'Untouchable' science
Nicola Jones
Tuesday, 03 February 2009 19:01 UTC
Should scientists study race and IQ?
A pair of opposing commentaries published in Nature (vol 457; 12 Feb 2009) tackle the sensitive proposition that gender- or race-linked differences in intelligence ought to be studied.
Steven Rose argues that studies investigating possible links between race, gender and intelligence do no good to science or society. Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue that such research is both morally defensible and important for the pursuit of truth.
The commentaries can be read on Nature’s website (password required).
Neither party saw the other’s argument before publication. They have the opportunity to respond to each other and to continue the debate online here, where we also invite contributions from our readers.
Updated 11 February 2009 23:55 UTC
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Why are there no good white jazz musicians?
“A lot of white critics kept talking about all these white jazz musicians, imitators of us, like they was some great motherfuckers and everything. Now, I´m not saying that these guy´s weren´t good musicians, because they were: Gerry, Lee, Stan, Dave, Kai, Lennie, all of them were good musicians. But they didn´t start nothing, and they knew it, and they weren´t the best of what was being done.”
As Diamond noted creativity, unsurprisingly, is everywhere. I find that when one makes this point to the disadvantage of the privileged one is more likely judged as prejudiced (responses to my piece) than when the point is made the other way around (discussion on IQ).
It is all nonsense, isn´t it? No one questions the brilliance of the astonishing musical development from King Oliver and Louis via Little Jazz to Dizzy and Fats and further on to Brownie, Lee and Miles or from Händel, Bach, Rameau and Scarlatti via Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to Haydn, Mozart and then to Beethoven. Not to mention what happened during seven months at the Five Spot Café in New York in 1958:
Ahmed Abdul-Malik replaced Wilbur Ware, pictured below:
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Ruth Rosin: "Heritable traits as such, do not exist at all. Therefore, there can be no heritable intelligence, and, since there is no such thing as heritable intelligence, there can be no such thing as heritable difference in intelligence!
I stressed in an earlier post that all individual traits (including behavioral traits), of all living organisms, develop ontogenetically (in the individual organism), under inseparable (!) effects of both (!) genes & environment (nature & nurture)."
I am very sorry, but this is simply rubbish. Even though heritability can not in real life be clinically separated from environmental effects, they are different things and they can be studied as separate causes, with mutual feedback. This is quite normal science which is done all the time. I recommend for you Michael Rutter’s book “Genes and behavior” which is a good introduction to all the methods to do this.
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Reflections on the debate.
I’ve read the posts following Ceci and Williams and my original essays with interest, though sometimes with a little frustration. We were asked to discuss the theme of ‘untouchable science’ with specific reference to race, gender, genes and intelligence, and indeed both essays did just this (with perhaps rather more convergence of views than our commissioners might have anticipated). As is often the case, such discussions tend to take on a life of their own, perhaps far removed from their starting point, and largely focussing on the issue of race rather than gender. So a reminder might be in order.As a number of contributors imply either that I am advocating banning research or that I speak for ‘political correctness’ (whatever that much abused term might mean) or am part of some ‘left wing thought police,’ I would challenge them to quote anything that I said which could be so interpreted. I do however broadly support the UK legislation banning hate speech. My essay argued that research, to meet the criteria of good science, must ask answerable questions, and that some apparently scientific questions, such as “what are the relative contributions of genes and environment to differences in IQ scores between different ‘racial’ groups,” are not scientifically answerable because they misunderstand genetics, so to persist in asking them is either to display scientific ignorance or to have some other non-scientific agenda in mind. Of course people are entitled to pursue whatever wild goose they wish, but they should not be surprised, or call foul, if responsible funding bodies have more pressing priorities. As for whether it is right to be indifferent to the social consequences of one’s research, I would reply that in a democratic society under the rule of law citizens are expected to be accountable for their actions.
Of course, IQ measures something, and correlates broadly with school performance (and income). And, like any other such performance measure, it will also have neurobiological correlates, which might be interesting to study. But as someone who has spent a lifetime of research investigating the neurobiological correlates of learning and memory I am only too well aware that correlations are not causes, and that a multitude of brain processes involving different biochemical mechanisms and different brain regions, are brought into play for even the simplest of learning tasks. There are few one-to-one correlations between brain processes and complex behaviours known to neuroscience, and depending on developmental experiences individuals of the same species/gender/’race’ may use different neural strategies to solve any given problem. Simplistic collapsing of complex social categories, like ‘race’ or gender and attempting to map them onto brain processes or, still worse, onto genes without reference to developmental processes, is no way to do science.
For references see:
Rose, S (2005) Lifelines: biology beyond determinism, Cape/Vintage
Rose, S (2006) The 21st Century Brain: explaining mending and manipulating the mind Cape/Vintage -
Reply to Steven Rose.
Mendel found and defined distinct units and patterns (genes) only by segregetation analysis (without knowing anything on the chemistry of the traits investigated or their so-called heritability). This is the logic of Mendelian genetics, underlying all true genetics. The discovery of the chemical nature of the genes underlying the flower colours of the Mendelian peas needed more than 100 years and to understand the details of the develepmont of any higher organism will need furter 100 years or more. At the beginning, the organism is seen by geneticists as a black box. But the indirect proof of the existence of certain genes by segregation analysis and later the direct proof including the decoding of the genome opens possibilities to understand biochemical and developmental processes never dreamed before. Also the discovery of genes underlying general intelligence (IQ), see Major genes of general intelligence , would open such possibilites never dreamed before by you and me. But it would also be the final scientific proof of the inequality of men with regard to general intelligence. And this is your problem.
What you intend is to define IQ genetics (which always will find different allele frequencies in different populations and different social strata, see the final chapter of Genes underlying national IQ means ) as “no good science” and publications on this as “hate speech”. You write: “I would reply that in a democratic society under the rule of law citizens are expected to be accountable for their actions.” Of course, any communist society is calling himself an example of a true democracy, too, and I was forced to grow up, to live and to work in such a society for more than 40 years, as you know, see It could be Neo-Lysenkoism .
J. P. Roos wrote (see further above): “But it is something which would need to be studied, which would need lots of funding and competitive research. And the person who finds the explanation, should deserve a Nobel prize.
I am afraid, this is naiveté. IQ genes are the most unwanted discovery in this democratic world, and the discoverer, should be ever any, will not deserve the Nobel prize but the fate on which De Tocqueville wrote: “But in a nation where democratic institutions exist, there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it. The majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an autodafe, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. … Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him …. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death”.
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“my essay argued that research, to meet the criteria of good science, must ask answerable questions”
Would the Cochran, Harpending & Henry thesis about Ashkenazi Jewish IQ be an answerable question? It seems to be subject to a cheap, simple experimental test: see whether heterozygotes for the diseases have higher IQ’s than their non-carrier siblings.
G. Cochran, J. Hardy, H. Harpending, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (5), pp. 659–693 (2006). (http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf).
Steven Rose seems to suggest that such knowledge can only have negative implications.
However, the assumption that groups must be equal in every way can itself lead to problems.
One is that if one group is particularly successful it must be due to unfairness. This leads to resentment which can result in persecution. Many atrocities of the twentieth century were committed in the name of egalitarianism, targeting people whose success was taken as evidence of their criminality. However, if you see the results of psychometric testing a lot of the group disparites can be explained.
Instead of shutting down research, people with progressive sympathies should study the issues and how we should respond.
Peter Singer has suggested this (‘A Darwinian Left’), and Steve Pinker has made contributions as well (see ‘The Blank Slate’). -
While I think we should not have any objection to work on the links between genetic setup and brain performance, the topic “race and intelligence”, as such is so deeply flawed that it cannot be part of Science, but simply another avatar of a variety of ideologies.
Reasons? Intelligence has to be defined. The IQ tests are interesting to measure … the outcome of the IQ tests. No less, no more. There are other definitions of what intelligence could be. One definition, derived from Piaget’s work, is “the number of steps that a given person can identify to relate consequences to causes”. This is much more interesting (but certainly difficult to measure) as it can apply to a variety of situations and persons, including illiterate persons. It would be fairly easy to find out other definitions.
Race? Here, a genetic (of course not phenotypic) definition might be proposed. Unfortunately this is now quite difficult as the level of genetic mix up in the human population is enormous. There may still exist a few human isolates, that might be named “races”, perhaps, but they are extremely rare.
Now, there is no doubt that there are links between genes and brain build up and development. There is no doubt that this must have consequences in behaviour, including behaviour we tend to label “intelligence”. But the problem (and this goes back to the second definition of intelligence I proposed) is that correlation does not mean cause. Extreme cases (a gene which would lead to a brainless infant) are trivial, but other cases are much more complicated to deal with. The standard, but utterly inintelligent intuition, is the confusion between a genotype and a phenotype. All living organisms result from the unfolding of an algorithm of construction. This implies that all living organisms display both a phenotype and a genotype, via interaction through a specific environment. We all know that, and this is the basis of “personnalised” medicine (pharmacogenomics) for example.
A brief conclusion. We need to know why we would be interested in these studies. And, of course, this drives us to moral issues. The main question is: what do we chose as a value for a human being? In our time, unfortunately, the only value seems to be venal value. I prefer Kant’s definition: has dignity what has no price. With this definition we need to accept that all human beings have equal rights whatever studies we wish to perform on them (including, perhaps, the right to refuse some type of studies…)
And then, back to science. The remarkable feature of human beings is that they can do what we are doing now, recursively speak about themselves. Recursivity has the remarkable consequence that the outcome of any discussion changes each time it has a follow up. And the link with our ‘intelligence’, is that this process is creating novel information. Stated otherwise, our brains are set up in such a way that they behave as information traps, recovering information, reorganising it, and even creating it.
This remarkable property comes from the fact that, as shown by Rolf Landauer in 1961, creation of information is reversible (does not require energy). However accumulating information is quite another matter, it requires energy to make room to permit progressively to put together novel creations of information. And this process requires energy. But not in the way we would tend to think about it, energy is not used to degrade, but to prevent degradation of relevant information. In the brain, if we accept the general model of selective stabilisation of synapses as the basis of learning, this means that there are processes that disconnect synapses, using energy to preserve those that are functioning. Any brain which would have this process active would tend to accumulate information.
The consequence is that, except in a few cases (such as the brainless infant) all human brains able to go on with this learning process (perhaps associated to the building up of a form of language, where recursivity is essential) will be creative. Can we compare creations? I think not, and this is why the ideology underlying the problem posed as “race and intelligence” is flawed at its root.
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We learn from simple examples.
How do measure intelligence between bacteria that have expertly acquired separate metabolic skills to benefit from unique resources avalaible in their environment?
Does that make the bacterium with a potential expertise in the metabolism of one substrate over another more intelligent that that which has other sets of metabolic specialities? How do you quantify their intelligence in the first place. How do you quantify the hurdles they had individually overturned to get to the point where they are today?
By no doubt will it be interesting to understand the science behind these different intelligent behaviours. But comparing them to an arbituarily chosen standard (usually ourselves) seems to be a kind of science that supremacists seek to achieve.
All that which is considered the hallmark of intelligence today is based on western civilization. We have failed to understand the implications and injury and abuse colonialism and imperalism had on the intelligence of those that were subdued! Using intelligence to explain poverty is an absurd and ludicrous science because different societies prior to colonization had different measures for what wealth was and what poverty entailed – the values which have changed and they are struggling with a culture that was alien to theirs.
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The debate about what IQ really measure is misdirected: it is like the eternal discussions about if the Hirsch index h is really the “good one” scalar indicator to how to measure the impact of a scientist work. Anyone knowns that inteligence, like scientificty quality is a complex that only can be partially evaluated by a multifactorial bunch of indicators.
The true value of such indicators is another one: supose that research reveals that absence of pre-school education or some food addictive leads to a fall of 15 points of IQ in some children population. This IQ research should be dismissed due to the fact that IQ is a poor measure of inteligence or should us be alerted that something is going wrong? Like any statistical indicator, IQ is limited, but in the absence of statistical indicators we cannot even define the concept of social (in)justice… -
Anonymous
“Race? Here, a genetic (of course not phenotypic) definition might be proposed. Unfortunately this is now quite difficult as the level of genetic mix up in the human population is enormous. There may still exist a few human isolates, that might be named “races”, perhaps, but they are extremely rare.”
There are readily identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. (See Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268–275, 2005.)
As Steve Hsu explains:
This clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa….
We see that there can be dramatic group differences in phenotypes even if there is complete allele overlap between two groups – as long as the frequency or probability distributions are distinct. But it is these distributions that are measured by the metric we defined earlier. Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences.
This leads us to two very distinct possibilities in human genetic variation:
Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.
Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.
Note H1 is under constant revision, as new genetically driven group differences (e.g., particularly in disease resistance) are being discovered. According to the mantra of H1 these must all (by definition) be superficial differences.
A standard argument against H2 is that the 50k years during which groups have been separated is not long enough for differential natural selection to cause any group differences in deep characteristics. I find this argument quite naive, given what we know about animal breeding and how evolution has affected the (ever expanding list of) “superficial” characteristics. Many genes are now suspected of having been subject to strong selection over timescales of order 5k years or less. For further discussion of H2 by Steve Pinker, see here.
The predominant view among social scientists is that H1 is obviously correct and H2 obviously false. However, this is mainly wishful thinking. Official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association even endorse the view that race is not a valid biological concept, which is clearly incorrect.
As scientists, we don’t know whether H1 or H2 is correct, but given the revolution in biotechnology, we will eventually. Let me reiterate, before someone labels me a racist: we don’t know with high confidence whether H1 or H2 is correct.
Finally, it is important to note that any group differences are statistical in nature and do not imply anything about particular individuals. Rather than rely on the scientifically unsupported claim that we are all equal, it would be better to emphasize that we all have inalienable human rights regardless of our abilities or genetic makeup.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-genomes-and.html
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html -
“This IQ research should be dismissed due to the fact that IQ is a poor measure of inteligence”
Actually, it seems to do a very good job in terms of academics, occupational performance, and even health outcomes.
Have a read of ‘Gottfredson, L. S. (2009). Logical fallacies used to dismiss the evidence on intelligence testing. In R. Phelps (Ed.), Correcting fallacies about educational and psychological testing (pp. 11-65). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.’
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies.pdf
“Does IQ explain socioeconomic inequalities in health? Evidence from a population based cohort study in the west of Scotland” Batty, G David, Der, Geoff, Macintyre, Sally, Deary, Ian J
‘Longitudinal cohort study of childhood IQ and survival up to age 76 (2001)’Whalley, Lawrence J, Deary, Ian J
http://en.scientificcommons.org/ian_j_deary
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