Head Size = Brains = Nonsense

Repost from the old site.

It is much postulated by hereditarians in the IQ debate that head size has a correlation with IQ. This seems to be true to some extent, but there are also problems with it. For one thing, nutrition increases head size, so head size is not as genetic as the hereditarians say it is. Another problem is that it is only a correlation, and not a very high one either.

What this means is that there will be cases where it does not make sense at all. For instance, Eskimos have the biggest heads, but they have IQ’s of 91, which, though Richard Lynn falsely states that they are the third major race in IQ, behind Northeast Asians and European Whites.

This is because Lynn leaves out very high scoring groups like East Indians in the West (IQ = 96) and Vietnamese (IQ = 99.5), but they don’t fit his silly Ice Age Theory of Brains Evolution, so they get left out.

Even more problematic, or much more really, enough to make the case for brain size = brains even more deadly, is the fact that human brains were much larger 10,000 years ago, when most Asians were all still Australoids (the same race as Papuans and Aborigines), when European Whites as we now know them were just beginning to evolve, and white skin was still 1,000 years away in Europe, when American Indians were changing from Australoid to Polynesian type, and the NE Asian type had not even really showed up yet, and would not for a few thousand years more.

People in India still looked like Aborigines too, and would not look like the modern-day Caucasians that they surely are for another 2,000 years. In most of the world, man was simply transforming from Australoid to either Amerindian, Indian Caucasian or Northeast Asian.

To think that these Aborigine types were smarter then than we are today and have today ended up sadly and world’s lowest IQ race except for Bushmen simply defies belief. No one was doing much better anywhere on Earth really at that time, as something called Civilization had not even developed.

If you want to think that 10,000 year old Cro-Magnon hulking hunter-gatherers and a bunch of proto-Aborigines, who were probably even lower IQ than they are today, were smarter than the guys who put a man on the moon and created the wonder known as sliced bread, you are entitled to that belief. But I will call you an idiot.

Even Lynn’s head size correlations that the hereditarians love so much only account for 1

That brains were bigger 10,000 years ago than they are today simply means that humans have been getting less robust and more gracile. Robust means big and hulking. Aborigines, Melanesians and Papuans are some of the most robust folks around these days. Blacks are not necessarily as robust as one might think, many are surprisingly gracile.

We have been transforming from robust, hulking cave men more or less to our present status as Blackberry-doing New York metrosexuals, and in this transformation our brains have shrunk dramatically as we got sleeker and sleeker and more Upper East Side New York sleek and gym-trained.

Also, we should note that since 1600 to the present day our heads have been getting smaller and smaller. This is occurring in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and may have been occurring elsewhere too.

If you really think that folks in the time of Shakespeare, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, Cromwell, Fermat, Rembrandt, Cervantes, Pascal, Leibniz, Peter the Great, Bach, Newton, Racine, Locke, Spinoza were smarter than we are, you may.

If you wish to believe that the humans who pulled off the Salem Witch Trials, Galileo’s Inquisition, and the idiotic Thirty Years War, the people who caused the Plague by sheer stupidity, the people who invented a famous thing called Pilgrims, who fought endless war in Europe against the Ottomans only halting at Vienna, were smarter than we are in our Teraflop Age, you are welcome to believe that, but I am going to call bull on that.

Still, they did halt the Turk at the gates, Newton did write is mathematical encyclopedic masterpiece, and the treaty of Westphalia was all pulled off, so this time did have its potential. Note, though, that all this good stuff occurred late Century when our brains were already shrinking. See where this argument is going? Time to get off a train that’s going off the tracks.

As you can see, the Fathead Brain Theory has serious issues, to say the least. There seems to be something there, but there is a lot less there than one might think. When people start talking in general terms of Fathead Brainiacness, it is time to wave the arms and shut the conversation down.

Hereditarians, come on, you can do better than this.

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