ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

'1. Mesopotamia, a warm climate region, spawned agriculture, towns and alphabets. There is ample scientific evidence of modern intelligence in prehistoric sub-Saharan Africa. And along the South African Indian Ocean coastline, between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, biologically modern humans were carefully blending paint by mixing ochre with bone-marrow fat and charcoal, fashioning beads for self-adornment, and making fish hooks, arrows and other sophisticated tools, sometimes by heating them to 315C (600F).

2. There is no evidence of cognitive advance, at least over the last 100,000 years, evolutionarily speaking. Long before humans left Africa for Asia and Europe, they had already reached the end of the evolutionary line in terms of brain power. We don’t have the right conditions for any meaningful biological evolution of the species.

3. One way to test this hypothesis that your genes determine your IQ, would be to see if you can increase IQ by learning. If so, this would show that education levels, which are purely environmental, affect the scores. It is now well-known that if you practise IQ tests your score will rise, but other forms of study can also help.

Another way to establish the extent to which IQ is determined by nature rather than nurture would be to find identical twins separated at birth and subsequently raised in very different circumstances. But such cases are unusual, and some of the most influential research – such as the work of the 20th-century English psychologist Cyril Burt, who claimed to have shown that IQ was innate – has been dubious. (After Burt’s death, it was revealed that he had falsified much of his data.)

In the relatively few cases where twins were adopted into families of different social classes and education levels, there ended up being huge disparities in IQ – in one case a 20-point gap; in another, 29 points, or the difference between “dullness” and “superior intelligence” in the parlance of some IQ classifications. In other words, where the environments differed substantially, nurture seems to have been a far more powerful influence than nature on IQ.

But what happens when you move from individuals to whole populations? Could nature still have a role in influencing IQ averages? Perhaps the most significant IQ researcher of the last half century is the New Zealander Jim Flynn. IQ tests are calibrated so that the average IQ of all test subjects at any particular time is 100. In the 1990s, Flynn discovered that each generation of IQ tests had to be more challenging if this average was to be maintained. Projecting back 100 years, he found that average IQ scores measured by current standards would be about 70.

Yet people have not changed genetically since then. Instead, Flynn noted, they have become more exposed to abstract logic, which is the sliver of intelligence that IQ tests measure. Some populations are more exposed to abstraction than others, which is why their average IQ scores differ. Flynn found that the different averages between populations were therefore entirely environmental.

This finding has been reinforced by the changes in average IQ scores observed in some populations. The most rapid has been among Kenyan children – a rise of 26.3 points in the 14 years between 1984 and 1998, according to one study. The reason has nothing to do with genes. Instead, researchers found that, in the course of half a generation, nutrition, health and parental literacy had improved.

So, what about the Ashkenazis? Since the 2005 University of Utah paper was published, DNA research by other scientists has shown that Ashkenazi Jews are far less genetically isolated than the paper argued. On the claims that Ashkenazi diseases were caused by rapid natural selection, further research has shown that they were caused by a random mutation. And there is no evidence that those carrying the gene variants for these diseases are any more or less intelligent than the rest of the community.

But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average.

A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of 92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Chinese Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990. And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002.

No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry Ostrer, who headed New York University’s human genetics programme, took the opposite view to Steven Pinker: “It’s bad science – not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.”'

Yes, i had to shower after digging up the pictures on the internet,
but atleast Stellaris managed to download inbetween :)

Bonus:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwz7kQtPPW0