I love me some Echidne of the Snakes, who has the chops to thoroughly and repeatedly discredit the two or three standard tropes of evolutionary psychology that are all we ever hear of it.
But when it came to dismantling the serially disgraceful Satoshi Kanazawa could have stopped right here
Ten thousand years ago, when humans were hunter-gatherers, we mated, tended to our kin and fled when danger was in the air – activities that did not require much intelligence.
10,000 years is as little as 1% of the estimated age of homo sapiens. And at most a quarter of the age of what at least used to be called our subspecies, homo sapiens s.
For most of that time our sizes, shapes, and colors may have varied but our brains? Probably not so much.
Which means we might not have needed much intelligence 10,000 years ago. (coughbullshitcough!) But we had the intelligence anyway!
It’s not even an insult to Kanazawa that a child born 40,000, or 500,000, or possible even a million years ago but educated today would stand the same chance as Kanazawa of landing a professorship in economics and political science at the London School of Economics. (The insult would be to say anyone, from any era, with more intelligence than he would have chosen a less disreputable line of work.)
At any rate, the fact that, need it or not, we have the same size brains today that we had 10,000 years ago and beyond… but didn’t need them until recently undercuts rather then reinforces Kanazawa’s fantasies about the evolution of human behavior. That a professor at a fucking school of economics would overlook, oh, say, theories of rational, enlightened self-interest in favor of biologically determined behavioral “central planning” says pretty much all you need to know about the professor and… the institution that chooses to retain him.
I would like to point out
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-02 20:06.I would like to point out that brain size is not directly correlated with intelligence – otherwise we’d be busy fighting off our elephant overlords. (And probably losing.) Likewise, even in individual humans, size doesn’t affect IQ levels. It’s the proportion of the brain not tied up in physical processes, plus the level of neuron interconnectivity, which are most important.
That being said, he’s still an idiot. Stone-age level tribes require a considerable amount of learning for survival, not much less involved than a modern school education, just different in nature. There’s no reason to believe that it was any different for the people who lived 10,000 years ago. (1 million years ago, maybe, but definitely not 10,000.) And then there’s cave art. That requires considerable abstract thinking. Especially the pictures which look distorted close up but take advantage of contours and viewing angles so they look normal from the distance. And then there’s writing. While nobody can read it yet, there’s considerable evidence that the clusters of lines, shapes, and squiggles that are often found with cave art are actually a form of writing. People 10,000 years ago (as well as quite a bit further back than that) certainly used their intelligence even in the unlikely event that they didn’t need it.
[Excellent point on the “big brain” thing, Nightfall. I meant big in the metaphorical sense of just like ours… not least because, since we’re the same species their brains were just like ours! :-) —fl]
Actually, no, being the same
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Wed, 2010-03-03 03:10.Actually, no, being the same species doesn’t mean very much aside from having the same general (occasionally broadly general) physical structure plus being genetically and behaviorally compatible for reproduction – compare, say, a Daschund with a St. Bernard. Likewise, there are modern-day humans with very low IQ, so being mentally ungifted is well within the range of possibility for our species. It’s entirely possible that the average intelligence could have gone up considerably over the past 10,000 years without any species splits or a significant change in brain size. (Evolution can happen quickly, given the right stimulus.) But as I said, that’s almost certainly false, making his claims irrelevant at best.
On the point of cave
Submitted by Redleader (not verified) on Wed, 2010-03-03 17:43.On the point of cave painting. There’s a new school of thought that says cave painting might have had the earliest forms of writing on them. It’s just that historically those great pictures of animals and those touching imprints of human hands tended to get all the attention at the expense of a number of smaller symbols and sequences of symbols that seemed to show up repeatedly!!
I wish, I wish everyone who talked about evolutionary psychology, war, and/or our relationship to the environment would read the book “Blood Rites” by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Ah, Mr. Satoshi. I stopped
Submitted by Attie (not verified) on Wed, 2010-03-10 03:17.Ah, Mr. Satoshi. I stopped even trying to read his bullshit when I stumbled across a sentence where he divides humankind into women and individuals.