people of your age and birth year and when norms become old, they typically give inflated results because newer cohorts had better nutrition and schooling. I would not necessarily correct your scores for the Flynn effect because we don’t know if scores are still increasing since the WAIS-IV’s norming and with the cultural and biological damage of covid, we may even see a small reverse Flynn effect