Today’s Taboo, And Where to From Here?
Here is the abstract from a paper that appeared two years ago in Molecular Psychiatry:
Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and mortality. Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits. Here, we highlight five genetic findings that are special to intelligence differences and that have important implications for its genetic architecture and for gene-hunting expeditions. (i) The heritability of intelligence increases from about 20% in infancy to perhaps 80% in later adulthood. (ii) Intelligence captures genetic effects on diverse cognitive and learning abilities, which correlate phenotypically about 0.30 on average but correlate genetically about 0.60 or higher. (iii) Assortative mating is greater for intelligence (spouse correlations ~0.40) than for other behavioural traits such as personality and psychopathology (~0.10) or physical traits such as height and weight (~0.20). Assortative mating pumps additive genetic variance into the population every generation, contributing to the high narrow heritability (additive genetic variance) of intelligence. (iv) Unlike psychiatric disorders, intelligence is normally distributed with a positive end of exceptional performance that is a model for ‘positive genetics’. (v) Intelligence is associated with education and social class and broadens the causal perspectives on how these three inter-correlated variables contribute to social mobility, and health, illness and mortality differences. These five findings arose primarily from twin studies. They are being confirmed by the first new quantitative genetic technique in a century—Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis (GCTA)—which estimates genetic influence using genome-wide genotypes in large samples of unrelated individuals. Comparing GCTA results to the results of twin studies reveals important insights into the genetic architecture of intelligence that are relevant to attempts to narrow the ‘missing heritability’ gap.
I’ve been doing some reading in the field, and there’s nothing particularly special about this paper. I picked it because the abstract provided a fair summary of where the literature has been for at least a generation now. In fact, I specifically avoided a couple of papers that would have seemed hair-raisingly controversial to people who haven’t looked at the literature.
My point is simple. Cognitive science and genetics are at a place that is very, very different than most people think. And the science is getting better, faster and more precise. I believe it is, in fact, fair to say that we are in the early stages of a revolution in the biological sciences, particularly where it concerns the study of intelligence and other mental traits.
So what is going on? Why does the science seem so alien in 2017 America? To quote no less an authority than Steven Pinker:
Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN’T apply to IQ: huge n’s, replicable results. But people hate the message.
As a complete outside, I wouldn’t dare argue the science with Pinker. Still, his statement is partly wrong. Sure, most people hate the message. But some people love it. The people who love the message love it because they can use it to justify the hatred in their heart. The rest of us hate it because we understand what it implies. If intelligence and other personality traits are largely heritable, people aren’t a blank slate. It casts doubt on many of our cherished myths. More disturbingly, it almost implies people have some sort of destiny, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a Gattaca world, or worse, a Brave New one.
Of course, if something along those lines were the case, it would be useful for the majority of the body politic – say, the center left, the center, and the center right – to develop ideas and policies for how to deal with it in a way that fits our values. Instead, a monopoly on that sort of discussion has been granted to the haters… and you can well imagine the policies they have in mind. For everyone else, such topics are now mostly taboo. They can be discussed in a lab setting, in technical terms, but woe betide anyone, including a biologist who translates them into the vernacular.
But what if it turns out that the actors, attorneys, community activists, educators, HR professionals, journalists and liberal arts professors are wrong? What if the world’s most pre-eminent cognitive researchers, geneticists and neurobiologists know the science better than they do? What if traits like intelligence and behavior are transmitted very much as described in the scientific literature? I know. It sounds nuts. But what if? What would we do then? In such a world, what policies should we set? And how do we ensure that those are the policies that actually do get enacted?
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Update. Corrected link to abstract.
“The people who love the message love it because they can use it to justify the hatred in their heart.”
One with hatred in his heart can always justify it.
I neither love nor hate the fact that people are born different. It is simply how God made them. God gave some people greater intelligence, just as He made some people tall. God gave some people more drive; and some, more opportunities. Should the strong pot that holds a tree look mock the fragile vase, made by the same hand, that can hold only a flower or two? The pot had no hand in his making. Neither did the vase.
I am not going to dispute the literature with you, Mike. However, I have to ask what are the “non-hater” policies that you would support might consist of. You name none in this post, but worry that haters are the people who will run with this issue for their bad ends.
I guess it sort of looks like you are posting this as a sort of implicit backup (although you can deny it) of your long-running set of posts about immigration, which have had a theme of how we should encourage “better immigrants” rather than worse, and your identification of certain nationalities and professions (generally better educated) as those among the “better” whom we should encourage. That so far would appear to be the only policy that would relate to what you have just posted.
Is that right? Is this a side-door defense of your immigration posts that have gotten a lot of people here upset? Or are there other policies that you think non-haters should be advocating or pursuing in connection with these findings?
I note that when I wrote the above, Warren’s comment had not yet appeared.
To Warren:
The literature suggests a strong input of genetics to intelligence, not a total determination, which holds for some of the other things you listed as apparently being what “God gave some people” when they were born. Nuerthre and environment and social surroundings and education and a lot of other things are involved in both intelligence and many of these other things than just genetics or God.
I find this to be a tendentious subject. Within the broad spectrum of behavior that is called intelligence, environmental factors have as or more impact on the average human child born with the average human quotient of intelligence. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poverty-shrinks-brains-from-birth1/
One of the striking “natural” experiments of the last 50 years is gradual removal, country by country, of lead from gasoline and the resulting decline in lead exposure by poor and working class children. Almost every country sees a decline 15 years after the elimination of lead in violent crime and teenage pregnancy and other impulse behaviors with the elimination of lead. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-lead-poisoning-science-met-20150605-story.html
The problem with the “all gene” argument is that it quickly leads Conservatives/Reactionaries who want a permanent hierarchy and patriarchy to state that there is no point in educating or assisting the poor and working class (and large “racial” groups which are almost always arbitrary cultural constructs) as doomed by their genes to remain stupid and poor. “Liberals,” who are almost always white men, who propagate the argument are really trolling for the Right. Because the fact is is that this science is irrelevant to the idea of giving a human child born in a society the best chance with intelligence and talents he or she comes into the world with.
They called it the Southern Strategy . . .
“Nuerthre and environment and social surroundings and education and a lot of other things are involved in both intelligence and many of these other things than just genetics or God.”
And who created those things and put particular people in those particular situations? As I said, God gave some people opportunities He did not give others.
“[The] fact is is that this science is irrelevant to the idea of giving a human child born in a society the best chance with intelligence and talents he or she comes into the world with.”
The BEST chance? That would require removing many thousands children from their homes. The child of every impoverished single mother would have to be taken from her and raised by the State.
No, not the BEST chance, but the best PRACTICAL chance.
Everything we do has a cost — in time or money. Doing one thing means not doing another. Every dollar spent on special education is a dollar not spent of the education of other children. Through our elected officials, we have to choose the best way to spend our money. Do we get a better overall outcome if we spend more money on remedial education for those with <85 IQ, or if we spend that money on educating the best and brightest, or if we spend it on the masses in the middle?
(The reality is that we're spending more on school bureaucracy, not education.)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
“From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to “cleanse” German society of individuals viewed as biological threats to the nation’s “health.” Enlisting the help of physicians and medically trained geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, the Nazis developed racial health policies that began with the mass sterilization of “genetically diseased” persons and ended with the near annihilation of European Jewry. With the patina of legitimacy provided by “racial” science experts, the Nazi regime carried out a program of approximately 400,000 forced sterilizations and over 275,000 euthanasia deaths that found its most radical manifestation in the death of millions of “racial” enemies in the Holocaust.
This campaign was based in part on ideas about public health and genetic “fitness” that had grown out of the inclination of many late nineteenth century scientists and intellectuals to apply the Darwinian concepts of evolution to the problems of human society. These ideas became known as eugenics and found a receptive audience in countries as varied as Brazil, France, Great Britain, and the United States. But in Germany, in the traumatic aftermath of World War I and the subsequent economic upheavals of the twenties, eugenic ideas found a more virulent expression when combined with the Nazi worldview that espoused both German racial superiority and militaristic ultranationalism.”
https://www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/search-the-collections/bibliography/nazi-racial-science
I do agree with Sherparick. We inherit our potential. However, our environment determines the degree to which that potential develops. This is because part of the development of the brain after birth and nervous system in general is how great a variety of stimulation it has experienced.
In college, for an assignment I ran across a mouse study. Wish I had copied it.
2 teams of mice. One got to play on wheel etc., the other just left in their pens. Both were tested as to time to complete a maze. Those that completed it the fastest were the ones who got to play.
But, the next part of the study really set off a light bulb. The bread the mice, and left both groups of this next generation of mice in the same no stimulatory environment. When the maze test was performed, those from the play group parents also performed better on the test.
To me, this suggested that what ever level of knowledge and ability to learn we have obtained, we pass that on via our genes as a greater potential to learn and do. This would suggest the observation that the next generation seems smarter is true. The kids are smarter.
But also, being around 1981 when gene were thought to be fixed other than spontaneous mutation, suggested that something plastic was happening with our genetic make up for it is the gene that pass on our traits.
If this is all true, then the opposite is true. The less experience, the less variety, the less knowledge obtained and thus the lesser ability to learn would suggest there is the potential to reverse any “intelligence” gain a society has made. Thus we talk about the dumbing down of society, voting against their best interest, and such as examples of society as a whole becoming less “smart”.
@Mike,
I note with interest that you didn’t cite a cautionary response, published in the same issue.
“Plomin, DeFries, Knopik, and Neiderhiser (2016, this issue) are correct in their assertion that many discoveries of behavior genetics have proven to be robust and replicable. I note, in contrast, that more specific assertions about the role of genetics in the development of behavior have failed to replicate. Reflecting on why more general findings replicate better than specific ones sheds light on the difficulties of studying complex human development and on the
role played by genes in determining its course.”
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Perspectives%20on%20Psychological%20Science-2016-Turkheimer-24-8.pdf
I think the problem here is that we have been fooled by science before. Eugenics seemed so reasonable that in 1927 US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes fell for it. (“Three generations of imbeciles are enough”)
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
I once had a conversation with a ‘head-teacher’ who was running a very small alternative high school. The students were young people who for one reason or another were not in the regular high school. He told me that the biggest problem that his students had, was that their parents had not been able to assist them with their homework.
1. Apparently IQ shifts over time. “NONE OF THE ABOVE”
See: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/17/none-of-the-above
Perhaps the reason IQ increases over time is that we are seeing parents who are a little better able to help their children with their homework. (In the aggregate and with each generation.) Read at least the last 5 paragraphs, excluding the CORRECTION.
2. There are problems with modern studies – “The Truth Wears Off”
See: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wears-off
In the article ‘The Truth Wears Off’ the studies were initially replicable and only later were not replicable. That should be taken as a warning. Especially read the last 6 paragraphs.
Maybe the researchers should be a little reluctant to inflict their newfound knowledge on society at large. Lest just as the economists in the Great Recession, they find ourselves muttering, ‘Who could have known!”
I’m trying to keep up with Mike Kimel. For weeks he has been saying that we must face the “fact” that there are good and bad cultures. Now we must face the “fact” that there are good and bad genetics.
So which is it, nature or nurture? Or are they like peanuts and chocolate — two good tastes that go together. The genetics explains the “bad” cultures and races. I don’t think that these two hobby horses of Kimel are just a coincidence.
Bad cultures propagate bad genetics. Our government rewards the indigent and punishes the prudent. So the indigent have more children, and the prudent have fewer.
Joel,
1. I originally had the wrong link in the post. I have since corrected it.
2. Due to my error, critique you cite is therefore for the wrong paper. But the critique would apply regardless.
3. Go back and read the last paragraph of the article you cited. Turkheimer notes that relative to Plomin he thinks less will be explained by genes, but… he still asks where traits like extroversion will end up on the continuum from likelihood of getting a divorce (which he doesn’t think genetic research can answer, though folks like Plomin think otherwise) to Huntington’s disease, which is genetically determined. Maybe I am missing something but this isn’t an argument between a Hindu and a Catholic about the obligation people have toward cows but rather a polite disagreement between a Lubavitcher rebbe and a Satmar rebbe over the most comfortable hat to wear while strolling to shul on a brisk morning.
4. As Turkheimer notes more is being learned all the time. What we know will change.
5. I have been reading in the field and some practitioners seem to question his views. For example, I have seen it mentioned that some genetic conditions have obvious effects on intelligence or behavior (e.g., Down’s Syndrome on one hand, torsion dystonia, Gaucher’s and perhaps Tay Sachs pushing in the other direction)
Barkley,
A recent iteration of the (decent n, systematically collected over a large time period) Dunedin study (a topic for another post) shows us that something akin to the 80% rule applies to a range of disfunction, from violence to dropping out of school to becoming a thief to not providing for one’s children. More, and not surprisingly, having one disfunction is s predictor for having another. So in the end, a small share of the population is responsible for a big chunk of the social costs. Additionally, it seems with a bit of testing you can tell at an early age whether he or she or ze will have a dysfunctional outcome.
So… here’s how I think the left should respond: The goal should be to limit the interaction between those with tendencies toward dysfunction and everyone else. Keeping sheep and wolves far apart both protects the sheep and minimizes the need to harm the wolves to protect the sheep.
People with such dysfunctions are disproportionately represented among those who are poor. Additionally, we don’t want to inflict the dysfunctional poor on the non-dysfunctional poor. (They have enough problems already.)
So… public assistance programs should be constructed to allow the dysfunctional to self-select and self-segregate from those who aren’t dysfunctional. Example: two sets of housing programs, one geared toward people seeking to better themselves through training and education and one geared toward entertainment, where the latter also serves to keep those who select that choice permanently some distance from everyone else. That was on the fly. My plea is for this to be a topic that can be discussed.
EMichael,
Yes, there is a bit of overlap between the Nazis and what cognitive researchers believe. If that is enough to disgrace the research, make sure you also avoid other Nazi predilections. The Nazis also banned vivisection, developed freeways, were against tobacco and for welfare programs. Should we assume you are a Nazi because your views have some overlap with theirs on those issues? And I sure hope you have never been in a Volkswagen.
JimH,
We have been fooled about lots of things. The tragedy of the thalidomide kids in the 1960s doesn’t mean we should never approve new drugs. Even thalidomide is used to treat leprosy and some types of cancer.
Changes in IQ over time… reread the abstract I quoted in the OP.
BillB,
I don’t much like chocolate covered peanuts.
But to be clear, I have stated several times before, I am a citizenist. I want to develop policies that benefit my fellow citizens. I hope citizens of other countries also work to improve the lives of their fellow citizens but that isn’t for me to worry about. I also think, as the evidence shows, that some people are dysfunctional but that isn’t a good reason to encourage them to act on their dysfunctions or to bring in more people with the same or different dysfunctions.
Warren,
Some of the poor are simply unlucky. They should be given the opportunity to get out of poverty.
Daniel Becker,
If you starve and beat a kid and keep him locked in the dark, yes, the kid had no chance to live up to his/her potential. You need some floor on the quality of nurture for that. On the flip side, if you treat every kid exactly the same and give them the same starting point, it won’t be luck that determines which one is good at swimming, which one can sing an opera and which one wins the Nobel prize in physics.
So Mike:
“The goal should be to limit the interaction between those with tendencies toward dysfunction and everyone else. Keeping sheep and wolves far apart both protects the sheep and minimizes the need to harm the wolves to protect the sheep.
People with such dysfunctions are disproportionately represented among those who are poor. Additionally, we don’t want to inflict the dysfunctional poor on the non-dysfunctional poor. (They have enough problems already.)
So… public assistance programs should be constructed to allow the dysfunctional to self-select and self-segregate from those who aren’t dysfunctional. Example: two sets of housing programs, one geared toward people seeking to better themselves through training and education and one geared toward entertainment, where the latter also serves to keep those who select that choice permanently some distance from everyone else. That was on the fly. My plea is for this to be a topic that can be discussed.”
So, the dysfunctional are forever doomed and caught up repeating the same mistake over and over rather than attempt to break the circle? Maybe suggest eugenics to eliminate the problem? You are heading down this path. Segregate, isolate, and then eliminate.
“Some of the poor are simply unlucky.”
I prefer to consider myself BLESSED, not LUCKY.
Those of us who are so blessed are required to be a blessing to others. That means a personal commitment of the time, talent, and resources that God gave us, not the appropriation and redistribution of the time, talent, and resources God gave to others.
Mike,
I appreciate that you have attempted an answer to my question. But I must say that it is not obvious to me how one distinguishes the dysfunctional poor from the non-dysfunctional poor. Are you suggesting that we engage in housing segregation based on genetically testing people?
Warren,
I find your religiously based social Darwinism to be both un-Christian and totally nauseating. You are well-off because God blessed you? If I remember correctly Jesus said that “It is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”
One thing in that abstract really jumped out at me:
“The heritability of intelligence increases from about 20% in infancy to perhaps 80% in later adulthood.”
Wow, that’s a huge jump. Genes account only for a minor difference in the intelligence of infants, but a large difference in adults. It makes perfect sense if more intelligent parents have resources that they can provide to turn modestly more intelligent infants into much more intelligent adults. Otherwise, this result raises red flags about the design of the experiments.
Did these studies involve siblings assigned adoptive or foster parents at random, without experimental bias towards matching the intelligence of their birth parents? Did they blind the school systems involved to the races of the children? Did they isolate the children from societal stereotypes?
I am 100% that a big chunk of intelligence is inherited, but that rise between infancy and adulthood is awfully suggestive.
Yes, Barkley, I am well-off because God has blessed me. I did get get what I have through theft or fraud, so that leaves only God’s blessing as an explanation.
Mike Kimel,
I am much less concerned with the harm caused by any particular drug than I am about the potential harm caused by some social scientific theory.
I should have been clearer that when I mentioned changes in IQ over time, I was referring to a change in IQ between generations. Not a change in IQ that happened over the years in an individual’s life.
Read this quote for clarification. From: “None of the Above”
——————————————————— Start ———————————————————
“One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better.
Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter.”
——————————————————— End ———————————————————
See: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/17/none-of-the-above
So Dutch IQs in the 1980s were much better than Dutch IQs in the 1950s. Thus parents were getting more intelligent. And that phenomena was playing out around the world.
Barkley Rosser,
I am not suggesting genetic testing. I stated this:
People with dysfunctional tendencies generally have shorter time preferences. They are more likely to fail the marshmallow test. As I noted earlier, give people on public assistance two options or paths (and here I am grossly simplifying):
a) All funds go to food, shelter and job training
b) All funds go to food, shelter and entertainment
Those who pick option b just signaled that they fail the marshmallow test. Keep them away from those who pick option a to give the option a group a better chance of succeeding. Keep group b fed and entertained, but keep them far away. Think of it as cheaper than prison, where they choose to stay if they are entertained.
JimH,
I have mentioned Flynn in comments to posts three or four times in the past few months. I am quite familiar with his research. And I am quite familiar with his comments about there are some issues related to IQ that people claim to want to answered, and that could be answered through simple experiments, but which will never be funded. (Reason: nobody really wants the answers. We know what the answers are, but we want to pretend otherwise.)
The Flynn effect is best understood as raising the baseline level. Think putting gasoline in race cars. Cars don’t run without it. But once they have a full tank different cars run at different speeds. Moving different countries out of subsistence and ensuring that the kids who took IQ scores weren’t starving and had their vaccines is like making sure the gas tank has gasoline in it. It raises scores. The effect is limited though. There is some evidence that it topped out and may even have reversed in wealthy countries. (Just Google Flynn effect reversed.)
Kaleberg,
Actually, this is why I take this sort of experiment seriously. As the father of a first grader, I can explain it easily.
Take kids in pre-school. They have had limited time in their lives to learn skills. The floor is close to the ceiling. Even if one is noticeably smarter than the other, the “extra” skills the smart one has relative to her dimmer colleague are few. An extremely advanced pre-schooler might be able to read at a first grade level. A really slow one might have (more) trouble talking. And then, some kids develop slowly until age five or six. Einstein couldn’t talk until that age.
Now, take the two kids who are 23 where one is smart and one is dim. The smart one graduated with a double major in math and physics, is going for a doctorate in engineering, and does consulting on the side. The dim one dropped out of high school, or if he is really stupid, he is in the process of getting a master’s in education and spouting some nonsense about intersectionality and appropriation.The obvious difference between the two kids is much, much greater as the kids get older.
TLDR…. the difference between a tenth percentile and a ninetieth percentile 23 year old is huge. The difference between a tenth percentile and a ninetieth percentile 2 year old or 3 year old is not so apparent.
As to how this was measured…. as I said, this isn’t new or controversial. I picked this study because it was a good summary. But, from the abstract I quoed:
Note also that there are other large scale tests, as the Pinker quote I mentioned above alludes or the Dunedin study I mentioned.
run
Allow people to opt into the education/training path at any point and problem solved. Some people do manage to outgrow their “wild phase.” But in the meanwhile, if someone is failing the marshmallow test, do you want them to disrupt other people’s chance of getting out of poverty?
When wearing my landlord hat, I spent a lot of time in working class neighborhoods looking for properties to buy and rehab. I found that it is important not just to look at a prospective house, but also the entire neighborhood. It is very easy to go an extra block or two and end up on the wrong side of the tracks. In my experience, the difference between a well kept working class neighborhood and a neighborhood on its way to becoming a slum is whether people are blaring music really loud from their porch somewhere on the block. (We won’t buy a house where that sort of behavior is taking place.) People who do that prevent their neighbors from sleeping, their neighbor’s kids from studying, etc. So yes, there are people who will self-segregate for short term fun, and developing a way to allow them to self-segregate reduces negative externalities tremendously.
Mike:
At 5 years old were you capable of making the choices necessary to succeed in life? Maybe you are exceptional. I was not and I did come from a large family which was not overwhelmed with $dollars. The cycle is broken with the young and the young of the immigrants. The young go beyond the parents when, when, when given the chance to further. If you cut them off the same as what segregation did, does, and still exists into the future in less obvious ways then you have doomed the young and the cycle repeats itself.
Don’t tell me about the city, I grew up in the city of Chicago and went to public schools with those who you would cast adrift. You just did your growing up in a different country. I did mine in Chicago pre-Vietnam, the burning of Chicago, and the Days of Rage. There are reasons why much of this happened and you are trampling down a very similar path which provoked people to push away from the table.
@ Mike,
“I have been reading in the field and some practitioners seem to question his views. For example, I have seen it mentioned that some genetic conditions have obvious effects on intelligence or behavior (e.g., Down’s Syndrome on one hand, torsion dystonia, Gaucher’s and perhaps Tay Sachs pushing in the other direction)”
I, too, have been reading in the field. You see, my PhD is in genetics. 35 years ago. I’ve authored or co-authored nearly 100 papers in genetics and molecular biology that have been cited over 5000 times. I’ve also reviewed hundreds of manuscripts and hundreds of grant proposals on genetics and molecular biology. Finally, I’ve trained 7 PhD students, taught over 100 graduate students and thousands of medical students about genetics and molecular biology.
Yes, there are many single gene traits (Fragile X, Tuberous Sclerosis among them) that feature mental deficiency. Those are trivial examples of heritability of intelligence.
Most people don’t have those conditions. The point of the article I linked to was that, in the range that most people are discussing , heritability is weak. Moreover, like height, weight, and other quantitative traits, regression to the mean is the norm. Ergo, breeding a master race for intelligence will take many generations, and the price will be things like poor dentition, bad spines, heart disease, etc. Just look at dog breeds.
What experience with genetics actually teaches us is the benefits of heterosis, and the penalties of inbreeding depression.
Joel,
Where did I say anything about breeding a master race (whether for intelligence or whatever other trait)? Even assuming it could be done it would take generations. If it could be done, perhaps it will be done by CRISPR much sooner in any case.
Everything I discussed upthread is about here and now. I want to alleviate the plight of the poor who want to work their way out of poverty here and now. As to those who are dysfunctional, perhaps we can not only shield others from their criminal behavior, perhaps we can save them from fates like jail. I threw out self-selection, isolation and entertainment as a possible mechanism. Is that a perfect approach? Obviously not. But, without patting myself on the back, this I am not familiar with anyone suggesting policies intended to make people better off that account for innate differences that exist in the tendency toward dysfunction. Well, except for those that come from the hatred-oriented crowd, and the point of this post is that we need alternatives to that. Sooner or later we won’t be able to pretend these differences don’t exist.
I don’t have your expertise but I understand that intelligence is usually more complex and nobody quite understands it. Yet. But a decade from now things may be different. In the meantime, yes, there is regression to the mean, but even with that, the smarter kids tend to be the offspring of the smarter parents. The opposite is also true.
One other thing… I also mentioned diseases that seem to be associated with increases in intelligent. One of the first papers I came across in the subject, a few years ago, is a 1970 paper finding an association between torsion dystonia and high IQ. http://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(70)91848-9/abstract Again… most people don’t have those diseases.
I understand that Gaucher’s disease seems to show an even greater effect.
Could somebody provide a plain English rephrasing of those five important implications? Here’s my shot:
i – ? (babies inherit 20% of their intelligence, adults inherit 80% of theirs? How does that make sense?)
ii – intelligence is 60% nature and 30% nurture.
iii – like marries like is truer for intelligence than for other characteristics.
iv – intelligence is something worth breeding for.
v – intelligence amplifies other positive characteristics to make them more effective.
Welcome to AB. First comments always go to moderation.
I’ve been wonder since Mr. Kimel’s first post on his culture selection topic (where he began with crime stats of white on white and black on black and black on white and white on black crime) when he was going to get around to the “intelligence” and “genetics” issue.
It’s always one of the points that is brought into the discussion when “culture”… read this as race, ethnicities, religions mores, etc. are used to justify selection of “better” people or “worse”. people. It never fails and I’ve been seeing this for decades.
There are even “scientists” in academic institutions who do “research” showing conclusively that race is the strongest general indicator of intelligence. I say ‘scientists” and “research” in quote marks only because there’s no science and the research is pre-selected data..
Here’s the problem though. The human population is normally distributed in whatever measures we want to make about human beings. Intelligence is one of these. If you follow the idea that we should select humans for their intelligence then the outgrowth is eugenics in some form or another….
Who among humans is the authority on which of other humans are to be ‘selected’ .. for any human attribute, including some measure of what one wants or decides to use as a measure of “intelligence”?
Should it be by a majority consensus of some group or “commission” or whatever “group”. If so which group should that be? Who among the human being’s population should select that “group”?
Maybe the selection criteria should be intelligence + height + race (or eye color, or hand size). Or maybe it should be selection by whose god they worship or believe in.
Gee, maybe science (legitimate science) will figure out why some people conservatives and others liberal.. and then we can select the right set of parents or genes in a dish to “purify” the human race to one type or the other over time (or by laws). I mean if we want everybody to be mutually agreed on anything .. .like which immigrant cultures to allow into the country.
Anyway, Mr. Kimel is on mark and true to form… not the least bit surprising. He’d get around to the topic sooner or later.
Longtooth,
I knew based on experience that you would make a statement that had two components to it:
1. It would include some comment contradicting a bit of data or evidence shown in the post
2. It would act as if I was making a statement that I did not make
For 1, you state:
The abstract I quoted states:
So right there off the bat is an example – psychiatric disorders – that are not normally distributed for whatever measure we want to make about human beings. It shouldn’t be difficult for even you to come up with other examples.
As to 2, the selection mechanism I provided was a self-selection process based on the marshmallow test. I noted it is less harsh than prison, which is the alternative selection process that we already use.
“EMichael,
Yes, there is a bit of overlap between the Nazis and what cognitive researchers believe. If that is enough to disgrace the research, make sure you also avoid other Nazi predilections”.
And then somehow the question is whether I am a Nazi.
Falls right in line with Obama tapping Trump’s phones.
R Clayton,
Mostly right. As to your question… Kaleberg had the same question. My answer above was this:
Run,
To expand… from observation, I would say there are two types of poor neighborhoods. There are the kind that many kids manage to get out of, and the kind that few kids escape. The latter are typically full of people willing to impose negative externalities on others. Loud music at all hours correlates with graffiti which correlates with crime. To organize my thoughts:
1. I think reducing negative externalities is, in general, a good thing and it is something I wrote about many times over the years.
2. I think the poor are least able to insulate themselves from the negative externalities imposed by the dysfunction of others
3. I think some of these externalities can kill a kid’s chances in life.
4. On the other hand, dysfunction is most prevalent in poor communities since people with dysfunctions have a hard time earning a living, and dysfunctions are hereditary to some extent
5. Item 4 just means the non dysfunctional poor deal with more dysfunction than non dysfunctional rich and they have less resources to insulate themselves
6. Finding ways to help insulate the non dysfunctional poor from dysfunction is a vital social issue.
Now… you cannot save everyone. Lord knows society has tried, or at least spent a lot of money at it.
So save the kids who aren’t the cause of the negative externalities, who don’t bring others down. That is both low hanging fruit and a focus on the kids who “deserve it.”
I am not sure what the intent of the original post is. It seems to be about constructing a eugenics-of-choice where we post the rules for a “what is your intelligence” game, and them that fit the profile get the prize and them that don’t get punished. And we construct this game because if we don’t do it based on some “rational criteria”, some “other” will do it badly, or will not be as morally upstanding as we are.
The problem for any discussion of intelligence as a trait assumes a context, in our case most likely an anglo-hetero-male-economic context that is very useful in the USA cultural envelope. And that is because there can be no “rational” approach to culling the herd. Some think we are so poor as a nation that we cannot afford to invest repeatedly in our citizens (or immigrants). I think this makes them disposable, but I may be misreading the intent. Some think that we should not invest in citizens (or immigrants) because they make choices that are different than we make (even though they may be highly appropriate for survival in their environment).
If you say my only choice is to choose who is sent to the room with no exit, then I will say no one goes. And I will stand with those who are being sent every time over the polite elites who would send them…those same elites who will express appropriate regrets about the “difficult choices” that had to be made.
As a society we have become quite good at concentrating advantage, hard to imagine any child of privilege ending up in the wrong queue. “Rational criteria” seem to favor the favored…what an odd thing.
Craig,
You have hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial head.
Craig,
Really? Where in the post, or my comments to it, do you get that from?
Ya gotta love this one by Mr. Kimel:
“Those who pick option b just signaled that they fail the marshmallow test. Keep them away from those who pick option a to give the option a group a better chance of succeeding. Keep group b fed and entertained, but keep them far away. Think of it as cheaper than prison, where they choose to stay if they are entertained.” @March 3, 8:29 pm
Can you say Gulag?: How about Reservations? or maybe just “residence camps” for entertainment lovers — or whatever else one wants to use as a discriminatory agent?.
Here’s another of Mr. Kimel’s beauties (@ March 3, 3:40 pm)
” But to be clear, I have stated several times before, I am a citizenist. I want to develop policies that benefit my fellow citizens.”
But there are two unknowns with Mr Kimel’s declaration:
1. How does Mr. Kimel define what “benefit” means to each “citizen” or is it just what Mr. Kimel deems it to mean?
2. What about our fellow citizens who prefer “entertainment” benefits for example? Substitute any other citizen preferred benefit for “entertainment”. What citizen’s count for more or less in Mr. Kimel’s preferences or his value system? Should some citizen’s be weighted more than others or should it be by majority of all citizens? And if the majority changes (read preceding the US civl war for example) does that mean the “benefits” he prefers changes too? Maybe the “Aryan” citizens? What about the citizen’s who prefer pot be legal? or alternatively those that prefer it remain illegal and banned? How about those citizens that are LGBT?
Mr. Kimel is letting the reader define for themselves what “citizen” means and what “benefits” are deemed “beneftical” I’m reminded of our (many find to be the esteemed) former decider in robes — Scalia, or the still sitting robed pontificator .. good ‘ol Clarence baby.
There is no taboo around this science that I am aware of. It gets studied and published pretty routinely. Hate has nothing really to do with it.
Mr. Kimel @March 4, 3:32 pm, response to Run:
What are sources of “negative externalities” and where to they coime from?
What constitutes externalities that are “negative’ in your view / value system?
Indeed, what makes the “negatives”, what-ever you deem them to be,, also deemed to be “externalities”? The general definition of “externalities” as I understand them are conditions imposed by events not in one’s own control (.. of course then one has to then define what “own” actually means which depends on the context as well as what one believes are “legitimate own” control). For example a business owner is not in control of the Fed’s policies, therefore the Fed is deemed an “externality” for that business’s operations. However neither is congress in direct control or the executive office of the Fed, so some economists view the Fed’s policies as “externalities”… either positive or negative depending on how those policies are expected to affect a given business’s present or future profitability’s.
In the U.S. OPEC is viewed as an externality and when they increase output by fiat and thus also drop oil prices, it’s a “negative externality” for oil dependent competitors who don’t belong to OPEC’s membership, but a “positive externality” for consumer gasoline and energy prices. The reverse is then also true.
On the other hand OPEC members don’t consider OPEC an externality because of course they control it. And what those member deem “positive” condition’s outsiders in competition with them consider to be “negative externalities”.
This is just to illustrate that your own views of what you deem to be “negative externalities” of poor neighborhoods are pretty interesting.
By deeming them to be “externalities” you clearly then have decided you (or your tribe) aren’t in control of those neighborhoods.
By deeming those things you find not to be conforming to your own value system (or your tribe’s) benefits as “negative” then you’ve pre-ordained some behaviors as “negative”.
From this and your other statements elsewhere you have decided that these “negative externalities” .. however you deem them to be “negative” and “external” should be isolated from those you deem to be “positive internalities”
What I’m waiting for next is how you think they should be isolated (made not to have influence)? You’re headed straight down the “eugenics is best” path whether you’ve figured this out yet for yourself or not. You’ve been headed down that path from the get-go though.. you may or may not have understood this from the outset, but then that just attests to your lack of rational and logical deductive reasoning capacity.
Mr. Kimel’s current pot topic is entitled:
“Today’s Taboo, And Where to From Here?”
The Taboo referred to is clearly that of modifying humanity be the use of eugenics or selective isolationism of those human traits and attributes someone deems to be non-beneficial. It wasn’t a Taboo in practice as conducted by the National Socialists. It isn’t a Taboo for other tribes conducting genocides
It isn’t Taboo by the White Supremacists or by Breitbart’s adherents though they don’t say “eugenics is best” outright or propose to round up and send those with the attributes they find objectionable to a Gulag (not yet anyway.. but I’m waiting for that to happen).
Nobody I know or can imagine would call research of those inherited traits and protein combinations in dna that in whole or part produce or enable human traits and attributes or their absence a taboo subject matter UNLESS it was identified with or proposed as a means and method of modifying the human race or some specified segment of it to remake it into what one might deem to be more beneficial to a specified group or humanity in general.
Research looks for and tries to identify genetic markers for inherited cancers, Alzheimer’s, and several other diseases with apparent ties to inherited traits. There’s much research in how the brain processes information, and very much of this research tries to identify and differentiate those which may be environmental from those which may be inherited But none of that medical and scientific research or their published reports are proposed to be or described as TABOO.
They aren’t taboo simply because they don’t and aren’t associated with means and method of selectively notifying the human race or some specific subset’s of them by selective dna or eliminating those humans with selected dna from propagating them by procreative methods.
I read a very recent overview article on new research which proposes that gene therapy may enable combating / eliminating sickle cell anemia in people in which it is present. Nobody and no other articles that referred to the original research even remotely implied that the subject was a Taboo.
It only becomes a Taboo when research or reports imply or describe these things as a means of modifying humans in general by selective geneology… “breeding” or by preventing “breeding” to prevent propagation of “undesired” traits..
“Undesired” traits in humans is not a universally agreed upon condition… of course, and never will be. Thus those “undesired” traits are those deemed so by some group or another that wants those traits eliminated … and then one must ask the question whose benefit does that actually serve?
So far what empirics based on historical facts finds is that it’s one race or one ethnicity or one religion or one “culture” that wants to eliminate opposition and impediments to its own benefits.
That’s what Mr. Kimel is actually proposing in one form of another.. hence he titles his post on the subject a “Taboo” subject. Quite obviously it get’s readers attention — much to AB’s advertising income advantage.
But what Mr. Kimel proposes by calling it a Taboo is that he’s actually come to the conclusion (either inferred or by extension) that this is what’s “best” for humanity… or some sub-set of it.. it’s not yet clear which subset he deems worthy. in his own view of “right”, “wrong” “good” and “bad”. Isolating the “bad” from the “good”.. at a “lower cost than using prison’s” (approximately his words). There are a lot of people who agree with him in principle, but they can’t figure out practically how to pull this off with half the nation being liberal and opposed to their conservative (alt-right?) view of what’s “good” and what’s “bad”.
Just a quicky… I’m also reminded of the taboo of inter-racial marriage and by direct inference creating a denigration of whites by blacks in their offspring. It was only in 1972 that SCOTUS lifted this Taboo.
So Kimel’s ancestors were idiot Breitbart parrots. Or there was a serious genetic mutation.
Eric377,
The TLDR version of the post is this: science says intelligence is strongly heritable, and the rest of us should take it damn seriously.
That was followed by a barrage of comments that this was the equivalent of what the Nazis did, of ethnic cleansing, of wanting to build a master race, of the Southern Strategy and of racism. Can you think of a non-taboo topic that, when brought up, gets compared to all those things?
Once upon a time it was taboo to bring up immigration restrictions.
Is Mr. Kimel a proponent of Dr. John Tanton, or his organizations? :Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, Center for Immigration Studies, Immigration Reform Law Institute, or U.S. English.
Or are you familiar and perhaps a proponent of Ehrlich’s organization Zero Population Growth (aka ZPG, & Population Connection)?. Are you familiar with the views and writings of Jared Taylor, (white nationalist publisher of a journal called the American Renaissance, and who also uses the term “cultural” issues as cover for his racial views?.
Have you read The Immigration Invasion (co-authored by Tanton)? How about The Camp of the Saints which is one of Bannon’s favorites?
I only ask because much or most or all in fact of what you’ve been writing and proposing in different forms come right out Tanton’s and Ehrlich’s and Taylors organizations… past and present.
Ref: http://chrishayes.org/articles/keeping-america-empty/
..
Mr. Kimel,
Perhaps you can explain in detail why you beliefe the “rest of us should take it damned seriously”?:
I’m referring to your statement @March 4, 9:42 pm
” The TLDR version of the post is this: science says intelligence is strongly heritable, and the rest of us should take it damn seriously.
Longtooth,
1. I’ve heard of Ehlrich. I haven’t read his material. Ditto Jared Taylor. Have not heard the name John Tanton. (Don’t know if you put the “Dr” in front of his name or not. As I mentioned in a post once before, I find the practice of referring to someone as “Dr So and So” to be obnoxious unless its a nickname. I don’t watch basketball but the best example I can come up with of it doesn’t sound obnoxious is “Dr. J.”)
2. “Perhaps you can explain in detail why you beliefe the “rest of us should take it damned seriously”?”
Sure. But you won’t get it. One big reason is that it involves the welfare of children. But from past comment threads, where you kept defending FGM and bacha bazi as being OK because they are part of someone else’s culture, it is clear that you don’t place all that much value on the welfare of children.
It also affects economic growth. But again, you seem to value maintaining growth inhibiting practices if they can be defined as part of a country’s culture, so I doubt you’d get that either. So I get that you don’t get it. I was hoping a few others might.
Longtooth,
I should note that I have seen some stuff on American Renaissance though not by Taylor himself. From what I can tell, he puts up videos and I generally don’t have the patience to sit through someone’s video. IIRC I haven’t seen an essay by him, and I never read any of his books. But the writings and views on American Renaissance and similar sites are concerning enough for me to write posts like this one. As I note in the post:
Like with any group, there seem to be a range of opinions about “what to do” on sites like those, but for the most part, they advocate (and American Renaissance does it nicely and politely) outcomes that I don’t support, namely that different ethnic groups should not mix, which is to say, they shouldn’t live in the same geographic regions. I think Robert Mugabe and Jacob Zuma might agree with them, but that’s for another post.
The problem is, every human being is different. Some possess traits that generate growth. Some don’t. Some are born with tendencies that are more likely to make them a Nobel laureate, and some are born with tendencies that are more likely to make them serial killer. Being able to tell the two sets of traits apart matters.
But.. the polite thing to do is to pretend we’re all the same, all equally likely to win a Nobel Prize, run the 100 meters in under 10 seconds, commit petty crimes, or kill 42 people in our basement. It violates norms to pretend otherwise, or that we can tell at age 2 who falls into which category. The folks on those sites, on the other hand, they relish what the science says. They read it a different way than it is intended to read, I might add, sort of the way EMichael or Beverly over here twist everything they read to fit their narrative. And their narrative is “that group is inherently dumb, that other group is inherently evil, etc.”
Me? I want an honest discussion of what science says. When a guy like Flynn says there are experiments he cannot run because nobody wants to know the answers those experiments would provide, it implies to many people that the haters are right. Ditto the Pinker tweet above. After all, the haters claim they already have the answer, and for the rest of us, the topic is a taboo. Well… not engaging is a way to lose the argument, to let the folks who do engage set policy once they figure out the message that works. I don’t have the patience to watch videos, but I understand that Taylor is polite and articulate. Eventually someone polite and articulate will find the way to craft their message that does resonate. And the center-left, and the center, and the center-right will lose the debate they aren’t in. And it is a debate that I think the center would win easily if they joined it, because “black people should live over there, white people over here, and Asians over there” or worse, “let’s have a race war” are fairly negative outcomes.
Keeping your head in the sand doesn’t fix problems.
Y’know, Kimel if this was not just another version of the same meme you have preached for months, your holier than thou “we need to find the facts” in this area might be listened to by people.
I’m not one of them.
EMichael,
It’s a miracle! You are able to learn something!!! For months I’ve been stating that everything I am putting out there is part of one consistent theme, and for months you and Beverly keep accusing me of continuously changing my story.
As to the holier than thou attitude… you’ve called me all sorts of names over the past few months. I would submit that the holier than thou attitude is yours.
We just differ on what your “consistent theme” is.
EMichael,
Don’t sell yourself short. In six months to a year you’ll come around on what the consistent theme is, though we won’t agree whether its right. Six months to a year after that, we’ll both agree the theme is correct. Going from finger pointing to enlightenment takes time.
EMichael and I do not dispute that everything you’re putting out there is part of one consistent theme, Kimel. To the contrary, we’ve been saying for months now that everything you’ve been putting out there is part of one consistent theme.
The inconsistency is decidedly not in the theme. It’s in the fact that when accused of pushing the actual theme you’re pushing, you deny that that is your theme. And that you based one or another wholier-than-thou (not a typo) argument on a statistic or fact or sociological claim that you did in fact use to support your absolutely consistent theme and that is either inaccurate, or utterly irrelevant, or lacks any acknowledgment that there are significant other facts that correlate in time with the statistic you claim is THE CAUSE OF … whatever.
These happen again and again and again and again.
A related hallmark of yours is that you misunderstand, or claim to misunderstand, or conflate basic straightforward statements by EMichael, Longtooth, Coberly, Joel, me and other critics in these threads. E.g.: that we’re disputing that you’ve been putting out here a consistent theme for months, cuz, well, there’s no difference between, on the one hand, saying that you’ve been putting out here for (many) months a virulently white ethno-nationalist theme that, I learned a few days ago from an article summarizing some Breitbart article from a year or two ago, are taken virtually verbatim from those articles, and, on the other, saying that when confronted directly about the nature of your theme you outright lie about what its actual nature is and also deny that you’ve said things you explicitly said.
I do want to emphasis: Your posts here are virtually identical to articles by a leading white ethno-nationalist published on Breitbart during Bannon’s tenure as editor there, and in the months shortly before Trump announced his candidacy. The article I read said that some of what Trump said in his announcement came directly from those articles.
So Dan Crawford is effectively playing the role of Steve Bannon on a blog that still bills itself as left-of-center. Whether he understands that or not, I wouldn’t know.
WTF makes you think that six months to a year will change my thoughts on your basic meme?
BTW, that six months to a year thing scares me as much as the three years, 10 months thing does about trump. And that’s saying something.
Beverly,
You keep stating something along the lines of “virulently white ethno-nationalist.” This despite the fact that consistently, in my posts on cultures that work well, I keep mentioning (because they keep showing up in the data) Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. I’ve also mentioned Ashkenazi culture a few times in a very positive light. These are not groups that the virulently white ethno-nationalist organizations favor. And this isn’t the first or the third or the fifth time I’ve pointed this out. It may be closer to the twelfth or fifteenth. And yet you keep stating something pejorative which not only is demonstrably untrue, it has been shown to be untrue on its face multiple times. Why?
Mr. Kimel,
You made an interesting statement that gives critical insight to your basic premise contained in your series of posts … e.g. the theme .
You said:
“The problem is, every human being is different. Some possess traits that generate growth. Some don’t. Some are born with tendencies that are more likely to make them a Nobel laureate, and some are born with tendencies that are more likely to make them serial killer. Being able to tell the two sets of traits apart matters.”
The key phrase which provides insight is “the problem is…” which refers to the genetically inheritable traits.
However the state of the art in being able to distinguish between various human traits by genetic markers is a probabilistic one… 60%, 70%, 50%, etc. of a given population or group. As the article you cited (and I read it all) and many others I’m familiar by having watched the progress over the years state quite emphatically, there are many factors that interact and inter-relate.. some additive (both positive and negative adders) some independent and uncorrelated.
You seem to focus on “intelligence” markers and evaluations .. and the article you cited was focused on and predominantly about “intelligence” heritability or lack thereof. For example, those who are considered genius (IQ > 150) are especially noted as being outside the normal distribution… hence no predicted by any means from heredity now available, no tto mention that only a tiny fraction of humans are in that lofty category.
Further, the same article (and others) state the many of the adverse traits of humans in the extremes are also not part of a normal distribution… they are unpredictable by genetic makers.
So the full normal distribution of humans exclude these two extremes and in-as-much as they comprise only the tiniest fraction of humans they are irrelevant to any relationships of human traits in any population of humans found to have probabilistically inheritable traits.
But you state your opinion that the variability in populations of intelligence is “a problem”!!! .. and by direct implication the variability in this includes populations of all other inheritable human traits.
The most prevalent and virtually unanimous opinion of science o the subject of human variability of inheritable traits is that the more the merrier …. that is to say, it’s precisely huge the variability among humans genetic make-up that has enabled humans to survive and extend their dominance on the globe. The less the variability the more negative survival attributes become more and more dominant in the human population. BTW this is well and fully documented in things we humans have done to minimize variability — dog breeders have been increasingly facing this problem, for just one very, very common example.
But you find the variability of intelligence (or perhaps you’re thinking of some other inheritable traits. it’s not at all clear or specific in your comments or note) to be “a problem”..
WTF are you opining that it’s “a problem”? Do you even have a clue what the f…. you’re talking about. The only people who think this is “a problem” are those that I listed … the “population control” groups.. the “cultural” and “race” based immigration control groups. The white supremacists (both the closeted ones and KKK types). The Steve Bannon’s and the like who take their que from these “other” humans denigrating the “superior”r white humans by cross breeding and “assimilating” their inherited traits into the pure “superior” whites. and thus the denigration of the “advanced” peoples, “nations”, “race” and “culture”..
I am unaware of any legitimate science of human genealogical research that has concluded or even remotely implied by inferences or “reading between the lines” that there “may” be some racial or cultural or ethic populations that are “inferior” in any aspect of measures of human traits.
I think from your subject note in this specific thread and it’s title line that you believe the reason that legitimate science doesn’t draw or cite such population, race, ethnic traits as not have the “superior” traits is because its “taboo”… not socially or politically acceptable.
But what history of science on the subject teaches is that it was not too long ago that it wasn’t at all a “taboo”… before and at the time of the Scopes trial for just one citation. Science has come quite a bit further since then… legitimate sciences of heritable traits and measures of intelligence… and there is no longer any scientific merit to believing that different racial groups are probabilistically inclined to higher or lower levels of intelligence distributions or any other “superior” inheritable traits.
But you appear to believe there are such population based differences in the distributions of inheritable intelligence traits — based on the simple fact that you cited and posted a scientific research paper o the topic. and then opined that its “a problem” and then also said ” The TLDR version of the post is this: science says intelligence is strongly heritable, and the rest of us should take it damn seriously.”
When I asked for you for detailed specifics on WHY “the rest of us should take it damn seriously” you responded (@March 5, 7:31 am) with nothing but single gross and unsubstantiated claim in one sentence That’s not specificity and provided no detail at all. You avoided answer the question. Why is that?.
Specifically your response was:: “One big reason is that it involves the welfare of children”.. How is that pray tell? Please provide detail and specifics. Support your claims with scientific foundations and public linkable citations.. Then do the same for all the other reasons “the rest of us should “take it damned seriously”.
Perhaps scientific foundations isn’t your thing though…. but then why would you decide to post on a scientific topic?
Meanwhile,
I am wondering how North and South Koreans have such different genetic traits?
Oh, does that work for East and West Germans also?
Longtooth,
Either there is a benefit to introducing genes for cystic fibrosis, ALS, Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, Epidermodysplasia verruciformis or Proteus Syndrome into a population that doesn’t have them, or your statement, at a minimum, needs some serious rephrasing.
If I may give this the thought you chose not to apply before writing it out, I think that you are mistaking cause and effect. Introducing bugs into software doesn’t add functionality to software. But adding functionality often introduces new bugs. In terms of population genetics, (and Lord knows I am not an expert) I would imagine one can say that adding variability that increases the odds an individual who has it will survive increases the survivability of the population. But that is a very, very different thing from your statement. Not all variation adds to survival. My understanding (again, not an expert) is that most mutations are deleterious, after all.
Additionally, as to this statement:
I would have thought it was obvious that was stated in refutation of the
In other words… the idea that black people should live over there and white people over here and asian people in that other place and no mixing should take place is illogical because (the problem, as in the problem with this argument advanced by people who I have stated I don’t agree with) is that it assumes all white people are the same, all black people are the same, etc.
So you then went on a multi-paragraph attack on what you misunderstood and which I don’t feel it necessary to comment on.
But then you arrive here:
Here’s one example I remember reading
Read that last sentence again.
As to whatever else you need to find, spend a couple of minutes on google.
EMichael,
How often have I pointed out that culture matters?
As I noted above when discussing the Flynn effect:
Longtooth,
I will save you the effort of responding to my comment. See my next post which I just put up.
Mr. Kimel,
You stated (@March 5, 1:33pm in response to Bev:
“…. fact that consistently, in my posts on cultures that work well, I keep mentioning (because they keep showing up in the data) Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. I’ve also mentioned Ashkenazi culture a few times in a very positive light.”
Of cultures that work well… you include the Ashkenazi Jews above.
I have a few questions related to your statement.
1. What criteria are you using for “work well”? Are you using statistically founded criteria for the entire population of Ashkenazi Jews specific “culture” “working well” (defined by your criteria) or just one of their subgroups? The Ashkenazi Jews are well established by scientific data (genealogical studies) as a specific ethnic group among humans with male dominant ancestry in the Middle East, but the female ancestry comes from where–ever the males migrated throughout Eastern and Western Europe.
2. Their “culture” is a religiously based one.. differing in religiously defined practices from the other Jewish cultures in several aspects. Which aspects are you using to differentiate the Ashkenazi Jews from the other Jewish ethic groups that give you reason to cite the Ashkenazi “culture” as one that “works well”.?
3. According to my light reading on the several studies done on the Ashkenazi, the most prominent one cites the basis for specific mental acuities as having been the result of externalities that excluded the Jews from most occupations except finance… and this simply led to genetic selections that improved on the mental skills that enabled livelyhoods to be improved. with succeeding generations.
4. The tighter genetic group though also increased the prevalence of inheritable diseases far more prevalent and even specific to the Ashkenazi than any other sub-group or ethnicities among humans. This is not new news though…. since it’s been clear for a long time that the smaller the genetic pool the more adverse genetic conditions become prevalent. Is this part of your consideration of “cultures” that “work well”?
Let me make an observation… genetic inherence of the Ashkenazi are from males who migrated from the ME millennia ago, intermarried with the indigenous populations of females in the regions of migrations, and which offspring then dominantly married within the Ashkenazi group.. because they were widely discriminated against by laws and their religious identity and practices (solely because they were not Christian). They were legally not entitled to participate in most occupations and thus were forced to obtain their livelihood in those that required numeric and verbal skills.. e.g. money lending, accounting. etc. This narrowness of allowable occupations produced a genetic selection for those types of intelligence that benefited that survival livelihood over 80 – 100 generations. The Ashkenazi still marry within the sub-group though presently to a lesser extent and so retain their religious identities, practices, and inheritable traits, including those that are adverse traits.
The Ashkenazi Jews are spread across multiple political and geographic environments … S. & N America, Eastern and Western western Europe (from Greece to the Baltic), and the middle east at least…I’m not sure to what extent in Asia, however.
Their entire ethnic sub-group and thus culture is a direct result of and is continuously based upon on their specific religious laws and practices emanating from (and retained) from the time of the 2nd Temple… when the laws related to male marriages and conversions of their non-Jewish wife selections to Judaism became mandatory and began to be strictly enforced.
Their genetic identity, which defines them as an ethnic sub-group, btw, is highly diverse in their maternal line (thus 50% inherited from a multiplicity of race,ethnic groups, and inheritable intelligence over at least 100 and more generations.
Thus what you refer to as a culture of Ashkenazi Jews is a combination of several races, adherence to a relatively quite strict religious rule regards marriage and conversions to Judaism, and persists because of it in multiple political and geographic environments over millennia, enabled during 1000 years in eastern, southern, western, and northern Europe to the Baltic by legal and enforced restrictions on allowable occupations which then promoted inheritable intelligence to the math and verbal skill sets.
So isn’t the “culture” of Ashkenazi Jews simply the random chance selection of a variety of different factors stemming from their earliest evolution of polytheism to a single polytheistic god (one deemed to be superior for whatever reasons) and then promoted later to be the “only god” and thus the 2nd religion to have a monotheistic religion?
Weren’t these selections of several different non-cultural factors purely a result of random chance that resulted in a specific combination that you now refer to as a “culture”?
And would it not be the most reasonable to conclude that every “culture” of your choosing is similarly derived from random chance events which promoted the culture to survive over time in some aspect of what your refer to as “culture”?
EMichael submitted that North and South Koreans are not differentiable by genetics, nor are East and West Germans (in his examples).
Is not the only difference between N. and S. Korea purely a direct result of might-makes-right conflict which was and remains unsettled in stalemate? Is it not concluded therefore that the difference has nothing to do with inheritance of human traits nor with differences in culture, but purely a difference due to might-makes-right … which happens to be due only to the superiority of U.S.’s military forces and subsequent economic favoritism by a capitalist economic system which was the U.S.’s entire reason for using it’s military force in Korea in the first place, rather than a result of culture or inheritable human traits?
I could bring up Singapore’s ancestral genetic inheritance… which is dominated totally and overwhelmingly by southern Chinese immigration form the time of the English’s first settlement / port at that location (1819). What “culture” are you referring to in Singapore? It only became an autonomous nation-state in 1965. At that time Singapore had “70 percent of [its] households lived in badly overcrowded conditions, and a third of its people squatted in slums on the city fringes. Unemployment averaged 14 percent, GDP per capita was US$516, and half of the population was illiterate”. The only reason it came out of that mess was by the formation of it’s governmental Economic Development Board.. a political creation. Culture and genetics had nothing to do with it.
Perhaps in fact you are referring to a political environment which took advantage of it’s geographic port location (which the English recognized long ago as marine navigation strategic and economic benefit… which is why it exists as “Singapore” in the modern sense at all). So it’s growth is a pure result of using it’s geographic attributes (it’s only natural resource) in a dictatorial police state that passed as a “democracy” only because it was a Pacific outpost to counter Chinese Communism on the mainland.. a purely political entity.
Just BTW, when I was there last in the early 2000’s the entire “technical” business’s were manned by low wage imported labor by Malay girls (16-25) bussed in before their shift, and bussed back to Malaysia after every shift. And I mean “low” wage.
But, a simple Toyota (not one that was imported to the US from Japan) was a $50k dollar equivalent purchase for Singaporeans with an annual “road tax” that all but precluded only the ultra-wealthy could afford a private vehicle… an import duty based price to limit vehicles on the small island (though the state owned and controlled public transportation system, including taxi services didn’t have to pay those duties).
So what “culture” are you referring to in Singapore? .
Mr. Kimel,
Your response to me @March 5, 6:08 pm, cited the study of Hurricane Katina refugee children reenrolled in Houstin and other Lousiana shools. Ref: http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Katrina_IKS.pdf
For the life of me, and I read most of the study, I can’t figure out how that study in any shape, manner what-so-ever has anything to do with inheritable intelligence or culture. There is absolutely nothing in that study related to intelligence… not even mentioned. I used word search for “IQ” and “Intelligence”
So your citation didn’t even remotely address the assertion you made nor the question I asked of it . You failed to answer the simplest question. Try again.
On the other item… where I stated
“The most prevalent and virtually unanimous opinion of science o the subject of human variability of inheritable traits is that the more the merrier …. that is to say, it’s precisely huge the variability among humans genetic make-up that has enabled humans to survive and extend their dominance on the globe.”
And which I elaborated in the very next sentence in the same paragraph (which you decided to omit from my statement you quoted for obvious reasons), was:
“The less the variability the more negative survival attributes become more and more dominant in the human population. BTW this is well and fully documented in things we humans have done to minimize variability — dog breeders have been increasingly facing this problem, for just one very, very common example.”
Then your response made zero sense: Your response was:
“Either there is a benefit to introducing genes for cystic fibrosis, ALS, Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, Epidermodysplasia verruciformis or Proteus Syndrome into a population that doesn’t have them, or your statement, at a minimum, needs some serious rephrasing.”
Please explain your response. How do you think I should have “rephrased” my statements. Or maybe you just didn’t understand that when a genetic pool is reduced the incidence and prevalence of ADVERSE inheritable traits increases dramatically relative to a larger genetic pools.
The point being that the Ashkenazi Jews retaining a smaller genetic pool results in their also having a much greater prevalence of offspring having ADVERSE inherited traits… precisely those diseases and health conditions that are far more prevalent in that gene pool than in any other.
The obvious conclusion is that a culture retained by maintenance of omitting more outside genes .. .from other populations of humans also carries with it a real (actual) adverse condition on the benefits of maintaining that pool. Entire species have disappeared from earth because a geographically isolated gene pool was over time denigrated to create a greater and greater prevalence of traits that inhibited their survival rather than enhanced it.
Thus if a culture is maintained by not allowing it to become subject to the influences of other genes from other cultures, it is not in the long term interests of humans as a species, or the specific culture for that matter.
Did you get this little piece of genetic science yet? or are you still confused?
Kimel approves of immigrants from Singapore! Japan! South Korea!
Some of his best friends are from ….
He’s not racist, after all! What a relief.
What does that word RACIST mean, anyway?