Since the dawn of modern science and the concomitant expansion of global inequalities among nations, genders, ethnicities and races, scientists have sought to explain these inequalities, dancing around their true foundations —poverty, power and perspective.
In the last 40 years, historically silenced groups of intellectuals have pushed poverty, power and perspective as explanations of inequality, pushing aside the racist, sexist and ethnocentric justifications that saturated the academy for centuries in the modern era.
These rationalizations for inequality that connote the inferiority of a particular group have not exited the academy. Even though they are not dominating the discourse as they once were, they are now like roaches. They crawl around everywhere in the walls of the academy, with notions about being politically correct, keeping them at bay. Occasionally, they show themselves.
Recently, Dr. Randy Thornhill and his colleagues at the University of New Mexico, offered a theory to explain why countries where disease is prevalent have lower IQ scores. Thornhill coauthored A Natural History of Rape, a book published in 2000 arguing that rape emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.
Children in these high-disease countries divert energy away from developing their brain to fighting infection, Thornhill and company theorize in a published report in the Proceeding of the Royal Society. In testing their hypothesis, the scientists decided to compare global IQ scores with data from the World Health Organization. They found that there was in fact an inverse relationship between levels of infectious disease in a country and its national IQ scores. The more disease, the lower the scores.
Over time, Thornhill asserts, people in these disease-ridden countries (read Africa) have developed their immune systems at the expense of their intellectual systems, according to the The Guardian.
In effect, African people are intellectually inferior to Europeans because of the prevalence of disease in their countries. It is an unfortunate environmental and biological evolutionary phenomenon, I am sure Thornhill would assert.
