Monk

Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.

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The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

-- David Brooks for The New York Times

I wonder if it's too late to start now!

William Saletan continues to struggle over the race-IQ issue

Although racial differences exist, Saletan argues that race is really only a first proxy when it comes to generalizing genetic studies, and that it is a bad proxy. As he puts it, "Race is the stone age of genetics." And he has only become more senstive to the misuses of race categories and racial studies.

Saletan also reminds us that his primary question was always how to stay consistent with egalitarian values as we learn more about our racial differences. I think his study is further complicated by the fact that egalitarianism is not exactly a driving principle in society anyway. The game is much more wild when your moral constraints are more illusory than confining.

Of course, at the risk of sounding personal, all of this still leaves open a related question that I consider interesting. Forget about race. Should there be such radical divergeces in the quality of life between high-IQ people and low-IQ people? When you consider that question, you can see just how illusory are our egalitarian values. Like they say: life isn't fair. It's not even very nice.

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It turns out that the Nobel-winning geneticist who was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” is inherently 16 percent African, or an amount of “someone who had a great-grandparent who was African,” according to a scientist who made the discovery.

-- Mike Nizza for The New York Times

Life sometimes does its own satire.

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In the absence of some startling new evidence, the crux of the issue turns out to be this: Do you believe the legacy of American racism, in all its complexity, can explain depressed black IQ scores, even when controlling for all other factors, including socioeconomic status? Is the black experience, in other words, so unique as to constitute, for nearly all black Americans, a separate wheat field? If you say yes, then good news: You believe (along with the most prominent environmentalists) that the black-white IQ gap will close in the next 50 or so years. If you think no, then bad news: You believe, with the most prominent hereditarians, that blacks as a group must resign themselves to higher rates of poverty, unemployment, divorce, and violent criminality purely as a matter of genetic fate.

The crux of Saletan's pieces was his Liberal Creationist analogy. The analogy is hopeless along several competing dimensions, but it reminded me of the Dilettante's First Law of Empirical Narcissism. In a moment of controversy, the temptation to proclaim yourself an avatar of truth, and your opponent a faith-based inquisitor, is natural enough. But Darwin is Darwin thanks to generations of independent corroboration. By definition, generations of independent corroboration do not stand behind a thesis that is still being hotly contested. In claiming Darwin (or Copernicus or Galileo) for his cause, a person is often by implication saying: There would be consensus here, but for you damned critics! This is an odd definition of consensus. Conversely, when one's angry reaction to an idea is being adduced as evidence in its favor, one should ask: What does my anger have to do with the truth-content of your idea? If you told me there was a genetic basis to Jewish avarice, I would be angry. So what? What does my anger have to do with your crappy research?

-- Stephen Metcalf for Slate.com

One more word on the Saletan essays on race and IQ. A hard word.

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William Saletan has been stepping back from his essays on race and IQ. These are the "Slate" articles I posted a couple of weeks ago, in which he argued that James Watson's comments on race and IQ were wrongly anathematized, laying out the statistical findings that have shown IQ disparity among the races.

His primary qualification is that he was arguing hypothetically, and that it is worth considering how we egalitarians should respond to the issues raised in the event that this IQ phenomenon is confirmed.

More pointedly, he also repents from using a study that is co-authored by someone who seems to be an avowed racist:

Many of you have criticized parts of the genetic argument as I related them. Others have pointed to alternative theories I truncated or left out. But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

It is a very sensitve subject fraught with dangers.


(Source: William Saletan for Slate.com)

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Eric Turkheimer makes a stirring riposte in the debate over race and IQ. I gather that it is the argument that enough time has yet to elapse for non-whites and non-Asians to enjoy the same cultural opportunities that would enable them to realize their intellectual potential, which is at least an open question.

( Turkheimer excerpt )

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Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on."

I wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

-- William Saletan for Slate.com

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Leave it to Charles Murray to raise the ugly truth that the problem with underachieving children may be that they are simply dumb. This is a long-term schtick of his. At least he is not focusing on the racial difference in intelligence now. However, it is easy to be unfair to the man since his position really is more nuanced than smug indifference. But I could not help chuckling when I came across his latest efforts at explaining the limits of education policy:

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Mr. Murray is sensitive to more substantive issues of fairness, and he certainly is not saying that lesser minds should just eat cake, but one does wonder what is his approach to the suggested issues of fairness and opportunity in a competitive society in the post-industrial Information Age. Or is he saying (implicitly) that they have to just eat cake.


(Source: Charles Murray for The Wall Street Journal)

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If you want an intelligent partner - seek out a man with body hair. A recent study conducted by psychiatrist Dr Aikarakudy Alias, who has been working on the relationship between body hair and intelligence for 22 years, showed that hairy chests are more likely to be found among the most intelligent and highly educated than in the general population. Excessive body hair could also mean higher intelligence.

Dr Alias's research, which focused on medical students in the United States, showed that 45 per cent of male doctors in training were "very hairy", compared with less than 10 per cent of men overall. In a region of southern India, research among medical and engineering students and manual labourers found that both groups of students had more body hair on average than the manual workers.

Further investigations showed that when academic ranking among students was examined, the hairier men got better grades. Taking this study one step further, Dr Alias studied 117 Mensa members (who have an IQ of at least 140) and found that this group tended to have thick body hair. Some of the most intelligent men were those with hair on their backs as well as on their chests.

-- Mary Francis for Daily Mail

Hmm, I'm a little hairy. And I am more than happy to share my DNA. No child support, though. These genes should be enough.

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