Clik here to view.
Rice farming and gene-culture coevolution
Why didn’t alcohol intolerance evolve the same way in China as it did in southern Europe? One reason was that the Chinese have a long tradition of boiling water for drinking. So they didn’t need wine...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cognitive ability of indigenous Arctic peoples
In cold environments, human cognitive ability was an adaptation not to resource scarcity, as is often claimed, but to an abundance of resources that could be exploited only through a high level of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Recent cognitive evolution in West Africa: the Niger's role
Before European contact, West African societies were more complex in the north and the east, i.e., in the Sahel and the Nigerian forest. This pattern is mirrored geographically by the frequencies of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Red is beautiful: Perceived femininity of skin color in an African population
Perceived masculinity and femininity of facial skin color. Cameroonian women rated faces of Cameroonian men, and Cameroonian men rated faces of Cameroonian women (Fiala et al. 2022, Supplementary...
View ArticleClik here to view.
When did Europe pull ahead?
Medieval market– Nicole Oresme (15th century) (Wikicommons) In terms of GDP per capita growth, northwest Europe began to surpass the rest of the world during the 14th century: before the conquest of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A virus that increases intelligence, and what else?
Caterpillar infected by baculovirus, before liquefaction (Wikicommons, Williams et al. 2017) Higher IQ is associated with antibodies to cytomegalovirus, but only in adults whose IQ is already above a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Recent cognitive evolution: The case of Ashkenazi Jews
Old Jewish cemetery in Prague (Wikicommons - Uoaei)The 11th century seems to be the time when cognitive evolution began to accelerate among Ashkenazi Jews. In terms of mean cognitive ability, they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Recent cognitive evolution in Europe: a new study of ancient DNA
Polygenic scores for alleles associated with educational attainment - Europeans of different time periods (Kuijpers et al. 2022) According to a new study of ancient European DNA, cognitive evolution...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Humans and the olfactory environment
Perfume burner, Egypt, c. 700-900 (Wikicommons, Musée du Louvre, Marie-Lan Nguyen) We have sought to remake our environment in ever more appealing ways, including its smell. But the change hasn’t been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ancestral East Asians and adaptation to coronaviruses
Early farming village in China (Wikicommons – Xinyang City Museum, Gary Todd) Respiratory viruses began to propagate more easily when hunting and gathering gave way to farming and as settlements grew...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Extreme founder events among ancestral Europeans
Expansion of steppe pastoralists (Narasimhan et al. 2019) How much of the present-day European gene pool comes from the indigenous hunter-gatherers? How much from Neolithic farmers of Anatolian...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Adapting to bubonic plague
Rash associated with familial Mediterranean fever (Wikicommons – Dr. H.J. Lachman) In the eastern Mediterranean, people were likelier to survive bubonic plague if they had stronger inflammatory...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cognitive evolution on the Italian Peninsula
A recent polygenic study has shown that mean cognitive ability is higher in the North of Italy than in the South. Cognitive evolution seems to have gone the farthest in the Northeast, perhaps because...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Recent evolution in Estonia
Estonian women at a song festival (Wikicommons – Anastasia Lakhtikova) Estonian women had more reproductive success during the late 20th century if they possessed a more masculine body build, narrower...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vampirism and bloodlust
Ishbosheth is slain (Wikicommons – Maciejowski Bible) Before the State monopoly on violence, an adult male was expected to spill another man’s blood in the course of life. Such action would be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Comparing an incomparable?
Stigmata Siciliana (1964), David McLure (Wikicommons) What is the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africans? There’s no clear answer. Current estimates come from an early stage of the Flynn effect and are also...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How real is the Flynn effect?
Changes in mean IQ between 1909 and 2013 (Pietschnig and Voracek 2015, p. 285) Because of the Flynn effect, average IQ has risen by 35 points over the past century. That’s more than the difference...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How real is the Flynn effect? Part II
Can you pass a Grade 8 exam that was given to American children in 1912? Why the Flynn effect never really happened. My last post elicited a tweet from Elon Bachman: Argument by incredulity (w.r.t....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Great Decline
Mean polygenic score of Icelanders by year of birth (Kong et al. 2017, Fig. 2) Three polygenic studies have shown that cognitive ability declined among European Americans, British people, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is intelligence all that matters for a successful society?
If we consider intelligence to be the only worthy mental attribute, we’ll end up with an elite that is not only intelligent but also narcissistic … and indifferent to the rest of us. George Francis...
View Article