Re: Hair color and IQ

"Robert Calvert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...

> Has anybody ever tried to find a correlation between hair color and IQ
> score? Even though the phrase "dumb blond" may sound like a cliché, I think
> there is a certain amount of truth to it. In fact, if you take a close look
> at pictures of some of the most brilliant people, you will find that almost
> all of them have dark brown hair. Some have light brown hair, a small
> percentage have jet black hair and almost none of them have blond or red
> hair. This is not the distribution that you see in the general population.
> Obviously, I'm omitting older people with gray hair from this assessment.

You overlook the fact that hair tends to darken with age, especially
in males. It also tends to coarsen with age, and coarser hair reflects
light differently and appears darker. Finally, exposure to the sun
will tend to bleach some hair types, while the hair oils used at the
beginning of the last century tended to render it much darker in
appearance, especially when photographed indoors.

As an experiment, try getting hold of pictures of the Danish, Swedish,
German and suchlike scientists who founded the modern atomic theory
WITH their families, then examine the apparent color of their
children's hair. Or else find childhood pictures of the scientists
themselves. You will find a considerable discrepancy in a surprising
number of cases. So, what do we call people with such hair? Blond or
not?

This fixation with very blond hair in older adults, and especially in
women, is a modern invention, greatly assisted either from a bottle or
from a life spent suntanning. It may be that nowadays people who spend
their lives tanning have given up on advancing theoretical physics!

> It shouldn't be too surprising why those with jet black hair would be
> underrepresented among the most intelligent since these are the people who
> usually belong to low IQ races.

I can assure you that until just a few hundred years ago, the west
obtained all its innovations from populations with jet black hair,
that it is well on the way to doing so again, and that much of the
genetics research that seems to interest you is currently being done
by precisely such people, namely from Japan, China, and South- and
South-East Asia.

> But the reason why this same trend holds true for those with light colored
> hair is a little more complicated. Is blond hair a sign of inbreeding in
> some cases?

Well, an inbred population of blondes will be blonde. For sure! If you
found an island population with nothing but blondes, that would
signify what is called a founder effect. If the island had been seeded
recently enough, it would imply that the population might still be
inbred. However the nordic populations of Europe are most certainly
not inbred.