Is anyone here unfortunate enough to be an Asian American?

[Heraclitus]

As to populations size (I'll ignore population inter and intra connectedness for now which are also very important) Think about it this way. Who is more likley to win the lottery? Someone that buys few ticket or someone who buys many? They are both unlikley to win, but suppose they had kept at it for thousands or hundreds of years. Who would end up with more money?

If you take this metaphore too literaly the guy that buys one ticket ends up with more money since the house always wins and its best not to gamble in the long term. But the beauty is that evolution lets you keep winning multiple times since its likley that by just writting the numbers of a previous lottery win you'll win on the next one too.


I'm not going to mutilate the metaphore by trying to use it to explain why smaller isolates populations "speciate" so to speak more but... I'll adress one potential argument.

"Neither player has yet had time to win since the time they started buying tickets at different rates. All their winnings predate this time."

A player being a hypothetical population.

There where plenty of winning lotto numbers still undiscovered in the past few hundreds of thousands of years. Even if brain size isn't a perfect proxy for inteligence there seems to be a pattern to these skull's don't you agree?



Notice that it only took just 0.5 million years to get to the last extra 400 ml of capacity?

Also even though skulls have shrunk over the past ~40k years the size of some brain regions increased in this period. Not is having more brains good, but once you get some technology, giving birth to ever larger heads pays less than actually getting rid of some no longer usefull parts to feed the growth of relativley new cognitive abilites.



Also we started buying different tickets 200 000 years ago when a few still existant African populations started branching off from each other. 100 years ago a branch left Africa and never looked back and then branched 50,40,30k years ago into all sorts of other ones like Australian Aboriginies, Whites, East Asians, Native Americans, ect.

And to top it all off when that branch of Eurasian Homo Sapiens left Africa the first thing it did was mugg and killed off the Neanderthalls to get their tickets. By now any useless ones are gone, but we keep writting in from 4 to 1 % of our combinations with Neanderthall numbers. Neanderthall numbers that have had a million years of independant gambling to come up with winning combinations. Do all these numbers just mean lots of free blenders and bookweights and other neat but not relevant consolation prizes?

Or did Neanderthalls stumble upon a few combos that win cold hard cash? (cash being cognitive enchancements if you are loosing track of the analog)

[giblets]

You didn't read my post carefully. If selection for inteligence was exactly as strong, and the trade offs where completley comparable in all the places human settled, we would still see cognitive differences due to different population sizes of various populations and their varying levels interconectedness with each other.

The only way to get a exactly egalitarian distributions in cognitive abilities among populations (ie races, subraces, ethnicities) is to have selection pressures vary across the world just right to offset this.

What if the selection pressures were weaker in populations with larger populations and greater levels of interconnectedness? And let's not forget that you're not just saying there could be some small difference, you seem to be claiming that a large part of the reported differences in IQ between people in different countries can be attributed to genetics.

[Heraclitus]

What if the selection pressures were weaker in populations with larger populations and greater levels of interconnectedness?

Perhaps. But why would that be though? Especially to the extent of how much more lottery tickets people with for example agriculture had.
Also in times before agriculture trade and presumably thus any sort of meaningfull cooperation was somewhat limited to a few hundred km. Why would round island A with a diamatere of 3000 km have weaker selection pressures than hypothetical island B with a 1000 km diameter?

Also other humans and societal complexity are a major reason we developed abstract reasoning in the first place.

In A Farwell to Alms its amply demonstrated some selection for inteligence still persisted in England in the last few hundred years.



Anycase this is a valid point of inquriy you raise.

And let's not forget that you're not just saying there could be some small difference, you seem to be claiming that a large part of the reported differences in IQ between people in different countries can be attributed to genetics.

This is true. However I'm not arguing about the differences in IQ between nations and ethnicities being mostly genetic right now. I'm just arguing for how unlikley the idea of absolutley no differences is to see how much common ground I can find with other people arguing with me.

Also by sperating parts of my opinions and arguments into smaller reasonable and choerent bits they can be accepted and rejected on their own merrit not any baggage I string along them. Also this helps *me* think more clearly during an argument. When examining them thus I oftend find a crazy idea or two has been pygybacking other related but reasonable ones. If I can see the premises that I'm completley sure of, are true being disagreed with rather than the ones that seem likley but are far from clear, then I know I need to reexplain my take on the basics or just give up. It also helps me to know if the other guy is arguing in good faith.

I do hope you'll post a response, your posts seem mostly to be very well tought out, you get to the meat and seperate ideas pretty well. I'd also encourage Albert to respon since two cents are reasonably fun to respond to, though I sometimes feel we spin in circles in this debate through various threads.