undead astronauts

AoR writes about the commonly perceived advantage east asians have in visio-spatial (math) iq. i’m not going to spend much time on that b/c i haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary, and at least they do alright in competition. but something that isn’t especially clear to me is the evidence on a lag on verbal scores.

as AoR cited, 97 asian-american verbal iq is a number i’ve seen bandied about in the bell curve, and richard lynn’s comparisons of different national verbal scores show asians with a lower verbal. exactly how the tests were done however is something i still don’t know. the lower verbal score for asian-americans might, in part, be due to a slower start in english b/c their parents spoke an asian language at home. a friend of mine took an iq test at his school’s urging after arriving in the states from taiwan as a young teenager. he did well on the visio-spatial part of the test, but horrible on the verbal. he said that he barely understood half the english questions at the time b/c he had only recently arrived.  by the end of high school, he was in AP english and graduated salutatorian in his class (an ABC grabbed 1st).

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satoshi kanazawa came out w/ a study last week that finds liberals, atheists, and male sexual exclusivity are linked to IQ. kanazawa is an evo psych guy and has some pretty kooky ideas, but his kookiness in this case only extends to how he thinks this came about and not the numbers indicating who has higher IQ.

frankly, i don’t understand the stated evo psych reasoning which says that these views would have hurt our ancestors in the past but now serve to “move the species forward” and are “evolutionarily novel.” well wtf does that mean? just b/c something is new, it’s mostly smarter ppl that will do it? eh, i suppose so, but not a strong argument. so i’m skipping over that. the important thing here is the numbers.

Very liberal IQ (socially, not economically) = 106
Very conservative IQ = 95

Not at all religious IQ = 103
Very religious IQ = 97

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from reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) – Intelligence comes second only to smoking as a predictor of heart disease, scientists said on Wednesday, suggesting public health campaigns may need to be designed for people with lower IQs if they are to work.

Research by Britain’s Medical Research Council (MRC) found that lower intelligence quotient (IQ) scores were associated with higher rates of heart disease and death, and were more important indicators than any other risk factors except smoking.

the less intelligent u are, the less likely u are to understand that eating healthy and working out help u live longer. but being sickly also probably lowers ur IQ. there’s also the factor of future time orientation. ppl w/ lower IQ tend to have lower future time orientation and so even if u understand the risk factors, u don’t have the willpower to defer gratification.

i thought this line was the best however:

“Public health campaigns should focus on early life factors that have been shown to influence IQ levels and tackle social inequalities,” she said in a comment on the study.

“At the same time, the public health messages for known risk factors such as diet may need to be simplified.”

hahaha! ouch… b/c obviously it doesn’t already make enough sense that unhealthy eating and not working out lead to health problems.

caught this on gnxp. a recent study shows that there’s a pretty strong positive correlation between cardiovascular health and iq. there have been plenty of studies that have shown smarter ppl are healthier, so we can’t really say how the arrow of causality points with much conviction. but if u needed motivation to go jogging or spinning, this might help.

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jason richwine, a writer for the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute or AEI, has an article up about how he would change immigration policy.

he goes over some of the ground i’ve mentioned here such as diversity being a killer of community bonds, even between ppl of the same race. he goes on to suggest that immigration policy should change to that of canada’s or australia’s which imports by skill and not family relation.

i don’t have any objection to a change policy which emphasizes IQ over all else, and in fact i’ve supported that position for a long time. but i’m not sure that it will foster much greater community bonding. at best it seems like it would only mitigate an increase in crime. (more…)

after i just said no single gene or polymorphism has been found that increases IQ by more than 1-2 points, we get this news. a study has found that ppl that carry 2 copies of a gene that causes myopia have an average 7 pts iq gain. i don’t know why this result hasn’t turned up before b/c studies have long shown a correlation between myopia and higher IQ. and just for reference, wiki says: “The prevalence of myopia has been reported as high as 70-90% in some Asian countries, 30-40% in Europe and the United States, and 10-20% in Africa.”

apparently u can also carry the gene heterozygously, have normal vision, and still receive an intelligence gain, although it’s a smaller gain than homozygous carriers.

watch now to see if parents start screening their babies in utero for this gene, and to see if sperm donors will get paid more for being myopic.

this is a huge finding if it holds up and has major implications for politics/econ/society. but we need to keep in mind that previous major finds have not held up. no need to make further big pronouncements until it’s confirmed. i say again, that it’s odd that such a major IQ related gene tied to myopia hasn’t been looked at before.

hat tip to inductivist.

the ricci vs destefano ruling came out today 5-4 in favor of ricci. for those that haven’t heard, this case was about a firefighter promotion test. this test had been used in past years to promote the city’s firefighters, and there had been no problem b/c at least 1 of the members who passed the test has been black. as long as they had at least 1 black person pass, they could say the test didn’t have disparate impact, which is difficult to prove in court. but in 2003, only 2 minorities (hispanics) passed, even tho the racial averages were about the same as previous years. (more…)

here’s a repost of what steve sailer posted earlier.

Here’s a simplified thought experiment to demonstrate the impact of generation length on the size of future populations:

Two babies girls are born today. They both will give birth to twins and to no other children, so their lifetime fertility will be at the idealized replacement rate of two. The only difference is that Tiffany will give birth to her twins at age 24 and Emma at age 32. Their descendants will continue these patterns: giving birth to twins at either age 24 or 32 years apart. Ninety-six years in the future, Tiffany’s 16 great-great grandchildren and Emma’s 8 great-grandchildren will be born.

since iq is correlated w/ having kids at a later age (in industrialized nations anyways), the implications are obvious assuming assortative mating. (random mating implicates nothing as the total gene load from tiffany and emma is the same b/c great-great grandchildren will have 1/16th each and great-grandchildren will have 1/8th each, which adds to 1.)

the takeaway here is that having a high iq will benefit u personally in the form of positive life outcomes, but is evolutionarily unfit b/c the environment is selecting against it.

leave it to steve sailer to find and post this data. he takes the white scores as the baseline and finds where on that bell curve distribution other groups’ test avgs fall. it’s not pretty.

Mean Score as Percentile of White Distribution
Test 	 	Degree 	 	White 	Black 	Asian 	Tot Hisp Mex-Am
GMAT 	 	M.B.A. 	 	50% 	13% 	55% 	27% 	 24%
GRE-Verbal 	Ph.D./M.A. 	50% 	18% 	47% 	29% 	 28%
GRE-Quant 	 	 	50% 	14% 	66% 	29%  	 28%
LSAT 	 	J.D. 	 	50% 	12% 	47% 	19%  	 29%
MCAT-Verbal 	M.D. 	 	50% 	10% 	36% 	19% 	 21%
MCAT-Phys Sci 	 	 	50% 	14% 	61% 	24% 	 25%
MCAT-Biol Sci 	 	 	50% 	10% 	54% 	24% 	 25%
DAT 		D.D.S. 	 	50% 	16% 	60% 	27% 	 NA

what’s interesting to me is that the test takers are more self-selected than takers of the SAT or ACT. 60% of the US has at least completed some college, but only about 1/3 of the nation has actually completed an associate or bachelor’s degree to even be qualified to apply to grad school. i would have thought differences in group test scores would be lower just for having passed that initial hurdle.

that appears not to be the case for NAMs unfortunately, while the stereotype that asians do better in math and slightly worse in verbal is upheld. before investigating this stuff i would have assumed that lower verbal was due solely to being immigrants, but east asian nations have slightly lower verbal iq’s than european nations in general.

as anecdotal evidence (i.e. this is prolly meaningless), my SAT verbal was higher than my math, but that changed on my GRE. in high school, my parents had me memorizing SAT words for years b/c they knew the PSAT verbal scores were doubled and that those scores mattered for national mertit awards. but for my GRE, i took practice tests a week or two in advance and that was it.

my experience may attest to the difficulty in raising scores and keeping them at a higher level than they would normally be… or who knows, maybe my GRE score was just a fluke.

there’s a forbes story making the rounds that coronates indian americans as the new model minority. this isn’t exactly news to ppl who follow this kinda stuff, but its interesting to see the mainstream media picking up on this.

East Asians continue to excel in the U.S, but among minority groups, Indians are clearly the latest and greatest “model.” In 2007, the median income of households headed by an Indian American was approximately $83,000, compared with $61,000 for East Asians and $55,000 for whites.

About 69% of Indian Americans age 25 and over have four-year college degrees, which dwarfs the rates of 51% and 30% achieved by East Asians and whites, respectively. Indian Americans are also less likely to be poor or in prison, compared with whites.

the author also mentions high indian IQ as a possible contributing factor.

Indian Americans place at about 112 on a bell-shaped IQ distribution, with white Americans at 100. 112 is the 79th percentile of the white distribution. For more context, consider that Ashkenazi Jews are a famously intelligent ethnic group, and their mean IQ is somewhere around 110.

Given the small sample size, the rough IQ measure and the lack of corroborating data sets, this finding of lofty Indian-American intelligence must be taken cautiously. Nevertheless, it is entirely consistent with their observed achievement.

so the next question might be whether indian immigrants are typical of indians from the subcontinent. there have been some studies on indian IQ which show something like 80-85, but none of them are definitive b/c the caste system has created a bunch of endogamous groups, and on top of that there are regional ethnicities that prefer endogamy. it’s a statistician’s nightmare and it’s possible that indian IQ variance is very high.

but it’s instructive to look at another group of immigrants to at least see how self-selection might influence representation. africans have generally averaged lower IQ scores than other groups. whether this is due to environmental factors like nutrition or to genes is up for debate. but african immigrants to the US have higher educational attainment than any other regional group including asians  (note: indian americans as an asian subgroup probably still has a higher attainment) according to the 2000 census. their median income was also comparable to that of asian immigrants.

in fact, african immigrants or their kids may compose up to 2/3 of black students at ivy league institutions like harvard. obama is only the most obvious example. he graduated harvard law magna cum-laude, and that is not something harvard gives away as an affirmative action nicety. his dad was a harvard grad, and one of his brothers is a physics phd. these immigrants however only compose 0.2% of the US population, so most of the time they aren’t especially visible. one of the few that i’ve actually met was in my graduate applied mathematics course and he was sharp as a tack.

oddly, the dataset which produced this result for indian immigrants contains info for african immigrants and shows it to be 89. there’s a significant disconnect here and i’m not sure how to explain it.

UPDATE: hmm. well, i’ve been reading some and one theory on why educational attainment of african immigrants don’t match their iq is that the content in the education is not up to standards in the west. apparently US universities won’t accept credit transfers from many african institutions. e.g. south african credits were always taken until sometime after aparteid when the classes became easier. i don’t know how true this explanation is, so caveat lector.

ben g takes on steven rose here.

some choice quotes:

Modern psychometrics isn’t claiming that all of a person’s intelligence is measured by IQ or g. IQ is used because of its strong and reliable correlations with educational and economic performance, independent of class and race.

this is an important point and one i don’t think gets much emphasis. iq is short for intelligence quotient, but using the word “intelligence” makes the entire measurement controversial. the important thing about the measurement isn’t necessarily that high scorers are “smart” but that preferred life outcomes are correlated with them. i’m not talking about every high iq person earning money like bill gates. i’m talking about not getting busted for violent crimes, not having babies before u turn 18, and not living in poverty. whether u want to call it iq, g, or BS, the measurement correlates positively w/ many such outcomes.

rose disparaged the idea of culture fair iq tests, and ben responds thus:

Rose doesn’t understand what is meant by “culture fair.” It doesn’t mean that the test prevents someone’s culture from having an effect on their IQ score. Rather, it means that culture does not effect[sic] the test’s predictive validity. And that is indeed the case. Worldwide the correlations between IQ and economic/educational success are high.

in the US, non-asian minorities who score high tend to have life outcomes similar to the white majority in the same iq range regardless of home socioeconomic environment. (i say similar on purpose b/c it is not exact. there does appear to be price paid for having non-white skin, but the difference is not large.)