In the never-ending circus of lies, misattributions, and ethical lapses surrounding the current so-called Culture War, especially as it relates to evolutionary science versus religious fundamentalism, biological anthropologist Pat Shipman has contributed yet another outright lie to the debate. (more…)

Norm Geras, whom I usually rely on to write thoughtful exercises in clear thinking, has let me down by praising a review by Marilynne Robinson. It’s not that I disagree with the point that attracted Geras to the review in the first place. Robinson was reviewing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion for Harper’s, and she made the fair point that,

[I]n comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison.

(more…)

Malcolm Gladwell has published an excellent article on IQ and race in the New Yorker. It’s almost enough to get me to forgive the New Yorker for the Darkness in El Dorado debacle. Here’s a taste of what Gladwell has to say:

When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”

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Big Don made a point that I needed to respond to at length, so I’ve broken out of the comments section. This is what he said:

Chris, I was merely refuting the point that sub-Saharan Pygmies and Bushmen must have had IQs greater than 54-60 for them to have survived. Not so. Rats and cockroaches, however smart, are probably below IQ-10 on the human scale. If you checkout the beautiful color photos in 1940s-era National Geographics, you can see the Pygmy standard of living was barely above that of rats & roaches. As a boy of 10-12, I grew up on those mags…it was the only place in those days, before Playboy & Penthouse, a kid could see photos of women’s tits…

Now I have to say that my initial impulse was to be scathing. After all, Big Don was still comparing an African ethnic group to rats and cockroaches and was backing up his argument with evidence derived from his memories of National Geographic from before 1953 (the year Playboy was first published) when his attention to the text was perhaps not as focussed as it could have been.

But then I realised that Big Don was right. I did some reading on the relevant peoples of Africa and discovered that they were, indeed, hunter-gatherers, much like rats and roaches. They build huts out of wood and leaves and arrange them in complex patterns to maximise their foraging efficiency, just like rats and roaches. They make music using a combination of instruments and vocals that are famous for their “dense contrapuntal communal improvisation” and which (some observers claim) exhibits a level of complexity that was not reached in European music until the 14th century, and others believe has yet to be realised by any other group of people (especially in the complex “super-patterns” of cyclical repetition that nobody ever gets to hear aloud in their lifetimes, not even the singers themselves), again just like rats and roaches. They have communal rites and religious practices, just like rats and roaches. They keep beehives for honey, just like rats and roaches. They hunt using poisoned arrows and spears, just like rats and roaches. They have two methods of fishing. One is to dam a river and then rapidly drain the dam. The other is to disperse a herbal poison in a river and collect the fish that float to the surface downstream. Just like rats and roaches. Traditionally they were so good at hunting that the German and French colonialists used to employ them to hunt elephants for ivory, a practice that continued until the colonial masters realised that rats and roaches were even better at hunting elephants and would work for less. They hate being called “pygmies”, this being a term they consider highly insulting as it is derived from the Greek work meaning the length of one’s forearm. They much prefer to be called after their specific groupings, such as Baka or Gyelli. Just like rats and roaches.

Many people don’t know all that about rats and roaches, but I found two award-winning documentaries that showed just how complex the lifestyles of rats and roaches are. ^1,2

A friend of mine also told me that one group, the Babongo, don’t have lungs. I told him this was ridiculous. My friend replied that plenty of animals survive without lungs. Fish, insects, and mollusca all survive perfectly well without lungs. Well that changed my mind quick smart.

But I still didn’t understand why various forest-dwellers of sub-Saharan Africa had evolved under a differential selection pressure for intelligence compared to Europeans and Asians. Big Don had already provided me with the answer.

As for Europeans emerging with higher intelligence than Africans, it’s a no-brainer. In the colder climates, food must be planned for and stored during growing season in order to survive the winter. By contrast, plentiful food was available year-round for hunter-gatherers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Now I have a long-standing distrust of anything called a “no-brainer.” It seems to me that as many times as something really is a no-brainer requiring no thought to be understood, just as often it means “calling this a no-brainer stops me from having to think about the flaws in my precious beliefs.” But in this case Big Don is right. Those peoples who live in colder climates have to use their intelligence to store food for winter. That is why the most intelligent people of all are Inuits. It also explains why the sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers are less intelligent than those who store food over winter like Scandinavians, Koreans, and squirrels.

That’s right. Hunter-gatherers are less intelligent than squirrels. I realise this is a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, but I have empirical proof of it. I called a friend of mine who works in the Congo and another who lives in North America about all this and together we worked out a new IQ test designed specifically to investigate the intelligence of food storers versus non-storers. It’s all copyrighted, but I don’t think Elsevier will mind if I release one of the questions.

Acorn is to oak tree as beechnut is to __________ tree.

When my friend in the Congo asked this of several Baka tribesmen, they didn’t know. They had to say ridiculous things like “What’s an acorn?” and “I’ve never heard of an oak tree.” Meanwhile my friend in North America noticed that squirrels could not speak and so he had to rely on observational evidence of their behaviour. He found that whenever a squirrel climbed an oak tree, it came down with an acorn and whenever it climbed a beech tree it came down with a beechnut, thus demonstrating that squirrels are smarter than pygmies.

None of this is new. As far back as the early 1970s a research team headed by Rosewall, Hoad, and Bartkowicz showed that penguins were smarter than foreigners.³ Why have liberals ignored this overwhelming evidence? Clearly they are incapable of incorporating “no-brainers” into their thought processes as they have become emotionally dependent on outmoded strategies such as collecting evidence, applying rational analysis, and promoting humanism. Just like rats and roaches.

References
1. Lasseter J, Stanton A, et al. A Bug’s Life: previously unobserved defences by Atta texana against parasitic feeding raids of Eusmastacoideae. Pixar, 1998
2. Bird B, et al. Ratatouille: communal problem solving and dietary diversity in a Rattus rattus colony of central urban Paris. Pixar, 2007
3. Python M. Frontiers in Medicine: The Gathering Storm. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1973

A notice caught my eye calling for general practitioners to sit on the BreastScreen Queensland State Accreditation Committee. The BreastScreen program is the national mammogram screening program and is available to all Australian women between the ages of fifty and seventy (or younger in some circumstances) and screens around 1,600,000 women every year. In 2004, the BreastScreen program identified 3,851 invasive breast tumours. It’s an important program. It’s public health. It involves some fascinating epidemiology. And they want a GP to sit on one of its committees. It’s right up my alley. I was thinking about it until I read more closely.

According to the notice, the position will be reimbursed at 50% of the rate of the F1 category for committee members. It took a bit of looking, but I found the schedule of rates. The F1 rate is the lowest possible tier of reimbursement. For a full day, the fee payable is $191. And you can only claim a travel allowance if it takes more than four hours to get to the meetings. And the reimbursement is only 50% of that rate. Which means an 8-hour day comes out at $11.938 per hour. If I was to include my travel time (1.5-2 hours each way), that would drop to $8.304 an hour. To put this in context, the hourly rate for junior shop assistants on a casual contract is $12.345 — when they are 18 years old and have no supervisory or management duties.

I would still consider the position if I wasn’t already burning up my goodwill to the government working at the University of Queensland, a position that pays me about half what I would earn if I spent the same time in general practice (and I am not a high revenue earner compared to most of my colleagues). But what I am trying to understand is how the same ministers who go on about the importance of public health and of training more doctors seem to be doing their level best to make it highly unrewarding to anyone who might want to actually achieve these tasks.

Previously, I laid into James Watson for his comments on intelligence. But there is a greater spectre than Watson out there. Watson, for all his faults, at least can be said to have been bemoaning the state of affairs he was describing and argued against discrimination (although it’s hard to see how the world should change policies towards Africa based on that continent’s supposed lower intelligence and not call this discrimination). Most importantly, Watson paid for his comments (he was forced to resign the chancellorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories) and later apologised publicly and, I believe, genuinely.

This is not, alas, true of most proponents of racial intelligence differences. To choose the most quoted recent example, William Saletan in Slate called the belief that intelligence is roughly equal across ethnic groups “Liberal creationism.” Here’s a taste of his writing:

…if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn’t just another fact; it’s a threat to their whole value system…The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals.

To Saletan, the evidence for different intelligence in different ethnic groups is as strong as the evidence for evolution.

Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, and 100 in Britain. White populations in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States score closer to one another than to the worldwide black average. It’s been that way for at least a century.

Saletan has three other planks of evidence: (1) that IQ is partly inherited, (2) that people with bigger brains on MRI tend to score better on IQ tests, and (3) that some genes have been identified as affecting brain size and varying by continent. Now if the evidence for evolution was no better than this, creationism would still be the dominant scientific position and Charles Darwin would be known only to historians of science.

In a study released just this week, Robert Plomin announced that after an extensive scan of the human genome to find associations between intelligence and genes, he found only six genes that could be statistically linked, and the most powerful of these genes accounted for only 0.4% of variation in IQ. In other words, individual genes make very little difference to IQ; the genetic recipe for brains contains thousands of ingredients and complex, interlocking cooking instructions. Saletan could not have known about this particular paper when he wrote his article, but it doesn’t matter because this is only the latest in a long string of such evidence. Plomin was uncovering the same sort of evidence back in 1998.

Saletan argues that “If Africans, Asians, and Europeans evolved different genes, the reason is that their respective genes were suited to their respective environments.” Now we can see that Saletan isn’t just ignorant of the research base on intelligence and genetics, he knows virtually nothing about evolutionary theory. Groups don’t “evolve different genes”, they generate new genes by mutation. Genes change distribution in populations because of selection pressure, to be sure, but also because of neutral drift, and also, as I explained in the previous entry, founder effects. In the extreme case of the Ashkenazim, of whom you may recall half are descended from a total of four women, there are dozens of genetic diseases that came down that descent line not because they were beneficial for survival — how could they be? — but because those four women carried recessive genes that passed into their constrained lineage thus increasing the chances of their descendants getting two copies of the ill genetic variations. Had it been a different four women, Ashkenazim would have a different set of genetic illnesses associated with their bloodlines. This has nothing to do with natural selection and everything to do with historical contingency — what evolutionary scientists call “frozen accidents.”

And in what bizarre universe does being a hunter in Africa involve less advantage for intelligence than being a hunter in Europe or Asia? Here’s your answer:

If we lived in a savannah, kids programmed to mature slowly and grow big brains would be toast. Instead, we live in a world of zoos, supermarkets, pediatricians, pharmaceuticals, and information technology. Genetic advantages, in other words, are culturally created.

Over millions of years we became late maturers and big-brained. This happened while we were savannah dwellers. What happened 70-100,000 years ago that suddenly changed the selection pressures on the savannah? Saletan doesn’t say. Even more absurdly, Saletan seems to think that information technology went back in time and exerted evolutionary pressure on prehistoric humans. In Europe and Asia. Not in Africa. Not in the Americas. Not in Australia and the Pacific.

I’m not going to go point by point through Saletan’s many egregious errors. If you want that, you can check out this roundup of the many rebuttals of Saletan’s article at Noli Irritate Leones. I would prefer to do the flip side of last entry’s approach. Last time I Hammered the Worst Argument. This is a nice shortcut because it demonstrates that if, say, James Watson can believe such a stupid thing, then we can be duly skeptical about anything else he has to say on this particular subject. It does not replace a proper academic rebuttal but it’s a good shortcut.

This time I’m going to Hammer the Best Argument. That is, if I can blow Saletan’s best argument out of the water, then everything else he says can be safely tossed aside. Can I do it? You bet.

(more…)

I had thought we had got past needing to write about race and IQ thirty years ago. Apparently not. There has been an surge of commentary recently to the effect that IQ is highly racially determined, and that this is a genetic phenomenon. The most infamous was James D. Watson’s career-ending interview in the Sunday Times in which is reported to have said that:

…he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

This was immediately followed with a safety net:

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented…”

Now James Watson knows a thing or two about genetics. He won the Nobel Prize for uncovering the structure of DNA. The scientific premise of his argument is sound:

…there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.

And this is quite true. There are many genes that follow ethnic groupings. Africans are more likely to have sickle-cell anaemia than anyone else on Earth. Asians are more likely to have lactose intolerance. Ashkenazi Jews, by virtue of a founder effect so strong that half of all the world’s Ashkenazim are descended from just four women, are troubled by a raft of genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Fanconi anaemia and many more. Caucasians are more likely to have cystic fibrosis than blacks or hispanics. Watson is correct in pointing out that the genes that are involved in brain development and function are quite likely to be differently distributed in different ethnic groupings.

However, there is a long, long gap between a premise and a proof. All of the genetic conditions mentioned above are single-gene diseases. Intelligence is not. Intelligence is a complex phenomenon, poorly understood, that is the result of lots of genes, lots of interactions between genes, and the heavy hand of culture and the environment.

I have an analytical technique that I find very useful. I call it Hammering the Worst Argument. It saves a great deal of time and it often reveals a lot about the person behind the argument. And Watson’s worst argument is this: “people who have to deal with black employees find this [equality] not true.” Many commentators have picked up on this statement for its offensiveness. But they seem to have missed the point.

Why is this an error and not just an offense? Watson made a blanket statement that people who “have to” deal with black employees perceive as obvious that there is inequality in intelligence. Each one of those emphases poses a problem for anyone who would defend Watson. He thinks the intelligence gap is so glaring as to be confirmed by casual personal observation. He does not allow for exceptions: anyone who deals with any black employees, he thinks, will attest to their lower intelligence. He does not allow for any perceptual biases that could make someone perceive inferiority even when there is none. And the “have to” gives the game away. Who “has to” deal with black employees? People who don’t really want to.

In the previous installment, we saw that a study published in Science was poorly reported in the mass media. One of the most egregious errors was the attempt to make a small IQ difference look big. In this case, the source of the error was not just mass media reporters but Science itself, or to be more specific, its commentary by Frank Sulloway arguing that:

Critics might still argue that the mean IQ difference documented between a Norwegian firstborn and a secondborn is only 2.3 points. Such a modest difference, however, can have far greater consequences than most people realize. For example, if Norway’s educational system had only two colleges—a more prestigious institution for students with IQs above the mean, and a less desirable institution for all other students—an eldest child would be about 13% more likely than a secondborn to be admitted to the better institution (the relative risk ratio), and the odds of a firstborn being admitted would be 1.3 times as great. In medicine, new therapeutic benefits of this magnitude often make front-page headlines. In addition, such differences in opportunities gained or lost inevitably accumulate over one’s lifetime.

I think we can all agree with one of Sulloway’s statements: that new therapeutic benefits of this magnitude often make front-page headlines. But the reason is that many press releases use the same dubious statistical manipulations to make their findings look a lot more impressive than they really are. I could rebut the statistical reasoning behind Sulloway’s rhetoric here, and I could explain why it is that public health specialists grumble about odds ratios and relative risks for exactly this reason: they exaggerate the size of effects sometimes to the point of absurdity. I could criticise Sulloway’s rather odd assumptions about the number of colleges in Norway and his perfect correlation between IQ and college entrance score. But I won’t. One doesn’t need painstaking statistical arguments. All one needs is this graph:

The black line on the left is the IQ scores of those children who were second-ranked among their siblings. The green line on the right is the IQ scores of the first-ranked. (I am deliberately avoiding the terms “firstborn” and “secondborn” for reasons I made clear in the previous blog entry.)

When statisticians look at a collection of data, they are interested not just in the average but also in the distribution of that data. One of the common measures of distribution is the standard deviation. In IQ scores, the average is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. To give you some scale for that, the average height of American males is 69.3 inches with a standard deviation of 2.92 inches.¹

What this means is that an IQ difference of 2.3 is the equivalent of a height difference of 0.45 inches (1.14 cm), which is to say that the difference is not very large at all.

Also, it seems that nobody has considered the very simple hypothesis that first-ranked children are more likely to be given greater educational opportunities — an effect particularly pronounced in low-income families — and that this has raised their IQ by the very simple process of training them to answer academic questions. I can’t tell if this potential confounder was excluded or analysed in the paper because the paper is far too truncated to know (the entire paper takes up just one page of Science; Sulloway’s commentary takes up nearly two pages).

As for Sulloway’s statement that lost opportunities accumulate over a lifetime, I couldn’t disagree more. History is sprinkled with examples of people who missed opportunity after opportunity before finally achieving greatness. This is, I believe, what is really at the heart of all this guff about IQ and birth order, and why so many commentators keep describing this new finding in terms of birth order instead of social rank order. Even Sulloway, commenting in the same journal that published the original paper, continually uses the terms “firstborn” and “secondborn” when he really shouldn’t. I think this is a telling sign. Lurking beneath these conflations and exaggerations of effect lies a deep yearning for fatalistic explanations of a person’s character and life success. It’s in their birth order. It’s in their genes. It’s in their star signs.

Reference:
1. Block HW, Li Y, Savits TH. Mixtures of normal distributions: modality and failure rate. Statistics and Probability Letters: 74(3); 253-264, 2005

From The Independent:

Using the IQ tests taken from the military records of 241,310 Norwegian conscripts, the scientists have found that eldest siblings are, on average, significantly “more intelligent” than second-borns. It may not seem like much, but 2.3 points on the IQ scale – the average difference between first and second siblings – could be enough to determine whether or not someone gets into a good college.

Whatever the cutoff mark is to get into a given college, there will always be someone who just misses out by a sliver. Any difference in IQ could be the difference between getting into a good college or not, especially as most academic entrance tests examine the same skills as IQ tests.

There is another flaw in this article. It’s not exactly an error, as we shall see, but it is worth comparing the quote above with what the actual abstract says:

We show that intelligence quotient (IQ) score levels among nearly 250,000 military conscripts were dependent on social rank in the family and not on birth order as such, providing support for a family interaction explanation. (my emphasis)

How is it possible that the journalist has come to the opposite conclusion to the research? The answer is that he hasn’t. Later in the article he goes on to explain that the research suggests that it is not strict birth order but authority within the family that matters. First-born children tend to be given a higher rank within the family, and it is the role within the family that appears to account for the IQ difference. So while it is true that the journalist is aware of this and has reported on it, the problem remains that in report after report (check Google to see what I mean), the wrong explanation is given first, discussed at length with little indication that the explanation is wrong, and only later is the correct interpretation given. One particularly bad piece at Boston.com takes eight paragraphs to get to the finding about social rank, and compounds my irritation with an even worse example of the statistical error above.

But the extra smarts conferred by birth order are significant enough in the broad sense. Spread over tens of thousands of individuals, the tiny difference could translate into a higher likelihood of acceptance into better colleges, improved chances of landing a good job, or even better luck at winning a brainy spouse, according to some child experts.

Which is the same bulldust, at greater length, and with new bulldust added. Winning a brainy spouse? Give me a break. Show me the person who can recognise a difference of 2 IQ points in others. Then show me that this difference affects mate selection. Then I might take it seriously as a finding, but I still won’t consider it to be a social process of any significance. Then the Boston.com article gets even worse:

With a sample size of nearly a quarter-million test subjects, that’s compelling scientific evidence.

No no no no no! Sample size is only one part of assessing the strength of a given finding. The real test of evidence is not sample size but significance score, which is not reported in this article here (and unfortunately I can’t access). You can have a billion samples and still not have compelling evidence. And even if there is strong significance, it does nothing to exclude biases or confounding variables.

Fortunately other journalists, such as those as the Washington Post and CNN, reported the social rank upfront as the key finding and avoided blathering to readers about how important this trivial IQ difference is. Kudos to them.

Kudos also to this pseudonymous poster who, despite providing compelling evidence that his parents deserve a refund, appears to have more insight than most professional commentators:

This type of ’scientific study’ is always so subjective and time wasteful. Every little factor of family life comes into play. I am the middle child. I went to private school. I am tested smarted then my older brother, who is a twin (faternal) to my very much smarter older brother. My younger brother dropped out of high school to go to college, and my youngest brother was in the youngest of us all to own his own home. We were all raised in Kentucky. Try am fit those oddities into the ‘findings’ and see how it is squewed.

One might expect that I would be in full agreement with Melvin Jules Bukiet’s essay “Wonder Bread” in American Scholar. Bukiet takes on the current crop of Brooklyn-based writers who use fantastical elements in their fiction to achieve a certain style of happy resolution. Among these writers he includes Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, who hail from Brooklyn, and expands his net to include non-Brooklyn writers such as Michael Chabon from San Francisco Bay and Sue Monk Kidd from South Carolina. “Brooklyn is a psychic rather than a geographic designation,” he tells us, at least for the purposes of his literary analysis.

I too have written an essay condemning the lazy use of fantastical plot resolutions. It’s called “The Curse of the Transcendental Happy Ending” and it is due to appear in the next issue of Borderlands. But I am not in the least bit in sympathy with Bukiet. Allow me to explain. My antagonism to the Transcendental Happy Ending is due to it being a lazy cop-out in most instances. The full argument can be read when Borderlands comes out. But this is not to say that all writers and all books that use a Transcendental Happy Ending are lazy cop-outs. If the ending is a natural resolution that follows the logic and tone of the book that leads up to it, then there is nothing wrong with ending this way. I went to great pains in my essay to explain why this distinction is important, but to Bukiet there is no real distinction. Happy endings arrived at by fantastical events are, to Bukiet, bad endings by definition.

Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

But people do find growth in tragedy. They do it all the time. I speak to people every day of my working life who find ways of growing past traumatic events. I also know as a clinician that pain is not tautological and that the biological and emotional purpose of suffering is to teach us to avoid injury. The reason why lepers and diabetics lose toes is that they lose their sense of pain and are unable to prevent injury, which leads to necrosis. That is to say, the very function of pain is learning and self-protection.

Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality.

To which I say: who made Mr Bukiet the Pope of Literature? On this score, we can exclude Pynchon, Vonnegut, Carter, Le Guin, Sterne, Cervantes, Ballard, Borges, Calvino, and many other great writers from “serious” fiction.

That’s precisely why their books are more insidious than simpler genre novels wherein people manage to triumph over trauma.

There is no correlation between “simpler” novels, “genre” novels, and triumph over trauma. Some of the simplest genre story forms are apocalyptic and unredemptive — consider post-Romero zombie plots or Planet of the Apes. And on the other hand, many of the canonical works in Western literature resolve on a triumph over trauma. The Odyssey springs to mind. Even Macbeth, one of the most bloodthirsty pieces of melancholia in the Western canon, ends with the restoration of the moral order.

In fact, trauma’s never overcome. That’s what defines it. Your father is dead, or your mother, and so are most of the Jews of Europe, and the World Trade Center’s gone, and racism prevails, and sex murders occur. What is, is. The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience.

No, that is not the definition of trauma, and exactly which of these authors have gone so far as to resurrect their dead characters, unkill the Jews of Europe, or restore the World Trade Centre? These stories, even with fantastical help, never go so far as to undo trauma. What they are about is coming to terms with it. This does not put these books above criticism. They can still be mawkish and I for one could never bring myself to read The Lovely Bones based purely on its form and subject matter (accordingly, I offer no opinion on its actual qualities as a novel).

Bukiet has praise for only one of the modern wunderkind: Jonathan Lethem. Can’t fault him for that. The problem with Bukiet’s piece is not his choices or the problems he identifies in the novels he discusses, but in the prescriptive way he generates rules for what is good writing and what is bad writing — rules that are even more egregious than the offences he means to condemn. Bukiet’s rules suggest that the best literature is soaked in gloom, the sort of story where everyone is miserable and nobody ever feels better. Nothing on the radio but late Shostakovich and nothing on Broadway but Eugene O’Neill revivals.

The real is real, all right, but what we think is real is not so steadfast; misery and emotional stasis is not the default setting for good fiction; and there is nothing intrinsically simplistic or generic or wrong in stories that end with redemption, peace, or reconciliation.