Black woman single cos the black men are in jail - would you marry outside your race?

[Louis VI the Fat]

A difficulty I have with this line of reasoning: How are we defining intelligence? 'Cause when I consider all of the myriad ways a human being may be intelligent, I get a little dizzy. Musical intelligence? Numerical math? How about somebody who is terrible at basic math but excels at more abstract formulations, as with Einstein? What about literary smarts? Engineering smarts? Practical smarts? How do we classify a woman who excels at chemistry but sucks at most other forms of science? What about a guy who's whip-smart about history and an idiot about all hard sciences?

All of these intelligences / character traits are unevenly distributed among human populations. If a characteristic is the product of heritable components, of genetic variation, it will most likely differ between populations.


Intelligence is a difficult subject. In a sense, I am not smarter than a snail. We are both equally adapt at what we do. My cognitive abilities useless to him, his to mine. But, nevertheless, we speak of me as more intelligent than a snail. This intelligence, as understood in this broad way, differs between human populations.

How would it be otherwise? It is commonly recognised that homo sapiens sapiens is more intelligent than his ape ancestors. By what mechanism did this evolution of cognitive abilities suddenly stop once humans diverged into seperate groups 60/70/150 thousand years ago? And if not, by what mechanism did all populations continue to develop in the exact same way? Rather, continue to develop mentally in the exact same way, even though all other physical traits continued to develop in diverging ways?