Big Don made a point that I needed to respond to at length, so I’ve broken out of the comments section. This is what he said:

Chris, I was merely refuting the point that sub-Saharan Pygmies and Bushmen must have had IQs greater than 54-60 for them to have survived. Not so. Rats and cockroaches, however smart, are probably below IQ-10 on the human scale. If you checkout the beautiful color photos in 1940s-era National Geographics, you can see the Pygmy standard of living was barely above that of rats & roaches. As a boy of 10-12, I grew up on those mags…it was the only place in those days, before Playboy & Penthouse, a kid could see photos of women’s tits…

Now I have to say that my initial impulse was to be scathing. After all, Big Don was still comparing an African ethnic group to rats and cockroaches and was backing up his argument with evidence derived from his memories of National Geographic from before 1953 (the year Playboy was first published) when his attention to the text was perhaps not as focussed as it could have been.

But then I realised that Big Don was right. I did some reading on the relevant peoples of Africa and discovered that they were, indeed, hunter-gatherers, much like rats and roaches. They build huts out of wood and leaves and arrange them in complex patterns to maximise their foraging efficiency, just like rats and roaches. They make music using a combination of instruments and vocals that are famous for their “dense contrapuntal communal improvisation” and which (some observers claim) exhibits a level of complexity that was not reached in European music until the 14th century, and others believe has yet to be realised by any other group of people (especially in the complex “super-patterns” of cyclical repetition that nobody ever gets to hear aloud in their lifetimes, not even the singers themselves), again just like rats and roaches. They have communal rites and religious practices, just like rats and roaches. They keep beehives for honey, just like rats and roaches. They hunt using poisoned arrows and spears, just like rats and roaches. They have two methods of fishing. One is to dam a river and then rapidly drain the dam. The other is to disperse a herbal poison in a river and collect the fish that float to the surface downstream. Just like rats and roaches. Traditionally they were so good at hunting that the German and French colonialists used to employ them to hunt elephants for ivory, a practice that continued until the colonial masters realised that rats and roaches were even better at hunting elephants and would work for less. They hate being called “pygmies”, this being a term they consider highly insulting as it is derived from the Greek work meaning the length of one’s forearm. They much prefer to be called after their specific groupings, such as Baka or Gyelli. Just like rats and roaches.

Many people don’t know all that about rats and roaches, but I found two award-winning documentaries that showed just how complex the lifestyles of rats and roaches are. ^1,2

A friend of mine also told me that one group, the Babongo, don’t have lungs. I told him this was ridiculous. My friend replied that plenty of animals survive without lungs. Fish, insects, and mollusca all survive perfectly well without lungs. Well that changed my mind quick smart.

But I still didn’t understand why various forest-dwellers of sub-Saharan Africa had evolved under a differential selection pressure for intelligence compared to Europeans and Asians. Big Don had already provided me with the answer.

As for Europeans emerging with higher intelligence than Africans, it’s a no-brainer. In the colder climates, food must be planned for and stored during growing season in order to survive the winter. By contrast, plentiful food was available year-round for hunter-gatherers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Now I have a long-standing distrust of anything called a “no-brainer.” It seems to me that as many times as something really is a no-brainer requiring no thought to be understood, just as often it means “calling this a no-brainer stops me from having to think about the flaws in my precious beliefs.” But in this case Big Don is right. Those peoples who live in colder climates have to use their intelligence to store food for winter. That is why the most intelligent people of all are Inuits. It also explains why the sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers are less intelligent than those who store food over winter like Scandinavians, Koreans, and squirrels.

That’s right. Hunter-gatherers are less intelligent than squirrels. I realise this is a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, but I have empirical proof of it. I called a friend of mine who works in the Congo and another who lives in North America about all this and together we worked out a new IQ test designed specifically to investigate the intelligence of food storers versus non-storers. It’s all copyrighted, but I don’t think Elsevier will mind if I release one of the questions.

Acorn is to oak tree as beechnut is to __________ tree.

When my friend in the Congo asked this of several Baka tribesmen, they didn’t know. They had to say ridiculous things like “What’s an acorn?” and “I’ve never heard of an oak tree.” Meanwhile my friend in North America noticed that squirrels could not speak and so he had to rely on observational evidence of their behaviour. He found that whenever a squirrel climbed an oak tree, it came down with an acorn and whenever it climbed a beech tree it came down with a beechnut, thus demonstrating that squirrels are smarter than pygmies.

None of this is new. As far back as the early 1970s a research team headed by Rosewall, Hoad, and Bartkowicz showed that penguins were smarter than foreigners.³ Why have liberals ignored this overwhelming evidence? Clearly they are incapable of incorporating “no-brainers” into their thought processes as they have become emotionally dependent on outmoded strategies such as collecting evidence, applying rational analysis, and promoting humanism. Just like rats and roaches.

References
1. Lasseter J, Stanton A, et al. A Bug’s Life: previously unobserved defences by Atta texana against parasitic feeding raids of Eusmastacoideae. Pixar, 1998
2. Bird B, et al. Ratatouille: communal problem solving and dietary diversity in a Rattus rattus colony of central urban Paris. Pixar, 2007
3. Python M. Frontiers in Medicine: The Gathering Storm. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1973