Undetermined

05/23/2008

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I’ve participated in a number of incredibly interesting discussions on this blog around the general topic of the reduction of mind to physical processes. I’ve written an article in the new National Review on that has, in part, grown out of this dialogue.

( Ungated version )

Thanks to everybody on this site. This is probably an appropriate time to mention that TAS has the best commenters I’ve ever seen. I view this as a real community, and am often humbled by how much I learn in the comments box.

jim,

great article. tough, big, topic. derb asked my opinion, and below is what i emailed him….

1) there is a difference between population genetic studies and
economics & sociology: one knows the physical units of population
genetics, genes. with a statistical genetic inference we have a physical
molecular entity which to examine. i think that the analogy therefore
exists, but breaks down on that level, and i think that’s a
significant break down (especially in light of the fact that jim uses
the discovery of DNA as a preamble).

2) jim spends a lot of time on epistasis; gene gene interaction. there
are two primary types, mechanistic/physiological and statistical/evolutionary. the former are the fixed and deterministic
background networks which thickly describe our biochemical bodily
processes; the latter are the interaction components of variance,
basically the non-linear aspect of the genotype-phenotype map. that’s
an important distinction.

3) the variance part is critical. ten thousand genes may produce
protein product which is utilized in the brain, but only 500 may be
implicated in variation which effects variation on brain activity.
IOW, much of what biologists must focus on are the tiny subset of
genes which influence variation, not all genes which control all
phenotypes. the “tiny” subset is still large, but more tractable than
the whole sample space of the genome.

4) the last part is correct i suppose; we are all uncertain of the
confidence of our assertions on some level. caution is warranted, but
that is almost a trivial observation. every time we step into a car
we take a chance that we’ll be killed, but the trade off seems
“rational” to us. we have a set of priors and a set of outcomes we
want. obviously we shouldn’t ignore the error deviations within our
prior assumptions when taking our line of logic as far as possible,
but where you draw the line on what is permissible and what is not in
terms of levels of appropriate certainty for projection is a matter of
taste & judgment….

— razib · May 23, 02:46 AM · #
Razib:

Thanks for the compliment. I was hoping that you would comment on this – thanks very much for taking the time to read it and provide (as always) very thoughtful comments. Some quick reactions:

1. I agree that this is an analogy, not equivalence. I think, though, that while we do have a physical entity, unless we are able to translate that physical understanding into a set of properties that can be shown in replicated experiments to govern the relationship between gene combinations and resulting mental states deterministically, then we are still stuck with the same problem of observing statistical associations between the prevalence of vectors of genes and some mental characteristic (often supported, of course, by a view of a plausible causal pathway).

2. I was making a purely mathematical point that to the extent that we need interaction terms in the equation that relates a gene vector (G1, G2,….,Gn) to some characteristic, and we don’t know how many orders these interaction terms must go to, then even a seemingly small number of genes can create an intractable problem for parameter estimation.

3. I agree that as the relevant number of genes approaches 1, and as the absolute impact of this relevant gene gets large vs. environmental and other complexities, the problem gets a lot more tractable. In certain cases, fully tractable. I had a hard time finding examples of normal mental states / characteristics for which this is true today – but you may be able to provide counter-examples.

4. As you know, this is a huge philosophical can of worms. We’re not going to resolve this here, but I’ll put forward two predicates that I hope will be uncontroversial: (A) no scientific finding provides absolute certainty of causality, and (B) replicated, controlled falsification tests provide the gold standard for scientific certainty. The relevant point I was trying to make in the article is that we’re not close to B for the reduction of mind to matter, and that until we actually do this, we don’t know that it can be accomplished, and further, that there is a dismal track record for what politicians can do if they get convinced we’ve solved this scientific problem when we really haven’t.

Once again, thanks for the obviously very informed comments.

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 04:14 AM · #
ok

re: #1, let’s grant we have a statistical association but can’t totally pin down the step-by-step molecular genetic process which mediates the map from genotype to phenotype. the fact that we know the genomic position to which that statistical association is localized is still information that can be input into our network of priors to strengthen plausibility cases, because we usually know something about the pleiotropic nature of the gene, or, we can discern the general nature of of what that gene does (e.g., look at its gene ontology).

re: #2, epistasis is a serious issue, and one which i once had a pretty strong interest (still do, but don’t focus on it as much). but let me note that on many traits we can get a pretty high heritability by regressing offspring value on parent values (heritability just being the the slope of the regression line). i think that tells us that though interaction effects are probably real, especially at the tails of a distribution. so, much of the prediction when it comes to quantitative and behavioral traits can be modeled as a linear system, an additive and independent genetic architecture where many random variables contribute to the normal distribution of the trait.

re: #3, if you’re talking a behavioral trait, i would look to personality for gene loci of very large effect. intelligence, far less.

re #4, agreed. i would just offer (though this is not as big of a deal for you obviously) that many people who would give credence to a given social science finding often throw up a much higher bar of “proof” for a biobehavioral finding. IOW, if economists should be listened too in terms of public policy, then biobehavioral scientists should most definitely be listened too. this doesn’t mean that every molecular geneticist is a sage; they’re not, and often scientists who don’t have any expertise in the statistical nuances of biobehavioral sciences (e.g., quantitative genetics, statistical genetics, behavioral genetics) say really stupid things.

p.s. i’m traveling tomorrow, but i’ll check in on this thread in the evening.

— razib · May 23, 07:05 AM · #
Jim says:

“(A) no scientific finding provides absolute certainty of causality, and (B) replicated, controlled falsification tests provide the gold standard for scientific certainty.”

True, but this is exactly the kind of thing that sophisticated Creationists, the ones who went to college and got exposed to Kuhn and Postmodernism, say all the time, too. We can’t carry out “replicated, controlled falsification tests” to prove that apes evolved into humans … so down with “The Descent of Man”!

Claiming that scientific theories about the evolution of humanity are unfalsifiable (as you and the smartest Creationists are doing) because we can’t replicate the last 5 million years (in the case of the Creationists) or the last 50,000 years since modern humans came out of Africa (in your case) is a wonderfully unfalsifiable defense: Sure, the statistics that are pouring in from genome analyses point toward politically incorrect findings, such as evolution in different directions among different racial groups, BUT “no scientific finding provides absolute certainty of causality!”

Thus, it’s hardly surprising that Creationists like Ben Stein are also banging the drum about eugenics and the Holocaust.

— Steve Sailer · May 23, 08:42 AM · #
Jim,

I noticed that in your length cover story, you didn’t mention anything in like, “Because we don’t actually know the answers yet, our society shouldn’t fire and humiliate great men of science like James D. Watson for expressing their opinions on this controversial topic.” How come?

— Steve Sailer · May 23, 11:05 AM · #
Razib:

Once again, great observations. Here are quick reactions:

1. I agree. Though it seems to me that if we go from one gene – one effect or one gene – many effects to an effect that is materially influenced by many interacting genes, and even worse complex many gene – environment interactions, the problem becomes analytically intractable without knowing the biochemistry at a pretty fine-grained level of detail. In this way, such a problem seems to me to be highly analogous to a social science or economics prediction problem.

2. I agree that the conclusion follows from the premise. That is, if we can reliably predict an outcome dependent on many genes as a linear combination of gene effects (a model with no interaction terms, no non-linearity, and in which gene effects overwhelm complex gene-environment interactions), then the whole argument breaks down. As I said in the article (and as you know at a greater level of expert knowledge than I do), many important diseases states have been shown to have this structure, including the important special case of single gene – effect. This is why I tried to make the point that GWAS are such an important and exciting frontier in genetic research.

I think, however, that it is not an idiosyncratic opinion that normal mental characteristics generally are not believed to have this structure, but is in fact current expert opinion. I also think one can draw a pretty strong inference that gene interactions must be important to evolutionarily-significant effects. If you think about the algorithmic task of searching the space of possible gene-states, if a much simpler structure prevailed the evolutionary algorithm would be a terribly slow way of searching it. If we imagine a meta-evolution in which various evolutionary schema compete, it’s hard to imagine that a “greedier” algorithm wouldn’t have displaced evolution as we see it (selection, crossover, mutation) by getting to fitter organisms much faster.

3. If I understand your point (and I may be missing it), I haven’t seen such an analysis (but that sure doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!).

4. I agree with the implication that my point implies (or even assumes, in terms of what I had space to get into in the article) that economics and social science findings that assert causality and are (i) non-intuitive, and (ii) not backed up by replicated experiments should be treated with intense skepticism. I’m working on a book more or less on this topic right now.

I tried to be as clear as I could in the article about this, but this isn’t an anti-genetic science point of view (far, far from it); it’s a point of view that we live in a sea of ignorance about causality and have to fight and claw for tiny scraps of causal knowledge.

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 12:59 PM · #
Steve:

Thanks for the questions. I have a lot of respect for your knowledge in this area.

Just to be clear, I am in no way a creationist or Intelligent Design advocate or some too-clever-by-half word game variant of these things. I’ve written many articles in which I’ve pointed out that these points of view are entirely non-scientific. I wrote a very negative review of Expelled for NRO. In it, I made the specific point that it’s kind of silly to blame Darwin for Hitler.

I think it is true that we can’t be sure about a statement like “all living creatures on earth descend form a common ancestor” in the same way we can be sure about a statement like “two unequally weighted objects will fall at the same rate in a vacuum”, but the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis has formed the paradigm for the most exciting and important science currently being pursued by humanity.

In regard to James Watson, I can say the following with great confidence. James Watson is a lot smarter than me, and unless Murray Gell-Mann or somebody is lurking on this thread, quite a bit smarter than anybody reading this. James Watson is a fully-realized scientific genius who probably did more for humanity in one month in 1953 than any of his critics will do in a lifetime. Finally, I’d hate to be judged on the most obnoxious thing I said last week, never mind what an 80-year-old man said in an unguarded moment to an old acquaintance.

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 01:12 PM · #
Jim:

I thought the article was very well-written, and not at all comparable to the usual screeds against science. But I’m still puzzled by the politics therein.

I’m very curious why you think that the most important political risk of current research is that we will be tempted by grand schemes to improve the gene pool through government-directed social engineering. We are a very, very long way away from that – all the massive government engineering we do now is related to attempting to control environment, not genes. If we’re going to worry about the social consequences of the new science, or any technologies that may emerge, it seems to me that worrying about the impact on actual equality of individual choices to practice “private eugenics” is more realistic than worrying about government-enforced sterilization of the unfit, much less the return of the gas chambers.

It seems to me that what we urgently need is a vocabulary to enable us to discuss the emerging science of human differences without causing social strife. I don’t have any brilliant ideas about how to achieve that vocabulary, unfortunately, but I suspect that a prerequisite to such an achievement will be ratcheting down the level of concern about the consequences of ideas.

— Noah Millman · May 23, 01:55 PM · #
An unrelated point:

I’m not sure why you think the mind/body problem is so closely tied to the question of genetic determinism. Nobody is going to seriously argue that we will one day be able to determine from reading a map of my genes whether I’m going to have a tuna sandwich next Tuesday for lunch. And, by the same token, if my predilection for tuna sandwiches turns out to be predominantly due to environmental factors – say, the ambient barometric pressure at the time and place of my conception – that doesn’t in any way rule out a purely physical explanation for my choice of tuna next Tuesday. So it seems to me these are largely separate problems.

As well, it feels like hidden somewhere in your concerns about the mind/body problem as it relates to genetic explanations of behavior is the concern that, if we can explain group differences (by which I don’t specifically mean racial differences; schizophrenics are a “group” that is different from non-schizophrenics, and there may be a genetic component to the difference, but that doesn’t imply a common ancestry among schizophrenics or a difference in rates of schizophrenia by racial group) by reference to genes, then we have somehow explained away individual choices in behavior. But that doesn’t follow. We have a very good idea about the rate of decay of a hunk of uranium, but the precise moment of decay of an individual uranium atom is literally unknowable – the weirdness of quantum mechanics is that the statistics go all the way down. The same may well be true of individual humans versus human groups, either because of complexity or because we ourselves are connected to the quantum strangeness of the universe (because our brains are, in some fashion, quantum computers rather than von Neumann machines). And the same may be true of human genes, and for much the same reason – certainly because of complexity. That is to say: we may well be able to map genetic patterns to differential traits, physical or mental; we may even be able to trace some of the causality; but individual predictions will remain statistical even at the level of measuring predispositions, much less at the level of specific decisions that an individual will make.

Maybe I misread you, and you don’t see the mind/body problem as closely connected to the fad for genetic-deterministic explanations of behavior, but it feels like you do, and I’m not sure why.

— Noah Millman · May 23, 02:10 PM · #
Jim, a thought before I dive into your article. You write: “If you think about the algorithmic task of searching the space of possible gene-states, if a much simpler structure prevailed the evolutionary algorithm would be a terribly slow way of searching it. If we imagine a meta-evolution in which various evolutionary schema compete, it’s hard to imagine that a “greedier” algorithm wouldn’t have displaced evolution as we see it (selection, crossover, mutation) by getting to fitter organisms much faster.”

An excellent description of human consciousness, no?

— JA · May 23, 02:27 PM · #
Jim, a fine article, about a difficult subject. I hope you don’t mind, but I have many thoughts and questions listed below.

1. I agree with Noah on the political dimension of the article, with a qualification. Humans are remarkably bad at low-probability-high-cost accounting, and tend to be risk-seeking when the problem is framed in terms of losses. In your article, the low-probability-high-cost risk is political retrogression, a kind of brave-new-world bureaucratic nightmare in which the government imposes an idea of the good on its constituent stock of gene-carriers. So I might agree with your conditional, “But if translated into public policy, their belief would likely have disastrous results,” disbelieve such a translation is remotely likely, and still think it’s worth thinking about if only to counteract our tendency to discount. Set some reasonable boundaries and all that. (Though much depends on whether the belief being translated to policy is a know-that or know-how; both can lead to “tinkering”, but only the latter does so directly; in other words, I’m not entirely sold on the idea that belief in genetic determinism tout court leads to policy catastrophe).

2. The scientific method is the best-known procedure to systematically discover technique, prediction, and (belatedly) understanding — in that order. Most of your article deals with our inadequacies vis-a-vis the last, and rightly cautions against the hubris of explanatory certainty: translating biological reality into mathematical models is hard enough, and lossy; translating it from models into descriptive English is so stupendously difficult and prone to error that deep skepticism and humility refer themselves automatically (and thus Noah’s suggestion that we need a new language to capture these things). So when you write that explanatory claims should be “treated with the appropriately intense skepticism,” I agree.

However, it’s possible we’ll still be cautioning against nature-nurture categorical certitude even after the more-proactive, less-squeamish scientists have reduced their discovered techniques to practice. Before we understand how everything works, we’re going to know how to do X to Y to get Z. This, it seems to me, has more implications for policy than the “know-that” objections and subtleties you spend much of your time discussing.

Note: I say this because I agree with you about a policy of cautious boundaries; I just think that, if you’re going to make this case, the explanatory/philosophical/ethical debate can be distracting.

Even if genetic determinism proved to be absolutely true, what happened to Carrie Buck is not justified thereby. Even if we can breed a smarter stock of humans, even if we can cull certain undesirables from the gene pool and cultivate a stronger, swifter, healthier humankind (and there’s no reason to suppose we cannot), it just doesn’t follow that we should. After all, nuclear physics, though proven to be correct enough to give us the bomb, didn’t significantly alter our political and ethical philosophy. So why should genetics — though more intimate than physics — have altogether different consequences?

— JA · May 23, 04:24 PM · #
Is there anyone else who would respect Steve Sailer more, and listen with a more open mind to those who claim he isn’t a racist, if absolutely every issue, in any field and for any reason ever, didn’t compel him to tack back towards “race realism”?

— Lifafa Das · May 23, 06:22 PM · #
Noah:

Thanks for the compliment.

I’m very curious why you think that the most important political risk of current research is that we will be tempted by grand schemes to improve the gene pool through government-directed social engineering.

As both you and JA have this question, I have to accept that I wrote imprecisely. I didn’t mean that the Social Darwinism episode would be repeated, but that it was the best example of something going very wrong when we assume we have biological knowledge about humans that we do not. I don’t think that compulsory sterilization is a policy likely to be implemented in the US soon. I suspect that the analogous policies that might be established if an (incorrect) view of the linkage between gene patterns and mental characteristics and capabilities became more widely and deeply entrenched would be unpredictable, but more likely to be related to the relaxation of the notion of personal responsibility – replacing justice with therapy, greater paternalism in constraining economic, political and lifestyle decisions for those who are “unable” to exercise “true” choice, targeting government services based on genetic content and so on. But all of these examples are illustrative: if we begin with an incorrect premise and grant the coercive power of the state to those armed with this false knowledge, it’s hard to know where they will go with it. The point of my article was to argue against the false (in my view) premise.

I agree with you that having a vocabulary to discuss these topics is quite tricky. I took my best shot at explaining some dangers in a way that I felt was accessible, but avoided glossing over key complexities.

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 07:31 PM · #
JA:

Thanks for the compliment also. Here are some reactions, keyed to your numbers.

1. Please see my reply to Noah above.

2. I have a very practical view of science (as we have discussed on this blog previously, and I know that you share it only partially). I think we privilege its findings not because of some rational critique of its methods, but because airplanes generally stay up. I was trying to say that we currently do not have, and it’s not obvious that we ever will have, the ability to predict non-obvious individual or group behavior reliably. If I understand your terms, we lack know-how not just know-that or know-why.

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 07:39 PM · #
Jim writes:

“In regard to James Watson, I can say the following with great confidence. James Watson is a lot smarter than me, and unless Murray Gell-Mann or somebody is lurking on this thread, quite a bit smarter than anybody reading this. James Watson is a fully-realized scientific genius who probably did more for humanity in one month in 1953 than any of his critics will do in a lifetime. Finally, I’d hate to be judged on the most obnoxious thing I said last week, never mind what an 80-year-old man said in an unguarded moment to an old acquaintance.”

Yes, but that’s not exactly, “I disagree with what James Watson said, but I’d defend to the death his right to say it,” or anything close. (And yes I know Voltaire never said it either.) The question that you haven’t answered remains: Should people like James Watson and Larry Summers get fired for saying things you don’t agree with?

Your article likely wouldn’t have been a cover story in a political magazine without the Watson brouhaha of last fall, so this is a terribly relevant point you’re dodging.

— Steve Sailer · May 23, 07:47 PM · #
Lifafa:

I don’t think that’s quite fair. Consider Steve’s whole series of posts on Affordable Family Formation, his analysis of the war in Iraq, or his long series of movie reviews. The guy is commenting on an article about genetic determinism, so I expect that this topic would bring up that issue

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 07:50 PM · #
Steve:

I disagree with what James Watson said, but I’d defend to the death his right to say it.

I don’t think that people like James Watson and Larry Summers should get fired because they say things I don’t agree with.

That’s not to say that either, neither or both of those two specific people should or should not have been fired in the specific circumstances under consideration. People in leadership positions need to be constantly aware of what they say and do because it can have outsized impacts on large organizations. The “owners” (in quotes only because this can get a little nebulous in non-profits) have the right, duty and obligation to take personnel actions that are in the interest of the organization, and not necessarily be guided solely by maintaining an environment in which anything can be said by anyone without material repercussions (though this should clearly be one important consideration in the case of a university). I don’t know the circumstances for, say, Larry Summers’s management performance, and all of the considerations the board had to weigh when deciding what to do. But I do think that the proper question for them to ask themselves was not “Does Larry Summers have the right to express an unpopular opinion?”, but instead was “Is Harvard better off if we can Larry Summers, keep him on or take some other action?”.

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 08:03 PM · #
From a political standpoint, what’s amusing about this article appearing in a conservative political magazine is its total lack of balance. This is just a rehash of the conventional wisdom, a smarter version of a Big Think article that Sharon Begley would write for Newsweek or wherever.

For example, why is is there not even a pro forma mention of Lysenkoism under Stalin to balance the eugenics-Holocaust cliche? Where, as Noah, points out, do you mention that the actual reigning model of humanity underlying government policy in a host of fields from education to affirmative action to immigration is what Steven Pinker calls “The Blank Slate.”

I’m all in favor of deflating media hype about the Happiness Gene or whatever, but you’re ludicrously distorting the current situation where policies are based on Blank Slate thinking by warning about the return of Social Darwinism.

And you are misreading the media climate badly. Sure, the glossies run silly articles about the Happiness Gene, but those who mention the implications of the new genetic findings for policy gets exposed to a Two Minute Hate for their crimethink. The more prestigious they are — and James Watson was voted the second most influential living American by ten historians in a 2006 Atlantic Monthly poll organized by Ross Douthat — the more they are in danger.

— Steve Sailer · May 23, 08:19 PM · #
JA:

An excellent description of human consciousness, no?

Yes, the Lamarckian juggernaut will always overwhelm natural selection when it is available. But one can make the same kind of claim for an equivalently “blind” algorithm as natural selection, if we assume a very simple structure of no epistatic interactions. If that situation obtained, much as an LP or QP will always outperform a genetic algorithm in searching a parameter space with limited or no interactions, it seems to me that there is a strong (though refutable) presumption that another algorithm that closed faster on more competitive phenotypes would have displaced natural selection. This is what I mean by “meta-evolution”: a competition of evolutionary schema, or evolution through natural selection at a higher level of abstration than organisms.

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 08:33 PM · #
Jim writes:

“Just to be clear, I am in no way a creationist or Intelligent Design advocate or some too-clever-by-half word game variant of these things.”

I know. But the point is that you are using the same rhetorical tropes (Eugenics! Holocaust!) and sophomoric Philosophy 101 chestnuts (How can we know what is Absolute Truth?) as the smarter Creationists.

Indeed, what we are witnessing is a convergence of Creationists, Frankfurt School leftists, postmodernists, “Science Studies” academics, libertarians, both right and left, and Oprahish self-esteem boosters (“You can be anything you want to be”) into a philosophical grand alliance into punish and intimidate the hard-headed James Watson-types who look at the incoming data and call it as they see it.

— Steve Sailer · May 23, 08:44 PM · #
Steve:

Ah…the light dawns on me. You think you’re losing this debate, but you’re obviously winning it. (“you” defined broadly, and “winning” defined as accepting an inherent human nature along with subsidiary propositions I list in the second quote below) Nobody who knows anything about this accepts the blank slate theory of human nature. In fact I think you’ve already won, it just has to be played out in non-scientific fields.

I was trying to shoot ahead of the duck, and think about how conservatives should deal with this in the decades to come. That’s why the opening paragraph is:

THE delineation of the double-helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 will almost surely rank as one of the most epochal scientific discoveries in human history. Following rapidly upon the synthesis of Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics in the 1930s and ’40s, it enabled a research program that now seeks to explain a vast array of physical phenomena, from the functioning of individual organisms to the development of species over geological time. This success has led some science popularizers to believe that we have found a new Rosetta Stone enabling us to understand many of the mysteries of human existence. But if translated into public policy, their belief would likely have disastrous results. In the coming decades, it will be important for conservatives to walk a fine line: on one hand, to resist such hubris; on the other, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater by denying valid biological science.

I was trying to say that it will be very important to understand the boundaries of what is known, and that the key issue is the operational ability to predict individual and group behavior, which we currently can not do, saying:

Now, the idea that the vast majority of people share a set of stable, inherent characteristics—that is, the idea that there is such a thing as human nature—is not new. Nor are the subsidiary ideas that individuals have somewhat varying inborn natures; that this variation is partially heritable; and that individuals who share a lineage will demonstrate common traits and tendencies. All of these beliefs are at least several thousand years old, and probably predate written records.

What’s new is that—because we believe that we have uncovered at least a component of the physical manifestation of human nature, in the form of the genome—many now believe that we can operationalize these old ideas: that we can explain the causes of the behaviors of individuals and groups sufficiently to predict these behaviors scientifically.

I was trying to lay out how to conduct politics in a world of human biodiversity, not disputing that is the world we’re going to live in.

— Jim Manzi · May 23, 09:25 PM · #
Jim, thanks for the thoughtful response. I think I understand your political points much better, now.

Also, you write: “I was trying to say that we currently do not have, and it’s not obvious that we ever will have, the ability to predict non-obvious individual or group behavior reliably.”

I’d agree if you limit the conversation to predictions based on genetic determinism, which you are. However, I’m not sure you’d still be right if we moved the conversation a couple of levels up: it’s far easier for us to model personality, motivation, wants and expectations, and I’m going to bet one day very soon, should we figure out how to calibrate our models to specific contexts, we’ll be able to predict non-obvious behavior of the individuals who inhabit these well-classified contexts (for instance, see my post on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita). And as for groups, I think we’ll get to the point where we can make very general, time-independent phase-predictions about how human-network topologies will behave under certain threshold conditions. Once the models are worked out for a broad diversity of groups and conditions, we should get a certain amount of predictive power simply from consulting a human-network cladogram.

Finally, you write:“This is what I mean by “meta-evolution”: a competition of evolutionary schema, or evolution through natural selection at a higher level of abstraction than organisms.”

This requires much more time than I can give it on this beautiful Friday evening in Tennessee, but I’m very intrigued by this. Later, then?

— JA · May 23, 11:22 PM · #
Jim comments:

“You think you’re losing this debate, but you’re obviously winning it. (“you” defined broadly, and “winning” defined as accepting an inherent human nature along with subsidiary propositions I list in the second quote below). Nobody who knows anything about this accepts the blank slate theory of human nature. In fact I think you’ve already won, it just has to be played out in non-scientific fields… I was trying to lay out how to conduct politics in a world of human biodiversity, not disputing that is the world we’re going to live in.”

National Review should host a debate between Jim Manzi 1.0 and Jim Manzi 2.0!

Ah…the light dawns on me. You’re used to a rarefied niche where people like Razib, Greg Cochran, and John Hawks are looked upon the way Jared Diamond and Stephen Jay Gould are viewed by subscribers to The New Yorker and the New York Times.

It sure would have made everything a lot simpler if you’d mentioned all this in your cover story. You could have written something like:

“Unlike what you were told over and over during the Two Minute Hate directed at James Watson last year, at present, there’s more evidence for the heretical human biodiversity perspective than for the politically correct conventional wisdom, and that’s only likely to increase year by year as the genome data comes in. So, let’s think seriously about the political implications of this likely distant but probably inevitable revolution in intellectual assumptions about humanity. For example, it’s important that the currently-vilified heretics don’t succumb to triumphalism as the evidence mounts in their favor.”

Maybe National Review wouldn’t have published that, but at least it’s clear and makes sense. Instead, we get a muddled article that will just reinforce the anti-empirical prejudices of the intellectually conformist of all political stripes, who are legion.

— Steve Sailer · May 24, 07:54 AM · #
Let me offer a theory of how the politics will play out that is more plausible than that, say, Phil Rushton is suddenly elected President-for-Life.

We’re living in an Emperor-Has-No-Clothes moment. But those moments can go on a lot longer than Hans Christian Anderson suggested. People seldom say to themselves, “Why, yes, that little boy is right and I have been making a fool of myself. Of course the emperor has no clothes, just as Occam’s Razor would suggest.” Instead, what they typically say for a protracted period is: “What a stupid, evil little boy who attacks our poor emperor. That brat can’t see that our emperor is wearing a higher form of clothing that you have to be really smart and ethical, like me, to understand.” And the closer the emperor comes and the more obvious his nakedness becomes, the angrier the crowd will at that little bastard.

So, outside of the United States and its First Amendment protections, the word “crimethink” will continue to slowly move from metaphor to reality as the police power is brought down upon heretics. Within the U.S., outspoken heretics won’t be investigated by the police, but they will be rendered largely unemployable in management positions because institutions will worry that their employment presents too much risk of the institution losing job discrimination lawsuits.

In pockets of the Internet, some anonymous individuals will continue to exchange facts and ideas, but, really, how many people like to look for truth for its own sake?

The long term outcome will be an increasing stultification of intellectual life rather like that seen in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Just as mathematicians and astronomers at the abstract end were relatively free and engineers at the practical end were too, but any Soviet scientist or intellectual in the middle who tried to theorize about human beings was in danger of losing his career or his liberty, so will it be in the West.

— Steve Sailer · May 24, 08:27 AM · #
Jim, re your thought that the False Premise People’s policies will be “…more likely to be related to the relaxation of the notion of personal responsibility – replacing justice with therapy, greater paternalism in constraining economic, political and lifestyle decisions for those who are “unable” to exercise “true” choice, targeting government services based on genetic content and so on.”

Actually, I think it’s pretty clear that we’re genetically determined to be behaviorally underdetermined. Only when things don’t work the way they’re supposed to (e.g., the decelerator/accelerator imbalance in the basal ganglia that attends Tourette’s patients), or when we find ourselves in extreme circumstances, do our final behaviors lie outside our immediate control. Further, this characteristically human ability to self-control exists regardless of intelligence (except, perhaps, at the margins). So long as the executive systems are working, humans can regulate themselves well-enough to be held personally responsible for their behavioral registrations on the environment. There is much evidence for this.

As for genetically-based redistribution, this impulse exists already. For instance, many people believe society should redistribute wealth to the “thrice disadvantaged”, whether or not the disadvantages are innate or contingent. In fact, if you read the literature on this stuff (which, unfortunately, I had to do in law school), you’ll find the “contingent” perspective more strident in its propositions than the genetic determinism people. If its society’s fault, its society’s responsibility, yada, yada.

To end, I think the more fine-grained one’s understanding of the genetically-determined human brain is, the more one realizes how underdetermined our ultimate behaviors actually are.

— JA · May 24, 02:55 PM · #
Steve:

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I think that the blank slate theory of human nature is example of the suspension of common sense in the face of pseudo-science. We are emerging from this delusion, and returning to the notions of an inherent human nature that, as I said in the article, have been believed on a common-sense basis for thousands of years. It is likely that many, and maybe most, people who currently hold some version of the blank slate theory will never relinquish it. Their minds will not be changed; they will simply be replaced by those with different beliefs.

I also think it’s hard to argue that the idea of a non-blank-slate biological basis for behavior is the opinion only in a “rarefied niche”. As I said in the article:

To choose just a few illustrative examples, within the past few months both Time and The New York Times Magazine have had cover stories on the evolutionary roots of morality; Time has had a second cover story on the biological basis of romance; Newsweek has had one article on the genetic explanation of psychological resilience and another arguing that varying incidences of disease-causing pathogens explain the degree to which different countries’ policies are individualist or collectivist; NBC News has broadcast a story on the genetic basis for smoking addiction; ABC has had a story on the evolutionary origins of the incest taboo; and CBS has run a story titled “Eureka: Happiness Gene Found.” Mass media are inundated with this biology-explains-all ideology.

I think that many of those who argue against the blank slate theory already make assertions that “science says” things that remain unproven. (And I think it is quite unfair to lump me in with the Frankfurt School, creationists and whoever else. I believe that I’ve thought pretty hard about what it means to “know” or “prove” something scientifically, and I don’t demand absolute philosophical certainty or deny the possibility of objective scientific knowledge) I’ve made the argument in detail for the example of the race-IQ-genes debate here at TAS. You and others have responded, and I don’t want to try to re-argue that here. My only point, here at least, is that I’m not speculating about some future triumphalism, but trying to distinguish known science from speculation today.

— Jim Manzi · May 24, 03:33 PM · #
JA:

Very helpful clarity. Take a read through some of the mass media pieces that I idenitified in the article, and tell me if you think they’re selling the idea that “we’re genetically determined to be behaviorally underdetermined”.

Here are links:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1685055_1685076_1686619,00.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1704672,00.html

http://www.newsweek.com/id/108268/page/1

http://www.newsweek.com/id/130623

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23919596/

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sex/story?id=4612467&page=1

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/search/videos_2006.php?=&num=10&offset=10&searchString=psychologist&section=&sort=1&source=video&type=all

I could point to a hundred more like these.

— Jim Manzi · May 24, 07:14 PM · #
The systematic fallacy is simple: the burden of proof has been misassigned. The fundamental problem here is not at the level of science. It is at the level of the philosophy of science.

You quote the APA: “at present, this question has no scientific answer.” The problem is that most Americans believe a scientific proposition for which there is no support at all. They believe that it is implausible that genetic variation is the cause of differences between human populations.

In other words, they believe that, according to the latest science, it is just as reasonable to attribute these differences to genetics as to attribute them to the fact that God hates black people, who are the children of Ham, or Cain, or even both. Thus, they feel perfectly justified in persecuting these opinions and those who hold them, because they are both pernicious and false.

The APA wants to have it both ways. They want to claim that “there is no scientific answer.” But they do not want to return to a world in which people believe that the question is not a scientific one, but should instead be answered with the evidence of their own eyes. Thus they answer the question, without answering it.

Above you have provided your own answer: you believe that the converse is pernicious, but probably (not certainly, but probably) true.

Curiously enough, this is exactly my answer as well. But I don’t feel that picking nits with study X or study Y is an effective way to explain this situation. I feel that when you write for a (relatively) mass market publication like National Review, you have decided that the most socially productive use of your talents is to lead its readers away from, rather than toward, the pernicious probable-truth. And thus you are implicitly defending the popular proposition, which is clearly false.

And this may be. This is the old argument of Plato and Aristotle, and we won’t settle it here. But consider: if said readers later do stumble on the PPT, what do you expect them to make of your attempts to guide them away from it?

— Mencius · May 24, 08:49 PM · #
well, i’ve been away for a while ;-) in any case, i’ll finish off with two points

1) re: epistasis, as i noted above epistasis means a few different things. i’ll ignore the molecular genetics and shift toward evolution; as a matter of fact many thinkers would deny that epistasis is evolutionarily significant. the line of thinking starts with r. a. fisher and continues down today with james f. crow and what not. the inverse line of thinking starts with sewall wright, and many workers in the area of speciation think that epistasis is critical in generating the population level discontinuities that we label “species.”

my own rough & ready (and uncertain) take is that evolutionarily the relevance of epistasis is contingent upon the span of time which you are framing the question within. e.g., along hundreds of thousands or more years epistasis is important. but on shorter microevolutionary time frames far less so. that being said, for medical models and diagnoses which are along a very short time window epistasis becames important again because the marginal effects are critical for obvious reasons (no one would say an extra 5 years of life expectancy is trivial).

i think in the case of modeling there are also general expectations you can have from the genetic architecture…but i’ll avoid that for now, and leave this as is. all i’ll say is that i think we have general expectations for when, and not when, gene-gene interactions are important and relevant.

2) personality & genes, keep reading my blog ;-) you’ll be hearing more from the behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists in the next few years, inshallah.

— razib · May 24, 09:44 PM · #
Jim comments:

“I also think it’s hard to argue that the idea of a non-blank-slate biological basis for behavior is the opinion only in a “rarefied niche”. As I said in the article: To choose just a few illustrative examples, within the past few months both Time and The New York Times Magazine have had cover stories on the evolutionary roots of morality;”

Jim, you’re making the naive assumption that intelligent people hold logically consistent views, or even want to hold logically consistent views.

I’ve been involved in these controversies much longer than you have. A decade ago, I too assummed that at least a small minority of people would like to achieve a better, more useful understanding of how the world works that’s consistent with empirical facts and logic. Who wouldn’t?

Well, as it turns out, most people. It’s not a small minority, it’s a tiny minority of people who think it makes sense to apply Occam’s Razor to what they see everyday with their lying eyes.

What the vast majority of well-educated, intelligent people want is status. They want to feel equal to high-ranking people and they want to despise low-ranking people. They want to be seen as part of the well-educated, intelligent grouop at the top our society and to do that they will worship the idols of the tribe. So, they worship evolution and genes, because that’s what’s fashionable, but they furiously reject simple logical implications like, say, that genes evolved on different continents among different races in different directions.

And a remarkably vast fraction of them do it in a sincere manner. If that’s what you have to publicly espouse to get ahead, and any statements of heresy, can lead to the destruction of your career, well not only will they say whatever’s wanted, you will believe it, and you will enthusiastically persecute disbelievers.

In fact, the more suspicion builds up that maybe their views are wrong, the angrier they will get at the heretics. That’s why you see the firings of heretics at the very peak of prestige, like James Watson and the President of Harvard. As Voltaire said, every so often the British hang an admiral to encourage the others.

— Steve Sailer · May 24, 10:02 PM · #
Dear Jim,

In summary, it looks like that, one way or another, you got played over this National Review article. It’s easy for an article to go awry through the lengthy process of commissioning, writing, and editing. Clearly, this cover story didn’t end up doing a good job of communicating your true views to the audience, and will be positively misleading to many who read it. As the article stands now, you’ll look back on it with regret and embarrassment.

So, you could save yourself a lot of feelings of guilt in the long run by now issuing some sort of Clarification.

— Steve Sailer · May 24, 10:12 PM · #
Steve is my personal hero, of course, but let me amplify a little.

Dear Jim, you seem to think of the American intellectual system – the universities and the press – as a sort of infallible truth machine, in which truth will always defeat error. Perhaps after a short, inertial period, of a few months. Or a year. Or two. Or maybe even five. Or ten.

For certain areas of science in which the results of controlled experiments are indisputable, this is true. It was once the received wisdom that there was no way to reprogram a mature cell to an undifferentiated state. One experiment, replicated, was sufficient to reverse this consensus. This surprised some people, but it changed their minds. Science is pretty great that way.

As you yourself demonstrate, the evidence for human neurological biodiversity is not and can never be this compelling. The problem is simply not susceptible to experiment. But the evidence for human neurological biodiversity is, as I’m sure you’ll admit, far more compelling than the evidence for the opposite proposition: human neurological uniformity.

The vast majority of educated, intelligent people today believe in human neurological uniformity. Nor is their belief tentative or conditional. They believe in it as completely as they believe in the existence of the Moon. I see no evidence that they are changing their views. I certainly see no evidence that the institutions which will educate forthcoming generations of intelligent people are, or even could, change their views. And yet the proposition is utterly unsupported, and its converse is constantly confirmed by both science and common sense.

And this quandary has survived at least since Jensen’s famous article in 1969. At least. It might be more appropriate to cite Galton. Or, for that matter, Gobineau. And there’s always Sir Richard Francis Burton.

If you take a historical perspective and ask why so many people believe in human neurological uniformity, when there is no evidence supporting the proposition and a great deal of evidence against it, your inquiry will not terminate in the realm of science. It will go back to religion and politics. The connection to Christianity is obvious. Furthermore, if human populations are not neurologically uniform, much of modern history needs to be rewritten, or at the very least reinterpreted. For example, how do you deal with the Civil War?

So when you say that “Steve is winning,” you are relying on the implicit assumption that our intellectual operating system – the universities and the press – works as an infallible conveyor belt of truth, not just in the physics, biology and chemistry departments, but also in questions philosophical and historical.

This is ascribing the same kind of credibility to these institutions, which are after all human, that Pio Nono wanted us to grant the Catholic Church. I am not a Catholic, and I don’t think even most of today’s Catholics would endorse the Syllabus Errorum. Nor have my own small experiences with the Apparat induced any such level of trust.

Do you really believe that, even if Steve is right, it will see the light? If so, it’d be interesting if you could clarify your motivations for this belief.

— Mencius · May 25, 12:18 AM · #
Here’s an example of how pervasive and impermeable the politically correct conventional wisdom is: For just about the entire decade, the New York Times genetics reporter Nicholas Wade has been beating the drum in the pages of the New York Times that, yes, race really does exist, and yes, races really have evolved divergently over the last 50,000 years and there are important differences on average among races in genes that affect behavior.

And how much influence has this excellent reporter, given the best soap box for a science journalist in the world, had on the conventional wisdom? Has he moved the needle 1%?
0.1%?
0.01%

I don’t know. Whatever Wade’s influence, it’s clearly too small to measure with any degree of accuracy.

When everybody was screaming at James Watson late last year, how many people came forward in the public press and said, “Hey, wait a minute, you know, what he says fits in with what I’ve been reading in the Science section of the New York Times for the last 6 years? Maybe we should give America’s most prominent living man of science a fair hearing?”

Let me know if you need a second hand to count all the voices who stood up in defense of James Watson.

— Steve Sailer · May 25, 12:39 AM · #
Steve:

I think the article under coinsideration presents my views clearly. I don’t think that I was played, and am confortable with every line in it.

— Jim Manzi · May 25, 04:56 AM · #
Using General Social Survey data, I show that the percent of Americans who believe that the racial poverty gap is due to genetic differences is at a 30-year low. Only 2.8% of those with advanced degrees believe it, compared to 20.2% of high school dropouts. This very low number among the highly educated is the same as what it was a decade ago.

http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2008/05/are-attitudes-changing-on-iq-and-race.html

— Inductivist · May 25, 05:50 AM · #
Jim writes in NR:

“If the pretense to scientific knowledge is always dangerous, it is doubly so when wedded to state power, because it leads to pseudo-rational interventions that unduly extend authority and restrict freedom. That the linkage of race and IQ is provocative to contemporary audiences is not surprising: It is almost a direct restatement, in the language of genetics, of the key premise of Social Darwinism.”

“Wedded to state power”???

What planet in what year does your article describe? Bizarro World? htraE in the year 8002 D.A.?

Wedded to what state power? All the state power in 2008 is lined up behind the human biouniformity dogma, which here in your comments you admit is false.

Ideas that are powerful, popular, and wrong have more than enough spokesmen already.

— Steve Sailer · May 25, 07:43 AM · #
Jim,

The more I reread your article, the less I understand what you are trying to say.

For example, who, exactly, are you warning us against? Who are these ominous “genetic maximalists” who endanger our freedom? Can you please name names?

And what are they proposing to do?

You mention Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., but they’ve been dead over 75 years. Is there anybody more recent?

The only time you get terribly specific is in your discussion of the black-white IQ gap. So, are you saying that Charles Murray is “wedded to state power” and thus a threat to our freedom? Arthur Jensen? Did Chris Brand just get approved as Secretary of Homeland Security? Please, help me out here, I’m dying for a clue …

The harder I try to understand your article, the more baffled I am by it …

— Steve Sailer · May 25, 08:55 AM · #
Inductivist:

I tried to be quite specific about what I meant by the “winning” comment here in this discussion. Here’s what I said:

You think you’re losing this debate, but you’re obviously winning it. (“you” defined broadly, and “winning” defined as accepting an inherent human nature along with subsidiary propositions I list in the second quote below)

Rejecting the blank slate theory of human nature does not mean (in my view) accepting that we have any scientific knowlegde about the race-genes-IQ connection.

— Jim Manzi · May 25, 01:54 PM · #
Steve:

I took my best shot at explaining myself clearly in the article, and I believe that it is clear.

If I were to summarize it at a high level vis-à-vis our discussion here, I’d put it as something like this:

1. Biology increasingly allows us to understand the human organism. 2. There is an academic belief, filtering down through mass media, that this means human mind and behavior is on the verge of or just beginning to be predictable. 3. In spite of this belief, most aspects of human behavior related to normal mental processes, characteristics and states remain resistant to scientific prediction (that is, reliable, useful and non-obvious predictions). 4. If state power were to proceed from the (to date) false premise that we have rendered human behavior predictable in ways that it is not, this false premise would, because it is false, likely lead to bad results. 5. A prior example of previous application of government power in the service of such a false premise provides an illustration of this dynamic.

Do you believe that these five points are an incorrect or incomplete (accepting that it is a summary) restatement of my argument relevant to our discussion here? If not, which of these points do you think is incorrect?

— Jim Manzi · May 25, 02:08 PM · #
Steve says:

“Where, as Noah, points out, do you mention that the actual reigning model of humanity underlying government policy in a host of fields from education to affirmative action to immigration is what Steven Pinker calls “The Blank Slate.””

The belief that there is no difference in IQs between races has here and now pernicious effects. Since blacks on average do less well in jobs that require a high IQ, they reasonably deduce that the difference in average achievement is due to discrimination. This results in anger between the races which results in riots, crime, etc. Also, whites feel unnecessarily guilty.

The fallacy also results in direction of many blacks into jobs they are not good at; and direction away from jobs they would be good at.

So there may be holocaust threats on one side, but there is here and now anger and misallocation of resources on the other side. Writers should not say that all the risk is on one side.

— Robert Hume · May 25, 03:33 PM · #
Jim:

Yeah, those articles, not so much. It reminds me of Dorothea Frede’s essay Pleasure and Pain, where she writes, “That our actions should be done with inclination rather than because of inclination is an insight that should never have dropped out of moral discourse.”

With, Rather Than Because should be inscribed on the hearts of all popularizers of the human sciences. As a catch-all slogan for human behavior, it’s pretty darn accurate.

— JA · May 25, 03:38 PM · #
Robert Hume:

As I say in the article:

Let’s start with some facts. There are sustained, statistically significant differences in IQ-test performance between self-identified racial groups in the U.S., and these self-identified racial groups also have statistically significant differences in genetic content.

Differing scores by group are an empiricial fact. As I go on to say, it is not this that I’m disputing, but that these differences are caused by genetic differences.

I go into this issue in great detail in a post here at TAS.

— Jim Manzi · May 25, 04:27 PM · #
I keep meaning to chime in with something in Jim’s defense, but he seems to be doing a fine job of defending himself, and remaining entirely civil under fierce criticism. So, kudos to you, Jim.

I said above that I don’t think Jim has the politics right; environmental explanations of behavior are as likely or, indeed, more likely to serve as justification for misguided projects in social engineering. But I think Steve Sailer et al get the politics wrong in a different way. To paraphrase Holly Hunt’s character in Broadcast News: you are beginning to repel those you are trying to seduce.

I think a good rule of thumb with all these debates over group differences is: imagine you are trying to convince a highly intelligent African-American – Henry Louis Gates, Barack Obama, Thomas Sowell, etc – of your views. How would you go about doing that?

— Noah Millman · May 25, 06:00 PM · #
Noah,

I can’t speak for Steve, but I am not trying to repel or seduce anyone. I am just trying to describe reality as I see it. Outrageous as it sounds, my words would be no different for an audience of any skin color.

You appear to still live in a world where everyone who speaks or writes publicly is doing so with the intent to affect the democratic process or the American political system. I don’t believe in the democratic process, and I have no respect for the American political system. As Dr. Johnson put it: “my dear friend, clear your mind of cant.” I don’t think he would have excluded democratic American cant, and nor do I.

— Mencius · May 25, 09:06 PM · #
Jim,

You write: it is not this that I’m disputing, but that these differences are caused by genetic differences.

No. You are arguing that the correlation between genetic and sociological differences is not strong enough to define as proof of causation. (I agree, for certain values of the word “proof.”) But, like the American Psychological Association, you are structuring your argument in a way that allows the listener to continue with the belief that it is scientifically implausible that the sociological differences are caused by genetics.

This is a belief he almost certainly holds at present. And it is a belief which is unambiguously false. Thus you are reinforcing error.

Here’s a way to put the question more precisely. Sociologically, Haiti is very different from Japan. Given the state of our current knowledge, is it prudent to assume that these differences are not best explained by the statistical differences between Haitian DNA and Japanese DNA?

Suppose you had a pill that would convert Haitians into Japanese. Your pill is a form of germline therapy that could be administered to the entire population of Haiti, that will result in the average Haitian children being born with the DNA of the average Japanese. Or, more precisely, born with whatever genetic traits are responsible for the high level of industrial civilization found in Japan.

You predict that, in 50 years, this will turn Haiti into Japan. 50 years later, you apply for approval from the FDA. You admit that your pill is a sugar pill, it does nothing at all, and indeed Haiti is pretty much the same. But, you say, Haitian DNA was already just as good as Japanese DNA, so the sugar pill is effective in the null sense. Rather, the difference between Haiti and Japan is entirely explained by cultural and political factors.

Note that this is your present position – or at least, if it is not, you have given us no indication otherwise. How would you expect a rational person to respond to this argument?

Of course, the magic pill is fanciful. But perhaps the last 150 years of Anglo-American public policy, and certainly the last 50, have been designed with the assumption that all human beings are the same under the skin. The results have not exactly been as forecast. Should we keep taking the medicine?

— Mencius · May 25, 09:22 PM · #
Jim,

We can be genetically determined for some types of behavior while not being genetically determined for other types of behavior. It is not going to be a simple binary question of whether we are genetically determined or not in our behavior.

Also, some people are going to turn out to be more genetically determined than others. There’s a Dutch family with an MAO-A mutant that makes its carriers very violent for example. Those carriers feel a compulsion on them that most do not feel.

Also, genetic differences can create different odds for behavior. The analogy here is with disease risks. ApoE4 and other gene variations create different risks of Alzheimer’s, breast cancer, heart disease, etc. We are going to find lots of genetic variations that alter our odds of engaging in various behaviors.

What is going to change this debate: Cheap DNA sequencing. Arguments made from adoption studies, twins studies, and other work can be dismissed more easily by those who do not want to believe. But the cost of DNA sequencing has fallen so far and so fast in the last few years that the rate of sequencing is going to rise by orders of magnitude. Therefore we are going to be able to tease out thousands of genetic variations that alter human behavior.

My guess is that the Chinese will figure out the human behavioral angle if Western scientists are unable to get funded enough to do the work. But perhaps some wealthy Western philanthropists will provide the money needed to do the massive comparisons of behaviors and genetic variations needed to identify all the genetic variations that alter human behavior.

— Randall Parker · May 25, 10:08 PM · #
Jim,

Once again, please let me know exactly who are these ominous “genetic maximalists” and dangerous “science popularizers” who, unscientifically riding the sociobiological “reigning presumption of academic America,” threaten our freedom?

James Watson? Razib? Arthur Jensen? Chris Brand? Godless Capitalist? Henry Harpending? Audacious Epigone? Jason Malloy? Half Sigma? Tatu Vanhanen? Greg Cochran? P-ter?

I’m stumped, so please help me out here.

And what public policies are they, whoever they are, going to impose once they get (or do they already have?) “state power”?

— Steve Sailer · May 25, 10:35 PM · #
“Differing scores by group are an empiricial fact. As I go on to say, it is not this that I’m disputing, but that these differences are caused by genetic differences.”

Jim,

Is it too much to ask those who don’t subscribe to a genetic basis for the black-white IQ gap to show some black population, somewhere, with a mean IQ in the west European and East Asian range? It’s not like black people only live in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa: there are hundreds of thousands in Europe and millions in South American. Yet all the results that I’ve seen for IQ tests in developed or relatively developed countries like the United States, Brazil, and Great Britain put blacks firmly in the 85-90 range.

For the hereditarian view to be false, there must be some common environmental factor (let’s call it X) or combination of factors (let’s call them XYZ…) depressing black IQ scores uniformly across three very different societies with very different histories. No viable candidate leaps immediately to my mind.

I can’t help but feel that if we were talking about a similarly robust and universal difference in any characteristic other than IQ, the reasonable inference based on the data would be, “It’s probably genetic.”

— Marc · May 25, 11:01 PM · #
Jim comments (in italics) and I’ll respond.

1. Biology increasingly allows us to understand the human organism.

S: Yes.

2. There is an academic belief, filtering down through mass media, that this means human mind and behavior is on the verge of or just beginning to be predictable.

S: Jim, you seem to have an engineer’s mindset, rather than a statistician’s, toward words like like “predictable,” “scientific,” and “reliable,” as if they require some absolute level, as if they imply some threshold of quality like, say, “fireproof” or “seaworthy,” below which predictions aren’t “predictable, scientific, or reliable.” That’s a perfectly reasonable way to use these words within the engineering field. If an aeronautical engineer says, “This airplane isn’t reliable,” well, then I want my ticket refunded because I’m taking the train.

In the human sciences, however, those words are relative, not absolute. The only threshold in science is whether you can make predictions that are more accurate than random chance. And then as you get better at making predictions, your predictions become more scientific, reliable, and, well, predictable. And, in complex systems, there is likely no end to improvements possible. You’ll never get to perfection, but you can keep trying.

3. In spite of this belief, most aspects of human behavior related to normal mental processes, characteristics and states remain resistant to scientific prediction (that is, reliable, useful and non-obvious predictions).

S: Wrong. Our society currently makes countless predictions about “human behavior related to normal mental processes, characteristics and states” all the time, and we typically achieve reliability levels far better than random guesses. For example, the college admissions process is a vast system for predicting human behavior. If we assume that the unspoken goal of all this prediction is for colleges to pile up endowments, well, then the top colleges seem to be awfully good at making predictions about how much high school seniors will donate to their alma maters decades down the road.

Similarly, the U.S. military has been requiring all potential inductees to take an IQ test since WWII and the Pentagon has done studies over and over again showing that the AFQT is a highly useful tool for predicting potential soldiers’ behavior.

You may claim that sorting for military assignment by IQ test is “obvious,” but it’s not obvious to people who buy into the conventional wisdom. In fact, most of them don’t know about the military’s reliance on IQ testing. The military tries to keep quiet its pervasive use of IQ testing exactly because it’s so politically incorrect, but so useful.

4. If state power were to proceed from the (to date) false premise that we have rendered human behavior predictable in ways that it is not, this false premise would, because it is false, likely lead to bad results.

S: A. I quite agree that it would be a bad idea to impose a Gattaca-like scientocratic dicatorship on America. Indeed, I’ll even go beyond your position and state that it would be a bad idea even if the predictive power of the human sciences attained levels adequate in your eyes for the effective functioning of the Gattaca State. In fact, you may be the only living American who seems to think Gattaca might be a pretty good idea if they could only get all the bugs worked out.

B. In our world, however, state power currently proceeds from false premises about human behavior (the blank slate dogma of human uniformity), which leads to bad results (e.g., check out the public schools). What we need is more skepticism, not less, among people wielding state power about the current dogma.

5. A prior example of previous application of government power in the service of such a false premise provides an illustration of this dynamic.

S: Yes, and we’ve all heard it a million times before about how Social Darwinism led to the Holocaust. But, as you may have noticed, there’s not a lot of demand these days to clone Hitler and elect Adolf 2.0 Furher. Perhaps in a future article you could show that it would be a bad idea to revive the theory and institution of the Divine Right of Kings, which is about equally relevant.

What is going in the real world on is “free market eugenics.” Lesbians like Jody Foster search for tall handsome sperm donors with 160 IQs. As I’ve pointed out, Jody’s careful search for a 160 IQ donor can be expected to boost her children’s IQ by only about 10-15 points on average relative to a donor chosen at random. But that’s how the human sciences work. “Free market eugenics” may someday have an important cumulative effect on our society, but it doesn’t come up in your article.

Eventually, the Chinese may use state power for eugenic purposes (Singapore already does), and this may, or may not, pose a challenge to the West in the distant future. But your article won’t help anybody think about that, either.

But the main real world story right now is dysfunctional public policies based on politically correct dogmas, such as Pres. Bush and Sen. Kennedy getting together to make up No Child Left Behind. And, anybody like James Watson, who points out that Emperor has no clothes are in danger of having their careers destroyed. That’s life as we know it on earth in 2008.

In summary, Jim, you are smart enough to not mislead people with this kind of straw man argument raised to the Nth power.

— Steve Sailer · May 25, 11:29 PM · #
JA says: “So long as the executive systems are working, humans can regulate themselves well-enough to be held personally responsible for their behavioral registrations on the environment.”

But we already know that some people have less than fully functioning executive systems. How would you describe drunkards in a bar for example? Fully functioning in their executive systems? I do not think so.

Or how about Aspies? A friend with Aspergers Syndrome keeps me informed of his readings on Aspie research. He’s discovering the various components of executive function and which particular components don’t work right for him. Well, Aspergers Syndrome looks to have a big genetic component. Ditto other autism spectrum disorders.

People who try to lose weight discover pretty quickly that they’ve got less executive decision making power than they thought they did. Few can keep off the weight. One part of the mind generates desires for food.

Our problem is that we want to think we are in control. But the evidence undermines this belief. So people tend to ignore the evidence.

— Randall Parker · May 25, 11:44 PM · #
Following the line of Mencius’ comments:

Real-world performance of many complex, difficult tasks is strongly influenced by intelligence. This should be a statement of the obvious.

For much of the past 40,000 to 50,000 years, there has been significant though not total reproductive isolation of humans divided into multiple groups. While there is a continuum of phenotypic traits both within and between ethnic and racial groups, both the Mark 1 Eyeball and SNP arrays can, quite reliably, classify individuals according to these groups.

Racial groups can be sampled so that members can be tested for intelligence, with the inexact but useful device of one of the IQ tests. Simple metrics (mean and standard deviation) reveal statistically significant inter-group differences that are large enough to have practical consequences.

However, per Jim’s article, let us assume that intelligence does not have any significant genetic component. More specifically, let’s assume that the demonstrated inter-group differences in mean IQ scores are nearly all due to environmental (non-genetic) factors. To quote Jim [May 25, 12:27 PM, above], “Differing scores by group are an empiricial fact. As I go on to say, it is not this that I’m disputing, but that these differences are caused by genetic differences.”

It follows from this “human neurological uniformity” position that environmental factors account for the gaps. The correct interventions will cause the scores of lower-performing ethnic or racial groups to rise to the levels of higher-scoring groups.

Has a search for such factors been contemplated by any researchers in the past century or so? Have any such interventional programs been proposed and implemented?

Do any of these efforts lend support to the prevailing Blank Slate dogma?

Head Start? Improved nutrition? Micronutrients? Structured educational instruction? Adoption? Changes in residence? New peer groups? After-school programs? Prenatal nutrition? Well-child clinics? Family planning?

At what point does it become reasonable to suggest that “a significant fraction of the observed inter-group differences is not readily eliminated by changes to the environment”? At what point should the unpleasant “other” category of explanations be opened for consideration in polite company?

— AMac · May 26, 05:50 AM · #
Over the last century, many interventions to raise IQ have been tried. Some have proven successful, such as adding iodine to salt and iron to flour between the Wars in the U.S. Both remain highly cost-effective in some Third World countries where not enough iodine or iron appear in local diets. Unfortunately, among the fashionable, the Bonos and Angelinas, there is minimal interest in trying to raise 3rd World IQs — about half the money given annual for iodine supplementation comes from Kiwanis International, which isn’t exactly cool.

— Steve Sailer · May 26, 06:03 AM · #
Noah:

I certainly agree that environmental causes of human behavior can and will be used to justify social engineering. This seems like a pretty safe prediction since they already have been used for this purpose many, many times.

I think, though, that if political society comes to see non-environmental causes of behavior as scientifically understood, predictable and not what most people mean in normal speech as “chosen”, then it will enormously sap resistance to social engineering that is premised on environmental causes.

Once again, if science gets to that point, so be it – I’m not advocating a “noble lie”. I made the argument that science has not achieved such findings, despite popular press that implies that it has.

— Jim Manzi · May 26, 03:22 PM · #
Mencius:

You made this argument in response to my long-ago post on race-genes-IQ, and I regretted that I never got around to answering it. I think it is not quite accurate to say that by rejecting the hypothesis that genes don’t account for a significant proportion of the difference in group IQ scores, we are stacking the deck in our choice of null hypothesis. Or, that what we should do is to choose between the yes/no alternatives based on the preponderance of the evidence.

I think that the issue with this criticism is that it assumes that group differences caused by genetic differences are of comparable magnitude to those caused by non-genetic differences. I think we can say with about 100% certainty that any any two populations will not have exactly identical phenotype outcomes for any trait that is influenced by genotype differences. I don’t have an a priori belief about the relative magnitude of genetic vs. environmental factors as causes of group differences in IQ scores, therefore I don’t have a prior that genetically-caused differences are more than 100 times larger or less than 100 times smaller than the impact of non-genetic differences.

The null hypothesis is, in essence, that we don’t know the answer to this question.

— Jim Manzi · May 26, 04:01 PM · #
Randall Parker:

I believe that I addressed the issue of the distinction between phenotype variations caused by single or small numbers of genes with biochemical effects powerful enough to overwhelm environmental variation (typically, diseases or other “malfunctions”) vs. characteristics determined through epistatic interactions compounded by gene-environment interactions. I went though the math for why it is not at all obvious that it is possible to scale up a GWAS to sufficient sample size to isolate the causes of such effects.

— Jim Manzi · May 26, 04:08 PM · #
Steve:

1. Check

2. S: Jim, you seem to have an engineer’s mindset, rather than a statistician’s, toward words like like “predictable,” “scientific,” and “reliable,”…

J: I’m pretty confident about my competence in understanding statistics, evidence, causation and attribution.

3. S: Wrong. Our society currently makes countless predictions about “human behavior related to normal mental processes, characteristics and states” all the time, and we typically achieve reliability levels far better than random guesses. For example, the college admissions process is a vast system for predicting human behavior. …

J: I agree. It would have been more precise for me to have specified that I was speaking of such predictions that depended upon the genetic science under discussion and were for “normal” mental states or characteristics (as per my article).

4. S: A. I quite agree that it would be a bad idea to impose a Gattaca-like scientocratic dicatorship on America. Indeed, I’ll even go beyond your position and state that it would be a bad idea even if the predictive power of the human sciences attained levels adequate in your eyes for the effective functioning of the Gattaca State. In fact, you may be the only living American who seems to think Gattaca might be a pretty good idea if they could only get all the bugs worked out.

J: We share our distaste for Gattaca-like state.

S: B. In our world, however, state power currently proceeds from false premises about human behavior (the blank slate dogma of human uniformity), which leads to bad results (e.g., check out the public schools). What we need is more skepticism, not less, among people wielding state power about the current dogma.

J: I think we should be skeptical about all dogma. Cheap answer, I know. Actually, though, I mean it. I believe that, while it is frustrating, the right answer to most important questions like the ones we are discussing is “I don’t know”.

5. S: Perhaps in a future article you could show that it would be a bad idea to revive the theory and institution of the Divine Right of Kings, which is about equally relevant.

J: If Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, ABC, CBS and NBC ran frequent stories alerting readers and viewers that we could now understand and predict human behavior through priestly augury, I probably would.

S: What is going in the real world on is “free market eugenics.” Lesbians like Jody Foster search for tall handsome sperm donors with 160 IQs. …

J: As I said in my article, the idea that inherent attributes of parents (including intelligence and height) are usually, to some degree, passed to offspring is thousands of years old, and predates any of the scientific issues we are discussing here. If Jodie Foster were not a lesbian looking for a sperm donor, but instead a woman looking for a mate in 2nd century Rome, one characteristic she would likely seek is intelligence and another is height, for exactly the same reasons.

S: But the main real world story right now is dysfunctional public policies based on politically correct dogmas, such as Pres. Bush and Sen. Kennedy getting together to make up No Child Left Behind.

J: As per my prior comment, I think that premising policies on false beliefs about scientific knowledge is a bad idea. It’s hard to predict how it will go wrong, but easy to predict that it will go wrong somehow.

— Jim Manzi · May 26, 08:33 PM · #
Jim,

From a scientific perspective, the null hypothesis is certainly that “we don’t know the answer.” This is how scientists think: carefully. I applaud your caution and skepticism. (It is especially laudable that you apply the same skepticism to wanton number-crunching in both climatology and psychometrics.)

Our society, however, considers the null hypothesis to be “there is no difference.” Curiously, this is also the correct answer according to Christian doctrine. (More specifically, it is the correct answer according to mainline New England Protestantism – Unitarian, Transcendentalist, Quaker, etc – which happens to be the most successful religious sect in recent history, and in which the democratic doctrine that all humans are born equal has assumed such importance that it has displaced theism itself. But I digress.)

Let me underscore how different the null hypotheses “we don’t know” and “there is no difference” are.

If the null hypothesis is “we don’t know,” we don’t know what causes the social differences between Haiti and Japan. It could be genetic disparities. It could be culture, education, nutrition, etc. So if the Japanese minister of education asks you whether he should admit a million Haitian babies, who will be adopted by and raised as Japanese, as long as you’re sure that as adults their behavior will be substantially indistinguishable from that of the host population, your answer will be: “no, I’m not sure. It’s a risk. Don’t try it unless you’re ready to be disappointed.”

And just how would you estimate the probability and distribution of that risk? A prediction market could guess the adult IQs of the Japanese-adopted Haitians. Would you, personally, stake money on the proposition that it would differ negligibly from that of native Japanese? If so, what evidence would motivate you? Where is the evidence that educational or cultural interventions can increase adult fluid intelligence?

There are many standards of evidence and proof that we apply in the real world. It is often necessary to make practical decisions based on inadequate evidence. Few murderers are executed based on a chain of logic as sound as that which convinces us that the circle cannot be squared. Yet we use the word “proof” for both.

Even the US judicial system has two standards of proof. I don’t think the case for a causal correlation between population group and IQ has been proven “beyond a reasonable doubt” – the standard used in criminal trials. In civil cases, however, the standard is “a preponderance of the evidence.” Whose side is the preponderance of the evidence on? As far as I’m aware, there is hardly any evidence at all for the theory that education can increase fluid intelligence – yet if this theory is false, the genetic explanation is almost certainly true.

Moreover, there is another standard of evidence we can deploy. This is the standard generally applied in the scientific field at issue here: physical anthropology.

Anthropologists studying fossil hominids often find it useful to speculate as to the cognitive capacity of their subjects. Since it’s impossible to give an IQ test to a skull, they have to guess. They have to use proxies. And what proxies do they use? Brain size and cultural complexity. When you apply these criteria to modern humans, you get classic “scientific racism,” 1930s style, a la the unfortunately-named Carleton Coon.

If you look at the history of the subject, you will see that – based on information far more primitive than the genetic studies we have today – the physical anthropologists of 60 years ago had already reached the same conclusion as Steve Sailer, namely, that cognitive potential is not evenly distributed across the human species. And how was this scientific conclusion reversed? By new evidence? No – by purging the entire field, and replacing it with the largely unrelated, and dubiously scientific, “cultural anthropology” of Boas and his ilk.

It is this purge and its continuing aftermath, which differs from l’affaire Lysenko only in its relative gentility and absence of forced-labor camps, that you are defending. In effect, at least, if not intent. Does it really deserve the benefit of the doubt – especially the unusually generous benefit you have lavished on it?

— Mencius · May 26, 09:24 PM · #
So, once again Jim cannot come up with the names of any of the dangerous “genetic maximalists” who threaten our freedom. Nor can he come up with any anti-liberty policies that these shadowy figures are about to impose upon us.

In contrast, I’ve listed names of influential true believers in the reigning doctrine of “human biouniformity,” such as the architects of the No Child Left Behind federal legislation that dominates K-12 public schooling, President Bush and Senator Kennedy.

I’ve also listed the names of distinguished figures who briefly expressed public skepticsism against the dogma of human biouniformity, such as the ex-President of Harvard and the ex-Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor (with emphasis on the “ex-”).

Now, in Jim’s world, the big danger facing humanity is that the vast institutional investment in the dogma of human biouniformity (which doesn’t seem to much exist at all in his article) will, under the pitter-patter of articles in glossy magazines about “the Happiness Gene” and the like, somehow collapse utterly; and state power will then be seized by fanatical advocates, none of whom Jim can identify, of human biodiversity and genetic determinism who will impose their new dogma and destroy freedom, in unspecified ways.

Let’s consider one obvious internal contradiction in Jim’s article. Jim spends a lot of time explaining why he believes the new genome research won’t find much actionable information about human behavior. Okay, so, if that’s true, then that failure would certainly slow the rush toward the dictatorship of the “genetic maximalists,” no?

I’ve seen a lot of superhero blockbuster movies lately, and they’ve all had more plausible plots than this. Jim’s plot would only come up to comic book standards of verisimilitude if it was set in Bizarro World.

Let me offer two alternative scenarios, one fortunate, one unfortunate:

A. The advances in the human sciences slowly make it more career-feasible to publicly express skepticism about the politically correct dogmas underlying current public policy. This decline in dogmatism leads, in the long run, to somewhat more effective public policies.

B. The advances in the human sciences make the falsity of the current dogma more and more obvious, leading to ever more fanatical defenses of the dogmas and persecution of those who point out the emperor wears no clothes. That public figures must increasingly testify to every more absurd beliefs to prove they aren’t heretics, leads to ever stupider laws.

I rate the chances of my second scenario to be 60%, of my first to be 40%, and of Jim’s to be, more or less, 0%.

— Steve Sailer · May 26, 09:32 PM · #
Steve:

One quick point:

If by “genetic maximalists” you mean (as I did in my article) something like “people who argue beyond the scientific evidence that normal human mental characteristics are operationally predictable”, then examples are you and all of those who authored, edited and approved the numerous high-profile mass media pieces that I have identified. Note that I am not here calling you a racist, crypto-fascist or any of the other names that I’m sure you’ve been called many times. I am making no statement at all about your motivations, ethics or morality. I am merely stating that we have reached different conclusions as a result of empirical analysis.

As hackneyed as this sounds, I think this is probably the most productive place to leave this thread: to agree to disagree without personal rancor.

Respectfully,
Jim

— Jim Manzi · May 27, 12:15 AM · #
Mencius,

I had never thought of it that way, to consider that the case for racial differences in intelligence would not fly in a criminal trial, but would pass muster in a civil suit. Great point.

Jim,

May I ask you directly what you think the cause of the black-white IQ gap is? I know you’re on record here and elsewhere as stating that it is impossible to know the cause of the black-white IQ gap at this stage, but I think everyone who is aware of the gap has inferred one cause or a combination of causes based on their interpretation of the available evidence.

So, if you had to bet your life’s savings on the black-white IQ gap being either the result of environment, genes, or a combination thereof, how would you bet?

— Marc · May 27, 01:19 AM · #
Jim says:

“If by “genetic maximalists” you mean (as I did in my article) something like “people who argue beyond the scientific evidence that normal human mental characteristics are operationally predictable”, then examples are you …”

LOL

You should have entitled the article, “The Terrifyiong Threat to Human Freedom Posed by Steve Sailer and a Few Other People You’ve Never Heard Of.” That would have made your theory a lot clearer to readers!

— Steve Sailer · May 27, 02:35 AM · #
I have a VDARE.com column about Jim’s article at:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080526_genetics.htm

— Steve Sailer · May 27, 03:14 AM · #
In case anybody finds Jim’s claim that my writing threatens human freedom alarming enough (or, more likely, amusing enough) to want to see what I’ve actually written, I put together handy Frequently Asked Questions lists on race and on IQ in late 2007:

Race:
http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/071216_race_faq.htm

IQ
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/071203_iq.htm

— Steve Sailer · May 27, 03:52 AM · #
Steve Sailer offers:

<blockquote>
A. The advances in the human sciences slowly make it more career-feasible to publicly express skepticism about the politically correct dogmas underlying current public policy. This decline in dogmatism leads, in the long run, to somewhat more effective public policies.

B. The advances in the human sciences make the falsity of the current dogma more and more obvious, leading to ever more fanatical defenses of the dogmas and persecution of those who point out the emperor wears no clothes. That public figures must increasingly testify to every more absurd beliefs to prove they aren’t heretics, leads to ever stupider laws.
</blockquote>

but forgot one:

C. The advances in human sciences will allow some people (perhaps our current crop of political leaders) to tailor the characteristics and skills of their offspring so that their lineages remain on top.

— Richard Sharpe · May 27, 04:41 AM · #
Jim,

Be careful what you call a malfunction. For example, the tendency to seasonal affective depression might have been selected for as a way to save energy in the winter when there was little people could do to grow crops or otherwise produce useful food. SAD might be a mild form of hibernation.

Also, if Greg Cochran is right most of the Jewish genetic diseases come from variants that boost IQ. If they do that will be a pretty easy thing to demonstrate. Maybe some rich guy will fund the needed genetic testing and IQ testing. Those genetic variations that boost Jewish IQ should be easy to find.

The brain is a huge consumer of energy. The metabolic cost of the brain makes it an obvious target for big selective pressures. Selective pressures for energy conservation in brain metabolism would have been different around the world since food availability varied. For that reason alone we should find differences in cognitive capability between populations.

As for difficulty in finding IQ-boosting genetic variations: They won’t be evenly spread out across the genome. The searchers will know more and more what to focus on as we learn more about metabolic pathways in neurons. Research on methods of memory storage alone will point in directions for where to focus to check for genetic variations that influence cognitive ability.

— Randall Parker · May 27, 04:43 AM · #
A more descriptive title for Jim’s “Escaping the Tyranny of Genes” cover story:

“Escaping the Tyranny of Steve”

— Steve Sailer · May 27, 05:43 AM · #
I guess I’m all alone in preferring the society of Gattaca to our own. As the version of Dartmouth parodies in Animal House proclaimed “Knowledge is good”. A scholarly article pointing out how the “hero” of the film deserves not admiration but its opposite can be found here

— TGGP · May 27, 05:51 AM · #
Jim,

A personal question. Do you have any black friends or colleagues?

I wonder if you write, as you do, to defend those close to you? My wife once would do as I believe you might be doing: taking a circuitous route to defend those close to the heart.

Zylonet

— Zylonet · May 27, 06:19 AM · #
My question for Mr. Manzi is —

Q: What if we find that the human genome is quite tractable, at least in the long run (the research on Ashkenazi genes / IQ), wrt the cultural environment?

Won’t that knowledge (some cultures produce higher average IQs and thus the potential at least for greater wealth, over the long term, than others) be dangerous, revolutionary, and well, effective? Since it would indicate some cultures are better than others at shaping average IQ through natural/sexual selection.

At the least, the death of PC and multiculturalism.

— Jim Rockford · May 27, 06:36 AM · #
I share Steve’s wondering what Mr Manzi is talking about. Where is that dark geno-cracy except in his imagination? If anything, reproduction is ruled by chaos and not talked about in polite society. The genotype of the next generation is left to the untutored decision of each individual. I cannot see even the slightest effort to control the next generation genotype, on the contrary, the State purposefully looks the other way. People of all kind of genes and mutations do reproduce freely, and the State takes charge of bringing up every one’s child. People is free to use sperm banks and choose any donor. By attacking an imaginary enemy, Mr Manzi is defending the status quo. Since change – as a rule – is coming, his effort must be considered pathetic as well heroic.

(The I am not to blame note: Change is inevitable, always and universally, please dont blame me or my kind for causing it. )

— j · May 27, 09:22 AM · #
“I guess I’m all alone in preferring the society of Gattaca to our own.”

Thank God someone said it. A world populated by Jude Laws and Uma Thurmans is not my idea of a dystopia.

— Marc · May 27, 01:31 PM · #
“…about half the money given annual for iodine supplementation comes from Kiwanis International, which isn’t exactly cool.”

That, arguably, makes Kiwanis the most objectively (using old M-L terminology) the most Afrocentric org on the planet. When will Rev. Wright dedicate a sermon to them?

— icr · May 27, 01:39 PM · #
“To choose just a few illustrative examples, within the past few months both Time and The New York Times Magazine have had cover stories on the evolutionary roots of morality; Time has had a second cover story on the biological basis of romance; Newsweek has had one article on the genetic explanation of psychological resilience and another arguing that varying incidences of disease-causing pathogens explain the degree to which different countries’ policies are individualist or collectivist; NBC News has broadcast a story on the genetic basis for smoking addiction; ABC has had a story on the evolutionary origins of the incest taboo; and CBS has run a story titled “Eureka: Happiness Gene Found.” Mass media are inundated with this biology-explains-all ideology.“

No it isn’t. Your own selected examples contradict you, every one of them. Not one of those articles claims “biology-explains-all”, and many of them contain superfluous qualifiers to the contrary.

“If by “genetic maximalists” you mean (as I did in my article) something like “people who argue beyond the scientific evidence that normal human mental characteristics are operationally predictable”, then examples are you and all of those who authored, edited and approved the numerous high-profile mass media pieces that I have identified.”

Jim, none of those authors went beyond the scientific evidence in their reports in any irresponsible manner as you assert. And certainly none of them espoused a biology-explains-all ideology as you assert. Your whole article is, I’m sorry, just really, really bad.

Those news articles are not going beyond what is claimed explicitly in the same published journal articles that they are reporting on.

[Time] What Makes Us Moral
http://tinyurl.com/24bqdd

There is nothing egregiously wrong with this article.

[NYT] The Moral Instinct by Steven Pinker
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html

A characteristically solid and empirical popular science summary by Pinker.

[Time] Why We Love
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/gnxpforum/message/4117

Again, popular summary of research evidence. You don’t appear to realize reporting on scientific research is a good thing.

Should published scientific research on human behavior be confined to journals? Not reported on? Or do you think the research itself is flawed.

If so attack the scientists, not the journalists. And do it in the appropriate journals, not in Creationist Review.

[Newsweek] The Resiliency Gene
http://www.newsweek.com/id/108268

Reading through all these stories it is clear the one common denominator is that they are simply reporting research that you disapprove of. Many media outlets reported on this exact same story in ways that are not discernibly different. If I am wrong, please, can you point to one that reported on it the “correct” Manzi-approved way? If not on this story, please find me a few media outlets (or even a few media reports) that report on genetic studies the “right” way? Seriously, can you do that? It shouldn’t be difficult, unless I am correct, or unless your article is not sweeping and specific enough to the necessary degree in its indictments.

[Newsweek] You Can Blame the Bugs
http://www.newsweek.com/id/130623

A good article on exciting and otherwise ignored research in a high status biology journal. Contrary to your insinuations, the author goes out of her way to disagree with the research authors that the difference is genetic. (which is more common than not, since surveys have found scientists believe in genetic explanations more than journalists)

If anything your battle here is not with journalists who simply tell the public about research (theory and evidence) published in science journals; no, your battle is primarily with scientists, reviewers, and journal editors who keep publishing research to support inconvenient Manzi-nonapproved science paradigms. Didn’t they get the memo that Manzi actually decides what is and what is not legitimate science?

[NBC] (Actually Associated Press) Can’t quit smoking? Blame your genes
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23919596/

Errors?

[ABC] When Daddy Loves Daughter: Exploring the Incest Taboo
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sex/story?id=4612467&page=1

Errors??

[CBS] Eureka: Happiness Gene Found
http://tinyurl.com/5sxyqs

The scientist they interviewed said it is complicated, that happiness is about 50% heritable, and that “you’re not genetically destined to gloom” if you don’t have all the happiness influencing variants, but when fed through the Manzi inversion machine she is spreading the “biology explains everything” ideology. This is insulting.

These are your ridiculous examples of articles arguing “beyond the scientific evidence” – along with Sailer – because you are wrong.

Your article is not a good article, it does not contain any correct, new, insightful, enlightening or well argued ideas, and it is simply wrong.

Your claim that “normal human mental characteristics are [not] operationally predictable” is Creationist false.

You can predict mental characteristics just by measuring the same traits on the biological parents. What are you thinking to make claims this embarrassingly inaccurate?!

— Jason Malloy · May 27, 02:25 PM · #
As to Jim’s interesting epistemology: I agree that it would feel better to punt with “I don’t know” in all cases. What could be more relaxing – and non-threatening?

But, the Establishment isn’t saying “I don’t know,” is it? Oh, it KNOWS, baby. It KNOWS Everyone Is Equal and No Child Should Be Left Behind and Diversity is Our Greatest Strength Regardless of Cost.

If Jim’s bete noir is supposed to be dogmatic absolutism, then why didn’t he direct his firepower at its virtually sole embodiments? As it is, his article calls to mind the image of a Pope speaking – ex cathedra – to a miserable handful of heretics: “Your error is your certainty. Nobody can be too sure of anything!”

“I am not here calling you a racist, crypto-fascist […] I am making no statement at all about your motivations, ethics or morality.”

Frosty! Imagine an employee reading the above in his quarterly review. It would be time to dust off the resume.

Clearly, while “here” (?) Jim isn’t saying it, he means it. The handful of genes men are Nazis. The rest is stuff and fluff.

“Gattica”? Heck, what about “The Boys from Brazil”? I know people who lie awake at night in a cold sweat thinking of that one. Absolutely none of them write articles for TNR, though.

— David · May 27, 02:29 PM · #
Jim Manzi’s argument is familiar and anything but politically or scientifically moderate. It is exactly what Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, and company have been asserting since the 1970s: Behavior genetics and sociobiology are somehow not science.

Very few scientists who are forced to research these subjects or journalists forced to report on these subjects agree, or have any room to agree. In that sense, yes, there is a powerful group of “genetic determinists” (oops, I mean “maximalists”) – they are called all scientists and journalists who are forced to work in terms of evidence when dealing with these subjects (Isn’t it amazing that every single major news outlet makes the same “mistakes” reporting on this “science”?).

Manzi’s approach to behavior genetics is what Slate writer Daniel Engber dubbed “radical skepticism”, the rejection of competing scientific paradigms as the source of knowledge, and the embrace of biased nihilism: people can believe what is convenient for them to believe, not limited by scientific paradigms, because most competing scientific paradigms on important topics are said to leave too much room for doubt with their rudimentary methods. It is the basis for much corporate science, global warming “skepticism”, the latest generation of “Intelligent Design” Creationism, and of course No Child Left Behind.

http://www.slate.com/id/2189178/entry/2189179/

It also frequently poses disingenuously as agnosticism, while working transparently towards goals that clearly imply belief in the losing or nonexistent scientific paradigm.

Manzi’s article states:

“No such experiment in a non-totalitarian society is sufficiently controlled to support reasonable inferences.”

This is radical skepticism. Your argument is not with “bad” science journalists and Internet-based pundits, it is with scientists, who unanimously disagree with you, because this is what they have to work with in the real world to solve their puzzles. Natural experiments are used in paradigmatic science. Paradigmatic science, in turn, is the best basis for policy.

Manzi’s article states:

“No such experiment in a non-totalitarian society is sufficiently controlled to support reasonable inferences … This, not political correctness, is why the American Psychological Association’s consensus on the matter of race and IQ is that, “at present, this question has no scientific answer.”“

First of all, since the APA Taskforce on Intelligence you cite, themselves cite natural experiment research in their report as – I quote – “clear” evidence for genetic causation in individual differences in intelligence, your assertion that “is why” they made that judgment on race is false. The APA panel most certainly did NOT agree with your extreme suggestions that natural experiments are not science. Their paper indicates the exact opposite: natural experiments such as twin and adoption studies provide “clear” evidence “that genes make a substantial contribution to individual differences in intelligence test scores”.

http://www.michna.com/intelligence.htm

What the panel was actually speaking to in that quote was a fully explorable and falsifiable question: is there an x factor (or nonshared environmental feature) acting on black and white intelligence? The same quote from the Taskforce in context is: “Are the environmental and cultural situations of American Blacks and Whites also substantially and consistently different— different enough to make this a good analogy? [i.e. seeds in two different kinds of soil] … At present, this question has no scientific answer.”

“… different enough to make this a good analogy?” is the key phrase, because it links the statement to an explicit scientific hypothesis: the x factor hypothesis.

In fact, this exact theory was tested by the late behavioral geneticist David C. Rowe in two important papers. There are testable assumptions that underlie the “two different pots of soil” analogy. For instance differences in the covariance matrices of developmental variables. Rowe found no evidence of a unique ethnic source of variance; while the hypothesis suggests this would be found.

http://www.nlsbibliography.org/qtitle.php3?myrow%5B0%5D=2115
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0160-2896(96)90004-5

So the seed hypothesis has indeed been challenged with scientific evidence. Given empirical disconfirmation, it is incorrect that science has nothing to say on this topic. Further science may show differently, but the available evidence does not support its assumptions. This is similar to the twin and adoption studies showing genetics are linked to individual differences: The necessary assumptions of the paradigm – equal environments, nonrestriction of range – have also been tested and supported through research.

Second, the panel’s judgment on race differences cannot be taken as the final word of scholarly consensus on this issue, much less one free from bias; a poll of experts done several years before the small Taskforce found a plurality in agreement that the evidence pointed to a genetic component for the gap. This was a poll where they had the option of choosing “insufficient evidence” to make a judgment. And more evidence has been collected since that time- including at least one of the papers cited above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyderman_and_Rothman_(study)

“But it turned out that the environments were not even close to equal. The black children had been adopted at later ages than the white children, and this can plausibly be associated with differing scores on IQ tests.”

It is hard not to interpret this as dishonesty. I provided direct evidence to you significantly before the time of this publication why this is not a “plausible” explanation in the terms of science. A meta-analysis of studies (a superior piece of evidence) found that age at adoption – along with even neglect and abuse! – has no long-term effects on IQ.

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/raldanash/3218094106715403266/#1978209

If I present direct evidence to you personally that a claim of yours is untrue, and yet you repeat the claim later in a high visibility publication despite no counter-evidence, how am I supposed to interpret that?

— Jason Malloy · May 27, 02:46 PM · #
“I am not here calling you a racist, crypto-fascist … I am making no statement at all about your motivations, ethics or morality.”

Did Manzi cut-and-paste this despicable piece of attitudinizing from Cold Springs Harbor’s letter to James Watson? Nah. Great minds think alike.

— Jonathan · May 27, 02:56 PM · #
Jason:

You have made what I think is a very practical assertion: that the examples of mass media pieces that I provided are inconsistent with my assertions about them. Here is the relevant statement about these pieces from my article :

Proceeding from the sociobiology movement of the 1970s, some biologists have sought to explain all individual behavior and social organization as the predictable result of genes-plus-environment. The reigning presumption of academic America is that over time this movement will sweep all before it.

This perspective inevitably trickles down into mainstream opinion. To choose just a few illustrative examples, within the past few months both Time and The New York Times Magazine have had cover stories on the evolutionary roots of morality; Time has had a second cover story on the biological basis of romance; Newsweek has had one article on the genetic explanation of psychological resilience and another arguing that varying incidences of disease-causing pathogens explain the degree to which different countries’ policies are individualist or collectivist; NBC News has broadcast a story on the genetic basis for smoking addiction; ABC has had a story on the evolutionary origins of the incest taboo; and CBS has run a story titled “Eureka: Happiness Gene Found.” Mass media are inundated with this biology-explains-all ideology.

I’ll take one example so that I can review your assertion in some detail. Consider the NBC story .

Here is the title: “Can’t quit smoking? Blame your genes”

Here is the first sentence: “Scientists say they have pinpointed a genetic link that makes people more likely to get hooked on tobacco, causing them to smoke more cigarettes, making it harder to quit, and leading more often to deadly lung cancer.”

The article goes on to say: ““This is kind of a double whammy gene,’‘ said Christopher Amos, a professor of epidemiology at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and author of one of the studies. “It also makes you more likely to be dependent on smoking and less likely to quit smoking.’‘”

And: ““This is really telling us that the vulnerability to smoking and how much you smoke is clearly biologically based,’‘ said psychiatry professor Dr. Laura Bierut, of Washington University in St. Louis…”

And: “Kari Stefansson, lead author of the largest of the three studies and chief executive of deCode Genetics of Iceland, said the increased lung cancer risk was indirect, and that the variant caused more addiction and more smoking.”

Do you dispute that this article argues that there is a demonstrated genetic cause for the propensity to smoke?

Here is what the Nature paper that is the key basis for this specific claim says:

Here we identify a common variant in the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor gene cluster on chromosome 15q24 with an effect on smoking quantity, ND and the risk of two smoking-related diseases in populations of European descent. The variant has an effect on the number of cigarettes smoked per day in our sample of smokers. The same variant was associated with ND in a previous genome-wide association study that used low-quantity smokers as controls, and with a similar approach we observe a highly significant association with ND.

In other words there is a genome-wide association study that shows an association between this gene cluster and number of cigarettes smoked.

Do you agree that it is a GWAS that is the basis of the claim in the NBC article?

Here is what I said in my article about the use of a GWAS to establish causality for most mental states:

Media outlets will often speak loosely of things such as a “happiness gene,” a “gay gene,” or a “smart gene.” The state-ofthe-art method for finding such a link is something called a “genome-wide association study” (GWAS). In a GWAS, scientists use blood or saliva samples to sequence the DNA for a group of several thousand people who exhibit a trait or behavior of interest (the “case group”), and for a second group of several thousand who do not exhibit the trait or behavior (the “control group”). Scientists then look for genetic differences between the two groups. In cases where a single malfunctioning gene creates, for example, a catastrophic disease that overwhelms other genetic and environmental factors, a GWAS can quickly pinpoint the culprit. Sometimes, however, the behavior or trait is caused by several interacting genes—so that, for example, Gene 1 has some effect only if Gene 2 has a special structure. This is called “epistatic interaction,” and can involve a large number of genes. Epistatic interactions make genetic effects harder to identify. Scientists deal with this problem and others by creating larger and larger case and control groups. The scaling up of such studies is among the most exciting frontiers in genetics. It is essentially an engineering problem, and money poured into solving it will likely improve human health through genetic screening and, ultimately, therapies.

Seeing this momentum, it is natural to assume that eventually we will have explained all human behavior, not just diseases caused by one or a small number of interacting genes. But the GWAS technique hits structural limits when applied to conditions that involve epistatic interactions among lots of genes. Mental activity is now widely believed by scientists to depend on many genes (though mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder may turn out to be partial exceptions). A person has about 20,000 genes, of which more than 5,000 are believed to play some role in regulating brain function. Consider a simplified case in which some personality characteristic—aggressiveness, for example—is regulated by 100 genes, each of which can have two possible states (“on” or “off”). The combinatorial math is daunting: There are more than a trillion trillion possible combinations of these gene states. Thus we could sequence the DNA of all 6.7 billion human beings and still not know which genes are responsible for aggressiveness.

A second limitation of a GWAS is that it detects association rather than causation. Suppose we found that a case group of persons suffering from a disease had a greater incidence of some gene than did a control group, but that we failed to notice that the case group was disproportionately of Chinese ancestry. Culturally transmitted behaviors in the case group might be responsible for the disease, even if these behaviors had nothing to do with the gene in question. That is, the gene could be nothing more than a marker for Chinese ancestry, and hence for participation in behaviors that cause the disease. Geneticists call this problem “stratification,” and deal with it by carefully matching individuals in the case and control groups to ensure that the groups really are comparable. The problem is that these stratification effects can be fiendishly subtle. No matter how carefully we match cases with controls, there can always be some unobserved environmental factor correlated with, but not caused by, a genetic difference between groups, and this environmental factor might be what is actually causing the disease.

Further, to think in terms of genes is to abstract away from a biochemical reality that is far more complex. On one hand, a gene is not an atomic entity, but a sophisticated machine with many components. Much as in the progress of particle physics over the past century, we keep discovering components-within-components of the genetic mechanism that are relevant to physical and mental outcomes, and it’s entirely plausible that we will eventually get all the way down to subatomic quantum effects as drivers of behavior. On the other hand, as we move away from the genome itself, we see that other dimly understood biochemical processes have a large impact on how the information contained in the gene gets expressed as an observable human characteristic. And all of this is before we consider interactions of the human organism as a whole with those factors that we typically term “environmental,” ranging from nutrition and exposure to pathogens to parenting styles and childhood experiences.

So how is a GWAS showing an association between Gene X and aggressiveness different from a social-science study showing a correlation between watching lots of violent TV and aggressiveness? Mathematically, it’s not. In both cases we start by measuring aggressiveness for each person. We then compile for each person a list of data providing information on potential causes of aggressiveness: in one case genomic information, and in the other, sociological observations on childhood experiences, school quality, and so on. In the first case we observe that aggressive people have a higher incidence of Gene X; in the second that they watch a lot of violent TV. The reliability of GWAS studies is thus subject to the same limitations that we think of in connection with sociology or economics (as opposed to, say, chemistry). The only way around this—the only way to attain the precision of chemistry —would be actually to show the chain of biochemical processes by which a set of named genes creates the observable brain functions collectively defined as “aggressiveness.” Of course, if we could do that, we would have no need for a GWAS study.

The claims of causality that arise from such studies should accordingly be treated with the appropriately intense skepticism that we apply to sociological or econometric studies.

Now, you may obviously dispute the validity of my argument for why we should treat the results of a GWAS as an assertion of causality when applied to most mental states with intense skepticism, but I think this NBC piece is an almost perfect illustration of the dynamic that I was trying to explain to readers.

— Jim Manzi · May 27, 03:30 PM · #
Jim Manzi [May 26, 08:15 PM]: “If by “genetic maximalists” you mean (as I did in my article) something like “people who argue beyond the scientific evidence that normal human mental characteristics are operationally predictable”, then examples are [Steve Sailer] and all of those who authored, edited and approved the numerous high-profile mass media pieces that I have identified.”

Jason Malloy [May 27, 10:25 AM]: Challenges each of Jim’s characterization of journalists as “genetic maximalists” on the evidence of their articles.

That leaves only Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who are dead.

For living public intellectuals who can join Sailer in being miscast as Gattacans, James Watson (of course), Charles Murray, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and Nicholas Wade come to mind.

As far as actual “genetic maximalists” who are both alive and in the public eye, I nominate Jeremiah Wright, David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, James Cone, and Leonard Jeffries.

— AMac · May 27, 03:37 PM · #
Jason:

Manzi’s approach to behavior genetics is what Slate writer Daniel Engber dubbed “radical skepticism”, the rejection of competing scientific paradigms as the source of knowledge, and the embrace of biased nihilism: people can believe what is convenient for them to believe, not limited by scientific paradigms, because most competing scientific paradigms on important topics are said to leave too much room for doubt with their rudimentary methods. It is the basis for much corporate science, global warming “skepticism”, the latest generation of “Intelligent Design” Creationism, and of course No Child Left Behind.

This would be a lot more convincing if I had not written NR cover article on global warming that starts with the following words: “It is no longer possible, scientifically or politically, to deny that human activities have very likely increased global temperatures…”, another article for NRO attacking the emptiness of intelligent design and pointing to the Modern Synthesis as a powerful scientific framework, and yet another NR article arguing that an improved approach to American education involves a radical restructuring focused on breaking the teacher’s unions and providing choice to families.

In regard to the balance of your comment, I don’t want to try to re-argue the genes-IQ-race debate, and will just refer readers to the long post and discussion on this from last year with specific reference to the parts of this post where I go through why the math works to make estimates of heritability at the individual level a much more mathematically tractable problem than at the group level. Finally, I’ll note that I dispute that “paradigmatic science” has reached a consensus conclusion that group differences in IQ test scores have a genetic basis.

— Jim Manzi · May 27, 04:05 PM · #
To Jim Manzi —

Your May 27, 11:30 AM comment is a response to Jason Malloy’s review of the media pieces you had cited. Malloy begins his May 27, 10:25 AM comment by quoting you. From your National Review article:

“Mass media are inundated with this biology-explains-all ideology.”

From your May 26, 08:15 PM comment:

“If by “genetic maximalists” you mean (as I did in my article) something like “people who argue beyond the scientific evidence that normal human mental characteristics are operationally predictable”, then examples are [Steve Sailer] and all of those who authored, edited and approved the numerous high-profile mass media pieces that I have identified.”

The quotes you select from the NBC report and from Nature support Malloy’s position. Here are the non-maximilist, not biology-explains-all qualifiers and hedges from your NBC quote:

— makes people more likely to get hooked on tobacco
— leading more often to deadly lung cancer
— “It also makes you more likely to be dependent on smoking and less likely to quit smoking.”
— “the vulnerability to smoking and how much you smoke is clearly biologically based”
— Stefansson said the increased lung cancer risk was indirect, and that the variant caused more addiction and more smoking

And qualifiers and hedges from the Nature abstract:

— we identify a common variant… with an effect on smoking quantity, ND and the risk of two smoking-related diseases
— The variant has an effect on the number of cigarettes smoked per day in our sample of smokers.
— The same variant was associated with ND in a previous genome-wide association study

So neither journalists nor scientists may report on risks, likelihoods, probabilities, likely effects, correlations, and associations without being outed as “genetic maximalists”?!

Where in either article (or in the other articles that you selected as examplars) do the authors reveal themselves as adherents to biology-explains-all? Where do they show their belief that normal human mental characteristics are operationally predictable, as opposed to being likely influenced by the actions of certain genes?

— AMac · May 27, 04:09 PM · #
One thing that is established beyond any possibility of scientific doubt, of course, is that the genetic variability in IQ within races is much larger than the variability between races; any ethnic group of nontrivial size will have plenty of smart people and plenty of dumb people, and basing, say, educational policy on group rather than individual characteristics is therefore not only unAmerican but scientifically misguided.

This observation is intended to apply to societies like the USA which have social mobility and mixing between ethnic groups. In such a society, it is hard to see how ethnic differences in IQ are relevant to any sort of social or educational policy (except to indicate that policies based on ethnicity can lead to bad consequences such as systematic mismatching of students with schools).

On the other hand, the IQ distribution of an ENTIRE society can be very relevant — certain countries just don’t have enough smart people to modernize well, especially because global mobility results in a “brain drain”; other countries have relatively few dumb people which allows them to achieve social results more difficult to obtain in a more mixed society.

— Joe Shipman · May 27, 04:39 PM · #
Here are the first three paragraphs of an article on a newly-discovered apparent genetic influence on the risk of developing lung cancer. Medical journalist Michael Smith writes —

Gene Defect Doubles Risk of Lung Cancer

ROCHESTER, Minn., May 27 — People with a common genetic mutation have up to twice the risk of lung cancer as do people without the variation, researchers here said.

Lung cancer patients were 70% more likely to carry one or more copies of a mutation that predisposes to alpha1-antitrypsin deficiency than were unrelated, cancer-free controls, according to Ping Yang, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic.

And they were twice as likely to carry such mutations as their cancer-free siblings, Dr. Yang and colleagues reported in the May 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Smith and Yang appear to use qualifiers in the much the same way as did the authors of the NBC and the Nature pieces quoted, supra. Are they equally vulnerable to charges of genetic-maximalism and belief that normal human… characteristics are operationally predictable?

— AMac · May 27, 04:41 PM · #
We’re seeing the pernicious political consequences of an unthinking geneticism right here, in the ungrounded racist stuff about group differences. There’s no scientific evidence that black people are immutably or even genetically stupider than white people — we don’t even have any genticically understood definition of “stupid”, so how could there be?

The IQ stuff is just a shiny veneer put on the anecdotal observation that Africans have not so far been very successful in Western societies by Western rules, which has many explanations. Manzi is quite correct to compare this evidence to social science evidence, since that’s all it is.

The game-changer here would be a real (physical, mechanical) understanding of how genes interact to determine higher-level brain function. At this point we don’t even have a deep physical understanding of higher-level brain function itself (localization within the brain is not an understanding).

Manzi’s point about genetic interactions is very important here. Since higher-level abilities are highly interactive even at the level of casual observation of behavior (many, many dimensions of personality and environment interact to produce someone who is intellectually productive), it is quite reasonable to suppose they will be highly interactive at the genetic level as well.

The various race types here have no scientific background on this question. The one person who does — Razib — has so far as I can see been asking us to take on faith the idea that genetic effects in this area will turn out to be linear and not interactive. At least, he didn’t present real evidence for his view in the early comments which I read. My priors would be quite the opposite, and I’d need much more to move them.

— mq · May 27, 05:50 PM · #

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