Why is it that typically the further you are from the equator, the smarter you are?

[NameName]

I would appreciate some hypotheses.

 

Here is a map of the world by IQ:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/IQ_by_Country.png

 

It seems that generally the further away you are from the equator, the smarter you are. My hypothesis is:

 

1. You need a high IQ to survive colder areas. You need to be able to foresee the future and plan for the winter. People with low IQs are not good at planning for the future. Surviving the winter, growing food and getting water in the winter forces you to work hard which stimulates brain activity allowing most to achieve a higher IQ.

 

What do you think?

[Wuzzums]

Another explanation would be that because humans originated from Africa, the individuals smart enough to value opportunity in distant lands were the ones to emigrate and populate the rest of the planet whilst the individuals prone to tribalism and scared of the unknown stayed behind. 

 

Also, we know that the agricultural revolution significantly increased the quality of life for people compared to hunter gatherers. So people in more temperate climates were pushed to adopt agriculture more because of the shifting weather. Whereas nearer the equator the weather is more constant and the chances of a hunter gatherer to find food is the same in the summer as it is in winter. A higher level of living leads to a more comfortable living which leads to more time spent on matters of the mind.

[NeoCortex]

very warm                                   much siestawauw                     

 

Another explanation would be that because humans originated from Africa, the individuals smart enough to value opportunity in distant lands were the ones to emigrate and populate the rest of the planet whilst the individuals prone to tribalism and scared of the unknown stayed behind. 

 

Also, we know that the agricultural revolution significantly increased the quality of life for people compared to hunter gatherers. So people in more temperate climates were pushed to adopt agriculture more because of the shifting weather. Whereas nearer the equator the weather is more constant and the chances of a hunter gatherer to find food is the same in the summer as it is in winter. A higher level of living leads to a more comfortable living which leads to more time spent on matters of the mind.

 

 

Oh, and this.

[Sal9000]

I strongly recommend reading Guns, Germs, and Steel if you are interested in the subject. Eurasian civilisations had a headstart, which lead to an ever increasing level of technological advancement.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs_and_Steel

[NGardner]

Its biological not sociological. They have documented this that a given group will perform better  on testing in Mid-Fall, than during the Summer months. Heat stress influences cognitive ability. 

 

http://www.peterhancock.ucf.edu/Downloads/ref_pubs/Hancock_Vasmatzidis_2003.pdf

[Tyler Durden]

There is so much to say about this topic, I think you could easily write an entire book about it. But I'll just share some of my thoughts.

 

For starters I don't equite having a high IQ with being smart. There is definitely overlap and IQ tests certainly measure some aspects of intelligence but I've always considered them rather incomplete. Some key aspects of human intelligence, such as social intelligence, just don't really get measured on IQ tests even though they're of vital importance.

 

That said, I think these are some of the factors contributing to the difference in IQ scores:

 

-What Sal9000 said. Read the book. It was the first thing I thought about when I read your question. There are a lot of environmental factors that shaped cultures around the world and they're explained very well in that book.

 

-IQ tests were developed in the West and they measure what highly educated people in the West consider to be intelligent. So if you've grown up in the West and you've gone through god knows how many years of schooling and you're used to sitting behind a desk with a pen in your hand doing math problems and fill in the gaps exercises then an IQ test will appear quite normal to you. But if you've grown up in some village in Africa and you've spent most of your time outside doing real stuff in the physical world then an IQ test will actually look rather foreign to you, and you will not score as high as someone who did spend all that time in a Western school environment.

 

This map shows how many people are enrolled in tertiary education (which I think says something about the education system as a whole) and it looks very similar to your IQ map: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR/countries?display=map

 

-What NGardner said. It's just harder to take an IQ test in the tropics.

[StylesGrant]

 

I strongly recommend reading Guns, Germs, and Steel if you are interested in the subject. Eurasian civilisations had a headstart, which lead to an ever increasing level of technological advancement.

 

http://en.wikipedia....Germs_and_Steel

 

 

 

 

Some important questions.

 

Why are the history of Buddhism and Hinduism and Eastern Philosophy on a whole, regarding pre 20th century Indian subcontinent cultures and south east Asia (and not China, which does have a violent history of civil war for millennial) have a consistently more spiritual, pacifistic, peaceful, innocent history compared to Judeo-Arbrahamic Religions and Indo-European linguistic historical cultural origins?

 

And Papua New Guinea and parts of Africa where violence still persists in primitive ways?

 

Remember Lloyd Demause's statements?

 

Cultures don't evolve unless economics, parenting, and technology evolve.

 

I believe culture, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience are all intertwined on the material biological level. 

 

Cultures are a form of free will chosen selectively over time that shapes evolutionary behavior, so this will always be affected by geography, environment, etc

 

Vitamin D probably plays a large part, since it affects 1/10th of the human genome. 

 

It is difficult to say why Germans invented the nuclear bomb, and Indians developed stable highly spiritual peaceful societies but never rational industrial means. There were many alchemists and pre-scientific process aspects to Indian society, however, and the Indians as a group now have more upper class professionals than any other country in the world. 

 

It should be noted that Middle Easterners weren't always totally given to undeveloped societies driven on Shariah Law. There were large parts of the Middle East affected by plague, cooling periods, and Genghis Khan during the end of the 13th century, and these effects endured towards the 14th century with Islam moving towards a conservative repressive Luddite paradigm. The Khan was heavily suggested as a cause for this, in that he utterly committed democide to entire Islamic civilizations. 

 

Some of the original basis for Western science, mathematics, and medicine actually comes from the alchemy of the 11th and 12th century golden periods of Islamic empires. 

 

Biological develop during gestation and childhood play a large part as well. Americans during the colonial period were taller, healthier, and smarter due to diet alone compared to mainland European peasants. And northern societies as a whole are wealthier, with a culturally ingrained puritanical work ethic. Access to more calories, more varied nutrition, and nutrition density play a huge part in development. 

 

Its also been strongly argued that agriculture actually reduced the quality of health of societies compared to nomadic groups based on fossil records. The free time and social and cultural changes in a large unnomadic society would have led to a development in intellectual rigor and organization however in order to drive a more complex large population. 

 

There is even a possibility that different herbal medicines and entheogenic substances played a role in developing entire cultures before the rise of alcohol bases agricultural societies. It seems strongly indicated that Hinduism and eastern metaphysics and philosophy had a strong root in entheogenic substances as well.

[giancoli]

very interesting topic...although politically incorrect (which gives me some weird satisfaction)

Two ideas: The further away from equator the more you have seasons, which means more irregular periods of food availability, which requires more planning (or very advanced instincts, which is off course possible)

So this theory focuses on survival.

Another route which is often forgotten is the sexual part. There are reasons to suspect intelligence is partly evolved due to sexual selection, that is selection due to mating preferences and mate competition. One thing that encourages this point of view is the fact that intelligence didn't evolve in the millions of other species on the planet, which seems to suggest it's an unlikely event. Now sexual selection is far more random than natural selection (survival), which often "discovers" the same solutions over and over again. Part of the random nature of sexual selection is something called fisherian runaway, which basically is an positive feedback effect...due to the component that something is attractive just by the fact that it is attractive...just a random preference can rize up and gain momentum by being more and more "popular".

So then comes the question is there any reason why there should be a higher sexual selection for intelligent mates further away from the equator? Now this can maybe go back to the environment again in that females are more vulnerable in harsher climates and so selects mates...

Another interesting correlation is between intelligence and r vs. k mating strategies....again in a harsher climate it might be more advantageous to go for the quality over quantity route. Hence males who had few offspring that they invested highly in would possibly do better closer to the poles where it was more difficult to survive. Males could then pass on knowledge to their offspring in how to survive. If this theory is true, males who have an inclination to fuck around alot and not bond with their female partner should tend to be less intelligent.

I have read something about europeans having neanderthals genes...but I have not read more in depth about this. This doesn't explain anything in the ultimate sense off course though, but is an interesting historical fact and a piece off the puzzle (if it's true).

[J-William]

I would appreciate some hypotheses.

 

Here is a map of the world by IQ:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/IQ_by_Country.png

 

It seems that generally the further away you are from the equator, the smarter you are. My hypothesis is:

 

1. You need a high IQ to survive colder areas. You need to be able to foresee the future and plan for the winter. People with low IQs are not good at planning for the future. Surviving the winter, growing food and getting water in the winter forces you to work hard which stimulates brain activity allowing most to achieve a higher IQ.

 

What do you think?

It could be that it has a lot to do with industrialization.

 

that at least would explain South Korea, japan, taiwan, and China... and then in Europe certainly Germany, Italy and the UK are more industrialized than much of the rest of Europe.

 

Industrialization would explain being further from the equator, and at the same time the east asian countries that aren't far from the equator.

 

The fact that map looks alot like a map of economic prosperity as well as education... seems unsurprising, but which came first the IQ or the prosperity and education? I don't know.

[Alan C.]

It has been suggested, and the idea holds merit, that as humans migrated away from the equator, nature selected for higher intelligence in harsher climates because greater ingenuity, resourcefulness, and foresight were required to survive.

 

I recall that Hans Hoppe discussed this in one of his lectures in which he postulated that private property was a necessary requisite, but not sufficient on its own, to improve the human condition; and that higher intelligence was also required. For this, he was accused of advocating eugenics (even by fellow libertarians).

 

I think that some people are so terrified of the left-liberal/progressive smear-machine that they will even smear their own as a proactive defensive measure.

[Brentb]

The IQ tests that I've seen are almost entirely based on logic and math skills. People who have had access to quality math classes at an early age are going to score higher on IQ tests. The act of reading and processing what was read also improves logic abilities.

 

If your environment requires that you operate at the level of survival, finding clean water and food is going to take priority over learning multiplication and reading books.

[Hannibal]

From the map it looks to me as thigh it's pretty simple - the lower IQs are all in areas that weren't even 'civilised' a hundred years ago. Now in the grip of religious fanaticism the progress in those areas is retarded, and much of the rest of the world makes it their business to keep those places retarded insofar as a cultural enlightenment is concerned.

 

Those places are only a few hundred years behind the US/UK. I would guess (and i may be entirely wrong) that if we looked at the same map 500 years ago the contrast would be much less obvious.

[cynicist]

1. You need a high IQ to survive colder areas. You need to be able to foresee the future and plan for the winter. People with low IQs are not good at planning for the future. Surviving the winter, growing food and getting water in the winter forces you to work hard which stimulates brain activity allowing most to achieve a higher IQ.

 

What do you think?

 

That was my immediate thought as well, but consider that all of the darker spots on the map are better off economically than the lighter areas. You might think, well duh, they have smarter people there, however, technological progress also leads to higher productivity and efficiency, which allows for more people to specialize and learn rather than fight to survive. I think it's probably the result of a snowball effect between technology and rationality. Rational thought leads to innovation, and innovation leads to more time or capacity for rational thought. 

 

I'm sure that you're right and that the harsher environment sparked a greater need for innovation for survival's sake though.

[NGardner]

If you took a IQ test in the North now. Then took another test in the hot south you would perform worse. 

[Waffles]

This is almost exactly the sahara IQ interaction hypothesis

 

http://www.psych-it.com.au/Psychlopedia/article.asp?id=331