From the London Conference, here is a paper by David Becker and Heiner Rindermann, looking at the arguments from a hereditarian and environmentalist perspective as to why some nations are brighter than others.
It is presented as a series of slides, so you will have to imagine the associated talk, but it is a replication and extension of the approach of Becker & Rindermann (2014). You will see that the authors use Y chromosomal haplogroup frequencies.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZQmwtYV9YR3lhSXM/view?usp=sharing
Forgive me if I've told you this before, but I learnt it perhaps twenty-five years ago and it's stuck in my mind. The early Portuguese and Dutch sailors who traded in the Far East agreed on one thing: the most impressive people they'd met in their travels were the Japanese.
ReplyDeleteYears after I read that, an acquaintance happened to run a knitting class which one year was attended by some Japanese young mothers. She said she'd never met such fast learners, and in no time at all they were inventing their own variants on what she'd taught them.
I recount these yarns because I suspect all social science generalisations should be tested against the haphazard empirical facts that one picks up in life. After all, anyone whose childhood and youth exposed them to experiences with pets and farm animals is unlikely to fall for the extreme environmentalist position that Eysenck, for instance, argued against in his methodical way.
Real life is the real test. Knitting patterns a worthy test. "Pearl one, carry one" my grandmother said, but after a line or two I turned to other things.
DeleteI'm in complete agreement that social science ought to be tested against anecdote: after all, evolution equipped us with at least some intuitive understanding of human psychology –– why should we throw it out because it is "anecdotal" or "introspective"? (I dislike functionalist or eliminativist philosophies of mind for the same reason.)
DeleteThat being said, anecdote might be less reliable when it comes to race and intelligence, considering the presence of implicit biases (in either direction!) Also, common sense is at odds with hereditarian theories and psychometric orthodoxy in many other respects. What would common sense make of the idea that parenting techniques and SES have a minimal effect across psychological variables? Or the ubiquity of positive correlations between "academic intelligence" and "practical intelligence"?* Or the idea that differences between low-SES blacks and middle-class whites in knowledge of items like "Who wrote Romeo and Juliet?" are due exclusively to lower intelligence on the part of the former?
*I mention this with some reservation, given that people's self-ratings on the two variables are adequately correlated, .44 without correction for artifacts, and there is some evidence that ratings of children's "common sense" correlates, or used to correlate, with their IQs.
In the table of global correlation, genetic distance and distance to equator have the maximum effect on national IQ. These findings imply polar region have the highest selection pressure on intelligence due to cold climate and low light environment. Both low temp and low light result low biodiversity and density of both plants and animals which means low volume available food for human population in the region. Low food = low population density = social isolation in the region. Every body has to solve the problem on his own with little help from others.
ReplyDeleteNeanderthals were products of such environment. They had to figure out every survival problem individually without much help from others. Thus autistic personality with poor-communication skill become normal for them. Instead this part of brain give room to other mental ability to solve problem individually. Today homo sapiens in the region also display similar trait like Finns and some NorthEast Asians.
So Neanderthals were likely individually genius but lack of communication limited their knowledge accumulation which is critical for today's civilization. Maybe East Asian stilly suffer similar problems of Neanderthals.
With introgression or admixture of modern human with Neanderthals lead to perfect combination of individual brain power and communication skill, which created needed foundation of human civilizations. Now we all can stand on the should of giants to make us look like giants due to improved communication skill and knowledge accumulation. Rome is not built in one day. Indeed, Fisher's evolutional theory was far more superior to Darwin.
Surely the authors could have appended the message 'apply smelling salts here" under the stronger slides. For most certainly they will be needed by many, on approaching this information.
ReplyDeleteExcellent. Also, perhaps "clutch your pearls".
DeleteDear James,
ReplyDeleteThank you for mention our presentation at your blog. Let me give an additional information which, I think, is not apparent from the slides.
The number of the branches of the phylogenetic haplogroup-tree growing over time. the closer you get to the present date, the stronger the ramification, and therefore the complexity of the genetic data structure. But as more complex the data structure, the more difficult it was to calculate genetic distances, because you can finde always less common alleles between the compared populations. So we had to make a compromise between high data variation and usefulness, and decided to stay on the level of the phylo-tree where the main haplogroups (E,R,N etc.) can be found.
But this decision limited the time of evolution, which is reflected in the data structure. For example, if one haplogroup-branch splited into two sub-branches, you have to use the frequencies of these sub-branches in calculation of the genetic distances to become able to analyze the different impacts of evolution on this two sub-branches. Or in general, if you decide to use one haplogroup, only the evolution happend before this haplogroup splited will be reflected by the data structure.
So, our data structure only represent the time from 150,000 to around 20-30,000ybp. This is the timeframe of the spread of Homo sapiens around the most parts of the world, but more recent events, like the "Neolithic Revolution" from about 12 to 3,000ybp, thus ignored.
This, together with the fact that HGs are on non-coding DNA and are not associable with candidats of intelligence-genes, eventually caused the relatively low correlation to Delta-IQ within our analysis.
"So, our data structure only represent the time from 150,000 to around 20-30,000ybp...[b] ut more recent events, like the "Neolithic Revolution" from about 12 to 3,000ybp, thus ignored." That's a significant problem with the method, since adaptation was plausibly fairly recent. Imagine applying a genetic distance approach to skin brightness. On the logic that variation tracked drift based divergence, one would predict that Sub Saharan Africans would be closer to Europeans in brightness than to Pacific Islanders and that Europeans would be closer to (south) South Asians that to North East Asians. A more robust method would be to look at recent post-1500 diasporas, since there would have been little time for adaptation. This is why I would suggest trying to repeat Putterman's analysis using cognitive ability and the global ancestry matrix. One can group countries into races (as we did for the Americas) or just use national values.
DeleteYes, that's right. To make the same analysis in recent time, we have to leave the global level and enter some smaller areas. Overall, I think the tracing of individual HG-branches seems to be more suitable for the purpose that genetic distances. Fortunately, there is a new source of HG-frequencies in the web which is more current than my. I already ordered the new data. Waiting for delivery. http://atlas.xyvy.info/
DeletePretty interesting but using Y DNA haplogroups for this purpose is laughable (nevermind other uncertainties like their place of origin) and the authors must know this, considering their use of the relevant literature.
ReplyDelete