btw, about those victorians…

in my post about the woodley, et al., iq paper the other day, i mentioned that one of the two studies on victorian iqs included in their research had been conducted on university of chicago students. i got to thinking afterwards that, apart from the fact that most of those students had probably been white (probably wasps, in fact), this could hardly have been a representative sample of victorian americans since the vast majority of people didn’t attend college in those days — late nineteenth century college students would’ve mostly been, you know, actual smart people.

so, then i was planning on (reluctantly) splashing out $11.95 on this article to find out the details on what sorts of people were included in galton’s study of victorian english iqs, the second set of victorian iq results used by woodley, et al. (reluctantly because, h*ck! — $11.95 is three or four tall decaf mochas!).

but scott alexander over @slate star codex is way ahead of me! scott writes:

“Galton’s Data A Century Later, published in 1985, tells us a little about how he gained his ground-breaking reaction time statistics. He set up a laboratory in the Science Galleries of the South Kensington Museum. There he charged visitors to the museum three pence ($25 in modern currency after adjusting for inflation) to be measured by his instruments, a process he advertised as ‘for the use of those who desire to be accurately measured in many ways, either to obtain timely warning of remediable faults in development, or to learn their powers.’”

ehhhh. charged a fee? uh-oh.

scott acknowledges that his $25 estimate mightn’t have been the most accurate, so i decided to use the calculator over at measuring worth to see how much three pence from 1889 would be worth today (i used their average earnings index), and i got £5.25 or $7.94 (for 2010). that’s not quite $25, but still that’s two or three tall mochas! i’m not sure that very many lower class victorians would’ve been willing or able to part with that amount of money just to take galton’s funny little test.

additionally, there may also have been an admission fee for the south kensington museum (now the victoria and albert museum) that we might have to add to that $7.94, but i’m not sure because i couldn’t find out anything about museum fees in victorian era london. (i know, for instance, that museums in places like new york generally had fees in the late 1800s, but also often had one free day a week to enable the lower classes to visit and learn. bunch o’ idealists, the victorians! (~_^) )

so again, i think we’ve got an apples and oranges problem here.

go read the whole of scott’s post, btw, because it’s excellent!

previously: we’re dumber than the victorians

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we’re dumber than the victorians

or so woodley, te nijenhuisc, and murphy have concluded:

Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time

- Simple reaction time has slowed since 1889.
- Simple reaction time genetically correlates with g.
- Psychometric meta-analysis reveals a decline in g of − 1.23 points per decade.
- The decline between 1889 and 2004 is − 14.1 points.
- This is the first direct measurement of a probable dysgenic trend in IQ.

The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition. In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1884 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.23 IQ points per decade or fourteen IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.

interesting!

my first question, of course, would be: are they comparing like with like? the authors write:

“We take our general inclusion rules from the meta-analysis by Silverman (2010)…. Third, given that Galton’s sample was British the studies had to have been conducted in a Western country.”

ehhhh. but the demographics of western nations — especially the u.s. and the u.k. — have changed a lot from victorian days!

i especially started asking myself if they’ve compared like with like when i noticed in their table that the iqs of the finnish in the 1980s-90s — demographically still very much a white northern european in those decades — were pretty much the same as the victorians’ scores:

the two reaction time studies on the victorians were done by galton in the u.k. in 1884-1893 and someone named h.b. thompson in the u.s. in 1898-1900. galton’s study presumably included mostly white britons and perhaps some amount of ashkenazi jews. thompson’s study, which was conducted on university of chicago students, was almost certainly comprised of mostly white americans.

what about all the later studies? well, i don’t have access to most of them, but here’s what i found out about a couple of them (again see the table above):

- the 2002 study from the u.k. (rt=324): Effects of caffeine on mood and performance: a study of realistic consumption [pdf] – the subjects were 24 university of bristol students. now, in 2002 at least 10.5% of the university of bristol student population were non-whites, possibly more since the ethnicities of 17.8% of the student population were unknown. this is not really comparing like with like when at least 1 in 10 of the subjects was not white, unlike in galton’s or thompson’s studies. and, do we even know what the ethnic/racial backgrounds of the subjects in this study were? nope.

- the 1984–85 from the u.k. (rt=300): Age and Sex Differences in Reaction Time in Adulthood: Results From the United Kingdom Health and Lifestyle Survey [pdf] – the subjects in this study were drawn from the 1984-85 health and lifestyles survey. i don’t know for sure, but presumably this was meant to be a representative survey — representative of the population of the u.k. in the early 1980s, minorities were 4.2% of the u.k. population [pdf], so 4 out of every 100. and what about the presence of, say, southern europeans in the u.k. at the time? i have no idea, but clearly these things should be taken into account.

i dunno. this is a really neat study, and maybe woodley, et al., are on to something, but i’d like some reassurance that they’re looking at the same sorts of populations.
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see also:

- Simple reaction time: it is not what it used to be.

- Objective and direct evidence of ‘dysgenic’ decline in genetic ‘g’ (IQ) and Taking on-board that the Victorians were more intelligent than us and Intelligence declined one SD since Victorian times – why NOT? from bruce charlton!

- The Victorians were cleverer than us! and ORIGINAL PAPER: “A response to Prof Rabbitt – The Victorians were still cleverer than us” by Woodley, te Nijenhuis and Murphy and Can I have a reaction? @dr. james thompson’s blog!

- The Victorians were smarter than us, study suggests
- Were the Victorians cleverer than us?
- Victorian Era Brits Were Smarter Than Us
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edit: see also btw, about those victorians…

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eugenics

reader request (we take requests!), from ogunsiron:

“Could you perhaps discuss or encourage discussion about Julian Saluvescu’s latest? He’s the infanticide happy ethicist who’s saying that it’s a moral obligation to genetically modify embryos so that they develop into children who are ‘ethical’. By that he means that it’s an ethical obligation to stamp out among other psychological traits, an inclination for groupness. I suppose that he leaves the option of infanticide for kids for whom the genetic enhancement didn’t work out after all.”

i linked to a story about savulescu’s pronouncement in this past sunday’s linkfest.

i don’t have a whole lot to say about eugenics really. i tend to think more about the past than the future — not because i’m not interested in the future (i think), but because i can’t see how we can decide how to shape our future if we don’t know how we got to where we are today in the first place. we need to understand how things (i.e. biological things) work before we start fiddling with them. (having said that, there are some obvious dysgenic practices i think we should quit right now like paying welfare mommas to have lots of welfare babies. that’s a no-brainer, i think.)

eugenical ideas and practices don’t make me squeamish. i don’t recoil in horror at the thought of people designing better babies. principally, it sounds like a great idea to me! practically is another matter.

two seemingly contradictory caveats from me: 1) no forcing people to adopt eugenical practices (except for stuff like the welfare babies example above) — i don’t like the GUBMENT interfering in private lives/choices (prolly an example of my own hamartia, but what can you do?); and 2) having said that, i do think eugenical practices might have to be regulated in some ways — to avoid certain pitfalls. for example, lots of people might be happy to deselect all sorts of genes for autism in their designer babies — but then we’d wind up with no engineers or mars rovers.

i would’ve suggested just making sure people were well-informed before they make their choices — which they should be in any case — but most people are so stooopid that there will probably have to be some regulations. we’d need to avoid situations like they have in china and india today where there are too many boys ’cause families are opting not to have girls. one could wind up with a similar situation only with no engineers or artists or creative thinkers or whatever.

for the record, not that my opinion really matters, i don’t agree with savulescu that going forward we should necessarily screen out “genes for psychopathy” (whatever they may prove to be) because that would be the most “ethical” thing to do. i would take a more pragmatic view and ask what, if any, benefits do “genes for psychopathy” provide (i’m sure they provide some) — and then i’d ask if we really want to get rid of them.

i’d guess that the good(?) folks at sociopath world might have some thoughts and opinions on all of this. (~_^)

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linkfest – 07/01/12

Racism is Innate: The Human Brain Makes Unconscious Decisions Based on Ethnicity – “Racism is hardwired into the brain and operates unconsciously because areas that detect ethnicity and control emotion are closely connected, according to scientists.” – original research article. see also How the brain views race.

CSIC recovers part of the genome of 2 hunter-gatherer individuals from 7,000 years ago – “The DNA data, which represent the 1.34% and the 0.5% of both individuals total genome, show that they are not directly connected to current populations of the Iberian Peninsula. Iberians from the Mesolithic Period were closer to current populations of northern Europe, who could have assimilated part of the genetic legacy of these hunters-gatherers.”

Food and Porn as Supernormal Stimuli – from dennis mangan

Pottery 20,000 years old found in a Chinese cave – “Pottery fragments found in a south China cave have been confirmed to be 20,000 years old, making them the oldest known pottery in the world, archaeologists say…. The findings … [refute] conventional theories that the invention of pottery correlates to the period about 10,000 years ago when humans moved from being hunter-gathers to farmers.” – original research article.

Steady studs, dysgenic dolls – “Jayman found that among black men, the trend is neutral, while a pronounced dysgenic trend exists among black women. The story is similar among whites, although the dysgenic tilt among white women is gentler than it is among black women.” – from mr. a. epigone, esq.

The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I) – read this!

also this!: Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue – “‘I would say recent experiments lead us down a road to the idea that we don’t all see the same colors,’ Neitz said. Another color vision scientist, Joseph Carroll of the Medical College of Wisconsin, took it one step further: ‘I think we can say for certain that people don’t see the same colors….’”

University of Pittsburgh study reveals moderate doses of alcohol increase social bonding in groups – cheers!

bonus: Phylogeny: Rewriting evolution – “Tiny molecules called microRNAs are tearing apart traditional ideas about the animal family tree.”

bonus bonus: Low-carb diet burns the most calories in small study

bonus bonus bonus: Mysterious Fairy Circles Are ‘Alive’ – whoa.

bonus bonus bonus bonus: How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline – cool!

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Mumbai doctors remove 12.5cm-long worm from man’s eye – ewwww!

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affordable family formation in china

they’ve got problems with that — especially in urban (read: expensive) areas:

“‘Naked marriages’ on rise in China”

“As costs soar in the cities, more couples in China are opting for ‘naked marriages’ – those without the once-required trappings of a house, a car, and other goods….

“In China’s most prosperous cities, time-honored truths are losing their luster for young adults coping with a very different world from the one their forebears knew.

“Wang Yu, a secretary, and her husband, Wang Lue, a sales engineer for an electronics company in Beijing, were both born after China introduced its one-child policy in 1979. Like couples almost everywhere in the country made up of only-children, they are eligible to have two kids. But they are not going to.

“‘Their thinking is not like their parents’,’ says Feng Xiaotian, head of the sociology department at Nanjing University, who studies young couples made up of only-children. ‘They have the choice but they are just like their whole generation. Sixty percent of them want only one child.’

“For a start, they say, having one child is normal to them, since they were brought up alone. But more important, says Ms. Wang, ‘more children mean more pressure.’ She adds, ‘It’s very expensive to raise a child here.’

“The cost of feeding and clothing a child is nothing compared with the cost of educating him or her in a competitive city like Beijing. Parents know that the road to the best universities begins with the best primary schools, and getting your child into one of those takes connections or money.

“‘I want us to focus on Yoyo and give her the best we can,’ says Ms. Wang. ‘If we had another child we’d have to cut everything we give her in half, and that would not be best for her….’

“His parents, who never had a choice, might have liked more grandchildren. But in fact ‘they are happy we’ve had a child at all,’ laughs Ms. Cao. ‘A lot of our friends don’t want any children.’

“Young urban parents born after 1980 pay more attention to their own well-being than earlier generations did, suggests Professor Feng. ‘They think that a kid’s life occupies a large part of family life, so if they have two their own quality of life will go down.’ Their generation is more than twice as likely as the average Chinese to want only one child, Feng has found.”

oops. i know they’ve got TOO MANY PEOPLE in china, but it’s not good if your best and brightest don’t reproduce much. also not good if they get up and leave the country, a trend that the slitty eye says is too common.

(warning: politically incorrect attempt at a joke >>) hbd chick say china futcha not vely blight. not if they continue down this road, that is.

and here i thought the chinese were being so clever when they banned cousin-marriage in 1981.

unrelated footnote: i learn from wikipedia this lovely evening (see – wikipedia can be informative!) that the chinese attempted to ban cousin-marriage at least once before in their history:

“There were also some periods in Chinese history where all cousin marriage was legally prohibited, as law codes dating from the Ming Dynasty attest. However, enforcement proved difficult and by the subsequent Qing Dynasty the former laws had been restored.”

even without understanding biology or genetics, many peoples have concluded that too much cousin-marriage is a bad idea. i don’t know what the reasoning was during the ming dynasty era (but i shall endeavor to find out), but i’ll betcha it had something to do with wanting to put the brakes on the ability of some families/clans to keep their wealth to themselves.

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“dysgenics”

linkfest 10/31/10

“Researchers find a ‘liberal gene’” – more from randall “parapundit” parker.

“W.D. Hamilton on Dysgenics, Eugenics, and Educational Romanticism” @vdare.com.

“The Other ‘G’ Spot” – (via diversityischaos) “[D]o people who score high on IQ tests use the frontal and parietal areas of their brains differently from people who score lower? The answer, discovered by other researchers, turns out to be yes.”

“Ich bin Mittel-Ostländer?” @evoandproud.

from inductivist: “Three dopaminergic genes predict grades in school” – “I should note that the multivariate model includes race and gender, and the effect of race on grades remains when genes are entered into the equation. In fact, the impact of race is stronger than the three genes together.”

“Stories vs. Statistics”

“The tea party warns of a New Elite. They’re right.” – Charles Murray on the bobos in paradise.

“How taking the Pill can bring out a woman’s jealous and possessive side”

“Asian Neanderthals, Humans Mated” – in east asia.

“Stone Age DIY: How Neolithic man decorated his house with homemade paint” – “It is the earliest ever example of man using paint to decorate their properties in Britain, if not in Europe.”

“Rising to the occasion” – “Electoral victory brings a surprising consequence: the winners look at smut”