The Biogeography of Human Diversity in Cognitive Ability
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Biogeography of Human Diversity in Cognitive Ability Aurelio José Figueredo1 · Steven C. Hertler2 · Mateo Peñaherrera‑Aguirre3 Received: 7 June 2020 / Revised: 21 September 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract After many waves of out-migration from Africa, different human populations evolved within a great diversity of physical and community ecologies. These ambient ecologies should have at least partially determined the selective pressures that shaped the evolution and geographical distribution of human cognitive abilities across different parts of the world. Three different ecological hypotheses have been advanced to explain human global variation in intelligence: (1) cold winters theory (Lynn, 1991), (2) parasite stress theory (Eppig, Fincher, & Thornhill, 2010), and (3) life history theory (Rushton, 1999, 2000). To examine and summarize the relations among these and other ecological parameters, we divided a sample of 98 national polities for which we had sufficient information into zoogeographical regions (Wallace, 1876; Holt et al., 2013). We selected only those regions for this analysis that were still inhabited mostly by the aboriginal populations that were present there prior to the fifteenth century AD. We found that these zoogeographical regions explained 71.4% of the variance among national polities in our best measure of human cognitive ability, and also more concisely encapsulated the preponderance of the more specific information contained within the sampled set of continuous ecological parameters. Keywords General cognitive ability · Cold winters theory · Parasite stress theory · Life history theory · Zoogeographical regions
Introduction The past few years has seen an increase in the number of publications on the social biogeography of human cognitive ability. Through the judicious application of exploratory path modeling (sequential canonical cascade models; see Figueredo & Gorsuch, 2007), various attempts have been made to predict the average IQ of both national and subnational polities from ambient ecological conditions (Cabeza de Baca & Figueredo, 2014, 2017; Black et al., 2017; Fernandes et al., 2017; Fernandes & Woodley of Menie, 2017; Figueredo, Cabeza de Baca, Fernandes et al., 2017a, b, c; Figueredo, Cabeza de Baca, & Peñaherrera-Aguirre, 2017). These ambient conditions included the following: (1) the * Aurelio José Figueredo [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, School of Mind, Brain, and Behavior, College of Science, University of Arizona, 1503 East University Boulevard, Tucson, AZ 85721‑0068, USA
2
College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, NY, USA
3
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
physical ecology, such as mean annual temperature and precipitation, as well as weighted combinations of latitude and altitude; (2) the community ecology, such as the geographical prevalence of temperate broadleaf deciduous forests, human parasite burden, and human life history strategy; (3) the social ecology, such as
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