If IQ is so genetic, why are the Saami so intelligent?

The Skolt Sámi people living in northern Finland are as intelligent as Finns living in close by areas. So says a well-known IQ blogger James Thomson in

http://www.unz.com/jthompson/lapps-finns-cold-winters-and/

referring to an 2014 article by Amstrong, Woodley and Lynn published in Intelligence.

The Skolt Sámi seem to have the same average IQ 101 as genetic Finns. This sounds believable, at least I cannot remember that anybody ever commented in Finland that the Saami people would be any less or any more intelligent than the Finns and people usually know such if some group is especially bright or dull. Of course, in the time that I remember, the Finns were said to have an average IQ of 97. So the times change.

In the study of Lynn and others the normal European level IQ of the Skolt Sámi is seen as strong supporting evidence for Lynn’s cold winter theory stating that in people became more cleaver in the cold climate as the life was harder there. In his review, Thomson does not go so far, but he does agree that the results are consistent with Lynn’s theory.

I see the IQ results of Skolt Sámi (very probably the IQ of the other Sámi groups is similar, but there is no data) as supporting quite different speculations. The main problem I see is why does this genetically unique group have an average European IQ? I mean, why should the average IQ be the same? There are many results where genetically different ethnic groups have different average IQs. Isn’t it suspicious if two genetically very different ethnic groups living in very similar environments turn out to have very similar IQs?

The Sámi are a European people, but genetically they are very different from all other Europeans, including Finns. They are not much mixed with Finns, Scandinavians or Russians. Northern Finns have some Sámi admixture, but not the other way. This is because of the different culture. Sámi women were taken as wives of agricultural Finns, but Finnish women did not go to be wives of reindeer herding Sámi men. Men did not change from one culture to another in those times.  Additionally, the Sámi population was always small and they were hunter-gatherers until about 1000 AD, when they adopted reindeer herding. The genetic separation between the Sámi and the Finns was about 6000 years ago, as calculated from U5b1 mtDNA clanes.

So, here we have a population, which was not much touched by agriculture or Indo-European invaders. If the European IQ has evolved in the last 8000-6000 years or so, the Sámi should not have the same average genetic IQ as other Europeans, but now we know that the measured average IQ is the same about 100 for both populations.

There are two possibilities: either the European genetic IQ has not changed in a long time, or the measured IQ of Sámi is 101 because of environmental factors. As almost all Skolt Sámi live in Finland (there are only some 300 of them) and they go to the Finnish school, and all Finnish schools are on a very similar level, they get the same education as Finns. When it turns out that their average IQ is the same as that of Finns, the logical conclusion is not that Lynn’s cold weather theory is correct but that in this case the measured similar IQ reflects the similar education.

Are the Sámi really so different genetically? Yes. That part is true.

Though in Y-DNA the Sámi people are similar to their neighbors (they have the haplogroups N1c and I1 as Finns and R1a as Russians), they differ very much in mtDNA and aDNA. Figure 2 in following article shows where the Sámi are in the mtDNA comparison by a PCA (Principal Component Analysis)

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003296

The Finns (FIN) can be found from left just above the main group of Europeans. The Finns are outliers in the genetic map of Europe, but not so much. The Sámi (saa) is in the upper right, far from everything. In the plot they are close to the Scandinavian Pitter-Ware culture (aPWC), but the Sámi are not direct descendants of this Mesolithic culture. In fact, it is not known where the Sámi derive from. The Sámi are white people, but further from Europeans than the (also white) Middle Eastern populations, who have average IQ of 84.

In the autosomal DNA the Sámi also differ from other Europeans. It is seen here

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/the-men-of-the-north-the-sami/#.WpPjPnxG3IU

and even better here:

Genetic History of the Finno-Ugrics

The ADMIXTURE plot in the second web-reference (DNA from various European peoples) suggests that the Sámi are close to the Chuvash. The Chuvash language belongs to the Turkish languages, but genetically they resemble Fenno-Ugrians. The Chuvash people live in the middle of Fenno-Ugrian Volga people and they probably were Fenno-Ugrians but changed their language. Though the Sámi and the Chuvash do not resemble each other genetically in every respect, there probably is some similarity in ancestors.

In the post by Thomson it is stated that the Sámi resemble the Siberian Chukchi (probably taken from Lynn et al), but this resemblance is more cultural than genetic. There is another people with a name similar to Chuvash or Chukchi, namely Chudas or Tsuds. The Tsuds were a Fenno-Ugrian people, but it is now known is they were closer to Veps, Marya, Komi or Sámi. What ever the case be with the Tsuds, the Sámi had a genetic contribution from Siberia rather recently and the main part of their genes is from a population, which was genetically rather close to the Pitted-Ware people and Volga Fenno-Ugrians.

Table 5 in

http://www.mankindquarterly.org/files/sample/niskanenbalticcorrected.pdf

gives the genetic distances of many populations. It shows how distant the Sámi are to the other European populations. All this taken together is enough to show that the Sámi indeed differ genetically from the Finns and other Europeans to a significant degree.

The first explanation that comes to the mind (mine at least) is that maybe Lynn’s cold weather theory explains why the Sami have IQ 101. Maybe living as a hunter-gatherer for 40,000 years in a cold weather necessarily leads to an IQ of 100. But it is not so.  Other peoples living in a rather similar climate, the Eskimos and Aleuts, have about 10 points lower IQ, while the Ainu, in a bit better climate, have an average IQ 97. The cold weather is at least not the only explanatory factor.

Let us try to create a better theory to explain the European IQ of the Sámi starting from the few facts that have been well established by IQ research.

One fact is that IQ is heritable to a degree of 40-80% and the heritability is higher if the test subjects are older when measured. That means that there is a high correlation between the measured IQ of parents and their children, but it does not say what is causing this correlation. It could be cased by IQ genes, other genes, or environmental factors.

The second fact is that that much of IQ is heritable for genetic reasons. This is best shown by twin studies: identical twins are more similar in IQ than non-identical twins, and identical twins raised apart are still quite similar in IQ. These observations do not imply that IQ is inherited through special IQ genes: this observed heritability can be caused by other genetically inherited traits, other genes.

For instance, let us assume that talkativeness would be found to be a genetically heritable trait and genes for talkativeness would be found. So far there no such genes are known, but this is just an example. Let us also assume that the verbal IQ increases from using words, which is not unlikely since most competences can be improved by training.  Under these assumptions we would notice that the verbal IQ is heritable for genetic reasons, but there would not be special genes for verbal IQ, only for talkativeness.

The third fact is that researchers have for a long time looked for genes for IQ. About 50 have been found, but even together they explain only a small part of IQ variance between people.

The fourth fact is that there is a small positive correlation between IQ and the brain size, but women, who have considerably smaller brains than men, are only a few points (like 2-4) behind men in average IQ. There are structural differences between male and female brains and the IQ distribution of men has higher standard deviation.

The fifth and last fact is that while there may be environmental reasons for different average IQs of different ethnic groups, there are also clear differences in the IQ profile between ethnic groups. Some ethnic groups are stronger on spatial IQ than on verbal IQ, while some other are stronger on verbal IQ. These profiles are stable and are noticed in any level of average IQ, so even though the environment influences the average IQ, the profile stays the same.

Trying to combine these four facts into something understandable, I suggested in an earlier post that the special IQ genes have a small effect mainly mediated by increasing the brain size, while the high genetic component of the heritability of IQ is mainly caused by genetic heritability of character traits.

I used the term character very loosely to refer to different interests, like an extrovert is more interested in people than an introvert. I think the gender gap is to a large extent caused by different characters of men and women reflected by their different interests. Women know things they are interested in, men the same. They do better in things they know better. I do not deny that there is a small genetic part: men are better in rotating 3-dimensional objects in their minds, but I do not think this genetic advantage of males explains as much the gender gap in mathematics and technical topics as the different interests of the genders.

I suggested in my earlier post that introversion and conscientiousness might be character traits connected with the observed higher IQ of people from cold climates, like Europeans and East Asians, who have an IQ profile where spatial IQ is elevated. Sub-Saharan Africans, Ashkenazi Jews and possibly all Mediterranean people have higher verbal IQ than spatial IQ.

That was my simple theory in the earlier post. Does it explain why the Sami IQ is 101 better than the cold weather theory or the brain size theory? The brain size theory is that the brain grew in cold weather and a larger brain correlates positive with a higher IQ.

The Sámi show more physical adaptations to a cold climate, thus the environment has not been the same from Sámi and Finns and according to the cold weather theory the Sami might be more intelligent. But they are the same. The brain size theory has even larger problems: Finns have big heads and consequently big brains, while the Sami have smaller heads, yet the IQ is the same.

The Finns may have a very small advantage because they have bigger brains, but it is one-two points in IQ and ignorable. The mutations during the last 8000 years have not much influenced the average IQ in Europe. The small IQ gradient from North to South in Europe reflects genetically different people: if the IQ of Southern Europe is slightly smaller than in Northern Europe, it is because agriculture was brought to Europe by Anatolian peoples, who had slightly lower IQ. It the average IQ of Northern Europeans has not changed by new mutations for 8000 years, then the Sami and other Northern Europeans have practically the same genetic IQ and the differences could only come through the effect of other genes, or thought the environment. The environment is the same and in the character these two ethnic groups are very similar: in the Finnish schools children from both groups will be interested in about the same things and with the same intensity. Consequently, the measured IQs will be virtually identical, as is observed.

A small victory to my sketchy theory.

What else could be said if my little theory were correct?

The big IQ problems are not connected with the Sami. They are teaching the US blacks or the immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. If we assume that the effect of IQ genes is small, but the effect of character genes is large, what changes?

The school should be tailored for the needs of these people. If it is done as it was done with the gender gap, the result is bad. What was done with the gender gap was that first girls did worse in the school since teaching methods suited boys. Then the methods were changed to suit better to girls. As a result, boys do worse. This same can be done with different ethnic groups. Certain teaching methods suit introverts, so let us change the working style to group work. It favors extroverts. As a result Finns start doing very poorly, while more southern ethnic groups will do better.

It is rather easy to see that there are merits in separating very different groups in teaching lessons and working places, but that is not accepted, as the best results usually will be produced to groups that talk less and do more. But if such a separation could be done, those who talk more and do less would also reach better results focusing on different fields.

There may be too much focus on the average IQ of different groups, since the average IQ very much depends on the environment, like the school system. More attention should maybe be paid to the IQ profile, since some character profiles promote learning, some do not, and the IQ profile may reflect the character by the rule of learning better things that interest more.

Maybe one could get something more out of this? Possible, I have not thought of it.