Smarter, Taller, Healthier ?

Sure. But basically the choice is between medieval science and modern science. So if you actually want to know anything about this, all you have to do is wait. An unfamiliar notion.

“Height, health status and measured intelligence are all positively correlated so it seems as if we should be looking for the same kind of explanation in all cases.”

You mean, like prenatal health care and/or nutrition?

Susan makes a good point. The nature v. nurture debate only really rages in “controversial” areas like intelligence. That’s not to say there still aren’t debates about whether specific components of our concept of cause, how we recognize faces, or even how tall we are, but they’re friendly debates. And they usually involve, you know, data.

A year ago I visited Amsterdam, and I expected the average Dutch man to be an inch taller than I am, 185cm minimum. It might even have been the case.

He did when I did the other version of this dance–the race v. racialization shuffle–around this time last year. Maybe he’s googling his name less often now.

People don’t care about height as much.

true, at least it’s not on the agenda. Nevertheless, it seems like a powerful social indicator; in my (anecdotal and wholly unscientific) experience tall people get an easier ride generally and are given more credence and authority in personal interactions. IQ and class ruffle feathers, but social power comes from many quarters.

Nevertheless, it seems like a powerful social indicator; in my (anecdotal and wholly unscientific) experience tall people get an easier ride generally and are given more credence and authority in personal interactions.

There are a reasonable number of academic studies that show this to be the case. With the twist that what matters is your height at 16-18 rather than your adult height – the explanation being that being tall helps you think of yourself as a leader and helps you gain self-esteem.

I think the “Cartesian” label–used by Chomsky and those influenced by him to describe the idea that certain cognitive capacities are innate–has always been unhelpful. For Descartes, our innate ideas were of things like God, infinity, etc. They were supposed to be concepts that a finite being–anything that was the product of contingent causal forces—could never grasp on his or her own without the help of divine implantation (the Third Meditation is supposed to be a “proof” of this).

The idea that evolution–or any other natural causal process– could vindicate anything as lofty as a Counter-Enlightenment notion of “human nature” that was insusceptible to progressive social improvement is decidedly NOT ‘Cartesian,’ at least if the term is being used in the attempt to capture a genuinely historical parallel.

[It should be noted that Chomsky is more historically self-conscious than others in constructing the parallel with Descartes. He has always emphasized that it is the language faculty’s capacity to be “infinitely generative”—i.e., to produce an infinite number of well-formed sentences given a finite set of syntactic rules and a finite lexicon—that it is difficult to account for using a behaviorist, stimulus-response psychology. He has also had, on occasion, the courage to say that he doubted whether evolutionary accounts of the origins of language could do the explanatory work required to explain THAT capacity of the language faculty. Unfortunately, those admissions of skepticism have occasionally caused people to cry “creationist.”

His most recent (and evolving) thoughts on this are, as far as I know, part of this jointly authored essay:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5598/1569 ]

I got the impression (unscientific also) that tall people generally don’t care much about ‘leadership’; on the contrary – it’s short people who crave ‘leadership’ to compensate for a feeling of inferiority.

“Liberals constantly invoke Sweden as a governmental model without paying much heed to the fact that Sweden’s government succeeds as much as it does because it governs Swedes.”

I mentioned that to a Swedish cognitive psychologist over dinner last night. She said: “Well… duh.”

I’ll quote myself, from elsewhere on the same subject:

Social democracy was a fact before it was an idea. People who imagine otherwise are the sort that thinks somehow that they aren’t representative of a group: that they are “individuals.” But if you know anything about the history of the esthetic or intellectual “avant gardes” you know -or you should by now- that none of them invented anything, but were merely the first to see what already existed. They observed they didn’t “create.” But then people began to put the cart before the horse and the result was catastrophe.

Intellectuals who are engaged with culture engage with Burke. Literary novelists are Burkeans, in the sense that the prize observation and description over “creation.” Political liberal intellectuals in this country refer to anti-burkean models of culture in the inventions of science fiction and fantasy, and being rationalists, they can’t imagine that their intellectual models are as much products of history as their own invention. Henry’s defense of this logic is as simplistic as anything by Goldberg. I always ask what it means that the humanities have developed the linguistic tropes of the hard sciences. What is the historical significance of the concept of the “nerd.” What is “geek culture” if not historically determined?
History is the history of actions and consequences, not of intended consequences. It interests me that the logic of individualism that the left and even the civilized bourgeois used to disdain is now considered the basis of every debate in this country: on both sides. It’s a recent development. Why? What is libertarianism as an ideology (and a joke) other than a product of social atomization?
Why is Kos called a Progressive? Because after the turn to the right of American politics over the past 30 years the now mainstream right-wing had the habit of calling liberals “leftists” and now liberals believe it. And people reason from this logic as if it was always so. Atrios looked up to Bill Clinton. How is it possible to maintain even the shadow of a foundation when everything, including the meaning of words is shifting? Rationalism outside of historical context is a joke.

Goldberg isn’t that smart, but the people attacking him make their careers out of assumptions that they are rational actors of the moderate left.

“Rational actors of the moderate left.” Think about that one for a minute. Think about what it means.
More fun here and here

The post begins with a reference and I was responding to that.
But you have a point.

“Debate over the relative influence of environment and heredity on intelligence has been going on for at least a century without much change or resolution”

Only someone who knows nothing about the relevant research in this area would ever say that. That being said, it’s better not to talk about this research openly. The public can’t handle the truth.

“This will be left as an exercise for readers (that is, I haven’t got around to working on it myself).”

Wait, are you doing a parody of Goldberg?

“The Wikipedia article spends lots of time on twin studies”

Well, yeah. Twin studies are important. You are quick to denounce Burt as a fraud for his twin studies. Do you think that these twin studies are frauds to? Consider this claim and citation from Wikipedia.

The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, a multiyear study of 100 sets of reared-apart twins which was started in 1979, concluded that about 70% of the variance in IQ was found to be associated with genetic variation.[6]

…

6. Thomas J. Bouchard Jr.; David T. Lykken; Matthew McGue; Nancy L. Segal; Auke Tellegen (October 12, 1990). Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. National Institutes of Health / Science, Oct 12, 1990 v250 n4978 p223(6). Retrieved on August 6, 2006.

Now, if you think that a number like 70% heritability is reasonable (and/or thought this in 1990), then perhaps this research and much like it is not “significant new information in the last few decades.” If so, great! We agree.

Or perhaps I am just confused. What do you think that the heritability of IQ is?

It is true that the correlation between height and IQ is about the same magnitude as the correlation between head size and IQ. However, unlike the latter, the correlation between height and IQ does not hold true within families. That is, the sibling with the higher IQ does not tend to be taller (whereas the sibling with the higher IQ does tend to have a larger head). The largest study bearing out the null within-family relation between height and IQ includes over 16,000 sibling pairs.

Some studies have looked for a genetic correlation between height and IQ. Two recent studies have gone opposite ways here.

The balance of the evidence strongly favors no functional relationship between height and IQ. (This poses a contrast to the case of head size and IQ. The correlation doubles when it is actual brain volume that is assessed through magnetic resonance imaging; head size is an attenuated proxy for brain size. Also, when whites and blacks at age 7 are matched for true-score IQ, the difference in average head size between whites and blacks completely disappears, whereas some gap in IQ remains when whites and blacks are matched in head size. This is what you would expect if sheer volume is merely one of many properties of the brain that causally determine IQ.) The most likely cause of the population correlation is cross-assortative mating for these two traits, both of which are highly valued in our society. A recent New York Times article about speed dating reported some very persuasive data showing that women are willing to trade off height against income in prospective dating partners. (A 5’1” guy has to make something like $500K before a girl will go out with him.) Going the other way, men value leg length in women. Thus, it must inevitably be the case that gametic disequilibrium among loci affecting height and IQ is created by the assortment of the enhancing alleles for both traits into the same families. (I mentioned the preference for leg length because it might explain the otherwise odd fact that the correlation between height and IQ is accounted for largely by sitting height.)

As for the parallel secular increase in both traits, it is reasonable to suspect common causes of both. However, I do not believe that any convincing evidence has been put forth to explain what these common causes might be. Given the high heritability of both traits and the absence of a common-environment variance component for IQ (at least for the middle 80% of the population), promising culprits are changes in the environment that have affected more or less the entire population (e.g., inoculations against once-common diseases).

I hope this sheds some light on the nature of the relationship between height and mental ability.

Also, it must remembered that some part of the Flynn Effect cannot be accounted for by true gains in the latent ability factors measured by IQ tests. In the lingo of structural equation modeling, the same measurement model cannot be fit to different cohorts manifesting the Flynn Effect. Some kind of measurement artifact is causing the intercept of the regression of observed scores on ability factors to drift upward.

John,

You may have accepted the 70% heritability figure decades ago, but I think that many social scientists still have trouble accepting it. (Or, perhaps more precisely, prefer not to think about it and its possible implications.)

Regarding the Flynn effect, as far as I understand the interpretation is controversial. In many of the cases studied the raw score increase coincides with a time period when average number of years of schooling increased considerably. It’s not surprising that conscripts (much of the data covering long periods is from military intelligence tests) who left school at 10 or 12 might not reach their full potential, e.g., compared to those that had a full K-12 education. In other words, I don’t think the Flynn effect suggests that intelligence is massively more malleable than previously suspected. It also appears that the effect may have saturated in the West, very possibly coinciding with the onset of universal K-12 education and elimination of nutritional deprivation. (Note: the Flynn effect is most pronounced for very abstract tests like Raven’s progressive matrices, and there it seems that exposure to similar types of reasoning might distort the correlation between the Raven’s score and overall intelligence. More general IQ tests don’t show as large a Flynn effect.)

Finally, once you accept heritability you at least accept the *possibility* of group differences in intelligence based on different distributions of genes in different populations. While the particular genes that influence intelligence are not yet known, it *is* known (due to recent advances in genomics) that there is significant clustering of gene distributions according to geographical (e.g., continental) origin. (i.e., alleles which are common in one group can be very uncommon in another.) Certainly, no one doubts the reality of group differences in the genetic component of height, which is about as heritable as intelligence in the twin studies.

Is David Kane the only person in the world who doesn’t know psychology’s worst kept secret…that Bouchard’s research is…er…how can I put it….well put it this way….that many people suspect he is following in Burt’s footsteps in more ways than one?

Note to Chris (comment 15)…of course Chomsky is also a (secularised) Platonist……(c.f Plato’s problem). This isn’t disagreeing with you, just pointing out that Pinker et al simply ignore all the bits of Chomsky’s thought that they don’t like.

Re the 70% heritability figure and the progress of research in the field over time, I came of age in the 70’s, and I recall quite well that the general consensus on the heritability of intelligence then was at about 40%, not 70%. It seems to have gone up dramatically since then, due to better studies. So whoever is claiming that this figure was 70% back then seems full of it to me. That’s a 75% increase in raw numbers, which seems highly significant to me. If someone thought back then that it was 70%, they’d have been dismissed as a loon, which may be just what this guy is.

hidari (comment 11) – Pinker’s ideas on linguistics derive from Chomsky, okay, I’ll take your word from it. Why does that mean that there’s any sort of contradiction based on Chomsky’s views on Cartesianism (be that modern, secular, materialist)? A simple explanation may be that Pinker isn’t into Cartesianism, regardless of Chomsky’s views on the matter.

‘Pinker’s ideas on linguistics derive from Chomsky, okay, I’ll take your word from it.’

Pinker’s ideas on linguistics ARE Chomsky’s ideas. The ONLY difference is that Chomsky has always been sceptical of evolutionary explanations for the Language Acquiring Device (or module or faculty or whatever you want to call it) and Pinker isn’t. *

The other point is that Chomskyan linguistics aren’t simply a scientific thesis that ‘happen to have’ a Cartesian ‘feel’ (i.e. when explained by Chomsky). They are, in their essence, Cartesian (i.e. Descartes-as-seen-by-Chomsky…whether Descartes, if he were alive today, would like or approve of Chomsky’s ideas is a whole other ball game): e.g. they presuppose an ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ world (inner being subjective, outer being objective), they presoppose Rationalism (NOT Lockean empiricism…indeed it is Lockean empiricism (which Pinker calls the ‘blank slate’) idea which both Pinker and Chomsky argue against most vehemently), and so forth.

You can’t just say ‘I approve of Chomsky’s theories except the Cartesian bit’: that really would be to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’.

*Giving this some thought this may not be strictly speaking, true. One of the more tedious aspects of Pinker’s over abundant academic output is his tendency to simply ‘add’ bits to his general theories without seeing whether the whole ‘infrastructure’ holds together. For example, he now expresses (qualified) admiration for George Lakoff, and quotes from ‘Metaphors We Live By’ etc. But Lakoff and Johnson were attempting to argue AGAINST Chomskyan linguistics. You can’t just chop bits of their theories off and then stick them onto Chomskyan theory and say ‘look at the wonderful synthesis I have created’ when all you really have is an incoherent mess.

All this and more will be explained in my forthcoming book, zooming to a book shop near you in September and bargain bins round the world in October.

Re:Hidari #49. It sounds like your and Michael Howe’s opponent in this debate is the mainstream psychological community, represented in my comment by the APA’s 1995 report on intelligence. That’s fine, but Howe’s work is, by his admission, a minority/fringe opinion, and is not an attempt at a “fair” review, in the sense of taking into account both sides – or even the mainstream POV – on an issue.

Hidari writes :–

“The other point is that Chomskyan linguistics aren’t simply a scientific thesis that ‘happen to have’ a Cartesian ‘feel’ (i.e. when explained by Chomsky). They are, in their essence, Cartesian ”

This is fine as far as it goes but still somewhat muddled. You need a distinction ,when discussing Descartes’, Chomsky’s or Pinker’s views on this subject’ between *metaphysical* thesis these thinkers are embracing and a *psychological* thesis which provides an account of the mechanisms involved in cognition.

Now Pinker and Chomsky see eye to eye with Descartes with respect to the sort of mechanism involved in cognition but Pinker parts company with both as far as metaphysics go because he rejects Dualism.

Btw it is also Chomsky’s sympathies with Dualism which underwrites his rejection of evolutionary accounts of language.

I second Matt’s call for an explanation from Hidari as to why the casual comment about Bouchard is not a scurrilous bit of libel. And, moreover, for something more substantial than the invocation of an “authority.” This deserves a description of documentary evidence or internal analysis of the data that Bouchard and his (numerous) colleagues have reported.

Alan K – Nothing was “dismissed” by my comment.
You may be confused by the “wtf^3”, which is simply me channeling John as he dismisses the remark (or its relevance).

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m afraid I agree with you on this particular point.

John writes:

I didn’t give any number for heritability of IQ, but 70 per cent for white Americans seems like a midpoint estimate now, and has been so ever since I have been paying attention to this literature, which is many decades.

I apologize for assuming that we would disagree about this. You and I think that (approximately) 70% heritability is a scientific fact. Do all your fellow CT authors agree? I doubt it. In fact, I would wager that a majority of them would disagree strongly. Let’s ask them!

As far as I can see the range around this number hasn’t narrowed much over time. Obviously neither has the extent to which people get upset about it, nor the extent to which both sides of the nature-nurture debate are prone to premature claims of victory (see Galton, Watson, Skinner, Eysenck, Bell Curve etc etc).

I am confused again. Once you grant (as you seem to) that IQ is a meaningful construct, that it predicts all sorts of important life outcomes and that it is highly heritable, what aspects of the Bell Curve do you disagree with? (Let’s leave aside the racial chapters for now.) Just considering white americans, every factual claim made by the Bell Curve seems to be something that you agree with. So why bad mouth the book?

53,58
It’s so incredibly laughable what you two (Matt McIntosh and Darth Quixote) are demanding from Hidaris. Both you of you are associated with GNXP where repeated charges of fraud and dishonesty have made about Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, etc. by GC and others and at no point in time did any of you made any demands for substantiations or retractions. Stop being hypocrites.

John,

I think I agree with your opinions (modulo perhaps the precise interpretation of the Flynn effect), but I suspect you are at odds with a lot of CT readers!

Regarding IQ as a predictor of non-academic outcomes, there is a lot of research (e.g., by psychologist Linda Gottfredson) on this. IQ correlates with many things which are not academic, like the chances you’ll be killed in a car crash, your ability to quickly navigate a restaurant menu, etc.

The US military found that below a certain threshold (like 85) troops are significantly less trainable and not effective as combatants. They received a special dispensation from Congress to filter by IQ (Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT)), the only US organization to be exempt from Griggs v. Duke Power. Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Google would love to have this dispensation :-)

the only US organization to be exempt from Griggs v. Duke Power. Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Google would love to have this dispensation :-)

Indeed, though the primary workaround today are academic pedigree (credentialism) plus proxies like this:

http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-5263941.html

The main difference is that there is the fig leaf that such tests are “directly related to work on the job”. Of course they are, insofar as IQ is directly related to work on the job, but this is an end run around Griggs vs. Duke Power.

In response to some of the more excitable commentators above (and in case any lawyers are reading) I, personally, have absolutely no opinions as to the ethical and ontological status of Bouchard’s data.

However, (and maybe I shouldn’t have passed this news on, although I’m not the first to bring this to the public’s attention) it is an objective fact that I have personally heard such issues raised. It’s not my imagination. I didn’t make it up. I really have heard these rumours. It’s also true that lots of other people have (in print, John Horgan and Oliver James have alluded to them).

OK so mea culpa maybe I shouldn’t have said it.

But here’s the key point. Bouchard could scotch all these rumours tomorrow, but he won’t because he won’t release his ‘raw’ data .

Now all I can say about this, with the laws against libel being what they are, is that I feel that Bouchard has made a mistake here. At the very least it would be common scientific courtesy to allow other researchers to access your raw data, don’t you think? And I will point out something else. ‘Human nature’ (!) being what it is, other people are going to continue to find it slightly mysterious that Bouchard refuses to release his raw data, in spite of repeated requests to do so.

Sorry but blame the ‘suspiciousness’ gene we doubtless all possess.

(Please note, I didn’t see John Quiggan’s note above, but just to restate: I’m not accusing anyone of anything, and I’m not going to reply to anything that assumes that I did).

‘Cartesianism has a metaphysical component ( dualism ) and a psychological component ( description of the mechanism which we call mind ).’

Well that’s certainly how we see things now, although it’s not how Descartes saw it. But this presupposes that Cartesianism splits easily and cleanly into two easily separable ‘parts’, the ‘metaphysical’ and the ‘scientific’. But it’s not at all clear that that’s the case, although Pinker assumes it is.

In any case, Pinker doesn’t make this distinction. Pinker rails against Cartesianism in its entirety (my understanding is), not just the ‘metaphysical’ aspect, or at least, he fails to make clear what parts of Descartes’s thought he is accepting and rejecting.

The primary observations of variation need extension – for example, do Yorubas have large testes as well as frequent dizygotic twins?

Wow. Wow. Jared Diamond wanted to take calipers and measure the balls of people of color. Wow. what next, we find out that Martin Luther King was a KKK member.

No, no discussion of fraud; I’m just curious what variations in testicles size among different populations have to do with cognitive abilities. After all, variations in skin pigmentation are plain obvious, so how’s the testicles article is earth-shaking?

I’m not a scientist, so I’m probably missing something.

Hidari earlier on said :–

“In other words, Chomsky always explicitly based his opposition to Empiricism and Behaviourism on his Rationalist Cartesianism, and, in fact, so does Pinker.”

Yes but note that Chomsky unlike Pinker is sceptical about the posibility of naturalising that is providing Darwinian account of mind. Why is that ?

Answer to this is the explanation why and where Pinker and Chomsky part company. The answer is Chomsky is a dualist ( either substance or property dualist ).Pinker rejects dualism in favour of some sort of physicalist functionalism.( mind is either identical to brain or function of brain that supervenes on the brain )

More important though is that this is not just a dispute between Chomsky and Pinker but rather between Chomsky and modern phil of mind /cognitive science.

That is, it is Chomsky’s view which is the weird one because note if one cannot provide an evolutionary explanation of mind we are left with
two posibilities ( Descartes wouldnt mind ):

a) supernatural origin : mind created by God and somehow implemented inside our bodies. ( Roman Catholic view )
b) mind cannot be explained at all ( lovely obscurantist view ).

But that’s the thing: IQ has predictive power in areas far from the expected bookish pursuits. Take a group of machinists or production workers. Give them each a 20 minute “Wonderlic” test (a simple IQ test, also used by the NFL on potential draft choices). Voila! A correlation between individual productivity (output) and IQ. (It’s only a correlation — sure, some future professors like me were terrible at woodshop.)

It almost makes you want to believe in “g”! :-)

From Gottfredson:

For example, a 1969 study done for the U.S. Army by the Human Resources Research Office found that enlistees in the bottom fifth of the ability distribution required two to six times as many teaching trials and prompts as did their higher-ability peers to attain minimal proficiency in rifle assembly, monitoring signals, combat plotting and other basic military tasks.

Aren’t you *happy* that Griggs vs Duke Power doesn’t apply to the military (despite the disparate impacts on different racial groups)? How about your local power utility? Would you like it if they could improve efficiency dramatically by administering little tests to all their job applicants?

Does the marshmallow test continue to predict academic ability better than IQ tests?

I find it hard to believe that higher IQ translates into better driving or crane-operating. I mean, we’re talking about the ability to analyze abstract concepts here. I mean, you concentrate on analyzing abstract concepts while driving – you’re gonna miss the moment when the driver in front of you hit the brakes. Seriously. I’d definitely prefer a chauffeur with 80 IQ to one with 140.

I used to work with a couple of Brazilian fellas from Rio. One was a run-of-the-mill programmer, the other was regarded as a genius, extremely smart, he later opened his own company, developed some voice-recognition something and settled in the US for good. The average guy was suffering from nostalgia all the time, complaining about quality of American meat and eventually moved back to Rio.

Now, here’s the punchline. Living in Rio, Navis (the smart one) had been attacked 18 or 19 times, while the average-intelligence guy hasn’t been assaulted or robbed even once, ever. See, the average guy had the common sense to watch what’s going on around, to cross the street or turn around if necessary. High IQ doesn’t help with that, quite the opposite. You know: the so-called street-smarts.

Re the marshmallow test: it is perhaps not surprising that a test of time preference at age four is predictive. IQ tests for that age are not worth very much. Time preference is a very strong correlate of IQ and of social class. A good read is Greg Clark’s “Genetically Capitalist”, a chapter from a forthcoming book that is all over the web, proposing that medieval evolution in England created a new kind of person. One of his big and interesting pieces of evidence is the time course of the interest rate, which mostly reflects time preference.

re #93: “Nothing comes without a price.”

But this is exactly why IQ is such a fascinating puzzle: there is apparently no price (except, perhaps, for myopia, maybe gout). The literature directly contradicts your impressions: high IQ predicts more not less athletic ability for example.

The absence of a price is a big problem for an evolutionary explanation of IQ differences. Evolution is supposed to optimise fitness.

Humans are not at steady state. Think about that. Deeper than you think.

There is no free lunch in optimization, genetic or otherwise. I know that JQ doesn’t think that much useful research has been conducted in “decades,” but has he considered “The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence” by Cochran et al.

Basic idea is that the Ashkenazi were under (greater) selective pressure and so their IQ rose faster. But, along with that rise came various genetic diseases, some quite serious.

Sure, if there was some magic button to press with no side effects which increased IQ then you might expect evolution to press that button. But there are always side-effects. A simple example is that increased head/brain size both increases IQ and (I think) increases maternal mortality. Evolution has to confront these trade-offs. The fact that we are all not 150 IQ is no more relevant to selection pressures on IQ then the fact that we are all not 6’6” (or super muscular or insert-your-favorite-desirable-genetic-trait) is relevant to selection pressures on height.

I think both Chonsky and Pinker’s metaphysical views are being oversimplified. Chomsky says somewhere that he is a materialist (I could dig it up). Pinker is a mysterian about consciousness/ qualia, much to the disgust of Dennett et al.

So what exactly is this “heritability” everyone keeps talking about? How much connection does it have to our usual notion of children inheriting traits from their parents?

I take it we estimate heritability by the correlation in IQ between identical twins raised apart. But there is no logical connection between this fact and the idea that high-IQ parents have high-IQ children. For example, identical twins always have the same eye color, so I guess the heritability of eye color is 100%. But children don’t always have the same eye color as their parents.

Am I missing something, or is this term incredibly misleading?

DK, I didn’t say no useful research had been conducted, I said nothing fundamentally new had been found. The discussion over at GNXP confirmed this. After a lot of spluttering, the claim was that we now have more and better data of the same general kind that we had in 1970, not that I had missed something big.

Are your feet sore yet? What exactly are you asking for from the relevant fields? We’ve spent the last two decades dismantling the wall of denial erected by Gould et al. (and are beginning to see the restoration of the reputations of those he unfairly libeled; being right still counts in the end).
It almost sounds like a creationist crowing about the inability to recreate speciation in the lab though, when discarding reams of relevant data all going in the same direction by pointing out the nonexistence of an unidentified breakthrough. And above all, it is oh so early still.

The revolution in genomics is harrowing, if one fears what it might reveal.
The past two decades have seen the confirmation of what Burt et al were marginalized for stating those many years ago, by way of all that “more and better data”, with the Great White Hope of the much used and abused (and still not satisfactorily explained) Flynn effect embodying more and more hope for those who desperately want it all to stop. As for what the Flynn effect means (not what we hope it means) one might want to read his recent Harvard paper to find out his thoughts on the matter.

Someone way up in this long comments thread has already pointed out that 70% heritability for IQ was once enough to end a career, now it is accepted by all but the last few diehards.

Once you accept heritability of IQ coupled with continuing evolution (discarding now discredited notions of stasis) you have to give up the ghost. Recent studies (Cochran and Harpending; Lahn) suggesting not only that evolution has not somehow stopped working on humans but that evolutionary pressures may have increased in recent history, in particular affecting the brain and behavior, the dread specter of significant racial differences in IQ must follow. It’s almost as if the “race as a sociological construct” canard was devised in anticipation of all this, like calling in an airstrike on your own position.

zdenek,

Pinker’s a mysterian about subjective experience. He says so in The Blank Slate and also in this interview with Robert Wright. As I understand it, he takes a computational view of mind-as-it-could-in-principle-be-observed-by-a-third party, i.e., beliefs, goals, emotions, etc.

Pitlord here is a concession to you because P also says this :

“There is something maddening about it in that it’s on the one sense complete comprehensible and in the other sense bafflingly incomprehensible and what that makes me think is that we’ve run into some limitation in our own mind a kin to the one that make it very difficult or impossible for us to understand that time came into existence with the big bang. ”

Is this mysterianism ? it sounds like it but I would expect an argument to the effect why the problem cannot be solved ( that is what McGinn does ) so to the extent that P does not offer any arguments like that he is not a mysterian but merely someone who things the problem is v. hard to solve ( as I said that is a different claim a weaker claim ).

“The absence of a price is a big problem for an evolutionary explanation of IQ differences. Evolution is supposed to optimise fitness.”

That’s “genetic” fitness, ie increased presence of particluar genes in the gene pool at the expense of others. Although there is bound to be a cost (larger brain, more neurons, more energy consumption) it’s the competition amongst genetic variants that will drive the evolution of IQ. Fitness is hardly ever stable.

I haven’t read all these comments – but what an awesome review of Pinker’s book!

Why didn’t selective pressure push IQs up to 150 (or whatever upper bound you want to nominate)

Err … because IQs are (were) normalised to 100? Or was this a trick question?