White Racists maintain that Northern Europeans are superior, and the cause is that they had to adapt to the harsh cold conditions of Northern West Asia. While I do agree that Europeans are advanced, their argument that the cause is geographical is absurd for:
(1) Polar people, like the Lapps, Nenet, etc. live several hundred kilometers to the North, in much harsher climates, and they are always tested as having one sigma lower IQ than Northern Europeans. Cold climate increases head size but not IQ. There is no correlation between latitude and IQ.
(2) Northern Europeans, like the Swedish Goths, live in the area only the last few thousand years, having immigrated from Eastern Europe. The original Goths are found in the Azov Sea and Crimea. The expansion of warlike Hun, Petcheneg, Mongol peoples from Eastern Asia pushed them out of their homeland (although still there are Goth speaking villages in the Crimean peninsula) and forced them look for refuge in the Roman empire. They settled in Northeast Europe, which was empty in those times.
(3) Modern population genetical studies show that Europe's original, ancestral population is almost unrepresented in the people we find there today, which originated in Turkey and colonized Europe by gradual agricultural expansion. The Ice people, if any, did not survive to our days.
The highest IQ national population is found in Japan, which is a semi-tropical country.
10 comments:
A Bangladeshi professor once commented that one of the reasons that the West was in advance of the tropical countries is that it is simply too hot in the tropics. I thought he has joking until I made a trip to Delhi in the summer. The heat was such that I nearly fainted. After that experience I had more sympathy for Mexican farmers taking their siestas in the afternoon. Their brains would have curdled under the heat. In fact Mr Lee Kuan Yew here in Singapore made it a point in the early 60s to air-condition all government offices. This is one of the reasons for the greater efficiency here.
Dear Ivan,
Your Bangladeshi professor is misleading you. Most of India enjoys temperate climate and in the Punjab and the Himalayas is decidedly cool. New Delhi has a good climate. Afganistan is decidedly cool. The coldest place on Earth is somewhere in Central Asia, not one of the most developed areas of the world.
About Mexico, I spent time in Baja California, and the climate is dry and cool, exacly like Arizona's. Very nice nights, I loved it. Mexico City is in a high plateau, also quite cool. Central Mexico, where the population concentrates, is mountainous and very nice.
On the other hand, Singapur and Hong Kong are very hot and humid, real hell holes, yet very successful economically even before the invention of air conditioning. Canton's climate is not comfortable, yet people is very industrious.
You mention the disappearance of the original population of Europe, but I don't think they disappeared. The Basques of Spain speak a language that is not related to the Indo-European languages near them. Wiki has this quote:
Though geographically surrounded by Indo-European languages, Basque is classified as a language isolate. It is the last remaining pre-Indo-European language in Western Europe.
AS for the German invasions, Trier is reputed to predate the invasions by at least a millenia. The Germans may have had some of their own in Europe long before the main body invaded.
It appears that the Basques are IndoEuropeans. They are certainly European looking. And very nice people too.
J, I am an Indian and for me air-conditioning makes all the difference between nodding off to sleep in the mid-afternoon and getting some work done. All of Singapore is heavily air-conditioned, from buses to trains and offices and shopping centres. I have worked in Hong Kong and Southern China. The weather there at the height of summer is milder than what my relations have to endured in Madras (Chennai) in supposedly winter time.
At a temperature of 45-50 deg C the brain matter begins to denature, long before this one has to take precautions against the heat. It may well be the case that cold kills more effectively than heat but against the cold one can hunt animals for their fatty meat and fur. I surmise that this accounts for the development of hand-eye coordination, binocular vision and the pack hunting skills so necessary to drive human evolution. The people in the tropics though have to take shelter from the heat, hide like the lizards in the shade because there is nothing one can do about the heat except hope that it goes away. But in return nature provides abundant fruits and nuts, and the small animals that feed on them, so therefore there is little need to develop the hard hunting and organisational skills that characterise the peoples of the northern climes. This would therefore definitely crimp the IQ of the swarthier types who infest the tropics. In fact now that I think about it, I'd say that Australian aboriginal 'Dream Time' culture is a development resulting from their habit of sleeping in the daytime, to the escape the ferocious Sun, with some inspiring drugs thrown in for good measure. I wrote the above as a lark, I don't believe in the Darwinian just-so stories about Lucy and her descendants at all. But rather that the true account of the diversity of the human race will be an elaboration of the story of Noah and his three sons.
It is thought that the aborigines of Australia were one of the first human groups to leave Africa. Their intelligence is also quite low (similar to Africans). I don't believe that this is because their brains are "cooked" by the heat but rather that they never evolved the higher intelligence that was required to live in colder climates where a simple hunter/gatherer type existence was not sufficient to remain alive. In evolutionary terms, the ability to do things such a higher mathematics was quite useless in most places and times
Ivan,
Europeans did not evolve in cold climates, on the contrary, they evolved in South West Asia, near the Azov Sea, which has a very temperate climate. The Black Sea is quite warm compared with oceans.
Mongols and Manchu peoples did evolve in Earth's coldest places, which is in Mongolia. Yet they are not specially intelligent. Eskimo and other polar peoples did evolve in the far North, yet they are too bright. On the Southern Hemisphere, the Patagonian tribes adapted to the extreme cold, but they never developed much brainpower.
I think intelligence was evolved as a social instrument to create alliances and manage complex relationships, and has little to do with climate. We humans have detached ourselves from the environment a very long time ago.
"Europeans did not evolve in cold climates, on the contrary, they evolved in South West Asia, near the Azov Sea, which has a very temperate climate. The Black Sea is quite warm compared with oceans."
Yes, we did J, at least some of us did -- cold/cool and cloudy climates; why else do you think we have lighter skin and non-brown eyes than everyone else? It was to better soak up the little available UV radiation (Vitamin D) in Northern Europe/Russia/Siberia.
Also, Europeans HAVE lived in Northern climates for thousands of years longer than you think. They recently found genetic evidence that many of the people who used to live in what is now Siberia (and is currently inhabited mostly by Asiatics or White/Asiatic mixes) had light skin and non-brown eyes, i.e. they were Northern Europeans, see -- http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/05/light-pigmented-caucasoids-from.html
There are other misconceptions and falsehoods in the rest of the post and in some other comments here. I'll try to come back later and answer them.
"We humans have detached ourselves from the environment a very long time ago."
That is very easy for an apartment-dwelling cosmopolitan in Israel to say...trying being a farmer or a rancher somewhere and then come back and say we are "detached from the environment."
Also, as someone who deals with water-issues, how could you say that? Water is obviously the most crucial part of our environment. DUH
Eman,
The issue was superiority/intelligence/whatever
and not light skin or light colored eyes. Show me the link between IQ and cold misty weather.
Regarding our detachment from Nature, you are usign the reductio-ad-absurdum type of argument. I did not mean that human became bodyless ethereals some time ago in their evolution. I meant that we exterminated our predators a long time ago, and the few surviving in marginal environments (like wolves in Siberia) try to avoid us if possible. We have no serious hunting animals trying to eat us. As for water, we have peopled the deserts since the beginning, Kung! people in Namibia, aborigines in the Australian Outback, Tuaregs in Sahara and so on. We have no problem with water at a species level.
Our problems are with fellow humans.
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