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.

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.

Not sure what’s up today, but there’s just so much stuff to post.

1. The results of new sleep studies show that Asians get the least sleep and feel the most sleepy during the day. I am absolutely part of that crowd as I get a food coma everyday after lunch almost without fail. Previous sleep studies were mentioned here before.
2. Chinese style meditation can lead to positive brain changes.
3. Darwintunes has crowdsourced music. You can see various snapshot iterations between the starting tune and the most recent ones.
4. The Economist profiles the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. He is a prominent IQ researcher and has made waves for some of his statements regarding IQ. His take on IQ is that it causes people with an above average amount to be good at things that are evolutionarily novel like living in cities, but no better or worse at things like human interaction and procreation.

A new study associates crime w/ low IQ across nations.

An impressive body of research has revealed that individual-level IQ scores are negatively associated with criminal and delinquent involvement. Recently, this line of research has been extended to show that state-level IQ scores are associated with state-level crime rates. The current study uses this literature as a springboard to examine the potential association between county-level IQ and county-level crime rates. Analysis of data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health revealed statistically significant and negative associations between county-level IQ and the property crime rate, the burglary rate, the larceny rate, the motor vehicle theft rate, the violent crime rate, the robbery rate, and the aggravated assault rate. Additional analyses revealed that these associations were not confounded by a measure of concentrated disadvantage that captures the effects of race, poverty, and other social disadvantages of the county. We discuss the implications of the results and note the limitations of the study.

(source)

Via steve hsu, there’s an article in the south china morning post regarding the sequencing of genomes from prodigy and avg children. i’ve previously mentioned this study with regards to the fearlessness of genetic research in asia.

The study will examine protein coding genes of the extremely smart children, many of whom are expected to enroll at Harvard, Yale or Cambridge. The results will be correlated with each youngster’s school test scores, in hopes of learning how specific genetic variations affect intelligence.

The study, which started in 2009 in Shenzhen, is moving to a new facility in Tai Po. By the end of this month, 115 of the world’s fastest sequencers – the HiSeq 2000 – will have relocated to the city. They will be able to sequence the equivalent of 1,000 human genomes a day, and soon surpass the entire sequencing output of the United States to become the world’s largest sequencing centre.

The study by BGI, which receives strong financial backing from the Shenzhen and mainland governments, will be the largest-scale examination of its kind. Ethical and privacy concerns have hindered such work in America and Europe.

it’s an amazing level of computational power that’s being aimed at this research. what’s interesting is that the genesis of this study was a child prodigy himself.

The idea of probing the genetic basis for human intelligence came after Beijing high school student Zhao Bowen , 17, who came to BGI on a summer internship last year to work on cucumbers, solved an assignment within a few hours that scientists expected to take him weeks.

Zhao is working as a full-time researcher now, and he will study the genes of 1,000 of his best-performing schoolmates from the affiliated high school of China’s prestigious Renmin University, where some of the smartest children from across the country have been sent. It’s a collaboration project between the institute and the high school.

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a chinese company is looking to hire US comp sci grads to work in shanghai, but the grads must first take an IQ test and show they’re IQ is 125+. US companies aren’t allowed to require applicants to take a written IQ test, even though some companies make applicants take a test that is very similar to an IQ test. the funny/practical/non-pc part of this is that the company only hires chinese applicants that demonstrate an IQ of 140 or above.

The lower IQ threshold for new U.S. graduates reflects the fact that the pool of U.S. talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of Chinese talent, Bleum said.

ouch. who would have imagined that the chinese would be giving americans the benefits of affirmative action?

so. “are you dumb?”

haven’t read the entire thing yet, but i’ll try to this weekend. the abstract suggests a very strange result however at first glance. the researchers found that heritability of IQ depends on the socio-economic status of the parents. wtf?

Scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children were analyzed in a sample of 7-year-old twins from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. A substantial proportion of the twins were raised in families living near or below the poverty level. Biometric analyses were conducted using models allowing for components attributable to the additive effects of genotype, shared environment, and non-shared environment to interact with socioeconomic status (SES) measured as a continuous variable. Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse.