Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!notecnirp!rks
From: rks@notecnirp.Princeton.EDU (Ramesh Sitaraman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Inheritance of IQ
Message-ID: <18330@princeton.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 23 Jul 89 22:04:47 GMT
References: <5453@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <2061@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <5480@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <458@edai.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: news@princeton.Princeton.EDU
Reply-To: rks@notecnirp.UUCP (Ramesh Sitaraman)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University
Lines: 40

In article <458@edai.ed.ac.uk> cam@edai (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>
>People from the north of Europe are on average taller and paler-skinned
>than people from the south of Europe. Once again this is a question of
>scientific fact, that can be established (or refuted) by measurement. To
>suggest, for example, that Germans tend to be bigger and paler than
>Portuguese is not racist. It is a question of fact which can be settled
>one way or another. It is also true that bigness and paleness tends to
>run in families, i.e., there is an inherited component.
>
>Since just about every quality which varies between individual people
>also varies on average between races, sexes, occupational groups, etc.,
>it would be remarkable co-incidence if IQ - or any other parameter of
>mental performance - did not.
>

Well, I think that certain qualitites can evolve much much faster
than others. Skin color, size and certain other external
characteristics belong to the former. Our essential biological
characteristics like the structure of the heart etc etc and
things like IQ (whatever that means) probably take many many
tens of thousands of years to change. If one is to beleive
the anthropologists, the human race diverged and setteled
in various parts of the world less than a hundred thousand years
ago. And our ancient river valley civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia
and the Indus are less than 10,000 yrs old. All this a miniscule
amount of time in evolutionary terms. (For example we diverged
from our nearest cousins, the apes, more than 6 million yrs back and
only 2 percent of our genes are different from theirs !!). 
So I don't think a trivial few tens of thousands of years can
produce an evolutionary change in our mental powers. Though other
external changes can occur even after a few lifetimes.

			Ramesh Sitaraman


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