Undead Astronauts

Some of you have probably heard about the Jason Richwine story where he lost his job at the Heritage Foundation for advocating selectivity in admitting new immigrants. The discriminating factor he advocated for was nominally high skills and education, but it was basically a code word for IQ. Once word of his doctoral thesis got out, he was fired and the foundation distanced itself from him because his thesis didn’t use code words and said that IQ differences were likely to persist for more than two to three generations.

I’ve read some of the criticism against his thesis and most of it rehashes old arguments about the validity of IQ or that race is only social construct. Nothing very interesting there except that some are now advocating a ban on research in the area of race and IQ because, well, what good can come of it? Obviously if something offends our sensibilities it must be immoral and we should stick our head in the sand.

Most people out there advocating against his thesis haven’t read it, so here it is, the paper itself. To date, I don’t know of anyone that has proven that the analysis in his thesis contains shoddy methodologies or incorrect math. People just don’t like his conclusions or the very fact that he wanted to investigate this topic in the first place. I can understand not wanting to believe that IQ differences between groups is persistent, but that doesn’t make it true. I’m only partway through myself, but I’m not the one calling for a ban on research.

Here’s Steve Hsu on NPR trying to separate reality from hype. Steve is very measured in what he says BGI’s goal is in their project, and also very measured in what he says is currently possible.

Here’s some speculation you won’t see much in mainstream media. I don’t have enough time to expand at the moment, but the title says it all. A conservative writer ponders whether current day economic success by the Chinese is due to a socially Darwinist society.

Anyone ever thought that girls, on average, talk more than guys? A blank slate view might say that socialization and gender stereotypes cause women to talk more, but science now says otherwise. The gene that codes for FOXP2 has been shown in humans and mice to affect the frequency of speech/vocalization and that gene’s frequency differs by sex.

Straight from Nick Wade in the journal of note the NYT – East Asians have thicker hair, smaller breasts and characteristically identified teeth that is different from other races.

Researchers tested this by inserting a known Asian gene mutation into mice and seeing if the mice developed different physical characteristics. The mice indeed grew thicker hair and had less breast tissue. Teeth are so different in mice that no conclusions could be drawn.

The method they used to test these changes can be applied to 400 other sites in the human genome. One might wonder what other traits they could test for… inclination to violence? intelligence? other personality traits? There is now a vast untapped trove of testable hypotheses for researchers to mine.

What’s also interesting is the age of this mutation. I didn’t have the impression that Asians as a group had already differentiated themselves from other races 35k years prior. I had for some reason thought that differentiation didn’t happen until much later, say 25k-20k years earlier. I thought that it was only in the past 10k years that much of what we see in today’s groups appeared and gave rise to our modern day stereotypes. If differentiation happened much earlier, any attempt to “homogenize” race (either by gov’t policy or by breeding between races) so that it really becomes meaningless has over 30k years of evolution to overcome instead of 10k. Egalitarianism is DOA.

In a study published in Psychological Science, researchers have found that whites behave differently from Asian Americans when it comes to motivational primers. When primed with messages emphasizing independence, whites worked longer at a difficult task that required some persistence. When primed with messages emphasizing interdependence however, they worked for a much shorter duration. When no priming was given, the time they spent was still closer to independent priming than interdependent.

When Asian Americans were tested, they performed about the same in all situations.

What apparently goes un-noted is the fact that Asians didn’t persist as long as whites in any setting except the one where whites were primed for interdependence. That result is somewhat counter to what I might have expected, which is that Asian Americans would persist longer than whites in most situations. I suppose I’m biased to think that Asians have higher grit when I have no evidence to support that position (I’ve looked… albeit briefly).

The only issue here is that I don’t have access to the paper, so I don’t know what the primers were. It’d be interesting to see what they actually consisted of and what other types of primers might have an effect. I’m actually somewhat skeptical of the result’s applicability in the real world as there are plenty of whites that feel like working with a good team is highly motivating in and of itself. Perhaps there’s a psychological difference between working toward a true public good versus a semi-public good like a small well-knit team. Political identity might also have an effect as liberals might be expected to do better under interdependent priming than conservatives.

The new Edge.org question and responses have been posted for 2013. The question is “What should we be worried about?”  The first response from Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, is that we should be worried about Chinese eugenics. The tone of the response is overwrought and somewhat breathlessly alarmist, but in the final analysis the guy has a point, if a minor one.

China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

What’s true of today’s political correctness might not be true of tomorrow. Think of all the social change that happened in the 50 years between 1960 and 2010. 50 years from today, maybe we’ll all be hereditarians.

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and “fetal education” (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father’s semen (yangjing) and mother’s blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter’s bookImperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and “the science of deformed fetuses” (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China’s rightful place as the world’s leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.

Of course the reformers of Republican China were Darwinians and Galtonians. So were the reformers in every other major nation on earth during that period. And what? And why include the romanizations of Chinese words here? Does every other country not have their own terms for these issues? The author’s purpose in highlighting foreign words here is dubious. He then goes over the gaokao test which he equates, not completely incorrectly, with the past imperial exams. Even so, China is hardly the only nation to use them. On a practical level, there’s no easier way to gauge which students to admit into higher education than a test. The US has plenty of them in the form of SATs, ACTs, MCATs, LSATs, etc. None of this demonstrates a stark difference between China and any other nation. Finally, he mentions the Beijing Genomics Institute.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles… These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

Here is where I believe he has a point. The BGI is indeed hunting for these alleles, and why search for these genes if not to put them to use in the future? The worry here is still overwrought, because it would conceivably take much more than a “couple generations” to have any large effect. In vitro is still extremely expensive ($15-20k per attempt) and a success rate of less than 40% even for young women and that rate drops precipitously by the mid 30s. There’s no way that enough young Chinese women could afford something like that to matter for many generations, even if they wanted it. But if you’re looking at a long enough timeframe, then yes, it will matter. Still, the state of political correctness by that time could be vastly different around the world. There’s little justification in saying the entire Western civilization needs to worry about this today.