I see. Well, I have nothing to add on that topic one way or another.
Well, I don’t know how poor his reputation could have been if he was still the head of a fairly presitigious institution like Cold Spring Harbor.
Rushton was, however, investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police while conducting his research for the possibility of charging him with a hate crime. Of course, Canada is the home of the Stalinesque Human Rights Commission which seems to be modeled on the Spanish Inquisition. “Nobody expects the Canadian Inquisition!”
And do you share Derbyshire’s view that under an Obama Administration, this “taboo” would become even stricter?
In one of Feynman’s books, he discusses (and decries) the fact that science is still home to prejudice and preconception, and that those factors have an unacceptable play in the outcome of what should be pure science. He describes how experimenters seeking to duplicate Milliken’s results could not, because Milliken had apparently cherry-picked his data. Future experimenters showed data slightly off from Milliken; later experimenters, data even more off, until finally it became accepted that the “real” numbers were such-and-so.
Feynman explained that it was obvious what had happened: the first researchers got data points that were way off from the celebrated Milliken’s. They scrutinized their experiments carefully, and fought to find ways to get tehir data closer to Milliken’s. When their numbers were closer to Milliken’s, they didn’t look so hard.
This bias, said Feynman, was wrong but unfortunately insidious in the field.
I write all this only to say that there’s no question in my mind that the scientific community is vulnerable to bias, even in the face of evidence.
Now, that out of the way, I don’t of any evidence to support the claims being made here, specifically. But I wanted to rebut the notion that all of the scientific community are dispassionate observers, driven only by the truth. Science, as a model and a process, is the best tool we have; science as executed by human beings is not flawless.
Yes, I think it’s likely, though how much stricter I can’t say. But then, I’ve never suffered from the illusion that science is somehow immune to politics. Scientists in the Soviet Union tended to conduct research and write papers that made their Marxist bosses happy. Scientists in Nazi Germany tended to conduct research and write papers that made their National Socialist bosses happy. And scientists in egalitarian America tend to conduct research and write papers that pose no threat to egalitarianism. (And it isn’t just lefties who tend to be egalitarians. The old pull-yourself-up-by-your-own bootstraps theory doesn’t work if genetics didn’t give you any bootstraps.)
In the past few months I’ve rethought my stance on this particular part of social liberalism due to my increased awareness of the deeply penetrating role epigenetics has.
Stresses can cause physiological changes to an organism (even humans in at least once scenario,) but moreso, can cause physiological changes to its offspring and their offspring, even if this regulator is not genetically inherited.
So, while more research should be done, it isn’t necessarily either
A) Intelligence and personality is genetically inherited, OR
b) Intelligence and personality is caused by environment, or
C) some combo of the two.
It could be that intelligence and personality is partly determined by the environment – OF THE PARENTS OR GRANDPARENTS etc. So it might be partially inherited but not genetically inherited, if you catch my drift.
I think that since most of the mammalian epigenetics have to do with stress and resource-related issue and diseases, I think it highly possible that the high rates of high blood pressure and other stress-related ailments among African-Americans might be due to their forcedly inferior and abused social position of 50+ years ago, even if individuals have a high income and live in good areas and are not discriminated against.
It follows that it’s possible, but by no means probable at this stage, that intelligence and personality can have the same heritability.
Didn’t a 1983 study pretty conclusively demonstrate that nurture rather than nature was responsible for success in economic matters?
I think it depends how you define “taboo.” If a university professor hypothesized during an interview that the universe was the result of God’s handiwork, I doubt it would evoke the same kind of reaction as if the same professor hypothesized that observed behavioural differences among different ethnic groups result, in whole or in part, from innate differences.
Particularly if that professor had serious evidence to back up his claim. Now, you may be pretty confident that natural mental abilities are distributed perfectly evenly among all ethnic groups. But that’s not the same thing as claiming that there is no serious evidence to suggest otherwise.
I have a couple questions.
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Would it be possible to simply tell us where we could read these “many many twin studies” for ourselves? I only ask because the twin studies have been mentioned many times before, but for some reason, on one has ever been able to tell me exactly where I should look if I want to read them for myself. (I read part of Pinker’s book some time ago, and I recall that he declared the case to be closed many times but didn’t offer too many citations to back it up.)
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Isn’t it about time that the Nature-sayers stopped relying on indirect evidence like twin studies, and instead showed us some actual genes? Consider, for example, an article in this month’s Scientific America about the largest ever study of intelligence among children. The researchers looked at genetic analysis for 7,000 children and found:
- Only 6 DNA segments have any correlation with intelligence.
- Those six account for roughly one percent of intelligence.
- It may just be statistical random noise, and it’s quite possible that no DNA has any effect on intelligence.
- Among those 6 DNA segments, three aren’t even genes, but are in the non-coding portions of the chromosomes.
So how does this fit in with the claim that “most of the variation between individuals is genetic in nature”?
(And yes, to state the obvious, I think Derbyshire’s article has about as much intellectual rigor as something that you’d read in The National Review. To start off with, he claims that The Bell Curve is a “masterpiece”. Presumably he’ll be next be saying that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the standard-b earer in its field.)
The original scientific basis for this argument comes from Wilson in Sociobiology the new synthesis. Wilson wrote pretty much the last word on ants before studying humans, neuroscience, and genetics. He’s pretty much the father of Neuroscience.
In the past, there has been the argument that you could take any three random babies, and turn one into a Doctor, one into a construction worker, and one into a bum, and it really didn’t matter which one you chose for which. Nurture was far more important than nature.
Wilson finds this is not true. Some people are much smarter than others, and have natural proclivities and talents built in.
His thesis is this:
The relationship between you and your genes is like that between a photographic negative and a photograph. It can be developed well, or poorly, but you can add or subtract precious little from what is there.
Tom Wolfe discusses Wilson and his thesis at length in this fascinating article:
First, what they did say in the past matters, because the past is where the fight started; which of the past viewpoints triumphs is what defines it as a “win” or not in the first place.
And second; the “nature” side (outside of the occasional racist perhaps ) always WAS claiming that nature was a major, but not the only influence; so yes, “about half” is a victory since it’s about what they claimed all along. The absolutists were on the side of the nurture argument; the people in favor of the “Blank Slate” of Pinker’s book. Which I recommend, by the way.
They’d love to, but it’s hard, and complicated. Biology is neither simple nor designed by a human mind; it’s hard to understand.
It fits because most of the genetic aspects of human nature aren’t set up along a neat “This gene = this characteristic” scenario. To use a simple example; Gene A may tend to produce greater mathematical ability, but only in the presence of Gene B and absence of Gene C; but in the presence of Gene D it will produce lower mathematical abilities, unless Gene E is also present . . . the genes all interact, which makes it very hard to label or identify them according to function. The fact that nature and nurture are heavily intertwined also makes it complex; a gene which produces qualities that only appear under high stress is going to have a bigger effect in an abused child than one from a happy home, for example.
As a rule, the only times they can find a linkage that neat and obvious is when there’s a defective gene involved.
That’s a pretty severe misinterpretation of what Summers actually said and what the reaction to it was. He didn’t say “there might be significant, biologically determined differences in the behavior of men and women” and suggest that the possibility should be scientifically studied. (In fact, of course, academic scientists study this possibility all the time, in gender-based psychology experiments.) He made some dumb remarks implying that we can conclude that certain gender differences in career achievement and other areas are biologically determined, and used a stunningly stupid anecdotal argument in his attempt to support that claim:
(Emphasis added.) He wasn’t saying, “It’s still far from clear what effect innate biological differences have on the representation of men and women at elite levels in science and engineering, and it’s important to study this further.” Rather, he was tossing out a number of vague and waffly statements about cultural versus genetic factors, and repeatedly trying to claim that the genetic factors were more important, without giving serious arguments or evidence backing that up.
Nobody who thinks that an anecdote about his toddlers counts as serious evidence in favor of the position that genetic factors outweigh cultural ones in determining the relative achievement levels of men and women in science and engineering has any business being president of Harvard.
Basically, Summers came across as a woolly-headed moron who was willing to tolerate any amount of sloppy thinking, as long as it reinforced his preferred position that underrepresentation of women on the Harvard faculty wasn’t something he needed to be concerned about. That attitude disgusted a good many people at Harvard, including many people who don’t feel that discrimination against women is a serious problem there, and Summers became widely perceived as an embarrassment and a liability.
That dog won’t hunt either. The persistence of academic disdain for The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrnstein is due primarily to the fact that they did a lousy job on the math, as this article explains.
Again, the targets of the disdain were not in fact spunky iconoclasts bravely challenging the liberal orthodox establishment, but disingenuous, woolly-headed con artists who were willing to accept sloppy reasoning as long as it reinforced the point they wanted to make.
In this regard, there are some grounds to suspect Tom Wolfe of bullshit.
AFAIK (from having superficially studied this subject, and from having run some earlier threads on it), there is no serious evidence to suggest otherwise. Do you know of any?
Well, it is.
I believe that nature gives an individual a maximum potential and nurture has some effect on the extent to which that full potential will be achieved. No amount of nurture is going to make me a Tiger Woods-level golfer or an NBA star. No amount of nurture will enable me to master complex mathematics. At the same time I am better at each of those skills to the extent I have been nurtured in them.
I further hold that there is clear and convincing evidence that population groups–cohorts defined by various definitions–have average potentials that are both measurable and distinct from other populations. The extent to which those differences are defined accurately reflects the extent to which the cohort has its genetic “nature” in common for the criterion being compared across cohorts.
It’s not about how much genetic diversity there is in a given cohort. It’s about whether or not the quality being measured reflects a genetically-based difference in maximum potential for that quality.
Nature versus nurture is a testable hypothesis, and whenever it has been measured (twin studies, e.g.), the answer is always the same: nature is a substantial contributor. In general, the arguments against it fall into two categories: 1) the cohorts don’t exist (race, for example) or 2) the studies are bad. But if it were the case that the hypothesis is wrong, there would plenty of studies simply showing no difference. Instead, every study using “race” as a cohort, for example, shows differences between races even when nurture is corrected for. Consider, for example, this study showing well-off blacks (80-110k/yr) perform more poorly on the SAT that poverty-stricken (10k/yr) whites: The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test * This is for me the most powerful common-sense reason to believe that nature is a very powerful influence.
A second easily-grasped common-sense observation is a large family, most of the children in which had more or less the same nurture. Yet some turn out dumb; some very athletic; some musical geniuses and some tone deaf. What is different? Their nature–their genes.
Were it not for the social and political ramifications of race-based differences, they would long ago have been accepted and ignored. Race-based cohorts would be no more interesting than, say, myopic versus non-myopic cohorts. Surely an alien choosing his basketball team after learning all about earth’s various populations would not limit his selection to Sweden. Nor would he head to Haiti to field his Jeopardy team. Neither of these statements means that any given Haitian is dumber than a Swede or that any given Swede would get his ass kicked by a Haitian on the basketball court. It just means that the contribution of nature in general creates measurable differences between populations. So what. The folks who find solace in this are either themselves low on the mental pecking order or else rabid goons trying to advance some crackpot social agenda that takes us back a few hundred years. No thinking person with any sense of social justice cares beyond the science of it unless they have to struggle with social policy that needs to create a just society where mother nature gives one individual autism, and another great leadership genius.
*Please note that my conclusion is not the conclusion of the authors, and read the article if you would like an alternate conclusion. I do not agree with their conclusion of why this is so (blacks don’t take the right preparatory courses) but as I mentioned, there is always a proffered explanation in every study of why what common sense seems to say: “There is a difference” – is wrong rather than simply presenting data which prove that nature is not a factor.
Yes I do. However, it would seem that Chief Pedant has already provided some.
“father of Neuroscience” Who the heck told you that? I study Neuroscience. My father has been, and always will be, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. My professors must have skipped the EO Wilson lectures.
Not to take anything away from EO Wilson but, come on.
“father of Neuroscience” I barely heard of him.
I think you may be conflating “race” with “genetically distinct population”. Superficial racial categories don’t reliably correlate with closeness of genetic kinship. In other words, two randomly chosen dark-skinned, dark-haired people who both look “typically black” may well be more closely related, genetically, to some light-skinned blond “typically white” persons than they are to each other.
Sorry, but that’s not “correcting for nurture”, unless you’re defining “nurture” very narrowly to mean “family income level”. And as noted above, race is not a reliable indicator of genetic descent.
Nature has won only insofar as nobody on the Nature side has ever advocated that behaviour is entirely determined by genetics while the hardline Nurture side took the position that all behaviour is determined by upbringing.
Seeing as we have almost overwhelmingly solid evidence of genetic influenced behaviour, the pure Nurture stance is one of pure ideology although still accepted by large portions of academia in the social sciences and also in the public mind. The real debate now is happening over what the relationship between nature and nurture is.