"An explosion without a bang"

The International Journal of Epidemiology has republished a paper on the marginal importance of shared environment by Plomin and Daniels: "Why are children in the same family so different from one another."  Neven Sesardic wonders why such a supposedly revolutionary change in thinking has had such little effect:

However astonishing this empirical discovery was (as it definitely was), it did not make a splash. Or, to mix the metaphors, it was like an explosion without a bang. The lack of reaction to such an amazing result is itself amazing. It is not just that this truly remarkable finding was not widely reported in newspapers, magazines or popular science publications.The event was also largely ignored in many relevant parts of psychology. No re-examination there, no questioning of the fundamental presuppositions, no paradigm shift.

Despite mountains of the evidence, juvenile delinquents and their political enablers continue their officer Krupke defense for  bad behavior.  Be it accelerated evolution or complications in the "Out Africa" model we can expect more quiet explosions.

Leftist Eugenics??????

Previously, I dismissed the possibility of leftist Eugenics but having just read the retard hating philosopher Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left I am having second thoughts. 

Singer writes that the failures of the left are due in part to their ambivalence towards Darwin and this ambivalence was present from the beginning.  For example, the Marxist approved of the anti-clerical implication of the theory of evolution but insisted that it was no longer relevant for discussions of human nature.  Singer writes,

Plekhanov, the leading nineteenth-century Russian Marxist, followed Engels in holding that 'Marx's inquiry begins precisely where Darwin's inquiry ends' and this became the conventional wisdom of Marxism.  Lenin said that 'the transfer of biological concepts into the field of social science is a meaningless phrase." As late as the 1960s, school children in the Soviet Union were still taught the simple slogan: 'Darwinism is the science of biological evolution, Marxism of social evolution.'...It is intriguing how two very different ideologies - Christianity and Marxism - agreed with each other in insisting on a gulf between humans and animals, and therefore that evolutionary theory cannot be applied to human beings.

Singer suggests that the Left leverage human altruism to create a better world.  Then he gets a little weird:

We are the first generation to understand not only that we have evolved, but also the mechanisms by which we have evolved...Hegel portrayed the culmination of history as state of  Absolute Knowledge, in which Mind knows itself for what it is, and hence achieves its own freedom.  We don't have to buy Hegel's metaphysics to see that something similar really has happened in the last fifty years...to those who fear the adding to the power of government and the scientific establishment, this seems more of a danger than a source of freedom.  In a more distant future that we can still barely glimpse, it may be turn out to be the prerequisite for a new kind of freedom.

So we have Hegel and more power to government to achieve true freedom.  What could go wrong?

Harvard Replicates Sailer's PISA Results

Eight months later, the Harvard Kennedy School has replicated and expanded on Steve Sailer's  PISA analysis ethnicity.   The percent of whites who are proficient in math is 41.8 which is better than the scores from France and Iceland and comparable to Australia. New Zealand, and Germany.   Reading scores are even better.

They agree with Sailer that Whitey's reading scores are adequate but insist that higher math scores are required since Whitey's percent proficient is "well behind" Germany's (45%) and has as gap of "over 25%" with Finland (57%).  Note, in the Finnish comparison they use a simple but effective trick to inflate a difference by ignoring a 15% absolute difference to report a larger relative difference.  

  

They try to make a connection between economic growth and math proficiency and present a graph without Japan.  Gee, why wouldn't they want to include Japan?  

The data presentation is good but would it be a huge strain on Harvard Kennedy School to calculate a confidence interval or something so we could tell if Ireland is really less proficient than Lichtenstein?  Someone may want to know!

Cousin Humping is Good for Science!

So if Kevin Mitchell is right and rare variants are important for IQ then a good place to look is retards (i.e., Intellectually Disabled).  From a review paper by Kaufman (2010) on the causes of non-syndromic intellectually disabled (NS-ID):

Under the rare variants model of causation, large consanguineous families are particularly useful. Rare mutations, which may be identified in such families, can provide us with information about the types of etiological aberrations in NS-ID as well as the genes and relevant pathways that may be essential for normal neuronal functioning.

People with NS-ID have and IQ < 70 without  co-morbidities.  So HBD chick should lay off the cousin bangers.

Ian Deary's new paper

There are many comments on Ian Deary's new paper.  Among the big time news sites: The Scientist gives the best overview, the Washington Post is a little shallow but balanced while the Atlantic Monthly is the home of diehard liberal creationist.

Razib gives a more in depth review and notes that the paper applies the same method to IQ that Yang (2010) applied to height.  The method is a way to show where to look for the missing heritability of complex traits.  It fits the phenotype as a function of thousands of SNPs modeled as a random effect thereby yielding an estimate of the lower of heritability with out some exotic data of twins, half sibs, or adoptees. The method must have been controversial since several authors wrote a commentary, Visscher 2010, explaining the method in detail in a separate journal. 

In the comments section of the Razib's blog Kevin Mitchel does not agree with the paper's conclusion that the this means the IQ genes are common with small effects and claims, rather, that they could uncommon with large effects. Does it really matter?  Either way the relationship between genetics and IQ is going to be complicated and never complete until the biology is understood.  

Some look forward to the study will not unleash the HBDapocolypse: that glorious day when the sky parts and irrefutable evidence of inherent human differences spreads throughout the land.  Maybe Steve Sailer replaces David Brooks at the NYT or Half Sigma becomes a Federal judge.  Do not hold your breath it is going to take many studies.

Oh No...

Some legitimate blogger is linking and criticizing my post on Duckworth's sloppy meta-analysis and threatening my well-deserved obscurity. Her post was too boring to finish but she seemed to imply that I would not submit my analysis to a peer reviewed journal because of my blog roll of bad guys or something. That is incorrect. As you can tell from this sorry excuse of a blog, I am very lazy.


The only reason I posted on Duckworth's tedious meta-analysis is that the results are driven  by a paper written by someone who actually pleaded guilty to a research related crime. That was too hilarious to pass up. That and the fact that you can publish a meta-analysis in PNAS without a forest plot. 

A bad apple in Duckworth's IQ-Motivation meta-analysis?

A new paper by Duckworth et. al. (2011) that links motivation to performance on IQ tests has interested Sailer, Bryan Caplan, and Tyler Cowen.  The regular media claimed the study weakens evidence around IQ testing.  It does not.  The study supports the predictive power of IQ tests but claims that they are a composite measure of intelligence and motivation.  If true, if motivation is more malleable, this could help explain the Flynn effect and make it easier to find genes associated with intelligence.  But after getting reviewing the paper's meta-analysis of randomized studies of motivation and IQ, I have my doubts about the robustness of "average" 0.64 improvement in SD  due to incentives.

The paper's meta-analysis of the 46 studies was very good but they neglected to make a "forest plot" that graphs the effect sizes and confidence intervals from each study.  So I did it.  The size of the effect circle is proportional to the inverse of the effect's standard error, i.e., bigger studies that get more weight have bigger circles.

Two things are apparent: the study outcomes are highly variable, i.e., they are heterogeneous, and there are only three large experiment (2, 3, and 4 in the graph) that showed motivation leading to a large improvement in IQ score and hence are very influential.

The three experiments were run on special ed kids and written up in one paper by Bruening and Zella (1978) while the first author was at the Oakdale Center for Developmental Disabilities.  A few years later Bruening admitted to fabricating data for other experiments on retarded kids at the same center and the case became a text book  example of scientific fraud.  Although there were no allegations of fraud on the 1978 paper, I re-ran the meta-analysis with out Bruening's data and found the the estimate (using the random effects model) was now 0.48 SD and was no longer significant ( p = .07).  This makes me uneasy about accepting Duckworth's results without further replication.