The 10,000 Year Explosion - a book review

[GIGObuster]

@harpend

I see a few folks here still sneering at The Bell Curve, but we all should notice that there has never been any serious academic criticism of that book.

To add to what **tomndebb **mentioned already:

http://www.atheistnexus.org/profiles/blogs/carl-sagan

Head Start is criticized in a 1994 book called The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Their argument has been characterized by Gerald Coles of the University of Rochester:

First, inadequately fund a program for poor children, then deny whatever success is achieved in the face of overwhelming obstacles, and finally conclude that the program must be eliminated because the children are intellectually inferior.

The book, which received surprisingly respectful attention from the media, concludes that there is an irreducible hereditary gap between blacks and whites—about 10 to 15 points on IQ tests. **In a review, the psychologist Leon J. Kamin concludes that “the authors repeatedly fail to distinguish between correlation and causation”—one of the fallacies in our baloney detection kit.
**
The National Center for Family Literacy, based in Louisville, Kentucky, has been implementing programs aimed at low-income families to teach both children and their parents to read. It works like this: The child 3 to 4 years old, attends school three days a week along with a parent, or possibly a grandparent or guardian. While the grown-up spends the morning learning basic academic skills, the child is in a preschool class. Parent and child meet for lunch and then “learn how to learn together” for the rest of the afternoon.
A follow-up study of 14 such programs in three states revealed:

1. Although all of the children had been designated as being at risk for school failure as preschoolers, only 10 percent were still rated at risk by their current elementary school teachers.

2. More than 90 percent were considered by their current elementary school teachers as motivated to learn.

3. Not one of the children had to repeat any grade in elementary school.

The growth of the parents was no less dramatic. When asked to describe how their lives had changed as a result of the family literacy program, typical responses described improved self-confidence (nearly every participant) and self-control, passing high-school equivalency exams, admission to college, new jobs, and much better relations with their children. The children are described as more attentive to parents, eager to learn and—in some cases for the first time—hopeful about the future. Such programs could also be used in later grades for teaching mathematics, science, and much else.

• The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark By Carl Sagan

[John_Mace]

@Captain_Amazing

What are you talking about? Pretty much the entire Berkeley Sociology Department published a book looking at problems with the authors’ methodology.

The Sosh Dept? He said serious academic criticism…

[Steve_MB]

@harpend

WRT the murder rate in Iraq: recall that the expansion of Islam in the seventh century may have been accompanied by a lot of population replacement.

The cerebrally stagnant barbarian population overran and replaced the people whose IQs had been boosted by six thousand years of continuous urban civilization. Yep, I’d say the OP’s thesis is rock-solid… :rolleyes:

[Steve_MB]

@New_Deal_Democrat

But as the human population sizes increased, particularly with the advent of agriculture, favorable mutations occurred more and more often.

Hint – the relevant You Fail Statistics Forever example is this one:

On The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly argued that life expectancy was lower in the US than in Canada because the US has ten times as many people, and therefore has ten times the number of accidents.

[Steve_MB]

@John_Mace

And those Orientals are crafty little buggers!

Especially the Japanese. The archeological evidence that they were very late to the urban civilization game must have been created by Satan to deceive us, or something…

[Steve_MB]

@New_Deal_Democrat

I have difficulty understanding the high murder rate in Russia.

Perhaps if they’d quit taking their porridge with sugar, their murder rate would fall into line with your theories.

[Belowjob2.0]

@GIGObuster

That would be next, this has been almost a constant in these discussions, when one checks if the writers agree with the extreme conclusions or solutions that some think the research leads them to, a closer look shows more often than not that the researchers would most likely spit on many of the conclusions that some are getting from the research papers.

However, in this case, the more I look for the background on the paper on the Jews that was used also in the book, the more it seems likely that the paper and book writer was helped by some peers at the journal that was used to publish that paper.

Are Jews Smarter? What Genetic Science Tells Us - Nymag
I will have to say that this controversy has many parallels with global warming deniers or creationists that abuse the scientific journals or I should say, there are some journals that have a very suspect peer review system that allows bad papers to poison the research well.

The pattern is that the contrarians look for a journal that has lax standards or an agenda to follow, once the paper is published, they publicize the hell out of it.

Déjà vu All Over Again | Skeptical Inquirer
As for the shredding, one has to point at the ones reported by the New York magazine linked early:

Are Jews Smarter? What Genetic Science Tells Us - Nymag

Good work, GIGO.

I hadn’t realized mainstream academia had handed them such a sound thrashing.

[harpend]

“What are you talking about? Pretty much the entire Berkeley Sociology Department published a book looking at problems with the authors’ methodology.”

Have a look at their stuff–it is pretty bad.

But what this discussion needs is to descend to the concrete. From my humble perspective the Berkeley sociology department is a bunch of California snowflakes. On the other hand there may be something useful that some one of them had to say. What?

I especially like the “standards of traditional scientific scholarship” quote. In fact that editor asked us for the paper, then the Dean told her that if she published it it would be the end of the journal.

A lot of the discussion here and elsewhere doesn’t grasp the distinction between whether or not something is pleasing and whether or not it is true. Take the Gilman quote: he is insulted. Very well, but what on earth does that have to do with whether or not it is true? Ostrer is a medic and does not, from what he has published, have a clue about population genetics. Or Risch:“I see no positive impact from this.” Neither do I, but that has nothing in this world to do with whether or not it is true.

[Hank_Beecher]

Is there any reason to doubt that heritable traits provided some human groups advantages that helped them to expand at the expense of other groups? When did this stop happening?

[GIGObuster]

@harpend

“What are you talking about? Pretty much the entire Berkeley Sociology Department published a book looking at problems with the authors’ methodology.”

Have a look at their stuff–it is pretty bad.

With no cite on why it is bad.

@harpend

"But what this discussion needs is to descend to the concrete. From my humble perspective the Berkeley sociology department is a bunch of California snowflakes. On the other hand there may be something useful that some one of them had to say. What?

Uh, you just said that it is bad, so it would be easy for you to mention something specific.

@harpend

I especially like the “standards of traditional scientific scholarship” quote. In fact that editor asked us for the paper, then the Dean told her that if she published it it would be the end of the journal.

As has been my experience with climate change deniers and other fringe, I will have to doubt that was the case.

@harpend

A lot of the discussion here and elsewhere doesn’t grasp the distinction between whether or not something is pleasing and whether or not it is true. Take the Gilman quote: he is insulted. Very well, but what on earth does that have to do with whether or not it is true? Ostrer is a medic and does not, from what he has published, have a clue about population genetics. Or Risch:“I see no positive impact from this.” Neither do I, but that has nothing in this world to do with whether or not it is true.

That was not the point, you claimed that there wasn’t any serious academic criticism of that book, there was, and what you affirmed before now puts all of your follow ups in doubt.

[Dissonance]

@harpend

Throughout Europe there was approximately a hundred-fold decline in the homicide rate from 1200 to 1900. “Culture changes”, some would say, but there are never any models nor mechanisms given, as if all change is random and meaningless. On the other hand a quantitative genetic model (i.e. AgSci 101) fits the data very nicely.

Do you have a cite for a 100 fold decline in murder rate? Assuming for the moment that it is accurate, you can’t find any models or mechanisms to explain this any better than genetics? There were a few changes in the fabric of European society between 1200 and 1900. The first one that springs to mind is the shift from a feudal society to an industrial one.

Similarly Frost describes how the barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire simply walked in and the indigenous Romans welcomed their new neighbors.

That’s a rather odd take on several centuries of violence as Rome decayed.

[harpend]

GIGO quoted someone as saying “A follow-up study of 14 such programs in three states revealed:”, etc.

I don’t know the ages of people here, but I am likely senior. I have been reading this kind of thing in the New York Times since the mid 1970s. They come out regular as clockwork–miracle schools, miracle programs, and so on. None of them have ever panned out, none. That is not to say that this particular one will not pan out, we must wait and see.

I do expect that if any of this stuff worked at all the private school industry would have picked it up and run with it. Nevertheless we can hope.

[Chen019]

@Belowjob2.0

Good work, GIGO.

I hadn’t realized mainstream academia had handed them such a sound thrashing.

Not really. Are Mel Konner & Harvard’s Steven Pinker “mainstream academia”?

[harpend]

“Do you have a cite for a 100 fold decline in murder rate?”

Eisner (2001). Modernization, self-control and lethal violence: The long-term dynamics of European homicide rates in theoretical perspective. Brit J Criminol (41): 618-38.

Eisner (2003). Long-term historical trends in violent crime. Crime & Justice (30): 84-142.

[GIGObuster]

@Chen019

Not really. Are Mel Konner & Harvard’s Steven Pinker “mainstream academia”?

H&H, then, have provided prima facie evidence for each of the hypotheses making up their theory. But all the hypotheses would have to be true for the theory as a whole to be true–and much of the evidence is circumstantial, and the pivotal hypothesis is the one for which they have the least evidence. Yet that hypothesis is also the most easily falsifiable. **By that criterion, the CH&H story meets the standards of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken. **

Yep that the best he can do with that paper.

We did this before, Pinker would say in the end that

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2003_01_20_time.html

None of this means that social and personal improvement are a waste of time. Even if each of us is born with a range of temperament and talent, we can try to reach the best point in that range. And even if we have a nature, part of that nature is an open-ended ingenuity that can think up possible solutions to our problems. Using our genes as an excuse for fatalism is unwise.

And true, also denying that genes are part of the equation is silly, but what is really silly is to pretend genes are all. As I saw Pinker saying that people like the OP would be wasting his time with the conclusions and solutions he offers, I would have to assume that you guys are imagining levels of support that are not there.

As for the Bell Curve getting a shredding:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/200704040003

Once experts in the fields of psychometrics, dysgenics, and genetics began to weigh in on the book, not much of it was left. Scholarly examination repeatedly demonstrated that the statements that form the very core of The Bell Curve’s arguments were either highly questionable or demonstrably false. For instance, Hernstein and Murray insisted, “it is beyond significant technical dispute that cognitive ability is substantially heritable”. But as a group of British geneticists and psychometricans pointed out in response, "Research in this field is still evolving, studies cited by Herrnstein and Murray face significant methodological difficulties, and the validity of results quoted are disputed. " [1]

The mistakes grow even graver. Herrnstein and Murray actually seek to quantify the degree to which such intelligence is heritable. “Half a century of work, now amounting to hundreds of empirical and theoretical studies,” they write, “permits a broad conclusion that the genetic component of IQ is unlikely to be smaller than 40 per cent or higher than 80 per cent. … For purposes of this discussion, we will adopt a middling estimate of 60 per cent heritability.” They appear to the unsuspecting reader to be the soul of caution in this regard. Alas, as Nicholas Lemann reported in Slate, another study by three scientists at Carnegie Mellon University employing exactly the same data base, suggested “a narrow-sense heritability of 34 per cent and a broad-sense heritability of 46 per cent,” a far cry from the figures employed by Murray and Hernstein.

In perhaps the key test of the honesty of the underlying science of the book, trained experts in the field found they could not reproduce its results. For instance, one chart in The Bell Curve purports to show that people with IQs above 120 have become “rapidly more concentrated” in high-IQ occupations since 1940. But Robert Hauser and his colleague Min-Hsiung Huang retested the data and came up with estimates that fell “well below those of Herrnstein and Murray.” They added that the data, properly used, “do not tell us anything except that selected, highly educated occupation groups have grown rapidly since 1940.”

[harpend]

Brain Glutton said:

“Primitive justice systems punish trivial crimes with death because their detection methods and organization are . . . primitive and they despair of catching every culprit, or even most; so they have to make an example of those they do. Which has little effect on the gene pool.”

I have spent several years living with “primitive” people in Africa as well as in Appalachia where I grew up :). My own experience is precisely the opposite. Everyone knows everyone else, and their parents and their grandparents and their children. Culprits are well known. WRT the effect on the gene pool, it depends on whether or not sanctions, like executions, are accurately mapped to additive genetic variance of the trait. I can’t imagine there would be little effect on the gene pool unless punishment was completely random.

Do you have literature to support your idea?

[GIGObuster]

@harpend

Throughout Europe there was approximately a hundred-fold decline in the homicide rate from 1200 to 1900. “Culture changes”, some would say, but there are never any models nor mechanisms given, as if all change is random and meaningless. On the other hand a quantitative genetic model (i.e. AgSci 101) fits the data very nicely.

Uh, I would think that the changes brought by something like the Black Death would be a mechanism that should not be ignored.

Black Death

[Chen019]

@GIGObuster

*H&H, then, have provided prima facie evidence for each of the hypotheses making up their theory. But all the hypotheses would have to be true for the theory as a whole to be true–and much of the evidence is circumstantial, and the pivotal hypothesis is the one for which they have the least evidence. Yet that hypothesis is also the most easily falsifiable. By that criterion, the CH&H story meets the standards of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken. *

Yep that the best he can do with that paper.

So it meets the standards of a good scientific theory. And it would be easy enough to test:

It would be easy to test the theory, said Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognition researcher: “See if carriers of the Ashkenazi-typical genetic mutations score higher on IQ tests than their noncarrier siblings.”

[GIGObuster]

@Chen019

So it meets the standards of a good scientific theory.

Saying that does not mean that one then should use the paper to set policy, any conclusions are therefore premature. Heck, if the best they can do is to report that it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken, then it follows that it has been silly to expand it into a book.

[GIGObuster]

@Chen019

And it would be easy enough to test:

I take it that you did not read the thread:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/crank_science_is_as_crank_scie.php

Mr Cochran’s flaw is in his premise. There is no reason to assume that the frequency of every allele in a population must be the product of a selective advantage. The mathematics was worked out in the last century, and we know that even deleterious alleles can go to fixation in a population. His frenzied scribblings and off-the-wall database searches were driven by a need to reconcile the facts with his naïve and erroneous vision of evolution, and are not very convincing.

Here’s another explanation: this isolated subgroup of Ashkenazi Jews also had a culture with a deep historical respect for scholarship, and emphasized and supported education and learning to a greater degree than the larger culture surrounding them. Their children therefore begin life with a leg-up on intellectual pursuits. We don’t need a genetic explanation for their better performance (on average) on academic tests. Note also that this does not exclude a genetic component, but now at least we’re talking about an environmental factor that favors selection for intelligence. Again, though, I haven’t seen any convincing evidence for such a thing; personally, I think our intelligence is built on a shared genetic/development core that enables a wide range of kinds and degrees of intelligence to be expressed in response to environmental conditions.

But here’s the final confirming evidence that Cochran is a crank and a non-scientist.

It would be easy to test the theory, said Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognition researcher: "See if carriers of the Ashkenazi-typical genetic mutations score higher on IQ tests than their noncarrier siblings."

Cochran and Harpending readily acknowledge the need for such experiments. But they have no plans to do them. They say their role as theorists is to generate hypotheses that others can test.

"One criticism about our paper is 'It can't mean anything because they didn't do any new experiments,' " Cochran said. "OK, then I guess Einstein's papers didn't mean anything either."

I don’t agree with Pinker that it would be easy — there’s going to be a lot of individual variation in performance, and I think it’s very hard to split the variables of culture and genetics apart in these kinds of tests. But at least he’s offering a positive approach to the problem, and that would be a good starting point.

But Cochran isn’t interested in doing them? He’s just a theorist? That’s where he begins to sound exactly like an intelligent design creationist.