The original quote mentions the builders of Stonehenge and the Pyramids, and I assume what’s intended includes the designers and administrators, not just the people doing the hauling.
Does it seem likely that the middle of the bell curve for preliterate people was a lot lower, even though the outliers were about as high?
Well yes; if nothing else early agricultural societies were probably rather malnourished outside the elite. But chopping twenty points off an average person’s IQ does not make him “intellectually disabled”, just excruciatingly slow. As opposed to merely painfully slow.
But chopping twenty points off an average person’s IQ does not make him “intellectually disabled”, just excruciatingly slow.
The usual boundary for “mentally disabled” is IQ 70. There are a LOT of IQ 90 people walking around, chopping off twenty points won’t work well for them.
And a warning—as was pointed to me recently IQ points are really ranks. There is no implication that a one point difference (or a twenty point difference) means the same thing in the 70 − 90 context as in the, say, 120 − 140 context.
The “vast majority” of preliterate people didn’t invent writing either. Outliers demonstrate very little.
The original quote mentions the builders of Stonehenge and the Pyramids, and I assume what’s intended includes the designers and administrators, not just the people doing the hauling.
Does it seem likely that the middle of the bell curve for preliterate people was a lot lower, even though the outliers were about as high?
Well yes; if nothing else early agricultural societies were probably rather malnourished outside the elite. But chopping twenty points off an average person’s IQ does not make him “intellectually disabled”, just excruciatingly slow. As opposed to merely painfully slow.
The usual boundary for “mentally disabled” is IQ 70. There are a LOT of IQ 90 people walking around, chopping off twenty points won’t work well for them.
And a warning—as was pointed to me recently IQ points are really ranks. There is no implication that a one point difference (or a twenty point difference) means the same thing in the 70 − 90 context as in the, say, 120 − 140 context.