The Inner Level by Richard Wilkinson

Author:Richard Wilkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141975405
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

SHARED INHERITANCE

Any genetically determined characteristic that confers a substantial survival advantage will tend to become universal among members of a species. We all have two eyes because binocular vision is so useful. Whole populations have lighter or darker skin to provide the appropriate level of protection from sunlight needed at the latitudes where their forebears lived. Of several hundred primate species, we are almost the only one to have whites to our eyes; in the others the sclera is brown. As we are a highly social species the ability to follow each other’s gaze and see what anyone is looking at is advantageous and has therefore become a universal human characteristic. It is therefore hard to imagine that if any specific genes for intelligence conferred significant survival advantages that they would not have become universal among human beings. Nevertheless, the improbable idea that some groups of humans have particularly advanced ‘intelligence’, which substantially enhances their ability to solve almost any kind of problem, while others are persistently poorly endowed, has until relatively recently appeared to have scientific support, and remains widely held.

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