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.

This public service announcement is dedicated to Margaret, for the inspiration, and to Eddie Izzard, for this:

The National Rifle Association says, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” But I think the gun helps, you know. I think just standing there going “Bang!”, that’s not going to kill too many people, is it? You’d have to be pretty dodgy on the heart to have that…

Scott Westerfeld and Shaun Tan have scored big, positive reviews in the NYT Book Review.

Gene Luen Yang writes of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival:

Reading “The Arrival” feels like paging through a family treasure newly discovered up in the attic… Such visual eloquence can only motivate readers to seek out any future graphic novels from Shaun Tan, regardless of where they might be shelved.

My only quibble with Yang’s review is that he spends far too many* paragraphs arguing that “[t]hough Tan is a native-born Australian, an American ambience pervades his book.” Not exactly. Tan researched the immigrant experience from all over the world. Naturally, that means some American imagery. There are scenes set in what looks like Ellis Island, the famous entry point for European migrants arriving in New York city, because Tan absorbed hundreds of photographs of the Ellis Island Immigrant Station and reworked them in his imagination. But he did the same thing for Australia, too, in the landscapes and the vaguely marsupial creatures that populate his fantastic new continent. Then there’s the very Chinese architecture of the Old Country and the social decay symbolised by dragon-like tentacles. Tan’s book is a testament to the universal immigrant experience; it also seems to be an unintended litmus test for insularity.

James Hynes writes of Scott Westerfeld’s Extras:

“Extras” is just as thrilling as its predecessors, but it’s also a thoughtful novel of ideas, a brilliant parody of the modern obsession with fame. Like almost everyone else in her world, Aya records everything she does with the help of a semi-sentient hovercam (a sort of floating soccer ball that’s a cross between R2D2 and Weegee), using the resulting footage to boost her face rank. It’s as if the whole world were like Facebook, with every citizen simultaneously a celebrity and his or her own paparazzi.

Both books are fantastic (in either sense of the word). It’s good to see them getting attention in the most conspicuous review space on the planet.

* Two

Bindeez, winner of the Australian Toy of the Year, has just been recalled for safety reasons. Some of the beads, it seems, contain the party drug gamma-hydroxy butyrate (GHB) and have hospitalized several Australian and New Zealand children after a harmless bead ingestion turned into a mysterious drug overdose.

Manufacturer Moose Products has announced a voluntary recall of Bindeez with refund, but I am not at all satisfied. My children love their Bindeez and they’re terribly upset that they can’t play with them anymore. A full refund is not enough. The emotional trauma and the risk to health are worth a great deal more than that. I for one will not be returning our Bindeez until Moose Products agrees to reimburse us at current street value.

Terry Dowling’s collection Basic Black tied for Best Collection with Glen Hirshberg’s American Morons at the International Horror Guild Awards. Other winners were Conrad Williams, Norman Partridge, Paul Finch*, Stephen Gallagher, William Sheehan and Bill Shafer, Subterranean magazine, Lewis Trondheim, S.T. Joshi, Aeron Alfrey, and John Picacio, while Ramsey Campbell was honoured as a Living Legend.

This year’s International Horror Guild Awards were wrapped into the World Fantasy Award convention, a synergy that works very well indeed. Details and nominees courtesy of the International Horror Guild.

*Who, given his primary genre, really ought to be Paul Flinch.

Talking Squid favourite Shaun Tan, creator of The Red Tree, The Lost Thing, and artist behind The Rabbits, took away the Best Artist trophy at the World Fantasy Awards banquet in Saratoga Springs, New York. As the award is for the 2006 calendar year, this would appear to be the judges’ response to Tan’s outstanding graphic novel, The Arrival.

Betty Ballantine and Diana Wynne-Jones* were recognised for Lifetime Achievement; other winners were Gene Wolfe, Jeffrey Ford, M. Rickert (twice), Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling, Ellen Asher, and Gary K. Wolfe. Details at LOCUS Online.

*Not to be confused with Diane Wynna-Jones.