Introduction
I’ve noticed in the past that Finns have significantly higher IQ’s than the Swedes and Norwegians. This is in my opinion the group of people to study if you’re interested in the nature of intelligence, because they’re all very similar people, from roughly equally rich nations, in the same part of the world, which should allow innate ability to take control. One notable difference is that the Finns speak an Uralic language, whereas the Norwegians and Swedes speak a Germanic language. There could be something to this, but investigating the problem again today led me to what seems an inescapable conclusion, that whatever the connection is between mtDNA and intelligence, it simply cannot account for the distribution of IQ as it exists.
Instead I now believe that brain structure is the most important factor in intelligence, which simply cannot be controlled by mtDNA in any credible way. Specifically, my thinking is rooted in algorithmic complexity, that if you have two equally powered machines, running different algorithms that accomplish the same task, then the machine with the more efficient algorithm of the two will be the most powerful of the two. Translated to biology, if you have two brains that both consume the same amount of power per unit of time, and have the same “clock rate”, one brain could still be vastly more powerful than the other, due simply to different structure. This could explain e.g., the fact that some birds can talk, whereas some dogs will eat until they vomit, despite the fact that birds have brain volumes that are a small fraction of a dog’s brain volume.
mtDNA and Intelligence
Despite the apparent complexity of the subject, this is going to be a short note, because the idea that mtDNA controls for IQ is apparently nonsense, despite the scholarship on the topic (not picking on anyone, but here’s a decent article that runs through some credible arguments for the role of mtDNA in intelligence). But as you’ll see, whole-genome sequencing throws the argument in the garbage.
There’s no nice way to say this, but the Roma people have pretty low IQs, but what’s most interesting about them, is that they are basically identical to each other, and all other people of that maternal line, including about 100% of Papuans, 67% of Russians, and about 30% of Taiwanese people. If you want to test the results yourself, you can see my paper, “A New Model of Computational Genomics” [1], which includes all the software, and a detailed walkthrough to explain how I end up with these numbers. At a high level, the Papuans, Russians, and Taiwanese people in this group of Roma lineage, are all a 99% match to the Iberian Roma, with respect to their mtDNA. If mtDNA controlled intelligence, then all of those populations should have similarly low IQ’s, since they’re basically identical to the Roma. This is just not true, and instead the Taiwanese have around the highest and second highest IQ on Earth, and the Russians have roughly the same IQ as the Norwegians and Swedes, despite the fact that Russia is, quite frankly, poor and dysfunctional compared to Norway and Sweden.
One important note, though you’ll often hear that “humans are 98% monkey”, or some nonsense like that, the algorithms in [1] use what’s called a global alignment, and as a consequence, they’re extremely sensitive to changes in position, causing e.g., the Roma to have little more than chance in common with some people (i.e., about 25% of the mtDNA bases). This sensitivity is probably why the software in [1] is so powerful, and is able to predict ethnicity with about 80% accuracy, using mtDNA alone (which is pretty amazing). In contrast, NIH’s BLAST algorithm uses a local alignment, and so it deliberately seeks to maximize the number of matching bases, by shifting two genomes around, causing everyone to look the same, and therefore, throwing away valuable information about the genome.
Getting back to the core topic, if you pay attention to this limited set of facts, mtDNA is in the garbage as a driver of intelligence, and moreover, the role of poverty is not exactly clear either, since Russia is really poor compared to Norway and Sweden, and yet they have roughly the same IQs. So what is driving this? Cynically, I think IQ testing is really just testing for basic education (when you look at a map), which is absent in the truly poorest countries, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t debunk the connection between mtDNA and intelligence. But to be clear, I do think intelligence is genetic, and in anomalous cases like Finland, Cambodia, and Suriname, IQ becomes something interesting, because it’s at least a test. I just doubt it’s mtDNA driving the bus.
Some Answers from Computer Science
Even if we posit arguendo (which is not very nice) that there’s something wrong with Roma mtDNA, this would simply imply that they have low energy per unit of time, perhaps as a function of fixed caloric intake and environment. To make this less abstract, let’s fix a Norwegian guy (not Roma) and a Russian guy (Roma), and give them the same food, education, climate, environment, clothes, etc., over a lifetime. Under this assumption, the Russian guy will produce less energy over his lifetime, and therefore, his brain has a lower output. But this is garbage as an argument, for mechanical reasons: if the Russian guy has a more efficient brain, then he doesn’t need as much power to run his brain. As a consequence, his output over a lifetime could in fact be higher.
To make things completely concrete, if you use a brute force method to sort a list of 10 letters, you’ll have to perform 10! = 3,628,800 calculations. If you instead use my parallel method, you’ll have to make between 3 and 4 calculations. As you can plainly see, there is an ocean between these two approaches to solving even the simple problem of sorting a list. As a consequence, the most sensible answer is, in my opinion, that brain structure controls for intelligence, for the simple reason, that it encodes the algorithms we use to solve the problems we face every day. Some people have fast ones, some people have dumb ones, and then there’s (probably) most people in the middle.
Returning to the birds versus dogs analogy, I think it’s not ridiculous to argue that birds have vastly more efficient brains than dogs, that something along the lines of computational efficiency is taking place in the brain of a bird, that allows it to perform complex tasks, with a smaller, presumably lower-energy brain. For the same reasons, this could explain the obvious fact that some people are wildly more intelligent than others, despite (possibly) having the same maternal line. Because intelligence varies within a given ethnicity, I can tell you that you are e.g., Norwegian, with high accuracy using just your mtDNA, but there’s no way of knowing (to my knowledge) whether you’re one of the dumb ones. This doesn’t preclude identifying deficiencies in mtDNA that will make you dangerously ill, and therefore not very bright, but it just doesn’t make sense that the means of power-production controls the most complex structure in the Universe –
It’s a single bean, in an ocean of genetic information.
Information Overload 