Secret intelligence conference in Europe

Last month, psychologist James Thompson hosted a scientific conference for researchers interested in IQ and human biodiversity topics at an undisclosed location in Europe. I advised him last year to keep arrangements non-public because a somewhat similar conference a decade-and-a-half ago was broken up by a mob of anti-science fanatics.

I would have liked to have attended, but I can't afford trips to Europe.

James has now posted a few of the abstracts of presented papers on his Psychological Comments blog.
     

Graph of most and least accurate media sites on IQ

Psychologist James Thompson has graphed one bit of the new survey of psychometricians by Rindermann, Coyle and Becker:

Now, obviously, iSteve is #1 relative only to a rather short list of mostly well-known outlets. In my blogroll, I link to specialist sites that are significantly better than mine at covering this difficult field, some of which even publish their own new research.

One reason that New York Times coverage of testing isn't very good these days (barely over a 4 on a 1 to 9 scale, while I scored about a 7) is because it's generally not assigned to the Science and Medicine staffs, which have a lot of solid veteran reporters. It seems like the beat is usually covered by a combination of Education, National, Opinion, Business, Legal, and Local writers, few of whom know much about this complex subject.

The Local kindergarten IQ test stories are probably consistently the best testing coverage that the NYT does, because subscribers want the straight scoop on how to get their kids into a $40,000 per year kindergarten.

On most else, however, subscribers just seem to want to know what the right kind of people think so that they can think the same thing too. Knowing what you are supposed to think makes conversations go much more smoothly at fundraising receptions for parents of toddlers who got into expensive kindergartens that use the Wechsler IQ test for admissions.

Beyond all that, there's the issue of mastery. Personally, I find cognitive testing to be cognitively challenging to understand. I'm just barely intelligent enough to write about intelligence. It takes a lot of work to move from the point where you have to rely upon fluid intelligence to where you can skate by on crystallized intelligence. It's not surprising that people who drop in on the subject briefly during their quick stint at the Education desk seem particularly baffled. 

The g factor and Ulam's challenge to Samuelson

The mathematician and thermonuclear bomb designer Stanislaw Ulam famously challenged economist Paul Samuelson to come with up a social science theory that was both true and nontrivial. After a few years, Samuelson replied with Ricardo's 1817 theory of comparative advantage in foreign trade: if Portugal is worse than Britain at making both steam engines and corks for wine bottles, Portugal should still concentrate on making corks because it's comparatively less bad at corks than at steam engines. (These may not be the precise examples Ricardo used in 1817, but they get his point across.)

Of course, Portugal's corkocentrism helps explain why the Portuguese Navy was such a decisive strategic element in the Age of Steam, but the advantages of having a navy that rules the waves are not considered relevant in conventional economics. 

Samuelson wrote to Ulam:

That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.

Whether Ulam, co-inventor with Edward Teller of staged radiation implosion, responded by pointing out the advantage of making nuclear weapons and not trading them is unknown. Compared to the Hussein family of Iraq and the Qaffathy family of Libya, two ruling clans that didn't find the economics of making nuclear weapons rational, the Kim family of North Korea has enjoyed a comparative advantage at avoiding violent death.

I've long thought that Spearman's 1904 g (for general) factor theory of intelligence is reasonably comparable in nontriviality.

I've always had a hard time grasping it myself. Back in 1998, I wrote a review of Arthur Jensen's magnum opus, The g Factor, that considered some of the paradoxical social and political implications:

Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, a 1981 book that continues to shape the non-scientific intelligentsia's feelings about IQ, demonized g as the "rotten core" of Prof. Jensen's 1969 article documenting the white-black IQ gap. The g Factor's overwhelming vindication of g, drawing on 15 years of new research, might seem likely to end the debate. It won't, of course, for reasons good and bad. The book sheds light on crucial new issues beyond the narrow scope of g (such as racial differences in nerdishness). More depressingly, few will grasp either its strengths or its limitations due to fundamental confusions rampant among American intellectuals about how to think about humanity. 

For example, nobody noticed that Gould's assertion that human equality is a factual (rather than a moral, legal, or spiritual) reality centered on denouncing g; yet, g is the only concept that could conceivably make sense of his claim. 

Ironically, the g-ocentrists are among the last students of human nature making important discoveries within the egalitarian world-view. The one technique capable of uncovering mental equality is Jensen's: minimize the number of data points by measuring only the single most important factor (g) across only a few vast groups. Thus, Jensen, the Great Satan to egalitarian fundamentalists, delivers in Chapter 13 the most important pro-equality finding in recent decades: Men and women really do possess the same average g. Their equal average IQ's scores aren't just an artifact of IQ tests being rigged to produce this result. Jensen's finding is hugely important in itself: it's the best explanation of the splendid performance of women in many white-collar jobs. 

Still, this example also shows that g, like any successful reductionist theory, has its limits. Males and females, while similar on mean g (but not on the standard deviation of g: guys predominate among both eggheads and knuckleheads), differ on several specific cognitive talents. Men, Jensen reports in passing, tend to be better at visual-spatial skills (especially at mentally rotating 3-d objects) and at mathematical reasoning. Women are generally superior at short-term memory, perceptual speed, and verbal fluency. Since the male sex is stronger at logically manipulating objects, while the female sex prevails at social awareness, that explains why most nerds are male, while most "berms" (anti-nerds adept at interpersonal skills and fashion) are female. Beyond cognition, there are other profound sex dissimilarities in personality, motivation, and physiology. All this helps explain the sexes' different patterns in career choices. 

Because Jensen's simple, single-factor model can detect intellectual equality between men and women, it can also detect intellectual inequality between whites and blacks, if that's what the facts are. Although most responses to Jensen's equality/inequality model haven't risen above name-calling, obfuscation, guilt-by-association, and professional cowardice, there is a logical, fruitful alternative: develop a complex, multi-factor "diversity" model that rather than concentrating upon one difference among a very few groups, focuses on the many differences visible among many groups. Emphasizing the trade-offs necessary for achieving different goals, it makes toting up an overall winner look a little pointless. 

The diversity perspective has much to offer, but only when it's thoroughly understood that it's inherently less empirically egalitarian than Jensenism. The diversity model's current popularity, however, stems from the wishful thinking that it discredits racial differences, on the assumption that since Diversity and Equality are both Good Things, they must be synonyms rather than antonyms. One particularly fashionable defense of empirical equality is to combine the doctrine that there "are no such things as races" (just swarms of little ethnic groups) with Harvard professor Howard Gardner's speculations about seven "multiple intelligences." Ergo, all groups must be equal, QED. 

Let's do the math: assume, say, 100 ethnic groups and seven "intelligences." That's 700 data points. No way, no how could they all be equal -- our universe doesn't work like that. The more complex your model, the less equality and the more diversity you'll perceive in the world. 

Interestingly, when I pointed this out to Gardner, he agreed with me.

The Gap is closing!

Speaking of Arthur Jensen, Occidentalist has a table listing all 40 academic studies he could find of the white-black gap in average IQ in the U.S. They range from 1918, when it was measured at 17 points, to 2008, when it was found to be 16 points. So, don't let anybody tell you The Gap hasn't closed over the last 90 years.

Seriously, is there anything in the human sciences more stable than La Griffe's Fundamental Constant of American Sociology? It's really odd when you stop to think about how stable it has been. I suspect that differences in average height have changed significantly more over the generations. For example, when I was a kid, the Dutch weren't particularly tall, not the way they are now.

Things change.

Except this ...

Indeed, I'm wondering whether there isn't some kind of behavioral feedback at work regarding IQ that somehow keeps The Gap about the same. I don't have any candidates in mind for what that stabilizing mechanism might be, but it's worth considering.

Dr. Betty Hart, RIP: Scientifically proved blacks don't talk enough or watch TV enough

From the NYT:

Betty Hart Dies at 85; Studied Disparities in Children’s Vocabulary Growth 

By WILLIAM YARDLEY 

Published: October 25, 2012 

Betty Hart, whose research documenting how poor, working-class and professional parents speak to their young children helped establish the critical role that communicating with babies and toddlers has in their later development, died on Sept. 28 in hospice care in Tucson. She was 85 .... 

Dr. Hart was a graduate student at the University of Kansas in the 1960s when she began trying to help poor preschool children overcome speech and vocabulary deficits. But she and her colleagues later concluded that they had started too late in the children’s lives — that the ones they were trying to help could not simply “catch up” with extra intervention. 

At the time, a prevalent view was that poor children were essentially beyond help, victims of circumstances and genetics. But Dr. Hart and some of her colleagues suspected otherwise and revisited the issue in the early 1980s, beginning research that would continue for a decade. 

“Rather than concede to the unmalleable forces of heredity, we decided that we would undertake research that would allow us to understand the disparate developmental trajectories we saw,” she and her former graduate supervisor, Todd R. Risley, wrote in 1995 in “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,” a book about their findings, which were reported in 1992. “We realized that if we were to understand how and when differences in developmental trajectories began, we needed to see what was happening to children at home at the very beginning of their vocabulary growth.” 

They began a two-and-a-half-year study of 42 families of various socioeconomic levels who had very young children. Starting when the children were between 7 and 9 months old, they recorded every word and utterance spoken to them and by them, as well as every parent-child interaction, over the course of one hour every month. 

It took many more years to transcribe and analyze the data, and the researchers were astonished by what they eventually found. 

“Simply in words heard, the average child on welfare was having half as much experience per hour (616 words per hour) as the average working-class child (1,251 words per hour) and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour),” Drs. Hart and Risley wrote. 

“By age 4, the average child in a welfare family might have 13 million fewer words of cumulative experience than the average child in a working-class family,” they added. 

Isn't there a giant assumption in this famous calculation: that the one hour per month of child-parent interactions that Hart & Risley recorded are representative of the entire month? Don't some of these non-welfare parents have jobs, during which periods they can't be talking to their children?

Let's try the math. Say the average 0 to 4 year old is awake 10 hours per day, or 3,600 hours per year, or 14,400 hours in those four years. If the working class family talks at the child 635 more words per hour than those famously laconic welfare families, then that comes out to a differential of 9,144,000 words, not 13,000,000 words. So the working class family must be talking at their children not just ten hours per day, but more like 14 hours per day, leaving only 10 hours per day for the poor child to sleep (or to talk himself or to watch TV or to play with his blocks or to watch the cat or to daydream).

Shouldn't somebody call Child Protective Services and report all the non-welfare families in the country for child abuse due to incessant chatter?

They also found disparities in tone, in positive and negative feedback, and in other areas — and that the disparities in speech and vocabulary acquisition persisted into school years and affected overall educational development. 

So, parents with big vocabularies tended to have children with big vocabularies. (Also, I would imagine, parental skin tone, height, and hair color tended to correlate with their children's skin tone, height, and hair color.)

“People kept thinking, ‘Oh, we can catch kids up later,’ and her big message was to start young and make sure the environment for young children is really rich in language,” said Dr. Walker, an associate research professor at Kansas who worked with Dr. Hart and followed many of the children into their school years. 

I recommend taking your preschoolers to Tom Stoppard plays. Start with The Real Thing no later than 30 months and work up to Arcadia by at least the fourth birthday. Also, read to them every night from Nabokov. Pnin is an easy start, but they should be finished with Ada by the time they enter kindergarten.

The work has become a touchstone in debates over education policy, including what kind of investments governments should make in early intervention programs. One nonprofit program whose goals are rooted in the findings is Reach Out and Read, which uses pediatric exam rooms to promote literacy for lower-income children beginning at 6 months old. 

Prompted by the success of Reach Out and Read, Dr. Alan L. Mendelsohn, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Bellevue Hospital and New York University Langone Medical Center, pushed intervention even further. He created a program through Bellevue in which lower-income parents visiting doctors are filmed interacting and reading with their children and then given suggestions on how they can expand their speaking and interactions. 

“Hart and Risley’s work really informed for me and many others the idea that maybe you could bridge the gap,” Dr. Mendelsohn said, “or in jargon terms — address the disparities.” ...

I don't see any mention here of experimental research, just tracking of existing differences that are compatible with most combinations of nature and nurture theories.

“Today, much of her research is being applied in many different ways,” said Dr. Andrew Garner, the chairman of a work group on early brain and child development for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I think you could also argue that the current interest in brain development and epigenetics reinforces at almost a molecular level what she had identified 20 years ago.”

Epigenetics!

One obvious but little mentioned implication of this popular line of thought is: White professional mothers who hire semi-literate nannies who have smaller vocabularies in English than in Spanish and smaller vocabularies in Spanish than in Mayan to raise their children for them while they put in the hours to make partner or get tenure are dooming their offspring to only getting into State U. You see, by not personally speaking to their small children for much of the day using their high level vocabularies, Hart & Risley's logic says their kids are in big, big trouble.

And, indeed, many white mothers behave exactly as if this were true.

For example, one of my early bosses in the marketing research business was Kathie, a hard-charging, funny, foul-mouthed MBA who let nothing stand in the way of our team making the numbers. Then I heard a rumor that she and her boyfriend, an MBA at a big corporation, were going to take a little time off from each other. Then she started going to the gym at lunchtime, lost ten pounds, and then showed up one Monday morning wearing an engagement ring and a big smile: her ex-boyfriend was now going to be her husband. Marriage and a baby ensued, but she was right back on the job a month after giving birth. Then she got pregnant again, and came back to the job a couple of months after giving birth. But within a week of her return, she announced she was permanently retiring to be a housewife. Management tried hard to talk her into part-time work or taking just a couple of years off or whatever she wanted, but she was adamant that she was done with working: she was a full-time mom from now on.

Of course, Kathie's trajectory was feasible because her husband was making good money. But, her emotions are common.

Of course, this pro stay-at-home-mom implication of the Hart & Risley conventional wisdom is not played up in the press, which is largely run by women who are not stay-at-home-moms and who frequently feel guilty about it if they do have children or resent those women who are mothers, and thus try to put them down by emphasizing how glamorous and politically important it is to be a working woman.

What does the research say on stay-at-home mothers vs working mothers in terms of children's cognitive development? I haven't looked in a long time, but my recollection was that it's inherently uncertain because nobody can run a controlled experiment. Mothers are constantly adapting to what they think is best for their children (e.g., Kathie), trying to optimize a variety of factors that differs for each family and, indeed, for each child.

That moms refuse to follow experimental methodologies when it comes to their own kids is bad for science, but good for children.

Judge Richard Posner on IQ by race and how to rate teachers

Richard Posner is probably the most prominent judge in the U.S. not on the Supreme Court. He has to be the hardest working, as a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer at the U. of Chicago Law School. The author of approaching 40 books, by one measure he's the most cited judge of the 20th Century. 

Posner has a joint blog with Gary Becker, the Nobel-winning UC economist, where they discuss a topic every week. Awhile back, they took on "Rating Teachers." Judge Posner wrote:

I don’t think varying salaries on the basis of measures of teacher quality are a feasible reform. My reasons for this pessimistic judgment are several. First, teaching below the college level tends not to be attractive to competitive people. I happen to have a job, as a federal court of appeals judge, in which everyone is securely tenured and paid the same salary, even though the judges vary in ability, experience, and effort.

I.e., nobody works as hard as Posner.

There are many jobs of that sort, they have their pluses and their minuses, and it would be a mistake to think that all such jobs would be performed better if they were restructured along the Darwinian lines that prevail in business. It’s a mistake to think that everyone is a natural risk taker. Tenure, a wage that varies with seniority rather than measured output, and long summer vacations create a compensation package that is attractive to a certain kind of person.  

Second, while in a sample of millions, as in the study by Chetty et al. that Becker cites, it may well be inferrable, as the study finds, that teachers vary in the value they add to their students, within an individual school such an inference will be very difficult to draw. The average IQ and home environment of students in different classes may differ significantly, random factors may affect their future success, and there can be spillover effects from other classes. 

I know a lot about the history of the evolution of baseball statistics over the last 150 years, a lot more than I know about the development of teacher rating statistics. Maybe I'm not up to date, but my general impression is that teacher rating stats are about where baseball stats were in the late 1800s.

Here's a concept for a nonfiction book. A lot of books come out that focus on schools, with journalists visiting KIPP schools, charter schools, etc. etc., and there's always talk about value added test scores being used to evaluate teachers, but I've never seen a journalist follow some teachers, sitting in the back of the classroom, and then watch them get back their value-added test scores. Do the value-added scores match up with the journalists' subjective impressions?

You may be saying, "Subjective? Everybody knows we have to trust only objective statistical measures, even if they were just made up this year!" In truth, subjective and objective evaluations improve each other. Right now, we have a bunch of brand new complicated value-added measurement systems with few ways of checking whether they seem plausible or not.

Suppose for example that a mediocre teacher teaches English, and a superb teacher teaches the same students history. Both teachers require essays. The superb teacher improves the students’ writing skills, and that in turn improves their performance in their English class, making the English teacher look better than he or she really is.  

Third, and related, varying teachers’ salaries by some output measure will induce all sorts of wasteful strategizing—office politics—what organization economists call “influence activities,” an aspect of agency costs—by teachers hoping to get a good quality rating. They will angle to get the best students assigned to their classes, even when salary is tied to “value added,” as discussed by Becker, because smarter students are likely to improve more.  

Fourth, although in principle the cost of higher salaries for the better teachers could be offset by reducing the salaries of the worse teachers, that is surely infeasible; so the Darwinian approach would cost more than the existing system, and maybe as much more as raising teacher salaries by a uniform percentage.  

Finally, I am not clear what we should think the problem of American education (below the college level) is. Most children of middle-class (say upper quartile of households, income starting at $80,000) Americans are white or Asian and attend good public or private schools, usually predominantly white. The average white IQ is of course 100 and the Asian (like the Jewish) almost one standard deviation higher, that is, 115. The average black IQ is 85, a full standard deviation below the white average, and the average Hispanic IQ has been estimated recently at 89. 

Black children in particular often come from disordered households, which has a negative effect on ability to learn and perhaps indeed on IQ (which is only partly hereditary) as well. Increasingly, black and Hispanic students find themselves in schools with few white or Asian students. The challenge to American education is to provide a useful education to the large number of Americans who are unlikely to benefit from a college education or from high school courses aimed at preparing students for college. The need is for a different curriculum and for a greater investment in these children’s preschool environment. We should recognize that we have different populations with different schooling needs and that  curricula and teaching methods should be revised accordingly. This recognition and response should precede tinkering with compensations systems.

Indeed.

Felix Salmon on IQ and Financial Literacy

Felix Salmon writes about planning for retirement in "Who is speaking for the poor?:"

IQ also helps. Check out this chart, for instance, from a very long and detailed paper about the likelihood that a person of given intelligence will be invested in the stock market.

The distribution is clear: the smarter you are (as measured by IQ), the more likely you are to be invested in the stock market. And this distribution is independent of wealth: it applies to the rich as much as it does to the poor. Or, as the paper puts it, “IQ’s role in the participation decisions of the affluent is about the same as it is for the less affluent. The definition of affluence—net worth or income—does not affect this finding.” 

Most impressively, check out this paper from 2007. It asked just three “simple mathematical questions” of couples to judge the numeracy of each one. If neither got any questions right, the total wealth of the couple, on average, was $202,000. If they both got one question right, it was $505,000. If they both got two questions right, it was $853,000. And if they both got all three questions right, their average wealth on average was a whopping $1.7 million. (If they got different scores from each other, the wealth ended up somewhere in between.) 

And similarly, at the other end of the spectrum, there’s huge amounts of research showing that if you’re particularly financially illiterate, or you’re not good at numbers, then you’re much more likely to be ripped off by predatory lenders or other scams, be they legal or otherwise. 

There are various conclusions to be drawn here, one of which is that if we do a better job of financial education, then Americans as a whole will be better off. That’s true. But at the same time, financial illiteracy, and general innumeracy, and low IQs, are all perfectly common things which are never going to go away. It’s idiotic to try to blame people for having a low IQ: that’s not something people can control. And so it stands to reason that any fair society should look after people who are at such a natural disadvantage in life.

Micronutrient supplementation

I've been writing since 2004 about how the most cost-effective way to help poor countries is through micronutrient supplementation: the U.S. used to have, for example, problems with cretinism in inland states caused by a lack of iodine in the diet. (Saltwater fish tend to be a good source of iodine, but not freshwater fish). So, back before WWII, manufacturers started to add iodine to salt, and this IQ-sapping problem went away. Adding iron to flour also helped raise IQs. This is one of the (many) reasons that the military found the mental sharpness of draftees in WWII much more satisfactory than in WWI.

The NYT has an article about an alternative approach to supplementation: instead of trying to get local manufacturers to add micronutrients to staples, have parents sprinkle the nutrients on their kids' food. 

Whatever the delivery method, this appears to be the most cost effective way to raise national average IQ, and higher national average IQs correlate closely with a host of good things such as higher school test scores and higher per capita GDP. Unfortunately, the entire concept of "national average IQ" has been more or less verboten outside a small corner of social sciences, so the best argument for micronutrient supplementation almost never gets aired. So, this extremely promising method remains stuck in the unfashionable corner of global philanthropy, with Kiwanis International being the prime donor.

The good news is that in the last few years the Gates Foundation has begun to get involved in this field. But, after getting in late, a decade after their splashy debuts in other fields, they've kept if pretty quiet. My guess is that Gates' personal worldview is roughly the same as Mike Judge's Idiocracy and Monty Python's The Protestant View. We know he's obsessed with IQ and that his father was big on population control. (As I pointed out in Taki's Magazine, eugenics was the ideology of Silicon Valley's founders, William Shockley and Fred Terman, and, for all I know, it might still be the sub rosa worldview out there. Here's Paul Graham's essay on "What You Can't Say.") How long do you think it would take you to explain the logic of micronutrient supplementation to raise national average IQ to Gates before he interrupted you and said, "Okay, yeah, I get it." 90 seconds?

But because it's pretty obvious that Gates comes out of the old WASP ideology of quality over quantity in reproduction, if anybody stopped and thought about it, he has to operate through these complicated double bankshot projects to burnish his reputation for being a true believer in political correctness, such as wasting (in his own admission) $2 billion on the lefty "small schools" fad of the last decade.

"Race, IQ, and Wealth"

Ron Unz has a big article in The American Conservative on a perennially interesting and important subject:

Race, IQ, and Wealth 

What the facts tell us about a taboo subject 

By RON UNZ • July 18, 2012 

At the end of April, Charles Kenny, a former World Bank economist specializing in international development, published a blistering attack in Foreign Policy entitled “Dumb and Dumber,” with the accusatory subtitle “Are development experts becoming racists?” Kenny charged that a growing number of development economists were turning towards genetic and other intrinsic human traits as a central explanation of national economic progress, often elevating these above the investment and regulatory issues that have long been the focus of international agencies. 

Although Kenny suggested that many of his targets had been circumspect in how they raised these highly controversial ideas, he singled out IQ and the Wealth of Nations, published in 2001 by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, as a particularly extreme and hateful example of this trend. These authors explicitly argue that IQ scores for different populations are largely fixed and hereditary, and that these—rather than economic or governmental structures—tend to determine the long-term wealth of a given country. 

Kenny claimed that such IQ theories were not merely racist and deeply offensive but had also long been debunked by scientific experts—notably the prominent biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his 1980 book The Mismeasure of Man.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Things Fall Apart: Greg Cochran's new theory of the cause of racial differences in IQ

Over at West Hunter, Greg Cochran has been introducing a a fairly new and potentially important theory of the genetic origins of race differences in IQ.  It's less a theory of evolution than of devolution. The mechanism causing effective differences, he argues, is less selection for higher IQ due to differences in the environment (e.g., winter versus tropics selecting for forethought); instead, a large driver is differential rates in random mutation leading to differences in average level of deleterious genetic load, which tend to correlate with climate warmth.

Sanctuary 

What would happen if people moved somewhere where the mutation rate was far lower? 

Their genetic load would decrease with time, assuming that they were still subject to much selection. Today, everybody has hundreds of nicked or broken genes:  selection keeps eliminating them, while mutation keeps creating them.  The suspicion is that their effect is quite large.  This hypothetical population would have fewer and fewer.  In a few thousand years, they would lose most of the variants that decrease fitness by 1% or more.

Cochran's next post looks at some data on the rates at which random mutations creep into the reproduction process.

Too Darn Hot? 

Posted on July 14, 2012 by gcochran9 

Several recent papers  give me the impression that there is regional variation in mutational load.   One can slice this a number of ways. Dan MacArthur and company looked for mutations that knocked out genes – loss-of-function or LOF mutations.  Mutational load is the sum of all deleterious mutations – LOF mutations are a clear-cut subset of total mutational load. 

Some of the LOF mutations they are found are common, and are presumably neutral, maybe even beneficial, but most are rare and likely deleterious.  The kicker is that they found significantly more LOF mutations in their African population sample than in their European and East Asian samples – 25% higher.  That was unexpected. 

Population history (and mutation rate) determine the variation you expect to find in neutral genes, but significantly deleterious mutations should be in mutation-selection balance.  A neutral variant might easily be a million years old, but a deleterious variant will  last, on average, 1/s generations, when s is the decrease in fitness caused by that variant.  A mutation that decreases fitness by 1% should disappear in  100 generations or so, about 2500 years.  Ancient bottlenecks should not influence the frequency of such noticeably deleterious mutations. 

Another related paper, by Jacob Tenessen et al,  looked at a large set of coding genes, sequencing many times (average depth of 111x)  for high accuracy. As in in MacArthur’s paper they found that the average person carries many probably-deleterious mutations, mutations which are individually rare.  Each person carried, on average, mutations expected to change function (almost always for the worse, although usually only a little for the worse)  in 313 genes (out of the 15,585 they studied. 

They looked at African-Americans and Americans of European descent, about a thousand of each.  They saw what MacArthur’s group did: there were significantly more probably-deleterious mutations in the 80%-African population.  When they used a loose definition of functional variation, about 20% more : with a more conservative definition,  which should have a higher fraction of truly deleterious genes, about 29% more. 

...    The only simple explanation (that I can think of)  is a higher mutation rate.

One possibility is that heat tends to cause a higher mutation rate.

Henry Harpending then summed up:

Pre-term Births 

Posted on July 16, 2012 by harpend= 

The model that Greg is dancing around suggests (1) that there is variation in mutation rate dependent on temperature or something correlated with temperature, (2) higher mutation rates cause a higher genetic burden in human populations, (3) leading to IQ reduction and other minor dings

Here's my model of this theory (which is probably pretty woozy):

Imagine, say, a factory that builds a complex product, such as a car, according to a complicated set of instructions. But, the instructions on how to build the next car are passed on via the Game of Telephone, with mistakes inevitably creeping in. Sometimes, big mistakes are made, and the resulting car is such a disaster that it can't function at all and has to be scrapped. But, most of the individual mistakes are minor and just mean, say, that instead of delivering 268 horsepower, the engine generates 267. Over time, the Telephone Game build up mistakes until a car is completely unusable and has to be scrapped. At that point the workers go find a better car and get the instructions for that car relayed to them. So, on average, most cars don't come off the assembly line performing at spec, but they perform well enough to make it through a test drive. 

Now imagine two factories making the same car from roughly the same overall design. One is in Nagoya and the other in Lagos. It's so hot and humid alla the time in Nigeria, unfortunately, that the workers get distracted during their Game of Telephone and have a higher rate of errors when transmitting plans from one generation to the next. 

In the comments, commenter extraordinaire Jason Malloy writes:

See these posts from February and April for the conceptual background. 

While not fully or explicitly articulated, this is the first New Big Theory of race differences in quite a while, and an interesting alternative to the reigning sociobiological models available since the 1980s. In the latter models intelligence and reproductive differences are seen as consequences of natural selection in divergent latitudes, but this new model replaces natural selection with accumulated mutational burdens. The differences at lower latitudes are not selectively advantageous, but dysfunctional. 

Dr. Cochran notes that complex adaptive systems, involving the functioning of many genes, should be the most vulnerable to genetic load, so this would obviously be the brain and probably reproductive physiology. So in addition to higher general mortality, dysfunctions associated with mutational burdens might include: 

Mental
- Lower intelligence
- Higher retardation
- Higher mental illness 

Reproductive
- Lower birthweight
- Higher premature births
- Higher infertility
- Higher reproductive deformities
- Higher miscarriage (and general obstetric complications)
- Lower sperm quality 

Of course there is a difference between establishing population differences in genetic load, and proving that this is related to population differences in socially valued traits. I’m not sold on this as a replacement for sociobiological models, although there are aspects that make it useful and attractive in different ways. For example, I recently found that ethnic differences in rate of homosexuality are inversely correlated with latitude. Since theories of selectively advantageous homosexuality fall flat, this theory seemed like a better fit.

In the comments to Henry's post, I offer a couple of tentative criticisms, which you can read there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James "Flynn Effect" Flynn: Man Smart, Woman Smarter

The World's Most Interesting Newspaper*, the Daily Mail, reports:

Women overtake men in IQ tests for the first time in 100 years (but is it all down to multitasking?) 

By CRAIG MACKENZIE 

IN the battle of the sexes women have always believed they are cleverer than men.
And now it would appear they are justified in thinking they are superior after psychologists found female IQ scores have risen above men's for the first time in 100 years. 

Women have been as much as five points behind men since testing began a century ago, but that gap has narrowed in recent times. 

This year women finally came out on top - and it may be because they are better at multitasking. The breakthrough has been uncovered by James Flynn, the world-renowned authority on IQ tests. 

He told the Sunday Times: 'In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women's have risen faster.This is a consequence of modernity.
'The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ. The full effect of modernity on women is only just emerging.' 

One theory is women's ability to multitask as they juggle raising a family and going to work, while another explanation is that they are finally realising they have a slightly higher potential intelligence than men. 

Flynn will publish his findings in a new book, but said more data was needed to explain the trend because tests have consistently shown differences between gender and race.

A forgotten bit of history is that early 20th Century IQ experts, most notably the endlessly-demonized Sir Cyril Burt and the Grandfather of Silicon Valley and Evil Eugenicist Lewis Terman, argued, based on the results of IQ tests, that males and females were about equal in intelligence. That was quickly established as orthodoxy among IQ mavens in the first half of the 20th Century. You are always supposed to believe that the IQ & Eugenics WASP scientists of the early 20th Century, being the Worst People in History, were mere playthings of the prejudices of their age. This example suggests the opposite, so it has been shoved down the memory hole.

So, Flynn isn't breaking any ground here, he's just upholding the IQ Orthodoxy endorsed by, among others, Arthur Jensen in 1998.


The main heretic in recent years has been Richard Lynn, so this is a Flynn v. Lynn argument. It's important to note that it's not the Evil IQ Establishment v. Flynn, it's the IQ Establishment (including Flynn) v. Lynn. 


Personally, I don't have a strong opinion on the subject. The male-female gap in median IQ, if it exists, is relatively small. The issues in the discussion quickly become highly technical. Psychometrics is a field in which sizable differences (e.g., median black v. white) show up under just about every conceivable measurement approach, but measuring small differences accurately is dependent upon a lot of technical testing issues.

------

* Not necessarily the World's Most Reliable Newspaper, however ...

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Father of Silicon Valley: Shockley or Terman?

My new column in Taki's Magazine:

With Silicon Valley back on top of the world, it’s time to point out a bit of unwelcome history.  

There are two competing narratives about the technology hub’s origins: 

• The famous tale of how William Shockley’s obnoxious management style spun off start-up silicon chipmakers such as Intel; 

• The less-familiar version centering on Stanford professor Frederick Terman and Hewlett-Packard.  

What has almost never been pointed out, however, is that the two rivals for the title of Father of Silicon Valley, Shockley and Terman, had common roots in early 20th century Palo Alto’s scientific and ideological consensus, a now extremely unfashionable worldview that has been driven underground but remains fundamental to how Silicon Valley actually succeeds in the 21st century.

Isn't the name "Terman" familiar for something else?

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Kanazawa on the disadvantages of intelligence

I admire Satoshi Kanazawa's lively intelligence, although I'm not totally persuaded to trust every idea he comes up with. From The Economist:

... less intelligent people are better at doing most things. In the ancestral environment general intelligence was helpful only for solving a handful of evolutionarily novel problems. 

I look out my window and see mourning doves and crows. The doves seem pretty stupid and the crows appear smarter. Presumably, they both have their evolutionary advantages and disadvantages. Still, it took a lot of natural selection just to get up to being as smart as a dove -- try building a robot bird. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Acemogluism

From my column in Taki's Magazine:

MIT’s Daron Acemoglu is a rock star among economists, one of the ten most cited in his profession. This is largely because of the paper the Istanbul-born Armenian cowrote in 2001: The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development. Other economists have found that it provides a suave way to finally answer the embarrassing question of why, in the 21st century, some countries are rich and some are poor. Acemoglu has a big new book out with James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, that makes his case at great length.

To understand Acemoglu’s professional popularity, you have to grasp how awkward the major features of global economic reality are to careerist economists.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

PISA scores for immigrants

Anatoly Karlin, who is making himself the go-to guy on analyzing the investment implications of international school test scores (a potentially lucrative niche), has a long, fascinating write-up of PISA scores adjusted by immigration status:

One thing that immediately leaps out from above is that just as US scores leap upwards (from 496 to about 525, in line with Australia and Canada) once only whites are considered, so do scores in many European states when only natives are considered (e.g. Germany from 510 to 533; Switzerland from 517 to 542; the Netherlands from 519 to 533). In fact, the Germanic nations equalize with Japan’s 529, Taiwan’s 534, and South Korea’s 541 (the natives of these developed East Asian societies also score a lot higher than their immigrants, but the overall effect on the national average is modest because migrant children are such a small percentage of their school-age populations). In other words, in the worst affected European countries, immigrants are lowering the mean national IQ (converted from PISA scores) by as much as 3 points. 

This might not seem like much, but it is highly significant when bearing in mind the extremely close correlation between national IQ and prosperity. Furthermore, since immigrant population tend to be highly variant – for instance, Britain has a lot of Poles, who are essentially equal to the natives in cognitive capacity (maybe even superior, once you adjust for the fact that it is better-educated Poles who tend to emigrate), and a lot of Pakistanis, who are far below them. This is a good explanation for the general sense of dereliction one sees (and the crime one is likely to experience) when entering Pakistani ghettos in the UK. 

Also note from the graph that there is typically a very high degree of overlap between 1st and 2nd generation immigrant children. The 2nd generation children DO typically perform better, presumably because 1st generation immigrants may frequently have language difficulties and problems with adjusting to a new culture. But the degree of convergence of 2nd generation children to the native mean is modest, despite their transferal to typically far more advanced educational environments. Convergence is almost inconsequential in most European countries like Germany, France, Benelux, Norway, and actually negative in the US (i.e. American 2nd generation immigrant children do worse than the 1st generation).

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Urge to Purge: IQ and the Wealth of Nations

The Urge to Purge appears to be superseding the Urge to Ignore.

From Foreign Policy:

Dumb and Dumber 

Are development experts becoming racists? 

BY CHARLES KENNY | APRIL 30, 2012 

Columnist John Derbyshire's recent effluvia on the subject of things your white kid should know about black people was met with suitable disdain and a rapid expulsion from the web pages of the National Review. Genetic determinism with regard to racial intelligence -- alongside the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould, among others.

Off to a good start there! Invoking the supreme authority of the late Stephen Jay Gould is a surefire way to persuade anybody familiar with the field of psychometrics that you know what you are talking about.

Sadly, Derbyshire-like prattishness on the intellectual inferiority of dark-skinned races and its impact on social and economic outcomes in the United States has a historied international equivalent. In fact, if anything, the academic consensus on why some countries are rich and others are poor is tacking closer to the shoals of genetic determinism than it has been since the days of high empire. Derbyshire's deserved disgrace is a needed reminder to throw brickbats at his partners in malodor who work in global development. 

... Development economists over the past 50 years have eschewed genetic explanations for the wealth and poverty of nations, favoring factors from lack of investment to lack of health care and education to wrong policies to poor government institutions. But the mainstream is moving back in the direction of "deep causes" of development. These involve determinants such as the relative technological advance of regions some centuries (even millennia) ago or levels of ethnic diversity that have long historical roots. And Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg have gone even further back, arguing that "genetic distance" -- or the time since populations shared a common ancestor -- has a considerable role to play in the inequality of incomes worldwide. They estimate that variation in genetic distance may account for about 20 percent of the variation in income across countries. 

Spolaore and Wacziarg take pains to avoid suggesting that one line of genetic inheritance is superior to another, preferring instead an interpretation that argues genetic distance is related to cultural differences -- and thus a more complex diffusion of ideas: "the results are consistent with the view that the diffusion of technology, institutions and norms of behavior conducive to higher incomes, is affected by differences in vertically transmitted characteristics associated with genealogical relatedness.… these differences may stem in substantial part from cultural (rather than purely genetic) transmission of characteristics across generations," they write. 

But where Spolaore and Wacziarg are careful enough to step away from interpretations based on the superiority of certain allele types, more foolhardy scholars have been happy to jump in. Take the book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen titled IQ and the Wealth of Nations. It suggests that the average IQ in Africa is around 70 points, compared with much higher averages in East Asia and the West. Based on their data, the authors suggest that higher average IQ scores are the cause of progress in measures of development, including income, literacy, life expectancy, and democratization. Lynn and Vanhanen even argue that IQ was correlated with incomes as far back as 1820 -- a neat trick given that the IQ test wasn't invented until a century later. 

As that surprising finding might suggest, most of Lynn and Vanhanen's data is, in fact, made up. Of the 185 countries in their study, actual IQ estimates are available for only 81. The rest are "estimated" from neighboring countries.

Lynn and Vanhanen can do their analyses based either on "only" 81 countries or using estimates of neighboring countries. In either case, they get virtually identical correlation coefficients, suggesting the robustness of their approach.

But even where there is data, it would be a stretch to call it high quality. A test of only 50 children ages 13 to 16 in Colombia and another of only 48 children ages 10 to 14 in Equatorial Guinea, for example, make it into their "nationally representative" dataset.

The correlations look slightly stronger if you throw out Equatorial Guinea. Anyway, all this data has been updated by Rindermann.

Psychologist Jelte Wicherts at the University of Amsterdam and colleagues trawled through Lynn and Vanhanen's data on Africa. They found once again that few of the recorded tests even attempted to be nationally representative (looking at "Zulus in primary schools near Durban" for example), that the data set excluded a number of studies that pointed to higher average IQs, and that some studies included dated as far back as 1948 and involved as few as 17 people. 

Wicherts and his colleagues also point out that there is considerable evidence the tests Lynn and Vanhanen use to make their case "lack validity in test-takers without formal schooling." It is, surely, hard to take a multiple-choice test when you don't know how to read. Not surprisingly, IQ test results in Africa are weakly aligned to other measures of intelligence that don't require written test-taking.

Right. As I pointed out in my VDARE.com review in 2002, Lynn and Vanhanen's finding of an average IQ of 70 in black Africa is strong evidence in favor of the nurture position that a better environment can raise IQs, because African Americans, who appear to be about 4/5th black, score 15 points higher. (Lynn subsequently adopted the logic of my critique.) So, Wicherts' finding that if you only count the IQ tests that he likes, on which black Africans average around 80 or a little higher, then that strengthens the hereditarian view. (This is much too subtle for Kenny to grasp, of course.)

On the other hand, there are reasons of predictive validity for including test scores where black Africans simply failed to grasp the point of using abstract logic to solve puzzles (typically, culture-free nonverbal ones, not "regatta" questions as Kenny implies). Long ago, Thomas Sowell recounted an anecdote where two 17-year-old African youths were asked a standard IQ test question. They wittily ridiculed the impracticality and absurdity of this highly abstract question, displaying quickness of mind in social cognition. On the other hand, as Sowell noted, if by the age of 17, your culture hasn't introduced you to abstract thought yet, you probably aren't going to pick it up very well as an adult, and you are probably not going to be highly productive in economic roles that demand that kind of nerdier thinking. Thus, the high correlation between low IQ scores in Africa and low per capita GDPs in Africa, even if some of low scores are due to lack of acculturation in modern thinking.

My guess is that the spread of cheap smartphones in Africa will stimulate the kind of black box logical thinking that IQ tests measure and which the modern economy rewards. As I pointed out in my review of James Flynn's 2007 book, the fascinating question is why IQ tests still possess so much predictive power more than a century after being invented.

Moreover, there are still some low-hanging fruits where 3rd World countries would benefit from public health programs that succeeded in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th Century in boosting IQ directly or or in boosting mental energy. Fortifying salt with iodine eliminated the medical syndrome cretinism. while fortifying wheat with iron also eliminated an IQ-sapping medical condition. The Rockefeller Foundation's war on hookwarm greatly benefited the physical and economic energy of Southerners by ridding them of a parasite.

Kiwanis International is the leading charity in salt iodization in poor countries. As you can see, these are not fashionable causes, but Bjorn Lomborg has long identified them as high bang for the buck development projects, as I pointed out in a 2004 VDARE.com essay.

I've been writing about the need for more micronutrient fortification to boost Third World IQ scores for over eight years, but practically nobody else will touch the subject because the topic of low average IQ scores in much of the Third World is off-limits.

Wicherts also points out international evidence that average IQs can rise dramatically over time -- by as much as 20 points in the Netherlands between 1952 and 1982, for example. In fact, Africa's current estimated "average IQ" is about the same as Britain's in 1948. The phenomenon of rising average IQ scores over time is known as the "Flynn effect," named after political scientist Jim Flynn, who popularized the result. It suggests that factors such as improved nutrition, health care, and schooling may all improve IQ test performance. Of course, Africa is currently behind richer regions on such factors, though it is rapidly catching up. Indeed, the Flynn effect may have added as much as 26 points to estimates of Kenyan IQ over a recent 14-year period. That's more than the gap between reported IQs in Africa and the United States estimated by Wicherts and colleagues based on samples from 1948 to 2006. In short, all of the evidence suggests lower levels of development cause lower test scores -- not the other way around.

But lower test scores also lead to lower development. For example, Singapore and Lagos are at the same latitude and altitude, but the high-IQ Chinese of Singapore have rid themselves of many IQ and energy sapping tropical maladies through well-conceived and well-executed public health programs. No doubt, the people of Lagos would benefit cognitively from better health, too, but it's hard to get the cycle started.

From Heiner Rindermann's new paper on whether IQ causes wealth or vice-versa:

Rindermann, H. (2012). 

Intellectual classes, technological progress and economic development: The rise of cognitive capitalism. 

Personality and Individual Differences, 53(2), 108-113. 

Abstract: 

Cognitive ability theory claims that peoples’ competences are decisive for economic wealth. For a large number of countries Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) have published data on mean intelligence levels and compared them to wealth and productivity indicators. The correlation between intelligence and wealth was supported by studies done by different authors using different countries and controls. Based on their pioneering research two research questions were developed: Does intelligence lead to wealth or does wealth lead to intelligence or are other determinants involved? If a nation’s intelligence increases wealth, how does intelligence achieve this? To answer them we need longitudinal studies and theoretical attempts, investigating cognitive ability effects at the levels of individuals, institutions and societies and examining factors which lie between intelligence and growth. Two studies, using a cross-lagged panel design or latent variables and measuring economic liberty, shares of intellectual classes and indicators of scientific-technological accomplishment, show that cognitive ability leads to higher wealth and that for this process the achievement of high ability groups is important, stimulating growth through scientific-technological progress and by influencing the quality of economic institutions. In modernity, wealth depends on cognitive resources enabling the evolution of cognitive capitalism.

Yes, it seems logical, as Kenny argues, that countries with high average IQs would suffer more from diminishing marginal returns. Yet, despite all the handwaving about the Flynn Effect, nobody has yet come up with much large-scale evidence for convergence.

One possibility is that the value of a strong back on the global market is in decline faster than the value of a high IQ.

Convergence is what everybody assumes will happen, but what actually seems to be happening is that East Asians have begun to pull away from the rest of the world. When I plotted Lynn's IQ data for the whole 20th Century in 2004, the main trend visible was rising East Asian scores relative to everybody else. The unreleased 2009 PISA scores from Chinese and Indian regions appear to show even poor, rural Chinese districts scoring in the same ballpark as European countries, while Indian states are scoring very badly, barely above SubSaharan levels. On the American SAT test, Asians (including, this time, South Asians) have been pulling away from everybody else over the last decade.

This is not to say that convergence won't happen at some point, but that there is remarkably little evidence for it so far.

There is a simple explanation for why the IQs of the offspring of colonists appear higher than those of the first descendants of the colonized. It's because the colonizers acted much as Thomas Carlyle's writing suggested they would -- as overlords with little or no interest in providing public services like a decent education or health care to a native population viewed with disdain. This left local populations malnourished, in poor health, and ill-educated -- if they were lucky enough to be in school at all. 

The good news is that decolonization began a process of leveling the playing field, with rapidly climbing and converging indicators of health and education worldwide. Thanks to the Flynn effect, IQs are doubtless on a path of convergence as well, and the poisonous idiocy of genetic explanations for wealth and poverty will soon lose what little empirical support they might appear to have today.

So that's why such longtime running dog lackeys of imperialism as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai have always had such abysmal test scores relative to uncolonized places such as Addis Ababa, Afghanistan, and the New Guinea highlands, where local intellects have been free to let their genius shine forth. The boot of colonialism lay heavily across the cognitive windpipe of urban East Asia!

As a closing thought, I just wanted to point out the air of thuggishness that is growing among mainstream pundits (highly noticeable in Kenny's choice of language), as they move from feeling they can safely ignore inconvenient facts to their growing fear and rage at the bearers of unwanted truths.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Can you raise your IQ thru mental exercise?

From the New York Times Magazine:

Can You Make Yourself Smarter? 

By Dan Hurley

Since the first reliable intelligence test was created just over a hundred years ago, researchers have searched for a way to increase scores meaningfully, with little success. The track record was so dismal that by 2002, when Jaeggi and her research partner (and now her husband), Martin Buschkuehl, came across a study claiming to have done so, they simply didn’t believe it. 

The study, by a Swedish neuroscientist named Torkel Klingberg, involved just 14 children, all with A.D.H.D. Half participated in computerized tasks designed to strengthen their working memory, while the other half played less challenging computer games. After just five weeks, Klingberg found that those who played the working-memory games fidgeted less and moved about less. More remarkable, they also scored higher on one of the single best measures of fluid intelligence, the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Improvement in working memory, in other words, transferred to improvement on a task the children weren’t training for. 

Even if the sample was small, the results were provocative (three years later Klingberg replicated most of the results in a group of 50 children), because matrices are considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests. Anyone who has taken an intelligence test has seen matrices like those used in the Raven’s: three rows, with three graphic items in each row, made up of squares, circles, dots or the like. Do the squares get larger as they move from left to right? Do the circles inside the squares fill in, changing from white to gray to black, as they go downward? One of the nine items is missing from the matrix, and the challenge is to find the underlying patterns — up, down and across — from six possible choices. Initially the solutions are readily apparent to most people, but they get progressively harder to discern. By the end of the test, most test takers are baffled. 

If measuring intelligence through matrices seems arbitrary, consider how central pattern recognition is to success in life. If you’re going to find buried treasure in baseball statistics to give your team an edge by signing players unappreciated by others, you’d better be good at matrices. If you want to exploit cycles in the stock market, or find a legal precedent in 10 cases, or for that matter, if you need to suss out a woolly mammoth’s nature to trap, kill and eat it — you’re essentially using the same cognitive skills tested by matrices.

I tend to look at this from the opposite perspective: Can you let your intelligence deteriorate? Yes, probably, I would imagine. 

It's a little like the perennial question debated by stat nerds of whether or not athletes enjoy hot streaks. They certainly suffer cold streaks when they are marginally injured, suffering from illness, worried that their wives will divorce them, angry at their teammates, defended by outstanding players, fallen into bad mechanics, etc. Perhaps hot streaks are just the absence of all cold streaks?

Anyway, I can well imagine that not exercising your brain could lead to declines in intelligence. 

But, then, the question becomes what is the best brain exercise for you individually. Is it one of these abstract games that are kind of like a Ravens Matrices IQ test? Or maybe, say, reading, oh, I don't know, this blog is good exercise for your brain. Plus, it's fun and informative.

As they say at the end of scientific papers, more research is needed!

P.S. Think about the different kinds of sports: the best training for long distance runners is long distance running. Same for swimming. On the other hand, sprinters don't need to sprint 20 hours per week, but they do need to lift weights. The best training for soccer as a youth is not playing in an 11-on-11 soccer game (the way American soccer kids are taught), but playing one-on-one soccer exercises to get in hundreds of touches of the ball per day (the Dutch method). On the other hand, playing basketball is pretty good training for being a point guard, but not for perfecting the skyhook.

So, a priori, I can't guess. I suspect that general intelligence might be kind of like playing point guard, and the most important thing is to turn off the TV and get out there and do it. But maybe there are good exercises for working memory, just like weight training can be highly useful for different sports. But it also helps to craft a weightlifting plan to the sport. For example, when Michael Jordan switched from baseball back to basketball in the spring of 1995, his weightlifting regimen had been crafted to make him "baseball strong" and he looked kind of awkward on the court. Then, his trainer switched him back to basketball strong lifting routines and he was pretty awesome again the next season.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rindermann: Who has highest IQ: left, right, or center?

In the U.S., people who are strongly liberal or strongly conservative tend to be better educated and better informed than moderates. Sure, some moderates are moderate because they understand each sides' arguments perfectly, but many are moderate because they aren't very interested in politics.

But, what happens when you disentangle the effects of IQ and education from each other?

Heiner Rindermann, the German psychologist who has been doing a lot of interesting IQ work, has co-authored a new paper comparing IQ to ideology among Brazilians, after adjusting for other factors. (I don't enough about politics in Brazil to say how well this would map to the U.S.)

Rindermann, H., Flores-Mendoza, C. & Woodley, M. A. (2012). Political orientations, intelligence and education. Intelligence, 40(2), 217-225. 

Highlights:
• Intelligence is an attribute of a “burgher” worldview and lifestyle.
• Intelligence works via insight, self-interest, and ethical and cultural effects.
• Intelligence had a positive impact on having a political opinion.
• Intelligence had a positive impact on political centrality.
• Education promoted orientations more to the left. 

Abstract:
The social sciences have traditionally assumed that education is a major determinant of citizens’ political orientations and behavior. Several studies have also shown that intelligence has an impact. According to a theory that conceptualizes intelligence as a burgher (middle-class, civil) phenomenon – intelligence should promote civil attitudes, habits and norms like diligence, order and liberty, which in turn nurture cognitive development – political orientations should be related to intelligence, with more intelligent individuals tending towards less extreme political orientations. In a Brazilian sample (N=586), individuals were given the Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) and a questionnaire measuring age, sex/gender, income, education and political orientations. Firstly, intelligence has a positive impact on having any political opinion. Among persons with opinions those with the highest IQ’s were found to be politically center-right and centrist respectively. The relationship held after correcting for gender, age, education and income. In a path-analysis, only intelligence had a positive impact on political centrality, whereas education promoted orientations that were farther from the center. These results are discussed in the context of results from other studies in different countries and in the context of different theoretical models on the relationship between political attitudes and IQ.

So, at a given level of IQ, more education pushes people either to the left or, less often, toward the right. At a given level of education, more IQ pushes people toward a point a little right of center.  At least in Brazil ...

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is the white-black cognitive / achievement gap smaller in the U.K.?

Probably. 

Chuck at Occidentalist assembles a bunch of test reports, here and here. It's not as well-studied of a subject as it is in the U.S., so it's hard to make sense of all the data, but most point toward the white-black gap in the U.K. being well under a standard deviation.

I haven't seen a good meta-analyses by a British researcher who knows the ins and outs of all these acronyms like GCSE. (For example, a few years ago a British researcher slipped up on writing about regional differences in performance on the SAT in the U.S. because he didn't know that only the most ambitious students in the Midwest take the SAT instead of the ACT -- so what pitfalls await American kibbitzers among British test scores?) But most of the data seems to suggest a smaller cognitive and/or achievement gap in the U.K. than in the U.S.

It has been apparent for some time now (see this post at Racial Reality) that in Britain, the lads are not all right. In the U.S., we've become familiar with gender gaps on school achievement tests favoring black and Hispanic girls over their brothers, but we see less of this among whites and Asians. This is among the better evidence that culture -- fear of being put down by your co-ethnics for Acting White, etc. -- is depressing NAM performance. 

On a lot of tests, in Britain, there's even a bigger gender gap favoring the distaff side, but it seems to go across all ethnicities, even Chinese. We see weird things like girls whose parents are from Africa outscoring white boys and maybe even East Asian boys on some tests. 

As I pointed out in a couple of articles in 2005, class is the big divide in Britain rather than race. "Class" is a 1500-year-long project to civilize the Conan the Barbarian warlords who inundated the Roman Empire to act like "gentlemen." By the late 20th Century, all that politeness, all that studying, all that self-discipline, was striking young males of the lower classes as pretty gay. Thus, chavism. 

In contrast, there isn't all that much of an oppositional culture among blacks in Britain, since assimilating into the white working class isn't terribly hard: You like 'aving a pint while watching footie on the telly, too? The proportion of mixed race children appears much larger than in the U.S. As historian David Starkey pointed out during the English looting last summer, that blacks were in the lead, but whites were right behind in the looting -- something you don't see in the U.S much at all.

Moreover, blacks in Britain are of immigrant origin: West Indian and African, with the Africans doing better on tests, typically. Some not insignificant fraction of Africans in Britain were brain-drained from Anglophone ex-colonies to work in National Health as nurses and doctors. In the U.S., West Indians and African immigrants tend to outperform native blacks. The Bell Curve found that in the NLSY79 longitudinal study, blacks who were immigrants or the children of immigrants outscored native African-Americans by an average of 5 IQ points. 

But, those are just a few speculations. It's an interesting question that, as far as I know, hasn't been studied terribly systematically.

Update: lots of good stuff in the comments from people who know more about what they are talking about when it comes to Britain than I know.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The IQ Ameliorist School

In Taki's Magazine, I write about a major new paper by leading lights in the left-of-center Ameliorist school of IQ experts, including Robert Nisbett, James Flynn, and Eric Turkheimer:

Even more courageously, the seven Ameliorists note that IQ tests are valuable because they quantify that most career-threatening of hot buttons in American intellectual life—racial differences in intelligence—which they find both sizable and socially significant:

IQ is also important because some group differences are large and predictive of performance in many domains. Much evidence indicates that it would be difficult to overcome racial disadvantage if IQ differences could not be ameliorated.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer