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Last week I read an [article][0] critiquing Charles Murray's work, largely in response to a [podcast][1] he did with Sam Harris. One of the assertions in the ar
by Brendinooo 9y ago
Last week I read an [article][0] critiquing Charles Murray's work, largely in response to a [podcast][1] he did with Sam Harris. One of the assertions in the article was:
> There are no “genes for” IQ in any but the very weakest sense.
I'm not super knowledgeable about this stuff. I'm not trying to kick a hornet's nest; just trying to point out how I found this news to be particularly relevant in light of what I'd been reading recently. I'd be interested in seeing the Vox article's authors would fit this news into their thesis.
[0]: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-...
[1]: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/forbidden-knowledge https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/forbidden-knowledge
- defen 9y agoThat Vox article is profoundly dishonest. The sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted is "Virtually none of the complex human qualities that have been shown to be heritable are associated with a single determinative gene!" That is the most ridiculous straw-man in the history of straw-men. No one thinks IQ is determined by a single gene. In reality it's probably caused by a large number of small-effect genes, leading to the characteristic "bell-curve" distribution. To oversimplify - within a population let's say there are a thousand genes or SNPs that each affect IQ by a small amount. If you have 500 "plus" (good) and 500 "minus" you end up with an IQ of 100 (average). If you have 450 "plus" and 550 "minus" you have 90 IQ. If you have 550 "plus" you end up with 110 IQ. If you have 800 you are Newton or von Neumann. The numbers are obviously simplified and made-up, but that's the general idea. Of course this is assuming the nutrition and environment to allow that IQ to develop. Since the individual effect sizes are tiny, you need a large number of people in a study to find them. But as big data gets better, we're going to find them, and the anti-science left will have to figure out a way to deal with it.
- snowwrestler 9y agoThis is nonsense. Genes don't work by some sort of "total weight" principle like pebbles on a balance. And intelligence has noting to do with "right" vs "left". That sort of political framing language is an excellent smell test for bad scientific information.
- astrange 9y agoGenes work in whatever way is easiest for evolution to work, and linear improvements are pretty easy to find this way, so can you rule it out?
- snowwrestler 9y agoYes I can. The definition of a gene is unit of hereditary information that determines a specific characteristic of an organism. Inherent in that definition is that each gene, and the characteristic it encodes, is distinct. So when many genes are expressed simultaneously, you can get complex interactions between these distinct characteristics. But not a straight linear additive effect. If 5 genes all encode the same characteristic, then by definition they are actually just 5 copies of the same gene. Intelligence is not related to genetics through some simple scalar factor. It is far, far more complex than that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- defen 9y ago> But not a straight linear additive effect. It mostly is when you're talking about "why person X has a higher IQ than person Y". It's not when you're asking why or how humans have intelligence at all, obviously. https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421 https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421
- crusso 9y agoHaven't we really put the nature/nurture debate to rest with twin studies, separated twin studies, adoption studies, etc? Bickering over the exact mechanism and arguing that our current ignorance of those exact mechanisms still casts doubt on the very existence of the observed differences isn't logical. The vox article is very politically charged and admits to an unscientific politically correct approach to the whole subject. If your concerns are emotional and political, I guess it would be persuasive. If your concerns are scientific, there isn't really anything there that is an argument against anything said by Murray or Harris.
- skybrian 9y agoYes, it's a politically charged subject, but if you want to know what some actual scientists think about such things, it's not a bad place to start. Consider that the issues involved (and the flaws they see in Murray's arguments) are fairly subtle, so this "bickering" as you call it is actually pretty important to understanding what's going on.
- crusso 9y agoThe article stated pretty clearly that its concerns were social/political, not scientific. It called Murray's conclusions "dangerous". What place does an accusation like that have in the assessment of his scientific findings? You can't have a credible scientific discussion about a subject like the racial correlations of intelligence without a high degree of detachment and willingness to go wherever the data leads. On top of that, the article was disingenuous. I listened to the podcast a couple of weeks ago and I recall a very interesting statement by Murray to the effect that "the IQ differences between members of each specific race are greater than the IQ differences between the different different races." And yet the Vox article implied that Murray was making sweeping and damning generalizations about the races.
- skybrian 9y agoAs you say, it's not a purely scientific article and doesn't limit itself to scientific claims. But talking about the disturbing ways misleading scientific claims get used is on-topic. They do talk about the science since that's essential to making their argument.
- rlanday 9y agoThe idea that there are no genes for IQ is completely ludicrous. Humans are clearly smarter than every other animal; this is entirely because we have different genetics. Additionally, the only possible way humans could've become smarter than other animals is that natural selection operated over time so as to increase the frequency of human genetic variants responsible for increased intelligence. This means there must also be genetic variants within our species that affect how smart we are relative to other humans, or this could not have happened. The fact that intelligence is highly genetic in origin is extremely obvious. But the implications this fact has on how people interact with each other are extremely disturbing.
- skybrian 9y agoWhen people talk about "genes for IQ" they mean genes that account for differences between people. The genes that all humans share (most of them) contribute a lot more to intelligence. That's a different subject altogether.
- rlanday 9y agoNatural selection to increase intelligence on a group level is impossible unless there's variance in the group for natural selection to operate on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_fundamental_theorem_of_natural_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_fundamental_theorem... "The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time."
- skybrian 9y agoThe genetic variation that got us here isn't necessarily the same as the variation that remains, though. Perhaps there used to be more variation? (There is the Flynn effect, but that's too quick to be genetic. Whatever its cause is apparently more important than genetics?)
- rlanday 9y ago
- skybrian 9y agoI thought the Vox article explained the issues involved pretty well. As I understand it (and I'm not that knowledgeable either), people who are more closely related (from a genetic point of view) are likely to have more similar intelligence. However, that's pretty much all you can say. How closely related you are doesn't map to anything else cleanly. It seems like that's pretty much what you'd expect from a lot of genes that contribute a tiny effect and are nearly randomly passed on to descendants.
- ralfd 9y ago> people who are more closely related (from a genetic point of view) are likely to have more similar intelligence. This may seem almost trivial, as most people probably have this opinion anyway. But it still has inconvenient ramifications for egalitarism. For example: is someone in Harvard because their filthy rich family bought them a place and had connections ... or are they maybe clever because they come from a clever family? > How closely related you are doesn't map to anything else cleanly. What do you mean?
- skybrian 9y agoPeople who are more related tend to be of similar height. Also, people who are related tend to have similar IQ. But that doesn't mean height correlates with IQ because they're not necessarily the same genes. And similarly for other traits you might notice.
- ralfd 9y agoA scottish study found though a slight correlation between IQ and height: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-014-9644-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-014-9644-z The hot potatoe is of course "race" (what US-Americans equate for some reason with skin color), or more specifically shared-ancestry-ethnicity (northern european vs southern europeans vs slavs vs ashkenazi jews vs sephardi jews vs south eastern asians vs east asians … etc)
- jonlucc 9y agoIn the most recent podcast (I think released today or last night), Harris discusses the Vox article and why he thinks it is exactly the sort of intellectual dishonesty that they were pointing out in the first place. He also gets into the topic a bit with his guest Sidartha Mukherjee in the second half of their discussion. https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-moral-complexity-of-genetics https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-moral-complexity-...
- losvedir 9y agoAfter Murray stirred up such a fuss with his publication of The Bell Curve, the APA (the main organization of psychologists in the US) put together a task force to determine what mainstream, scientific, orthodox thoughts were about intelligence. The report is called "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" and is probably your best bet for answering your question. The Wikipedia page on it highlights its findings. It's 20 years old at this point but I don't think too much has changed since then. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unknowns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unk...
- ewjordan 9y agoLet's be accurate about that quote, though - that Vox article itself says that a lot of what goes into IQ is heritable, and comes through DNA. "No genes for IQ" is better interpreted as a statement that it's not just a small handful of genes that determine IQ (or any behavioral trait), but very, very many (plus nurture, but that goes without saying). It cites http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc4635473 http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc4635473, which mentions: The SNP rs9320913 is estimated to account for only 0.02% of the overall variability in educational attainment, but biometrical studies show that the total percentage of variability owed to genetic differences is three orders of magnitude larger (Heath et al., 1985; Rietveld et al., 2013). Since the SNPs with the largest effects are the easiest to find, these results suggest that educational attainment is a phenotype affected by thousands of undiscovered genetic variants, each responsible for a minuscule fraction of individual differences. ...which is not to say that Murray's claims that intelligence and race correlate strongly have merit, since as the article you posted points out, his argument has some severe deficiencies. Specifically (and this is coming from me, not the article), when a measured trait (say IQ) is a function of a large number of genes, then unless that trait has highly variable selective importance depending on habitat, we would not expect it to diverge significantly between races. Traits that do diverge significantly tend to be either subject to different selection pressures between environments, or involve a small number of genes (with a small number of genes, it's easy for random noise to freeze unusual variants into segregated populations, but as the count goes up the law of large numbers kicks in and we see similar bell curves in all populations). This is almost trivial to prove.
- tunesmith 9y agoIt's worth pointing out that even if it's true that environment may not increase someone's measured intelligence (as evidenced by someone's performance going up when in a controlled, artificial environment, and then going back down when removed from that environment), it's certainly possible for someone's measured intelligence to decrease due to environment (lead poisoning, other substances, repeated head trauma). Where that point gets political is if people believe that the "environment" commonly surrounding certain socio-economic populations is the natural baseline for that population, or instead an environment that is depressing their likely natural performance. Like, if you move someone from their status quo, then is that putting them in an artificial environment that ultimately will not help? Or is that removing them from an artificial environment that is artificially depressing their performance, thereby giving them a permanent relative boost when you move them? Where it gets even more political is when people believe that certain disadvantaged environments are "natural" specifically because the intelligence of that population leads them there.
- Bartweiss 9y agoThanks for this. I'm (perhaps unduly) annoyed that this article went with "Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment." 50/50 genes/environment has become a safe way to avoid outrage, but as far as I know it's not something any actual academics believe - genes and environment cause qualitatively different effects with substantially different variance. (Environment in particular appears strongly capped on upside.) Summarizing that as "just as important" is sloppy and unhelpful, even without taking a politicized stance.
- adrusi 9y agoThe vox article is mostly political, and offers misleading descriptions of Harris and Murray's conversation in many placement, and falsely represents it in a couple places. Some of its interpretation of science is questionable, but it does offer a solid piece of critique. The evidence conclusively shows 1. Intelligence is largely genetically determined 2. There is some genetic difference between races 3. Races differ in mean intelligence As a result, Harris and Murray are correct in saying that it would be a miracle if none of the racial difference in intelligence is attributable to genetics, but that's not a very substantial claim. While they were clear about how differences within racial groups are much larger than differences between, it would have been better if they had taken care to also point out that we simply do not know how much of the difference between races is attributable to genetics, except to say that it's extremely unlikely that the answer is "none" or "all". By identifying genes relevant to intelligence, we can start to answer this question. That will require someone to perform such an analysis, however, and seeing how Murray has been treated, few people besides him and some actual white supremacists are likely to be interested in doing such an analysis.
- shidoshi 9y ago"The evidence conclusively shows" is not the way science works. I think your overview is well-reasoned, and ripe with good intentions, but that comment is what white supremacists use to justify their nonsense. Correlation is not causation, and a majority of the HN community understands this point (we keep revisiting it, so I'm making a weighted assumption.) The more important question is why would it matter? Who cares if there are differences within or across racial groups with regards to intelligence? What reasonable social benefit is there in researching this? Intelligent people should seek ways to enrich the lives of others through their intellect, not find ways to build gates and limit possible outcomes.
- adrusi 9y agoThe vox article is mostly political, and offers misleading descriptions of Harris and Murray's conversation in many placement, and falsely represents it in a couple places. Some of its interpretation of science is questionable, but it does offer a solid piece of critique. The evidence conclusively shows 1. Intelligence is largely genetically determined 2. There is some genetic difference between races 3. Races differ in mean intelligence As a result, Harris and Murray are correct in saying that it would be a miracle if none of the racial difference in intelligence is attributable to genetics, but that's not a very substantial claim. While they were clear about how differences within racial groups are much larger than differences between, it would have been better if they had taken care to also point out that we simply do not know how much of the difference between races is attributable to genetics, except to say that it's extremely unlikely that the answer is "none" or "all".
- markdog12 9y agoCurrently reading The Bell Curve to see what all the fuss is about. I'm not far in, but their hypotheses about intelligence stratification and poverty seem to make sense and they seem to have been very careful in their analysis.