Shalizi on Saletan
This has been another episode of what Cosma said
In my first post about this, I said that there were two possible interpretations of Saletan’s actions: that he didn’t know that the ideas he was spread were crap, or that he did, but spread them anyway to advance an agenda. Saying that the second interpretation was more charitable wasn’t just a joke. Sadly, this partial mea culpa supports the first interpretation, that of incompetence. To put it in “shorter William Saletan” form, what he is saying is: I am shocked — shocked! — to discover that the people who devote their careers to providing supposedly-scientific backing for racist ideas are, in fact, flaming racists. And he does seem to be shocked, though it is hard (as Yglesias says) to see why, logically, he should strain out those gnats he displays for our horrified inspection while swallowing the camel of group inferiority (and telling his readers that camel is really great and the coming thing). This indicates a level of incompetence as a reporter and researcher that is really quite stunning …But let me back up a minute to the bit about relying on “peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue”. There are two problems here. One has to do with the fact that, as I said, it is really very easy to find the rebuttals showing that Rushton’s papers, in particular, are a tragic waste of precious trees and disk-space. For example, in the very same issue of the very same journal as the paper by Rushton and Jensen which was one of Saletan’s main sources, Richard Nisbett, one of the more important psychologists of our time, takes his turn banging his head against this particular wall. Or, again, if Saletan had been at all curious about the issue of head sizes, which seems to have impressed him so much, it would have taken about five minutes with Google Scholar to find a demonstration that this is crap. So I really have no idea what Saletan means when he claimed he relied on published rebuttals — did he think they would just crawl into his lap and sit there, meowing to be read? If I had to guess, I’d say that the most likely explanation of Saletan’s writings is that he spent a few minutes with a search engine looking for hits on racial differences in intelligence, took the first few blogs and papers he found that way as The Emerging Scientific Consensus, and then stopped. But detailed inquiry into just how he managed to screw up so badly seems unprofitable.
[raises hand]
Um, does this mean that those of us who rejected this racist pseudo-science (again) aren’t “creationists” in Saletan’s mind?
Oh, that’s right: I don’t care.
.
Cue the emergence of the second line of pseudo-serious handwringing, which is something like “Well, OK, it may be that in this case there is no merit to the claims Saletan was making and he really didn’t know what he was talking about at all; but just look at how angry his critics got—surely we don’t want to live in a world where someone who raised these questions of Race and IQ would be risking their reputation and livelihood simply for raising them, oh behold the terrible state of our discourse on race where a seemingly respectable person can’t talk out their ass in public for even a few minutes without someone who knows something about the topic irritably correcting them, for shame.”
Kieran, when Sullivan posts that paragraph on his blog tomorrow, I hope you demand royalties.
The notion that IQ correlates with race (= black people are unintelligent) is far easier to process than the scientifically defensible alternate views that reflect the complexity of the real world. Since most people, especially most conservative commentators, aren’t especially bright and almost none of them are scientifically literate, the Bell Curve thesis has built-in staying power.
Whoa! As usual, the deeper I dig, the dirtier it gets:
To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime (“Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous”) and heresy (“Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people”).
A “distinct people”? In what way are the various white-skinned people of the world a “distinct people”?
Weird, weird people.
.
Well then, if whitey is not a distinct people, then they’ve already lost.
What amazes me is that this whole brouhaha has actually lowered my opinion of the racist side. On further examination, every piece of empirical evidence that the black-people-are-genetically-stupid brought up turned out to be either fatally flawed, or torn out of context.
What amazes me is that this whole brouhaha has actually lowered my opinion of the racist side.
Interesting that is even feasible by this point in time.
The moral to the Saletan story has nothing to do with “race science” or IQ, it seems to me, but with the persistent trivilization of racism. I would bet that Saletan would indignantly reject the suggestion that he is a racist. And the reason he’d reject it is because he doesn’t ‘feel’ racist. Racism has become a matter of feeling or taste – it is like the question of whether you like chocolate or not. And thus, the systematic social aspect of racism gets nicely covered up, as it is reduced to a matter of private language, of the “heart” – that favorite of Bush’s organs. Saletan and Douthat and Sullivan, who have all expressed their belief that black people are mentally inferior, work at two pretty important media spots. Undoubtedly their attitude – which is that we are on the brink of discovering black people are inherently inferior, just give ‘race science’ another fifty years – leaks into the attitude in the office. Or might even reflect it. And that no doubt will feed into the work report on some ‘inferior’ black hire.
Imagine the difference in the reception of the article if Saletan had pressed the point, say, that doing an audit of the neurological damage done to black children by an oppressive white society was strong evidence for the case that the U.S. owed hundreds of billions of dollars in remuneration to African Americans. You could have pulled out the same bourgeois tests and made that point. But the same people who weep, figuratively, at the idea that calling people racist when they are racist is gonna prevent us from having one of those grand old scientific and objective discussion of race differences would, of course, pipe a different tune – one of outrage! It is the same outrage that you can squeeze out of them by mentioning affirmative action – even though they seem less than outraged that their white American ancestors benefited from affirmative action, otherwise known as the Jim Crow system, for one hundred years after the more oppressive slave system was overthrown.
I agree that we are witnessing the trivialization of racism. But in the sense that the accusation is coming to be leveled at people who simply aren’t doing anything reprehensible. They’re not advocating discrimination, they’re not prejudiced against individuals, they’re not burning crosses or lynching anybody. They’re simply seriously entertaining ideas that make some people uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, in spite of the fact that the conclusions they draw from these ideas aren’t particularly bad.
This is trivializing racism in the sense that it’s robbing racism of it’s sting; Racism, so stripped of everything offensive, ceases to be anything to be ashamed of.
They’re simply seriously entertaining ideas that make some people uncomfortable.
In this case Brett, they are simply seriously entertaining ideas that are demonstrably unsupported by the evidence, and this makes some people very annoyed.
ideas that have been debunked repeatedly; ideas that have been used to support slavery, genocide, apartheid, and a host of atrocities; ideas that almost destroyed this country; ideas that still poison the politics of america to this day.
yeah, weird; i wonder why people get so uncomfortable when brave people treated this thoroughly discredited notions as though they deserve serious consideration.
next up: why can’t i get my synagogue to start a reading group on the protocols of the elders of zion? all i want to do is to seriously entertain some ideas that make some people uncomfortable.
i’m so brave; why are they persecuting me?
Listen, I am sick and tired of these gentle responses to racists like Saletan. A bullet to the back of the head would be a measured, reasonable response.
In this case Brett, they are simply seriously entertaining ideas that are demonstrably unsupported by the evidence, and this makes some people very annoyed, you lying racist Bell Curvist wh*reson.
Corrected.
did he think they would just crawl into his lap and sit there, meowing to be read?
A wonderful metaphor (more evocative if you have a cat).
That said, Brett has a point: it’s a shame no one talks about the nice racists, the ones who care.
Who could possibly dispute the force of your logic, Barry? The crystalline clarity of it has struck me speechless!
Oh, wait, that’s Henry’s ban, not your logic…
So true, #15. I think it’s a shame we tar the good racists and the bad racists with the same brush. This is so unjust to those racists who use their racism to do good in the world, like fighting for racial harmony and justice.
Oh, yeah, and we apparently also are including uncritically in our condemnations the racists who are too chickensh*t openly to claim the logical conclusions of their premises. Like William Saletan, maybe, and Andrew Sullivan. Or Brett.
Kieran claims that these “ideas” are “demonstrably unsupported by the evidence.” Good to know! Crooked Timber would contribute much more to scholarly discussion if, instead of ex cathedra pronouncements like that, it hosted, say, a seminar on the topic. Kieren and Henry may think that those on the other side are all blithering idiots, but you won’t catch someone as informed as Shalizi making those sorts of generalizations.
Format? Easy. Start with Jason Malloy’s essay on Watson. Invite whoever you like to comment. (dsquared has thoughts.) Allow Malloy to respond. You can be sure that folks like Razib and others from Gene Expression will chime in. Wide open debate follows. Many views are presented. Science marches forward.
Could this happen at Crooked Timber? I have my doubts. Henry and Kieran already know the truth. Why discus? Someone like John Quiggin seems more open-minded.
Oh, and the question of head/brain sizes is a fun place to start. Facts are stubborn things and all. Pick a thousand people at random of the same race (or different races). Measure their head size using a tape measure or their brain size using an MRI. Give them an IQ test. You think that the correlation between those two vectors will be zero?
No need to look that up! After all, this is probably one of those “ideas” that Kieran has assured us is “demonstrably unsupported by the evidence.”
Pick a thousand people at random of the same race (or different races). Measure their head size using a tape measure
Whee! Sounds like someone has a fun summer project al lined up.
I suggest we measure heads in areas where the mortality rate is negative.
Kieren and Henry may think that those on the other side are all blithering idiots, but you won’t catch someone as informed as Shalizi making those sorts of generalizations.
Hasn’t Shalizi just written a series of detailed posts, linked here, explaining his basis for believing the other side are all behaving like blithering idiots? I’m not getting what you want additionally here.
Pick a thousand people at random of the same race (or different races). Measure their head size using a tape measure or their brain size using an MRI. Give them an IQ test. You think that the correlation between those two vectors will be zero?
We should probably find someone good at statistics to work out that last bit.
LOL!
I know that I should be insulted by jdkbrown, but, that comment had me laughing out loud, as the kids say.
And, by the way, lots more fun stuff coming out about Lancet in the next few months. Stay tuned! For those who care, I also have a partial response to Kieran’s critique from last year. If I ever get around to a full reply, I will pass along the link.
Hasn’t Shalizi just written a series of detailed posts, linked here, explaining his basis for believing the other side are all behaving like blithering idiots? I’m not getting what you want additionally here.
I’m sure David wants to muddy the waters with a series of borderline plausible arguments that he’ll keep setting up as people knock them down, just like he did with his enormously disingenuous (and irresponsible, as it included accusations of academic misconduct) carping about the Lancet Iraq casualty study.
Watson’s also the schmuck who tramped through a fields of experimental crops developed by a female researcher at Cold Spring, ruing the experiment.
Maybe history should revisit the Rosalind Franklin case again.
As others have pointed out the unexamined axiom is that there is a valid meaning for “race”.
In the US a great number of the “black” population has some “white” ancestors as well. There was a PBS program about this where well-known people had their DNA tested. The results surprised many of them.
So trying to correlate anything to race is really a variation of the “just one drop” form of racism that has existed in the country for several centuries.
At an earlier time this was the subject of much discussion. There are even two semi-fictional novels on the subject:
“The Marrow of Tradition” by Charles Chesnutt and
“The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” by James Weldon Johnson.
Apparently Krugman’s recent book is timely after all, racism is alive and well in the US as he argues.
Hasn’t Shalizi just written a series of detailed posts, linked here, explaining his basis for believing the other side are all behaving like blithering idiots? I’m not getting what you want additionally here.
LB, what David Kane wants here is what he always wants, which is to show up as if we don’t already know about his past record, pretend that he’s arguing in good faith, demand that others do his research and analysis for him, and then complain that those others are being unreasonable and dogmatic when they decline to play on the grounds that he has already long ago burned up any credibility he might have had as an interlocutor.
Kieran claims that these “ideas” are “demonstrably unsupported by the evidence.” … Kieren and Henry may think that those on the other side are all blithering idiots, but you won’t catch someone as informed as Shalizi making those sorts of generalizations.
The other thing he does, incidentally, is to ignore qualifying clauses such as “In this case …” in my 11 above. But like I say, we have been here before.
David (@18): the study you propose has (at least) one obvious confounder, which even someone like Vincent Sarich can see pretty plainly. When he did a study that was not so confounded, the correlation between brain size and IQ scores turned out to be trivial. (This was part of my second post on Saletan’s idiocy; for some reason this comment box doesn’t like a direct link to the paper.) As for correlations between brain sizes and ethnic groups, the huge problems there are brought out in another paper I linked to, a link contained in the part of my post Henry quoted above. Kindly follow the links.
The more time I spend on this, the more convinced I become that the race-and-IQ crowd are all blithering idiots; but I admit I have serious intellectual arrogance issues, so that opinion should perhaps be discounted.
15: more evocative if you have a cat
This, comrade ball, is no coincidence.
Kieran (@2): Matt McIrvin recently gave a good description of this phenomenon; what prompted him, I couldn’t say.
Friends, hear an elder’s wisdom. The same ideas about genes and race come up aqgain and again. The resurgence is never based on new data. It is a troll phenomenon. Competing with each other on who can be more hysterical in denouncing racism (spare me, #13) won’t prevent the next iteration of Jensen/Murray/Saletan. The point has been made, now let’s stop feeding the trolls.
Very occasionally, someone has something new to say (Sandra Scarr back in the day, Flynn, Turkheimer). Otherwise this is all deeply tedious.
Cosma: “The more time I spend on this, the more convinced I become that the race-and-IQ crowd are all blithering idiots….”
Surely that’s part of their charm, indeed part of the reason why you do spend time on this?
I gather from the comments on Matt Y’s thread that one prominent researcher speculates that homosexuality is an infection caught from sheep. Apparently some sheep exhibit behaviour similar to that seen in homo sapiens (excuse the pun). I haven’t got around to reading the paper, so I don’t know whether the author considers the possibility that it was the sheep who caught the infection from men and turned gay as a result.
Hopefully Andrew Sullivan will ensure that this theory is widely publicised, in the interests of science.
Brett at 10,
There’s an interesting twist to your representation of Saletan’s project. On the one hand, you represent Saletan as doing nothing reprehensible, but simple advocating an open investigation of IQ differences between races. On the other hand, you seem to want to close off another open investigation, which is the one connecting Saletan’s interest and evident skewing of his data to the legacy and function of institutional racism. I can’t see how you can close off the second investigation unless you are claiming that racism is entirely defined by feeling – thus, if Saletan doesn’t preface his remarks by some statement that he hates black people, then he can’t be a racist. Racism, on this interpretation, is an entirely subjective thing, and we can believe self reporting on it 100 percent.
I don’t buy that. And I think that it is curious that no media outlet ever investigates its own atmosphere and attitudes. Slate might be all too willing to float a series of articles as nutty as Saletan’s (by nutty, I mean that Saletan is evidently so unfamiliar with ‘race science’ that he had never heard of Rushton before – which is a little like publishing a study of WWII and admitting never to have heard of, say, Himmler before. He merely had to go into Slate’s own archives to find salient information). This is from a piece on “How to Deal with Fringe Academics in 2000:
“But MacDonald! It’s not as if all he ever did to link himself up with neo-Nazis was testify a week ago Monday at the David Irving trial. (By the way, John, while on the stand he cited his executive positions at HBES as proof, in part, of his solid professional standing in the field.) MacDonald has created a body of work in which he advances several ideas barely distinguishable from those used not long ago to justify the mass murder of the Jews. In that work, he claims to be building on the ideas of respected scholars. His work has been recognized by many in the scholarly establishment, such as David Sloan Wilson and MacDonald’s editor, Seymour Itzkoff. (Of course, MacDonald also thanks in his acknowledgments other fringe scholars, such as J. Phillippe Rushton, the Canadian who believes that brain size correlates to intelligence.)”
Here would be bravery indeed – what, for instance, is the effect on the hiring practices at the Atlantic magazine of the fact that two of their most prominent contributors, Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat, think that it is scientifically proven that blacks are mentally inferior to whites? Now of course you might claim that Sullivan and Douthat are model laboratory workers, objective to the max, simply jotting down the data and coming to fearless conclusions. I don’t know. If I was told that the person I was working with had objectively come to the conclusion that cannibalism is a healthy and necessary adjunct of the human diet, I’d be a little leery of working around him when nobody else was in the office late at night. Humans have the darndest nack for extrapolating rational beliefs onto human behaviors.
So here’s a challenge for brave, contrarian Slate: an article exploring the possibility, mind you, that Slate is institutionally bigoted, starting with Saletan, going through the editing process, looking at the network of writers that are normally contracted to do pieces there, and going through the hiring policy. Maybe they could get David Kane to make an alternate study of the ratio between head size and racism quotient. Xenophobia might be a genetically determined trait!
Crooked Timber would contribute much more to scholarly discussion if, instead of ex cathedra pronouncements like that, it hosted, say, a seminar on the topic
As with the late Calvin Coolidge’s ability to help a party swing, Kane, you could contribute much to scholarly discussion simply by leaving it.
This is my new theory on this issue. I already posted this at MY, but since it is such a great theory I am posting it here too so that you too can benefit from my wisdom.
I think we have to look at the race/IQ phenomena in terms of political ideology.
I think a certain type of conservative mind likes the idea of races with differing abilites. It means that the current state of the world is the result of genetics, that the competition amongst the races has been fair. This absolves a lot past wrongs. It is an anwer to all that liberal poitical correctness. It justifies their position of privilegde. (That these conservatives are also restating ALL the arguments (including penis size and uncontrlled sexuality) that the white man made during the colonialist era to justify the taking of all the goodies, is something I find kind of disturbing. But that’s another topic).
So becasue of this, certain types of conservative minds get really interested in proving this thesis. They spend all their time on it. It bocomes an advocation. The problem is they bring thier biases into a field that is hugely ripe for bias mistakes. The design of cross cultural ability tests, the design of human studies, the interpretation of statistics, all are areas that historically have had a high number of bias mistakes. So they go into these studies with a bias and they find what they are looking for and then—with a telling lack of scientific discipline, they make all kinds of unwarrented extrapolations, hypothosis, guesses, bets.
This could also be true on the liberal side.
The point is, that not only is the science very ambiguous, complicated, and greatly supceptable to bias mistkes, we also have to deal with the effects of political ideology and human nature. A wise person would refrain from making statements about race and IQ either way at this point.
CW-
Or, if one felt like deviating from the unbearably boring ‘pox on both your houses’ viewpoint, one could simply point out that all the scientists doing this type of work are hacks, that their studies are deeply flawed and quickly rebutted, and that for hundreds and hundreds of years white people have attempted to prove their innate superiority over dark people, and have yet to present a shred of credible evidence. I’d said they had their chance.
I am sorry that Kieran does not believe that I argue in good faith. Is there anyone who disagrees with him on the topic of either Lancet/Iraq or IQ/Race who, in his opinion, does argue in good faith? If he gives me some specific examples, then perhaps I can improve my behavior. But, my suspicion is that, at least on these issues, there is perfect union of the two sets: those-that-disagree-with-Kieran and those-that-argue-in-bad-faith. Counter examples welcome.
Hasn’t Shalizi just written a series of detailed posts, linked here, explaining his basis for believing the other side are all behaving like blithering idiots? I’m not getting what you want additionally here.
I think a back-and-forth with critics would be very illuminating. At least it would be to me. One main thrust of Shalizi’s post on heritability (and I should say here that there is much in that very good post) is that performing estimates of heritability is exceptionally challenging. This is true for IQ as much as for any complex trait. This seems true enough. Yet, if one looks in the literature, one will find people doing heritability estimates for complex traits. Most of these studies have nothing to do with IQ, and still less to do with the race and IQ issues that make the topic so radioactive. It’s not my field, but I’d like to know what a defender of heritability estimates would say, and what that back and forth sounds like.
The discussion on cato unbound between Flynn et al. may not be a perfect model, but it’s pretty useful. It’s also interesting that neither Flynn nor Ceci believe their opponents are idiots, blithering or otherwise.
One main thrust of Shalizi’s post on heritability (and I should say here that there is much in that very good post) is that performing estimates of heritability is exceptionally challenging.
I am very, very far from being an expert or even reasonably fluent in these issues, so someone should correct me to the extent the following is garbled. But I think the point is something much more like that linking estimates of heritability to a vernacular conception of what percentage of some personal quality is genetically determined and therefore unchangeable is not just difficult, in the sense of being hard to measure, but not conceptually reasonable. The number of fingers on your hands is, in that vernacular conception, almost entirely genetically determined. But over a population, the heritability of that number is going to be very low—almost all the variation in number of fingers is going to be environmental (chainsaw accidents) rather than having anything to do with the number of fingers your parents had.
Whoops, I left that unfinished. The upshot, therefore, is not that ‘heritability’ of IQ is necessarily impossible to determine, but that statistical measures of ‘heritability’ in a given population don’t tell us anything at all toward answering the question we’re interested in—to what extent is IQ immune to environmental influences? Heritability doesn’t answer that question for you, not even poorly or incompletely.
That’s exactly the type of issue I’d like to hear back and forth on. How should Joe Layman like myself interpret the estimates from the Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns report?
“Amusingly”, you could probably find clusters of environmental variation of number-of-fingers that passed statistical tests for heritability – as in, if someone works in an industry where accidents are common, there’s a significant probability their parents or other members of their family also do.
One could then proclaim that finger-loss must be heavily genetic, so stringent workplace safety regulations are liberals unwilling to face the hard truths of life.
So I follows me the link open minded baa kindly supplies and what with all that important back and forth I end up here (scroll down to the concluding paragraphs):
It overstates only slightly to say that health care providers currently pay no attention to patient differences in the ability to learn and understand. As health literacy researchers have shown, however, a sizeable fraction of patients in urban hospital outpatient clinics are unable to understand an appointment slip (when to come back), a label indicating how to take four pills a day, or, among their insulin-dependent diabetic patients, the signs of low (or high) sugar and what action to take to bring their blood sugar back under control. Do proportionately more blacks have such problems? Yes, many more. Is that a reason to continue ignoring or disputing individual and group differences in g?
Takes the concept of driving-while-black to a whole nutha level. Gosh, ya think the concept could have some general application? Think of the possibilities!
Because everyone knows only black people are stupid and it’s a good thing stupid people are black because how would you know a white person was stupid if it was possible for a white person to be stupid? Now I just have to figure what to do with those darn oversmart yellow people.
Baa: Cosma links to two papers that provide detailed summaries of the existing literature. They are written as replies to papers that advance the genetic-race-IQ hypothesis, so you can read the original papers as well. I read through some of the literature in the wake of Saletan’s article, and I was astonished at exactly how weak the evidence for the genetic race-IQ connection was.
GRRRRRR! The preview showed both paragraphs as blockquoted! I swear it did. Anyway, the excerpt is both paragraphs (ending with “…diferences in g”, in case it’s not clear. My Original Racist Yahoo Content should be discernable, I hope.
41: Well, one place to start is to note that Shalizi’s argument about ‘heritability’—not so much that it’s immeasurable, but that it’s not a valid descriptor of ‘the degree to which IQ is immutable’, which is how people tend to use it, is conventional among those arguing that there is no good data tending to establish that group differences in measured average IQ are genetically caused and immutable. Again, I’m no expert, but in a fair amount of lay reading on the subject, I’ve seen various forms of the same argument made convincingly.
You could, on your own, try to follow that argument (Shalizi’s got his IQ posts collected on his site under that tag), and then go looking for refutations that would explain why people who rely on the equation of heritability with immutability don’t accept its validity.
baa @ 41: The 1995 APA report is not, sadly, all that reliable. One the subject of test bias, it repeats a common, but definitely fallacious, argument. On heritability, it pulls together numbers from studies which used the common models, whose assumptions are just wacky, e.g., assuming that the fact that twins spend nine months together in utero has no effect. (No, really.) So my advice would be that Joe Layman is better off ignoring that report, as well-intentioned but technically weak, than attempting to sort through it.
You’re quite right that the problems of trying to estimate heritability are not confined to IQ. Things are a bit better when one is interested in the effects of specific genes, but even then there are huge issues with population structure, and checking that the models are right, which are usually just ignored, if they are even grasped. There are few substitutes for controlled breeding and rearing experiments, or (better yet) being able to actually modify the organisms’ genes and see how that alters developmental mechanisms.
I should add that there is a single value for the heritability of any trait only if some quite strict assumptions hold; otherwise, the fraction of variance in the trait associated with genetic differences will depend on other variables, even within a single population. Turkheimer and co., for example, fitted a model where a (very crude) measure of socio-economic status was allowed to modify the effects of genetic inputs and family environment, and found that the effective heritability of IQ was next to zero at low status, rising to about 0.8 at high statuses. So you should be extremely suspicious of anyone who tries to tell you that the heritability of IQ has any particular value. (And, of course, similarly for other traits.)
These comments —and thanks very much to LB, walt, and cosma—are exactly the types of things I would like to see illuminated by a back and forth.
To LB’s point, I can, of course, go to the papers
and try to piece the argument together. I don’t want to that. One reason is because I’m lazy. But a second, more creditable reason is that in my experience a person not steeped in a literature or discipline does himself no favors if he tries to get to the bottom of contentious issues via direct analysis. Sometimes it works out, but it’s just as easy to fixate on the wrong aspects of problems, solve the wrong equations, overlook the totality of evidence, etc. I could read the literature and pose criticisms of the twin studies, or criticisms of the criticism, ad infinitum. But what I really want is to hear is what, e.g., Stephen Ceci would say in defense of that consensus statement, and how a critic would respond, etc. Often, after a couple of rounds of this, Joe Layman is really in a better position.
49: Well, that’s the beauty of the internet—these things don’t need to be formally set up. Cosma can put up his posts that set forth why he thinks that arguments which that there’s good reason to think that that group differences in measured average IQ are genetically caused and immutable are poorly founded, and then someone who disagrees with them can link and refute. I guess the next step is to find someone you think of as credible in this regard who disagrees, and see if you can convince them to link and refute.
50: Sure. But activation energy is key here, hence the value of a set forum, etc.
Also, it would be clarifying to know what points are really at issue. Just as an example, I don’t get the sense that anyone within shouting distance of the mainstream claims IQ is immutable. I do get the sense, by contrast, that many researchers believe that, despite limitations, meaningful conclusions about heritability can be drawn from twin studies. It would be useful (to me, at least) to have a unifying set of questions or subjects for debate. That’s the type of focus the back and forth of blog-talk doesn’t usually do as good a job providing.
I’d say a useful subject for the debate you want would be this from Saletan’s original article:
That is, the really controversial part of the discussion of IQ is differences in average scores between ethnic groups, and specifically the claim that there is good evidence that those differences are due to genetic differences between the groups. The problem with CT setting up a useful forum on the topic (aside from the fact that neither you nor I hands out assignments to the posters here) is that I don’t know, offhand, and don’t know that the CT posters know either, of reasonable people with relevant subject matter expertise who will defend Saletan’s statement.
In summary, “intelligence” can’t be defined, much less measured, genetic variance can’t be differentiated from phenotypic variance, heritability of quantitative traits is impossible to determine and, even when methods for QTL analysis exist, biostatisticians won’t know how to use them.
Let’s hope that environmental influences on “intelligence”, once defined, will be a simple matter to elucidate.
Is it possible? Is David Kane really going to venture boldly into a whole new field of incompetence?
Yes!
Yeah—c’mon, what’s wrong with you guys? Give David Kane a chance.
I, for one, eagerly await Race and IQ: the Case for Fraud.
Pick a thousand people at random of the same race (or different races). Measure their head size using a tape measure or their brain size using an MRI. Give them an IQ test. You think that the correlation between those two vectors will be zero?
I was meaning to mention that the word “vectors” here is being used in a sense which leaves it very much an open question whether Kane knows what it means.
A 1-dimensional array of numbers such as [20.2 20.5 …] can be called a vector. DK is not using the word incorrectly.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_vector
The measurements he talks about would result in two lists of numbers which could be called vectors.
(Not that this makes anything else he says correct)
There seems to be some interest in a good-faith back-and-forth, let me do my bit. I’ll address these to Cosma, who I have had useful interactions with over the years, but others should feel free to chime in (even dsquared, who seems much less his usual happy warrior self lately).
Cosma,
1) Thanks for your response. You think that Razib and friends are “blithering idiots”? Just want to clarify . . . I think one of the most helpful services you can provide is to indicate those on the other “side” who are most worth reading.
2) I am making an empirical claim. Take a 1,000 random people (all Japanese from Tokyo or whites from Salt Lake City or the first 1,000 you meet walking down the street in NYC). Measure their brain size with an MRI. Give them an IQ test. Are those two vectors correlated? (dsquared should feel free to chime in with his words of wisdom on “vectors.”)
I am no expert in this literature, but I am pretty sure that the answer is Yes. (And I don’t mind trying to bait the CT crowd (i.e., jre in 54) into asserting that it is No.) Now, nothing in particular follows from this empirical fact, but science starts with observations of the world around us. If we can’t first agree on the facts as they are, we aren’t going to make much progress.
This fact, if true, does not imply that IQ tests (or MRIs) are useful or the correlation between the two is real or spurious or genetic. But it often seems to me that small, concrete facts are the place to start the conversation.
Why start here? Cosma mentions the “issue of head sizes.” Is this one of the things that Cosma disputes or not? (Again, this has no necessary connection to race.)
The other reason I start here is that, I think, Cosma is wrong to insist that family is a “confounder” in studies of the relationship between brain size and IQ. I disagree. Consider the relationship between height and basketball success. There is no doubt that this is correlated. Pick a thousand people at random. The taller are more likely to exhibit basketball success (whether because of genes or environment is irrelevant).
But, if we follow the suggestion of the article that Cosma links to, then we would “control” for family by only looking at the, say, sibling pairs. Given two siblings, is the taller always the better basketball player? No! (Or at least, a zero correlation wouldn’t surprise me.) If that isn’t obvious, I would be happy to walk through why. Short answer: most of the variation in height associated with basketball skill is between families, not within them.
Similarly, most of the variation in brain size associated with IQ is between families, not within them.
If CT were to host a forum, it could also start with Cosma essays (rather than Malloy’s). I suspect that I could round about some Gene Expression people to reply.
But, again, that might be a little too wide-open a discussion for the likes of Henry, Kieran and dsquared. I bet that Cosma would be up for it though.
So anyway, what is Kane’s status at at IQSS? Google tells me that he’s got a Harvard Political Economy PhD and is an Institute Fellow at IQSS, and that he is “chairing a panel on mortality in Iraq and the Lancet surveys for the August 2008 Joint Statistical Meetings [of the American Statistical Association] in Denver, Colorado.”
As an Institute Fellow he seems to need an IQSS sponsor and not much more. What does he need to chair at the ASA Joint Statistical Meetings?
I say this because I think that Kane’s credentials and affiliations make it seem that maybe he knows what he’s doing. If he doesn’t, it would seem that IQSS and the ASA might want to do something about it. He drags their name into arguments, and by now it would seem that they should either back him or disavow him.
I have no credentials at all, but I don’t claim them and don’t present myself as a technical expert the way Kane does. At this point Kane’s affiliations and credentials are all that he has as far as I’m concerned.
Well done, John Emerson. I sometimes make fun of CT for being the Little Green Footballs of the academic left. You are upholding that fine tradition. Think the comparison with LGF is unfair? Check out comment 13. Nothing like a “bullet to the back of the head” to encourage open-minded discussion.
By the way, has anyone read the article in an anthropology journal that Cosma links to above? (Nothing wrong with anthropologists of course! I just generally look to neuroscientists and psychologists when I am interested in things like brain mass and IQ. Maybe that’s just me!)
Anyway, skim the article. Read Rushton’s reply and then the author’s response. Good stuff!
For the record, I am not a fan of Rushton or of this IQ/race stuff. But I am a believer in IQ and genetics. Tall people have tall children and smart people have smart children, on average. Don’t believe me? Let’s discuss!
Glad to hear from you, David! For me, the only scraps of credibility you have are your affiliations with IQSS and the ASA and your Harvard degree.
The title “Fellow” doesn’t always amount to anything, and I don’t know anything about IQSS or about the APA’s standards for vetting panelists. But if these are reputable organizations with high standards, you gain credibility. On the other hand, if you’re a fraud and a troll, as many have suggested, then these groups lose credibility. So which is it? What do those organizations have to say about the quality your work on the Lancet study? It strikes me that both you and they have an interest in settling this question.
I do not understand medicine and must trust my doctor, and furthermore must rely on accreditation organizations to tell me if a doctor is competent and honest, and in the same way I don’t understand statistics and depend on IQSS and the APA to assure me that you’re competent and honest. But my informal sources, D^2 and others here, assure me that you’re not competent and honest. SO I’d like to know what the ASA and the IQSS have to say. I don’t see how you have a problem with this. Do you regard it as snitching for us to ask your sponsors whether they stand behind your work? Do you think of the ASA and IQSS as cops?
At this point, I have to think one of two things. 1.) Either you or D^2 is incompetent or a fraud. Or 2.) statistics isn’t an exact technical science at all, but just a form of expert advocacy like law, where interested parties do what they can to to get the results they want within rules which are by no means strict. I do not think that your sponsoring organizations would be happy with the latter conclusion, so I think that it’s in their interest to decide whether they endorse your work or not. And in fact, it’s in your interest for them to say that yes, they do indeed endorse your work.
What’s LGFish about that?
1) ASA and Harvard have contact information on their websites. Feel free to call them.
2) I do not think that the only two options are that either dsquared or I are dishonest and incompetent. I certainly don’t think that dsquared is. And, I hope, when he’s feeling less emotional, he would grant the same to me. People of good faith disagree all the time, on scientific and other matters.
3) And, to repeat myself, the way to make progress on these sorts of disputes is to talk about them. If Crooked Timber doesn’t want to host such a forum, then that probably should tell you something. If they don’t want to host it, I would be happy to. Or pick another forum.
4) I think that the central problem here is the Cosma’s posts (especially on heritability and g) are 95% perfectly correct. His only “mistakes”—- meaning things I think are wrong (and which weren’t even mentioned in those posts)—- have been to more recently claim (implicitly, at least) that IQ and brain size have nothing to do with another. That’s just wrong. (Now, again, nothing about race/IQ necessarily follows from that, but we need to start with the facts.) But, the problem with Cosma’s posts is that, while 95%+ true, they are not responsive to the claims made by people like Malloy. But folks not steeped in the details don’t see that. They think that Cosma has refuted Malloy (and others) when, in fact, he hasn’t even engaged them. (I don’t know whether Cosma would agree or disagree with that claim.)
It’s as if Cosma came along and wrote 20,000 words proving that the sky is blue. Indeed, the sky is blue! But that tells you little about IQ and genetics and, especially, race.
By focusing on a small but specific part of the debate—- i.e., is brain size correlated with IQ?—- I am trying to cajole the two sides (or at least the CT side) to engage in the debate rather than whistling a Shalizi tune as they stroll on past the graveyard of their preconceptions. Wish me luck!
5) I understand that you may not understand statistics. No worries. That is another reason for focusing a specific data rather than principal factors. Are people with big brains smarter? Let’s start there.
I do not think that the only two options are that either dsquared or I are dishonest and incompetent. I certainly don’t think that dsquared is.
During the Lancet debates, especially (a more significant debate than this one, in my opinion), you were repeatedly accused of mishandling statistics (especially by D^2, IIRC). This was not an emotional one-time thing on his part. It seems pretty clear than someone has to be wrong.
Incompetence is a strong word, David, but it’s clear from the Lancet argument that you don’t understand frequentist statistics. You wasted the time of a lot of people who tried to explain to you what you didn’t understand, when finally it dawned on people that understanding was not high on your list of priorites where Roberts, et al is concerned.
On the big brains question, one of Cosma’s links addresses it. In the nineteenth century, it was observed that “Mongoloid” heads were smaller than Caucasian heads. In the twentieth century, this correlation has reversed. Correlation itself is a very weak argument for causality (I’m sure that the correlation across time between the average IQ and the current world record in the 50 meter dash is pretty respectable). The one study that tried to measure direct causation (I forgot how they did this exactly) found no causation.
Two replies:
John: During the Lancet debates, dsquared claimed that the confidence intervals for the crude mortality rates estimates were bootstrapped. He made this claim repeated and vociferously. He was wrong. (Don’t recall if he ever acknowledged that error or thanked me for pointing it out.) Does that make him incompetent or dishonest? No! He just made a mistake. I made several myself. (The next draft of my paper will have those corrected.) That’s how science moves forward.
Walt: I have explained above why Cosma’s citation to a within-family lack of an IQ-brain size correlation is unresponsive. I have suggested that you read (or at least skim) the second paper that Cosma’s links to but then read closely Rushton’s reply and the author’s (pathetic) response. If you don’t think that Rushton clearly wins on the issue of an IQ-brain size correlation (ignoring the race stuff) then we can get into the details. But, on that point, Rushton seems obviously right to me.
@61 Malloy contends that IQ scores in sub-Saharan Africa are lower.
Shalizi (among others) have shown the problems with measuring intelligence by means of these tests.
The rest of Malloy’s work on the gene expression page seems to be rants about the unwillingness of people to accept the reality of races and not a little shrieking about political correctness (Larry Summer’s name was invoked). Neither of these issues are in any way germane to Shalizi’z excellent work dissecting Saletan, et al.
I was not around for the Lancet Study interchanges, so I don’t fully comprehend the history, but it’s far from clear what you’re trying to do here Mr. Kane. There’s no good science on correlations between brain size and intelligence (and yes, you would expect an anthropologist to weigh in on this, as measuring skulls has long been part of their discipline). But if you want the neuroscientist’s take on it.
This took me maybe 30 seconds to find.
“. If I was told that the person I was working with had objectively come to the conclusion that cannibalism is a healthy and necessary adjunct of the human diet, I’d be a little leery of working around him when nobody else was in the office late at night.”
Caucasians – the other white meat.
I certainly don’t think that dsquared is. And, I hope, when he’s feeling less emotional, he would grant the same to me
Nevergunnahappen, Kane. You accused good scientists of fraud on the basis of no evidence at all. You played me for a sucker by asking for comments on a paper you’d already distributed (and were apparently planning to put my name on as if I’d refereed it). You continually wasted everyone’s time at Deltoid. And now you’re back, insinuating but failing to back up some cockamamie bullshit about racial inferiority. It takes very little emotional effort for me to continue to dislike you, and given the above, I am likely to consider the 3 calories a day well spent for the forseeable future.
David Kane happens to be right about the correlation between MRI measured brain size and IQ. The correlation improves as you move from measuring the gross volume of the brain to recording volumetric measurements of individual brain compartments (now possible with high resolution MRI).
There is a rapidly expanding literature on the topic by now, but here are a few representative cites.
Haier et al., reviewed in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040721/full/news040719-11.html
They found that people with high IQ scores had significantly more grey matter in 24 of the regions than people with lower scores. Many of the areas, which are spread throughout the brain, are known to be related to memory, attention and language. Their results are reported online in Neuroimage 1.
Haier believes that different aspects of intelligence might depend on the amount of grey matter in these different brain regions. “This may be why one person is quite good at mathematics and not so good at spelling, and another person, with the same IQ, has the opposite pattern of abilities,” he says.
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2004
http://www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/PDF/nrn0604-GrayThompson.pdf
1. Posterior lesions often cause substantial decreases in IQ. Duncan and colleagues suggested that the frontal lobes are involved more in Gf and goal-directed behaviour than in Gc (Fig. 2). In addition, Gf is compromised more by damage to the frontal lobes than to posterior lobe…
2. MRI-based studies estimate a moderate correlation between brain size and intelligence of 0.40 to 0.51
3. g was significantly linked to differences in the volume of frontal grey matter, which were determined primarily by genetic factors… the volume of frontal grey matter had additional predictive validity for g even after the predictive effect of total brain volume was factored out
4. Only one region is consistently activated during three different intelligence tasks when compared to control tasks…The surface features of the tasks differed (spatial, verbal, circles) but all were moderately strong predictors of g (g LOADING; range of r, 0.55–0.67), whereas control tasks were weaker predictors of g (range of r, 0.37–0.41). Neural activity in several areas, measured by a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, was greater during high-g than low-g tasks.
5. Speed and reliability of neural transmission are related to higher intelligence (reviewed in Refs 15,20). Early neuroimaging studies using PET found that intelligence correlated negatively with cerebral glucose metabolism during mental activity54 (for a review, see Ref. 55), leading to the formulation of a ‘neural efficiency’ hypothesis…
6. Gf is mediated by neural mechanisms that support the executive control of attention during working memory…greater event-related neural activity in many regions, including the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes, dorsal anterior cingulate and lateral cerebellum. Crucially, these patterns were most distinct during high-interference trials, even after controlling for behavioural performance and for activity on low-interference trials within the same regions
7. RAPM scores obtained outside the scanner predicted brain activity in a single left parietal/temporal region, and not in the frontal lobes.
8. An exploratory fMRI study60 (n = 7) indicated that parietal areas are involved in inspection time tasks, specifically Brodmann area (BA) 40 and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (BA47) but not the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Behavioral Genetics of IQ:
1. Monozygotic twins raised separately following adoption show a correlation of 0.72 for intelligence
2. For 48 identical twin pairs separated in early infancy and reared apart, Bouchard et al.83 found remarkably high between-twin correlations for verbal scores on the WAIS (0.64) and for the first principal component of special mental abilities (0.78)
3. Psychometric g has been shown to be highly heritable in many studies, even more so than specific cognitive abilities (h2 = 0.62, Ref. 87 compare with Ref. 88; h2 = 0.48, Ref. 89; h2 = 0.6–0.8, Refs 90,91)…
4. Intriguingly, the influence of shared family environments on IQ dissipates once children leave home — between adult adoptive relatives, there is a correlation of IQ of -0.01
Molecular Genetics of IQ:
1. Chorney et al.104 discovered an allelic variation in a gene on chromosome 6, which codes for an insulin-like growth factor-2 receptor (IGF2R), that was linked with high intelligence…
2. Later studies identified a second IQ-related polymorphism in the IGF2R gene, and others in the cathepsin D (CTSD) gene, in the gene for an acetylcholine receptor (CHRM2)106, and in a HOMEOBOX GENE (MSX1) that is important in brain development107, 108.
3. Influence of each polymorphism was minimal — variants of CHRM2 accounted for a range of only 3–4 IQ points, whereas different forms of CTSD accounted for about 3% of the variation between people…None of these associations has yet been replicated by other research groups
4. Some patients with microcephaly also possess the ASPM mutation, indicating that a shortened version of the gene might lead to the development of fewer cerebral neurons and a smaller head.
5. Polymorphism in the human brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene is associated with impaired performance on memory tests
6. Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene influences the activation of working memory circuits. COMT polymorphisms seem to be highly specific to some prefrontal cortex-dependent tasks in children.
7. Dopamine receptor (DRD4) and monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) polymorphisms are associated with differences in performance and brain activity during tasks that involve executive attention
I don’t want to rain on the parades of people who think playing statistical whack-a-mole with people like Kane and blah is fun. But the problem is not in the statistics; it’s in the premise of the claims about intelligence and heritability in the first place.
I am a political theorist, not a statistician, but I did study enough statistics in grad school to remember this precept: garbage in, garbage out. Statistical tests of unsound hypotheses are meaningless.
Arguments for the group level and heritability of intelligence all rest on the notion that there is one quality of human beings that we can call intelligence, a quality we can describe precisely enough to make the question ‘who is more intelligent?’ nontrivial and specifiable, and that we can measure precisely enough (the variable ‘g’) that we can compare people and groups of people to one another to see who’s ‘more intelligent’, or that we can correlate with physiological characteristics (genetic potential or expression, fetal development, brain chemistry, or whatever else).
I appreciate that Cosma and others, people with a lot more statistical prowess than I have, can find methodological holes in arguments based on these premeses large enough to drive through. But the better and more fundamental approach would be to ask: what exactly do we mean by ‘intelligence’, and why should we be so invested in its being one thing? Because until you can answer that question, all statistical bets are off.
Speaking only about what I’ve read by people trying to answer this question, and about conversations I’ve had with acquaintances, students, and colleagues about it, here are the two things I find to be true:
1. That there is no way of saying ‘what intelligence is’, certainly not to the extent that statistical tests would require, that is both specifiable and nontrivial. A myriad of qualities and combinations of qualities count as ‘intelligence’. The best I could imagine ever doing is to offer a long list of traits that in that context bear a family resemblance to one another, and that vary in their importance according to their contingent relevance to circumstances and specific problems needing to be solved.
2. That as people who insist against the manifest weakness of their claims that there is such a thing as intelligence understood as it would have to be for ‘g’ to make sense continue to push their arguments, they invariably demonstrate that their conclusion is something they reached independently of and at least in part prior to those arguments. That is, they are not interested really in contemplating intelligence. They are interested to show that intelligence has to be something specific, measurable, and heritable, such that you can say with certainty and the blessings of the NSF that these people over here are intelligent, and these people over here are not, and that’s just the way they are.
This does not mean they are racist, necessarily, though too many of them are. And it is significant that their conclusions about what intelligence is and what groups have it and don’t have it mirror socially-widespread predispositions about both, and involve all sorts of ascription and category errors. (Exactly who, for example, are ‘Asians’? Or ‘African-Americans’?)*
The more I encounter these claims that ‘intelligence’ is best understood as something like ‘g’, and the more I see them rehearsed and renewed in the face of devastating critique, the more certain I am that they are, strictly speaking, bullshit. I mean that in Harry Frankfurt’s sense: they are finally unconcerned with the difference between truth and falsehood, at least as far as their substance is concerned. They are meaningful only in light of the self-image or interests of the claimant, or the intervention in public policy they are meant to advance.
The late Neil Postman had it about right: humans have any number of ways of being intelligent, but they are not nearly as inventive when it comes to ways of being stupid.
Also, this link reviews about 20 different studies of MRI measured brain volume vs. IQ. See the third page for citations.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=q7ENd_Rnb5UC&oi=fnd&pg=PA93&dq=%22within+family%22+%22brain+size%22&ots=zL8A-Tz4Aj&sig=zka6SaJfzcJN2imJn57req0pqjo
In total 858 people had brain volumes measured by 12 different first authors, with overall weighted regression coefficient around .40.
So the relationship between MRI measured brain volume and IQ is pretty solid.
Note that the 1999 study which Shalizi cites by Schoenemann et al. is included in this analysis. That study is interesting as it found the same .45 between family correlation of IQ vs. brain size, but no within family correlation between IQ and brain size.
However, if you note their remarks on pages 4936 of the pdf (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=18335), they note that the older siblings in their study had on average IQs which were .57 SDs higher than those of the younger siblings—and that the sibling pairs which differed in age by more than 4 years (and hence likely had less similar shared environments) had a positive albeit modest relationship (r=.22, P = .054) between WF delta brain volume and WF delta IQ. So it appears that shared environment may be depressing the WF/brain volume correlation.
Additionally, the more recent Gignac et al. article also reports a different data set which does show the within family relationship.
Finally, the Schoenemann et al. results are plausibly consistent with a model in which a set of variants which is an upstream determinant of larger brains and higher IQ is inherited together. As a simple model, let F, G, BV, and IQ be random variables representing (1) an index which differs for each family, (2) the number of these variants (assume they are additive and equal for now), (3) MRI measured brain volume, and (4) Raven’s measured IQ.
Then it is quite reasonable to set up a model in which:
1) $P(BV,IQ)$ neq $P(BV)P(IQ)$
2) $P(G|F)$ is much narrower than $P(G)$ (i.e. the mutual information $I(G;F)$ is quite high relative to the entropy $H(G)$), such that measuring $F$ gives you a good proxy for $G$
3) Finally, $P(BV,IQ|F) approx P(BV,IQ|G) = P(BV|G)P(IQ|G)$. That is, knowing the family gives you a strong clue about genotype, which in turn turns the BV/IQ relationship to mush.
To visualize this, think about Figure 2a in the Schoenemann paper except add a third axis which goes into the page that measures F, which ranges in this case from 1 to 36.
If F is truly correlated with G, then we have the problem of cryptic stratification, which is a well known bugaboo in the genetics literature; see for example the Pima Indian study or this review (there are lots of more recent ones)
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/full/11/6/505
If Crooked Timber doesn’t want to host such a forum, then that probably should tell you something.
Yes, it does. It tells me that the people at Crooked Timber really don’t want to give legitimacy to some racist cranks who really, really want to say “By the way, these blacks are inferior because they’re black”. And really, I feel that is as it should be.
“and found that the effective heritability of IQ was next to zero at low status, rising to about 0.8 at high statuses.”
More or less what you’d expect if there was a significant genetic component present: It’s the old “hammer blow to the head trumps genes” thing: People of poor socio-economic status provide nurture which varies all over the place, and at it’s worst completely overwhelms any genetic influence, while people of high socio-economic status tend to provide more uniformly good nurture. With the nurture component maxed out, only nature is left to account for differences, so heritablity is high.
But, of course, providing a uniformly positive nurturing environment for children of all socio-economic statuses IS among our goals, isn’t it? So we are, like it or not, aiming to create a world where heritablity of intelligence is very high.
The interesting thing, from my perspective, is that research indicates that bad nurture, in the sense of sub-optimal prenatal nutrition, is the rule, not the exception. Very few potential mothers are gobbling choline and omega 3 fatty acid suplements throughout their fertile years, for instance. Or being chelated to remove heavy metals from their systems.
It seems likely that we could produce a nutritional supplement beverage, based on current research, and provide it at subsidized prices, to huge benefit, and given the facts on the ground, most of that benefit would go to the lower socio-economic groups, particularly blacks. And it wouldn’t be particularly expensive.
I’d suggest that the government not directly produce it, (Bleah!) but instead just provide some kind of subsidy for any beverage which met the requirements. That would probably result in it tasting better, and having a better advertising campaign.
In the mean while, any liberal foundation that felt like actually, you know, doing something to benefit the poor, is capable of doing this on it’s own, and given the economics of scale, private foundations could probably finance the whole thing quite handily.
I now, based on past experience, await being declared a KKK loving racist whore-son for this suggestion. ;)
David, have you ever considered that perhaps you ought to start on some smaller, incremental projects and build up from there? After all, demonstrating that a) you are part of a master race and b) it’s possible to bomb the hell out of a country, invade it, and then have a civil war without killing anyone are some pretty hefty propositions. Couldn’t you turn to, say, improving teaching at IQSS, or something?
Alex, your project b) is actually pretty easy compared to project b*): bomb a country and in so doing resurrect the dead, which is what David Kane aims to prove with his crazy fun statistical arguments. It’s only a small step from there to completing project a*): showing that black people have negative IQs.
It’s all the rage at Harvard these days, don’t you know?
No, David, I would not be game for that sort of debate. I try not to do things which implicitly legitimize blithering idiots with pernicious views, and on this and related topics that’s exactly what the GNXP crew are. Malloy’s essay definitely falls into this category. (No, I am not going to write a point-by-point rebuttal.) On a much higher intellectual level, Richard Herrnstein was a real scientist, whose work on the “matching law” was a real contribution to behavioral learning theory; at the same time, in these matters he was a destructive blithering idiot.
Now, as for whether brain volume is correlated with IQ, there are a number of studies which claim this for various samples; the reported correlation coefficients range from slightly negative to around 0.6. Lieberman, in the paper from Current Anthropology I linked to, gives a value of 0.24 from averaging various then-published studies. Averaging correlation coefficients like that is painful to watch, but that’s the kind of statistics Rushton does, so, like Lieberman says, take it up with him. (Incidentally: David, meet the science of physical anthropology; physical anthropology, meet David Kane; the two of you are going to get on like a house on fire, I just know it.) None of them seem to use especially large or especially well-designed samples, but I nonetheless would not be terribly surprised, or at all troubled, if one found a positive correlation in a representative sample of the general population, as such correlations could arise through a large number of processes.* After all, if I took a representative sample of American cities and towns, I would flabbergasted if I didn’t find a positive correlation between the number of inhabitants employed as investment-fund managers and the number employed as prostitutes.
Coming up with correlated quantities is easy. The interesting question is whether they are spurious, or whether they might indicate some actual causal link between the quantities. I have been taking this as obvious, which I guess left a rhetorical opening to make it seem like I was saying there was no such correlation. If one is actually interested in learning about how the world works, one tries to eliminate confounders. (Surely, David, in your day job you pay attention to whether correlations are spurious or not?) Spend a moment drawing the graphical model for your basketball example, and you’ll see that if being taller really makes you better at playing basketball, then the correlation will still show up in a within-family design. (If you do not know how to manipulate graphical models, start with Pearl’s book on causality.) Some spurious correlations will survive this sort of design (again, draw the graph), but if it disappears under this, then it was spurious. Lo: the correlation between brain size and IQ largely, but not entirely, disappears. Conclusion: the correlation is at least largely spurious. (Similarly, I’d expect the correlation between fund-managers and hookers to mostly go away, once one compared cities of equal size.) Moral: on the interesting question, which is the causal one, Rushton is wrong. So, David, on the basis of what evidence do you think that there is a causal connection between brain size and IQ in modern populations?
In general, this conversation has been going on for a long time. Pretending that we’re all starting from scratch here seems pointless and unprofitable. In particular, pretending that various participants haven’t assembled histories, and that the history of the genes-IQ-and-race crowd has been anything to be proud of, is crazy. In very particular, if you want much more out of me, David, you’re going to have to start paying my consulting rates, with a surcharge for the toxic and tedious nature of the work.
*: The Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper that blah links to above claims that the correlation is at the 0.4 to 0.5 level, in support of which it cites two papers from the early 1990s, and a meta-analysis from Nguyen and McDaniel from 2000. It does not discus the possibility of spurious correlation. The papers from the 1990s don’t either—- Schoenemann et al.’s paper came out in 2000. I can’t find Nguyen and McDaniel’s paper, but McDaniel went on to publish (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2004.11.005) a meta-analysis by himself in Intelligence in 2005 . (For David’s edification, McDaniel is a professor of human resources.) The meta-analytic procedure there is curious to behold—- is he even giving more weight to studies with more samples?—- but in the end comes out with a value of 0.33. McDaniel tosses Schoenemann et al. study into the pile, without any indication that its point was not to just come up with this correlation coefficient, and without any discussion anywhere, that I could find, of the possibility of confounding, which is to say of whether this correlation (assuming that there even is a single value for it) is anything more than an artifact.
Brett can you explain to me how the modern problems which beset the western world are actually a function of IQ? It seems like the fundamentals of modern social health, for example – clean water, public transport, preventing overcrowding, basic hygiene – were all discovered and practiced by people whose IQ was lower today than the supposed gap between black and white IQs. How is this small gap meant to explain the big difference in health and social outcomes between black and white Americans? And how does it explain the relative lack of such differences in other countries (e.g. the UK).
I mean, do you really think Zimbabwe’s problems would be solved if everyone there was on average 15 IQ points smarter? And if so, how can you explain World War 2, which occurred between people who you think are smarter? Or, for that matter, the Iraq war?
Framing this in terms of helping black people seems like concern trolling at its very best, to me…
SG: Yes, that’s a good point. As I remarked at the time, there’s only one way of making more people and it’s more fun than reading David Kane.
What would be interesting, however, would be to reframe the entire project of IQ. What about a stupidity quotient? Intelligence is very difficult to define and highly context-dependent; stupidity seems much easier to recognise programmatically.
Admittedly unsystematic empirical observation appears to suggest that SQ is highly decorrelated with typical indices of social status and attainment, and has essentially no correlation at all with race or ethnicity; stupidity is common in all social groups.
And no-one can deny that the world would be a better place if everyone was 10 points less stupid.
David Kane happens to be right about the correlation between MRI measured brain size and IQ.
Maybe so, but the cortical gyral patterns are determined primarily by non genetic factors. (Or so I’m told. I’ll let Cosma handle the toxic and tedious stuff.) What bugs me is that the implications of the racist model are so hard to square with my everyday experience. The Chinese have bigger heads than the Irish? Are you shitting me?
Alex, I think I read your link to that stupidity-filtering software a while back. I think a more sophisticated system needs to be applied to academic work before peer review, but only people with a very low SQ could design it. Such people would surely have heads even bigger than David Kane’s…
Kevin, I’m sure Brett can tell you that the cortical gyral patterns create a signature pattern of lumps on the skull which are very closely correlated with intelligence, and easily read by any suitably trained expert. As a bonus, they predict criminality!
I have some sympathy with the Stupidfilter.org people, but I think their methodology is flawed. Personally, I have a memetic model of stupid; stupid beliefs lead us to stupid actions, as we can see from the well-known phenomenon that individuals’ stupidity changes over time. We are all occasionally stupid; the stupid can cease to be stupid.
It’s the killer memes that do it; I would imagine the stupidity test as being more a collection of statements the subject must agree or disagree with.
So, David, on the basis of what evidence do you think that there is a causal connection between brain size and IQ in modern populations?
I hope you won’t mind if I pipe up here!
1) We can’t do truly causal experiments in humans, but we can in mice. Mice have successfully served as models for many neurological systems, including Alzheimer’s, so neurological studies on them are fair game for extrapolation to humans.
Enhanced learning after genetic overexpression of a brain growth protein
Aryeh Routtenberg*, Isabel Cantallopsdagger , Sal Zaffuto, Peter SerranoDagger , and Uk Namgung§
Cresap Neuroscience Laboratory, Departments of Psychology and Neurobiology, Institute for Neuroscience, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208
Edited by James L. McGaugh, University of California, Irvine, CA, and approved April 10, 2000 (received for review February 8, 2000)
Ramón y Cajal proposed 100 years ago that memory formation requires the growth of nerve cell processes. One-half century later, Hebb suggested that growth of presynaptic axons and postsynaptic dendrites consequent to coactivity in these synaptic elements was essential for such information storage. In the past 25 years, candidate growth genes have been implicated in learning processes, but it has not been demonstrated that they in fact enhance them. Here, we show that genetic overexpression of the growth-associated protein GAP-43, the axonal protein kinase C substrate, dramatically enhanced learning and long-term potentiation in transgenic mice. If the overexpressed GAP-43 was mutated by a Ser right-arrow Ala substitution to preclude its phosphorylation by protein kinase C, then no learning enhancement was found. These findings provide evidence that a growth-related gene regulates learning and memory and suggest an unheralded target, the GAP-43 phosphorylation site, for enhancing cognitive ability.
2) Brain size correlates with g across primate species
Social intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates
Simon M. Reader* and Kevin N. Laland
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, High Street, Madingley, Cambridge CB3 8AA, United Kingdom
Communicated by Paul R. Ehrlich, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, January 24, 2002 (received for review August 23, 2001)
Despite considerable current interest in the evolution of intelligence, the intuitively appealing notion that brain volume and “intelligence” are linked remains untested. Here, we use ecologically relevant measures of cognitive ability, the reported incidence of behavioral innovation, social learning, and tool use, to show that brain size and cognitive capacity are indeed correlated. A comparative analysis of 533 instances of innovation, 445 observations of social learning, and 607 episodes of tool use established that social learning, innovation, and tool use frequencies are positively correlated with species’ relative and absolute “executive” brain volumes, after controlling for phylogeny and research effort. Moreover, innovation and social learning frequencies covary across species, in conflict with the view that there is an evolutionary tradeoff between reliance on individual experience and social cues. These findings provide an empirical link between behavioral innovation, social learning capacities, and brain size in mammals. The ability to learn from others, invent new behaviors, and use tools may have played pivotal roles in primate brain evolution.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g517026182uhh034/
Primate Intelligence
Handbook of Paleoanthropology
Richard Byrne
Brain size has traditionally been employed as a measurable proxy for species intelligence. Using allometric scaling of brain size relative to body size shows the biological cost suffered from investment in brain tissue. Shifts in diet type are the engine permitting increased investment in brain tissue because higher energy diets allow a larger brain at any given body size. Relative brain size, however, confounds effects of gut size required for particular diets with effects of brain size required for enhanced cognitive function. In contrast, the absolute size of brain parts specialized for particular functions gives evidence of the computational power of those systems. Correlational analyses strongly imply that demands of social complexity, rather than difficulties associated with frugivory or embedded foods, led to evolutionary increase in simian primate brain size. Primate brain expansion has largely involved neocortex, and among living primates, neocortex size predicts frequency of use of tactical deception and of innovative responses. These capacities likely rely on extensive memory for social information, but there is evidence (only) among great apes for understanding how systems work, whether social or technical. Representational understanding may derive from the ability to parse complex behavior, allowing imitative learning of elaborate new skills.
3) Modern MRI studies have moved beyond gross brain size/IQ correlations—that is absolutely established at this point in the field, with 37+ studies (see e.g 12 different groups listed on page 3 of this link) and only one negative result, by Tramo & Gazzaniga. Researchers have moved beyond to measurements of individual cognitive regions. This paper from 2004 and the following recent review by Haier et al (dedicated issue of Behavior and Brain Sciences just a few months ago) goes through a lot of the evidence.
http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1187
Human intelligence determined by volume and location of gray matter tissue in brain
Single ‘intelligence center’ in brain unlikely, UCI study also finds
Irvine, Calif. , July 19, 2004
General human intelligence appears to be based on the volume of gray matter tissue in certain regions of the brain, UC Irvine College of Medicine researchers have found in the most comprehensive structural brain-scan study of intelligence to date.
The study also discovered that because these regions related to intelligence are located throughout the brain, a single “intelligence center,” such as the frontal lobe, is unlikely.
Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and long-time human intelligence researcher, and colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico used MRI to obtain structural images of the brain in 47 normal adults who also took standard intelligence quotient tests. The researchers used a technique called voxel-based morphometry to determine gray matter volume throughout the brain which they correlated to IQ scores. Study results appear on the online version of NeuroImage.
Previous research had shown that larger brains are weakly related to higher IQ, but this study is the first to demonstrate that gray matter in specific regions in the brain is more related to IQ than is overall size. Multiple brain areas are related to IQ, the UCI and UNM researchers have found, and various combinations of these areas can similarly account for IQ scores. Therefore, it is likely that a person’s mental strengths and weaknesses depend in large part on the individual pattern of gray matter across his or her brain.
“This may be why one person is quite good at mathematics and not so good at spelling, and another person, with the same IQ, has the opposite pattern of abilities,” Haier said.
And see here, especially Figure 2
“Is there a biology of intelligence which is characteristic of the normal human nervous system?” Here we review 37 modern
neuroimaging studies in an attempt to address this question posed by Halstead (1947) as he and other icons of the last century
endeavored to understand how brain and behavior are linked through the expression of intelligence and reason. Reviewing studies
from functional (i.e., functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography) and structural (i.e., magnetic
resonance spectroscopy, diffusion tensor imaging, voxel-based morphometry) neuroimaging paradigms, we report a striking
consensus suggesting that variations in a distributed network predict individual differences found on intelligence and reasoning
tasks. We describe this network as the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT). The P-FIT model includes, by Brodmann areas
(BAs): the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BAs 6, 9, 10, 45, 46, 47), the inferior (BAs 39, 40) and superior (BA 7) parietal lobule, the
anterior cingulate (BA 32), and regions within the temporal (BAs 21, 37) and occipital (BAs 18, 19) lobes. White matter regions
(i.e., arcuate fasciculus) are also implicated. The P-FIT is examined in light of findings from human lesion studies, including missile
wounds, frontal lobotomy/leukotomy, temporal lobectomy, and lesions resulting in damage to the language network (e.g., aphasia),
as well as findings from imaging research identifying brain regions under significant genetic control. Overall, we conclude that
modern neuroimaging techniques are beginning to articulate a biology of intelligence. We propose that the P-FIT provides a
parsimonious account for many of the empirical observations, to date, which relate individual differences in intelligence test scores
to variations in brain structure and function. Moreover, the model provides a framework for testing new hypotheses in future
experimental designs.
So, David, on the basis of what evidence do you think that there is a causal connection between brain size and IQ in modern populations?
1) We can’t do truly causal experiments in humans, but we can in mice. Mice have successfully served as models for many neurological systems, including Alzheimer’s, so neurological studies on them are fair game for extrapolation to humans.
Enhanced learning after genetic overexpression of a brain growth protein
Aryeh Routtenberg*, Isabel Cantallopsdagger , Sal Zaffuto, Peter SerranoDagger , and Uk Namgung§
Cresap Neuroscience Laboratory, Departments of Psychology and Neurobiology, Institute for Neuroscience, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208
Edited by James L. McGaugh, University of California, Irvine, CA, and approved April 10, 2000 (received for review February 8, 2000)
Ramón y Cajal proposed 100 years ago that memory formation requires the growth of nerve cell processes. One-half century later, Hebb suggested that growth of presynaptic axons and postsynaptic dendrites consequent to coactivity in these synaptic elements was essential for such information storage. In the past 25 years, candidate growth genes have been implicated in learning processes, but it has not been demonstrated that they in fact enhance them. Here, we show that genetic overexpression of the growth-associated protein GAP-43, the axonal protein kinase C substrate, dramatically enhanced learning and long-term potentiation in transgenic mice. If the overexpressed GAP-43 was mutated by a Ser right-arrow Ala substitution to preclude its phosphorylation by protein kinase C, then no learning enhancement was found. These findings provide evidence that a growth-related gene regulates learning and memory and suggest an unheralded target, the GAP-43 phosphorylation site, for enhancing cognitive ability.
2) Brain size correlates with g across primate species
Social intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates
Simon M. Reader* and Kevin N. Laland
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, High Street, Madingley, Cambridge CB3 8AA, United Kingdom
Communicated by Paul R. Ehrlich, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, January 24, 2002 (received for review August 23, 2001)
Despite considerable current interest in the evolution of intelligence, the intuitively appealing notion that brain volume and “intelligence” are linked remains untested. Here, we use ecologically relevant measures of cognitive ability, the reported incidence of behavioral innovation, social learning, and tool use, to show that brain size and cognitive capacity are indeed correlated. A comparative analysis of 533 instances of innovation, 445 observations of social learning, and 607 episodes of tool use established that social learning, innovation, and tool use frequencies are positively correlated with species’ relative and absolute “executive” brain volumes, after controlling for phylogeny and research effort. Moreover, innovation and social learning frequencies covary across species, in conflict with the view that there is an evolutionary tradeoff between reliance on individual experience and social cues. These findings provide an empirical link between behavioral innovation, social learning capacities, and brain size in mammals. The ability to learn from others, invent new behaviors, and use tools may have played pivotal roles in primate brain evolution.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g517026182uhh034/
Primate Intelligence
Handbook of Paleoanthropology
Richard Byrne
Brain size has traditionally been employed as a measurable proxy for species intelligence. Using allometric scaling of brain size relative to body size shows the biological cost suffered from investment in brain tissue. Shifts in diet type are the engine permitting increased investment in brain tissue because higher energy diets allow a larger brain at any given body size. Relative brain size, however, confounds effects of gut size required for particular diets with effects of brain size required for enhanced cognitive function. In contrast, the absolute size of brain parts specialized for particular functions gives evidence of the computational power of those systems. Correlational analyses strongly imply that demands of social complexity, rather than difficulties associated with frugivory or embedded foods, led to evolutionary increase in simian primate brain size. Primate brain expansion has largely involved neocortex, and among living primates, neocortex size predicts frequency of use of tactical deception and of innovative responses. These capacities likely rely on extensive memory for social information, but there is evidence (only) among great apes for understanding how systems work, whether social or technical. Representational understanding may derive from the ability to parse complex behavior, allowing imitative learning of elaborate new skills.
3) Modern MRI studies have moved beyond gross brain size/IQ correlations—that is absolutely established at this point in the field, with 37+ studies (see e.g 12 different groups listed on page 3 of this link) and only one negative result, by Tramo & Gazzaniga. Researchers have moved beyond to measurements of individual cognitive regions. This paper from 2004 and the following recent review by Haier et al (dedicated issue of Behavior and Brain Sciences just a few months ago) goes through a lot of the evidence.
http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1187
Human intelligence determined by volume and location of gray matter tissue in brain
Single ‘intelligence center’ in brain unlikely, UCI study also finds
Irvine, Calif. , July 19, 2004
General human intelligence appears to be based on the volume of gray matter tissue in certain regions of the brain, UC Irvine College of Medicine researchers have found in the most comprehensive structural brain-scan study of intelligence to date.
The study also discovered that because these regions related to intelligence are located throughout the brain, a single “intelligence center,” such as the frontal lobe, is unlikely.
Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and long-time human intelligence researcher, and colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico used MRI to obtain structural images of the brain in 47 normal adults who also took standard intelligence quotient tests. The researchers used a technique called voxel-based morphometry to determine gray matter volume throughout the brain which they correlated to IQ scores. Study results appear on the online version of NeuroImage.
Previous research had shown that larger brains are weakly related to higher IQ, but this study is the first to demonstrate that gray matter in specific regions in the brain is more related to IQ than is overall size. Multiple brain areas are related to IQ, the UCI and UNM researchers have found, and various combinations of these areas can similarly account for IQ scores. Therefore, it is likely that a person’s mental strengths and weaknesses depend in large part on the individual pattern of gray matter across his or her brain.
“This may be why one person is quite good at mathematics and not so good at spelling, and another person, with the same IQ, has the opposite pattern of abilities,” Haier said.
And see here, especially Figure 2
“Is there a biology of intelligence which is characteristic of the normal human nervous system?” Here we review 37 modern
neuroimaging studies in an attempt to address this question posed by Halstead (1947) as he and other icons of the last century
endeavored to understand how brain and behavior are linked through the expression of intelligence and reason. Reviewing studies
from functional (i.e., functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography) and structural (i.e., magnetic
resonance spectroscopy, diffusion tensor imaging, voxel-based morphometry) neuroimaging paradigms, we report a striking
consensus suggesting that variations in a distributed network predict individual differences found on intelligence and reasoning
tasks. We describe this network as the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT). The P-FIT model includes, by Brodmann areas
(BAs): the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BAs 6, 9, 10, 45, 46, 47), the inferior (BAs 39, 40) and superior (BA 7) parietal lobule, the
anterior cingulate (BA 32), and regions within the temporal (BAs 21, 37) and occipital (BAs 18, 19) lobes. White matter regions
(i.e., arcuate fasciculus) are also implicated. The P-FIT is examined in light of findings from human lesion studies, including missile
wounds, frontal lobotomy/leukotomy, temporal lobectomy, and lesions resulting in damage to the language network (e.g., aphasia),
as well as findings from imaging research identifying brain regions under significant genetic control. Overall, we conclude that
modern neuroimaging techniques are beginning to articulate a biology of intelligence. We propose that the P-FIT provides a
parsimonious account for many of the empirical observations, to date, which relate individual differences in intelligence test scores
to variations in brain structure and function. Moreover, the model provides a framework for testing new hypotheses in future