THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE 117 



contemporary ancestors, it is convincingly clear that, what- 

 ever is to be said of sheer native intellectual capacity, civilized 

 man has developed a technique so superior to that of primitive 

 peoples that his intelligence enjoys enormous advantages at 

 almost every stage. It is peculiarly difficult for us to dissociate 

 mere intellectual power from the cultural surroundings under 

 which it is exercised. It may be, for example, that the in- 

 ventor of the bow and arrow accomplished quite as great a 

 feat in the intellectual world of his day as the inventor of 

 printing in his, or the inventor of the steam engine, or the 

 inventor of the electric light. Similarly, the inventor of the 

 fishhook and the line, as a method of extracting food from 

 the sea, may have enjoyed powers of native intelligence entirely 

 comparable with those of our great modern inventors. All of 

 which is but another way of saying that the evidences of the 

 evolution of civilization and culture are far more striking and 

 far more demonstrable than those which suggest, in historic 

 times at least, any real progress in the intrinsic fabric of human 

 thought. Moreover, in all comparisons of racial groups one 

 must remember the astonishing variation of natural capacity 

 in any large number of people. The psychological tests em- 

 ployed in the American army during the war exhibited the 

 amazing range of capacity in a cross section of our population. 

 Certain of the recruits in the army exhibited an intelligence 

 capacity which marked them as morons and accordingly com- 

 parable with the most backward races. One is always tempted 

 when comparing one's own racial group with another to take 

 as the standard one of its very intelligent members. This is 

 entirely unfair and sure to result in fallacious conclusions unless 

 one is in a position to select from the group under comparison 

 an equally exceptional representative. 



But, after all allowances are made, it would appear that, if 

 we compare the normal civilized man of any of the more ad- 

 vanced races with those savages lowest in the human scale, the 



