"Intelligence" and "Race."

by C. Loring Brace

Edited by Larry T. Reynolds and Leonard Lieberman. Copyright 1996 by General Hall, Inc.

Professionals involved in the testing of intelligence often assume that racial differences are there to be discovered. The pitfalls in such research include not only the elusive definition of "intelligence" but also the lack of a biological measure for "race" that is independent of ethnic identity. Despite repeated efforts at making intelligence tests culture-free, bias remains inevitable. Nonetheless, people seem to have difficulty giving up on this enterprise.

The geographic determinists of two or three generations ago were fond of contrasting the supposedly indolent life in the Tropics--where goodies were available for the plucking from fruiting trees and bushes--with what was purported to be the bracing rigor of more northerly climes, where survival was said to depend more on ingenuity and disciplined effort. Presumably these different life styles would have led to racial differences in intelligence.

Aside from the lesser chance of freezing to death, however, gaining a living by gleaning from the land in the Tropics is no easier than it is in the temperate portions of the world. The knowledge of what is edible and what is not, what ripens where at which time of the year, and the habits of potential prey animals is every bit as difficult to come by at the equator as it is in the north. In the pre-literate world of the hunter-gatherer, the penalty for stupidity is starvation.

Take the elderly Aborigine who led his group on a six-month trek to escape the consequences of the drought of 1943 in the outback of Western Australia. His first goal was a water hole at the extreme northwestern corner of the tribal territory, which he had visited only once in his youth, more than half a century earlier. When the resources there started to fail, he led them westward again, through territory known to him only through the verses of a song cycle sung at totemic ceremonies and depicting the legendary wanderings of "ancestral beings." The trek led on through a sequence of more than fifty water holes, with the only additional clues to the route being occasional marks left by earlier movements of peoples. The little band finally emerged at Mandora Station, on the coast of Western Australia, more than 360 miles from where they had started. (The saga was recorded at Mandora Station by anthropologist N. B. Tindale in 1953.) Evidently the myths that made up those ceremonies represented the transmitted knowledge of previous generations. One would be hard put to come up with another instance in the literate world in which survival was so dependent upon such a feat of human memory.

The ingenuity necessary to extract sustenance in the most unlikely areas and by the most unlikely means was an essential element in the human success story. That ingenuity was certainly taxed by $he need to maintain a network of supportive relationships and deal with potential competitors. A combination of these factors must have constituted the selective process that led to the expansion of the human brain starting at the beginning of the Pleistocene. These circumstances were a constant for humans pursuing a hunting and gathering mode of subsistence. This is why human intelligence, although an important adaptive trait, should not be expected to differ significantly among groups.

A fallback position for those intent on finding a link between race and intelligence is the view that intelligence is the ability to adapt to civilization and that races differ in "intellectual ability" depending on the civilizations with which they are associated. One recent advocate of this view feels that the Stanford-Binet IQ test measures the inherent ability to adapt to Western civilization.

Even a relatively simple adaptive trait such as skin color, however, shows only minimal response to changes in selective pressure over periods of 10,000 to 15,000 years. Our vaunted Western civilization has existed for only a small fraction of that span, and most of those who now reap its benefits are descended from people untrained in the niceties of reading and writing.

Westerners tend to look down on peoples without long, written traditions, considering them innately ill-equipped. But it probably requires more in the way of basic smarts to survive in a world where one cannot go and look up the answers to crucial questions in a book. If anything, then, perhaps those whose ancestry has-the longest continuous tie with literate civilization are the recipients of a heritage in which selection for intelligence has been least stringent.

C. Loring Brace is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. Among his books are The Stages of Human Evolution (fifth edition, 1995) and, with Ashley Montagu, Human Evolution (second edition, 1977).