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From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Stupidity about intelligence (or genetics)
Message-ID: <102@snark.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 26-Jun-87 21:22:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: snark.102
Posted: Fri Jun 26 21:22:00 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Jun-87 09:46:00 EDT
References: <126@snark.UUCP> <3728@sunybcs.UUCP>
Organization: Thyrsus Enterprises, Malvern PA 19355
Lines: 62
Xref: mnetor talk.politics.misc:3270 sci.bio:488

In article <3728@sunybcs.UUCP>, alin@sunybcs.UUCP (Alin Sangeap) writes:
> Most matings between humans are infertile.  It's because human females
> don't go into heat, so when they mate they're mostly just fooling.

Some sort of sexist remark seems almost required here, but since I'm
not a sexist (and wouldn't care to arouse the ire of the net's ferocious
feminists if I were) I'll let that perfect straight line slide right by...

> Also, Kalahari is a desert; the Bushmen probably can't afford to increase
> their population without starving.  They must have developed some methods
> to reduce their fertility, else they would have died out.  Your source,
> did it test fertility for Bush-persons away from possible social and
> chemical means to reduce fertility?

Several people have asked me for an exact reference on this. I am very sorry
I can't supply one. I recall reading the information; I even have exact visual
memories of a cross-section diagram of a Bushman's head pointing out the lower
density of cortical folding. The whole business startled and amazed me.

I believe it was one of my college anthro textbooks. It's not the
facts themselves that have been tabooed, just the clear implication that
there is more than one species of genus homo on earth.

The implication of my source was that the infertility was extraordinarily
high and due to biological incompatibilities, so much so as to make hybrids
unheard of or nearly so. This in itself doesn't establish speciation (there's
a classic example of similar stuff going on between populations at opposite
ends of the circumpolar range of a species of seagull) but together with the
morphological differences it makes the case pretty strong.

Of course, some biologists would take the easy way out: "So what's a 'species',
anyhow?". They have a point -- life is a continuum. But if we're going to
describe (say) wolves and dogs as different 'species' based on peoples'
more-or-less intuitive notion of mutually-infertile-populations-with-
gross-morphological-differences, it's time to write homo kalaharensis into
the taxonomies.

Personally, I'd like to see that shouted from the housetops -- it's time
for us as a species for us to deal with the idea that the self-awareness,
abstraction-handling and tool-using skills we're so proud of, and the
vaguer qualities we call 'humanity', aren't restricted to beings with
the DNA of a homo sap.

Whales, dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas and even some species of
octopi and squid have demonstrated the ability to think, plan and handle
abstractions in a rather humanlike way. Whales and dolphins have native
languages of their own; chimps and gorillas can be taught language and
use it creatively, and there's some reason to believe that the cephalopods
do language-like things with chromatophore excitation patterns (though
no one has caught them communicating abstractions yet). Chimps and gorillas
make and use tools.

One of the spookier data I have on this is that one gorilla who'd been taught
language (Ameslan, I think), a female named Koko, expressed a primitive but
unmistakable notion of afterlife when discussing the recent death of her pet
kitten (I do have a source for this, but it was a 'new-age' magazine; you
may not care to trust it).

      Eric S. Raymond
      UUCP:  {{seismo,ihnp4,rutgers}!cbmvax,sdcrdcf!burdvax}!snark!eric
      Post:  22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355
      Phone: (215)-296-5718