I’m shocked. Shocked.

Hi,

What? WTF????

Antti

The only uncomfortable truth Kanazawa represents is the historic obsession with intelligence and race in psychology. There is a need for a new DSM disorder to describe psychologists compelled to rank order humans along racial lines. Burt’s Syndrome?

And the British unis are cutting philosophy so that EvoPsych academics can write trolling articles about race and gender.

Let me be the first to say that I am shocked…shocked that this has occurred under a Tory government.

Dr. Hilarious

Ontogeny recapitulates philosophy?

Broca’s Brainless?

Morton salts his data?

The G Spot?

Troll much do we?

Look! Here’s that article I can never read!

I don’t know why the hell this guy is still with either LSE or Psychology today. See this gem from 2007 where he advocated nuking 35 Muslims cities to win the war on terror: http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/05/evolutionary-psychologist-says-black-women-are-scientifically-ugly-advocates-muslim-holocaust/

There’s an article in the current issue of New Scientist (yet another in a long series about why the Black Man just can’t cut it in a White Man’s world) which uses the phrase ‘a pair of maverick Evolutionary Psychologists…’. The author of the piece obviously never paused to ask himself whether or not the phrase ‘maverick evolutionary psychologist’ was a contradiction in terms or not.

So someone reanalysed his source data and found him to be wrong?

Wasn’t that a better approach than shouting “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP”?

I think it was.

Kieran Healy said:

some evidence that inflammatory claims in something written by Satoshi Kanazawa may…arise from an inability to analyze AddHealth data properly.

I am not surprised that there is a big outcry against Kanazawa. Sex is a touchy subject, race is a touchy subject, so the relative sexuality of races must be doubly touchy. (Darwin, in the Descent of Man, explained that sexual selection is the fundamental driver of racial differentiation. But he was always very careful to check his reasoning before dropping these intellectual bombshells.)

What surprises me is that the intellectual attack is focusing on the sloppiness in his empirical methodology, which no doubt could be better. But the real problem is in the fallacy of his theoretical biology.

He makes a couple of howlers on genetics, first misunderstanding the criteria for evolutionary success and then confusing overall diversity with deleterious mutability. In a generally over-looked passage he argues that African’s have a higher deleterious mutation load because they have a longer evolutionary history and an associated greater genetic diversity:

There are many biological and genetic differences between the races. However, such race differences usually exist in equal measure for both men and women. For example, because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

A long evolutionary history does not imply greater genetic diversity. And genetic diversity does not imply a greater average load of deleterious mutations. Most mutations are deleterious but, in the nature of things, are subject to adverse selection.

“All viable breeding populations are equally evolved”, (Haeckel?) is a standard assumption of evolutionary biology. Evolutionary success is relative, measured by “fitness” to an ecological niche. If anything, a given breeding populations longer evolutionary history and greater fertility implies greater evolutionary success. By that standard, African’s are doing okay.

Australian Aboriginal’s have a long evolutionary history without generating a great deal of genetic diversity owing to the uniformity and stability of the Australian ecological niche. They survived quite well until the environment changed drastically with the introduction of European pathogens. African’s are more genealogically diverse because Africa has been an ecologically diverse and somewhat unstable environment.

The profligacy of deleterious mutations in a breeding population depends somewhat on the adversity of the developmental environment (in gametes & in utero). The durability of these deleterious mutations depends on the degree to which the environment weeds them out prior to reproduction. There is no convincing evidence that African gene pool bears a significantly higher deleterious mutation rate.

One hears reports that Africans have higher abortion/still birth rates and lower life expectancies. This could be cited for evidence for Antagonistic Pleiotropy. But these differences in mortality have to be controlled for environmental differences.

The rate of in-breeding will obviously increase the gene expression of deleteriously mutated genes, by increasing the probability that there will be a conjugal match between lethal recessive alleles. There is no evidence that African’s are especially prone to consanguinity.

Such empirical work that exists on the relative rates of deleterious mutations between racial breeding population suggests that Kanazawa’s genetic argument is almost the opposite of the truth. Nature reports on a study which shows that European’s relatively short evolutionary history in a given ecological niche, and their associated genetic uniformity, implies a higher load of deleterious mutations:

A genetic study into Americans of European or African descent finds that the Europeans have a bigger proportion of ‘harmful’ genes than the Africans…The findings confirm the idea that after human groups migrated out of Africa, they experienced a population ‘bottleneck’ in which their overall genetic diversity was reduced. The European population then expanded quickly, accruing new mutations before there was time for the old ones that caused negative consequences to be weeded out…The result is that the European population contains a lower overall genetic diversity than the African population. And a higher proportion of the European genetic diversity is potentially harmful, as the DNA contains mutations that could alter the function of the proteins it encodes, the team says.

Kanazawa is generally a pretty good socio-biological analyst, who often blows a refreshing gust of anthropological realism through the politically correct cobwebs choking social science. But occasionally he over-reaches and sometimes gets way out of his depth. (Not that I am any great shakes at evolutionary biology, but I do know the basics.) If he wants to make bold contentious claims he should make sure they can withstand cursory inspection, perhaps by running them past a few expert colleagues, rather than airing them first in his blog.

If he wants to make bold contentious claims he should make sure they can withstand cursory inspection….

No, that would be boring for all concerned. He has the potential to be the Jonah Goldberg of his field. He should be given every encouragement.

pf: Consistency in ratings is a necessary but not sufficient condition of objectivity. If they are objective, then they should be consistent across observers. That doesn’t commit you to believe that if they are consistent in this particular study, then they must be objective. (And it’s easy to think of outside causal factors that would drive consistency.)

Jack, that’s some serious grocer’s apostrophization you’ve got going on there. Sure sign of genetic frailty, that is…

@2: In fairness to the readers of Psychology today, it should be pointed out that all the sludge was emitted by a single individual (as far down as I cared to look, anyway).

His research is pretty uniformly terrible, isn’t it? (Andrew Gelman wrote a paper illustrating elementary mistakes in statistics just using Kanazawa’s research as an example). It’s hard to find that level of consistency in this fallen world.

…the politically correct cobwebs choking social science.

Yes, thank goodness that we have Objective Thinkers like Kanazawa to help out with those and boldly speak the truth to power by using shoddy statistics to tell racists what they want to hear.

Why, I think I hear the jackbooted PC police kicking in my office door right now…

Andrew Gelman and David Weakliem (2009). Of Beauty, Sex and Power. American Scientist. Vol. 97, pp. 310–316.

Danke sehr!

sorry, too late…

It’s too bad that Kaufman displays an absolute, gross ignorance of the most basic concept of Statistics in the first few paragraphs: “It must be noted that with so many variables, there are bound to be many statistically significant results in the dataset simply due to chance.” Significance is a measure of the LACK of chance as cause in Statistics. Everything after must, necessarily, be treated as a (bad) joke.

I pray that Dr Kaufman does not next try to lend his “expertise” to the nuclear power industry.

imajoebob@38 No, Kaufman is correct. Statistical significance can be due to chance. If you have a large number of variables or repeat an analysis sufficient times you are predictably going to obtain statistically significant outcomes by chance. The significance level of 0.05 represents a 5% chance of obtaining a statistically significant result by chance alone. Do enough comparisons and you will get chance significance. Bonferroni’s method for adjusting significance levels with repeated t-tests, for example, is used to minimize such spurious significance.

That should read “bivariate” not “binary”

Kieran’s post on Irish roads reminds me that imajoebob’s fallacious reasoning can have tragic consequences. In the days when fewer people had cars and almost all rural Irish roads were narrow and winding, many a drunk driver used to reassure his passengers that the probability of meeting a car coming in the opposite direction around a blind corner at 2:00am was so small that it could safely be neglected.

Alas, as the number of Bernoulli trials increases….

For example, because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history,

Er, no. All living species (and subspecies, etc.) have existed the exact same length of time in evolutionary history: from the first lifeform to today.

There’s no way to make this clause even meaningful, let alone true. “They have been reproductively isolated from the rest of the species for longer than anyone else” would work fine — for Australian Aborigines. But it’s a horrible description of Africans, sub-Saharan or otherwise.

Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races.

Aha — something that resembles an empirical claim! (At least, once you change “mutations” to “alleles”. It may be difficult or even impossible to determine which allele was the original, if that’s even a meaningful question, and in any case it’s probably irrelevant.) Maybe Kanazawa should have stopped and proved this point first, before building chains of speculation on it.

Then, once he got over that little methodological hump of deciding what “attractiveness” means and how to measure it in some way that gives you grounds to believe you are measuring a phenomenon that exists in the subjects being measured, he could tie the greater variation to measures of attractiveness and claim that high-attractiveness genes have somehow been fixed in non-African populations and remain a small part of a larger spectrum of variable ugliness in African ones.

But there should be a lot of much more foundational, if less “popularly ambitious” research work that could be done right in that space. I assume it is being vigorously pursued by some area of inquiry (other branches of evo psych? more standard evolutionary biologists?Neurologists? Somebody doing things in conjunction with anthropologists and ethnologists? ) Is the whole thing just too fraught with methodological and “political” disputes to be profitably worked at the current state of these overlapping fields?

politicalfootball, your argument that Kaufman is just as clueless doesn’t make any sense to me. A precondition of objectivity is that the ratings are consistent. That doesn’t mean that Kaufman believes that consistent ratings necessarily imply objectivity, and I don’t see anything in the article that suggests that he does believe it. You can believe A implies B without believing B implies A.

Symmetry has been considered as factor underlying a perception of beauty from Darwin on. Symmetry has been considered as a possible phenotypical signal of underlying developmental health. I have not kept up with the literature since falling into the Great Dismal Swamp of the law, but a quick google check shows ongoing investigation. But if there is some fundamental basis for attractiveness it is likely to be confounded by more transient cultural factors, particularly in the age of mass media.

I’d have to google for a bit, but I seem to remember recently seeing that researchers were recently having trouble duplicating results showing a strong preference for symmetrical members of the opposite sex.

Dr Hilarius@41 et al – Sorry, but Kaufman is obviously saying you can “prove” this is due to random chance, when he should know that you can’t. All you can do is reject the original hypothesis for lacking credible significance. He can claim unreported correlations will reject the hypothesis, that the data simply doesn’t support the hypothesis, or a number of other things, but he can’t say there is any way to use statistics to prove the negative.

“I don’t know why the hell this guy is still with either LSE or Psychology today. See this gem from 2007 where he advocated nuking 35 Muslims cities to win the war on terror”

A bit odd for someone from Japan, post-1945, to be so enthusiastic for nuclear war. He also recommended Ann Coulter for US president. This man makes wingnuts look sane.

Wow, a post and 60 comments on Kanazawa’s ‘research’, and only one feeble attempt to tie it to the Gaddafi money.

Looks like we’re over the hump.

it’s maybe not Gaddafi – thanks hopkin – but i’m surprised no-one has mentioned that the LSE has a track record with this stuff.

see Oliver Curry, for example, in 2006.

http://www.badscience.net/2006/10/%E2%80%9Call-men-will-have-big-willies%E2%80%9D/

d

I see you noticed Kanazawa’s stupidity already three years ago:

https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/11/in-the-eea-tactical-nuclear-weapons-were-highly-fitness-enhancing/