Studies investigating evolutionary theories on the origins of national differences in intelligence have been criticized on the basis that both national cognitive ability measures and supposedly evolutionarily informative proxies (such as latitude and climate) are confounded with general developmental status. In this study 14 Y chromosomal…

Derived changes in genes associated with primary microcephaly (MCPH) have been suggested to be "currently sweeping to fixation" i.e., increasing in frequency in most populations, with the likely outcome that the derived allele will completely displace the ancestral allele over time. Possible causes for this sweep include effects on human reasoning…

Most theories of human mental evolution assume that selection favored higher intelligence and larger brains, which should have reduced genetic variance in both. However, adult human intelligence remains highly heritable, and is genetically correlated with brain size. This conflict might be resolved by estimating the coefficient of additive genetic…

This article proposes that a complete account of cognitive evolution may have to accommodate a domain-general source of variance in mental abilities accounting for differences among primate taxa. Deaner, van Schaik, and Johnson [Deaner, R.O., van Schaik, C.P. and Johnson, V.E. (2006). Do some taxa have better domain-general cognition than others?…