Some of you may have encountered a popular meme, shared by many celebrities and other people in the spotlight. Well in this post, I wanted to fix it just a bit: We've seen similar corrections to false PC memes, like the one at the left. But the above meme on the "racist brain" is clearly... Read More

Does higher IQ correlate with colder temperatures? Not among people belonging to the same cultural system, such as the Chinese. (source) Big brains are costly, not only because of their high energy consumption but also because many genes have to interact to create neural tissue. The bigger and more complex the brain, the more it... Read More

An Inuk wearing snow goggles. Is ambient light at its lowest in Inuit territory? The logjam seems to have broken. On the heels of Lewis et al. (2011), we now have another paper on variation in brain size among human populations, this time by Pearce and Dunbar (2011). Brains vary in size by latitude, being... Read More

Human variation in cranial capacity. Black, 1,450 cc and over; checkerboard, 1,400-49 cc; crosshatching, 1,350-99 cc; horizontal striping, 1,300-49 cc; diagonal striping, 1,250-99 cc; dots, 1,200-49 cc; white areas, under 1,200 cc (Beals et al., 1984) So Stephen Jay Gould was wrong, and Samuel George Morton was right. Brain size does vary among human populations.... Read More

There is no doubt that when species are compared, a large brain confers greater intelligence than a small brain. Fish and reptiles have small brains and are not very bright. Cats and dogs have larger brains and are much brighter. Monkeys and apes have still larger brains and are brighter still. Humans have the largest... Read More