Even many conservatives fail to understand that basic fact. Some peoples can adapt to civilization, and some can't. I read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" where Diamond promotes the silly idea that the people of Papua New Guinea are just as intelligent as the people of northern Europe.
Diamond believes it's simply a matter of Europeans living in a geographically favorable area compared to New Guinea that explains why Europeans live much better, richer lives.
I'd like to conduct an IQ test to test Diamond's ridiculous theory. I think we'd find out the people of PNG have IQs far below northern Europeans. Which would explain why Europeans live first world lives while the people of PNG live in the third world.
Guilty pleasure:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/MoreCannibals.shtml
>> I think we’d find out the people of PNG have IQs far below northern Europeans <<
Probably so. But why are the IQ’s lower? I submit that perhaps it’s because the colder climates of northern Europe required the northern peoples to be “smarter” on the average than their tropical cousins, simply in order to survive.
Therefore, I think it’s possible that once upon a time, the people who moved north may have had average IQ’s more-or-less equal to those of the tropical folk.
But then, the rigors of living in cold climates could have been too much for people with “below average” IQs — meaning that the genes of the lower IQed folks got weeded out of the gene pool over the centuries, leaving the ultimate surviving northerners with higher average IQs than the averages found in the tropics.
If this explanation is correct, then perhaps Diamond’s geographic determinism doesn’t look so bad after all.
You don’t have to conduct tests, its already been done. The results were as you predicted.
http://www.photius.com/rankings/national_iq_scores_country_ranks.html