# I can has Neanderthal genes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 6, 2010, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-has-neanderthal-genes/538552 "2010-05-06T21:00:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 105
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2010, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-has-neanderthal-genes/538552/105 "2010-05-11T04:14:45Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > You know I hadn’t even read that part of what **CP** wrote. > > Wow. > > He believes that Eurasians, as a population group, have cognitive superiority over sub-Saharan Africans. Proven fact to him. > > And “that differences found between any two reasonably large groups are typically going to be genetic” - not that “may be”, but typically are. So health of a Western population now and of a population two hundred years ago? Genetic. Nutritional changes, infectious disease differences for improved infrastructures for sewage and clean water and vaccines and antibiotics, etc - those are pretty inconsequential. And when you compare the health of Chinese in America with those who live in China (at least up until this last decade), well the rates of diabetes and heart disease that are much higher in the American Chinese are because of those intragenerational genetic changes. > > Wow. Remember that we are talking about groups here. These debates always end up this way even though there is no proven cause on either side yet. Let’s not get away from the obvious, Eurasians as a group do have cognitive superiority over almost all indigenous groups of sub-Saharan Africans in any way that can be measured by our standards. No one has ever given a shred of evidence to the contrary even though people bend over backwards to make up explanations and excuses for it. You can’t even raise populations of sub-Saharan children in a western environment and expect them to do as well as their European or Asian counterparts. It is one of the most consistent and repeatable social experiments in the world although it is unfortunate. It is impossible to make up any kind on non-specific cognitive test in which kids of sub-Saharan African descent do better than their European or Asian counterparts no matter how or where they are raised. This is one area where the Ivy Tower types have gone off the rails. They ignore the most significant fact of all and dive straight into the minutiae while ignoring the obvious. That doesn’t mean much for individuals. There are plenty of sub-Saharan Africans smarter than me or you but the only way to claim that they are intellectual equals in population terms is to base it on mysticism and add lots of non-specific environmental factors on top of that. Most people know this intuitively yet we get called bad things if we say it. There may be some biological basis for what we all see every day the testing always reports but I don’t know what the ramifications will be if something like Neanderthal genes means that there was a distinct split in the homo sapien family tree between sub-Saharan blacks and other groups. I am not a white supremacist by any stretch but this topic always elicits an emotional response which doesn’t have much bearing on the scientific facts whatever they turn out to be. There is plenty of evidence that the differences in existing human populations is not just skin deep and it grows greater all the time. I think it would be more amazing if all groups turned out to be exactly equal for everything except skin tone. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-has-neanderthal-genes/538552)._