Steve Sailer:

It's interesting to compare the number of hits turned up by Google for searches of two figures important in the history of IQ research:

- Sir Cyril Burt, who among much else, conducted early research on separated twins from which he derived a high estimate of the heritability of IQ.

- Rick Heber, whose Milwaukee Project to use intensive daycare to raise the IQs of poor black children was widely lauded at the time and continues to be cited unskeptically, as in Richard J. Nisbett's new book Intelligence and How to Get It.

The day after Burt's death in 1971 at 88, an anti-hereditarian colleague advised Burt's distraught housekeeper to burn his papers. Soon, widely publicized charges appeared claiming that Burt had fabricated his twin research, charges which couldn't be disproved from Burt's papers, which were now ashes. Leon Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould jumped in. Later research did much to salvage Burt's reputation, but by then the conventional wisdom had hardened. (Arthur Jensen concluded in his 1998 magnum opus The g Factor that most of the charges against Burt were exaggerations, but that he wouldn't use Burt's later publications, but that it hardly matters since subsequent separated twin studies, such as the famous Minnesota Twins project, came to almost identical conclusions.)

In contrast to Burt, Rick Heber turned out to be a conman who was sent to federal prison for stealing from the Milwaukee Project. In a way, Heber's criminality makes the Milwaukee Project a little more usable to nurturists, since the costs of the project -- $14 million supposedly spent on just 40 children over a half dozen years beginning in the relatively low-cost 1960s -- were so insanely high that they couldn't possibly be replicated on a mass scale. So, knowing that Heber was skimming some of that $14 million actually makes the Milwaukee Project look less ridiculous on the cost front. However, that knowledge also raises questions about it on the findings front. So, Heber's crimes have, unlike whatever it was that Burt did, been shoved down the Memory Hole.

A Google search of

"Cyril Burt" scandal

turns up 2,310 hits.

Meanwhile,

"Rick Heber" scandal

turns up 26 hits.

They say history is written by the winners, but I say that history is written by the history-writers.

Sounds to me like history is written based on what ideas people find palatable or appealing, rather than which ones are most supported by the evidence. I know some of you love science but are baffled by my passion for defending genetics and evolutionary biology. Perhaps this perspective will help. I see these areas as a struggle between what is true and what people wish were true. And that pisses me off. In a world where conventional wisdom was that genes and fate determined the entire course of your life, I expect I'd be just as passionate about free will and the idea that we make our own fate.

It was news to me that the Milwaukee Project was run by a con man who went to jail for embezzling funds. Considering it is one of the few pieces of evidence that interventions can make lasting changes to IQ, that is a pretty damning fact for the belief in intervention.

How about I believe the scientific consensus about global warming being real and anthropogenic, and y'all belief the scientific consensus that:

The nature- nurture debate is over. The bottom line is that everything is heritable, an outcome that has taken all sides of the nature-nurture debate by surprise.

Not that this means we have genetic determinism, the picture is more complicated than that:

Abstract
Behavior genetics has demonstrated that genetic variance is an important component of variation for all behavioral outcomes, but variati on among families is not. These results have led some critics of behavior genetics to conclude that heritability is so ubiquitous as to have few consequences for scientific understanding of development , while some behavior genetic partisans have concluded that family environment is not an important cause of developmental outcomes. Both views are incorrect. Genotype is in fact a more systematic source of variability than environment, but for reasons that are methodological rather than substantive. Development is fundamentally nonlinear, interactive, and difficult to control experimentally. Twin studies offer a useful methodological shortcut, but do not show that genes are more fundamental than environments.

The three laws of behavioral genetics are:

First Law. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
Second Law. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
Third Law. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effect s of genes or families.

The piece also takes a pro-prockian viewpoint that:

The disconnect between the analysis of variance and the analysis of causes, to use Lewontin’s (1974) phrase, is not a proprietary flaw in behavior genetic methodology; in fact, it is the bedrock methodological problem of contemporary social science.

While I believe that correlation correlates with causation and is a meaningful signal to discover it, considering this criticism in the context of sciences with which I am moderately familiar, such as macroeconomics and epidemiological health/nutrition, I cannot dispute that it is a serious problem.

I'm reading this book by Cochran & Harpending, which I posted about earlier.

I tend to regret posting about genetics, but this book has such great refutations of the classic "There are no racial differences that go more than skin deep" arguments that I will yield to temptation.

The thesis of the book is that evolution has accelerated over the past 10K years, since the end of the last ice age, invention of agriculture, and huge increase in population. The evidence suggests that evolution in the past 10K years has happened about 100 times faster than the average over the past 6M years. Evolution is rapid enough that humans have changed significantly in body and mind over the course of recorded history.

The most basic theoretical reason is one I am very fond of because it is an accessible mathematical argument. The rate of generation of beneficial mutations scales approximately linearly with population size. Twice as many people means twice as many babies and twice as many new genes generated for testing. The time it takes a better gene to spread is logarithmic in population size (because genes spread exponentially). Hence, doubling the population size approximately doubles the speed of evolution, because it doubles the rate of generating mutations while only slightly increasing the time for a good mutation to spread.

This theoretical argument is supported by empirical data.

To demonstrate that the conventional view is not a strawman, the book opens with a quote from Stephen Jay Gould: "There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."

( Key points )

Anyway, I'll quit now. The homepage for the book summarizes each chapter. Suffice it to say that modern genetics has destroyed the myths that evolution has stopped, that people all over the world have experienced the same selection pressure, that race is a meaningless social construct, evolution only goes skin deep, etc. Instead, there are substantial geographic correlations in genetics, evolution has sped up, evolution operates on a short enough time scale to create geographic differences in the brain as well as the skin, we have *specific examples of genes which affect the brain that vary by race*, etc.

Note that there are no claims here about some races being "better" or "more evolved" than others. Merely that they have undergone different selection pressures. The best course of action to take with this (with current technology) is not genocide, it is miscegenation - for everyone to fuck everyone else until we all have the best genes from all races. (Try to fit that into the stereotypical racist box!)

Of course, current technology will not last long, and I think it is far less important what evolution has done to date than what we are going to do when genetic engineering lets us take over our own evolution. It's the Robot's Rebellion that matters. But understanding the history of our robot selves is an important part of rebelling.

( Brief troll )

I prefer to argue about truth, not implication. But one argument about race and genetics which I have found to be somewhat persuasive in the past is this: "It may or may not be true, but it is counterproductive to speak it. It breeds divisiveness, people viewing themselves as separate, making assumptions about other people based on their race, discrimination, and other bad things"

In the past, my answer has been: "That's true. But ignoring and denying the truth of genetic racial differences hampers transhumanist science. And transhumanist science to genetically improve us will have far more positive effect in the long-term than the negative short-term effects of admitting there are genetic racial differences"

But I just read a new argument, which suggests that it is cultural explanations for differences in racial outcomes which are divisive and counterproductive:

A culturist explanation would be that blacks and Hispanics are held back by “racism”—basically, by malice on the part of white and Asian people.

A non-culturist explanation would be that a population whose ancestors went through some key transiton—say, from hunting-gathering to pastoralism—ten thousand years ago, if compared with a population whose ancestors passed through that transition only one thousand years ago, will have, on average of course, different gene sets conferring different abilities, personalities, and social skills. Natural selection can just get more done in ten thousand years than in one thousand. This is not scientifically controversial.

Now consider the effect on a black or Hispanic person of the two explanations. If he accepts the first, the culturist explanation, he will be mad as hell, and rightly so. He looks out at the world and sees people like himself stuck at the bottom of society. Why? Because of malice on the part of other groups. That’s what the culturist model tells him. He’s just the same as those other groups—the differences are only superficial. Why isn’t his group doing as well as their groups? Malice, the culturists tell him, wicked malice! Why wouldn’t he be mad as hell?

If, on the other hand, he accepts the biological explanation, there is no-one to blame. That’s just how human biology has shaken out across the deep history of our species. It isn’t anybody’s fault.

Thus, a culturist explanation of human group inequality—or of human individual inequality, for that matter—breeds rage and rancor. The true, biological explanation, by contrast, offers at least the hope of acceptance. We do, after all, accept our individual differences without pain. Everybody in this room is better than I am at something or other: playing tennis, appreciating music, writing, attracting the opposite sex. Many of you are undoubtedly smarter than I am. I don’t lose any sleep over this. Millions of American men and women go out and play golf every weekend, by no means sunk in listless despair at the knowledge that they will never be as good as Tiger Woods. If we can so placidly accept individual inequality, why can’t we accept group inequality—especially since it is supported by an ever-growing mountain of evidence? Perhaps we like rage and rancor, I don’t know.

The idea that some races have had evolutionary pressure from a more modern world (post-agricultural revolution) than others makes me uncomfortable. I don't like theories that imply some races may be more "advanced" than others - that brings up bad associations with theories that have done awful things (like perpetuating slavery). But this is an interesting point, that the non-genetic explanation for differences in outcome has bad blowback too. One encourages discrimination and demonization, the other entitlement and resentment.

One explanation leads to harm from others, the other to self-harm - what an awful choice. Let's hurry up and figure out how we can engineer everyone's genome to be fabulously advanced.

Although, genetic engineering will be expensive, and sold to the rich first, so I guess these differences are probably going to perpetuate themselves onward forever, through the Singularity and beyond. That's sad. Someone, please give me hope for a future that is not in denial of the facts, not a Harrison Bergeron dystopia, but not one where current priveleges are perpetuated forever.

This sort of thing is why I love Pinker:

Looking to the genome for the nature of the person is far from innocuous. In the 20th century, many intellectuals embraced the idea that babies are blank slates that are inscribed by parents and society. It allowed them to distance themselves from toxic doctrines like that of a superior race, the eugenic breeding of a better species or a genetic version of the Twinkie Defense in which individuals or society could evade responsibility by saying that it’s all in the genes. When it came to human behavior, the attitude toward genetics was “Don’t go there.” Those who did go there found themselves picketed, tarred as Nazis and genetic determinists or, in the case of the biologist E. O. Wilson, doused with a pitcher of ice water at a scientific conference.

Today, as the lessons of history have become clearer, the taboo is fading. Though the 20th century saw horrific genocides inspired by Nazi pseudoscience about genetics and race, it also saw horrific genocides inspired by Marxist pseudoscience about the malleability of human nature. The real threat to humanity comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than a curiosity about nature and nurture. Today it is the humane democracies of Scandinavia that are hotbeds of research in behavioral genetics, and two of the groups who were historically most victimized by racial pseudoscience — Jews and African-Americans — are among the most avid consumers of information about their genes.

Ok, that's all the important bits :).

Now the question is: Do I get a 23andme analysis? I'd love to learn about my genetic risk factors some day, but it sounds awfully poorly developed right now, I dunno. Any of y'all done it and have comments?

From the Pinker article, another important point was that we have a pretty robust but really weird answer for the nature / nurture debate: nature matters a lot, nurture matters not at all - and they don't add up to 100%. There is a big, important "X factor" missing, which may be gene/environment interactions, or just blind chance:

Behavioral genetics has repeatedly found that the “shared environment” — everything that siblings growing up in the same home have in common, including their parents, their neighborhood, their home, their peer group and their school — has less of an influence on the way they turn out than their genes. In many studies, the shared environment has no measurable influence on the adult at all. Siblings reared together end up no more similar than siblings reared apart, and adoptive siblings reared in the same family end up not similar at all. A large chunk of the variation among people in intelligence and personality is not predictable from any obvious feature of the world of their childhood.

Think of a pair of identical twins you know. They are probably highly similar, but they are certainly not indistinguishable. They clearly have their own personalities, and in some cases one twin can be gay and the other straight, or one schizophrenic and the other not. But where could these differences have come from? Not from their genes, which are identical. And not from their parents or siblings or neighborhood or school either, which were also, in most cases, identical. Behavioral geneticists attribute this mysterious variation to the “nonshared” or “unique” environment, but that is just a fudge factor introduced to make the numbers add up to 100 percent.

No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are.

Decades ago, scientists expected that there would be two major contributors to individual differences: human nature (genes) and nurture (family life, home environment). The first one has held up (in statistical aggregate - as the article points out, individual gene differences have not fared so well), but the second one has not. Identical twins raised apart are very similar, adopted siblings raised together have close to *zero* similarity. Family life and home environment, as Judith Harris tells us, don't have gross measurable effects on personality or life outcome. (This is not to say they aren't important!).

Yet identical twins raised together are not 100% similar - there is some major unknown source of difference coming into play. Fascinating!

Awesome article in today's NYT by Steven Pinker, which outlines the current knowledge on nature, nurture, and the contributions of individual genes. And don't think I'm saying "awesome" as in "confirms all my personal prejudices" - one of the neat ideas in it was that an overemphasis on genetics is just the latest version of the bias known as "essentialism":

The human mind is prone to essentialism — the intuition that living things house some hidden substance that gives them their form and determines their powers. Over the past century, this essence has become increasingly concrete. Growing out of the early, vague idea that traits are “in the blood,” the essence became identified with the abstractions discovered by Gregor Mendel called genes, and then with the iconic double helix of DNA.
...
When the connection between the ACTN3 gene and muscle type was discovered, parents and coaches started swabbing the cheeks of children so they could steer the ones with the fast-twitch variant into sprinting and football. Carl Foster, one of the scientists who uncovered the association, had a better idea: “Just line them up with their classmates for a race and see which ones are the fastest.” Good advice. The test for a gene can identify one of the contributors to a trait. A measurement of the trait itself will identify all of them: the other genes (many or few, discovered or undiscovered, understood or not understood), the way they interact, the effects of the environment and the child’s unique history of developmental quirks.

It’s our essentialist mind-set that makes the cheek swab feel as if it is somehow a deeper, truer, more authentic test of the child’s ability. It’s not that the mind-set is utterly misguided. Our genomes truly are a fundamental part of us. They are what make us human, including the distinctively human ability to learn and create culture. They account for at least half of what makes us different from our neighbors. And though we can change both inherited and acquired traits, changing the inherited ones is usually harder. It is a question of the most perspicuous level of analysis at which to understand a complex phenomenon. You can’t understand the stock market by studying a single trader, or a movie by putting a DVD under a microscope. The fallacy is not in thinking that the entire genome matters, but in thinking that an individual gene will matter, at least in a way that is large and intelligible enough for us to care about.

Good point, I think I can be a bit "Essentialist" about genes sometimes.

I'm hooked. Damned shenpa. I have to say just one more thing in defense of a genetic basis for intelligence (as opposed to cultural, environmental, etc.), because it is such a simple, powerful piece of evidence.

Consider the correlation between the IQ of a) identical twins raised together vs. b) fraternal twins raised together. We've kept environment almost constant - same family, same wealth, same education, same *prenatal environment* - the only difference I see is how parents/people respond to identicals vs. fraternals[1]. All we've varied is the genetic similarity, (a) shares 100% of genes, (b) only 50%.

The correlation in case a) is 0.88, and b) is 0.53. So we lose 0.35 of correlation between two people with almost identical environments, culture, wealth and education, based solely on whether they share 100% or 50% of genes. 50% genes, 0.35 correlation, hence, roughly speaking, IQ is 70% heritable (70% of variation is caused by the genes).

If environment played such a large role, the difference between (a) and (b) would be much smaller because in both cases the environment is the same. Variance within the family would be low compared to variance within a country, so MZ/DZ twins raised together would have about the same IQ correlation. We would not get such a dramatic drop by only varying whether the 2 siblings pull one or two sets of genes from the random Mendelian lottery. But that ain't the case. You can add data to this w/ various other kinship relations and level of shared environment, and you add more possible environmental confounders (in theory), but in practice the results get you about the same heritability as the simple (a) vs. (b) which cleanly short-cuts such problems.[2]

While I am neither a statistician nor a geneticist, from what I understand of the basics of both fields, this argument cleverly short-cuts the PC hand-waving about environment and culture. It is simple, and incompatible with the claim that shared environment, education, culture, prenatal environment, or anything other than genes is responsible for the majority of variation in IQ, at least among people in the 8 countries the data is from.

So for those of who you don't buy the hypothesis "IQ as defined by whatever IQ tests measure is about 60%-80% genetic in the first world", tell me why this simple, powerful argument is wrong. Why do siblings with the same environment have such different IQ correlation based only on this factor which some of you say is at best a minor contributor?

[1] This turns out not to be a significant contributor. From [2]: "Studies have clearly shown, however, that DZ twins who were mistakenly thought by their parents to be MZ twins are no more alike in IQ than DZ twins who were not mistaken for MZ twins." Also, another confounder I didn't think of is that MZ twins are always same-sex, so perhaps some of the difference w/ DZ twins is that they are sometimes opposite-sex, and parents treat their boys & girls differently. But different-sex DZ twins and same-sex DZ twins both have correlations of 0.53.

[2] See Chapter 3 of Jensen's _Straight Talk About Mental Tests_ for the data and a more detailed discussion of basic Mendelian genetics and the caveats in this method