West Hunter

It now looks as if the majority of the genetic variance in IQ is the product of mutational load, and the same may be true for many psychological traits. To the extent this is the case, a lot of human psychological variation must be non-adaptive. Maybe some personality variation fulfills an evolutionary function, but a lot does not. Being a dumb asshole may be a bug, rather than a feature. More generally, this kind of analysis could show us whether particular low-fitness syndromes, like autism, were ever strategies – I suspect not.

It’s bad new news for medicine and psychiatry, though. It would suggest that what we call a given type of mental illness, like schizophrenia, is really a grab-bag of many different syndromes. The ultimate causes are extremely varied: at best, there may be shared intermediate causal factors. Not good news for drug development: individualized medicine is a threat, not a promise.

On the other hand, this bodes well for our secret project aimed at ‘accidentally’ creating a super-Neanderthal.

Often you can come up with better explanation by taking a wider view. For example, I’ve heard people suggest that Europeans have lower IQs than Ashkenazi Jews because of priestly celibacy.
But a broader perspective suggests that is not key: lots of populations that never had anything like priestly celibacy score lower and accomplish less than Western Europeans. Western Europeans aren’t anomalously dumb – Ashkenazi Jews are anomalously smart. Look for an explanation based on their genetics and history, not someone else’s .

In the same way, when looking at the wave of extinctions in North America about 12,000 years ago, the story becomes clearer if you consider the extinctions in South America ( a bit later), in the Caribbean islands ( thousands of years later), in Australia ( about 46,000 years ago) , on Madagascar and New Zealand, on various oceanic islands ( flightless birds disappear in Oceania and the Azores): the common factor is the arrival of modern humans.

Similarly, when considering the origin of cognitive differences between racial groups in the US, a wider perspective is helpful. Probably low scores in Zimbabwe are not caused by structural racism or implicit bias. You might want to blame Mugabe – but scores are similarly low throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Testosterone Rex is a really stupid book. Interesting that none of the Establishment reviewers noticed. Anyhow, I was talking with a friend, and he opined that this is always the case – all the books by self-professed feminists are stupid. Since the world doesn’t work the way they’d like it to, this might seem inevitable, but on other questions I have to say that at least some of the people pushing false theories do a technically better job, are more proficient obscurers of the truth. For example, when Lewontin said that most genetic variation in humans is within-group [true] and therefore Pygmies can’t really be short [but they are short], he was pushing something untrue, but he didn’t sound nearly as dumb as Cordelia Fine when she claims that a guy getting tons of nookie won’t end up with extra kids.

If there are counterexamples, tell me.

Scott Alexander talks about our paper, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. He thinks it a good explanation of a burst of contributions by Ashkenazi Jews in the exact sciences in the early 20th century. His guys then comment extensively, if not always particularly wisely.

Milton said ‘who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? ‘ – but he was wrong. I’ve seen it put to the worse time and time again. A major fraction of western universities are dominated by various kinds of lunatics – much more so than 50 years ago – and the situation is deteriorating. Sometimes the bad guys win the arguments, not least because there are a million lies for every truth, and it’s not surprising that some of those lies are more attractive. People aren’t logic machines.

Searching for truth via open debate works sometimes, on some subjects, with some people. But on many topics falsehoods prevail. In war, though, there is a systematic bias towards truth. It helps you win. A tendency, one that can often be overwhelmed by disparities in material or population, or by chance events, but is nonetheless real.

When one side is really crazy – drastically misaligned with reality – even big numerical advantages are sometimes not enough.

Being the strongest power gives you more latitude to indulge your fantasies. Women aren’t ever going to make useful Army Rangers: if we were fighting a war of survival, one in which that kind of infantry combat was key and against a foe with comparable resources, we would either shed that delusion or lose. War, serious war, keeps your head on straight [or chops it off] . That’s one reason that governments in Europe generally didn’t get as goofy as sometimes happened in China , late in a dynasty. Not for long.

The South didn’t want to use black soldiers- if they were effective, it would be a strike against their whole social theory. But winners are interested in winning, not some silly proposition.

Part II of my recent interview with James Miller is now up.

Average IQ scores have gone up a lot over the years, although they seem to be plateauing.

Do I think that people really got smarter over that period? Based on real-world accomplishments? Not one bit. Probably they’ve gotten a bit dumber, from selection, and more than a bit dumber, from demographic change.

Most importantly, math subscores haven’t changed much. “There is a subtest of the Wechsler called Arithmetic. A typical question: If a widget costs 18 cents, and if you buy 3 widgets and give the clerk 1 dollar, how much change should you get back? This is one of the subtests showing the smallest Flynn effect. Over 50 years it showed 0.23-SD increase in adults, whereas Raven’s Matrices showed a 2.39-SD increase. ”