I heard about this tribe that ...

In 2002, the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for murderers with IQs below, typically, 70. If you are a justice of the Supreme Court, any relative of yours or of a friend of yours with an IQ below 70 is likely to suffer from a visible organic syndrome of mental retardation, such as Down's. They are what doctors abbreviate in their notes as FLKs -- Funny Looking Kids.

But in sizable swaths of American society, an IQ below 70 doesn't mean you are retarded in a medical sense -- it just means you're dimmer than normal. You walk and talk like everybody else on your block. You just aren't any better at abstract reasoning than the Supreme Court Justice's nephew with Down's Syndrome.

Lack of understanding of this leads to the widespread incredulity at hearing of the low average IQ scores in some Third World countries, and the even lower IQ scores found among some hunter-gatherers, such as the Australian Aborigines: "You're saying that half the people in the country are retarded! That's insane!"

Some poor people overseas are physically retarded, due to lack of micronutrients like iron or iodine. But a lot just don't do much abstract thinking. This doesn't mean their offspring wouldn't be able to, but they don't. So they score low on IQ tests, and perform poorly at real-world tasks that require higher IQs.

I've heard of an anthropologist who has spent years with the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert who can't recall ever hearing a conversation among them about something abstract.

An extreme example of concrete, here-and-now, nonabstract thinking appears to be a tribe in the Amazon called the Pirahã. They've been known to Portuguese-speakers since the 1700s, but they've successfully resisted being assimilated by their remarkable lack of curiosity about and contempt for anything outside their own time and place.

John Colapinto reported in the New Yorker last spring in "The Interpreter" on a linguist named Dan Everett:

The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. ...

Unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon, the Pirahã have resisted efforts by missionaries and government agencies to teach them farming. They maintain tiny, weed-infested patches of ground a few steps into the forest, where they cultivate scraggly manioc plants. “The stuff that’s growing in this village was either planted by somebody else or it’s what grows when you spit the seed out,” Everett said to me one morning as we walked through the village. Subsisting almost entirely on fish and game, which they catch and hunt daily, the Pirahã have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking, and they produce only enough manioc flour to last a few days. (The Kawahiv, another Amazonian tribe that Everett has studied, make enough to last for months.) ...

The tribe, he maintains, has no collective memory that extends back more than one or two generations, and no original creation myths. ... Everett also learned that the Pirahã have no fixed words for colors, and instead use descriptive phrases that change from one moment to the next. “So if you show them a red cup, they’re likely to say, ‘This looks like blood,’ ” Everett said. “Or they could say, ‘This is like vrvcum’—a local berry that they use to extract a red dye.”

Gordon had visited the tribe with Everett in the early nineties, after Everett told him about the Pirahã’s limited “one,” “two,” and “many” counting system. Other tribes, in Australia, the South Sea Islands, Africa, and the Amazon, have a “one-two-many” numerical system, but with an important difference: they are able to learn to count in another language. The Pirahã have never been able to do this, despite concerted efforts by the Everetts to teach them to count to ten in Portuguese.

During a two-month stay with the Pirahã in 1992, Gordon ran several experiments with tribe members. In one, he sat across from a Pirahã subject and placed in front of himself an array of objects—nuts, AA batteries—and had the Pirahã match the array. The Pirahã could perform the task accurately when the array consisted of two or three items, but their performance with larger groupings was, Gordon later wrote, “remarkably poor.” Gordon also showed subjects nuts, placed them in a can, and withdrew them one at a time. Each time he removed a nut, he asked the subject whether there were any left in the can. The Pirahã answered correctly only with quantities of three or fewer. Through these and other tests, Gordon concluded that Everett was right: the people could not perform tasks involving quantities greater than three. Gordon ruled out mass retardation. Though the Pirahã do not allow marriage outside their tribe, they have long kept their gene pool refreshed by permitting women to sleep with outsiders. “Besides,” Gordon said, “if there was some kind of Appalachian inbreeding or retardation going on, you’d see it in hairlines, facial features, motor ability. It bleeds over. They don’t show any of that.”

Shortly after Gordon’s article appeared, Everett began outlining a paper correcting what he believed were Gordon’s errors. Its scope grew as Everett concluded that the Pirahã’s lack of numerals was part of a larger constellation of “gaps.” Over the course of three weeks, Everett wrote what would become his Cultural Anthropology article, twenty-five thousand words in which he advanced a novel explanation for the many mysteries that had bedevilled him. Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”

To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.

Personally, I haven't met any Pirahãs, so I can't tell you if Everett's theories are true or not. Anthropologists have gotten things wrong before.

The Pirahãs survive fine in the jungle -- there are about 250-300 of them -- and they seem to amuse each other no end, although they find outsiders boring, unless they bring them stuff.

They're kind of reminiscent of that NYT Magazine article about the Syrian Jews in Brooklyn: about IQ 50 points lower, but just as xenophobic (although that's not quite the right word -- the Amazonians appear to be not scared or repulsed by the outside world, but simply uninterested in it). The Syrian Jews aren't very interested in science, higher education, or other creations of abstract thought, either, although they have no problem using abstract thinking to make lots of money.

Maybe that's the future of the human race. If we curious moderns can't keep up our birthrates, the distant future may belong to cultures that raise their members to be not curious.

By the way, the article has a long section on how this one tribe supposedly undermines Noam Chomsky's venerable theory of Universal Grammar. I don't really see that. We know that a really bad environment, like being chained to the water heater in the basement for your whole childhood, can severely retard a child so that he might never catch up after he is freed. Perhaps this tribe's culture is the cultural equivalent of being chained to the water heater. It sounds like they more or less intentionally create a stupid cultural environment to dampen curiosity about the outside world. Maybe it's not intentional but it seems to work -- they appear to have survived intact for over 200 years of contact with the Western world, whereas tribes with what we think of as better cultures, more conducive to curiosity, have just blended into the mestizo mass by now. It shouldn't invalidate Chomsky's general theory of Universal Grammar that some tribe has constructed a culture that keeps themselves too stupid to use useful features of the Universal Grammar.

I'm not sure if a culture can make you smarter, but I bet it can make you less interested in abstract thinking.

But, I don't know anything about linguistics, so don't take my word for it.

Anyway, you aren't supposed to think like that:

"Some scholars believe that Everett’s claim that the Pirahã do not use recursion is tantamount to calling them stupid. Stephen Levinson, the neo-Whorfian director of the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Netherlands, excoriated Everett in print for “having made the Pirahã sound like the mindless bearers of an almost subhumanly simple culture.” Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist at the Australian National University, was also troubled by the paper, and told me, “I think from the point of view of—I don’t know—human solidarity, human rights, and so on, it’s really very important to know that it’s a question that many people don’t dare to raise, whether we have the same cognitive abilities or not, we humans.”"

Okay, Dr. Wierzbicka, you don't sound real comfortable with where this could be going, and we don't want to get you Watsoned.

I was, however, amused by Steven Pinker's reflections on his old mentor:

Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, who wrote admiringly about some of Chomsky’s ideas in his 1994 best-seller, “The Language Instinct,” told me, “There’s a lot of strange stuff going on in the Chomskyan program. He’s a guru, he makes pronouncements that his disciples accept on faith and that he doesn’t feel compelled to defend in the conventional scientific manner. Some of them become accepted within his circle as God’s truth without really being properly evaluated, and, surprisingly for someone who talks about universal grammar, he hasn’t actually done the spadework of seeing how it works in some weird little language that they speak in New Guinea.”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer