An Anthropological Perspective on "Race" and Intelligence: The Non-Clinal Nature of Human Cognitive Capabilities

Abstract

Traits that are clinally distributed are under the control of selective forces that are distributed in graded fashion. Traits that cluster in certain regions are simply the results of relatedness and are not adaptively important. Traits that are of equal survival value for all human populations should show no average difference from one population to another. Human cognitive capacity, founded on the ability to learn a language, is of equal survival value to all human groups, and consequently there is no valid reason to expect that there should be average differences in intellectual ability among living human populations. The archaeological record shows that, at any one time during the Pleistocene, survival strategies were essentially the same throughout the entire range of human occupation. Both archaeological and biological data contribute to the picture of the slow emergence of human linguistic behavior and its subsequent maturation. The similarities in human capability were not the result of a sudden, ...