“American Renaissance” and the Alleged Intellectual Superiority of East Asians: Cranial Capacity By Brian Simpson
American Renaissance, although promoted as a pro-white site, champions the thesis of East Asian intellectual superiority. This idea has been pushed by most of the so-called modern race realist school. It was not held by racial theorist in the past, as discussed below. Here I consider their latest take, based upon alleged larger cranial capacity of East Asians. But the modern data is inconsistent with data from the past, as well as ordinary observation, where as I see it, East Asian heads tend to be smaller than euro-whites. My guess is that South Sea Islanders may be the largest as well, if there was unbiased research in this area. There is little reason to connect head size to intelligence neurologically, after a point, since it is neural connectivity which counts. But, that is much too scientific for the race realist school, who generally operate on crude empiricism.
https://www.amren.com/news/2021/11/brain-size-counts/
“It is a vexed question whether the association between brain size and intelligence holds for humans, and many anthropologists and psychologists have denied the association. For example, Professor Maciej Henneberg, professor of Anthropological and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Adelaide, has written that “there is ever more evidence accumulating against a direct relationship between cranial capacity and intellectual capacity.” Professor Diane Halpern, a past president of the American Psychological Association and currently Professor of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College, has written that “there is no evidence that larger brains are, in any way, better than smaller brains.”
Why are Professors Maciej Henneberg, Diane Halpern and many others so adamant about this? Could it be that if an association between brain size and intelligence is admitted, then it follows that races with larger brains are likely to be the more intelligent than those with smaller brains? This is a question many anthropologists and psychologists prefer to avoid.
The definitive study of race differences in brain size was carried out on approximately 20,000 crania by Professor Kenneth Beals and his colleagues at Oregon State University. Their results for endocranial volume, measured in cubic centimeters for the major races were as follows: North East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans): 1,416 cm; Europeans: 1,369cm; Native American Indians: 1,366cm; Southeast Asians: 1,332cm; Pacific Islanders: 1,317cm; South Asians: 1,293cm; Sub-Saharan Africans: 1,282cm; Bushmen: 1,270cm; Australian Aborigines: 1,225cm. These brain size differences correspond with intelligence differences derived from IQ tests given by Prof. Richard Lynn, who finds IQs of 105 for North East Asians,100 for Europeans, and so on downwards to 62 for Australian Aborigines and 54 for the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert.
Profs. Kenneth Beals and his colleagues were evidently somewhat embarrassed to find that North East Asians and Europeans had larger brains than the other races. Could this mean that they are more intelligent? The Oregon professors went out of their way to deny this. Of the possibility of a relationship between brain size and intellectual capacity they wrote: “No convincing case for such associations has ever been presented.”
Contrary to these assertions, the positive association between brain size and intelligence in humans has been shown in numerous studies beginning in the first decade of the 20th century. Professor Philip A. Vernon of the University of Western Ontario and his colleagues have summarized studies of the correlation between intelligence and head size, and the correlation between intelligence and the size of the brain itself. Every one of 54 studies that measured head size showed a positive relationship, with an overall correlation of 0.18. Research using CT (computerized axial tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) gives a more accurate measure of brain size, and the 11 studies that used these methods found an overall correlation with intelligence of 0.40. Prof. Vernon and his colleagues conclude that brain size must be a determinant of intelligence because larger brains have more neurons and this gives them greater processing capacity.”
Here is a counter to American Renaissance from 1933, putting European cranial capacity at 1,481 c.c., which is larger than the figure proudly trumpeted by American Renaissance, and all research at the time reported similar results. It is unlikely that evolutionary changes occurred in such a relatively short space of time, so the modern results are likely to be politically biased.
https://www.nature.com/articles/132958a0
European Civilisation and African Brains
Nature volume 132, page 958 (1933)
- H. L. GORDON'S letter in the Times of December 8, recording the results of his calculation of the average skull capacity of 3,444 unselected adult male natives of Kenya Colony, and an examination of 100 brains of normal adult male natives, opens up a question of considerable scientific interest and of far-reaching practical importance. Dr. Gordon finds that the average cranial capacity of the natives measured is 1,316 cubic centimetres, as against the European average of 1,481 c.c. The element of uncertainty introduced by the fact that the cranial capacity, and inferentially the size of the brain, is calculated from measurements taken on the head of the living is neutralised in some degree by the examination of the 100 brains, which confirms the evidence of the cranial capacity, giving an average weight 150 gm. less than the average brain weight of the European. There is a further quantitative inferiority in the brain, in that, according to Dr. Vint, Government pathologist, the cortex shows a deficiency of 15 per cent in quantity, while the cells of the cortex are smaller, less well arranged and less well shaped than in the European brain. Thus both in quantity and quality the Kenya brain is shown to be inferior. Anthropologists have virtually abandoned any attempt to correlate size of brain with mental ability in view of the conflicting character of the facts; but if ability is regarded as in some way related to the quality of the brain, the inferiority of the Kenya brain is still significant.
“Are East Asians More Intelligent Than Whites? The Evidence Says "Not Really!" by Ferdinand Bardamu, gives a searching critique of the intellectual who has influenced American Renaissance and Jared Taylor, Richard Lynn. Here we will quote the section dealing with the history of cranial capacity before Lynn came on the scene. Lynn championed the intellectual superiority of East Asians, and has done so since 1977, despite numerous refutations of his views, as summarised in the Bardamu article, which is very readable.
https://www.eurocanadian.ca/search?q=richard+lynn
“Widespread belief in white intellectual superiority was further supported by the rise of physical anthropology as a separate academic discipline in the 19th century. Samuel G. Morton, an American naturalist, amassed a large collection of human skulls from around the world. This became known as the “American Golgotha.” He determined their cranial capacity using seed- and shot-based measurements. The average difference in cranial capacity, with Caucasians having the largest brain volumes, followed by Asians, American Indians, and negroes, was seen as evidence of polygenesis, the Bible-based belief that the races were distinct species of men. Their creational rank in nature was determined by brain volume; Caucasians were superior to all other human varieties because their brains were the largest, followed by Mongols, Malays, American Indians, and negroes. According to polygenists, the races were specially created by God to be fully adapted to the physical environments over which they were dispersed.
In Crania Americana (1839), Morton’s magnum opus, the white race was said to be distinguished from all other human varieties by the “facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments.” This was the end result of having the largest average cranial capacity. In contrast, the negro species represented the “lowest grade of humanity,” an order determined by virtue of possessing the smallest brain volumes on record. His disciples, the physician Josiah C. Nott and Egyptologist George Glidden, were strongly influenced by his polygenist race theories. After Morton’s death, they collected his papers and further publicized his findings. … For these writers, not all whites were created equal; the “Teuton” or the Germanic race was superior to all other white populations in both mind and body.
Charles Darwin, the founder of evolutionary biology, strongly argued against the Bible-based polygenist views of the early physical anthropologists. He said that all men, because of their numerous similarities in anatomy and behavior, belonged to a single species that had originally evolved on African soil. Darwin was a firm believer in the white man’s racial superiority over the non-white. However, he liked to remind his fellow Europeans that, despite having attained a level of intellectual development far higher than any achieved by non-whites, they too were likewise descended from savages. In 1871, he wrote:
The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.
In Darwin’s view, a distinction was to be drawn between race and culture. Men were savages because of a lack of proper moral and intellectual training, not because of race, at least not primarily. It was the rediscovery of ancient Greek philosophy, mathematics, science, engineering, the great achievements of antiquity long-obscured by the Christian Church’s neglect and hostility, that had raised the white man to his current position of unchallenged racial superiority. Nevertheless, Darwin was only marginally less “racist” than his contemporaries.
Morton’s use of cranial morphology to establish white intellectual superiority proved highly influential. It was widely supported by the European scientific community until the end of the 19th century. Prominent disciples of Morton included the noted French anthropologist Paul Broca and his student Paul Topinard, who both transformed the emerging field of craniology into an exact quantitative science.
With the establishment of the Boasian school of anthropology in the early 20th century, the idea of racial differences in intelligence and behavior was considered taboo among European and American intellectuals. The emerging scientific consensus was that there were no innate racial differences in intelligence and behavior and that race was a social construct. It was this biological egalitarianism that emerged as the dominant orthodoxy among academics in the 1960’s. Even though physical anthropology was gradually marginalized within the academy and replaced with the more politically correct, race-neutral discipline of biological anthropology, racialists continued to maintain that Caucasians were the most highly evolved race in terms of intelligence and behavior well into the 20th century.
The last great physical anthropologist, Carleton S. Coon, argued that whites were more evolved than Mongoloids, Congoids, Capoids and Australoids. In The Races of Europe (1939), Coon asserted that the earliest Homo sapiens were members of the white race. Given his racial theories, this implied that the white cerebral cortex had doubled in size before the other races had completed their “saltation” from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. In Coon’s mind, Northeast Asians were less evolved than whites, but biologically similar enough to be classed along with Caucasians as the “alpha” of human evolutionary development; other populations, such as the Hindus of India, who were of partial Australoid racial stock and the Hottentots or Capoids of southern Africa were seen as less evolved than Europeans and Orientals. They were classed as the “omega” of human evolutionary development.”
How very different all this is from the world of Richard Lynn and American Renaissance! With their obsession with IQ, if the East Asian intellectual superiority thesis was true, there is no reason why American Renaissance should defend Euro-white interests at all, and instead should support the Chinese domination of the world! Of course, they do not, but there is another issue here. I read their blog each day, and observe virtually no discussion of the threat of China or anything critical about China. As documented at this blog recently, even 60 Minutes is discussing the possibility of war with China. Wouldn’t anyone concerned with racial survival see this as an issue of debate? Odd, isn’t it?
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