CapitalistImperialistPig

Most of us have some idea of what we mean by intelligence, but putting it into precise words is not so easy. Arun Gupta, who has seemingly been obsessed with IQ for a while, has collected definitions of intelligence from a thirty odd people who spent much of their careers studying the question. While the definitions have considerable overlap, they are anything but isomorphic. Some of the definitions are peculiar enough than one might reasonably deduce that cockroaches are smarter than people and bacteria are smarter still. Francis Galton seems to have been the first to systematically attempt to measure intelligence, but the tests he devised were failures. Alfred Binet wasn't actually trying to measure intelligence - he called what he measured "mental age" - but the mainly verbal tests he devised to measure educational readiness became the first IQ tests. (See the Wikipedia article: Intelligence Quotient for this and much else. Unlike Galton's attempts, th...

Some high school student has injected himself (or perhaps herself) into the most radioactive issue in social science by doing a science fair project on the subject as above . The hypothesis of the project: “If the average IQs of blacks, Southeast Asians, and Hispanics are lower than the average IQs of non-Hispanic whites and Northeast Asians, then the racial disproportionality in Humanities and International Studies Program (HISP) [the school program the student is in] is justified.” Well, kids make bad decisions, perhaps regardless of their own IQs. But I doubt that the student in question has advanced his or her chances of getting into an elite university. The article adds: The student who prepared the project was of Asian descent and has a history of making racists remarks in class, reports said. That's the article's entire characterization of the alleged perp. Fair and balanced? I report, you decide. The article helpfully adds: The controversial theory that rac...

Steve Hsu leads us to a new paper which finds evidence of recent selection for the polygenic traits height, educational attainment, and "self reported unibrow." Steve is particularly interested in the evidence for selection for genes associated (with educational attainment in Europeans) in East Asians. That selection appears to have occurred during the past 10,000 years. Although the paper is about 84 pages, most of that is figures and tables, with only about 19 pages of exposition. I found it more understandable than Steve's very brief summary. It's probably obvious that selection is important for polygenic traits, since most significant differences are polygenic, but data to date has been sparse. From the abstract: An open question in human evolution is the importance of polygenic adaptation: adaptive changes in the mean of a multifactorial trait due to shifts in allele frequencies across many loci. In recent years, several methods have been developed to d...

In what the NYT has labelled an "enormous success" a big genome wide association study is reputed to have found a number of gene variants associated with intelligence: In a significant advance in the study of mental ability, a team of European and American scientists announced on Monday that they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people. These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery. Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment. Still, the findings could make it possible to begin new experiments into the biological basis of reasoning and problem-solving, experts said. They could even help researchers determine which interventions would be most effective for children struggling to learn. I'm not too impressed with the story. The second quoted paragraph is mislead...

Because why settle for a lousy 60 standard deviations when you can have almost 70,000. Fans of genetic engineering of the brain (like Lumo and Steve Hsu) think that human brains can be tweaked to produce IQs of 1000, whatever that might mean. Those who have studied biology are more dubious. One component of IQ is mental processing speed, and that has got to be limited by the physiology of nerves. Fundamental neural processes take milliseconds or longer, and the basic design is not going to permit much speedup. Silicon transistors, on the other hand, are 1 million times faster. Another component of IQ is memory, short term and long. Given enough disk space, a computer can remember everything it has ever read, heard, or seen. A number of humans have been reported to have eidetic memories , but psychologists who have attempted to study it are highly dubious, though some children have short term eidetic memories. It's physiologically improbable that a person could store all th...

The short answer is that IQ is what IQ tests measure. That answer is saved from total circularity by the fact that there is a high correlation between results of a bunch of different tests of reasoning. Typical IQ tests have questions designed to test short term memory, general knowledge, ability to follow written or spoken instructions, and ability to reason concretely and abstractly, ability to generalize and analyze relationships as well as speed of mental processing. Early intelligence researchers noticed that there was a strong correlation among the results of rather different tests and the statistician and psychologist Spearman hypothesized that the correlation was due to an underlying g-factor, the g standing for general intelligence. A century or so later, our knowledge of the underlying biological substrate of IQ has made only limited progress. We know of lots of genetic and environmental factors that limit IQ, but have only vague indications of what things produce higher...

Steve Hsu is a physics prof with degrees from Harvard and Caltech, so he's got to be a smart guy, right? He writes a lot about IQ and it's genetic basis, and is evidently involved in efforts to isolate and cultivate those genetic elements, about which he blogs frequently . He is also, IMHO, a nut-job on the subject of IQ. He has, for example, expressed the opinion that genetic tinkering could produce humans with an IQ of 1000, something I think is as likely as genetic tinkering being able to produce a human who could run 100 meters in 2.0 seconds flat. Never mind that nobody has a clue as to what it means to have an IQ of 1000, or, for that matter, 210. His latest is entitled, The brute tyranny of g-loading: Lawrence Krauss and Joe Rogan, by which he implies that explaining gauge symmetry to Joe Rogan is prevented by the fact that Rogan is not smart enough to comprehend it. Now I don't know Rogan from Adam, and have no opinion on his IQ, and Hsu's post is a lot ...

Choose your parents wisely. That's at least partly because of genetics. A new study of 300,000 individuals reported in this week's Nature found 74 variant loci associated with educational attainment. From the Abstract: Here we report the results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for educational attainment that extends our earlier discovery sample1, 2 of 101,069 individuals to 293,723 individuals, and a replication study in an independent sample of 111,349 individuals from the UK Biobank. We identify 74 genome-wide significant loci associated with the number of years of schooling completed. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with educational attainment are disproportionately found in genomic regions regulating gene expression in the fetal brain. Candidate genes are preferentially expressed in neural tissue, especially during the prenatal period, and enriched for biological pathways involved in neural development. Our findings demonstrate that, even for a beh...

Lubosh has joined the fray. And PZ Myers has another rejoinder to Steve. Myers's latest is such a confused mishmash of dubious assertions, irrelevancies, and physicist baiting that it hurts me to say that he's mostly right, but he is. He claims, with no real evidence, that human IQ hasn't increased in the last 100,000 years. He makes a big deal of the fact that race horse speed hasn't increased in 50 or more years. This is true, but it ignores the fact that the effective breeding size of the race horse population is tiny - about 31 ancestors, and that artificial rules prohibit any kind of genetic engineering not known to the ancient Egyptians. He makes a big deal of the fact that super high IQs may not have been adaptive in the past, and that there are ethical and practical reasons why experimenting with genetic engineering of smarts might not to be a good idea. Lumo makes the point that this latter fact is irrelevant - for the moment we are talking about possi...

A slightly better one, that is. Steve Hsu's pursuit of IQ 1000 reminds me of a few, mostly quite modest, improvements that I would like for my current wetware. a)More durable memory. Steve reports that after reading a book, John von Neumann could recall every word. That would be useful. b)Faster learning. Why should endless repetition be needed to learn a new skill, like math, piano or Spanish? c)More alacrity at puzzle and problem solving. d)Faster neural cycling times. Milliseconds drag on. I wouldn't even need anything like the full million fold speedup to silicon based times - a modest factor of 1000 would be cool. Heck, even a factor of ten might be nice.

Steve Hsu and PZ Myers are apparently engaged in a bit of mutual trash talk. The subject is whether the human IQ can be significantly enhanced by genetic manipulation, with Steve, naturally, saying yea and a nay from PZ. I'm far from being a fan of Myers - he's way too dogmatic for my taste - but I would definitely give him this one on points. Myers: Stephen Hsu thinks super intelligent humans are coming. He thinks this because he’s very impressed with genetic engineering (he’s a physicist), and believes that the way to make people more intelligent is to adjust their genes, and therefore, more gene tweaking will lead to more intelligent people, inevitably. And not just intelligent, but super-intelligent, with IQs about 1000, even though he has no idea what that means, or for that matter, even though no one really knows what an IQ of 100 means. We’re going to figure out all the genes that are involved in intelligence, and then we’ll just turn the knob on each one of them up...

Thanks to Swedish military conscription tests that measure every eighteen year-old male's height, cognitive ability, and non-cognitive ability, Sweden has a great resource for tracking the correlation of these test scores with later life outcomes. Steve Hsu looks at a study which which does the math for corporate CEO's. It turns out that they are just a bit above average in each category (0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 SD respectively). Evidently, if you want to be a CEO, it might help to be a couple of inches taller than average, have an IQ of about 115, and a NCQ of around 122.5. About that Non Cognitive Ability (Steve's quote): [Non-cognitive ability:] Psychologists use test results and family characteristics in combination with one-on-one semi-structured interviews to assess conscripts’ psychological fitness for the military. Psychologists evaluate each conscript’s social maturity, intensity, psychological energy, and emotional stability and assign a final aptitude score foll...

We are rapidly gaining skill in genetic manipulation. In addition to such high priority goals as creating better athletes and prettier people, what are the prospects for smarter and healthier people? Steve Hsu has some thoughts and quotes on the former: .. I think there is good evidence that existing genetic variants in the human population (i.e., alleles affecting intelligence that are found today in the collective world population, but not necessarily in a single person) can be combined to produce a phenotype which is far beyond anything yet seen in human history. This would not surprise an animal or plant breeder — experiments on corn, cows, chickens, drosophila, etc. have shifted population means by many standard deviations (e.g., +30 SD in the case of corn). ... I think we already have some hints in this direction. Take the case of John von Neumann, widely regarded as one of the greatest intellects in the 20th century, and a famous polymath. He made fundamental contributions ...

Magnus Carlsen is the newest world chess champion, after beating long time champion Viswanathan Anand. At 22, Carlsen is probably the youngest champion of all time. Steve Hsu has a three-year old interview with him in which he says he doesn't know his IQ and doesn't want to. He thinks English grandmaster John Nunn never became world champion because he was too smart - and filled his head with all sorts of useless algebraic topology stuff. SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ? Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise. SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever. Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champ...

Ron Unz, writing in the American Conservative (of all places) has a long article on IQ and national wealth ( via Arun Gupta ). The take away: the overwhelming evidence indicates that wealth differences cause national IQ differences rather than vice-versa.  This is consistent with the notion that economic and cultural differences dominate doucmented group vs. group IQ differences.

Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nahisi are thumping away at that old meme of "race as a social construct." Well, all our concepts are, you know. One point that is absolutely clear is that there are no magic lines which one can use to divide humans neatly into three, five, or twenty-seven clear and distinct races. At the same time, most of us can look at another of us and guess something about where most of our ancestors came from. Populations differ on average, and differed more before the modern era started moving people around in large numbers. It's perfectly obvious that there are systematic differences, some of them easy to recognize, between populations that have lived in Europe or the Congo for six hundred years. Some of those differences will persist in those with some ancestry from one place or another that that have lived in another place for a couple of hundred years. The fact that race is a social construct, with no absolute biological undepinning does not say a...

Watson, the IBM Jeopardy champion and medical diagnosis expert, has shown that it can beat humans at a bunch of intellectual tasks. How about IQ tests? Probably IBM is too smart to tackle that problem, but my guess is that some amateur with a punier computer will do it in the not too distant future. Raven's progressive matrices, look out! If nothing else that might make the race and IQ debate more irrelevant.

Via Tyler Cowen , it seems that China is taking a serious look at the genetics of IQ. At a former paper-printing factory in Hong Kong, a 20-year-old wunderkind named Zhao Bowen has embarked on a challenging and potentially controversial quest: uncovering the genetics of intelligence. DNA samples from the super smart are being scarfed up and fed to 100 powerful gene sequencing machines. Evidently, the effort is patterned on a previous analysis that elucidated some of the genetics of height. Apparently it took DNA from about 10000 people to isolate 1000 genes that make you tall. "People have chosen to ignore the genetics of intelligence for a long time," said Mr. Zhao, who hopes to publish his team's initial findings this summer. "People believe it's a controversial topic, especially in the West. That's not the case in China," where IQ studies are regarded more as a scientific challenge and therefore are easier to fund. The roots of intelligence are a ...

Via Kevin Drum, the story of the stuff long term memories are made of. It seems that the archives of memory must be constantly tended at the molecular level, and the archivist is a molecule called PKMzeta. What does PKMzeta do? The molecule’s crucial trick is that it increases the density of a particular type of sensor called an AMPA receptor on the outside of a neuron. It’s an ion channel, a gateway to the interior of a cell that, when opened, makes it easier for adjacent cells to excite one another. (While neurons are normally shy strangers, struggling to interact, PKMzeta turns them into intimate friends, happy to exchange all sorts of incidental information.) This process requires constant upkeep—every long-term memory is always on the verge of vanishing. As a result, even a brief interruption of PKMzeta activity can dismantle the function of a steadfast circuit. If the genetic expression of PKMzeta is amped up—by, say, genetically engineering rats to overproduce the stuff—the...

It seems that sixty some years ago, Harvard psychologist Anne Roe gave some IQ tests to 64 noted biologists, physical scientists and social scientists. IQ fan Rodrigo de la Jara has posted some results , including a nice table of results in verbal, spatial and mathematical sections. The highest score among them was a 195 in the mathematical section, which was achieved despite disqualifying all the physical scientists for whom the test was "too easy." Presumably they all or mostly maxed it. The lowest score by anyone was a 121 verbal, which, if adjusted for sixty years worth of Flynn effect reduces to 108. While this does tend to show that famous scientists indeed do have pretty high IQs (the median combined score was 152), I was more interested in the exclusion of the physical scientists part. So why was the math too easy for them? Talent might be some of it, but I have to think that training was the key. They were very good at solving math problems because they had h...