The YouTube channel BantuCityDiaries, who I have mentioned before in another blog post, recently did something that has been de facto taboo and verboten in most of the rest of the world, particularly the western world: He want ahead and performed an IQ test in Nigeria to see if older reports on it are actually accurate or not.
Turned out that his results match those old reports quite well, and it appears, according to this experiment, that at least in Nigeria the average IQ is extremely low (somewhere around 73, give or take.)
Of course in the west this is a taboo subject and such studies must never be conducted and the results and the subject overall must never be discussed, and any results must be categorically denied, excused and rationalized, and cannot be taken at face value.
If we approach these results without any prejudice, without any judgment, without any preconceptions, without jumping to any questionable conclusions, just taking them as they are, in a completely neutral and rational manner, what could explain this significant difference between the average IQs of different peoples around the world?
It is, I believe, due to our recent evolutionary history and, most particularly, natural selection.
I have written before about the question of "what explains the vastly different developmental levels around the world before imperialism?" where I note how parts of the world, most prominently sub-Saharan Africa and pretty much all of the American continent, still lived literally in the Stone Age at the same time that Europe and the Far East had the printing press, gigantic gothic cathedrals, massive concert halls where elaborate concerts were played with very elaborate musical instruments, sea ships could travel across oceans and so on and so forth, and how this vast difference lasted without much change up until the era of colonialism and imperialism, when Europe conquered much of the rest of the world and brought its technological advances to those regions.
The reason for this was largely (although not completely exclusively) environmental: In warmer but more humid areas of the world there was very little evolutionary pressure for humans to develop new techniques and technology for better survival. In these regions of the world humans survived by just going on a daily hunting trip and bringing food to the village that way, and that's about it. They had no incentive to do so much as develop agriculture (particularly because most African and American tribes were almost 100% carnivorous, very rarely if ever eating plant-based food.)
In harsher climates, both much colder and much hotter and drier, though, people had to overcome the challenges imposed by their environment by being more inventive.
Because of the harsher climate, such as for example deadly winters, people could not afford to just go on a hunting trip every day and bring food back to the village. Instead, they had to plan ahead. They had to come up with ways to survive for months on end without a constant supply of food. They had to invent ways to preserve food for months on end. They had to invent ways to generate a lot more food than what was needed for one day (after all, if you need to feed a village for 4 or 5 months without any constant source of food, and all you have is preserved food, you need a lot of it to preserve and store in the first place.)
It's precisely this planning-ahead and the inventiveness requires for it that started to differentiate peoples from different regions of the world very early in the history of humanity: In environments where such inventiveness increased chances of survival, people who possessed that inventiveness were just naturally selected over hundreds of generations. In environments where planning-ahead and inventiveness was not necessary, no such natural selection happened (even if someone was born smarter, there was no environmental factors making the lineage of that person more likely to survive.)
So the answer is, in my opinion, once again the environment: The environment where different isolated peoples have lived for tens of thousands of years has shaped, via natural selection, many of their characteristics, including mental capabilities. If there was never environmental pressure that helped the smartest people survive better, then smarter people were never naturally selected. And, of course, the converse.
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