Eugenics or Evolutionary Psychology?

A lecturer at the prestigious London School of Economics, Satoshi Kanazawa, has published a paper in the British Journal of Health Psychology "alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries" according to a news report in The Observor. Kanazawa's paper "compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries" and "cites Ethiopia's national IQ of 63, the world's lowest, and the fact that men and women are only expected to live until their mid-40s as an example of his finding that intelligence is the main determinant of someone's health."

According to his profile on the LSE, Satoshi Kanazawa research interest is "evolutionary psychology" and "the consequences for modern human social life of the human brain's difficulty in comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment". Sounds a lot nicer than eugenics, the term critics of his paper are using.

It's curious how discredited Eurocentric views of Africa from the last century have resurfaced. As Paul Collins, a spokesman for War On Want, the international development charity, says: "The notion that people in poor countries have inferior intelligence has been disproved by much research in the past. This is another example, which other academics will shoot down." Read "Low IQs are Africa's Curse"...