Posted on 07/02/2010 11:55:56 PM PDT by wac3rd
People in developing countries have lower IQs because their bodies divert energy from brainpower to fighting disease, researchers claimed today.
In hot nations blighted by deadly infections, the priority is survival and populations have evolved to develop stronger immune systems rather than intelligence, according to the controversial theory.
Some critics warned the study could become an excuse for racism if it was used to suggest that people in the Third World are not as intelligent as those in cooler, richer climes.
Others pointed out that the ancient Persians, Greeks and Romans lived in hot climates and still boasted extraordinary civilisations. U.S. researchers claimed their work could explain why national IQ scores vary around the world and are lower in some warmer countries stricken by diseases such as malaria, tetanus and tuberculosis.
Infection could have as important an impact on intelligence as education, diet and wealth, said researcher Randy Thornhill and a team from the University of New Mexico. Children under five use most of their energy for brain development and this can be restricted if the body has to fight disease, they wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. They compared data from worldwide IQ studies with disease maps drawn up by the World Health Organisation and concluded that the higher the level of infectious disease in a country, the lower the average national IQ.
'The effect of infectious disease on IQ is bigger than any other single factor we looked at,' said Chris Eppig, lead author on the paper. Disease is a major sap on the body's energy, and the brain takes a lot of energy to build. If you don't have enough, you can't do it properly. (snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Nutrition definitely has a lot to do with it. I remember being in a hospital waiting room several times with a group of pregnant black teenage girls who were part of a project aimed at improving their diet during pregnancy. The nurses asked the girls to provide a list of what they ate every day.
I had no idea that people could even survive on a diet of potato chips and Coke, let alone have babies. These kids had been given all sorts of supplemental welfare payments, free vitamin supplements, etc. They didn’t take the vitamins and they didn’t use the money to buy food. They said it was too much trouble to cook and nobody cooked in their homes. They all sounded and acted as if they had what are politely called “developmental disabilities” themselves. I was pretty stunned.
Needless to say, things didn’t look great for their babies. They had a high rate of premature births, infant mortality and congenital defects. Those were things directly related to nutrition, and the sad thing was that none of these girls seemed to take it seriously or want to change their habits.
I think nutrition has a lot to do with it. The correlation with disease may be that people who are malnourished have less resistance. As for the southern connection, tropical climates are very favorable to insects, so you also have more disease carriers there and more opportunity to spread disease among an already weakened population.
I was taught some 35 years ago the brain worked on a food first,then shelter,then reproduction basis. The plain fact is you have countries like ours and organizations like the U.N. gifting the first 2 which leads to too much of the third.
Its not a hot cold comfortable situation by itself but one of achievement. If you need to perform to have the first 2 then you by that very process become more cunning and more intelligent. Remove the first part of the process and you have an unintelligent reproductive machine.
Rampant disease is a natural result of being unintelligent,not the other way around.
And all the morons on Leno’s “Jay Walking” segment would answer his very simple questions correctly.
As a side benefit, we could probably balance the budget with the fines this would generate.
This is very sloppy thinking.
I can blow a hole in this theory with a single name...Nancy Pelosi.
“I’ve known some who’ve left such places. To a man and a woman, they’re very intelligent. “
The people whom you have met are not necessarily representative of where they came from. Quite obvious that if they left the hell-hole where they were born it follows that they are intelligent. This has made America what it is today.(well used to be anyway)
This article recalls the eugenic thought that was so popular back in the 20’s and 30’s that brought about Hitler’s “final solution” and Margaret Sanger’s starting Planned Parenthood to get rid of the “blacks and undesirables”. We’ve been there and it’s ugly!
I’ve heard about that theory too. If we control for epidemics and pandemics, the affluent and powerful were the healthiest. By the way, speaking of epidemics, pandemics, wars, and natural disasters - there was a priest in the Church of England, Thomas Malthus, who was a mathematics scholar at Cambridge prior to his ordination. Over 200 years ago he published a work called “Essay on Population.” His contention was that food supplies tended to increase by arithmetic ratio while, on the other hand, population increased by geometric ratio. He concluded that those famines, diseases, etc. were NECESSARY in order to keep population under control. Even though some of his precepts have become dated, the gravamen of his thesis still has some truth to it. But for most, life was, as Hobbes put it, “brutish, cruel, savage and short.”
I don’t think you need a government mandate; you just need families where people actually feed their own kids and the kids learn how to cook by watching somebody actually do it. There’s no shortage of food in this country, no endemic diseases that cause mass deaths, and no excuse for the fact that these girls had never seen anybody do anything but open a bag of Ruffles for breakfast. (The other thing that amazed me was that they always bought the most expensive potato chips.)
This program was an attempt to teach these girls to take some control over this aspect of their lives and at least be responsible for their diet and that of their babies/children, things that they should have learned from their parents...except for the fact that they really didn’t have parents in any meaningful sense of the word.
I used to work with developmentally disabled adults, and there was a category for those who had been “culturally deprived” as children. Most of these people were white. They had no organic problems, but functioned like people who did, because they had been so poorly socialized as children. They had never received any intellectual stimulus (mostly, nobody talked to them) and had abominable diets that included drinking beer from cans left around the trailer by their parents the night before. Heck, the beer was probably the most nutritious thing they consumed.
You may think this is a joke, but it’s not. The cost of these pregnancies was very high, and you the taxpayer are paying it; the cost of having a population of people who are so low-functioning they are barely employable is also high, not to mention the crime they generate.
I would say that creation of this group (poorly nourished, poorly socialized, low-functioning) dates to the Great Society. Food assistance to the poor had, prior to that, been in the form of the famous “surplus foods,” things like corn meal, canned meat, beans, powdered milk, cheese, etc. In other words, all real foods that required cooking.
Then it was decided that this was undignified, and the government not only started to hand out food stamps, but did campaigns throughout lower income neighborhoods to get people on food stamps whether they had previously gotten surplus foods or not. Once the government stepped in and started playing mommy and daddy, families fell apart and the basically good nutrition people got from their home diet disappeared. Coupled with the fact that girls were having children at increasingly young ages, several generations were produced in rapid succession that suffered from the effects of this lack, and I think that much of this population genuinely does have nutritionally linked developmental deficiencies.
That was my point--the smart ones left.
“It’s poverty, not heat.”
It’s the corrupt, cannibal-king tyrants.
To make things fair the UN should introduce a disease program for the developed world, nobody gets vaccinated and every child must get at least one documented infectious disease a year. Seems fair.
Did it not occur to them that perhaps all the intelligent people were simply smart enough to leave?
Ruffles hold the dip better. :)
What decides a high IQ?
Good memory, math skills, logical thinking? I really don’t know what the-powers-that-be value in order to make a high IQ.
IQ’s just the measurement of how well you can adapt to a stress-free Western Culture. Things like logic and mathematics mean nothing to somebody who’s trying to hunt for their next meal or grow their next crop and try to avoid crop failure. There needs to be more culturally sensitive IQ tests in order to truly measure “intelligence”.
it turns out that intelligence is helpful for essentially EVERYTHING, whether tossing spears at game, shooting hoops, designing boats, or deciding where to gather water from the river.
All other things being equal, the smarter person will probably be better at the task.
Of course it’s not a perfect predictor of everything, nor possibly to measure with perfect accuracy, but it provides an advantage in just about everything (and any exceptions one might offer would likely prove the rule).
It has more to do with how we measure IQ. We set the standard to make only developed, school educated people score well on the test. The ability to survive in harsh environments without technology isn’t something we deem useful, so it has no place in IQ tests.
The ability to survive in harsh environments is correlated with the kind of intelligence that can be measured with conventional tests (which don’t necessarily test book learning.)
It is possible to test the intelligence of “savages” and testing is done, and first world schooled people’s scores on these tests correlate with with their scores on other intelligence tests.
We only have so much energy. If we use it to find enough food for the day, that doesn’t leave much to contemplate the origins of the universe.
>>>>> "I've known some who've left such places. To a man and a woman, they're very intelligent." <<<<<
Perhaps these individuals weren't subjected to the many infectious childhood diseases of their country of origin; perhaps their intelligence is the reason they decided to leave and come to America - OR perhaps their inate high intelligence and consequent success in education made it easy for them to find employment in the USA.
What would be interesting to know is if IQ has truly substantially increased in the West through history -- how about those centuries before modern sanitation when Black Death and many other plagues swept through Europe??? What was the impact upon IQ and what circumstances lead to high IQ in such conditions???
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