The Poona of Peshwa
Blood Glutton
Έρεβος;6648333 said:Nice job reducing European society to "we like cattle ."
There are thousands of catalysts for cognitive evolution, and the main ones are certainly not the means of getting food.
Hunter-gatherer society most definitely has much less advanced cognitive competition; the competition is much more geared towards physical attributes: speed, strength, endurance, et cetera; and also physically-geared cognitive attributes: reflexes, pain tolerance, coordination, et cetera. This is all really quite self evident. Hunting & gathering requires great physical aptitude, and not too much advanced thinking.
Whereas agricultural society takes the focus away from the importance of being able to acquire enough food: farming leaves society with much added free time. This free time was filled with thinking: advanced cognitive pursuits. These activities became much more meaningful, much more central, to society, and the simple ability to acquire food and the attributes associated with thus became inconsequential. Philosophers, scientists, writers, artists, et cetera became the highest class, those most likely to survive, and hence intellect became the most naturally selected trait.
So no, you are very, very wrong. African society has spent much more time in hunter-gatherer society, therefore advanced cognition is at a much lower level. Whilst European society has spent much more time in agricultural society, therefore advanced cognition is a much higher level.
As for the increased variation between individuals than between groups, that is entirely irrelevant. It is fucking obvious that the genetic differences between the degenerates and greats of any single race are going to be larger than the difference between races, but that doesn't mean anything, extremely fucking obviously.
Sir, do you honestly believe that between the dawn of agriculture and the modern period people had free time to think about philosophy and science? The literacy rate in Europe before the advent of the printing press was limited to monks who would hardly have been passing on a signficant amount of genetic material. The vast masses of humanity lived short, brutish, nasty lives until after the industrial revolution. Thinking was not a popular passtime in medieval Europe, far less than in the Muslim world.
Intelligence just plain would not have been selected for ahead of disease resistance on a continent riddled with plague and smallpox for the better part of a millennium. A dolt with generations of exposure to the animals that carried the disease would have a better chance of survival than a genius who did not.
As far as the diversity of genomes is concerned, what I meant to imply was the tawdriness of emphasizing ethnic genetic disparity. If you annihilated all races on earth except for one, you would still preserve nearly all human genetic diversity. The most recent common male ancestor of all living humans probably lived as few as 60,000 "fucking" years ago, after all.