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Tag Archives: Quest for Fire

Prehistoric war

07 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 99 Comments

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Anthony Burgess, fire, fluid vs crystallized, IQ, nuclear weapons, paleolithic, Quest for Fire, vocabulary, war

With all the talk in the news about a potential war, it’s a good time to ask what war was like 80,000 years ago, as brilliantly depicted by one of my all time favorite movies, Quest for Fire (1980)

There were no guns so people (and I use that term loosely) would stab with spears, throw rocks or simply wrestle. Instead of dropping bombs on cities, people would try to drop boulders on folks on sitting around a camp fire by pushing it off of an above cliff.

The tribes in Quest for Fire can be divided into three main levels. 1) those smart enough to make fire (potential IQ around 80),

2) those smart enough to maintain fire but not smart enough to make it (potential IQ around 70),

and 3) those not smart enough to make or maintain it so they must steal it from more advanced tribes (potential IQ around 50).

Today every human population has mastered fire so we no longer fight wars over that, and instead (as Lion of the Blogosphere has implied) the World is divided into countries smart enough to make nuclear weapons (potential IQ around 100), countries smart enough to maintain nuclear weapons (potential IQ around 90) and countries smart enough to do neither (potential IQ around 80).

Quest for Fire as a culture fair test of fluid verbal IQ?

Another interesting feature of this film is that it could serve as a rare example of a of verbal IQ test that is both culture reduced and fluid (as opposed to crystallized). Since most of the dialogue is from no-known language ( a new language based on Indo-European roots was specifically created by Anthony Burgess ), high SES people can’t rely on their fancy education and must infer definitions on the spot.

If one scores much higher on an English vocabulary test than they do on a test like this, it implies either they were educated beyond their ability and/or cognitive decline (since their fluid verbal IQ was presumably good in the past to have acquired high crystallized verbal IQ).

Just from watching the above clip, readers can test themselves by defining the words “wogaboo” “dominyai” and “Ka Ka Ka”.

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My fascination with HBD started when I saw the movie “Quest for Fire”

11 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 16 Comments

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HBD, J.P. Rushton, Quest for Fire, race, racism

The blogger destructure recently implied on this blog that I am too liberal, which he attributed to my putative sheltered life as a Canadian. I don’t consider myself liberal at all, but I think I seem so liberal because my path to HBD (i.e. behavioral genetics) was very different from that of many HBD people. I would imagine that many people get interested in HBD because they have certain right-wing politics (maybe anti-affirmative action, anti-immigration) and hijack HBD to push their political agenda, much like the peaceful religion of Islam is hijacked by violent extremists pushing agendas. In both cases, a burden is placed on all the millions good HBD people (and millions of good Muslims) to defend their ideology from those who would want to twist it.

For me, HBD was never about politics, but started when a babysitter rented the movie Quest for Fire when I was five. This movie was set 80,000 years ago and depicted a tribe of cavemen who have their most valued resource (fire) destroyed by a violent tribe of primitive monkey-men who brutally slaughter most of the cavemen. Amazingly, a few of the most adventurous surviving cavemen walk from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa where they find a tribe of behaviorally and anatomically modern gracile humans, one of whom was a beautiful young African woman, who falls in love with one of the cavemen and teaches him to be fully human. Til this day this remains one of my all time favorite movies and makes me nostalgic for life 80,000 years ago.

But at age five, this wasn’t just a movie, it was an obsession. Every time I would go camping, I would look for a pile of ashes to roll around in, because the advanced African tribe I worshiped were covered from head to toe in ashes giving them a completely grey skin color.

The advanced Africans colored grey by ashes make fun of less advanced caveman for falling into their trap. Image found here


As a child I remembered thinking how boring life was in the modern era because all living human populations were at the same level of evolution. Things seemed so much more exciting 80,000 years ago in the movie Quest for Fire when you had three different levels of evolution competing in a struggle for survival.

But then I began hearing about the theories of scientists J.P. Rushton who argued that there were indeed three different levels of evolution coexisting at once, except instead of Africans being the most advanced people, Rushton put “mongoloids” at the top of his nice neat pyramid, arguing that they were more advanced than other humans because they evolved most recently, having split-off caucasoids in a bigger brained, less sexual form. When I first heard this theory I was absolutely fascinated because it was as though the movie that had dominated my early childhood had been true all along, but because Rushton’s theory was condemned as racist, I felt great shame and guilt for liking his theory so much.

Luckily, as I grew older, I came to realize there was absolutely nothing racist about such theories because virtually the entire range of intelligence, personality, sexuality, and athleticism exist in every race, and there’s an evolutionary trade-off, such that races that are higher in some traits (brain size, IQ, mental stability) are lower on other valued traits (sexual anatomy, rhythm, sociability, artistic creativity). I don’t think one should have to deny science to prove they’re not a racist. It’s very easy to spout politically correct platitudes about all races being the same in the abstract; but the real test of character is whether you treat everyone as an individual, regardless of race.

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