Professor Richard Lynn is a leading authority on the evolution of human intelligence and personality. In a world of social science which ignores evolution, his views are very controversial - see a summary on his website here.
I wrote to Professor Lynn with a "bright idea" I had coming to work a few days ago. I guess he gets a lot of idiotic letters and has refined to high art how he responds.
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Dear Professor Lynn,
Most theories of the evolution of costly human intelligence struggle to explain how ancestral human-level intelligence arose on the African savannah in the first place. After all, every other species survives there without it. The argument that ancestral IQ fuelled a "generalist hunter-gatherer strategy” only takes you so far.
Is there a view in the research community that perhaps cold-adaptation drove all of the IQ levels we see today - including within Africa?
ANSWER: No because equatorial Africa never got cold.
The argument is that ancestral proto-humans repeatedly left Africa to the north, encountered differential selection for intelligence and increased cooperation as they encountered tougher ecologies,
ANSWER: YES
and then re-entered Africa displacing the earlier, less intelligent hominids?
ANSWER: NO
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