I think some of you are missing the boat here. It's not so much skin color - it's geography. All over the globe, people from the North tend to have higher IQ's than people from the South. Thousands of years of evolution in adapting to cold harsh climate caused natural selection for higher intelligence. Northern Caucasians (Europeans) have higher IQ's than Southern Caucasians (Arabs, Indians), and Northern Asians (Japanese, Koreans, most Chinese) have higher IQ's than Southern Asians (SE Asians, Polynesians, Malays). The dichotomy is not East-West, but rather North-South. This is a rather studious observation on your part comrade Cassidy, I am inclined to concur with your scholarly synopsis. Evolving in a harsh, cold/rainy/snowy more Northerly climate does seem to lend itself to a bit higher IQ level. But at the same time, my observations seem to indicate that a year round warm more Southerly, equatorial environment lends itself to city building aka civilization.    Which is why I gather that you see large civilized aka citified civilizations spring up in year round warm climates and not Northern climates. For instance Rome and Athens compared to Northern Europe, the Mayans, Aztecs and Incans compared to the Chippewa, Cherokee, and Iroquois in the Americas, the ancient north African and middle Eastern civilizations, and the ancient south eastern civilizations in present day Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam such as the Khmer Empire. The people from these year round warm equatorial climates seem to have obviously been more civilized(by civilized I am meaning cityfied, their societies tended to revolve around large city centers, they were cityfied, city building peoples, as opposed to the Northern people who tend to be more rural or nomadic due to the climate). Now obviously people from more Northerly climates tend to have a slightly higher IQ than people from warmer climates, so the reason the southern peoples got a jump start on civilization(city building) was not because they were more intelligent so it must be due to the environment, at least that is what my spidey sense is telling me.    As soon as the northern Europeans and Asians were introduced to city building and less rural lifestyles they went straight to work building cities that rivaled and even surpassed most of their southern counterparts. Eg. in Europe: London, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Moscow, Paris etc...and in Asia: Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo,etc........