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…)

Seen while browsing through New Scientist’s Evolution: 24 Myths and Misconceptions; a link to video of a salamander that coils up and rolls downhill a la the mythical hoop snake or M. C. Escher’s Curl-Up.

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…)

Courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day, this magnificent image:

Squid favourite Astronomy Pic of the Day has announced its choices for the 12 best astronomical images for the year. Here are my favourites.

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?”

(more…)

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

An interesting post at physorg.com on recent work by University of Utah scientists Henry Harpending and Gregory M. Cochran, who have previously argued that the high IQs of Ashkenazi Jews can be attributed to genetic selection. Their more recent work suggests that 7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, recent evolution.

The quotes Cochran as saying: “History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans - sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants.”

Harpending is now studying whether the mutation that made Indo-European speakers lactose tolerant “gave them more energy, allowing them to conquer a large area. ”

got milk?

snikt ™

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.