One of the subjects people care most about in ev psych and related disciplines is intelligence. Teachers would love it if all of their students suddenly began scoring in the 90th %; so would parents, of course. Tons of psychological studies have been done on subjects like “Do people score better on tests after thinking about famous scientists,” (without finding much useful,) not to mention millions of dollars spent on education reform without, as far as I can tell, much real change in school performances.
Since “IQ”–our best attempt at measuring and quantifying intelligence–appears to be at least 50% genetic, genes are a good spot to look when attempting to unravel the mystery of genius.
One of my theories on the subject is that if there are two kinds of dumb, perhaps there are two kinds of smart. Obviously dropping someone on their head is probably not going to result in genius, but perhaps there are some people who are smart due to having the good luck to have a variety of genes that generally code for things leading to high IQ, while other people are smart because they have a few particular genes or mutations. The folks with the generally IQ-boosting all-around genes are people who come from a background of parents and extended families with similar IQs to themselves, but folks with rare, particular, or novel mutations/genes would likely stand out even from their families. Such genes might have deleterious side effects or only confer genius in one or two particular arenas, resulting in, say, the stereotypical absent-minded professor or idiot savants.
If genius is fragile–my definition of fragile, not necessarily anyone else’s–then it is easily damaged; the difference between high-IQ and low-IQ in a particular population will be related to the possession of deleterious mutations that damage IQ. If IQ is not fragile–that is, if it is robust–then we would find rare, beneficial genes that boost IQ.
Environmentally, it is already obvious that genius is fragile–that is, it is much easier to drop someone one their head and subtract 40 IQ points than to find any intervention that will reliably add 40 points, but this does not necessarily preclude a variety of interesting genetic findings.
Perhaps I am thinking about this all wrong, but that’s the structure I’ve got worked out so far.
Anyway, so people have been searching for genes linked to IQ. Will they find specific IQ-boosting genes that highly intelligent people have, but dump people don’t? Or will they find specific IQ-damaging genes that dumb people have but intelligent people don’t? (Or maybe a combination of both?)
So, Neuroscience News recently covered a study published in Molecular Psychology that looked at genetic differences between highly intelligent people and the general population.
Now, I’m going to have to stop and point out a potential design flaw, at least according to the article:
“Published today in Molecular Psychiatry, the King’s College London study selected 1,400 high-intelligence individuals from the Duke University Talent Identification Program. Representing the top 0.03 per cent of the ‘intelligence distribution’, these individuals have an IQ of 170 or more – substantially higher than that of Nobel Prize winners, who have an average IQ of around 145.”
Duke TIP is aimed at middle schoolers, based largely on their elementary school test scores Anything that starts out by comparing the IQs of elementary school kids to people who’ve already won Nobel Prizes may not be saying much.
Second, I’d just like to note that while the article is unclear, they are probably not claiming that all Duke TIP participants have IQs over 170, since they don’t–Duke TIP’s own website states that they only require IQ scores over 125. Rather, I suspect they used the test scores submitted to the TIP program to select students with IQs over 170. If some confusion has occurred and they actually used people with 125s, well, results may not be as claimed.
Quick rough calculations indicate that 1,400 people in the top 0.03% is not an unreasonable number, since it would only require 4.667 million people, and there are about 4 million kids per grade level in the US, TIP takes from multiple grades, and they could have used multiple years’ worth of participants. But I don’t know how many kids TIP takes each year.
Anyway, results:
“The study focused, for the first time, on rare, functional SNPs – rare because previous research had only considered common SNPs and functional because these are SNPs that are likely to cause differences in the creation of proteins.
“The researchers did not find any individual protein-altering SNPs that met strict criteria for differences between the high-intelligence group and the control group. However, for SNPs that showed some difference between the groups, the rare allele was less frequently observed in the high intelligence group. This observation is consistent with research indicating that rare functional alleles are more often detrimental than beneficial to intelligence. …
‘Rare functional alleles do not account for much on their own but in combination, their impact is significant.
‘Our research shows that there are not genes for genius. However, to have super-high intelligence you need to have many of the positive alleles and importantly few of the negative rare effects, such as the rare functional alleles identified in our study.’
Or as the abstract puts it:
We did not observe any individual protein-altering variants that are reproducibly associated with extremely high intelligence and within the entire distribution of intelligence.* Moreover, no significant associations were found for multiple rare alleles within individual genes. However, analyses using genome-wide similarity between unrelated individuals (genome-wide complex trait analysis) indicate that the genotyped functional protein-altering variation yields a heritability estimate of 17.4% (s.e. 1.7%) based on a liability model. In addition, investigation of nominally significant associations revealed fewer rare alleles associated with extremely high intelligence than would be expected under the null hypothesis. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis that rare functional alleles are more frequently detrimental than beneficial to intelligence.
*What does “and within the entire distribution of intelligence” mean in this sentence?
To be honest, I’m not sure about the interpretation that only genetic differences between high IQ and low IQ people is that the low-IQ have more deleterious mutations and the high-IQ don’t. For starters, we observe ethnic variation in IQ scores, and I find it difficult to believe that vast swathes of the planet, some of which have very different marriage patterns, have abnormally high levels of deleterious, fitness-reducing mutations that other swathes of the planet don’t.
I certainly can believe, though, that there are deleterious mutations that reduce IQ.
“If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.” — Confucius
This quote is one of my personal mottoes, but I have added a corollary: “If I am walking with only one man, I still have two teachers, for I may learn to achieve goodness from a man’s good side, and to avoid evil from a man’s bad side.”
At any rate, Edison is a man whose goodness instructs us on how to take brilliant ideas and build the structures necessary for them to benefit humanity. Edison is a man who literally built civilization and deserves credit for both seeing how the structures needed to fit together to work, and for having the skills necessary to actually bring people together and build those structures.
Tesla is a lesson on how society should not manage its creative geniuses, (and I don’t mean the dumb pay dispute with Edison.)
Tesla is an interesting character. He appears to have been one of the world’s exceedingly rare true short sleepers, which appears to be a genetic condition:
“Ying-Hui Fu … studies the genetics and other characteristics of short sleepers at her neurogenetics lab.
“Currently, Fu knows of three types of genetic mutations that are related to the ability to function well on minimal amounts of sleep, which often runs in the family. In a 2009 paper published in the journal Science, she described a mother and a daughter who shared the same genetic mutation of the gene DEC2 that allowed them to thrive on six hours of sleep per night. So far Fu has identified about 50 families of short sleepers.
“This group of short sleepers is unique,” Fu said, describing them as optimistic and energetic, often holding more than one job. …
“Interestingly, these high energy levels typical of short sleepers can sometimes reach behavioral extremes. For instance, a 2001 study published in the Journal of Sleep Research that examined the sleep patterns and personality of 12 short sleepers, researchers found some evidence of subclinical hypomania — a milder form of manic behavior, characterized by euphoria, disinhibition and, in fact, a decreased need for sleep.”
Please note that drinking 10 5-hour-energy drinks in a row is not the same as having a genetic mutation that lets you get by on less sleep. Chances are extremely likely that you, my friend, are already not getting as much sleep as you need for optimum health. Also, since very few short sleepers have actually been studied, what we think we know about them may not be entirely accurate; they may suffer long-term consequences that have not yet been documented, for example. I do wonder if chronic lack of sleep eventually got to Tesla, reducing him to a state of waking-dreaming toward the end of his life, when he began going obviously loopy.
Tesla’s rigidity of personality, behavior, and dress are reminiscent of the compulsive, repetitive, and restrictive behaviors associated with autism/Asperger’s Syndrome (now just another part of “autism” in the DSM,) eg,
“People with Asperger syndrome display behavior, interests, and activities that are restricted and repetitive and are sometimes abnormally intense or focused. They may stick to inflexible routines, move in stereotyped and repetitive ways, or preoccupy themselves with parts of objects.
“Pursuit of specific and narrow areas of interest is one of the most striking features of AS.[1] Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic such as weather data or star names, without necessarily having a genuine understanding of the broader topic.” (Wikipedia.)
I’ve long thought it a problem that these definitions/descriptions make no effort to distinguish between “Aspies” and genuinely intelligent people, who simply have more ability to memorize facts of any sort and will learn about any subject in more depth than someone of ordinary intelligence. If we want to define high IQ as a mental disorder, then, well, I guess we can, but it seems like a bad idea to me.
Autistic children apparently also have difficulty sleeping, which is why many of them are being prescribed melatonin as a sleep aid (as I discussed back in Melanin, Sexuality, and Aggression.) However, these autistic kids appear to actually need more sleep than they’re getting; they just seem to have trouble turning off their brains and keeping them off long enough for a proper sleep.
Anyway, to get extremely speculative: Much like Fu’s short sleepers, the autistic people I have worked with personally (N=small) seemed like they had brains on overdrive. Imagine that a normal brain is an Amish buggy, going along at a nice, reasonable clip, and their brains are Formula One race cars. Brain speed in this case may have nothing to do with IQ, per say, or may in fact be detrimental to it–autistics are far more likely than the general population to test as mentally retarded–but I favor a theory that having a small quantity of autistic-like traits may be useful for people in fields or occupations that require high IQ, but large quantities of autistic-like traits cause too many negative side effects, resulting in full-blown autism. In Tesla’s case, he got the benefits of the massively high-powered, sped-up brain, with a side effect that he couldn’t turn it off long enough to get more than a few hours of sleep and lacked the normal social instincts that lead people to marry, have children, and generally form stable relationships with other people.
To be fair, this is not evidence that Tesla actually supported the Nazis or their policies.
Back in Is Genius Fragile?, I discussed a recent paper in Molecular Psychology that claimed to have studied 1,400 students with IQs of 170 or above, and found no rare genetic alleles that were more common in them than people of normal or low IQ, but did find rare, deleterious alleles in regular/dumb people.
Edit: I just realized that for scheduling reasons, “Is Genius Fragile” actually got moved to mid-November. The Molecular Psychology paper is here.
But are such alleles actually deleterious? Tesla never married and had no children; neither did Isaac Newton. Einstein had three children, but one of them seems to have died in infancy and one was institutionalized for schizophrenia.
In other words, perhaps some of these alleles they’ve noticed aren’t deleterious, but actually helpful in some way. Perhaps, for example, there is an allele that codes for processes that help you turn off your brain at night and transition to certain sleep states. Without that allele, your brain is more “on” all the time, you feel more alert and can think more clearly than others without getting tired, but ultimately there are some bad side effects to not sleeping. Or perhaps the brain’s ability to see patterns is normally regulated by another mechanism that helps you distinguish between real patterns and false matches, which might malfunction in people like John Nash, resulting both in increased pattern-matching ability and in schizophrenia. By the way, I am totallyspeculating and might be completely wrong.
Please note that from the evolutionary POV, traits–like IQ–are not inherently valuable. A trait is adaptive if it leads to the continuation of your DNA into future generations, and is deleterious or maladaptive if it hinders the continuation of your DNA. If high IQ people do not have children, the high IQ is maladaptive and being selected out of the population. (Please note, also, that different environments, both physical and cultural, select for different traits. Had Tesla remained near his family back in Croatia, they might have helped arrange a marriage for him, leading eventually to children and romantic entanglements with someone who wasn’t a pigeon.)
However, even if high-IQ people never reproduced under any circumstances, their existence in a population might still be advantageous to the population as a whole–you probably enjoy having lightbulbs, electricity, cell phones, and other such things, for example. The development of vaccines, industrial agriculture, and modern theories about nutrition and hygiene have vastly expanded the Earth’s human population over the past hundred years, and would have done so even if the people involved had not had any children at all.
This is a somewhat complicated issue that depends on the interaction of a lot of variables, like whether society can consistently produce high-IQ people even if the high-IQ people themselves do not have many children, and whether the innovations of modernity will actually help us survive (the Amish, after all, have more children than your average person with a cell phone.) See: “How–and why–genius is group selected–massive cultural amplification” for some more discussion on the subject.
Regardless, I am operating under the assumption that society benefits from the existence of people like Tesla (and, of course, Edison.)
Anyway, back to Tesla and his job difficulties.
In “The Improperly Excluded,” Micheal Ferguson theorizes that there exists a maximum IQ difference between two people beyond which they cannot effectively communicate, which he places around 20 IQ points. (I think I discussed it here and here.) So a person with an average IQ of 100 can understand and communicate with someone with a 120 IQ, and someone with a 120 can understand a 140, but the 100 and 140 are essentially speaking Greek to each other; the 100 IQ person cannot make heads or tails of the 140’s thoughts, nor distinguish their claims from those of a crazy person or charlatan. If the 100 trusts the 120, the 120 can take advice from the 140 and recommend it to the 100, but beyond that, people of, say, 160 IQ are just too far removed from the average population to even get their ideas effectively communicated. Extremely high IQ people, therefore, may be improperly excluded from positions where they could actually do important work just because average people have no way to understand what they’re saying. Additionally, since extremely high IQ people are very rare, they may have to cope with a world in which almost no one they meet is within their comfortable conversation zone.
Note: see Hollingworth Fan’s comment below for some very interesting quotes on this subject.
Tesla, a guy who could do integer calculus in his head, was undoubtedly brilliant far beyond the common walks of man, and so seems to have faced the constant frustration of being surrounded by idiots like Edison. Upon Edison’s death, Tesla opined in the NY Times about his former boss:
“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene … His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.”
That idiot Edison, by the way, had six children, none of whom seem to have died in infancy or gone crazy. Three went into science/inventing, two were women, and I don’t know what happened to the fourth boy. Edison was undoubtedly helped in life by living in the same country as his family, but he also seems to have just been a more stable person who successfully managed to balance his work and social life. Edison: better adapted to his environment than Tesla.
Tesla’s genius was undoubtedly under-utilized. Tesla could not manage his own affairs, and so needed, at the very least, the strong structural support of a family that would prevent him from doing stupid things like gambling away his tuition money and dropping out of college, as well as a sound employer or university that would manage the business end of Tesla’s laboratory expenses and design implementation. Immigration to the US left Tesla without the support of his family, and his own stubbornness lead him to quit what would otherwise have been a productive career.
Additionally, Tesla’s ideas may truly have been too far ahead of their time for even other smart people to appreciate and understand. There were few people in the world at his level, and he must have spent much of his life completely isolated from anyone who could understand him. Even an employer willing to finance his schemes might not have been able to understand (and thus implement) some of them.
Isolation, I suspect, leads eventually to madness. Not because (or just because) isolation makes people lonely, which makes them depressed. But because the human animal is not designed to work in isolation.
In the extreme example, we know from observing people in solitary confinement that it breaks their brains and drives them insane.
In everyday life, our brains require regular feedback from others to make sure our ideas and impulses are correct. To give a trivial example, suppose I mention to my husband that a friend of mine did something today that really annoyed me, and he responds that I am misinterpreting things, that he heard from my friend’s husband that morning about some extenuating circumstances that explain her behavior and that I should not be annoyed with her. Likewise, he might come to me with a story about a co-worker who seems to be stealing his ideas, and I could help figure out if the guy really is.
Isolation removes this feedback, leading to more and more incorrect ideas.
“Think of top-down processing as taking noise and organizing it to fit a pattern. Normally, you’ll only fit it to the patterns that are actually there. But if your pattern-matching system is broken, you’ll fit it to patterns that aren’t in the data at all. …
“So hallucinations are when your top-down processing/pattern-matching ability becomes so dysfunctional that it can generate people and objects out of random visual noise. Why it chooses some people and objects over others I don’t know, but it’s hardly surprising – it does the same thing every night in your dreams.
“Many of the same people who have hallucinations also have paranoia. Paranoia seems to me to be overfunctioning of social pattern-matching. … When a paranoiac hears a stray word here, or sees a sideways glance there, they turn it into this vast social edifice of connected plots.”
Tesla’s claims to have been working on a “Death Ray” that turned out to be an old battery, his romantic entanglement with a pigeon, claims that “thieves” had broken into his hotel room in search of his “Death Ray” but not been able to find, and the Mythbusters’ thorough busting of his claims to have built an oscillator that nearly brought down the building and had to be destroyed with a sledgehammer all sound a lot like what Scott’s describing. As a guy who could do calculus in his head, Tesla had an extreme talent for pattern matching–perhaps too extreme. Scott continues:
“So to skip to the point: I think all of this is about strengthening the pattern-matching faculty. You’re exercising it uselessly but impressively, the same way as the body-builder who lifts the same weight a thousand times until their arms are the size of tree trunks. Once the pattern-matching faculty is way way way overactive, it (spuriously) hallucinates a top-down abstract pattern in the whole universe. This is the experience that mystics describe as “everything is connected” or “all is one”, or “everything makes sense” or “everything in the universe is good and there for a purpose”. The discovery of a beautiful all-encompassing pattern in the universe is understandably associated with “seeing God”.”
Recovered schizophrenics I’ve talked to report the exact same thing: both a mystical sense of the union of all things, and joy at the experience (though they also report that schizophrenia can be absolutely terrifying, because sometimes the voices are evil.)
And finally (at least for the quoting):
“I think other methods of inducing weird states of consciousness, like drugs and meditation, probably do the same thing by some roundabout route. Meditation seems like reducing stimuli, which is known to lead to hallucinations in eg sensory deprivation tanks or solitary confinement cells in jail. I think the general principle is that a low level of external stimuli makes your brain adjust its threshold for stimulus detection up until anything including random noise satisfies the threshold.”
Isolation/ lack of stimulus has a direct effect of lowering the brain’s threshold for identifying patterns until random background noise gets interpreted as conversation. (The general correlation between schizophrenia and low IQ could be partially an effect of smarter people being better at avoiding severe isolation, and dumber people being more likely to end up in situations where literally no one has a real conversation with them for years at a time.
Tesla seems to have been isolated in his own way, both by being far more intelligent than the vast majority of people, and so unable to converse properly with them, and also by having none of his family, kin, or fellow countrymen around. He even had to communicate primarily in a language that was hardly his first.
Long term, I suspect such isolation had a negative effect on Tesla’s sanity and ability to wisely conduct his own affairs.
Tesla is a difficult case, because he willingly walked away from what were probably excellent career opportunities, and there’s hardly anything anyone could do about his family being back in Croatia. However, since most people do live in the same country as their families, we can still draw some general conclusions:
Some really smart people may require significant support from society and/or their families/employers in order to properly function and fully realize their potential. Their families should probably step in and help them get married if they can’t do it themselves, at the very least to help keep them happy and stable.
The Wikipedia quotes physicist Y. S. Kim on the subject of P. A. M. Dirac (one of my favorite scientists)’s marriage to Margit Wigner, sister of Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner:
“It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46…. Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else.”
Dirac and Manci in Kopenhagen
Alas, the Wikipedia does not give the details of how an autist like Dirac managed to marry Manci.
Really smart people may have some ideas that are astounding brilliant, and also have a lot of ideas that don’t work at all, because that is just the nature of creativity, but the average person probably can’t tell the difference. They need other people like themselves to bounce ideas off of and generally converse with. Their eccentricities are generally harmless, and the community is better off tolerating them.
Above all, try not to abandon them. Humans are not built to be alone.
So while on my walk today, I got to thinking about various potential implications of the hippocampal theory of time preference.
The short version if you don’t want to read yesterday’s post is that one’s degree of impulsivity/ability to plan / high or low time preference seems to be mediated by an interaction between the nucleus accumbens, which seems to a desire center, and the hippocampus, which does a lot of IQ-related tasks like learn new things and track objects through space. Humans with hippocampal damage become amnesiacs; rats with the connection between their nucleus accumbens and hipocampus severed lose their ability to delay gratification even for superior rewards, becoming slaves to instant gratification.
So, my suspicion:
Relatively strong hippocampus => inhibition of the nucleus accumbens => low time preference.
Relatively weak hippocamus => uninhibited nucleus accumbens => high time preference (aka impulsivity.)
Also, Strong hippocampus = skill at high IQ tasks.
Shamelessly stolen from Jayman’s post. As usual, I recommend it.
(Other theories on the subject: Intelligent people make lots of money and so marry attractive people, resulting in a general correlation between IQ and attractiveness; there is something about eating too much or the particular foods being eaten that causes brain degeneration.)
People generally claim that overweight people lack “willpower.” Note that I am not arguing about willpower; willpower is only a tiny part of the equation.
The skinny people I know do not have willpower. They just do not have big appetites. They are not sitting there saying, “OMG, I am so hungry, but I am going to force myself not to eat right now;” they just don’t actually feel that much hunger.
The fat people I know have big appetites. They’ve always had big appetites. Some of them have documented large appetites going back to infancy. Sure, their ability to stay on a diet may be directly affected by willpower, but they’re starting from a fundamentally different hunger setpoint.
So what might be going on is just a matter of whether the hippocampus or nucleus accumbens happens to be dominant. Where the NE is dominant, the person feels hunger (and all desires) quite strongly. Where the hippocampus is dominant, the person simply doesn’t feel as much hunger (or other desires.)
That a strong hippocampus also leads to high IQ may just be, essentially, a side effect of this trade-off between the two regions.
We might expect, therefore, to see higher inhibition in smart people across a range of behaviors–take socializing, sex, and drug use. *Wanders off to Google*
So, first of all, it looks like there’s a study that claims that higher IQ people do more drugs than lower IQ people. Since the study only looks at self-reported drug use, and most people lie about their illegal drug use, I consider this study probably not very useful; also, drug use is not the same as drug addiction, and there’s a big difference between trying something once and doing it compulsively.
I am reminded here of a story about P. A. M. Dirac, one of my favorite scientists:
“An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to a conference in Japan in August 1929. “Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a ladies’ man who constantly flirted and danced, while Dirac—’an Edwardian geek’, as biographer Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socialising or small talk. ‘Why do you dance?’ Dirac asked his companion. ‘When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,’ Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: ‘But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'”[30]” (from the Wikipedia.)
Folks speculate that Dirac was autistic; obviously folks don’t speculate such things about Heisenberg.
Autism I have previously speculated may be a side effect of the recent evolution of high math IQ, and the current theory implies a potential correlation between various ASDs and inhibition.
The atypical gamma response to contextual modulation that we identified can be seen as the link between the behavioral output (atypical visual perception) and the underlying brain mechanism (an imbalance in excitatory and inhibitory neuronal processing). The impaired inhibition–excitation balance is suggested to be part of the core etiological pathway of ASD (Ecker et al., 2013). Gamma oscillations emerge from interactions between neuronal excitation and inhibition (Buzsaki and Wang, 2012), are important for neuronal communication (Fries, 2009), and have been associated with e.g., perceptual grouping mechanisms (Singer, 1999).
“It has been suggested that the restricted, stereotyped and repetitive behaviours typically found in autism are underpinned by deficits of inhibitory control. … Following sham, adults with autism relative to controls had reduced activation in key inhibitory regions of inferior frontal cortex and thalamus, but increased activation of caudate and cerebellum. However, brain activation was modulated in opposite ways by depletion in each group. Within autistic individuals depletion upregulated fronto-thalamic activations and downregulated striato-cerebellar activations toward control sham levels, completely ‘normalizing’ the fronto-cerebellar dysfunctions. The opposite pattern occurred in controls. Moreover, the severity of autism was related to the degree of differential modulation by depletion within frontal, striatal and thalamic regions. Our findings demonstrate that individuals with autism have abnormal inhibitory networks, and that serotonin has a differential, opposite, effect on them in adults with and without autism. Together these factors may partially explain the severity of autistic behaviours and/or provide a novel (tractable) treatment target.”
This may not have anything at all to do with the hippocampus-NA system, of course.
““What we found in animal models and others have found postmortem in schizophrenic patients is that the hippocampus is lacking a certain type of GABA-ergic [GABA-producing] neuron that puts the brakes on the system,” says Grace. “What we’re trying to do is fix the GABA system that’s broken and, by doing that, stabilize the system so the dopamine system responses are back to normal, so that we can actually fix what’s wrong rather than trying to patch it several steps downstream.””
Wow, I made it through two whole posts on the brain without mentioning the amygdala even once.
Time Preference isn’t sexy and exciting, like anything related to, well, sex. It isn’t controversial like IQ and gender. In fact, most of the ink spilled on the subject isn’t even found in evolutionary or evolutionary psychology texts, but over in economics papers about things like interest rates that no one but economists would want to read.
So why do I think Time Preference is so important?
Because I think Low Time Preference is the true root of high intelligence.
First, what is Time Preference?
Time Preference (aka future time orientation, time discounting, delay discounting, temporal discounting,) is the degree to which you value having a particular item today versus having it tomorrow. “High time preference” means you want things right now, whereas “low time preference” means you’re willing to wait.
A relatively famous test of Time Preference is to offer a child a cookie right now, but tell them they can have two cookies if they wait 10 minutes. Some children take the cookie right now, some wait ten minutes, and some try to wait ten minutes but succumb to the cookie right now about halfway through.
Obviously, many factors can influence your Time Preference–if you haven’t eaten in several days, for example, you’ll probably not only eat the cookie right away, but also start punching me until I give you the second cookie. If you don’t like cookies, you won’t have any trouble waiting for another, but you won’t have much to do with it. Etc. But all these things held equal, your basic inclination toward high or low time preference is probably biological–and by “biological,” I mean, “mostly genetic.”
The scientists train rats to touch pictures with their noses in return for sugar cubes. Picture A gives them one cube right away, while picture B gives them more cubes after a delay. If the delay is too long or the reward too small, the rats just take the one cube right away. But there’s a sweet spot–apparently 4 cubes after a short wait—where the rats will figure it’s worth their while to tap picture B instead of picture A.
But if you snip the connection between the rats’ hippocampi and nucleus accumbenses, suddenly they lose all ability to wait for sugar cubes and just eat their sugar cubes right now, like a pack of golden retrievers in a room full of squeaky toys. They become completely unable to wait for the better payout of four sugar cubes, no matter how much they might want to.
So we know that this connection between the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens is vitally important to your Time Orientation, though I don’t know what other modifications, such as low hippocampal volume or low nucleus accumbens would do.
So what do the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens do?
According to the Wikipedia, the hippocampus plays an important part in inhibition, memory, and spatial orientation. People with damaged hippocampi become amnesiacs, unable to form new memories.There is a pretty direct relationship between hippocampus size and memory, as documented primarily in old people:
“There is, however, a reliable relationship between the size of the hippocampus and memory performance — meaning that not all elderly people show hippocampal shrinkage, but those who do tend to perform less well on some memory tasks.[71] There are also reports that memory tasks tend to produce less hippocampal activation in elderly than in young subjects.[71] Furthermore, a randomized-control study published in 2011 found that aerobic exercise could increase the size of the hippocampus in adults aged 55 to 80 and also improve spatial memory.” (wikipedia)
Amnesiacs (and Alzheimer’s patients) also get lost a lot, which seems like a perfectly natural side effect of not being able to remember where you are, except that rat experiments show something even more interesting: specific cells that light up as the rats move around, encoding data about where they are.
“Neural activity sampled from 30 to 40 randomly chosen place cells carries enough information to allow a rat’s location to be reconstructed with high confidence.” (wikipedia)
“Spatial firing patterns of 8 place cells recorded from the CA1 layer of a rat. The rat ran back and forth along an elevated track, stopping at each end to eat a small food reward. Dots indicate positions where action potentials were recorded, with color indicating which neuron emitted that action potential.” (from Wikipedia)
According to Wikipedia, the Inhibition function theory is a little older, but seems like a perfectly reasonable theory to me.
“[Inhibition function theory] derived much of its justification from two observations: first, that animals with hippocampal damage tend to be hyperactive; second, that animals with hippocampal damage often have difficulty learning to inhibit responses that they have previously been taught, especially if the response requires remaining quiet as in a passive avoidance test.”
This is, of course, exactly what the scientists found when they separated the rats’ hippocampi from their nucleus accumbenses–they lost all ability to inhibit their impulses in order to delay gratification, even for a better payout.
In other word, the hippocampus lets you learn, process the moment of objects through space (spatial reasoning) and helps you suppress your inhibitions–that is, it is directly involved in IQ and Time Preference.
Dopaminergic input from the VTA modulate the activity of neurons within the nucleus accumbens. These neurons are activated directly or indirectly by euphoriant drugs (e.g., amphetamine, opiates, etc.) and by participating in rewarding experiences (e.g., sex, music, exercise, etc.).[11][12] …
The shell of the nucleus accumbens is involved in the cognitive processing of motivational salience (wanting) as well as reward perception and positive reinforcement effects.[6] Particularly important are the effects of drug and naturally rewarding stimuli on the NAc shell because these effects are related to addiction.[6]Addictive drugs have a larger effect on dopamine release in the shell than in the core.[6] The specific subset of ventral tegmental area projection neurons that synapse onto the D1-type medium spiny neurons in the shell are responsible for the immediate perception of the rewarding property of a stimulus (e.g., drug reward).[3][4] …
The nucleus accumbens core is involved in the cognitive processing of motor function related to reward and reinforcement.[6] Specifically, the core encodes new motor programs which facilitate the acquisition of a given reward in the future.[6]
So it sounds to me like the point of the nucleus accumbens is to learn “That was awesome! Let’s do it again!” or “That was bad! Let’s not do it again!”
Together, the nucleus accumbens + hippocampus can learn “4 sugar cubes in a few seconds is way better than 1 sugar cube right now.” Apart, the nucleus accumbens just says, “Sugar cubes! Sugar cubes! Sugar cubes!” and jams the lever that says “Sugar cube right now!” and there is nothing the hippocampus can do about it.
What distinguishes humans from all other animals? Our big brains, intellects, or impressive vocabularies?
It is our ability to acquire new knowledge and use it to plan and build complex, multi-generational societies.
Ants and bees live in complex societies, but they do not plan them. Monkeys, dolphins, squirrels, and even rats can plan for the future, but only humans plan and build cities.
Even the hunter-gatherer must plan for the future; a small tendril only a few inches high is noted during the wet season, then returned to in the dry, when it is little more than a withered stem, and the water-storing root beneath it harvested. The farmer facing winter stores up grain and wood; the city engineer plans a water and sewer system large enough to handle the next hundred years’ projected growth.
All of these activities require the interaction between the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumbens tells us that water is good, grain is tasty, fire is warm, and that clean drinking water and flushable toilets are awesome. The hippocampus reminds us that the dry season is coming, and so we should save–and remember–that root until we need it. It reminds us that we will be cold and hungry in winter if we don’t save our grain and spend a hours and hours chopping wood right now. It reminds us that not only is it good to organize the city so that everyone can have clean drinking water and flushable toilets right now, but that we should also make sure the system will keep working even as new people enter the city over time.
Disconnect these two, and your ability to plan goes down the drain. You eat all of your roots now, devour your seed corn, refuse to chop wood, and say, well, yes, running water would be nice, but that would require so much planning.
As I have mentioned before, I think Europeans (and probably a few other groups whose history I’m just not as familiar with and so I cannot comment on) IQ increased quite a bit in the past thousand years or so, and not just because the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage. During this time, manorialism became a big deal throughout Western Europe, and the people who exhibited good impulse control, worked hard, delayed gratification, and were able to accurately calculate the long-term effects of their actions tended to succeed (that is, have lots of children) and pass on their clever traits to their children. I suspect that selective pressure for “be a good manorial employee” was particularly strong in German, (and possibly Japan, now that I think about it,) resulting in the Germanic rigidity that makes them such good engineers.
Nothing in the manorial environment directly selected for engineering ability, higher math, large vocabularies, or really anything that we mean when we normally talk about IQ. But I do expect manorial life to select for those who could control their impulses and plan for the future, resulting in a run-away effect of increasingly clever people constructing increasingly complex societies in which people had to be increasingly good at dealing with complexity and planning to survive.
Ultimately, I see pure mathematical ability as a side effect of being able to accurately predict the effects of one’s actions and plan for the future (eg, “It will be an extra long winter, so I will need extra bushels of corn,”) and the ability to plan for the future as a side effect of being able to accurately represent the path of objects through space and remember lessons one has learned. All of these things, ultimately, are the same operations, just oriented differently through the space-time continuum.
Since your brain is, of course, built from the same DNA code as the rest of you, we would expect brain functions to have some amount of genetic heritablity, which is exactly what we find:
“A meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies was conducted to estimate the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity. The best fitting model for 41 key studies (58 independent samples from 14 month old infants to adults; N=27,147) included equal proportions of variance due to genetic (0.50) and non-shared environmental (0.50) influences, with genetic effects being both additive (0.38) and non-additive (0.12). Shared environmental effects were unimportant in explaining individual differences in impulsivity. Age, sex, and study design (twin vs. adoption) were all significant moderators of the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity. The relative contribution of genetic effects (broad sense heritability) and unique environmental effects were also found to be important throughout development from childhood to adulthood. Total genetic effects were found to be important for all ages, but appeared to be strongest in children. Analyses also demonstrated that genetic effects appeared to be stronger in males than in females.”
“Shared environmental effects” in a study like this means “the environment you and your siblings grew up in, like your household and school.” In this case, shared effects were unimportant–that means that parenting had no effect on the impulsivity of adopted children raised together in the same household. Non-shared environmental influences are basically random–you bumped your head as a kid, your mom drank during pregnancy, you were really hungry or pissed off during the test, etc., and maybe even cultural norms.
So your ability to plan for the future appears to be part genetic, and part random luck.
However, The Atlantic article notes that, “the significance of these figures may be hugely overblown. “Everybody who’s remotely professionally involved in this kind of stuff knows that beyond about 10, 15, 20 years, [population estimates] are basically useless,” says Dr. Sean Fox of the University of Bristol in the U.K.”
Personally, I’d still be worried.
1. Rare events / things are likely to be over-represented in survey results due to random chance, if the chance of randomly picking that option among the survey items is higher than the chance of it occurring in real life. For example, let’s suppose I hand out 1000 surveys with three options to select from:
Heterosexual
Homosexual
Asexual
Then chances are I will end up with an over-representation of asexuals. In real life, asexuality is rare–a British survey estimates it at about 1% of the British population, so I expect to get about 10 surveys marked asexual. But let’s suppose some people decide to just fill my survey out completely at random because they’re just here for the free M&Ms, or they’re not paying very good attention and mark the wrong box, or I accidentally make a mistake while tallying up the numbers. Then the chances of randomly ticking “asexual” are 33%. If 1% of responses are randomly incorrect, then I will get an additional 3.3 or so asexuals–that is, I will over-estimate the asexual population by about 33%. If 3% of responses are incorrect, then fully half of my reported asexuals aren’t asexual at all.
This problem will only get worse if there are two rare categories you can select on my survey. Suppose you can also select your race:
White
Black
Hispanic
Anything else
And we’re doing this survey in Comanche, TX, where Whites are 80%, Blacks are 1%, Hispanics are about 17%, and everyone else is about 2%.
The statistical odds of a black asexual in Comanche, TX, assuming these are independent variables, are therefore around 0.01%–in other words, we probably shouldn’t find any, so let’s hand out our survey to 10,000 people so we have a reasonable chance of finding one. (You know, pretending that Comanche has 10,000 people.)
If you’re filling this survey out randomly for the M&Ms, you’ve got a 25% chance of marking black and a 33% chance of marking asexual, for an 8.3% chance of marking both. If 1% of people do this, then we should see about 8 black asexuals–about 8 times as many as we ought to see.
A prominent real life demonstration of this effect was Pat Buchanan’s performance in the 2000 election in Florida. Voters had a close to 33% chance of randomly voting Buchanan if they mis-poked the ballot, but only 0.4% of people nationwide voted for Buchanan. This resulted in a large over-counting of votes for Buchanan.
Pop Palm Beach= 1.135 million * 51.3% voting rate = 582,255 voters. 0.4% of that is 2,329 votes. But if 1%–5,822–of those voters vote randomly, that’s another 1,921 votes for Buchanan. If the difference between winning and losing in Palm Beach comes down to less than 2,000 votes, then random chance, not democracy, is casting the deciding vote.
If your error rate goes above 1%, things obviously get even worse.
(To his credit, Pat Buchanan freely admitted that his anomalously high numbers in Palm Beach were probably due to people getting mixed up about the ballot.)
2. The black (African American) IQ score distribution may be wider and/or less normal than claimed.
The number of high-scoring blacks does not line up with the expected number of high-scoring blacks based on IQ distribution estimates. Pumpkin Person does a good breakdown of the math on this one, in their post, “Are too many U.S. blacks scoring high on IQ tests?“
It’s a pity the text on the image is so small. I’m going to try to replicate it, just in case you’re having trouble reading the caption:
Stable: Earth’s climate system is very stale. Global warming will have little or no effects.
Random: Earth’s climate is random. We do not know what will happen.
Fragile: Earth’s climate is delicately balanced. Small amounts of global warming will have abrupt and catastrophic effects.
Gradual: Earth’s climate is gradual to change. [?] Global warming will gradually lead to dangerous effects.
Threshold: Earth’s climate is stable within certain limits. If global warming is small, climate will return to a stable balance; if it is large, there will be dangerous effects.
In case you are wondering how big each group is, here you go:
The left to right ordering of the bubbles is probably not coincidental: global warming believers tend to be liberals, while deniers tend to be conservative. The disengaged, cautious, and doubtful tend toward political moderatism, not picking either obvious side.
Amusingly, I consider myself a political moderate, though to be fair, it’s a moderatism of considering myself “somewhere between anarchism and fascism.”
Some people are “moderates” because they just don’t want to get into annoying arguments with others, a position I find very reasonable in this day and age. But others are moderates because they just aren’t smart enough to make sense of either side’s arguments.
The Disengageds and their neighbors are the most likely to favor the Random hypothesis: the climate is totally random and we can’t predict it at all.
I suspect this is what life is actually like for unintelligent people: stuff seems to happens for no particularly coherent reasons at all.
IQ tests measure, among other things, your ability to figure out patterns. Finding patterns in data and making non-obvious connections requires cleverness and insight. For those not gifted with such skills, many of life’s events seem simply random.
Candy Crush, Bejeweled, Farmville, and many other games are exceedingly dumb ways to pass your time–and yet, chances are you’ve played some version of them anyway. People have, collectively, spent millions of potentially-productive hours on such games. Even more amazingly, people have spent millions of dollars in actual money on these games.
These games work because they’re addictive. Click the screen a few times, and corn appears! Wow! So you click the screen again, hoping more corn will appear. But as you “progress” through the game, each level becomes harder, takes longer, or requires more clicks. Next thing you know, you’re pulling out your phone at family functions to check on your fake corn instead of socializing with your cousins, or getting mugged on the subway because you were too busy swiping candies to pay attention to your surroundings.
Our career tracks have become far too similar.
I had the luck to catch up with a friend recently during a rare moment of down time. Way back in highschool, she decided to dedicate her life to one of those careers that shows a true commitment to helping others. Her adulthood, so far: 4 years of college; 4 years of grad school; 4 years of training; 2 years in a specialization program. By the time she has any hope of even being geographically settled instead of moving every few years, assuming she can get a job that will let her settle, she’ll be in her mid to late 30s. By the time she’s paid off her education debt, she’ll be in her 50s. Whether she wants kids or not, the question is practically moot.
It’s like the Farmville of real life, only instead of crops, you harvest degrees and grants and papers and fellowships.
Why pursue such a track? Yes, obviously, because she’s passionately committed to helping others, which is what she does. But also because our system requires and rewards such behavior.
There is absolutely no damn reason a JD or MD requires 4 years of college in addition to the programs themselves. There is no damn reason not to expedite a new doctor or lawyer or scientist or pretty much anyone else’s path to geographic and income stability.
When we ask why smart people don’t have more children, a big reason is that smart people are up to their eyeballs in debt, working 12 (or 24!) hour days, and constantly moving in hopes of finally getting enough points on their resumes to score a permanent job.
Fuck, people struggle just to get volunteer jobs.
Meanwhile, compare our friend to an Amish farmer. The work is hard. Back-breaking, sweaty, sometimes disgusting. If you’re unlucky, you could get trampled by a cow or something.
But there are no degrees. You don’t have to go to school to learn how to milk a cow and plow a field; your parents taught you that. There’s very little in the way of career advancement. You’ve been doing farm labor since you were four or so, and you’re likely to continue doing it until you die. You know you’ll probably have a job next year, how much money your crops will bring in, and if you need a new barn, your family will probably pitch in and help you out.
And the Amish have a lot of children. According to the Wikipedia, there were 5,000 Amish in 1920, and there were 290,000 Amish in 2014–and that’s not counting all of the ex-Amish who’ve left the faith over the years.
The same is true for people who aren’t Amish, but who face similarly limited career opportunities. If you can’t advance, you focus your energies elsewhere. If your phone dies because you forgot to charge it, you might be forced to actually interact with the people around you or read a goddamn book for a change.
I like having doctors. I like scientists. I can even stomach the thought of having some lawyers for certain purposes, like helping people fill out their wills. But we have to expedite the process.
While researching the previous post, I came across a claim that the Pygmies are retarded due to having IQs around 55.
No, the Pygmies are not retarded.
If you’ve already read Two Kinds of Dumb, you already know why, and don’t need to continue on. But if you’ve just wandered in, here’s the quick and dirty version:
An actual diagnosis of mental retardation requires not only a low IQ score (I think the bar is 75 but could be 70, I forget,) but also major life impairments. That is, the person must be unable to do, unsupervised, the normal things people do to function, like hold down a job, get dressed, or feed themselves.
While I don’t know the exact IQs of the pygmies, all of the evidence I’ve seen suggest that the average is probably pretty low. For starters, books are heavy, so hunter-gatherers tend not to carry them around, which has a real impact on the average hunter-gather’s ability to read. Second, hunter-gatherers tend not to conduct much trade, so they tend not to need much in the way of mathematics. Some groups don’t even have words for numbers over three. Such groups tend to score lousily on math tests.
I’ve searched high and low for whether or not Pygmy languages contain words for numbers over 3, and come up with nada. But I think Pymies tend to use a lot of words from other languages/be multi-lingual, so if the Pygmies are speaking some other language they picked up from an agricultural tribe, the language could easily have a full suite of number words whether the Pygmies had any interest in numbers or not.
Third, given neither books nor maths in Pygmy history, it’s unlikely that there’s been any selective pressure on the Pygmies to adapt to readin’ and ‘rithmetic.
Fourth, there is a pretty strong correlation between IQ scores and technological complexity. You don’t have to think of IQ as “intelligence” if you don’t want to, but whatever it is, it is necessary for building technologically complex societies. If the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is your thing, then you don’t need much in the way of IQ.
And fifth, their heads are kind of small. Unfortunately, brains have to go somewhere, and this poses a limit on grey matter.
That said, Pygmies are perfectly functional in their environment. They can hunt and gather their own food, carry on some trade with their neighbors, build their own houses, make their own clothes, get dressed, cook, take care of their children (one Wikipedia article claims that one Pygmy group has some of the highest level of fatherly involvement in child-rearing in the world,) are bi- and tri-lingual, and otherwise conduct their lives.
If you and I got dropped in the rainforest, we’d probably die within three or four days.
To over-simplify, mental retardation is generally caused by some form of traumatic brain injury, say, by getting dropped on your head as a child, eating lead, or being born with an extra chromosome. These injuries change your IQ from what it should have been, and cause a general loss of brain functioning.
If you live in a society where the average IQ is 100, then the average person you meet with a 50 IQ is most likely someone who suffered a traumatic injury.
However, if you live in a society where the average IQ is 50, this is the normal, um-injured IQ of people in your society. It just means that people in your society are bad at reading and math, not that they were all dropped on their heads as infants and cannot care for themselves.
“But wait,” I hear you saying, “what if Pygmy low IQ is caused by malnutrition? After all, they ARE pretty short.”
Doubtful. There’s no reason to think that Pygmies would have been more malnourished than all of their neighbors for thousands of years (we have records going back that far.) Also, their height is genetic (see studies on Pygmy genetics,) not due to malnutrition. According to Westhunter, an average-heighted person would have to starve to death twice before mere malnourishment would make them as short as a pygmy.
Are Pygmies human?
I’ve also come across this question during my research, so I think it bears addressing.
Look, the term “human” is a social construct. So is the whole concept of “species.” You can come up with a personal definition of “human,” if you feel like it, that doesn’t include the Pygmies. Certainly their neighbors, who rape, murder, eat, and enslave the Pygmies (and sometimes evict them to make more room for gorillas,) do not regard the Pygmies as human. Personally, I look down on the Pygmies’ neighbors for their despicable behavior toward the Pygmies, rather than look down on the Pygmies for their stature and lifestyle.
Practically speaking, people only declare other groups of people “not humans” in order to justify killing them. I have no desire to kill the Pygmies; it seems more pleasant to me to live in a world where Pygmies exist, while still recognizing them as one of the most genetically distinct groups on Earth.
I was working on this post about how Les Mis is totally communist, but then I remembered this is a blog about evolution, not pop culture ramblings.
Women, math, and genetics.
Many people have wondered why mathematicians are disproportionately male. Some have wondered if Larry Summers got nudged out of being president of Harvard for saying it might just be biological.
Of course it’s biological.
Sex differences in math performance are probably just a side effect of the Y Chromosome.
Let’s back up a speck. First, let’s be clear what we’re talking about.
Last time I checked, women and men performed, on average, about equally well on highschool math. Little girls seem to do slightly better on elementary school math, but elementary school is largely a test of how long you can sit still, so that’s no mystery. But by highschool, the boys have gotten a little better at sitting, and the testing is probably a little more reliable. (See the Wikipedia for way more details.)
And yet, more men than women end up in lucrative, high-status math professorships.
I’m being sarcastic. Math is nerdy and low-status, so women avoid it like the plague except to complain that there aren’t enough women in it.
Anyway, you might be wondering how, if men and women have the same average ability, more men than women end up as math professors. The answer, of course, is that while there are more men than women at the extreme tail of high math ability, there are also more men than women at the extreme tail of low math ability.
After all, more men than women are retarded. Boys dominate special ed classes 2 to 1–that is, they are 2/3s of special ed students, and not just because they’re more aggressive.
Anyone who thinks there’s a vast male conspiracy to keep women out of those sexy, lucrative math jobs needs to explain why those same conspirators think so many little boys are retarded. If society is somehow magically convincing little girls that they suck at math, then it is doing an even better job of convincing little boys that they’re even worse. And which should we be most concerned about, society causing a slight dearth of women at the very top end of a profession that doesn’t pay very well, or a massive over-representation of boys among the retarded?
If society’s not to blame, then what else could cause men to both under and over-perform at math?
Their Y chromosomes.
You see, for women, every chromosome comes as part of a matched set. In the slightly simplified view, you have one eye-color gene from your mom, and one from your dad. Together, they determine your eye color. If one is wonky, the other at least is still there, functioning properly. This has a moderating effect on gene expression–you get fewer extremes.
But males only have one Y chromosome. If something goes wrong with it, well, there’s not a lot your X chromosome is likely to do about it.
The result is that men show greater spread on a lot of traits that involve the Y chromosome. Height is an obvious example: while most men are taller than most women, men have a wider range of heights. Women are more narrowly clustered around their average, while men are more spread out:
Even allowing that some of these people are probably lying (some of those 5’7″ guys are probably actually 5’6″, and probably one of the 6’s is actually 5’11”,) there are far more women at 5’6″ than men at 5’10”. The men are more spread out, with more of them, therefore, at the tails of their distribution.
The Y chromosome contains the code that makes men taller than women, but since they only have one copy of this code, there’s nothing to moderate it. If they happen to get one gene for short, well, then they’re short. If they get one for tall, then they’re tall.
It’s the same with math. The Y chromosome has an effect on brain development (it must, otherwise males brains couldn’t create the sex hormones they need for proper genital development and function.) A woman who is lucky enough to get a good math gene from one of her parents has decent odds of getting a mediocre math gene from her other parent, bringing her back toward average. A woman who gets a particularly bad math gene is likely, again by chance, to get a better one from her other parent, again bringing her back toward average.
By contrast, a man is stuck, for better or worse, with one gene. If it’s a good gene, he’s good at math. If it’s a bad gene, he ends up in special ed.
(Note: in reality, there are a lot of genes involved, not just one or two. This is a simplified model to highlight the effect of the Y chromosome in decreasing individual genetic variation in men.)
Why does any of this matter? It doesn’t, except that humans think it matters. There’s been a huge push, socially and legally, to force more women into fields where they aren’t yet 50% or greater. To the extent that math departments have been partially protected, it’s just because math, unlike medicine, is low-status and so not all that attractive to women; they just feel insulted by the claim that they’re bad at math.
Of course, women aren’t “bad at math.” For all of the normal sorts of math people do in everyday life, women and men are equally competent. And plenty of women are math professors–I know some personally. They are just less than 50% of math professors.
No one should be picking math professors based on gender. Male or female, pick ’em based on their math skills.
The beauty of math, the thing I love about it, is its objectivity. You can’t bullshit your way through math; culture doesn’t matter. An answer is correct or it is not. The other thing I love about math is that it is cheap. Of all the subjects, math requires the least $$$ to teach–as my relatives who lived through the Great Depression have impressed on me, reading requires heavy, expensive books (heavy is a concern when your penniless family is fleeing the Dust Bowl,) but you can do math with a stick and some dirt.
This is (among other things) why Asian immigrants do so well in math–it’s cheap, culture-independent, and objective. There are no environmental factors other than brain damage that can be reasonably argued to interfere with math performance.
Frankly, I think arguing about whether people are bad at something or inundating them with messages that essentially say, “Everyone thinks you’re bad at this, but don’t worry, it’s totally not true!” causes way more insecurity than just not saying anything and letting people just be.
Much of American advertising works like this; take something people weren’t thinking about at all, then go out of your way to tell them that of course they shouldn’t be concerned about it until they’re so concerned that they go buy your products.
Maybe we’d be better off not stressing out and just letting kids do their homework without imposing political ideas either way on them.
You know what’s kind of awesome? Understanding the economic development level of virtually every country on earth becomes much easier as soon as you realize the massive correlation between per capita and IQ–and it gets even better if you focus on verbal IQ or “smart fraction” vebal IQs:
La Griffe du Lion has a lot of great articles explaining phenomena via math, so if you haven’t read them already, I strongly recommend that you do.
One wonders what this data would look like if we looked backwards, at per capita GDP in, say, the 15 to 1800s.
I really hope I can find a better graph (this one’s from Wikimedia)
Also from Wikimedia
According to the Guardian article about the paper British Economic Growth 1270-1870, “estimates that per capita income in England in the late middle ages was about $1,000 or £634 a year when compared with currency values in 1990.
“According to the World Bank, countries which had a per capita income of less than $1,000 last year included Ghana ($700), Cambodia ($650), Tanzania ($500), Ethiopia ($300) and Burundi ($150), while in India – one of the BRIC emerging economies – the gross income per capita stands only just above medieval levels at $1,180.”
“The %GDP of Western Europe in the chart is the region in Europe that includes the following modern countries – UK, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and other smaller states in the Western part of Europe.
The %GDP of Middle East in the chart is the region in West Asia and Northeast Africa that includes the following modern countries – Egypt, Israel, Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Yemen, Iran, Iraq and other regions in the Arabian region.”
The problem with doing the graph this way is that it doesn’t control for population growth. Obviously the US expanded greatly in population between 1700 and 1950, crushing the rest of the world’s GDP by comparison, without anyone else necessarily getting any poorer. It would be nice if the graph included Africa, because I wonder how things like Mansa Musa’s gold mines would show up.
At any rate, here is my impression, which this graph basically seems to back up:
Around the time of the Romans, “Europe” and the Middle East had similar levels of development, integration into global economy, etc. The fall of the Roman Empire coincided with the Middle East pulling ahead in math, science, and nice-looking buildings.
Meanwhile, India and China were doing quite well for themselves, though it’s not clear from the graph how much of that is population. I would not be surprised to find similar numbers for per capita GDP at that time, though.
Then around 1000, Europe starts to improve while the Middle East falls behind and stays there. I suspect this is in part because cousin marriage became more common in the Middle East between 0 and 1000 while simultaneously becoming less common in Europe, and because the Middle East probably didn’t have much arable land left to expand into and so population couldn’t increase very much, whereas the Germans started their big eastward migration about then, (The Ostsiedlung–goodness, it took me a while to figure out how that’s spelled.) increasing the number of Europeans in our cohort and spurring growth.
(BTW…
Click for the bigger version )
India, meanwhile, went downhill for a long time, for I have no idea why reasons. China was doing great until quite recently, when it apparently went capootie. Why? I don’t know, but I think part of the effect is just Europe (and the US) suddenly pulling ahead, making China look less significant by comparison.
So. Extrapolating backwards from what we know about the correlation between GDP and verbal IQ, I suspect Western Europe experienced a massive increase in IQ between 1000 and 1900.
A large chunk of this increase was probably driven by the German eastward expansion, a rather major migration you’ve probably never heard of. (As HBD Chick says, “from a sociobiological point-of-view, probably the most underappreciated event in recent western european history. that and the reconquest of spain.”) Another large chunk was probably driven by various cultural factors unique to manorialism and Christianity.
Windmills began popping up in Western Europe in the late 1100s (given that they seem to have started in France, England, and Flanders, rather than in areas geographically closer to the Middle East, it seems unlikely that the European windmills were inspired by earlier Middle Eastern windmills, but were instead a fairly independent invention.
Watermills were an earlier invention–the Classical Romans and Greeks had them. The Chinese and Middle Easterners had them, too, at that time. I don’t know how many mills they all had, but Europeans really took to them:
“At the time of the compilation of the Domesday Book (1086), there were 5,624 watermills in England alone, only 2% of which have not been located by modern archeological surveys. Later research estimates a less conservative number of 6,082, and it has been pointed out that this should be considered a minimum as the northern reaches of England were never properly recorded. In 1300, this number had risen to between 10,000 and 15,000. [Bold mine.]By the early 7th century, watermills were well established in Ireland, and began to spread from the former territory of the empire into the non-romanized parts of Germany a century later. Ship mills and tide mill were introduced in the 6th century.” (Wikipedia page on Watermills.)
In short, by the 1300s, Europe was well on its way toward industrialization.
IMO, these things combined to produce a land where the clever could get ahead and have more children than the non-clever, where those who could figure out a new use or more efficient milling design could profit.
““‘By 1200 Western Europe has a GDP per capita higher than most parts of the world, but (with two exceptions) by 1500 this number stops increasing. In both data sets the two exceptions are Netherlands and Great Britain. These North Sea economies experienced sustained GDP per capita growth for six straight centuries. The North Sea begins to diverge from the rest of Europe long before the “West” begins its more famous split from “the rest”. [W]e can pin point the beginning of this “little divergence” with greater detail. In 1348 Holland’s GDP per capita was $876. England’s was $777. In less than 60 years time Holland’s jumps to $1,245 and England’s to 1090. The North Sea’s revolutionary divergence started at this time.’”
The result, I suspect, was an increase in average IQs of about 10 to 15 points–perhaps 20 points in specific sub-groups, eg Ashkenazi Jews–with an overall widening of the spread toward the top end.
