A few years ago, I remember reading a Nick Kristof column where Kristof mentioned wanting to do some simple mathematical calculation — it might have been taking a derivative — and finding no one on his floor at the Times who was able to do so. To his credit, Kristof found this troubling.
It wasn’t so much later that I began reading Ross Douthat’s blog and noted that he often comments on scientific things, invariably in an ignorant and wrong-headed fashion (arguing against the primacy of empirical-based reasoning or getting excited about white supremacist “science”), despite having admitted that he never took a science class in college.
And so I agree with this, written by a commenter at Volokh Conspiracy in response to Volokh’s idiotic rant about racial differences:
Harvard Law students are not in the “pursuit of truth.” They’re not scientists. They’re not researchers. They’re law students and legal academics. I presume that everyone there is manifestly unqualified to evaluate the scientific evidence one way or the other. It’s rebuttable. If they show me their scientific creds, I’ll listen. Until then, STFU.
Would-be conservative intellectuals — like Volokh and Andrew Sullivan (though I like his blog in general) — enjoy wanking about “IQ science” for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere. But what’s amazing to me is that they don’t realize how far all this wanking is from any actual science. Standardized tests simply don’t measure a real quantity in the way that, say, temperature or mass measurements do. In fact, the quantity they seek to measure isn’t even defined. There is not any sort of solid model for how the human brain arrives at its answers on these tests, either. It’s just not science.
I sometimes wonder how much of the idiocy of our high-level public discourse is caused by the scientific and quantitative illiteracy of the vast majority of its participants.
I realize I’ve been on this general topic a lot recently and I’ll shut up about it now.
Cat Lady
My wingnut friend’s strongest opinions are about the things she knows the least about. I don’t think she’s unique. At all.
cyd
Does James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, have enough scientific cred for you, DougJ?
Rick Massimo
Evidence of this stuff abounds. Someone on Firedoglake a couple of years ago mentioned speaking with Mike Pence and saying “Well, doesn’t moral hazard apply to rich bankers too? If they know they’re gonna get bailed out, aren’t they going to behave recklessly with their and other people’s money?” And Mike Pence, US Congressman, was completely dumbstruck by the idea.
Similarly, Mitch McConnell and one of his minions were asked just a few months ago, “If the Republicans want to end the rejections for pre-existing conditions, but at the same time think a mandate is unconstitutional, how do they propose to solve the problem of people freeloading by waiting to get sick before buying health insurance?” It was like when the robot on “Lost in Space” got shot in the junk and his arms started waving and he started blurting random phrases from his memory. McConnell said “the premiums are going up either way” two or three times in a row, and literally nothing else. And this is a question that has been around not since a year ago in the health-care debate; it’s been around since early in the Obama-Hillary primary battle, more than two years ago.
When we say “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about,” we really mean it.
DougJ
@cyd:
No one his age has any credibility about anything with me.
Guster
It’s a good topic–I hope you stick with it.
Rick Massimo
@cyd: He has credibility, but it doesn’t mean he’s automatically right, as gobs of scientists with at least as much credibility in their fields say he’s wrong.
jeffreyw
-Mark Twain
jeffreyw
ack! hyphen fail
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Winnuts are desperate and afraid of losing power permanently in this country, and even the so called “smart” ones are losing their inhibitions and letting their White Freak Flag Fly. It could mean surrender, but I doubt it. More likely another straight stretch on the road to Peak Wingnut. Two miles past Oz.
Zifnab
Evolution isn’t a scientific fact. It’s a THEORY!
It was cold outside yesterday. SUCK ON THAT, CLIMATE CHANGE!
Brief case nukes! Shoe bombs! Liquid Explosives in the men’s room!
And don’t even get me started on economics. This time last year the Republicans and their conservative fellows were absolutely breathless about looming inflation, while we stood on the brink of 10% unemployment. As though the price of bread and whiskey were going to skyrocket when no one could afford to buy either.
Some of this ignorance is perpetuated deliberately. Certainly, the brain trust that developed “Death Panels” knew full well what demagoguery it was instigating. But when you’ve got guys like Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, and Steve Doucey as the talking heads of the day, is it any wonder these intellectual juggernauts fail to slap down fallacy after fallacy?
DougJ
@cyd:
It’s also worth noting with Watson that:
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
There is not any sort of solid model for how the human brain arrives at its answers on these tests, either. It’s just not science.
Hell, Republicans have declared war on learning, much less science. Did McConnell ever go to business school? And Douchehat never took a science class at Hahvad(Yes, it’s intentional)? Really? He didn’t have to take any basic classes? Like one semester of chemistry and one of biology? Hell, I had to take three semesters of science classes(as part of GER requirements) to graduate college.
Onkel Bob
@cyd: Watson is a fine scientist, and if was lecturing on genetics or molecular biology, I’d listen. If he started telling me about how to interpret expression levels of fluorescence proteins, I’d take his advice to heart. But if he started telling me how to write the program that detects those levels, or maps their gradient, I’d respectfully ask for his credentials. Just because a guy understands one aspect of the science, doesn’t mean he understands it all.
BTW – The frau had a nice talk with Jim this past week during her trip to CSH. He even remembered her from her days working with Francis Crick at the Salk.
Zifnab
@Rick Massimo:
Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence don’t write the legislation. They’re the big green heads, not the men behind the curtain. They don’t know what the hell they are talking about because they don’t need to. Marching orders come from higher up the ladder.
What you really need to do is pitch these questions to the CEO that authorized the hiring of the K-Street lobbyist that is currently taking Pence and McConnell out to lunch.
But, if history has taught us anything, it’s that the CEO knows exactly what he’s doing – getting paid coming and going. So convincing them that universal health care is a great idea for the country as a whole, but may result in diminished rates of return for particularly successful insurance companies, you’re embarking on a truly lost cause.
David White
In addition to the point you make about IQ, you need to add that race isn’t a scientifically valid concept either.
David White
In addition to your point on IQ, you should note that race isn’t a scientifically valid concept either. It’s a social construct.
HumboldtBlue
Jesus Fucking Christ riding a dinosaur while carving the Constitution from the rock-hard ass of a flamboyantly gay Roman Centurion, but if we ignoramuses can’t speak on subjects we have no fucking clue about what the fuck good is the internet, blogs and blog comment sections?
If I had a dime for every dumbass comment I have submitted over the past 8 years or so, I’d still be an ignorant, dirt-poor fumbledick, but at least I wear my ignorance with flair!
Now I may not be a goddamned Nobel laureate scientist in any field other than how many beers and bong hits it takes before I fall over and slightly dislocate my shoulder and then ignore the pain and discomfort for six years before getting it looked at but I can read a series of books and studies and confirm without a shadow of a doubt that anybody who believes an IQ test is anything other than a test of learned knowledge is a fucking douchebag that makes Sarah Palin seem like a MENSA candidate.
J.W. Hamner
There’s little that irritates me more than a lawyer pontificating about science. It’s not that they aren’t smart enough… of course they are… it’s that their training and mode of argument is diametrically opposed to a scientific approach.
The last thing science needs is advocates.
David in NY
Gotta read the late, lamented Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man again. It’s one of those books that makes you realize how people keep making the same mistake over, and over, and over again. As if it’s because they really want to make that particular mistake.
DougJ
@HumboldtBlue:
You make a good point. Obviously, I’m all for people spouting off.
What bugs me is “I’m the Daniel Plainview Professor of Legal Studies, so my opinions on science matter” or “I’m at the Atlantic, my opinions about science matter”.
matoko_chan
this says what i mean–
Lets find out why. If its environmental, we control our environment.
We can fix that.
Ashkenazai jews are a population deme, they interbreed and have specific genetic markers like increased incidence of Tay Sachs.
Is Tay Sachs associated with elevated IQ?
There is a lot of speculation that two high IQ parents have an increased probability of having a child with autism….it might be artifact, there might be a hidden variable, but I want to know
Understanding the mechanism is science.
I want to understand.
AhabTRuler
@HumboldtBlue:
I think you’re safe, at least here.
David in NY
@J.W. Hamner:
The advantage a good lawyer has over a scientist is that lawyers are trained to explain complicated things to people who don’t know anything about them, and good lawyers are very good at this. The problem is that sometimes the lawyer is very good at explaining something that is actually quite wrong.
Scientists, lamentably, often don’t care very much about explaining things to the untutored or are terrible at doing it. They seem to think that just because things are obvious (to them), they don’t need to be explained to others.
DougJ
@matoko_chan:
Beginning a sentence this way gives me the creeps.
David in NY
Damn advert just shouted “Congratulations!” at me and nearly scared me to death.
Turbulence
This is a huge problem, but the idiocies of national politicians are just the top of the iceberg. The underwater problem that remains invisible is all the local government and community groups that are really anti-science. I’ve been fighting with a neighborhood group regarding a redevelopment project my church is trying to do. Most of these people are just as bad as republicans.
I had to spend a lot of time just trying to get them to acknowledge the consequences of their actions. They insist on making the development smaller (even though the development is well within the code/zoning requirements). I explain that asking for a smaller development means lowering the population density this part of the city can support. And that high density living near public transportation (which this site is) are the most important thing we can do for climate change. They balked. “Just because we insist on making the building much smaller does not mean we’re making climate change worse!” Yes, yes it does. And maybe that’s OK, but either way, you’ve got to own your actions and own your policy preferences. If you yell and scream and sue to make urban buildings near public transit really small, then you’re making climate change worse. Some of them even insisted that making the building smaller does NOT necessarily lower the population density…because you could totally like, dig 30 stories underground and build an underground city.
Maybe we can fix the national idiots or at least humiliate them, but the local government and community organization idiots? There are too many of them. They’re too entrenched.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
I think the problem is quantitative, or maybe “epistemological” illiteracy. The problem isnt’ that they don’t have science or math backgrounds per se, but rather that they are unaware of the limitations this gives them. People in general have an insufficient skepticism about what we know and how we know it–I don’t mean in the “attacking the messenger” fashion of global warming or evolution denialism, but just in the sense of not knowing where knowledge comes from, how it’s evaluated, etc.
Intelligence is a great example (personally, I will engage in a debate about gross intelligence when someone can give me an objective, non-circular definition of intelligence), but things like the anti-vaccine nuttery (cause/=correlation) and even arguments about social welfare (you don’t have to rely on Limbaugh, you can look up how many people are on welfare and what minority group they are!) are also good examples.
Test-based evaluation and learning, particularly in high schools, doesn’t help this trend. One of the first things that goes by the wayside when teaching high schoolers to mainly memorize/regurgitate information is their skills in evaluating information. Personally, I think we’d do better to focus less on teaching people facts and more on teachign them how to look up/find/evaluate them.
HumboldtBlue
Matoko until you can define just what an Intelligence Quotient is you’ll never know and allowing a shitferbrains asswipe like Sullivan lead you down the path is one sure way to ignorance.
Growing a beard? Go to Sully. Sucking a dick? Go to Sully. Want to learn how to write beautifully? Go to Sully. If you want to learn about IQ differences, can we at least first define what we are searching for?
matoko_chan
ok, it activates your yuck factor response.
Everyone has a limit.
This is just the way theoretical population geneticists talk.
But what I said is true.
Do you deny that?
Amanda in the South Bay
@DougJ:
I think that there is a certain…conceit among libertarians that, well, since they are all free marketyey and innnovationey than they are tech* experts? Since that (to them) is how new tech gadgets are born, I guess.
Its hard to explain, and I don’t have the benefit of being on anything to explain my haphazard thoughts, but there you have it.
*And of course wanking about the latest tech gadgetry is not nearly the same thing as being an actual scientist.
Turbulence
@matoko_chan:
But what you’re forgetting is that for many years, this same population of Jews was considered to be intellectually defective, as one of Sully’s other readers pointed out. How is it that the same genome can be intellectually deficient one year and then a few decades later have higher than average IQ? If changing environmental factors explain the difference, than the effects of genetics on IQ are pretty irrelevant.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Variables in the human psyche and experience cannot be replicated in a test, or a series of tests, with any degree of reliability. It is like trying to prove what lies beyond the universe and then beyond that. The question itself is rendered moot by the likely hood there is no true answer. Or the only answer is everything. ohmmmmmmm!
But what about the variable of being born with black skin into a white skinned country? test that. if you can
DougJ
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Yes, I’ve noticed that too.
Dave
Watson has always been a conceited blowhard, and aging has not blunted that a bit. Another Nobelist, William Shockley, also had some interesting notions about race and intelligence. Neither of them had anything to back up those notions. You know, the stuff we scientists call “evidence”.
Intelligence, like lots of other unmeasurable characteristics, is context-specific. Watson would be dead in a week in the Kalahari; a Bushman would be dead in a week in downtown LA. Which one is more intelligent? How do you measure that?
More to the point of the opening post, ignorance is exacerbated in America these days by anti-intellectualism. It’s not enough to be stupid, you have to be proud of it and angry at the “intellectual elite” for “telling you what to think”! It’s a badge of honor to be ignorant in this country when it comes to evolution, climate change, stem cells, or any of a number of other complex topics.
Sad.
Turbulence
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: But what about the variable of being born with black skin into a white skinned country? test that. if you can
Heh. The fastest way to make a smart woman perform really poorly on a math test is to ask her to wear a bathing suit while taking it. Science proves it. Fortunately, women have the option of wearing other clothes besides bathing suits. Too bad black people don’t have the option of having other skin colors.
SpotWeld
You got to remember, lawyers, as a profession, are trained to only ask the questions they already know the answers too.
James in WA
Please don’t shut up, DougJ. As a scientist myself, I am infuriated by these kinds of stories, and I’m convinced that pushing back HARD is the only proper response.
Seriously, look at our national discourse: law students discussing “intelligence” without even a definition or the vaguest idea of what a probability distribution function is; hayseed senators decrying climate science as if their bullheaded opinions carried weight identical to the studied research of professional climatologists; and all the while, Serious Journalists reporting “both sides” as if each deserved equal consideration. It’s exasperating, and I’m sick of it. More power to you.
flukebucket
Yeah but are they scientists? That’s what fucks me up. I never know who to officially listen to.
Nylund
Not to mention the fact that none of them really understand probability theory, distributions, asymptotic properties, parametric assumptions, biased/consistent/efficient estimators or any of the other things that one really needs to understand to read empirical papers in the social sciences. Heck, even most social scientists don’t get half these things.
The irony of the press is that the people we rely on to give us information are often entirely unable to even understand the information their tasked with sharing.
cyd
@DougJ:
Sure, and Galileo recanted.
While Watson may well be wrong in his speculations on race and intelligence, it’s chilling how vehemently he was shot down. From the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is more than plausible that (i) many cognitive abilities have a genetic component, and (ii) such genetic components may be distributed differently among different human populations. Now, does the evidence bear this out? I’ve taken a look at the literature, and my (non-expert) impression is that there is not enough to go on right now. But in the meantime, it’s certainly not correct to label the race-IQ field as unfounded bullshit, in the way that we would label, say, homeopathy.
Many on the Right are mocked, and deservingly so, for rejecting evolutionary biology. But the Left also has its issues. (See also Ed Wilson, sociobiology, etc.).
matoko_chan
IQ is a psychometric measure of cognitive ability measured by standardized testing.
g is a measure of how well brain modalities correlate…also measured by standardized testing.
umm…its helpful to think of g as problem solving ability.
Both IQ and g are models of cognitive ability….there are others.
These have just proven to be more correct at describing cognitive ability.
so far.
;)
Darkmoth
* Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
* Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.*
* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312115133.htm
schrodinger's cat
Instead of Presidential debates how about we give them a math test instead, nothing too difficult, may be they could solve some second order differential equations. We can require the same of NYT columnists, especially if they want to spout about science and tell what quantum mechanics and economics have in common.
matoko_chan
@Turbulence: So?
that is what science does….the heresy replaces the orthodoxy.
the new improved paradigm replaces the old, because it is a better description of how things work….i want to know how things work.
and still it moves…..
Darkmoth
@matoko_chan:
“So?”?
It’s odd that you want to know how things work, yet you dismiss such an relevant finding so quickly.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@cyd: Whether there are differences in cognitive abilities between races is not the point. The point is can we reliably create tests to prove or at least lend credibility to claims of such. Not even close imo, and some questions in science are probly best left unasked, when the answers would be of no practical or moral use.
see questions asked by Mr. Mengele. This thread is already Godwinned imho, might as well make it official.
J.W. Hamner
@David in NY:
Very true. I also think that if a lawyer approaches a scientific argument like it’s a jury trial, the layman is likely to go along with her… and that probably irritates me the most. With a “beyond reasonable doubt” standard, all the lawyer has to point out flaws in some relevant work… and it honestly doesn’t take a lot of scientific knowledge to find poorly done and fatally flawed studies… and then they dismiss an entire field of research.
An expert in the field knows how to get the wheat from the chaff, but all the lawyer is interested in is doubt.
Turbulence
@matoko_chan:
If you really want to understand how things you work, you need to understand why previous efforts failed. So explain to me: what did all those scientists who were convinced that Jews were genetically inferior get wrong? They knew about g. They had IQ tests. Did Jews get much much smarter over the past few decades? Or were the original tests wrong?
matoko_chan
@flukebucket: theoretical population geneticists are scientists. They are also applied mathematicians.
Its like all that goofy Eurabia scaremongering….Spengler and Bat Yeor and Mark Steyn..
No one did the math.
Then they all looked stupid when the statistics came out and the actual data proved they were full of shit.
I especially hate Mark Steyn.
He is a linear thinker in a non-linear world.
albertus
That is way off. So only Ph.D.s are allowed to express opinions on empirical questions, and everyone else should STFU? (Better close down the website!)
And the emailer’s whole point was that she was *not* making any conclusions about intelligence and race. So it’s not enough that she admit her own lack of expertise, she has to actually agree with the experts (even though she clearly lacks the expertise to evaluate their conclusions)? I’m a Balloon Juice fan, but you guys have the wrong take on this one.
matoko_chan
@Turbulence: look…i havent seen their data. i suspect those people were no more scientific than Mark Steyn and the Nazis.
They all just made shit up.
cyd
@Dave:
I hope you’re not suggesting that the term “intelligence” is meaningless. The statement “Barack Obama is more intelligent than Sarah Palin” is not a vacuous one.
So, this is just to say that intelligence is difficult to measure. Thus, developing the appropriate measurement is a scientific problem. One day this problem will be solved (though partial solutions exist, e.g. the much-maligned IQ test).
Darkmoth
@cyd:
I don’t think any reasonable person would disagree that genetics influence intelligence. That’s a reasonable biological argument, for specific values of “intelligence”.
The problem comes in when you try to generalize this fairly obvious fact using social constructs, subjective criteria and debatable statistical inferences.
Martin
@matoko_chan: That’s great, but you don’t even know what the fuck you are measuring. You’re about 15 steps ahead of where you ought to be – everyone discussing IQ trends is.
How do you deal with someone like Daniel Tammet who can multiply 6 digit numbers instantly in his head and learned Icelandic in a week. He’s written two books. He’s also autistic. He’s smoke the shit out of certain parts of the IQ test and do horribly in others. Is he a genius, an idiot, or just as smart as you and I, just not as well balanced in specific areas?
I do extremely well at spatial reasoning tests. Freakishly well. I ace almost every such test given to me with time to spare. Give me a verbal reasoning one and I’ll be pretty average. My wife is 100% the opposite. Which of us is smarter? Which one of us will do better on IQ tests? I will, because the tests are geared toward spacial, logical, and mathematical reasoning because there are fewer cultural variables there than in verbal reasoning, vocabulary, reading comprehension, etc.
themann1086
Ah, I love the smell of defenders of scientific racists JAQing off*. Ever notice how no one ever speculates if “blacks” are genetically smarter than “whites” but this is hidden by environmental factors? Gee, I wonder why that is.
*JAQ= Just Asking Questions. That has to be the biggest and most common bullshit excuse given by quacks with no evidence.
The Moar You Know
Please don’t. It’s probably the single biggest problem facing society today – as in “will take us back to the dark ages if not fixed” caliber of problem.
Martin
@cyd: Given that Sarah Palin has created an environment where she has outearned Obama and has found a way to stay in the national spotlight much longer than Obama would likely have managed, I wouldn’t say there’s some counterevidence to the claim. It may not be evidence that we wish to consider or want to reward, but it’s also not as cut-and-dried as we’d like it to be.
Turbulence
@matoko_chan: look…i havent seen their data. i suspect those people were no more scientific than Mark Steyn and the Nazis.
They all just made shit up.
“Those people” are the ones who invented IQ tests and did all the original work on g. Maybe you would know that if you read Mismeasure of Man.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Martin:
I’ve always done well on verbal reasoning parts on tests. And I hate talking in real life, especially small talk. go figure. Luckily the internet came along and I can blab away and not make a sound.
Martin
@Martin: And to prove my point, there’s at least two grammatical/spelling errors in my post. Probably more if I took the time to look.
cyd
@Martin:
E. coli bacteria are much more successful than chimpanzees (which are in danger of extinction). This does not mean the bacteria are more intelligent than the chimps; it just means they are more successful. One more time: it’s pretty clear that there is something (neural interconnectedness?) underlying what we colloquially refer to as intelligence. Figuring out how to measure it, and how it comes about, is a scientific problem. Just because we can’t do it as well as we like, doesn’t mean the underlying thing does not exist.
(Edit: to forestall those with limited comprehension skills, I’m not comparing Obama to a chimpanzee.)
NeuroSci
@Onkel Bob: James Watson is a reasonably pleasant person, but he isn’t particularly knowledgeable about genetics or molecular biology. He’s like a lot of Emeritus Laureates I’ve encountered, happy to totter around the margins while actual scientists do their work, but not willing or perhaps able to keep up with the decades of additional knowledge that have been added on top of their reputation-making work.
“Watson has always been a conceited blowhard, and aging has not blunted that a bit.” – Dave
I wouldn’t go that far, but he does carry the whiff of arrogance, and his part in elucidating the structure of DNA didn’t really advance molecular biology or genetics in any important way – it just happens to resonate with and be easy to explain to lay audiences. Nobels are definitive to people who don’t have the opportunity to see the politics and sausage-making that go into their award. There is a certain threshold of qualification and achievement that is required, but there are gobs of scientists who clear that low hurdle. The ones who actually receive the Prize have the additional qualifications of possessing the luck of good timing and good connections.
kezboard
Oh my god, race and intelligence wank is the least fun kind of political wank in the world. Volokh had a post comparing this situation in Harvard to his childhood in the USSR. To be fair, he was suggesting that black people may be less intelligent than white people at Harvard today to suggesting that Lenin and Stalin were dictators in the USSR of the seventies, not saying anyone’s going to any gulag, but it’s not a fair comparison: Lenin and Stalin were dictators, while we have no idea whether one race is smarter than another, or even what “race” or “smarter” even means and how we could go about answering this question. God, this topic is such a disaster, and it drives me crazy how much glee right-wing ideologues get out of beating liberals over the head for not being open to possibilities and not accepting facts by a giant two-by-four made of their own racism.
Turbulence
@cyd: One more time: it’s pretty clear that there is something (neural interconnectedness? size of blood vessels in the brain?) that gives rise to what we colloquially refer to as intelligence. Figuring out how to measure it, and how it comes about, is a scientific problem. Just because we can’t do it as well as we like, doesn’t mean the underlying thing does not exist.
Obama is clearly a more moral individual than McCain. It’s pretty clear that there is something (more mirror neurons? A larger ventromedial prefrontal cortex?) that gives rise to what we refer to as morality. Figuring out how to measure it, and how it comes about, is a scientific problem. Just because we can’t do it as well as we like, doesn’t mean the underlying thing does not exist.
That translation works, doesn’t it? Which means we should soon be able to assign a single morality score that will allow us to objectively rank all individuals from most moral to least moral. It is just a matter of time and research grants, right?
Or, maybe morality is a very complex multifaceted phenomena that contains multiple components which *might* be things you can measure individually but for which there is no objective way to combine into a single score. What objective basis is there for IQ tests weighting the spatial skills that Martin does well on higher than the verbal skills his wife does well on? To put it bluntly, how you weigh individual components is a value judgment.
Corner Stone
@AhabTRuler:
That’s cold man. Accurate, but cold.
micah616
@matoko_chan: “They were selected, either for their physical strength, or because they lacked the skills necessary to escape capture.” The sentence is flimsy at best, mostly because the either writer doesn’t understand the how the slave trade actually worked, or he/she is grossly oversimplifying it.
IQ and race are both mostly imaginary beings that mean different things to different people at different times. Somebody mentioned James Watson. Watson discovered that he had something like 10-12% “African” DNA. Not so long ago, that would have made him an octaroon. DNA wise, he may have more black genes than my did my maternal grandfather, who was definitely considered a Negro, as was most of his family.
My mother expresses even more stereotypical Caucasian traits than her father. If you saw her on the street, you would most likely believe her to be a white person. She’s at least as white as James Watson, yet she was discriminated against in a way he never was.
My father and his immediate relatives are far more stereotypically black than my mother and her family, but even so, as a slave descendant, he’s not as African as an actual African.
So that leaves a whole group of people like me, usually referred to as African Americans, or blacks. We range from people like my mom to people like my dad and well beyond. But that’s only how we define black in this country, we haven’t even gotten to the rest of the descendants of the Diaspora Africans. And it certainly doesn’t factor in pre-slave trade relations.
The point is to ask how do you draw racial lines to test IQs between different racial groups when racial groups are pretty much impossible to define?
Sir Nose'D
@HumboldtBlue:
WIN!
cyd
@Turbulence:
Scientists do ask questions about what morality is and how it comes about, you know. There is a large literature about the biological basis of morality, e.g. the effects of brain damage on moral judgment calls; see this Nature article about prefrontal cortex brain damage for just one recent example.
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
@matoko_chan:
If the two best metrics of intelligence we have depend on standardized tests, then we basically don’t have any good measures. Standardized tests are only good for finding rough estimates of the cognitive differences between individuals of mostly similar backgrounds, and absolutely nothing else.
Well, they’re also good for keeping the Kaplan Post running, which is strike two. And three.
It’s as Martin says: we haven’t even cracked the nut of properly measuring, or hell, even defining intelligence, yet people are already trying to figure out which races are the smartest. This isn’t putting the cart before the horse, it’s not even having a horse because you’re content sitting in your unmoving cart making cloppity sounds with two coconut halves.
It’s fascinating to me that people can find themselves on the same side as out-and-out white supremacists without ever stopping to consider that, hey, I’m on the side of fucking white supremacists, maybe I took a wrong turn somewhere. I mean, if I found that my staunchest allies on an issue were the Klan and the assholes who wrote The Bell Curve, I’d rethink a few things.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
What about Palin as the fecal coliform?
Anyways, those of us with limited comprehension do however understand that in fact the term Intelligence is indeed “colloquial” thereby holding nebulous and varied meanings. It is the sum of being human and the reason it is resistant to a scientific definition and a an uncontrollable variable in itself and unstable for scientific proof. Bigger arteries and bloodflow to the brain notwithstanding. Nor shitass wingnuts.
Darkmoth
@micah616:
To your point, Elizabeth Alexanderteaches African-American studies at Yale. She is clearly “black” as Americans would define it.
Yet, on the PBS special “Faces of America”, it was revealed that 60% of her DNA is caucasian.
Turbulence
@cyd: Scientists do ask questions about what morality is and how it comes about, you know. There is a large literature about the biological basis of morality, and for instance the effects of brain damage on moral judgment calls; see this Nature article about prefrontal cortex brain damage for just a recent example.
cyd, I asked you several direct questions in my comment. Can you please answer them? I’ve included them below.
That translation works, doesn’t it? Which means we should soon be able to assign a single morality score that will allow us to objectively rank all individuals from most moral to least moral. It is just a matter of time and research grants, right?
What objective basis is there for IQ tests weighting the spatial skills that Martin does well on higher than the verbal skills his wife does well on?
And for the record, I know about the biological basis of morality. That’s why I asked the questions that I did.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
This means abnormal damaged brain. no more, no less. How is that relevant to study undamaged brains?. So we know that certain areas of the brain handle certain responses. But that is all really.
TrevorB
@matoko_chan: I knew there was something disingenuous about this definition, but it took me a second. Your problem is you believe that all cognitive ability can be summed up by an IQ test, this is utterly false only a select few cognitive abilities are being tested within an IQ test.
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
Another point about the scientific study of intelligence: why is race a part of the question at all? Assuming a person was actually trying to isolate the genes that correlate with intelligence, and knowing that studies of IQ correlation with race have shown larger variation within racial groups than between those groups, doesn’t it follow that studying race at all in this context is a huge waste of time? It seems to me that all of that action would be in studying genotypes of individuals found to be unusually intelligent or unintelligent?
Obviously, this isn’t my area of expertise, but bringing race into intelligence study at all seems a dead end. And if there’s no scientific use to such a line of inquiry, one can only assume something else is going on. (But surely not racism, because you totally have black friends and stuff.)
AhabTRuler
@Corner Stone: At your service.
Anoniminous
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
We’re in the goo-goo, gah-gah, stage of understanding the brain. Much less the mind. Much less the Brain/Mind Unity.
Studying a damaged brain gives a way to “focus in” on the function of the damaged section(s). These studies are indicative (“Pointers To”) as to what the damaged section(s) are about or help do.
No more than that.
But that is a great help in starting to define WTF is Going On.
cyd
@Turbulence:
As I’ve indicated, working scientists do use quantitative criteria—scores if you will—when asking such questions. So clearly it should be possible to develop a test, or rather a battery of tests, that measure various aspects of moral behavior, such as an inclination towards cooperation vs non-cooperation, risk-taking behavior, and so forth.
Now, maybe what you’re saying is that the results of a morality test, or an intelligence test, should not be bundled into a single number. Such bundling involves (possible biased) judgment calls, I agree. That’s why IQ should not be treated as anything more than a very rough estimate for the actual thing it is trying to measure.
micah616
@Darkmoth: That is part of my point, indeed. But even more so, take President Obama and Will Smith. Will Smith has two black parents, and yet…
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Anoniminous:
Yes
And I am glad you said this
Galaxies far far away.
Darkmoth
@cyd:
I’m not sure that’s true, cyd.
In order to develop a test for a thing, you need to verify that the test measures the thing. The accuracy of the test is important.
Therefore, in order to create tests that accurately judge intelligence, you need a good estimate of the intelligence of the people you’re testing. Since you do not yet possess an accurate test, your estimate of their intelligence is obviously subjective.
At that point, any test you develop will simply be validating your subjective views on intelligence (or morality), since it will be “scored” on how well it replicates those views.
George Lucas' Lawyers
Careful there, buddy.
Corner Stone
@micah616:
And I gotta tell ya, I like girls and all that but good lord he’s one good looking hunk of a man.
ChockFullO'Nuts
It’s an interesting topic.
I spent a lot of years in classrooms teaching things like aviation ground school, and then later, troubleshooting of electromechanical and electronic defects, and then later, things related to programming and software development and database administration. I really enjoyed the classroom work and spent a good deal of time and energy on issues related to how people learn things and how they apply their new understandings to practical problems.
So what great wisdom and insights did I glean on this topic from teaching all those years? Not much. The best I can come up with is that some people get things and some don’t. Some people learn things by rote and never really understand them. You can teach people to follow a procedure and do something complicated, but you can’t make them understand what is happening at a deeper level unless they have the proclivity. You can teach some people how to play the piano but you cannot make them into musicians. Others are natural musicians and will learn to play instruments even if you try to stop them. They’ll play any object that makes a sound if no other instrument is handy. I know from personal experience that very smart people can completely fail to get the simplest things about the way the natural world actually works. Sometimes being a flight instructor feels like trying to explain vectors to a hamster. This is not all that funny when the hamster is paying good money for you to teach him, and may someday have to operate an airplane carrying his whole hamster family in a situation where an insight or two might save his furry little life.
I attributed a lot of things to a lack of curiosity, but really, the relationship between curiosity and “getting” something seems like a chicken and egg problem. If I get something, I get curious about what there is next to learn. The more I learn, the less I think I know, and the more I think there is to know. I have no idea why my brain works this way. Other people seem to be satisfied when they perceive that they know something and therefore there is less work to do learning any more. And they are happy that way. My brother, call him J, is seemingly wicked smart. He went to a school where they study the classics and he read and loved reading all those classics, and can talk for hours about them in great fascinating detail. He is also a fundamentalist Christian who converted to Catholicism, and is sure that (a) the Pope is the inerrant voice of God on earth, and (b) that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder. He votes Republican and thinks global warming is a scam. He’s convinced that I am a prisoner of a religious and rigid view of science and can’t make proper moral distinctions because of it. He has no problem with clinging to faith even though he knows it to be belief in the face of evidence to the contrary. For this reason, he and I don’t speak to each other any more.
The whole thing makes me profoundly sad and leaves me shaking my head.
demimondian
First, anyone who believes that IQ measures nothing is wrong. IQ measures *something* — each test is reliable and reproducible, and, within reason, predictive of certain scholarly outcomes.
That says *nothing* about whether IQ measures intelligence. In order to answer that, we’d need to know what intelligence is, and we don’t. We have certain qualities *generally shared* by people we believe to be intelligent, but we also recognize that those qualities are unevenly shared among those people — in one, the ability to reason about abstractly defined objects, in another, the ability recognize and reason about phenomenological anomalies, in yet a third, the ability to quickly and reliably learn multiple expressive forms.
And yet, you notice, I didn’t mention “creative” abilities — composition, performance, and handcraft are not considered aspects of intelligence. That’s a highly socially colored view, not even shared with all the European cultures whose influence we acknolwedge, to say nothing of the West African or Asian cultures which we attempt to ignore.
Turbulence
@cyd: As I’ve indicated, working scientists do use quantitative criteria—-scores if you will—-when asking such questions. So clearly it should be possible to develop a test, or rather a battery of tests, that measure various aspects of moral behavior, such as an inclination towards cooperation vs non-cooperation, risk-taking behavior, and so forth.
Sure, but no scientist in his right mind would ever say “I’ve invented a morality test!”. Being able to score individual components is not controversial at all; the controversial part is combining those components into a single value using a bunch of weights and then claiming that this quantity reflects something that exists in the real world.
Now, maybe what you’re saying is that the results of a morality test, or an intelligence test, should not be bundled into a single number.
I’m saying that single number means nothing because the process of assigning weights to different components is garbage. Blood pressure and index finger length are two objective measurements, but 32*(systolic pressure measured in mm Hg) + 19.7*(index finger length in cm) is garbage. It is a synthetic quantity that does not measure anything in the real world.
Such bundling involves (possible biased) judgment calls, I agree. That’s why IQ should not be treated as anything more than a very rough estimate for the actual thing it is trying to measure.
But IQ is treated that way. And there is zero evidence that that is going to change anytime soon. Which means the entire enterprise is rotten at its core.
DougJ
@cyd:
I wasn’t aware that Watson was tortured. Silly me.
DougJ
@cyd:
You’re referring to “social scientists”. I reject that term and do not recognize it as science. I’m talking about actual science.
(EDIT: I see that you are also referring to some actual science. I still think you’re mixing apples and oranges that your argument is essentially nonsensical.)
bootsy
Echoing what everyone is saying: We can’t define “race.” We can’t define “intelligence.”
My addition: The vaunted supposed Ashkenazic Jew being smarter thing is B.S. … As unscientific anecdotal evidence, I present myself. :(
More importantly, ‘Ashkenazic’ is not a race, it’s just a descriptor that means someone follows a certain rabbinical liturgy. In fact, genetic testing has shown ‘Ashkenazic’, ‘Sephardic’, and ‘Mizrahi’ jews are all closely related, without a lot of admixture with European populations.
Also, Arabs and other Semites, as well as other Near-Eastern people like Persians, have been found to be genetically related to Jews. Yet you don’t see these (un)scientific racists talking about how Arabs are inherently smarter than Western Europeans… I wonder why that is?
Anoniminous
@demimondian:
An IQ Test is an accurate measurement of the test designer’s expectation of what intelligence Is and how to test for it.
Otherwise, they are bollocks.
The “predictive effect” stems from the teacher’s expectation of the intelligence of the child.
“There be a horde of feedback loops out there and they’s a’ headin this way.”
CynDee
There is no point and it’s a waste of time trying to define and discover what groups are smarter than others.
Is this how anyone should be spending their remaining heartbeats? To what end? More anger and disagreement. Wow, what a reward.
Everyone is a valid human. Everyone matters. No one is more or less important than another individual. Who is to judge otherwise? Hypocrites and megalomaniacs. They’ve already got that covered, so how about the rest of us?
A more worthy pursuit is to study in depth the causes and remedies for hatred and hateful actions and see what can be done to make the haters feel good enough about themselves so that they don’t have to have enemies and targets. Study how anyone can become a hater, and why some do and others don’t. A lot of that has been studied, but it’s not communicated to the general population, and of course most Americans aren’t that curious.
Hating is bullying lived large. Wouldn’t it be better for us to put more minds and money on the social-psychological solution for destructive humans than, say, to get ourselves up to Mars??
Just talking common sense here, nothing fancy. Greed and intolerance are our biggest problems, so what do we plan to do? Go to Mars? Oh, Okay. And look, there’s a zebra. I can see it from my house.
cyd
@DougJ:
I’m a physicist.
And to return the favor, I’d say that I detect in your cracks about social science a fundamental misunderstanding of what a scientific model is, a common misunderstanding amongst mathematicians.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@bootsy:
Maybe they have tried talking to a muslim Arab about why women should wear a Burqa.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
If it is true that humans, all humans, are capable of utilizing only a tiny fraction of the brain’s capacity, then wouldn’t it be something worth finding out why THAT is? Test for that.
Or, does a person born into poverty and racism, or abuse, or whatever negative environment have psychological roadblocks created to further inhibit reaching more of that untapped potential brain power all humans have. Test for that.
I simply don’t care whether race is a factor in intelligence. I do care to know if racism is a factor in groups of people realizing their potential for intelligence. Test for that why dontcha!
Comrade Bukharin
Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan. Both gone too soon. They were unmatched in explaining scientific concepts to the layperson. The Demon-Haunted World should be required reading.
Anoniminous
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Yup.
And THEN we get into …
It appears one huge, major, affect on a child’s learning ability is the nutrition of the mother during pregnancy.
(sigh)
So, gals, if you want your child to be “intelligent” (sic) eat your fruits and veggies.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I’ve never put a lot of stock in that old saw.
In my experience, some people are using every bit of their brain’s capacity …. but to no avail.
They have just run out of juice, if you know what I mean.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Have you ever watched an autistic musical savant play the piano? Just by sitting down and start banging the keys. But not be able to tie their shoe laces.
cyd
@DougJ:
You don’t need torture to get people to recant. BTW, Galileo was not tortured (the historical record is not definitive, but that’s what modern scholars think). He was, however, taken into the Vatican’s dungeons and “shown the instruments of torture”, which no doubt made a tremendous impression on the aging scientist.
DougJ
@cyd:
You’re throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. You’ve launched about three different abortive arguments so far.
I can’t respect that. Sorry, I can’t.
I doubt that you are actually a physicist.
bootsy
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Not sure what you’re trying to say, but it’s obvious the Burqa is a construct from religion and culture, not intelligence and/or genes.
The ‘IQ test’ is a similar cultural construct.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@bootsy:
Call it “snark.” One of the Internet Traditions.
BrainGuy
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
This is a reference to that old saw about humans only using 10% of their brains, yes? If you’re into wasting time on ideas borne of transparently false premises, then I think this is an excellent avenue to pursue.
mclaren
@DougJ:
We’d like some hard scientific evidence to support DougJ’s claim. Fortunately, hard evidence from the peer-reviewed scientific literature supporting DoubJ’s claim abounds.
If Spearman’s g, which IQ tests purport to measure, is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn Effect?
If Spearman’s g really is the measure of absolute abstract intelligence that its supporters claim, it should remain constant over time.
Alas, the Flynn Effect shows up as IQ scores which rise throughout each person’s lifetime, and which also rise from one generation to the next. The Flynn Effect has been exhaustively documented and shows that IQ scores tend to rise over time worldwide. No one has explained the Flynn Effect. What we do know is that the older a person gets, the higher they score on current IQ tests — and each generation tends to score better than the last generation on IQ tests.
“The Flynn effect and its relevance to neuropsychology,” Hiscock, M., Journal Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, Volume 29, Issue 5 July 2007 , pages 514 – 529
“Evidence from several nations indicates that performance on mental ability tests is rising from one generation to the next, and that this “Flynn effect” has been operative for more than a century. No satisfactory explanation has been found.”
Naturally, the Flynn Effect is not found only in white Americans, but everywhere worldwide, including rural Kenyan children:
“IQ On the rise: The Flynn Effect in rural Kenyan children,” Daley, T.C., Whaley, S.E., Sigman, M.D., Espinosa, M.D., and Neumann, C., Psychological Science, Vol 14, No. 3, May 2003, pp. 215 ff.
“Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests: Test scores are certainly going up all over the world, but whether intelligence itself has risen remains controversial,” Neisser, U., American Scientist, Sept-Oct 1997.
Given the catastrophic recent collapse of the dot-com bubble, the crash of the housing market, the enthusiastic initial approval of arguably the greatest blunder in military history, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the election of the grossly ignorant incompetent drunk-driving C student to the presidency (not just once, but twice), it becomes extremely difficult to portray the intelligence of the American people as constantly rising over time.
The Flynn Effect has had a serious impact on the incorrect diagnosis of children as mentally deficient:
“The Flynn Effect and U.S. Policies: The Impact of Rising IQ Scores on American Society Via Mental Retardation Diagnoses,” Kanaya, T, Scullin, M. H., Ceci, S. J.,
American Psychologist, Vol 58, No.10, Oct 2003, pp. 778-790
“None of the above: What IQ doesn’t tell us race,” Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker< 17 December 2007.
And of course the Flynn Effect isn't restricted to a long-term rise worldwide in IQ scores — more recently, IQ scores have started to decline worldwide:
"A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in reverse," Teasdale, T. W. and Owen, D. R., Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 39, Issue 4, September 2005, Pages 837-843
So Spearman’s g is an immutable innate inherited quantity which never changes…except it does. In fact, Spearman’s g bounces up and down over time like a yo-yo.
Yes indeedy…Spearman’s g is an absolute measurable inherited constant quantity just like the universal constant of gravitation…except that it changes drastically over time.
Is that credible?
If intelligence is a fixed innate immutable inherited quantity, how can it rise throughout a person’s lifetime, and rise dramatically from one generation to the next? If intelligence is rising so dramatically, how do we explain the gross incompetence we see everywhere around us, from the inept fools who botches the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the incompetent clowns who crashed the housing market to the fumbling bum bumbling jerkoffs responsible for this latest gigantic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Rising intelligence worldwide? Where’s the evidence? We’re becoming a natio of Einsteins? Yet we elected as president a guy who couldn’t even enunciate a coherent statement?
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that something is terribly wrong with the allegedly “scientific” measurement known as Spearman’s g.
But wait — there’s more!
It turns out individual national groups exhibited drastic rises in IQ scores over a very short time. The Dutch, for example, had IQ scores that skyrocketed between 1952 and 1982.
“None of the above: What IQ doesn’t tell you about race,” Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 17 December 2007.
So why are American IQ fans so desperately concerned about blacks with low IQ scores…but not about Dutch immigrants with low IQ scores, or Southern Italian immigrants with low IQ scores?
Could the real concern perhaps not involve some mythical quantity like Spearman’s g, but rather the duskiness of the skin of the population involved…?
Gladwell, op. cit.
And now the coup de grace to finish off the pseudoscientific fantasies of Spearman’s g as an allegedly innate immutable solely inherited quantity based entirely and excuslively on a person’s genes:
“All Brains Are the Same Color,” Nisbett, R., The New York Times, 9 December 2007.
The research Nisbett cites, by Turkheimer et al, is:
“Socioeconomic Status Modifies the Heritability of IQ In Young Children,” Turkheimer, E., Haley, A., Waldron, M., D’Onofrio, B., and Gottesman, I., Psychological Science, Vol. 14, No. 6, November 2003.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the smoking gun. To quote from the abstract:
Turkheimer et al., op. cit.
Short version: the overwhelming preponderance of the available psychological experimental literature published in peer-reviewed scientific journals supports DougJ’s statement.
Simply put, IQ is pseudoscience on the level of ufology or dowsing, and basing social policy of IQ measurements is not meaningfully different from basing social policy on the movements of dowsing rods or the proclamations of psychic surgeons.
chopper
love, just love the comments at the volokh link. just goes to show where morons complain about scientists pointing out they’re morons, moron followers of the former will come out of the woodwork to defend them.
brilliant. really. utterly brilliant.
cyd
@DougJ:
I haven’t deviated at all from my central point (to repeat: (i) many cognitive abilities should have a genetic component, and (ii) such genetic components may be distributed differently among different human populations). Yes, differences within populations are far larger than the differences between populations; and yes, the field is currently in a far from satisfactory state. But the above statements should not be controversial to anyone with a knowledge of the principles of biology.
I’m crushed.
chopper
@Comrade Bukharin:
wha, no feynman? the greatest physicist of the last 100 years, truly unmatched in explaining scientific concepts to the layperson (makes gould and sagan look like a pile of puke)?
fuff.
bootsy
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Fair enough — my ‘g’ is not high enough (or low enough?) to allow me to be aware of all traditions.
I personally find the Burqa repugnant, but wanted to make sure we weren’t talking about repugnant culture equalling low intelligence.
chopper
@mclaren:
the wife is a clinical psychologist and is always quick to point out that IQ tests really don’t measure much at all. which sucks, because my last IQ test had really impressive results.
mclaren
@Cyd:
That statement contradicts the available peer-reviewed scientific literature on IQ and heritabiltity. To quote from the paper Turkheimer et al. once again:
If you want to spout pseudoscience which provably contradicts the available peer-reviewed scientific literature, Cyd, you’d be best advised to go to a ufology website or a crystal healing website or an astrology website. You won’t get away with it here.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@bootsy:
Not at all. It was just a smartass funny.
If repugnant behavior were the test of intelligence, then we’d have to question the intelligence of Southern white people.
Ahem.
Kathleen
@The Moar You Know: Agreed, please keep it up; the pushback is essential. If only I believed those reading it were the ones who need to do so!
Let’s just say that I know for a fact that one very highly placed (former) media figure, a good person who is very well educated, honestly did not comprehend the concept of scientific hypothesis.
When those reporting the news lack essential fundamental concepts, much less basic facts, allowing them to filter our “news” is truly dangerous.
Basic college level education should head this off, even for your proverbial liberal arts major. Should. Sigh.
cyd
Oh, come on. Let’s take the reductio ad absurdum first: what do you think makes a human more intelligent than a llama? Is it Yahweh swooping in to grant each human fetus the spark of intelligence, and declining to do the same for the fetal llamas? Unless you’re a nut, you have to admit that our genetic makeup makes humans more intelligent than llamas—undeniably, unambiguously more intelligent despite how difficult “intelligence” is to measure.
So, you’d have to argue that the genes influencing intelligence almost never vary between viable individuals of the same species: that these genes are like those controlling haemoglobin formation, rather than the genes controlling height. Fair enough; that’s a scientific claim, and there’s a corpus of scientific research research devoted to answering it. Some studies, such as the one you pointed to on kids hailing from impoverished families, have found that environmental effects are frequently dominant, with genetic effects negligible. But other studies, far too many to brush off, have also found a heritable component to intelligence after controlling for a variety of other environmental factors. Your argument is akin to that of creationists pointing to gaps in the fossil record as disproving evolution.
Xanthippas
To be fair, this argument could be used against those of us who don’t believe there are genetic differences in intelligence between different “races” of people. We’re just as unqualified to know one way or the other. I think it would be more accurate to say that, absence scientific training, it’s best for us amateurs to accept the conventional scientific wisdom, which is that there is no evidence for genetic disparities in intelligence. This is generally my approach to everything, being as I’m a liberal and don’t feel inclined to “go with the gut” as conservatives do.
mclaren
@Cyd:
Define “intelligent” in such a way that intelligence can be objectively and reliably measured, otherwise you’re spewing pseudoscience. Since intelligence is ill-defined, there’s no evidence that a human is more intelligent than a llama. Indeed, if we define intelligence as problem-solving ability, than depending on the circumstances, llamas are obviously far more intelligent than humans — for example, if we define as the ability to solve problems the capacity to balance on slippery rocks at high altitude while being chased by predators.
Your statement makes no more sense than the undefined pseudoscientific assertion “What do you think makes a human more full of chi than a llama?”
“Oh come on” is not a credible rebuttal. Please cite articles from the peer-reviewed scientific literature which directly and specifically rebut the peer-reviewed articles I have cited — otherwise your words are as empty as air.
Wag
@SpotWeld:
You got to remember, lawyers, as a profession, are trained to only ask the questions they already know the answers to.
Xanthippas
@chopper:
Did Feynman create “Cosmos”?
‘Nuff said.
Hob
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Just for the sake of gratuitous nit-picking of a joke, may I point out that very few of the Muslim women who wear burqas are Arabs– it’s more of a thing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So that’s kind of like saying “talk to a French Protestant about snake-handling.”
trollhattan
But, but, but…science is so sciency, it needs to be ignored.
Speaking of ignorance, I was pointed to this today.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=531662
Damn librules won’t be happy until everybody’s starvin’. Never mind the pesky three-year drought.
DougJ
@mclaren:
At the end of the day, conservatives want to believe there are differences in intelligence between different races. It doesn’t matter that you can’t define intelligence (at least not now) or race. It’s all, come on, you know what I mean.
There’s not much point in arguing about it. They want to believe.
mclaren
Permit me to demur ever so slightly here. The magnificent thing about science is that you do not need extensive scientific credentials in a given field to assess the credibility of a scientific claim. All you need is the ability to read and count.
If you want to assess a given claim, look up the relevant citations in the Science Citation Index at your local university library. Each article in the SCI gets ranked according to the number of times it’s cited by other articles in the peer reviewed scientific literature.
Now count up the total number of articles supporting the hypothesis and count up the total number of supporting citations. Then look for the articles which rebut those peer reviewed journal articles and then count up the total number of citations for those rebutting articles.
One group of articles will typically have many more citations than the other group — usually at least an order of magnitude more citations, sometimes two orders of magnitude more. When the science is settled, it’s entirely clear from reviewing the SCI whether a given claim is supported by the available peer reviewed scientific literature or not. Moreover, you don’t have to be a scientist to go through this process. The SCI is open and available to anyone at your nearby university library. All you need to do to assess the validity of a claim (in which the science is settled) is read the Science Citation Index and count the total number of citations.
DougJ
@mclaren:
Sure, I see what you’re saying. But I think that people using their “authority” as a columnist or law professor to ramble baselessly about pseudo-science should STFU.
cyd
@mclaren:
OK, just so we are clear: do you think that there is no evidence that a human is more intelligent than a bacterium either?
To avoid cherry-picking data (see my prior reference to the “gaps in the fossil record” arguments by creationists), it is far more illuminating to look at meta-analyses, which incorporate a variety of studies. I think the general conclusion is, as I said before, that there appear to be significant genetic component after controlling for environmental effects, e.g. Bouchard et. al. “Genetic influence on human psychological traits – A survey”. Current Directions in Psychological Science 13, 148 (2004). (If an Association for Psychological Science journal is not sufficiently mainstream for you, how about this recent Nature review?)
Corner Stone
@DougJ:
Damn. Crankypants again.
cyd
@DougJ:
You know, I often like to believe that liberals are generally more open minded than conservatives, more empirical, and more willing to admit that they might be wrong. And then I come across a topic like this.
One more time: I think it’s entirely possible that the socially acceptable position is correct, i.e. that genes have negligible effect on intelligence (and that even if they had an effect there’d be no variations between races (and that there’s no such thing as intelligence anyhow)). All this seems implausible to me, from my understanding of biological principles, but I (or rather all the scientists who’ve worked in the field and know a lot more than me) could be wrong. That’s how science works. For someone who likes to rail against anti-science, I’d expect you to know that.
mclaren
@Cyd:
micah616
@cyd:
Define race.
MTiffany
The problem is that we don’t know what thought is, other than a process which arises from interactions of neurons in the brain
Unless you ask a philosopher, in which case they will explain to you precisely what thought and intelligence are, albeit in nebulous, circular references which have nothing to do with any empirical evidence.
mclaren
@Micah616:
More to the point, define ‘race’ in such a way that it can be measured reliably and objectively in a scientific setting.
We can’t. “Race” disappears into genes, but many genes arise from interaction with the environment (we have learnt recently that environmental factors can turn dormant genes on) and genetic links tend to flow across large geographic boundaries.
“Genetic variation, classification and ‘race’,” Jorde, L. B. and Wooding, S. P., Nature Genetics 36, S28 – S33, 2004.
Using all these bogus loaded ill-defined terms like “intelligence” and “race” reminds me of the similarly bogus loaded ill-defined terms that the Reaganaut neocons have used to defend their indefensible smash-and-grab economic crony capitalist thievery. As james Kenneth Galbraith points out:
The Predators’ Boneyard:
A Conversation with James Kenneth Galbraith
Endless mischief can be played by using these kinds of ill-defined loaded bogus terms. Before going along with this kind of linguistic framing, we need to stop and ask some sharp questions: what, exactly, does this term we’re using mean? Does is have a definable meaning?
Or is it just some buzzword that we’re supposed to reflexively approve of in kneejerk fashion?
I am not about to give my assent to vast changes in social policy based on ill-defined kneejerk buzzwords — especially when those buzzwords seem like thinly veiled excuses for enriching the already wealthy or cementing the social privileges of the already privileged.
Sm*t Cl*de
The fastest way to make a smart woman perform really poorly on a math test is to ask her to wear a bathing suit while taking it. Science proves it.
I am willing to help replicate the experiments.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Hob:
Your point is well taken.
cyd
Interesting. Are you even reading the same words that I am?
mclaren
@Cyd:
cyd
@mclaren:
Imperfect but hardly non-existent. Hardly what we’d expect if “race” were just a meaningless social construct.
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
@cyd: Uh? That’s exactly what you’d expect!
Of course, it’s a strawman to say that race is “meaningless.” The social construct we call “race” tends to correlate with interbreeding populations within an area, because that’s what we call race. That doesn’t mean the concept has the slightest amount of scientific rigor.
cyd
Anyway, the question of the existence of “race” (as opposed to “genetically differentiable population overlapping with others, based on historical gene flow patterns”) is irrelevant; props for diverting the conversation, though. I’m more interested in your assertion that “intelligence” is meaningless, and curious about whether we can pin it down further.
First of all, do we agree that there is a colloquial meaning of the word “intelligence”? I agree that this is a broad term encompassing a variety of cognitive abilities such as reasoning and memory, which might be better to consider separately. But in the vast majority of the abilities we typically associate with “intelligence”, humans perform better than llamas. Do you disagree?
mclaren
We certainly agree that there’s a colloquial meaning to the word “intelligence.”
In America, “intelligence” refers to the amount of cash in your bank account. In Europe, “intelligence” refers to the degree to which your ancestry derives from royalty.
cyd
How do you explain away the twin studies? Twin studies control not only for socio-economic status, but for pretty much everything else.
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
Can we agree that colloquial definitions are completely fucking useless for a scientific inquiry?
Colloquially, global warming is fake because it was cold out today. However, climatologists don’t use “warming” colloquially.
Is a colloquial definition good enough for theoretical population geneticists? If so, they aren’t doing science.
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
Also, the anti-llama racism on display here is sickening. Too.
Turbulence
Yawn. The cyd troll bores me now. Better trolls please kthxbye.
mclaren
Turkheimer et al. worked with twins. They simply controlled for SES, which the other studies did not. You need to read the Turkheimer paper.
In any case, twin studies of IQ have a history with scientific fraud, courtesy of Cyril Burt. If you really want to have that conversation, how do you explain away the need of the single most prominent scientific researcher in the twin IQ study arena to perpetrate scientific fraud?
If the evidence from twin studies so overwhelmingly supports the heritability claims, fraud shouldn’t be necessary, should it?
Meanwhile:
1. Children with black fathers, brought up in white family – no evidence of lower IQs
2. Adoption studies – e.g. black children brought up by white families only slightly lower IQs than white adopted children (Howe, 1997)
This is not getting any better for you, Cyd. You may want to quit while you’re ahead.
djESNO
never eat spinach with a stranger!
Ecks
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Yes they fucking well can be tested with reliability. It’s what psychologists do all the time.
And fuck you too DougJ for basically suggesting that all of social science isn’t “real science”. This is one of the things I’ve learned over the years – physical scientists all THINK they understand social sciences, but most of them are clueless as hell about it.
You get pissed off when glib politicians willfully missunderstand your science, so don’t go around willfully misunderstanding other people’s.
And yeah, social science is hard because we can’t mix people up in test tubes – but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we can’t do it.
eponymous
@cyd:
I think you are misunderstanding what the statement means. Imperfect here should be thought of as arbitrary. In other words, the concept of race may have some meaningful relevance in a social/cultural context (because race, as is commonly understood, is a sociological construct), it breaks down when we try to apply it in a biological/genetic context.
To say that race exists in a biological context would mean applying an arbitrary definition to it. By which I mean, at what point does one include/exclude an individual (or group) from a race and not another? Geographic origin/area? If so, how large is the geographic origin/area?
Even using geographic origin, you would likely run into problems where some groups (such as the Kalahari Bushman in Africa) having significant genetic differences from groups nearby (Bantu speaking peoples, for example). Or groups that share similar morphological features (Aborigines and Africans) that are separated by large geographic distances and, thus, are the most dissimilar in their genetic makeup (Aborigines actually are closer genetically to East Asians – which makes sense geographically, but does not in the normal sense of how many understand the concept of race).
Even if you were able to come up with an acceptable way of defining geographic area, then how big should it be? And how many “races” would you eventually come up with. 3? 10? 100?
So the concept of race in a biological/genetic context is meaningless (or rather, we can’t use the concept in any rigorous, scientific way based on the biological and/or genetic evidence thus so produced/discovered).
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix:
Can you email me at
jackalopez_two
at
yahoo
Thanks,
TZ
mclaren
We really ought to clarify a couple of points:
[1] It’s not accurate to say that “intelligence is meaningless.” I tried not to say that, and I believe I repeatedly asserted that intelligence is ill-defined.
Something can be entirely real but so scientifically ill-defined that it’s not suitable for quantitative scientific study. Let’s take some examples: culture. French culture has lots of definable characteristics, as does American culture, but supposed someone tried to make up a CQ, a numerical ranking of cultures — could we scientifically verify that kind of numerical ranking?
No, because culture can’t be quantitatively defined in such a way to be reliably and objectively measured.
Likewise, we cannot quantitatively rank the taste of wines, or whether your girlfriend loves you, or how adorable your new puppy is. Lots of things in the world are entirely real but not susceptible to objective quantifiable measurement in a laboratory.
So the fact that intelligence is ill-defined in scientific terms doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t refer to an objectively real quantity — what it does mean is that we can’t use scientific methods to reliably and objectively quantify what is currently defined as intelligence. The tests produce garbage. The results vary over time, the results vary according to geography (did the kid come from Southern Italy in the 1920s, or from New York in the 1920s?), the measured so-called “g” factor shoots up if a black kid gets adopted by white parents and Spearman’s g suddenly plummets if the black kid gets dumped back in the ghetto. If the black parents are upper middle class, the black kid’s IQ suddenly skyrockets — if the white kid’s parents come from the Netherlands in the 1950s, the white kid’s IQ suddenly collapses and hurtles downward to the level of the poor black kid’s IQ. This is not objective reliable repeatable measurement of an innate immutable quantity. You look at the history of IQ testing and you pretty quickly realize it’s measuring something more like acculturation — the ability of the student to share and reproduce the cultural assumptions of the test-maker.
[2] Can we please stop calling anyone who disagrees with the groupthink on this forum a “troll”? Cyd has been respectful and thoughtful and he’s even cited a peer-reviewed scientific paper. That’s not the sign of a troll. Let’s put a short sharp end to this practice of slapping the mindless label of “troll” on anyone who disagrees with the majority. Liberals are supposed to respect reason and evidence. We should welcome people who disagree with us, as long as they debate using rational arguments and evidence. Cyd has done that. Enough with the “troll” name-calling, it’s nonsense.
[3] Again, nobody said the concept of race was meaningless…just that the concept of race is so ill-defined that it can’t be reliably and objectively quantified in a scientific context. We can precisely quantify contributions of particular genes in a population as a whole, and if we sequence the complete genome of an individual we can theoretically quantify what genes that person has — but in terms of assigning those genes to racial group, that’s a lot trickier. Suppose you have the gene for lactose intolerance that’s common among Asians — does that make you part Asian? Suppose you’re a Caucausian with sickle cell anemia, a gene that’s extremely common in Africa… Does that make you part African-American?
I think you can see how tricky this kind of attempt to quantify race can get. Once upon a time, people in the deep South in America used to be quantified according to their race depending on the degree of separation from some distant black ancestor. So you had mulattos, but also quadroons (1/4 black) and octaroons (1/8 black) and so on. I believe it went up to 1/16 or 1/32 black. It was absurd because many of the people in the American south in the 19th century who were legally classified as octaroons &c. looked white and for all intents and purposes, as far as anyone could tell, were white. Yet legally they got classified as blacks. This is the kind of craziness that numerical attempts to quantify race get you into.
[4] Let me just cite some practical concrete reasons why intelligence is so ill-defined. Most people regard intelligence as problem-solving ability. Well and good: but what kind of problems? IQ tests typically measure peoples’ ability to solve unimportant problems within a tight time frame. By contrast, the people who are historically known as the great geniuses (Newton, Einstein) solved problems that no one at that time thought were important, and they took many years to solve ’em. Nobody in Newton’s day thought too much about the problem of universal gravitation. Thing fall — big deal. So what? Newton considered it a problem, and he spent many years solving it. Einstein was troubled by the fact that the speed of light seemed to be same no matter how fast you were travelling. No one else was. Einstein took quite a few years to solve that conundrum.
So one point here is that IQ tests are very poor measures of problem-solving ability because they measure our ability to solve phony artificial problems that aren’t very important, and they also measure primarily our ability to solve such trivial unimportant problems fast. There’s no evidence from the real world that the ability to solve trivial puzzles fast is important for success in life, unless you consider winning in a game show to be “success in life.”
Another even more important piece of evidence comes from studies done using Nobel prize winning scientists. These studies uniformly show that the Nobel laureates had slightly above average IQs, but by no means stellar IQs — for example, Richard Feynman had a measured IQ of 124. That’s actually higher than average for nobel laureates. By comparison, the highest recorded IQ (well over 200) belongs to a woman who spent her life editing a puzzle column — she never accomplished anything else.
What made the Nobel laureates unusual was not the size of their IQs, but rather personal qualities like imagination, perseverance, and the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one problem to the exclusion of all else for long periods of time.
Notice that these personal qualities are emotional characteristics. They’re personality traits. It’s not easy to quantify something like “imagination” or “perseverance.”
There is no such thing as an “Imagination Quotient” or a “Perseverance Quotient” in psychology. There’s no Wechsler Test Of Doggedness, no Stanford-Binet Test of Single-Mindedness. Yet these, from studies done on the scientists who’s attained the highest level of accomplishment in their fields, seem to be the characteristics that set them apart from the rest of the scientists.
[5] I think Cyd is falling into the Western trap of the logical rational fallacy here. Since Decartes, Western culture has had this belief that it’s the ability to perform purely logical entirely rational reasoning that defines human beings. Cogito ergo sum. But neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has pointed out that emotion is inextricably linked with all thinking, and consequently it’s impossible to disentangle emotional traits from pure logic. This is essentially the point I made in number 4 above — much of what makes someone successful in problem-solving arises not from pure reason, but from emotional traits like imagination, daring, originality, doggness, and so on.
Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis has been tested and confirmed. You may want to read Damasio’s book Descarte’s Error for a summary. You might also want to persue Alan Gardner’s book Multiple Intelligences, in which he cites case after case of people with extraordinary abilities who did poorly on standardized tests that measured mtthematical and verbal facility because humans have many more areas of skill than just words or math. Martha Graham, for example, tested at a nearly mentally retarded level on verbal/math standardized tests, but she excelled to an extraordinary degree at tasks of physical coordination. Is it really reasonable to call a great ballet dancer like Martha Graham unintelligent?
[6] One last issue that I think seduces people into believing that intelligence is a real quantity that can be reliably inherited is the example of animal breeding. When you breed two fast racehorses, you can reliably expect to get a fast racehorse as the offspring. So why should intelligence be any different?
Because how fast a racehorse runs can be reliably and objectively measured. You let the horse out of the gate and you run the 400 with a stopwatch and you always get the same measured result. Doesn’t matter whether the horse runs in Italy or America, doesn’t matter if the horse was born in Africa or suburban America, it’s an objective measurement and it’s reliable and it’s repeatable.
But intelligence is a much more nebulous characteristic. The ability to solve problems depends on lots of things and can’t be measured easily or simply, as I’ve pointed out above. Problem-solving depends to a significant degree on personality traits that can’t be quantified, and it also depends on things like the ability to adroitly choose which problems to work on. That’s a talent more akin to intuition than to anything that a standardized test can measure.
So IQ fans are here falling into the well known fallacy of false reification. If you’re not familiar with it, google it and take a look at the definition. Essentially, people delude themselves into thinking that because they make up a name for something, it’s a real quantity with an indpendent existence, but, as the phlogiston escapade showed, it ain’t necessarily so.
These are all real issues and they illustrate why the frantic effort to collapse people into a single one-dimensional number has failed so badly as a measure of problem-solving ability, or of anything else, except perhaps the degree of acculturation into white middle class society.
Sm*t Cl*de
Alan Gardner’s book Multiple Intelligences
That would be Howard Gardner, but otherwise mclaren is taking the fun out of the thread by being (a) informed and (b) non-abusive.
slightly_peeved
Also, we have a mechanism for it; science can describe well how muscles move, and how moving in concert they can propel a horse down a field.
We don’t actually understand how humans solve problems yet. Neuroscientists can show that certain bits of the brain light up with certain activities, but that doesn’t give a mechanism any more than measuring the voltages coming out of an athlon chip could lead one to determine if the user of the computer was good at playing a Spy in Team Fortress 2.
There are people working on testable, definable ways of solving problems, but they aren’t psychologists or psychiatrists; they’re AI researchers and roboticists. And the entire history of AI and robotics research is a succession of apparently easy problems turning out to be much harder than people thought. Even the problems AI researchers can solve well, like chess, they solve in a way that is most likely completely different to the way humans solve the problem. Any AI or robotics researcher who claims to understand how human-level intelligence works, or even to have a basic grasp of the problem, is trying to con you.
One school of thought that’s arisen in robotics is that looking at high-level human intelligence is actually a really bad way of trying to understand the concept of intelligence; it’s like trying to understand flight by building a 747, without building a glider first. To understand human intelligence, we must first understand animal intelligence, and we barely understand fucking insects at this stage. To continue the flight analogy, trying to understand intelligence by means of tools like IQ is like trying to determine what plane is the most manoeuverable by the quality of the airline food.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Ecks:
Not to make determinations of differences in so called “intelligence” between races. Which is the topic of this thread and what I was referring to. And then only to make narrow, and highly error prone observations of ill defined vague conclusions between individuals that are hardly products of the rigorous demands for reproduction of results under a true scientific model. Or “unreliable”
RSA
@mclaren:
Exactly. There are so many such examples of concepts we intuitively take for granted that have no real scientific basis that it’s hard for us (some of us) to recognize this. I think that a key idea is convention. Race is largely a convention, even if it’s correlated with biological characteristics. For a different analogy, we’d laugh at a scientific study of indoor furniture, even though all the characteristics we might examine are measurable, and even though most of us have quite a good understanding of what indoor furniture is.
DougJ
@Ecks:
It’s not real science. I’ve never met a social scientist who said it was.
cyd
So we agree that there is something, or likely more than one thing, underlying what we refer to as intelligence. Now, I’m not convinced that it’s completely useless to bundle a set of cognitive scores into a single score (IQ), as long as that score is understood to be a very crude measure, akin to the “human development index” composite score used by economists to look at how developed a country is. But if you’re convinced that it is nonsensical, fine; that’s an argument we can have some other time.
But if “intelligence” contains separate cognitive abilities, some of which can be concretely measured in the lab—and indeed that’s what cognitive psychologists do—then do you doubt that such abilities can have a variable genetic component? And that such genes may be distributed unevenly within the human population?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
That’s what they said about Orville and Wilbur and their fandangled flying machine.
cyd
Let me expand a little more on the point of variation, which I think might be easily missed.
It’s a tenet of the theory of evolution by natural selection, going all the way back to Darwin, that almost all the macroscopic physical attributes of an organism are subject to heritable variation. This variation is the “raw material” on which natural selection works. Darwin didn’t know anything about genes, but nowadays we say that there are genes for such attributes. Some attributes, such as height, are influenced by a large number of genes (they are also influenced by things like nutrition, but the genetic component can be seen to exist once we control for environment).
There are certain attributes that don’t vary much within a species. For instance, the composition of haemoglobin is more or less the same in most people, because most mutations to haemoglobin would make the organism non-viable. (As a notable exception, people originating from certain geographical areas—certain “races” if you will—do possess mutations that confer increased malarial resistance but at the cost of sickle-cell anemia.) But the vast majority of complex, “macroscopic” attributes, like height, do possess significant variation.
Now, it should be uncontroversial nowadays that the mind is also a “physical” attribute. This is to say that that there is nothing mystical about cognition; it’s just a bunch of neurons firing, albeit in a vastly complicated manner that we don’t yet understand—but I think we eventually will.
Given this, it seems to me much more likely that the assorted cognitive abilities are more like height, in that there should be some (possibly complicated) genetic variation within the species, rather than something like haemoglobin where the genes are largely “locked in”. We know that such cognitive abilities have varied in the past, because, as I’ve said, humans are smarter (along multiple dimensions of “intelligence”) than llamas, which means the genes have undergone differential evolution between us and llamas. What you’d have to argue is that such genes had stopped evolving at some time in the recent past—say in the past few ten thousand years—and had spread uniformly throughout the human population, in complete contrast with the genes controlling many other physical attributes. This seems implausible to me, and if you think it really is the case, I’d like to know what your explanation is.
slightly_peeved
It doesn’t – or more accurately, we don’t know, and it’s unlikely. Like every other theory of mind we currently have, it’s too vague to be testable in any scientific sense.
DougJ
cyd:
I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I just want to see if I’m reading you right. Your argument is essentially:
1) Basic biological principles mean that there is almost certainly difference in intelligence among different groups.
2) Even though we can’t define intelligence, we all know what it means, so that’s good enough.
3) Even though IQ tests may or not measure that intelligence that we can’t define, we should accept that it does or that maybe, in a worst case scenario, that IQ tests combined with other tests, which we may or may not have created yet, will measure intelligence, possibly among several dimensions.
4) Scientists do things with morality and the cerebral cortex, which is sort of similar to this, and that puts all of this on the same plane with laboratory science.
5) If we refuse to accept the above points, we are being closed-minded.
Is that about right?
slightly_peeved
Given what we know about cognition – which is, as I have repeatedly gone on about, fuck all – it could well be more like haemoglobin than height. Creating any sort of learning system out of massive numbers of interacting elements can be very fiddly. Emergent can be really hard to tune, because minor changes in the underlying variables can ruin the whole thing. That’s why people don’t design things using large groups of interacting entities when one big entity will do. The correct functioning of a conscious mind could rely on a very delicate balancing of certain elements within the brain. And we can’t say if it’s “likely” or “unlikely”, because we don’t even know enough about cognition to make those judgements.
Furthermore, one clear ability of the brain is to adapt and reorganize; people are able to retrain significant portions of the brain in response to injuries. This plasticity may be greater than any minor genetic variation occuring in any particular “race” or other.
gwangung
Why? You’re presuming your conclusions are already true. You need to test THAT first.
cyd
@DougJ:
Yes, you have a mostly fair characterization of my view, with a couple of qualifications.
1) I am willing to concede this point given sufficient evidence. It could well be that the variation between groups is insignificant (we already know that it’s much smaller than the variation within groups). My impression from the literature is that this is not the case, but I look at the references others have provided. Nonetheless, my point is that no one should view point 1 as a theoretical impossibility; it’s not.
2) I don’t think that our current definition of intelligence is “good enough”, not by a long shot. But I do think that there is such a thing as intelligence, and that trying to characterize it is a valid scientific problem.
JR in WV
@Turbulence:
They knew their desired answer before they did any “research”. They KNEW Jews were inferior, because of their racial content, their non-Aryan heritage, their darkness, most of which today sounds as crazed as Lamarkian evolution.
When you know your answer before you start research, you aren’t doing science, you’re justifying your twisted belief structure.
This is somewhat similar to ID vs. Darwinian evolution in thought process.
Science is HARD, even as a spectator. I took physics and bio in HS, aced it. Chemistry in my first go as college, got a C, worked hard.
Then I took 3 semesters of Calculus, thru orbital mechanics, which was really cool, 2 semesters of stats, discrete structures, and a Computer Science curriculum. I live with biologists, and worked for 25 years with geologists, chemists, statisticians, engineers and biologists in an environmental regulatory agency.
Science is HARD, for everyone. The average passerby isn’t prepared to have a valid opinion, esp. as so many folks are pushing their version of false-science. I’m barely qualified to have an opinion others should respect…
My $0.02 worth.
JR
slightly_peeved
Oh, yeah – this is actually quite controversial, and in fact it is a hot topic of debate within cognitive science. Informational processes, such as computer programs, are to some extent independent of the media they are processed on. If the brain was essentially running a computer program, it should in theory be possible to create, for example, conscious robots by running a similar program in a different physical media. If this was possible, it would imply that the mind is a form of computation that is independent of physical attributes. Some philosophers (particularly John Searle) argue that this is not the case, and that the aspects of the biological structure of the brain are necessary for consciousness or intelligence. But it’s a big unsolved debate.
cyd
@slightly_peeved:
But remember that all animal species are not equally intelligent. So, at least on the broad scale, there is a continuum of cognitive ability, and human cognition must have evolved more or less continuously from a (presumably less intelligent) ancestor.
cyd
@slightly_peeved:
We don’t disagree. Human brains evolved to perform a task—cognition—that we can in principle replicate on a computer. That’s what I mean by “cognition is physical”; it’s ultimately governed by physical, as opposed to “spiritual” or “metaphysical” processes.
slightly_peeved
Sorry, but inequality in an attribute does not imply a continuum. Your conclusion of continuous evolution does not follow from your premise. This conclusion would require that consciousness could be continuously evolved, and therefore that something could be partially conscious. This is certainly still up for debate.
DougJ
@cyd:
But, on point 1), you think the burden of proof is on those who claim there is a variation in intelligence (which you believe can be defined rigorously, possibly multidimensionally) among groups.
(EDIT: I changed the paragraph above since the way I wrote it the first time made no grammatical sense.)
So until we can a) define intelligence b) come up with good tests for it (I can’t tell if you think there are good ones yet or not) we should just assume that some racial/ethnic groups are smarter than others.
And anyone who denies this is closed-minded.
So, if I’m reading you right, the idea here is that we should all have a more or less a priori belief (modulo biological principles, etc.) that some racial/ethnic groups are smarter than others. That’s more or less what I’ve been saying all along: that the main basis for the belief in the power of IQ test and so on is grounded in an a priori belief about racial/ethnic differences.
cyd
@slightly_peeved:
I agree, it’s up for debate. But with the exception of cognition, the statement that a biological adaptation evolved gradually is not controversial for people who accept the fact of evolution. The special treatment afforded to the mind sounds to me like human chauvinism (OUR distinguishing adaptation is different from others!).
slightly_peeved
I better get to bed, so I guess here’s my point with all my ramblings here.
In the statement of yours I’ve quoted above, you’ve assumed something that is still a subject of pretty heated philosophical debate. The reason it’s the subject of heated philosophical debate is because scientists can’t answer it yet.
The statement that led to it – that the brain is entirely physical – is in itself, an assumption that, again, is the subject of heated philosophical debate because, again, scientists can’t answer it yet.
In almost every post, you’ve assumed something that is either beyond scientific proof at this stage or the subject of continuing debate. You’ve then suggested people are closed-minded for not wanting to investigate your conclusion.
I think the reason people don’t want to investigate this conclusion is that they’re still busy working out all the other problems that you just assumed were solved.
les
@cyd:
Well, you could scarcely have demolished your own position nor confirmed Dougj’s “they want to believe” any more effectively. “All the scientists who’ve worked in the field” support your “understanding of the principles of biology?” Having addressed none of the research presented in this thread that contradicts you? Having presented no justification for your having any understanding of biological principles? It just seems implausible to you? What bullshit.
Are you sure you’re not really an engineer?
gwangung
@slightly_peeved:
Bingo!
cyd
@DougJ:
Like I said, I’m not wedded to the conclusion. If there is insufficient interbreeding between historical human populations, and if those populations were exposed to environments that value the various cognitive tasks differently, we should expect to see cognitive abilities evolve differently between the populations. (This is the reasoning behind the Super Jews hypothesis, for instance.) If on the other hand interbreeding is sufficiently large, and the adaptive values don’t vary much, then cognitive abilities should not differ between groups. Can we at least agree on this theoretical point?
cyd
@slightly_peeved:
Sure, you can believe that the mind is not subject to physics; this is just the old position that people have souls. That’s a religious position.
This is not too different from the creationist argument that every other biological adaptation out there arises from some metaphysical process, not subject to scientific inquiry.
Redleg
By god there’s a lot of wanking going on in this thread! So I’m not going to add anything useful to the discussion. I believe that would be the intelligent thing to do.
cyd
@les:
I’m not an engineer, but if that’s your idea of an insult, maybe Balloon Juice has more in common with the Free Republic than I thought.
les
@cyd:
No insult to be an engineer. However, long experience in the Intelligent Design arguments shows a higher than expected number of engineers on the design side; and they typically argue just like you–assume their conclusions; assume their training equates to expertise in unrelated fields; JAQ’n off; fixate on whatever “authority” supports their argument and ignore authority that doesn’t, even when confronted with it; pretending to be reasonable on hypothetical questions but reverting to cant on specifics; etc.
In short, “they gotta believe.” The absolute similarity in style and content led to the question.
4jkb4ia
In the department of irony, evidently no less than Thomas Sowell has devoted his new book to people who know about nothing in particular other than manipulating words.
Volokh and Sully aren’t stupid, and there are things they know something about. The idiocy you have to look out for is a product of willful surrendering of independent thought and knowing things outside one’s peer group.
And not completely OT: Cayne and Schwartz are coming across as just entirely defeated. I am tempted to feel sorry for them.
4jkb4ia
Ross Douthat NEVER TOOK A SCIENCE CLASS IN COLLEGE? Did he get AP credit?
ScottRock
@cyd:
But you’re approaching this question backwards: you’re presupposing genetic intelligence differences between populations actually exist. Blacks are not the same as whites, so one group must be genetically predisposed to be smarter! This is what DougJ said above: if you assume differences in intelligence between races, you automatically subscribe to some idea of racial supremacy.
Take the conditions themselves: If x conditions exist, then y difference. There’s no evidence for x existing within all of your loosely-defined racial groups, x being conditions in which intelligence is directly related to reproductive fitness in a closed environment. The Ashkenazim were the exception, according to the hypothesis, precisely because they and they alone had that combination in Medieval Europe. We don’t need to provide evidence rebutting 1) because you don’t have a scientific argument to begin with.
It’s an interesting thought experiment; a theory it’s not.
cyd
@les:
Funny you should make this point. I was the one who raised the various meta-analyses (surveys of surveys) indicating a heritable component to IQ. It’s the no-heritable-component side that’s cherry-picked a single paper, Turkheimer et. al. Now that I’ve gone and read the paper, I see that its point is that environmental effects have overwhelming and complicated effects on IQ in low-income (low nutrition?) households. It explicitly does not contradict others’ findings of high IQ heritability. Their point is that environmental effects interact with genetic ones in a complicated way, not that genetic effects don’t exist.
There’s one side of this argument that’s behaving like the intelligent designers, and it’s not mine.
cyd
@ScottRock:
If two biological populations are isolated and the evolutionary pressures on them are different, their characteristics will differ over time. That’s not a presupposition, it’s a fundamental prediction of evolutionary biology.
So, the question to ask is whether different human populations have been sufficiently isolated, or subjected to sufficiently different pressures. Your statement, as far as I know, is that this wasn’t the case (or at least not generally the case; I couldn’t tell whether you thought the Super Jews hypothesis persuasive). From my reading in the subject, I have to say that I’m not sure. I just don’t see how you can be so convinced.
The Raven
They were thought to for a period of about 20 years. There’s a lot of people in the field who still think they do. The test design and standardization processes are trade secrets. A big non-linear transform is applied to get the data into a Gaussian distribution. Their domain of use is in education, where we hope they have some validity. We regard other claims as questionable.
…and how could Douthat graduate Harvard without any science classes?
Croak!
les
@cyd:
Perhaps you can see the conclusion that you then go on to assume?
cyd
@les:
Be more precise please. Do you disagree with the statement you quoted?
DougJ
@cyd:
I’m an agnostic about the whole thing. My sole point here is that until we have a better definition of intelligence (possibly among many different axes) and a better way of measuring it there’s not much point in discussing it.
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we should remain silent.
That said, I am particularly galled by attempts to claim that IQ testing is like a laboratory experiment, as Sully and Douthat try to do.
The Raven
@DougJ: Doug, it’s not just Sully and Douthat. Many researchers in the field also believe that. Hominds.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@DougJ:
I don’t know why Cyd keeps going, he has pretty much backpeddled slowly out of his original comments on the topic, and now is pretty much arguing with his own downed strawmen.
Turbulence
cyd, there’s something I don’t understand at all about your argument. Since we have no idea how to objectively weight different measurable components of intelligence, how are we supposed to compare different people’s intellectual abilities. If we could just weight the different components and sum them up, then comparison is easy: is person A’s IQ score bigger than person B’s. Simple.
But let’s say there are only two components. Person A scores 7 and 23. Person B scores 19 and 11. Which one is smarter?
I claim that in the general case, without objectively determining a set of component weights, you can’t solve this problem. Now, for any given pair of people, there might be solutions (if every one of A’s component scores is larger than B’s corresponding score). But this will be a very infrequent occurrence, especially since it is likely that there are far more than two components.
les
@cyd:
You have provided no evidence for the following:
in the case of humans. Many have shown evidence that this statement does not hold, genetically. You simply assume that some populations of humans have been sufficiently isolated, under sufficiently different evolutionary pressures, such that your vast “understanding of biological principles” makes it “implausible” that some race is not less intelligent than some other (and it’s not too difficult to figure out which is which, and which you are a member of). This, despite the fact that you can’t identify the populations or the evolutionary pressures, and you can’t usefully define race or intelligence. And so you blather about meta-studies and your common sense and what follows obviously from general principles. A sounding gong, without sense or meaning.
cyd
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
On the contrary, I stand by what I said about 140 posts ago:
cyd
@les:
Considering that you have contributed nothing—neither references to the scientific literature, nor argument from established scientific theory—to the conversation, I’m still ahead.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I was referring to this. You have admitted several times that “intelligence” is “colloquial” and poorly defined and understood, but continue to argue that that is still plausible to make scientific connections of IQ and race. The generality of saying genetics is linked to cognitive abilities is insufficient to make the leap that man constructed tests can accurately measure it, and especially not link it to race. That leap doesn’t work on any planet in the solar system. It breaks your argument to pieces, at least what we know now/ A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and about impossible to define for lab tests.
les
@cyd:
Your definition of “ahead” is nearly as bad as your other definitions. I notice you haven’t addressed or refuted a single statement on the glaring logical and scientific fallacies that underlie your “argument.” You might as well claim to be
“winning” an argument that starts out, “If Superman and Batman were locked in a room…” I mean, hooray for you; I’m sure you could bring equally strong argument to the latter.
les
Let me shorten it for you, cyd:
Citation needed.
Turbulence
Cyd, I’m still waiting to hear how it is even possible to compare intelligence without settling on a weighting scheme.
cyd
No one’s responded to this yet. People were happy to brandish the Turkheimer et. al. paper when mclaren was describing it as disproving the heritability of IQ. On actually reading the paper, it clearly says the opposite of what was claimed (in particular, it finds a high degree of heritability of IQ in affluent families).
cyd
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Sure. To cite an analogy from physics, supersymmetric particles are poorly understood. We have only very vague and general ideas about what properties “real” supersymmetric particles would possess, e.g. what are their couplings to ordinary matter. We have certain theoretical arguments for why such particles might exist. Some people disagree with these arguments, but no one doubts that detecting these particles, or disproving their existence, is a valid scientific endeavor.
Similarly, there are certain theoretical arguments, which I’ve given in this thread, for a genetic basis to cognitive abilities. Attempting to detect these cognitive abilities in a scientific way, and to identify the underlying genes, is a valid and ongoing scientific endeavor. As I said, it’s not unfounded bullshit.
cyd
@Turbulence:
I’ve already said that:
We can bypass the bundling objection by arguing about logical reasoning, memory, etc. separately. That’s why I’ve been referring to “cognitive abilities”, plural. The point remains: these unbundled cognitive abilities should have (maybe separate, maybe related) underlying genes, which can vary between individuals and maybe between populations.
Turbulence
cyd, I’m sorry, I still don’t understand. If you can’t come up with a weighting scheme, then how can you possible compare the effects of genes on individuals? I mean, if some gene X causes a significant increase in cognitive ability A while causing a minor decrease in cognitive abilities B, C, D…., then how can you say whether or not X is beneficial? Can you explain? This seems like a very simple question.
Why should we assume that genes would act completely independently on different cognitive facilities? Your argument seems to assume that.
les
How about I summarize my view of the argument from cyd, and you tell me how I’m wrong. You want to say:
If [condition], then [result] is “more than plausible” based on your understanding of “basic principles of biology.” In reverse order:
1. I don’t know why I should respect your understanding of basic principles of biology, especially when they appear to contradict that of Steven Gould. Maybe you can convince me.
2. “More than plausible” is pretty weak sauce, and largely undefinable.
3. It has been pointed out at length that your [result] consists of ill-defined, ill-measured, and (especially with respect to race) vague and useless terms; and that to the extent definable [result] has been contradicted by actual scientific work in the relevant field. In particular, your initial supporting authorities have been blown away.
4. You’ve given no reason to believe that your [condition] does or could exist.
Now if you want to argue the relative merits of superheroes on the internet, that’s all swell. But you want to advance an argument that’s been used to disenfranchise, oppress, murder and enslave entire groups of human beings. Hence, pushback. Stupid argument has its place, but this ain’t one.
cyd
@Turbulence:
If you can measure cognitive abilities A, B, C, D, and you find that individuals with gene X increase A while decreasing B, C, D, then that’s a scientific finding: you’d say that X is correlated with increased A and decreased B, C, D. Or, you might find that X increases A with no measurable impact on B, C, D. This is one of the reasons why it makes sense to measure separate cognitive abilities separately; more detail is better.
The question of whether X is “beneficial” is a separate one, and depends on what you mean by beneficial. If you mean “beneficial” in the evolutionary sense, then the answer is simple: count the number of descendants holders of the gene X leave behind. But this meaning of the word “beneficial” is not the one we use when making moral or social judgments. Genetics is descriptive, not prescriptive.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Sure it is, till it isn’t. Right now it is unfounded bullshit to attempt linking IQ tests to race. I believe in ghosts, or at least that there are phenomenon that are invisible to me and unmeasurable by any reliable scientific standard. I say the mind is a ghost of sorts that can’t be reliably standard tested by any known means today at least further than the most basic levels.
Someday, it could be, and linked to race, I suppose. But in between now and then, Intelligence and race there lies a void that is either the one thing or the other. There is no middle ground and we are currently stuck on one side. The side that doesn’t really have a clue how to cross that void. Call me when you reach the other side with the knowledge that we have finally confirmed racism scientifically. I will give you a box of my personal Plastic Purple Unicorns for a prize.
Turbulence
@cyd: If you can measure cognitive abilities A, B, C, D, and you find that individuals with gene X increase A while decreasing B, C, D, then that’s a scientific finding: you’d say that X is correlated with increased A and decreased B, C, D. Or, you might find that X increases A with no measurable impact on B, C, D. This is one of the reasons why it makes sense to measure separate cognitive abilities separately; more detail is better.
You’re still not engaging with the fundamental problem: without weighting, you can’t make any judgments about the utility of coupled abilities. Frankly, I’m not sure you grasp mathematics well enough to even understand the issues.
cyd
@les:
Well, since we’re name checking… I’ve read The Mismeasure of Man, and Gould’s cautionary tales about scientific fraud, motivated by racist misconceptions, are surely compelling. But many scholars have pointed out that Gould goes too far in many of his arguments, because he is ultimately uncomfortable with the consequences of evolutionary thought in application to humans. Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, argues this most convincingly. Some have criticized Dennett for being “merely a philosopher”, but no less an accomplished evolutionary theorist than John Maynard Smith (who is to Gould as Richard Feynman is to Carl Sagan) has chimed in to agree with Dennett in this online article. Another excellent book, far more on-topic to this discussion, is Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which debunks, decisively I think, the notion that human cognition is a “blank slate” uninfluenced by genetics.
cyd
@Turbulence:
Who said anything about “utility” or the need for weighting? Suppose you find a gene that increases memorization ability while decreasing problem solving skills, and suppose you found that (to exercise a crude stereotype) this gene is distributed predominantly within East Asia. Such a finding would immediately demolish the position that there are no differences in (the distribution of) cognitive abilities between human populations. Would such a finding mean that East Asians are superior or inferior to others? That’s a nonsense question; evolution does not say anything about whether an organism is “superior” to another, only whether it is more adapted to a particular environment.
les
@cyd:
Jebus, did I call it in my first try? Intelligent Design; citing Dennet pretty well destroys your pretensions. And you still haven’t addressed anything substantive, unless your cite of Dennet as proof of your command of biological principles is supposed to be substantive.
Did I include cherry picking the questions you will (attempt to) answer in my list of characteristics?
les
@cyd:
Another nice job; appeal to authority, to demolish an argument no one made.
cyd
@les:
I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but, unlike the other correspondents in this thread, my troll alert is going off (maybe belatedly) over you. So, for anyone who’s still following this, this will be my last attempt to correct some of your misstatements.
On the contrary, Dennett’s one of the more prominent opponents of intelligent design out there.
You wrote:
An appeal to authority if I ever saw one.