In any event, you are right to be concerned with echoes of the Bell Curve. I don’t think that is what is going on here but you can be sure that any research pointing to human variation will be distorted and turned into “evidence” for the existence of races (even though they don’t exist) and for racist thinking and policy.

Toto, I was thinking of that as well while reading about this research: Actually, there are two things going on here at once: Larger eyes and more visual processing go with nocturnal lifeways because of low light, but primate-style color vision and it’s associated equipment goes with rainforest frugivory and, later, color-based social signalling.

I think that the observation being made here is a very small scale fine tuning.

My personal null hypothesis is that brains are bigger in higher attitudes for thermal reasons and that for some reason we don’t quite get eye size is closely linked to brain size (something developmental, not adaptive).

Always remember that there may be different levels of explanation at work: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/05/ultimate_causes_proximate_mech.php

So the good news is, the hypothesis that some populations have larger or smaller visual brain areas (as opposed to merely larger or smaller brains in general) can easily be tested.

There is an idea floating around that the main impetus for the initial impetus for brainification among “higher” primates was driven by the need for better visual abilities, as these ancestors switched from the nocturnal lifestyle of early primates to a diurnal lifestyle. Not sure what status this idea has among paleontologists.

Here’s a better explanation: In the small subgroup of humans which reached the Urals and Caucuses before moving west and east, the small percentage which already had larger eye sockets survived better than those with smaller ones, whether by happenstance, accident or survival of the best adapted. It was because they survived that larger eyes became predominant, not the other way around. As for larger brains, larger sockets require larger skulls and the brain just filled in the space rather than having the brain slosh around in a cavity.

It’s likely no more relevant than brunette/blonde/redheads all coming from Europe – again, it sounds like something out of “The Bell Curve”.

.

Complete non-sequitur. PC strikes again.

The fact better vision has been selected for, resulting in bigger brains says nothing about the extra smarts conferred by bigger brains, as implied by this loopy PR.

Anyway, the stupidity caused by proximity to the equator must be largely environmental – the USA is only recently densely populated and just look at the voting patterns North v. South.

(Why else would we invent sun glasses? Northern europeans have a tough time with the bright light of the tropics.)