Skip to main content
Log in

Race and IQ in the postgenomic age: The microcephaly case

  • Original Article
  • Published:
BioSocieties Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

A convergence of contextual factors, technological platforms and research frameworks in the genomics of the human brain and cognition has generated a new postgenomic model for the study of race and IQ. Centered on the case study of Bruce T. Lahn's 2005 claims about the genomic basis of racial differences in brain size and IQ, this article maps the disciplinary terrain of this research, analyzes its central claims and examines the rigor of critical debate within the genomics community about new race and IQ research. New postgenomic race and IQ research, while displaying some continuities with previous eras of racial science, also differs in important ways, both contextual and conceptual. In particular, this new research draws on methods and hypotheses that are widely accepted across many fields of the contemporary molecular genetic sciences. This has implications for the forms of critical engagement that science studies scholars might pursue.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Figure 1
Figure 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See, for example, Fujimura et al (2008); Koenig et al (2008); and Whitmarsh and Jones (2010).

  2. ‘IQ’ refers to a measure of general intelligence arrived at by cognitive tests and in relation to statistical measures of age-appropriate performance on those tests. In this article, I use the terms ‘IQ’ and ‘intelligence’ interchangeably. For more general claims not specific to IQ, I use phrases such as ‘cognitive differences’ or ‘cognitive performance’.

  3. For example, the Autism Genome Project has become a generative location for genes that many assume will also be implicated in intelligence (Abrahams and Geschwind, 2008; ‘GenomeWeb’, 2010).

  4. Researchers believe that cortical thickness, thickness of the corpus callosum, and grey and white matter volumes of the total cerebrum are relevant predictors of intelligence, all features that have been shown to be influenced by genes (Deary et al, 2010). Any gene influencing these features is, in theory, a candidate ‘intelligence gene’.

  5. Perspectives on Psychological Science published three accompanying commentaries on Hunt and Carlson (2007). Although two present some broad criticisms of research on racial differences in IQ, the commentaries praise Hunt and Carlson's article as offering ‘sensible guidelines for the conduct of research on group differences in intelligence’ (Brody, 2007) and as ‘a major work of … high caliber’, ‘sensible, well-written, and balanced’ (Sternberg and Grigorenko, 2007). None of the commentaries, nor any of the dozen or more scholarly publications that have since cited Hunt and Carlson (Google Scholar, 29 July 2011), remark on their striking claim that molecular research on group differences in intelligence could lead to BiDil-like therapies for race-based cognitive deficits. To my knowledge, however, no one is taking serious steps toward developing such a drug at this time.

  6. See Proctor (2003) for a disciplinary and intellectual history of what Proctor calls ‘the recent emphasis on recency’ (p. 227) in the fields of archaeology, paleontology and molecular anthropology.

  7. It should be noted that such claims frequently present, as scientific fact, a simplistic and uncritical picture of present-day racial and ethnic groups as reflecting known population genetic substructures with distinctive, unbroken histories. This picture of the genetic basis of race and ethnicity is at best an idealization of human population variation and, at worst, a crude concretization of human folk racial conceptions in genetic terms.

  8. For example, the publication of the 2010 draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome has reinvigorated debate over whether Neanderthals and Eurasians exchanged genetic material (Green et al, 2010). Evidence in favor of this hypothesis is seen as bolstering claims about unique gene variants and recent positive selection in non-African populations. In his article, ‘Genomics Refutes an Exclusively African Origin of Humans’ (Eswaran et al, 2005), Harpending and coauthors advance the idea that infusions of genes from other hominids occurred after humans left Africa, and that these genes may be implicated in racial and/or cultural differences between modern humans. Indeed, Lahn has suggested that the advantageous microcephaly gene variants may have originated from introgression with Neanderthals or another hominid species (Evans et al, 2006; Thornton and Woods, 2009).

  9. I focus my discussion here on Lahn, the primary author of the papers and the principal intellectual architect and defender of their claims. Two coauthors, genetic anthropologist Sarah Tishkoff, then of the University of Maryland, and population geneticist Richard Hudson of the University of Chicago, were not students or postdocs in Lahn's lab. These external coauthors consulted on the elements of the papers having to do with the signature of positive selection. They distanced themselves from the papers after publication, claiming that they had not signed off on the papers’ conclusions about the role of the gene variants in the evolution of modern human behavior, language and culture (Richardson, 2010).

  10. Microcephalin is expressed in the fetal brain, but as Jackson et al (2002) report, ‘A similar level of expression is also present in fetal liver and kidney, and transcripts are detectable at low levels in a range of other fetal tissues, as well as in a number of adult tissues’ (p. 139).

  11. ASPM and microcephalin are involved in spindle pole organization and orientation during mitosis, including related processes, such as DNA damage repair, chromosome condensation, microtubule dynamics, centrosome maturation and cohesion, and centriole biogenesis (Bond et al, 2002).

  12. The lack of correlation between brain size and IQ is demonstrated by the so-called ‘paradox of sex’. Though women's brains are on average 100 grams lighter than males when corrected for body size, men and women show negligible or no differences in IQ. Some continue to claim, however, that there is a small correlation between brain size and IQ, and that Africans have, on average, smaller brains (Rushton and Ankney, 2009).

  13. In numerous interviews and publications, Lahn has cited lactose intolerance and skin pigmentation as examples demonstrating the plausibility of recent positive selection for human traits – including cognitive traits. As he wrote in a 2009 Nature article, skin pigmentation and lactase persistence show that recent positive selection can produce ‘differences among groups … so substantial that the trait displays an inter-group difference that is non-trivial compared with the variance within groups, and the extreme end of a trait may be significantly over-represented in a group’ (Lahn and Ebenstein, 2009, p. 728).

  14. Lahn's data on population difference in frequency of the ASPM and microcephalin gene variants was based on resequencing of the gene loci using a panel of 89 samples (90 in the case of ASPM) from the Coriell Institute. The panel included small samples from geographically disparate global populations, labeled as follows: nine sub-Saharan Africans, seven North Africans, nine Iberians, seven Basques, nine Russians, nine Middle Easterners, nine South Asians, eight Chinese (nine for the ASPM locus), one Japanese, eight Southeast Asians, six Pacific Islanders and seven Andeans (online supplementary material for Evans et al, 2005; Mekel-Bobrov et al, 2005, available through www.sciencemag.org).

  15. For example, microcephaly has been described in the contemporary literature as an ‘atavistic brain size reduction’ (Bates et al, 2008, p. 690), ‘atavistic – a “throwback” disorder’ (Gilbert et al, 2005, p. 581), and ‘an atavistic disorder’ (Jackson et al, 2002, p. 136; Wang and Su, 2004, p. 1131).

  16. For a history of speculations about the relationship between head size, race, class and intellectual ability before the nineteenth century, see Goodey (2005).

  17. The use of the term ‘atavism’ by contemporary brain genomicists in the microcephaly case is striking not only because of this painful history, but also because today ‘atavism’ is not widely accepted as a term with any precise technical meaning in medicine or evolutionary biology. As the anthropologist Ashley Montagu wrote in 1945, ‘as a concept to account for the appearance of certain physical characters or forms of behavior, “atavism” belongs in the Academy of Discarded Curiosities’ (p. 133). Although today developmental biologists continue to study anomalous human characteristics such as small tails, webbed toes or extra nipples, these are understood primarily as evidence of ‘the developmental plasticity that exists within embryos and the relative ease with which development can be switched from one program to another’ (Hall, 1984, p. 118), rather than as direct and compelling evidence of the organism's evolutionary past. In any case, given what is empirically known about the etiology and pathology of microcephaly, there would seem to be little reason to conceive of microcephaly as an atavism. The resemblance in size (though not structure) of the microcephalic brain to a lower primate brain is, of course, not sufficient evidence of atavism. Moreover, all evidence indicates that microcephaly is not the result of aberrant expression of normally muted ancestral developmental processes, but a disorder caused by a loss-of-function mutation in a gene essential to early cell division in neurogenesis.

  18. See Lee (2008) for further analysis of how this discourse of ‘courage’ functions ideologically in recent debates over the biology of racial differences.

  19. Sociologist Aaron Panofsky's (forthcoming) ethnographic analysis of the management of controversy in the field of behavioral genetics makes similar observations about the polarizing effects of external criticism and the ineffectiveness of the field in generating forums for the open discussion of research standards and methods.

  20. Despite this 2006 pronouncement, Lahn has not ended his work in the field of evolutionary cognitive genetics (Vallender et al, 2008; Lahn and Ebenstein, 2009).

  21. Nicholas Wade reported in a 2005 article in The New York Times that Lahn ‘expected more such allele differences between populations would come to light, as have differences in patterns of genetic disease. “I do think this kind of study is a harbinger for what might become a rather controversial issue in human population research,” he [Lahn] said’ (Wade, 2005).

References

  • Abrahams, B.S. and Geschwind, D.H. (2008) Advances in autism genetics: On the threshold of a new neurobiology. Nature Reviews Genetics 9 (5): 341–355.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Akey, J.M. (2009) Constructing genomic maps of positive selection in humans: Where do we go from here? Genome Research 19 (5): 711–722.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Akey, J.M. et al (2004) Population history and natural selection shape patterns of genetic variation in 132 genes. PLoS Biology 2 (10): e286.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • American Rennaisance. (2005) Race realism takes a step forward, http://www.amren.com/ar/2005/12/#article3, accessed 1 February 2011.

  • Balter, M. (2005) Evolution: Are human brains still evolving? Brain genes show signs of selection. Science 309 (5741): 1662–1663.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Balter, M. (2006) Bruce Lahn profile: Brain man makes waves with claims of recent human evolution. Science 314 (5807): 1871–1873.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barnes, B. and Dupré, J. (2008) Genomes and What to Make of Them. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bates, T.C., Luciano, M., Lind, P., Wright, M.J., Montgomery, G.W. and Martin, A. (2008) Recently-derived variants of brain-size genes ASPM, MCPH1, CDK5RAP and BRCA1 not associated with general cognition, reading or language. Intelligence 36: 689–693.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bersaglieri, T. et al (2004) Genetic signatures of strong recent positive selection at the lactase gene. American Journal of Human Genetics 74 (6): 1111–1120.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berstein, C. (1922) Microcephalic people sometimes called ‘pin heads’. Journal of Heredity 13 (1): 30–39.

    Google Scholar 

  • Biology 2.0. (2010) A special report on the human genome. The Economist, 17 June.

  • Bliss, C. (2009) Genome sampling and the biopolitics of race. In: S. Binkley and J. Capetillo (eds.) A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 322–339.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bond, J. et al (2002) ASPM is a major determinant of cerebral cortical size. Nature Genetics 32 (2): 316–320.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brody, N. (2007) Barriers to understanding racial differences in intelligence: Commentary on Hunt and Carlson (2007). Perspectives on Psychological Science 2 (2): 214–215.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clarke, A.E., Shim, J., Shostak, S. and Nelson, A. (2009) Biomedicalizing genetic health, diseases and identities. In: P. Atkinson, P. Glasner and M. Lock (eds.) Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era. London: Routledge, pp. 21–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cochran, G. and Harpending, H. (2009) The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cochran, G., Hardy, J. and Harpending, H. (2006) Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence. Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (5): 659–693.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Condit, C. (2008) Race and genetics from a modal materialist perspective. Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (4): 383–406.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cox, J., Jackson, A.P., Bond, J. and Woods, C.G. (2006) What primary microcephaly can tell us about brain growth. Trends in Molecular Medicine 12 (8): 358–366.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crookshank, F.G. (1924) The Mongol in Our Midst: A Study of Man and His Three Faces. New York: E.P. Dutton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Currat, M. et al (2006) Comment on ‘Ongoing adaptive evolution of ASPM, a brain size determinant in Homo sapiens’ and ‘Microcephalin, a gene regulating brain size, continues to evolve adaptively in humans’. Science 313 (5784): 172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Deary, I.J., Penke, L. and Johnson, W. (2010) The neuroscience of human intelligence differences. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (3): 201–211.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dediu, D. and Ladd, D.R. (2007) Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104 (26): 10944–10949.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Derbyshire, J. (2005) The specter of difference: What science is uncovering, we will have to come to grips with. National Review 7 November.

  • Dobson-Stone, C. et al (2007) Investigation of MCPH1 G37995C and ASPM A44871G polymorphisms and brain size in a healthy cohort. Neuroimage 37 (2): 394–400.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dorus, S. et al (2004) Accelerated evolution of nervous system genes in the origin of Homo sapiens. Cell 119 (7): 1027–1040.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Down, J.L.H. (1866) Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots. London Hospital Reports iii, pp. 259–262.

  • Eswaran, V., Harpending, H. and Rogers, A.R. (2005) Genomics refutes an exclusively African origin of humans. Journal of Human Evolution 49 (1): 1–18.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Evans, P.D., Anderson, J.R., Vallender, E.J., Choi, S.S. and Lahn, B.T. (2004a) Reconstructing the evolutionary history of microcephalin, a gene controlling human brain size. Human Molecular Genetics 13 (11): 1139–1145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Evans, P.D. et al (2004b) Adaptive evolution of ASPM, a major determinant of cerebral cortical size in humans. Human Molecular Genetics 13 (5): 489–494.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Evans, P.D. et al (2005) Microcephalin, a gene regulating brain size, continues to evolve adaptively in humans. Science 309 (5741): 1717–1720.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Evans, P.D., Mekel-Bobrov, N., Vallender, E.J., Hudson, R.R. and Lahn, B.T. (2006) Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103 (48): 18178–18183.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fujimura, J.H. and Rajagopalan, R. (2011) Different differences: The use of ‘genetic ancestry’ versus race in biomedical human genetic research. Social Studies of Science 41 (643): 5–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fujimura, J.H., Duster, T. and Rajagopalan, R. (eds.) (2008) Special issue on race, genomics, and biomedicine. Social Studies of Science 38: 643.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fullwiley, D. (2008) The molecularization of race: U.S. health institutions, pharmacogenetics practice, and public science after the genome. In: B.A. Koenig, S.S.-J. Lee and S.S. Richardson (eds.) Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 149–171.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gene Expression Blog. (2006) 10 questions for Bruce Lahn, 12 August.

  • GenomeWeb. (2010) Autism speaks funds new genomics programs, http://www.genomeweb.com/proteomics/autism-speaks-funds-new-genomics-programs, accessed 9 April 2010.

  • Gilbert, S.L., Dobyns, W.B. and Lahn, B.T. (2005) Genetic links between brain development and brain evolution. Nature Reviews Genetics 6 (7): 581–590.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goodey, C.F. (2005) Blockheads, roundheads, pointy heads: Intellectual disability and the brain before modern medicine. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41 (2): 165–183.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gould, S.J. ([1981] 1996) The Mismeasure of Man, Revised and Expand edn. New York: Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Green, R.E. et al (2010) A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome. Science 328 (5979): 710–722.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hall, B.K. (1984) Development mechanisms underlying the formation of atavisms. Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 59 (1): 89–124.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • HHMI. (2005a) HHMI Research on Evolution in Action Highlighted in Science's ‘Breakthrough of the Year’. Research News, http://www.hhmi.org/news/122305.html, accessed 29 July 2011.

  • HHMI. (2005b) Human brain is still evolving. Research News, http://www.hhmi.org/news/lahn4.html, accessed 29 July 2011.

  • Hsu, S.C. (2006) Lahn is up against PC Thought Police. Information Processing Blog, http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2006/11/neanderthal-human-interbreeding.html, accessed 1 February 2010.

  • Hunt, E. and Carlson, J. (2007) Considerations relating to the study of group differences in intelligence. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2 (2): 194–223.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ireland, W.W. (1877) On Idiocy and Imbecility. London: J.S.A. Churchill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackson, A.P. et al (2002) Identification of microcephalin, a protein implicated in determining the size of the human brain. American Journal of Human Genetics 71 (1): 136–142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kahn, J. (2008a) Exploiting race in drug development. Social Studies of Science 38 (5): 737–758.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kahn, J. (2008b) Patenting race in a genomic age. In: B.A. Koenig, S.S.-J. Lee and S.S. Richardson (eds.) Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 129–148.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klein, R.G. (1989) The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Koenig, B.A., Lee, S.S.-J. and Richardson, S.S. (2008) Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kouprina, N. et al (2004) Accelerated evolution of the ASPM gene controlling brain size begins prior to human brain expansion. PLoS Biology 2 (5): e126.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lahn, B.T. and Ebenstein, L. (2009) Let's celebrate human genetic diversity. Nature 461 (7265): 726–728.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, S.S.-J. (2008) Racial realism and the discourse of responsibility for health disparities in a genomic age. In: B.A. Koenig, S.S.-J. Lee and S.S. Richardson (eds.) Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 342–358.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewontin, R.C., Rose, S.P.R. and Kamin, L.J. (1984) Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, 1st edn. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Longino, H.E. (1990) Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Longino, H.E. (2002) The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lynch, G. and Granger, R. (2008) Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maghirang-Rodriguez, R., Archie, J.G., Schwartz, C.E. and Collins, J.S. (2009) The c.940G variant of the Microcephalin (MCPH1) gene is not associated with microcephaly or mental retardation. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 149A (4): 622–625.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mekel-Bobrov, N. and Lahn, B.T. (2006) What makes us human: Revisiting an age-old question in the genomic era. Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration 1 (November): 18.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mekel-Bobrov, N. and Lahn, B.T. (2007) Response to Comments by Timpson et al. and Yu et al. Science 317 (5841): 1036.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mekel-Bobrov, N. et al (2005) Ongoing adaptive evolution of ASPM, a brain size determinant in Homo sapiens. Science 309 (5741): 1720–1722.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mekel-Bobrov, N. et al (2007) The ongoing adaptive evolution of ASPM and Microcephalin is not explained by increased intelligence. Human Molecular Genetics 16 (6): 600–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, E. (1996) Idiocy in the nineteenth century. History of Psychiatry 7: 361–373.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mochida, G.H. and Walsh, C.A. (2001) Molecular genetics of human microcephaly. Current Opinion in Neurology 14 (2): 151–156.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Montagu, A. (1945) Some anthropological terms: A study in the systematics of confusion. American Anthropologist 47 (1): 119–133.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nielsen, R. (2009) Adaptationism – 30 years after Gould and Lewontin. Evolution 63 (10): 2487–2490.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Panofsky, A.L. (forthcoming) Rethinking scientific authority: Behavior genetics and race controversies. In: C. Calhoun and R. Sennett (eds.) Creating Authority. Routledge.

  • Peng, Y. et al (2010) The ADH1B Arg47His polymorphism in east Asian populations and expansion of rice domestication in history. BioMed Central Evolutionary Biology 10 (January): 15.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plomin, R. (2008) Behavioral Genetics, 5th edn. New York: Worth Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plomin, R. and Rende, R. (1991) Human behavioral genetics. Annual Review of Psychology 42: 161–190.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Plomin, R., Craig, I. and Kennedy, J.K. (2006) The quest for quantitative trait loci associated with intelligence. Intelligence 34: 513–526.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ponting, C. and Jackson, A.P. (2005) Evolution of primary microcephaly genes and the enlargement of primate brains. Current Opinion in Genetics and Development 15 (3): 241–248.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ponting, C.P. (2006) A novel domain suggests a ciliary function for ASPM, a brain size determining gene. Bioinformatics 22 (9): 1031–1035.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Proctor, R. (2003) Three roots of human recency: Molecular anthropology, the refigured Acheulean, and the UNESCO response to Auschwitz. Current Anthropology 44 (April): 213–240.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Regalado, A. (2006) Head examined: Scientist's study of brain genes sparks a backlash. The Wall Street Journal, 16 June.

  • Richardson, S.S. (2010) Interview with Sarah Tishkoff.

  • Rimol, L.M. et al (2010) Sex-dependent association of common variants of microcephaly genes with brain structure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107 (1): 384–388.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rothfels, N. (1996) Aztecs, aborigines, and ape-people: Science and freaks in Germany, 1850-1900. In: R.G. Thomson (ed.) Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, pp. 158–172.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rushton, J.P. and Ankney, C.D. (2009) Whole brain size and general mental ability: A review. International Journal of Neuroscience 119 (5): 691–731.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rushton, J.P., Vernon, P.A. and Bons, T.A. (2007) No evidence that polymorphisms of brain regulator genes Microcephalin and ASPM are associated with general mental ability, head circumference or altruism. Biology Letters 3 (2): 157–160.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sabeti, P.C. et al (2006) Positive natural selection in the human lineage. Science 312 (5780): 1614–1620.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Simonson, T.S. et al (2010) Genetic evidence for high-altitude adaptation in Tibet. Science 329 (5987): 72–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Snyderman, M. and Rothman, S. (1988) The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sternberg, R.J. and Grigorenko, E.L. (2007) The difficulty of escaping preconceptions in writing an article about the difficulty of escaping preconceptions: Commentary on Hunt and Carlson (2007). Perspectives on Psychological Science 2 (2): 221–223.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thacker, E. (2005) The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thornton, G.K. and Woods, C.G. (2009) Primary microcephaly: Do all roads lead to Rome? Trends in Genetics 25 (11): 501–510.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Timpson, N., Heron, J., Smith, G.D. and Enard, W. (2007) Comment on papers by Evans et al. and Mekel-Bobrov et al. on Evidence for Positive Selection of MCPH1 and ASPM. Science 317 (5841): 1036.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tishkoff, S.A. et al (2007) Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe. Nature Genetics 39 (1): 31–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vallender, E.J., Mekel-Bobrov, N. and Lahn, B.T. (2008) Genetic basis of human brain evolution. Trends in Neuroscience 31 (12): 637–644.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Virchow, R. (1877) Ueber Microcephalie. Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie 9: 288.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vogt, C. (1869 [English trans.]) On Microcephaly; or, Human-Ape organisms. Anthropological Review 7 (25): 128–136.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wade, N. (2005) Researchers say human brain is still evolving. The New York Times 8 September, accessed online.

  • Wade, N. (2010) Adventures in very recent evolution. The New York Times 19 July, accessed online.

  • Wang, J.K., Li, Y. and Su, B. (2008) A common SNP of MCPH1 is associated with cranial volume variation in Chinese population. Human Molecular Genetics 17 (9): 1329–1335.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, Y.Q. and Su, B. (2004) Molecular evolution of microcephalin, a gene determining human brain size. Human Molecular Genetics 13 (11): 1131–1137.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitmarsh, I. and Jones, D.S. (2010) What's the Use of Race?: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yi, X. et al (2010) Sequencing of 50 human exomes reveals adaptation to high altitude. Science 329 (5987): 75–78.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yu, F. et al (2007) Comment on ‘Ongoing adaptive evolution of ASPM, a brain size determinant in Homo sapiens’. Science 316 (5823): 370.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, J. (2003) Evolution of the human ASPM gene, a major determinant of brain size. Genetics 165 (4): 2063–2070.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This article arises from a collaboration with Jacob Metcalf. I greatly benefitted from our conversations and exchanges, although any errors are my own. Thanks also to Jennifer Hamilton, Ju Yon Kim, Alondra Nelson, Aaron Panofsky and Quayshawn Spencer for valuable comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Richardson, S. Race and IQ in the postgenomic age: The microcephaly case. BioSocieties 6, 420–446 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2011.20

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2011.20

Keywords

Navigation