Greg Cochran apparently has sources who tell him that the genes that affect intelligence in Europeans do not do so in Africans, which would be an amazing racial difference, but also invalidate this whole approach.

The most important paper yet written on the genetic basis of IQ differences was published yesterday on biorxiv:

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/04/146043

While looking for signs of polygenic selection generally, researchers say:

We find evidence for polygenic adaptation in East Asian populations at variants that have been associated with educational attainment in European GWAS. This result is robust to the choice of data we used (1000 Genomes or Lazaridis et al. (2014) panels). Our modeling framework suggests that selection operated before or early in the process of divergence among East Asian populations – whose earliest separation dates at least as far back as approximately 10 thousand years ago [42, 43, 44, 45] – because the signal is common to different East Asian populations (Han Chinese, Dai Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.). The signal is also robust to GWAS ascertainment (Figure 6), and to our modeling assumptions, as we found a significant difference between East Asian and non East-Asian populations even when performing a simple binomial sign test (Tables S4, S9, S19 and S24).

“Greg Cochran apparently has sources who tell him that the genes that affect intelligence in Europeans do not do so in Africans, ”

It seems they might not do so as reliably/accurately—or be as accurately calculated— (or the current “scores” may not because there may be other genes unaccounted in them since they are a more distinct/distant population—and possibly other genes might work differently) There seems to be some evidence that there may be some other alleles for IQ in Africans (and perhaps to a lesser extent some other non-European groups such as Amerindians) that are not likely in samples/tested for (since the studies on/showing the correlations of the alleles to intelligence are mostly on European/Eurasian—now increasingly also North East Asian—populations)—making the correlations posited in Africans likely somewhat more uncertain.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/everything-is-different-but-the-same/

“Another new paper finds that the GWAS hits for IQ – largely determined in Europeans – don’t work in people of African descent. That was always a possibility: I’ve talked about it. If you look at the frequencies of height alleles (determined from GWAS in Europeans) you would predict that Pygmies are pretty short – but they’re considerably shorter than that. They have their own private alleles influencing height, which make them even shorter than you would think. Or, if you tried to estimate skin color in Koreans by the frequencies of variants that cause light skin in Europeans, you would conclude that they were black as night – but they’re not. They’re pretty light-skinned, but that’s caused by light-skin alleles common in East Asia, almost completely disjoint from the common light-skin alleles in Europeans.

So you can’t use those GWAS hits to tell how smart sub-Saharan Africans are, at least not today. All you can use are IQ measurements and achievements. It is as if the only way we could determine your height was by using a ruler, instead of GWAS predictions.”

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/05/106062

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/02/05/106062.full.pdf

“. Our modeling framework suggests that selection operated before or early in the process of divergence among East Asian populations – whose earliest separation dates at least as far back as approximately 10 thousand years ago [42, 43, 44, 45] – because the signal is common to different East Asian populations (Han Chinese, Dai Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.). ”

I wonder if the signal is also present in South East Asian populations that (at least mostly) share this mesolithic ancestry with North East Asians, of late diverging gross of New world Natives (like Inuit/Eskimo and Aleuts, whose ancestors left Asia only about 4-6,000 years ago) or Siberians, who do not score as high on tests.

Edit: “…of late diverging gross of…”

should be:

“…or later diverging groups of New World Natives (like Inuit/Eskimo and Aleuts, whose ancestors left Asia only about 4-6,000 years ago) or Siberians, all of which do not score as high on tests as the North East Asian groups mentioned above.”

Not affecting is not the same as not being detectable in a GWAS. I would expect detection to be maximized for a large effect SNP which has multiple (i.e. at least two) alleles appearing at reasonable proportions in the population studied. For a thought experiment, consider a large effect SNP which is 50/50 between alleles in Europeans while Africans are more like 99/1 in favor of the negative allele. I believe it unlikely that SNP would be detected in an African GWAS.

I thought I saw a good post (on Steve Hsu’s blog?) discussing the interaction of effect size, MAF (minor allele frequency), and sample size for determining SNP detectability in GWAS, but I am unable to find it right now.

In a related vein, the bolded Piffer quote in Risch’s speech (Dr. Thompson, do you have a citation for the full Risch speech?) about the relevant genetic variation being present in Africa is very interesting. I suppose that makes sense given the time scales involved and the frequency of beneficial mutations over time. What surprises me is that that variation would have been included in the relatively small population that migrated from Africa. I wonder if an argument could be made that one or more of these SNPs influenced migration out of Africa?

I am amazed at the correlations Piffer is seeing. The results are setting off warning bells in my head to look for some kind of tautology behind the scenes, but I don’t see one. Assuming everything is as it seems this result really says something about the ability of large(ish) populations to smooth out noise in the individual data.

Has Piffer (or anyone else) done a similar analysis for height? That would make an interesting comparison.

I like that he published the analysis on RPubs along with a link to the underlying data. The only problem is that the OSF link to the data seems to be broken.

Page 84 has a barplot which I think can be used to rank the populations according to the number of tests in which they display a significant advantage in EA alleles. Here’s my attempt at eyeballing it:

1. Korean
2. Miao (Hmong)
3. Yi
4. Tujia
5. Han
6. Japanese
7. Hezhen
8. Naxi
9. Tu
10. Mongolia
11. Daur
12. North Han
13. Iraqi Jew
14. Tunisian
15. Saudi

The groups at the top of the list are all either Chinese or China-adjacent. The groups with a longer history of agriculture seem to have an advantage over the recent hunter gatherers or pastoralists. The Nganasan, a Uralic speaking people of Northern Siberia who have no European admixture, have the smallest bar of any Asian group on the plot, in fact no bar at all.

I should probably add as an official disclaimer that this study only measures the strength of recent selection on educational attainment, and not the absolute value of genetic intelligence in these groups. I can therefore easily explain away how my own ethnic group does so badly in the ranking.

Correlation of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism with latitude and a hunter-gather lifestyle suggests culture–gene coevolution and selective pressure on cognition genes due to climate Piffer (2013)

https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/correlation-of-the-comt-val158met-polymorphism-with-latitude-and-a-hunter-gather-lifestyle-suggests-culturee28093gene-coevolution-and-selective-pressure-on-cognition-genes-due-to-climate.pdf

However, COMT is only one of the many genes responsible for variation in cognition, although it is the best studied so far. Thus, it is probable that many other genes act along with COMT to explain cognitive and cultural differences. Particularly interesting is the relatively low frequency of COMT in East Asian populations (range 0.22–0.30), which contrasts with their reported higher IQ (105). In fact, a recent study (Wang et al., 2013) shows that the COMT polymorphism operates in the opposite fashion among Chinese subjects. In this population, the Vat allele was associated with better WM performance and greater hippocampal volume. The authors interpreted this surprising finding in terms of population-specific effects of gene–gene interaction.
[...]
Is it possible, that males on average perform better than females and East Asian males perform better than European males on IQ tests, the SAT, exams, etc., because taking these tests is stressful, i.e., it increases a person’s dopamine levels, and since females and Europeans have higher baseline dopamine levels to begin with, they perform not as well under stress/pressure?
[...]
Better cognitive function when not under stress: Better attention and processing of information (executive function). (R) However, realize that this one gene only accounts for 4% of the difference in executive function. The FAB exam tests executive function. GG scored an average of 16.0, GA 15.7 and AA 15.3. These scores are statistically significant, but not large.

– http://www.unz.com/jthompson/sex-differences-in-intelligence-in-nigeria/#comment-1866670

Another important factor, in my opinion, is to control for the time of year the intelligence test is taken, due to this:

There are so many factors to take into account when it comes to IQ, SAT, etc. test scores and test taking in general besides test prepping, inherited intelligence, etc.

– Testosterone levels
[...]
To truly standardize testing, all tests would have to be taken in the same location during the same time of year, etc.
[...]
…and ask them to take their tests only in the winter, would this lower their average test scores, even if all other controls/factors remain the same?
[...]
Earlier research has also shown that men’s testosterone levels tend to be lower in the spring.
[...]
For both sexes, she said, the differences are subtle and would not affect daily life. But she said that after puberty boys would do better on mathematics tests in spring than in fall. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test, she said, the difference might be up to 50 points.
[...]
TESTOSTERONE LEVELS can affect performance on some tests [see boxes on opposite page for examples of tests]. Women with high levels of testosterone perform better on spatial tasks (top) than women with low levels do, but men with low levels outperform men with high levels. – see page 4 http://www.ucd.ie/artspgs/langimp/genderbrain.pdf

– http://www.unz.com/jthompson/womens-brains/#comment-1851020

These are seemingly insignificant differences independently, but added together they can become a significant confounder for differences in in-between-races intelligence testing results, in my opinion, particularly when it comes to the differences in paper-and-pencil IQ test scores between Europeans and East Asians.

Do post that Steve Chu link if you find it. He’s the most accessible link to the BGI IQ study in Shenzen that is now in its third year.

But she said that after puberty boys would do better on mathematics tests in spring than in fall. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test, she said, the difference might be up to 50 points.

This quote was taken from this 1991 NY Times article:

Men’s Test Scores Linked to Hormone

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/14/us/men-s-test-scores-linked-to-hormone.html

50 points on the 1991 SAT (maximum possible score of 1600) would roughly be a ~3% difference.

Plus:

However, realize that this one gene only accounts for 4% of the difference in executive function. The FAB exam tests executive function. GG scored an average of 16.0, GA 15.7 and AA 15.3. These scores are statistically significant, but not large.

Just these two factors combined could account for a ~7%/7 point difference on an IQ test performance, in males.

Continental Differences

G allele frequencies: East Asians have 71% G’s, Africans 69% G’s Americans 61% G’s, Europeans 48% G’s (R). So East Asians are going to be more likely to have GG vs Europeans. – http://uswest.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Variation/Population?db=core;r=22:19963248-19964248;v=rs4680;vdb=variation;vf=4468

– http://www.unz.com/runz/how-social-darwinism-made-modern-china-248/#comment-1866207

When we experience stress, many people rally to the cause and increase their performance. Yet others seems to melt and fall apart under the same type of pressure. How can two different people under going the same type of stress have such different experiences? The answer lies in understanding how the COMT system influences the brain.
[...]
The Advantages of Higher Dopamine Levels

Higher dopamine isn’t always a bad thing like the list above would suggest. Remember, when individuals are born with a SNP in the COMT gene (esp. the V158M COMT) they are born with a SLOWER COMT enzyme. This predisposes them to having MORE DOPAMINE in the frontal lobe of the brain. Under less stressful circumstances, these individuals are proven to have better memory and more brain function – basically they are very smart people!

Remember that more dopamine in the frontal lobe of the brain confers an ADVANTAGE in less-stressful periods. With more dopamine (and norepinephrine and epinephrine) these individuals have a very alert mind, better memory and will be quick, sharp learners.

– http://www.beyondmthfr.com/treating-comt-and-mao-how-comt-influences-the-brain/

So paradoxically better test performers/takers are not necessarily more intelligent than less successful test performers/takers, if that makes any sense and I understood it correctly.

There is also this, which confirms this paradox:

And it seems that they have done just that. They found that the three dopamine genes they examined, the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1), the dopamine D2 receptor gene (DRD2), and the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4), had small but reliable effects on educational attainment, such that those with a higher “dopamine index” tended to attain less education. [...] But what’s much more interesting is that they found significant differences in the prevalence of the alleles of theses genes between the White and the Black subjects, with Blacks having tending to have higher dopamine indices. The differences are small, but solid.

– https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/how-much-hard-evidence-do-you-need/

Dopaminergic Polymorphisms and Educational Achievement: Results From a Longitudinal Sample of Americans
Kevin M. Beaver, John Paul Wright, Matt DeLisi, and Michael G. Vaughn http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Beaver-et-al.-Dopamine.pdf

This would mean, that educational attainment and IQ test scores, do not predict intelligence, but how well or not someone performs under pressure/stress.

They are basically “stress tolerance/dopamine level tests” not “intelligence tests.”

Maybe sub-Saharan Africans are not that much less intelligent than the rest of us after all?

The Black-White IQ difference has existed for as long as IQ tests have been administered. However race realists claim that the Black IQ mean of 85, and even lower in Africa indicates a racial inferiority in intelligence. Even if this was so, and it could well be, the African IQ scores are so low as to make the majority of the population so dysfunctional that they would not be able to operate modern technology, such as military technology used in warfare. This, alone, indicates that there is a problem with IQ tests.

It is not unreasonable to use our ordinary experience as an error detector. A gram of controlled experiment is not necessarily worth more than a tonne of unanalysed observations, if the experiment is misconstrued from the start.

– https://thecross-roads.org/race-culture-nation/25-the-myth-of-east-asian-intellectual-supremacy The Myth of East Asian Intellectual Supremacy by Peter J. White

Who is Davide Piffer? Affiliation? Credentials? Is he real? Like Matthew Sarraf was real?

And what about this think tank? How is it funded?

Ulster Institute for Social Research
Institute President – Professor Richard Lynn
Director – Sophy Carroll
Academic Advisory Council – Professor Edward Miller, Professor Helmuth Nyborg, Professor Donald Templer, Professor Andrei Grigoriev, Dr James Thompson, Professor Gerhard Heisenberg

IQ is not the same as intelligence.
As far as I know nobody has been able to define intelligence.
I wonder if the inhabitants of Arnhem Land in N Australia ever were tested on IQ.
They live in paradise, it seems, their jungle is one big restaurant, we die there of hunger, or of poisoning.
Polynesian people were able to navigate on waves, their shapes, and directions.
Western captains did not have this intelligence.
So I wonder what these studies show, or are meant to show.
Africans have low IQ’s, I read.
Yet a book as
⦁ ‘The archaeology of Africa, Food, Metals and Towns’, ed. Shaw, Sinclair, Andah and Okpoko, London and New York 1993
does not show that Africans in any way were behind Europeans.

” Even if this was so, and it could well be, the African IQ scores are so low as to make the majority of the population so dysfunctional that they would not be able to operate modern technology, such as military technology used in warfare. ”

A USA navy ship by mistake shot down an Iranian passenger airliner.
They were unable to distinguish between a passenger plane and a jet fighter.
If I remember correctly at the 26th effort the crew managed to feed the right code into the missile that hit the plane.
One wonders if Americans can handle their own technology.

not necessarily

1) the gene may only be active in the presence of enough of a particular nutrient – say for example as people moved north they needed more iodine to feed a higher metabolism (to keep warm) and as a side effect the increased iodine increased the IQ of their children

2) there might be a second gene with activates the effect of the first and SSA don’t have the second one

the people who have opposed this kind of research for so long may find out that some of the answers produced may be fixable.

Correlation of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism with latitude and a hunter-gather lifestyle suggests culture–gene coevolution and selective pressure on cognition genes due to climate Piffer (2013)

Particularly interesting is the relatively low frequency of COMT in East Asian populations (range 0.22–0.30), which contrasts with their reported higher IQ (105). In fact, a recent study (Wang et al., 2013) shows that the COMT polymorphism operates in the opposite fashion among Chinese subjects.

My guess is there are two threads to IQ:
- environmental HG IQ increasing with distance from the equator
- civilization-selected IQ increasing with length of time civilized

(civilization defined as high surplus farming with lots of competition for the jobs that didn’t involve shoveling animal s**t – aka cereal farming)

and
- EA have lost more of their HG base while gaining more of the civilization IQ
- Euros retain more of their HG base but have gained less civ IQ due to less time “civilized”

(just a guess)

TESTOSTERONE LEVELS can affect performance on some tests

if correct then early puberty in boys would reduce academic success generally

LOL. Anybody can reach the proper conclusions about racial differences in intelligence just by walking by a KFC in a shopping mall and checking out the customer’s behavior. Give me a break, Cochran.

Where are the Han Chinese in that chart?

Jul 2, 2016 Race, Genetics and Intelligence

Discussions about ethnic and gender differences in intelligence are seen as impolite by many, but in an age where the failure of others is held up as an example of sexism or racism, it is an essential topic to discuss.

A load of bullshit. All that genes do is coding proteins to be produced by the body. Intelligence however is created mainly by human experience and the first four to five years of life are paramount. You have to understand how neural networks and learning works to understand this. If a child is traumatized or socially impaired during that time its mental development will be impaired also.

Also, IQ is a load of shit. It measures only certain kinds of intelligence, but there are many. I am with Harvard professor Howard Gardner on this (google it yourself).

So, the whole idea of this study is pure scientific crap.

For what information from these sites is worth.

Richard Lynn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn

“”Lynn sits on the editorial boards of the journals Intelligence,[11] Personality and Individual Differences,[12] and Mankind Quarterly, which has been called a white supremacist publication.[13][14] He is also on the board of the Pioneer Fund, which funds Mankind Quarterly, and has also been described as racist in nature.[13][14] A number of scientists, including Leon Kamin, have criticised Lynn’s work on racial and national demography and intelligence for lacking scientific rigour and for promoting a racialist political agenda.[7][9][15][16][17][18] A number of people, such as historian of psychology William Tucker, have said that Lynn is associated with a network of academics and organizations that promote scientific racism.[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]“”

Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund, Inc. is a white nationalist 501(c)(3) private foundation based in New York that studies the “science” of eugenics.[1] It was founded in 1937. According to its website, accessed in 2009 but since shuttered, its mission is “to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences.”[2] According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the group’s original mandate was to pursue “race betterment” by promoting the genetic stock of those “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.” It has funded Anglo-American race scientists as well as anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).[1]

The Pioneer Fund reported $326,929 in total income, $403,102 in total expenses, and $234,119 in net assets in 2011.[3] According to SPLC, Pioneer is now solely funded by Swiss physicist “Walter P. Kistler, who is in the Aviation Hall of Fame and founder of Kistler Aerospace. In 1996, Kistler also endowed in perpetuity the well-known Bellevue, Wash., science outfit, Foundation for the Future.”[4]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund

I also believe that Intel 486 are just as fast as the new quad cores.

Nevertheless, though one cannot separate the way a child grows up from genetic causes, anyone can see that there seems to be a hereditary aspect to intelligence, whatever it is, and consequently to IQ.
I know nothing on how scientists try to connect IQ with DNA, but if correlation exists between IQ and DNA, it is interesting.

Feb 27, 2016 Why Your Nation’s IQ Matters

Over the last several decades, economists and psychologists have documented the many ways in which an individual’s IQ matters. But, research suggests that a nation’s IQ matters so much more.

No, actually, there is proof that Derbst is correct and genes are irrelevant to so-called intelligence with the real factor being experience in the first four or five years of life. A number of people have conducted tests in which they raised chimpanzees at home alongside their children, giving them the same life experience in the first four or five years. Many of these chimps grew up to have successful collegiate careers and are even professors at Harvard.
Oh no wait, they didn’t. They are still chimps. OK, never mind.

All human macro-races have the same distribution of this correlations*

All human sub-groups also have the same distribution of this correlations*

You are missing my point. Not only is IQ bullshit, genetic heredity on groups is nonsense if you really understand how it works.

That is like the Body Mass Index on individuals.

Are you for real? Does the pure Nurturist still exist? You nonetheless admit it seems that IQ does measure intelligence, albeit not all useful functions of the brain. As it clearly measures such generally useful attributes as processing speed and shott term and working memory what’s your problem with studying the biology of the causes of such mental characteristics – most often not impaired by childhood trauma?

Thanks! Interesting that Risch chose a forum like that (i.e. informal and not peer reviewed I believe) to criticize Piffer’s work. Has anyone responded in a more intellectually rigorous fashion to this work? This is one of those “dog that didn’t bark” type clues that can be so instructive.

But since numerical coprocessors exist CPUs don’t matter.

(it’s fun to make stupid arguments, right trolls?)

The only problem is that the OSF link to the data seems to be broken.

Turns out the problem is a missing “4″ at the end of the RPubs reference to the data. The data is available at osf.io/5yhf4

IQ is not the same as intelligence

The only reality (ontological, epistemological) of IQ is that of a test result. It is not correct to say that Feynman had IQ of 127 but instead it should be said that Feynman IQ test result was 127. If Feynman was retested on another occasion the result would be different. The test and retest mutual correlation is between r=0.9-0.95. This means that the two results may differ by ±13 (2-sigma) when r=0.9 and ±9 (2-sigma) when r=0.95.

Mr. Thompson: Caucasians have the highest IQs, then Asians, blacks are last. The ancient Egyptians have been identified as Caucasians. What destroyed them was miscegenation with blacks. The ancient Indians have been identified as Aryans. What destroyed them was mixing with Asians.

Asians have to give up Western technology and stop having plastic surgery on their eyes.

Blacks have to stop bleaching their skin and dying their ‘fros blond.

It is time for separation. Any Caucasians that disagree can live with blacks/Asians.

I think this bit from Piffer’s wordpress post is worth emphasizing (bolding mine):

Native Americans and Africans occupy the lowest places, despite being genetically very different. The Native American result is a huge problem for people who want to explain the pattern in term of drift or migrations, because despite being the closest genetically to the East Asians, they are at the opposite of the spectrum in terms of factor scores.

This also suggests that whatever created the East Asian advantage happened after 15kya (the earliest estimate of a migration across the Bering strait into the Americas). It is possible that the extremely low population density in the Americas reduced intraspecific competition, hence selection pressure on higher intelligence was lower.

This observation seems both novel and possibly important. What I find most surprising about it is that I would have expected Native American passage through the Bering Strait area to imply more cold climate exposure than for the East Asian population which stayed home. If the cold exposure hypothesis is true why did the migration not increase the IQs of Native Americans? Is it possible that the selection happened before 15kya and then IQ SNPs were selected against in the Americas? Is genetic data available in the Americas at fine enough granularity to look at the north/south gradient there?

I have been wondering about some of the ideas in the above paragraph and Native American IQs being low for a while, but this is the first data and analysis I have seen which addresses it directly.

Also:

We see the that East Asians are at the top. Mongolic tribes from the north, such as Mongolians and the Daur, occupy the top positions. These populations live in really cold climates, and would provide suggestive evidence to the cold winter theory. The Siberian Yakut however, do not fare as well as the East Asians, despite living in cold climates. However, the Yakut are not a Mongolic tribe, but they belong to the Turkic ethnic group.

Presumably the migrating populations were relatively small. Is it possible that relatively low frequency beneficial alleles were lost for some groups by not being present in the migrating gene pool? Or lost by chance while still low frequency and small population?

That is an interesting way of looking at it. Worth noting that you are looking at 2 SD outliers for your range estimates. How many SDs out would you estimate Feynman’s physics skills were? As a starting point how about him being top 100 in a population of 1 billion which suggests >5SD? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule
(note top 1000 in a billion is still >5SD)

This is how I learned that Down’s Syndrome doesn’t decrease intelligence or functionality at all because it can be inheritable.

Good question. I assume you are talking about the first graphic in the post? By doing an image search for that I see a citation from L.L. Cavalli-Sforza et al, 1994, “The History and geography of Human Genes”. How has that analysis held up with current day genetics research?

Looking more closely at that graphic, one thing which seems highly relevant to Amerind migration discussions is that the Inuit are in a separate subgroup from other Amerinds. Is there a good explanation for why this is so?

How many SDs out would you estimate Feynman’s physics skills were?

Why would anyone want to assign a number to it? I brought up Feynman’s IQ test result just for the sake of illustration because his test result is known in these circles here at unz.com and not because the actual value of this number has any significance to who he was and what he accomplished.

So much gullibility about candidate-gene results in some of these comments. GWAS or GTFO.

People have some wacky imaginations.

The Inuit only arrived in the Americas in the last 4,000 years or so. Just as the old Sforza graphic suggests, they still show a strong genetic resemblance to Siberian groups like the Chukchi and Yupik. There there were at least three independent migration from Siberia to the Americans, maybe four, and just possibly five.

yes – denial of biological reality leads directly to the psych abuse of white children in the public schools for their “privilege”

If the cold exposure hypothesis is true why did the migration not increase the IQs of Native Americans?

i may have remembered it wrong (?) but iirc if you look at just HGs there is s cline of increased IQ with distance from the equator with Eskimo at the top but HGs as a whole are very low – hence why i think there are two drivers: original selection from the physical environment and then secondly the man-made competition from the more complex societies created by cereal farming

I have impression that ancient egyptians had the same ”jewish-like” background, european and middle east. And why seems there is only ”brown skinned characters in egyptian paintings”*

Are you positive about your hypothesis?

SIGMUND FREUD began his researches into the workings of the human mind in 1881

After a century during which Europe and America saw the reform of the insane asylum and an ever-increasing interest in “abnormal” psychological states, especially the issue of “nervous diseases” (which was the first phenomenon that Freud studied, examining the nervous system of fish while gaining his medical degree at the University of Vienna from 1873 to 1881).

http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/freud.html

The Pioneer Fund reported $326,929 in total income

This is not much. In 2011 they provided Ulster… $50k. This is not much either though Rushton of University of Western Ontario got a bit more: $223k.

I believe you could be correct.

This is just anecdotal evidence on my part, but all the boys I have known (I have never known a girl), who had to repeat a grade were around 13 to 14 years old when their academic performance suddenly and dramatically changed for the worse/collapsed. They also happened to be the-most-sexually-active and the-most-interested-in-girls boys among my group of peers and acquaintances. Even for me personally grades 8 and 9 were the most challenging. I was simply not (even more than usual) interested in school, and had a hard time focusing, etc. Instead of chasing after girls and partying to get my extra energy out though, I played lots of golf, which helped to keep me on the straight and narrow mostly. So there very likely is a link with testosterone here in reducing academic success during that particular period in boys’ lives in general.

There are also these interesting findings:

“Male serum testosterone levels appear to vary by generation, even after age is taken into account,” said Thomas G. Travison, Ph.D., of the New England Research Institutes (NERI) in Watertown, Mass., and lead author of the study. “In 1988, men who were 50 years old had higher serum testosterone concentrations than did comparable 50-year-old men in 1996. This suggests that some factor other than age may be contributing to the observed declines in testosterone over time.”
[...]
The NERI team carefully analyzed the data to compare men of similar ages during each phase of the study. After accounting for age and additional factors such as obesity, smoking, and medications, the researchers found that, each year, the subjects’ total and bio-available testosterone decreased an average of 1.2 and 1.3 percent, respectively.

For men 65-69 years of age in this study, average total testosterone levels fell from 503 ng/dL (nanograms/deciliter) in 1988 to 423 ng/dL in 2003. A normal, healthy adult male usually has blood total testosterone concentrations that range anywhere from 300-1000 ng/dL.

– https://www.endocrine.org/news-room/press-release-archives/2006/testosterone_lvls_in_men_decline

I think the explanation for this is that we lead more sedentary lifestyles nowadays in the West/First World than in the past and are generally less physically active and therefore physically weaker, but likely more intelligent, due to lower testosterone levels:

To look at it another way: In 1985, the typical 30-to-34-year-old man could squeeze your hand with 31 pounds more force than the typical woman of that age could. But today, older millennial men and women are roughly equal when it comes to grip strength.

So what’s going on here: a crisis of masculinity? A mass-effiminization of the American male? Not exactly. The biggest driver, as alluded to above, is likely changes in Americans’ work habits. In the 1980s, men were more likely to be employed in jobs involving manual labor than they are today. Less daily physical activity means less overall strength — and incidentally, more weight gain, too.

The study doesn’t show the same decline among women partially because women were less likely to be doing jobs involving manual labor to begin with, and also because women’s labor force participation has increased since the 1980s. Changes in women’s daily physical activity over the past 30 years appear to be much less drastic than changes for men. And those changes are reflected in these measurements of strength.

– http://www.unz.com/isteve/are-american-men-getting-wimpier/#comment-1614377

With decreases in the number of people employed in agriculture, etc a country’s overall testosterone level likely drop as well and its average IQ should also increase due to that. People leaving agricultural/manual labor jobs for services sector jobs, etc. could be another IQ booster for Africa and and the Third World. Right now the majority of Africans are employed/work in agriculture, for example: LABOR FORCE – BY OCCUPATION
Country LABOR FORCE – BY OCCUPATION(%) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2048.html

We see the that East Asians are at the top. Mongolic tribes from the north, such as Mongolians and the Daur, occupy the top positions. These populations live in really cold climates, and would provide suggestive evidence to the cold winter theory. The Siberian Yakut however, do not fare as well as the East Asians, despite living in cold climates. However, the Yakut are not a Mongolic tribe, but they belong to the Turkic ethnic group.

Remember that populations change: migration, phenotypical changes, dysgenics, eugenics, whatever-genics…

Other possibility is ”unique events” versus ”put ANY people in cold climate and after some time you see the increasing of their intelligence even at complex ways”. To the human being be capable to explore and live in very cold climates ”he” must be developed its intelligence before and not during…

Rembering that all civilizations as well agriculture came back in tempered climates. Too harsh climates inhibit increasing of population [new mutations/social complexity--confusion, ;)] as any other possibility or responsibility if not survival.

Among native americans, all civilizations appeared in tempered climates [high altitudes in intertropical zones create a type of ''pseudo''-tempered climate] or in transitionary areas between tropical and altitude-tempered zones/climates. Maybe mongolid migration to americas was organized and not random, just like when europeans invaded americas.

In north america, native americans who have lived in less cold areas seems have developed more elaborated cultures firstly by obvious reasons, live in very cold areas inhibit human culture.

Most east asians don’t live in very cold areas. Historically bigger demographic densities are in tempered areas. Based on this logic, in very crude way, tibetans would be smarter than chinese Han.

Maybe the communal/basal cognitive advantage of caucasoids and mongolids came before the split of both groups even because some mutations/differentiation in personalities* curiosity to explore new places*

Maybe [number.. er] migration from some place of central asia to far east had contributed to increase slightly the intelligence of east asians before the sedentarization and civilization [uber-ultra-plus speculatif]

And humans could procreate with neanderthals because they share some genetics because they came from the same ancestral population [other petulance and repetitions of known]

Thanks! Is the mapping between the 3/4/5 migrations and current populations throughout the Americas well understood?

There is no “jewish-like” background to the Egyptians. There was a little incident called the Exodus. The “brown-skinned characters…” is due to the aging of the paints.

Are you Jewish, Asian, involved with Asians?

I downloaded the data files there and am attempting to replicate the RPubs RMD file.

It appears that one data file used by the RPubs file is missing: Int_EA_Replicated.csv

Can anyone make that available either on OSF or elsewhere?

Does anyone know if/how sql_random_freqs.csv and Matched_18_freqs.csv are related?

There are a bunch of typos in the last paragraph, corrections:

With decreases in the number of people employed in agriculture, *etc.* a country’s overall testosterone level likely *drops* as well and its average IQ should also increase due to that. People leaving agricultural/manual labor jobs for *service* sector jobs, etc. could be another IQ booster for Africa *and* the Third World. Right now the majority of Africans are employed/work in agriculture, for example

These articles seems to be another confirmation:

Early Adolescent Achievement Drop: Falling Effort and Grades

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/surviving-your-childs-adolescence/200903/early-adolescent-achievement-drop-falling-effort-and

Early adolescence (around age 9 to 13) can be the enemy of school achievement. Rebelling against being defined and being treated any longer as a “child” can cause early adolescents to resist the educational system at their own expense, the price of this newfound independence being failing effort and falling grades.

Does Puberty Affect Learning?

http://healthymagazine.com/does-puberty-affect-learning/

According to Louann Brizendine, M.D., author of the book “The Male Brain”, major hormone changes are occurring in the pubescent male’s brain. Two big players are testosterone, which can increase by 20-fold and feed the propensity for aggression, confidence and bravery; and vasopressin, which prompts adolescent males to try to outrank other males and aggressively protect what they perceive is theirs, i.e. territory and girlfriends. With all of this on a teen’s mind, how can his learning not be affected.
[...]
Psychologist and psychology professor Robert McGivern from San Diego University confirmed the conclusions from the SUNY team. His study showed that at the onset of puberty, males and females take significantly longer to perform a simple matching activity than their pre- and post-puberty peers. However, McGivern and his associates attribute the longer time to an excess of synopses, or connections, in the brain that are waiting to be pruned. As a neglected tree, the connections in the brain also grow wild and need to be pruned for optimum potential. Puberty is the season for such pruning and organization that often makes it difficult for adolescents to process information.

I have only had time to do a quick skim, but that looks very interesting! Hopefully Dr. Thompson will do a post on it.

For anyone who wants to delve deeper, their GitHub has their tools along with a height analysis: https://github.com/FerRacimo/PhenoGraph

Page 27 Figure 4 has Pheno-graphs for each of their phenotypes (educational attainment, height, male-pattern baldness and unibrow).

The EA Pheno-graph has an intriguing strong positive (if I interpret the sign correctly) selection event on the branch leading to Chinese/Japanese. Is that indicative of the Asian IQ advantage? Note that Peruvians are on the other branch.

Unibrow shows strong negative selection in Northern Europeans compared to Southern Europeans.

Very interesting.
In Neurenberg the accused German politicians were IQ tested.
Göring and Schacht scored highest.
Schacht was an excellent economist, in just three years he reduced German unemployment from six million to one.
Schacht already in 1938 left Hitler, he saw the disaster coming.
Göring was the cause of the disaster of the German air force, he made a mess of it, also of the Göring industrialisation plans.
Milch had to come to the rescue, too late.
Nevertheless, Göring was the only one who saw what was coming in Neurenberg, death sentences.
Göring therefore defended himself in such a way that the chairman Jackson had a nervous collapse, and had to leave the proceedings.
So we see that IQ has a very limited value.

So we see that IQ has a very limited value.

Fascinating that you chose an example with Göring having the highest IQ and also being the one to successfully see what was coming at Nuremberg, and managing to avoid execution by killing himself.

Perhaps an example that did not show the competence of the highest IQ scorer would be better for demonstrating the limited value of IQ?

“racerealist88″ just a pun on 1488′ers or maybe you harbor the same dream?

“fascinating…choose Goering” are you Jewish? Jews can’t admit they are not smarter than Germans.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4982469/

If you scroll down here to extended data figure 1 you can see an ADMIXTURE chart (well, if you squint) that might help. At k=11 three distinct Amerindian clusters are revealed: one that encompasses most North and South American Indians, one that is highest in Na-Dene speakers, and a dark blue component that appears in the Eskimo, Aleut, and Yakuts. In 1957 Joseph Greenberg divided up Amerindian languages into three groups: Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and “everybody else” and he seems to have been right.

The paper also claims to discovered a small amount of Onge or Australian Aboriginal like ancestry in South Americans, maybe about 2%. This is a disputed point, though.

The Dorset culture that preceded the Eskimo in the Arctic was created by an extinct group of Indians different from all the rest. So altogether maybe 5 strands of ancestry in all, although some groups have just the one.

IQ matters when it comes to who does well in college and gets good jobs.

Among elites in any field — science, medicine, finance, computers, and etc — , it is very important.

But what about your average white person who isn’t dumb but not smart and lives in what is called the ‘real world’ by most people?

What affects them most is not IQ differences between whites and blacks. If an average white guy has an IQ of 100 and if an average black guy has an IQ of 90, who cares?
What really affects the average white guy is MQ and PQ, muscle quotient and penis quotient.

That is an amazing misreading both of my intent in comment 58 and of my overall posting history at the Unz Review. It’s actually pretty hilarious if you knew more about me. It might help to read comment 58 more carefully.

Interestingly many-most African groups seem to score higher in his analysis (the referenced one) than some Amerindian groups, (and overall in the “subcontinental average factor scores”
Sub Saharan Africa is just above the Amerindians:

https://topseudoscience.wordpress.com/2017/06/02/new-genes-same-results-group-level-genotypic-intelligence-for-26-and-52-populations/

Thanks! That chart is an eyestrain inducer and I haven’t fully understood it yet, but the overall idea makes sense. I need to spend some time on that paper. It looks interesting.

I wonder if the detailed genetic population data for the Americas (which appear to be specific to that paper?) would tell us anything if run through either Piffer’s methods or the Pheno-graphs in your link?

As usual, the fantasy of racial purity quickly followed by self-aggrandizing.

Putting aside the obvious (race is a fiction), please provide the collection of traits that make us “white” people inferior.

After all, only a child could possibly believe that we are superior in every conceivable way…

Having a high IQ is not of much use if you are a 140 IQ proverbial rocket scientist who managed to survive a plane crash over the jungles of Zaire with just a Swiss Army knife in his pocket and a canteen of water to sustain him. In the interim, your average member of the local gentry–IQ roughly half that of the rocket scientist–appears to survive quite well. For thousands of years in fact. Interesting.

And somewhat curiously (in the analysis I linked) , the Papuans and Melanesians also score above Mozabites (Berbers) and Mayans.

“Having a high IQ is not of much use if you are a 140 IQ proverbial rocket scientist who managed to survive a plane crash over the jungles of Zaire with just a Swiss Army knife in his pocket and a canteen of water to sustain him. In the interim, your average member of the local gentry–IQ roughly half that of the rocket scientist–appears to survive quite well. For thousands of years in fact. Interesting.”

You aren’t going to find a receptive audience for this here. But this has always bugged me, at least by extension as well.

Look, according to this site, every damn positive thing there is, depends on intelligence.

You will be told, that no matter what, intelligence is the only thing.

Well ok. Say you are right. Why haven’t all populations everywhere, evolved for greater intelligence, no matter what?

I get that malaria resistance may have been more important in some locales. Sure let’s go with that.

But why hasn’t natural selection favored high intelligence groups over low intelligence, regardless of era, barring something like malaria?

Why didn’t the high IQ Chinese conquer the Mongols, instead of vice versa?

If we wind the clock back to the 17th century or something, is there some feature of West Virginia trailer trash that makes them more fearsome competitors than the erudite Oxfordians?

Because I have a hard time seeing what stopped an arms race for bigger brains. It didn’t happen, but why?

Incidentally another thing that has always puzzled me is why peoples that have a long history of residence in mountainous areas didn’t converge physically to the same phenotype. The Swiss are famous for one, Alpine. Yet the Balkan peoples seems to be tall. Why?

Maybe I was born in 1988?

I don’t ‘dream’. I look at what the data says—and the data says that your statement above is wishful thinking. And please don’t link me to a shitty news article that has a click-baity title about it.

What part of my data is wishful thinking? If you were born in 1988, now I know what I’m dealing with.

What do you think about IQ?

I don’t remember you so your comments must not be interesting. Are you Jewish?

Well, just because IQ may be helpful for success of the individual, it doesn’t mean that it is evolutionarily adaptive. In that, I think you very much hit on something – right now, the “smart” people of the world aren’t really having that many children. If it was adaptive, then intelligent people would also be the most fecund.

On the other hand, if being “r-selected”, careless and being unable to stop yourself from having a number of children, then it is highly adaptive in an environment where needs are met by a prosperous environment. In that case, we’ve captured an exact example of how being careful is punished by the gods of Gnon.

And yeah, in a society of frontiersmen, higher intelligence might not be as helpful as being physically tough, resilient, and otherwise impressive. Its a different society than one we live in, with different pressures. In our current environment, it seems like we all need to become androgynous female-dominant personality to match the female primacy of the world, for example.

You probably share my sentiments that this seems like a pretty horrible world. I don’t disagree. For all of our scientific knowledge, we suck at being architects of our social future, don’t we?

Maybe because for non-modified or natural environment that level of intelligence has been enough. When organism have challenges about your own survival that maybe higher intelligence will be required. When a organism can establish a “perfect” interaction with their environment evolution is no more required. What seems happen(ed) with Inuits. When they found a perfect way to deal with the environ they are they no longer needed increase their intelligence to re establish that balance.

But the modern world is requiring not just higher cognitive skills but also responsibility/more rationality to deal with world even by now intelligence-alone have showed negative correlation with high fertility.

I looked at the paper by Davide Piffer “A review of intelligence GWAS hits: Their relationship to country IQ and the issue of spatial autocorrelation.”

I do not understand how polygenic or metagenic scores were calculated for a given population. But I can imagine it is some weighted average of allele frequencies for a given population.

The result, i.e. correlation and country IQ (per Lynn) that is 0.863 (for 9 SNP’s metagene) is exceptionally high. Suspiciously high. What if the selected SNP’s are responsible for skin color and have nothing to do with intelligence? Or maybe they do. Isn’t it that a skin color correlates with IQ? It all comes back to the original premise that started this silly business in UK in 19 century.

The polygenic or mutagenic scores can be calculated for an individual and they will be on the same scale as the scores used in this studies. So, the question is what is stopping Piffer from taking the next logical step and see how the score predicts IQ among white population. What correlation would he get? Would it be as ridiculously high as 0.863? To get an idea about the answer to this question we must keep in mind the study that had to use 1.7 millions of SNP’s (17% of all SNP’s in human genome) to get close to confirmation of twin heritability studies:

DNA evidence for strong genetic stability and increasing heritability of intelligence from age 7 to 12, Molecular Psychiatry, 2013

And this wunderkind Davide Piffer, the last hope of white racialists of Ulster, thinks he can do it with 9 SNP’s?

In the interim, your average member of the local gentry–IQ roughly half that of the rocket scientist–appears to survive quite well.

There is a big difference between knowledge and intelligence. The aborigine knows there are plants in dried river beds where water is stored in the roots and can be used for drinking water but learning that had nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence would be if it had sugar in it and he made alcohol from it.

LOL. You sure know how to win friends and influence people. Why do you care so much if I am Jewish? This is hugely entertaining to me since I was half expecting to get flamed for posting an arguably positive comment about Göring. Instead, I seem to be getting the opposite.

Perfectly put!

This is a Nash Equilibrium.

A Nash Equilibrium is always the goal of Evolution/Life/Nature.

The only advantage higher intelligence confers is, that it can reach a Nash Equilibrium more quickly, but the outcome and the goal is always the same, namely to reach a Nash Equilibrium.

Lecture 29 – 3-7 Low rationality: What Happens if Players Are Not Very Smart?

https://www.coursera.org/learn/game-theory-introduction/lecture/VL9XO/3-7-low-rationality-what-happens-if-players-are-not-very-smart

So let me just summarize. In some games like location games, repeated elimination of obviously bad strategies, repeated elimination of strictly dominated strategies, leads to a Nash equilibrium. Location game with finitely many locations is a perfect example. In such a game, Nash equilibrium might emerge under very different two reasons. So Nash equilibrium may emerge by very careful and sophisticated reasoning. Or Nash equilibrium may emerge out of very low rational trial and error adjustment process. Okay? So if repeated elimination of strictly dominated strategy leads to Nash equilibrium, Nash equilibrium is expected to emerge under a wide range of intellectual capacities of players.

Lecture 30 – 3-8 Game Theory Under Zero-Intelligence: Biological Evolution

https://www.coursera.org/learn/game-theory-introduction/lecture/uBGVK/3-8-game-theory-under-zero-intelligence-biological-evolution

In, in the last two lectures, I consider the case where players have absolutely no intelligence. ‘Kay, zero intelligence case. But still you can apply the concept of game theory to get fruitful prediction. Okay? So this is about biological evolution. Application of game theory to biological evolution. Okay? So we have been examining the whole spectrum of possible intelligence, okay? We have been examining whole spectrum of possible intellectual capacities of players. Spanning from hyper rationale situation and low rationale situation. And now, we are ready to examine zero rationality situation. Okay? So our subjects now are animals and insects and plants. And they have very little or no intellectual capacity for any strategic thought. But still, I’m going to show that game theory is useful to predict their behavior.
[...]
So no strategy can invade the society by means of mutation. In other words, no profitable deviation present is present to other strategies. This is the very definition of Nash Equilibrium. So therefore the outcome of evolution is a kind of Nash Equilibrium. So this is a basic message of evolutionary game theory. The application of the game theory to biology. The outcome of biological evolution is Nash Equilibrium of a game played by genes.

Obviously, this research is a work in progress. The new intelligence GWAS had 18 SNPs and the results were very similar to what had been found before. More SNPs will be forthcoming. Maybe the results will be confirmed, or maybe not.

“The last hope of white racialists”? Piffer is white and a racialist, but continually finds that East Asians have higher factor scores for cognitive ability and educational attainment than whites. Rather than being the “last” hope, the research supplements an ongoing stream of findings, including findings concerning cranial capacity, backward digit spans, decision-making times, heritability studies involving black identical twins, and the mediation of the racial admixture-socioeconomic-status relationship in Latin America.

But why hasn’t natural selection favored high intelligence groups over low intelligence, regardless of era, barring something like malaria?

Because there are costs associated with higher IQ just as there are costs associated with having more fast-twitch muscle fiber etc.

The costs associated with higher IQ are three fold:

1. Developmental. Bigger brains take more energy to develop.
2. Bigger brains are more difficult to give birth to and place more constraints on women.
2. Energy expenditure during life, since our brain consumes a large amount of energy and oxygen.

It the society you live in is not so complex and the intelligence demands are lower, then selection will select for lower IQ people, pretty much as it has done in most of Africa and many other places in the world.

Why didn’t the high IQ Chinese conquer the Mongols, instead of vice versa?

Well, they did. Didn’t you read the complaints by the remaining Mongols about being deprived of their pastoralist way of life and being forced to live in cities. While it took the Chinese quite a while to do it, they have finally destroyed the Mongols.

Do you have some intelligent questions?

Maybe the results will be confirmed, or maybe not.

Piffer and Lynn are driven by hypothesis they want to confirm very badly. They want to correlate some genetic information with the list of country IQ’s that Lynn compiled and partly made up. The result of 0.89 correlation between these IQ’s and polygenic score derived from just 9 SNP’s is very suspect. It is too good to be true. Keep in mind that heritability of IQ based on twin studies has been estimated at no more than 0.8 but more conservatively it is estimated to be around 0.7 or even less. It took 1.7 million of SNPs to approximate this heritability using genotype.

I would not be surprised that it would be possible to always extract some polygenic score based on few SNP’s selected out of 10 million available that would correlate well with random generated sequence of numbers assigned to the racial groups Piffer selected. Mathematically we are dealing here with a heavily underdetermined system. We have a list of just 20 countries (racial groups) and 10 million of SNP’s. You want to explain 20 numbers with a combination of some numbers out of 10 million possible. Undetermined system are very malleable and hypothesis friendly. They can yield results to your liking and when you are not careful or too blinded by your desire to prove your hypothesis you may end up believing your result. If you however do not believe it because you are a good enough mathematician, as I think, Piffer is and you still publish it you are a fraud and charlatan.

“Jim Flynn once observed that no-one was funding research into the genetics of racial differences in intelligence because they feared they would find something.”

Any chance you have a reference to this?

“You probably share my sentiments that this seems like a pretty horrible world. I don’t disagree. ”

Exactly. But still sometimes I wonder about things.

I kind of found this HBD thing randomly. I had some question in my mind about intelligence, did a google, and found Sailer’s pre-Unz site. I’ve been following it ever since.

Well and good. This sort of thing totally changed my thinking. At one time I would have said I was a liberal (after all isn’t that the best thing for the maximum number of people, – if you accept certain assumptions?). In particular reading La Griffe du Lion, Jesus the black/white disparity on rape still blows my mind… well that isn’t possible any more.

But I still have life experiences that don’t jibe with what most seem to believe on this site.

For example if you are good at sales you will make money. But damned if I can see a correlation between being able to make a sale and g. Sure you can be a super salesman and blow it all on coke or bad investments by being stupid, but still had to make the sale in the first place? Never seen a successful salesman who would have had the slightest bit of interest in this kind of site (autism helps).

Or scoring with the ladies. Lots of things can lead one to conclude there are different kinds of intelligence. Back when I used to bar hop I saw on a number of occasions total schmucks with zero dinero and bodies like Chris Farley score time after time. Could never figure it out.

Or take something like fixing a car. Trust me, if you want your car fixed, you DO NOT WANT a PhD looking at it.

Popeyes Runs Out of Chicken in Rochester, NY

[In] the jungles of Zaire … the local gentry–IQ roughly half that of the rocket scientist–appears to survive quite well. For thousands of years in fact. Interesting.

In the jungles of Zaire, the bonobos appear to survive quite well. For millions of years in fact. Interesting.

Why didn’t the high IQ Chinese conquer the Mongols, instead of vice versa?

Mongolia is reported to have an average IQ 101, which is higher than England. So they aren’t exactly primitive.

Do we have only Feynman’s word for it that he tested at 127?

“There was a little incident called the Exodus.” Or more precisely, there wasn’t.

“What part of my data is wishful thinking?”

“Ancient Egyptians wuz Kangz!” except in the reverse way. It’s idiotic. Sure they were “Caucasoid” (West Asian) but they weren’t Europeans or whatever Nordicists say about it.

“If you were born in 1988, now I know what I’m dealing with.”

Are you assuming I’m an SJW?

“What do you think about IQ?”

Its a good measure. Though I’m actually reading a book at the moment called “Genes, Brains, and Human Potential: The Science and Ideology of Intelligence” and, who knows, I may change my view because he has some great arguments—especially on twin studies.

If you think that all of your views are ‘right’ without constantly reevaluating them, then you’re not an intellectually honest man.

I don’t think brain size has anything to do with intelligence. Microcephaliics can have normal IQs. People with TBI have IQs in the normal range. This implies that large brains are not needed for high IQs, even Jensen agrees. Am I a heathen for taking that position?

https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2017/03/14/brain-size-increased-for-expertise-capacity-not-iq/

And don’t assume motivations. It makes you look dumb.

By the way IQ increased with larger cerebral volume to a point then began to decrease.

IQ increased with a larger cerebral volume to a point, then began to decrease.

Source: Reiss, A. L., Abrams, M. T., Singer, H. S., Ross, J. L. & Denckla, M. B. (1996). Brain
development, gender and IQ in children: A volumetric imaging study. Brain, 119, 1763-1774.

Large brains are not needed for high IQs, and cause large problems.

http://www.human-existence.com/publications/Up%20from%20dragons%20skoyles%20Big%20Heads%20running%20evolution.pdf

So if microcephalics can have IQs above average, and people with TBI can have IQs in the normal range, brain size must not have increased for intelligence over the past 3mya; it must have increased for another reason due to the big problems it brings us.

Source for TBI and IQ.

https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2017/05/17/traumatic-brain-injury-and-iq/

The aborigine knows there are plants in dried river beds where water is stored in the roots and can be used for drinking water but learning that had nothing to do with intelligence.

Dumbest statement, why*

Culturally accumulated knowledge, specially that really factual knowledge IS the achievement of certain intelligence type/and qual-quant levels within certain environment.

Intelligence would be if it had sugar in it and he made alcohol from it.

This is the sophistication of intelligence but it doesn’t mean the example you used mean ”nothing to do with intelligence”. Intelligence since from basic understanding to the complex or sophisticated/elaborated ones.

Mongolia has been a satellite of communist China and seems a strategic country because is between China and Russia.

The fact that Mongolia seems have nothing interesting to be exploited and also because chineses have showed [comparative] lower impetus to explore and to conquest other lands at least throughout its history by several reasons [internal conflicts, real lower inter-competitive impetus at least its elites].

Piffer is white or italian-jewish* He’s live in Israel now, isn’t*

Low rationality: What Happens if Players Are Not Very Smart?

Thank you! And also for that information, i don’t knew there is this Nash Equilibrium.

But here the author is convoluting rationality with intelligence. If we are dependent on HBD/psychometrics intelligence is basically IQ.

I think humans in harsh environments no had/have the luxury to increase their intelligence beyond the restrictly recommendable, but tempered climates [seems a plethora of ''climates types'' --itself-- in its four seasons] look terribly suitable to select for advanced abstract skills because its natural dynamics.

You aren’t going to find a receptive audience for this here. But this has always bugged me, at least by extension as well.

…snip…

Well ok. Say you are right. Why haven’t all populations everywhere, evolved for greater intelligence, no matter what?

you’re obviously correct so the answer must be IQ is in balanced selection with something else – maybe energy consumption? as the brain uses a lot of calories (or so wiki tells me) – and so under normal circumstances this balanced selection tends to the minimum necessary average IQ to be successful in a particular environment

once that minimum necessary *average* IQ is reached, being too dumb or too smart should be negative for the individual – although during their time some of the smart might invent something that helps everyone else

if it’s balanced selection then evolution would prefer genes that increased IQ too much above the average (for that environment) to be destructive to the individual

so the high IQ outliers from the average for a population would be kind of a genetic sacrifice to maintain future adaptability / creativity / innovation

What if the selected SNP’s are responsible for skin color and have nothing to do with intelligence? Or maybe they do. Isn’t it that a skin color correlates with IQ? It all comes back to the original premise that started this silly business in UK in 19 century.

Or the skin lightening effects some element of nutrition which feeds IQ – which might make some of the problem easily fixable – in which case the denial of obvious reality prevents it being fixed.

I was half expecting to get flamed for posting an arguably positive comment about Göring. Instead, I seem to be getting the opposite.

people spreading ethnic divide and rule – in his case white vs east asian – aren’t always what they appear to be

game theory is awesome sauce

At one time I would have said I was a liberal (after all isn’t that the best thing for the maximum number of people, – if you accept certain assumptions?).

This is something a lot of people on the Right don’t get. If a person thinks like this – and *some* liberals genuinely do – and you feed that person false data then you can get them to believe in stupid, destructive policies.

For example if you are good at sales you will make money.

yes – above average IQ for the population but not too high is probably optimal for relative prosperity

(high – for the population in question – might be needed to hit the jack pot but generally speaking only a small number can hit the jackpot)

Do we have only Feynman’s word for it that he tested at 127?

He was probably just trolling people.

So if microcephalics can have IQs above average, and people with TBI can have IQs in the normal range, brain size must not have increased for intelligence over the past 3mya; it must have increased for another reason due to the big problems it brings us.

Or… originally skull size did increase for IQ reasons but because of the problems you mention a second alternative mechanism evolved afterwards.

If the homo-chimps moving onto the savannah already had a range of head sizes then truncation on that basis wouldn’t take any new genes – while genes evolving to deal with the new problem of ever increasing heads might come after.

(or head sizes increased for heat exchange reasons and increased IQ was a side effect)

What kind of alternative mechanism? If you read the excerpt from Up From Dragons, you’d see that wide pelves are not conducive to running.

The obstetric dilemma, along with how wide pelves are not conducive to good running ability, along with the other data mentioned above, shows that large brains cause large problems. So if people with erectus sized brains can have IQs in the modern range then brain size increased for something else, which I believe to be expertise since larger brains have more cortical columns and that’s where information is stored.

I’ve read that hypothesis on heat dissipation, however head size varies as a function of climate with people in hotter areas having smaller beads than people who live in colder climates, race doesn’t matter to this.

Expertise capacity is the more likely reason for the brain size increases in humans over the past 2 mya since erectus. Not coincidentally, erectus was able to “pay” for the large brains with cooked food. Since erectus was the first to control fire then that was the beginning of cultural acquisition and transference. Think of thar as expertise and the brain size increase will make more sense since it’s clear that large brains are not needed for IQs in the modern range.

Dumbest statement, why*
Culturally accumulated knowledge, specially that really factual knowledge IS the achievement of certain intelligence type/and qual-quant levels within certain environment.

????? What. His dad took him out in the bush and dug a root up and showed him how to look for it – same as 1000 generations before him. It isn’t intelligence it is just rote memorization.

Intelligence at it’s core is using the information you have and doing something with it. If for a thousand generations cave men strike a rock to make a sharp edge and cut meat with it, it isn’t intelligence but just rote memorization. When somebody makes multiple strikes and makes a spear point, and sticks it on the end of his spear to replace the fire hardened end everybody else has, that is intelligence.

Maybe because for non-modified or natural environment that level of intelligence has been enough.

Define “enough”. Most of the reason societies don’t advance technologically is cultural. Every aboriginal society suffers from some form of ill health – bad teeth, fatal infections, and food poisoning to name a few. Every society has benefitted from trying to understand the world around them and how to modify it to the benefit of the group. Some just more than others – some not much at all.

But damned if I can see a correlation between being able to make a sale and g.

Good salesmen research their clients. You only see the schmoozing and not the preparation. Yes there are salesmen in things that don’t require much other than being able to BS their way around a topic but that ability to think on their feet is an example of intelligence. However, the guy selling mainframe computers does have to know something about what the machine is capable of doing. The pharmaceutical company rep has to know something about the disease the drug is supposed to help with.

It isn’t intelligence it is just rote memorization.

Long road to affirm ”isn’t intelligence”.

Intelligence at it’s core is using the information you have and doing something with it.

EXACTLY
ye yeah

This earlier human achievements may look trivial for us…

”Doing something with it… in correct way” i think.

If for a thousand generations cave men strike a rock to make a sharp edge and cut meat with it, it isn’t intelligence but just rote memorization.

You already said that.

that is also intelligence.

Maybe you’re confusing intelligence with creativity.

Define “enough”.

Enough is enough.

Most of the reason societies don’t advance technologically is cultural.

And culture/rote memorization is just a ”collective’ expression of intelligence/personality in different types of tasks.

Every aboriginal society suffers from some form of ill health – bad teeth, fatal infections, and food poisoning to name a few.

and*

Every society has benefitted from trying to understand the world around them and how to modify it to the benefit of the group. Some just more than others – some not much at all.

yes.

Piffer and Lynn are driven by hypothesis they want to confirm very badly.

And everyone else in this debate is completely disinterested and objective…

Some things that are critical to Piffer’s work IMHO:
1. As I understand it he did not choose the SNPs (they came from various IQ and EA GWAS).
2. The results have been robust to new SNPs being found and incorporated in the polygenic scores.
3. He used simulation with random control SNPs to check for behavior like you complain about. I have not been able to reproduce his R work yet (because a data file is missing at OSF) so have not tried to understand his method fully yet, but that sounds like a reasonable approach.

utu, are you a good enough mathematician to properly evaluate Piffer’s work? Have you done so in a thorough manner? You earlier asked some questions which led me to believe you have not looked at Piffer’s R code. Without taking a detailed look at the methodology (including the random SNP control) I don’t think it is appropriate to be throwing around terms like “fraud” and “charlatan.”

A healthy skepticism is merited when results that good appear. Accusations of the sort you are throwing around are not.

Maybe you’re confusing intelligence with creativity.

No because many animals exhibit acts that are passed down from parent to child and that act never changes for generations. Birds dropping nuts on rocks or big cats stalking are examples. They are learned but are not dependent on how intelligent the animal is – every animal in the group learns it.

“Every aboriginal society suffers from some form of ill health – bad teeth, fatal infections, and food poisoning to name a few.”

Aboriginals that are introduced to their ancestral environment actually get rid of their type II diabetes.

http://cyber.sci-hub.bz/MTAuMjMzNy9kaWFiLjMzLjYuNTk2/10.2337%40diab.33.6.596.pdf

Obesity is a disease of civilization.

https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2017/02/19/an-evolutionary-look-at-obesity/

Correct. Tons of animals learn through the socialization.

No because many animals exhibit acts that are passed down from parent to child and that act never changes for generations.

Instinct*

Birds dropping nuts on rocks or big cats stalking are examples. They are learned but are not dependent on how intelligent the animal is – every animal in the group learns it.

yes.

Now i’m well informed, thank you!

“(high – for the population in question – might be needed to hit the jack pot but generally speaking only a small number can hit the jackpot)”

Another thing about that is you have to be in the right place at the right time to make the play, whatever it is.

I’ve kind of mused that what Sam Walton accomplished was a lot more amazing than anything Larry Ellison, Zuckerberg, Gates, the Ebay and Google people have accomplished.

Barring some kind of resource thing like oil, it is pretty darn hard to become the richest man in the world (or just America?) from Arkansas.

The other guys were in the right place at the right time, had access to the funds, or just had it drop into their lap (Gates – as he famously said something to the effect that the market wants the OS to be a monopoly, along with the bizarre story about how IBM actually picked DOS and his company for their PC OS).

Swap Ellison, Zuckerberg, etc with Sam Walton at birth and I don’t think they are becoming the same big noise.

Risch seemed to me to be disingenuous on many points in his speech, though perhaps not always consciously. Despite his constant homage to the late-2015 tenets of political correctness, his questioning of the alleged genetic basis for homosexuality still led some degenerate-supremacists to squeal in outrage.

I have added the Int_EA_Replicated.csv file. The sql_random_freqs. csv file is an old file with another set of random SNPs that I had used for another simulation. You can ignore it for the time being.

Do your homework and read my papers before you say stuff like that. This problem has been solved by carrying out Monte Carlo simulation with 13,000 random SNPs, almost always failing to produce the same correlation with IQ. https://rpubs.com/Daxide/279148

Aboriginals that are introduced to their ancestral environment actually get rid of their type II diabetes.

Fine, but what was the life expectancy of an Australian aboriginal before the white man came? It may be lower now due to alcoholism but even with no natural predators like in Africa it was probably pretty low.

Thanks! That was enough for me to knit my RMD file succesfully. Understanding will take longer…

I don’t know if it was an error on my part, but I got a large number of warnings (mostly Matrix not positive definite) from the MC simulations.

If I might make a request, would it be possible to add section headings and a table of contents to your next RPubs publication? I like using the header options below in combination with hash marks, dashes, or equal signs marking the section titles.

output:
html_document:
number_sections: yes
toc: yes

Also, I may have missed it but would using an explicit random number generator seed be helpful to make your MC results reproducible?

Thanks for your fascinating work in this area. I look forward to seeing your ongoing progress.

Correction: … added together they can become a significant confounder for differences in *between-races* intelligence testing results …

Maybe there is a way to either shrink, close completely or even reverse some between-races-intelligence-testing-score gaps:

How Meditation Might Boost Your Test Scores

After two weeks, the students were re-evaluated for mind-wandering and working memory capacity and given another version of the G.R.E. reading comprehension section.

The nutrition group’s results did not change.

The group that took mindfulness training, however, mind-wandered less and performed better on tests of working memory capacity and reading comprehension. For example, before the training, their average G.R.E. verbal score was 460. Two weeks later, it was 520.

– https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/how-meditation-might-boost-your-test-scores/

It’s possible to neutralize ominous ruminations, if not eliminate them. Writing about worries before taking an exam dilutes their negative impact on students with test anxiety, Beilock says, “in essence downloading them from mind so they’re less likely to pop up in the moment and distract them.” In a paper published in the January 14 Science, Beilock and Chicago PhD student Gerardo Ramirez reported the effect. Test-anxious ninth graders who spent ten minutes writing about their feelings before a biology exam earned a B-plus on the test, compared to a B-minus for those who didn’t write, a significant difference between students with otherwise comparable academic credentials. “We show that this has an especially big effect,” Beilock adds, “for students who are high in test anxiety.”

– http://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/performance-anxiety

Interestingly Whites/Europeans, not African-Americans, could likely benefit the most from these anxiety-alleviating/management techniques, since they seem to be the most anxiety-prone racial group, which in turn would mean that they could see the biggest boosts/improvements in average group test score results. This actually means, in my opinion, that Whites/Europeans could close the gap with or even surpass Asian Americans in average group test score results.

A Cross-Ethnic Comparison of Lifetime Prevalence Rates of Anxiety Disorders
Asnaani et al. (2010)

Figure 1 link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2931265/figure/F1/

Figure 1 shows the prevalence rates of DSM-IV social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder for each individual racial group. As was found across a range of psychiatric disorders, Asian Americans consistently endorsed symptoms of all four anxiety disorders less frequently than any of the other racial groups. White Americans consistently endorsed symptoms of SAD (12.6%), GAD (8.6%) and PD (5.1%) more frequently than African Americans (8.6%, 4.9%, 3.8%, respectively), Hispanic Americans (8.2%, 5.8%, 4.1%, respectively), and Asian Americans (5.3%, 2.4%, 2.1%, respectively). African Americans more frequently met criteria for PTSD (8.6%) as compared to the White American subgroup (6.5%), Hispanic Americans (5.6%), and Asian Americans (1.6%).

Our results indicate that individuals from minority groups, especially Hispanic or Asian respondents, are less likely to meet criteria for many of the anxiety disorders than White Americans. African Americans are also less likely to endorse criteria for GAD, PD, and SAD, but are more likely to meet diagnosis for PTSD. Across the board, Asian Americans endorsed less anxiety symptomatology, regardless of type, whereas White Americans presented with increased rates of the anxiety disorders examined (except for PTSD) as compared to the three minority groups. These findings held even when demographic variables such as age, gender, and socioeconomic status were accounted for by including them as covariates in the analyses. These results support the findings of the other few large-scale epidemiological studies that have considered cross-ethnic differences in prevalence rates of single disorders(Grant et al, 2005a, b; Grant et al, 2006).

I browsed through your paper again today and I did not see you mention “13,000 random SNPs”. In the 3.1 section you say “40 random SNPs”. Do you mean that you look for all possible subsets of 40 among 13,000? This would make 4.16874109260558E+116 possibilities. Can your computer really do it? What is interesting that with the random SNP’s that you picked you got correlation with IQ’s of r=0.74

That is to say, factors extracted utilizing random SNPs exhibited very high correlations to the GWAS hits factors (r = .6 to .98) and similarly high correlations with country IQ distances. Unexpectedly, the method of correlated vectors produced very high values also when run using the random SNPs, ren- dering the extremely high magnitude and significant correlation (.99, p b .05) found for the GWAS hits somewhat less impressive. However, the correlation of IQ with the GWAS hits metagene (.89) was somewhat higher than the IQ correlation with the random SNP factors (.74).

which is exceptionally high. You could have written a paper just on this that you have explained r^2=0.55 of variance of IQ’s among countries with just randomly picked SNP’s. You are an exceptionally lucky person. Or perhaps this is not an indication of an exceptional luck but that IQ set from Lynn is a proxy for who knows what? Perhaps if you really looked among all those 13,000 SNP’s or among 10 millions of them you could find a subset that would give you correlation r=1. In your Table 2 you have IQ’s for 23 populations only. Don’t you think you can find a combination of SNP’s among 10 million of them that could fit these 23 numbers exactly?

If you feel really confident for your 9 SNP’s as great predictors of IQ (r=0.89) try to predict IQ’s of large database (say 100,000) of individuals with these 9 SNP’s. I would be surprised if you get anywhere near r=0.25.

What kind of alternative mechanism?

more efficient brains as in your “expertise capacity”

i imagine a sequence like
1) increased skull size (simple and easy truncation selection)
2) leading to birth problems due to skull size
3) leading to a switch to more efficiency instead

Maybe inverse is a better word than reverse in this sentence/context:

Maybe there is a way to either shrink, close completely or even* inverse* some between-races-intelligence-testing-score gaps

I believe the following data further confirms my theory. Whites seem to benefit the least from test prep. I believe the explanation for this, is that even if a person studies hard for an exam/test, but they have not learned how to control their thoughts and emotions properly under stress/pressure, most of the test prep/studying effect will go out the window if they are anxiety-prone, have difficulty focusing or struggle with other general attention deficit disorders.

As performance anxiety researcher Sian Beilock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sian_Beilock experienced it herself:

Growing up in the Bay Area, she was a strong student and an accomplished athlete, good enough to play lacrosse at the University of California, San Diego, and soccer in the Olympic development program. When the stakes were highest, though, the skills she spent hours refining sometimes failed her. “I had one of the worst soccer games of my life playing in front of college recruiters,” Beilock writes, “and I could never manage to score as well on the actual SAT as I did on the many practice tests.” Even then, she wondered what caused her performance fluctuations: “I was always interested in trying to uncover the reasons, the why, that in certain situations, we don’t perform at our best.”

– http://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/performance-anxiety

East Asian Advantage

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/19/study-finds-east-asian-americans-gain-most-sat-courses

Use of Test-Prep Courses and Gains, by Race and Ethnicity
Group % Taking Test-Prep Course Post-Course Gain in Points on SAT
East Asian American 30% 68.8
Other Asian 15% 23.8
White 10% 12.3
Black 16% 14.9
Hispanic 11% 24.6

– http://www.unz.com/jthompson/iq-does-not-exist-lead-poisoning-aside/#comment-1833752

There is also this:

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in ADHD Diagnosis From Kindergarten to Eighth Grade
Morgan et al. (2013) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3691530/

We investigated racial/ethnic disparities in ADHD diagnosis in a large, nationally representative cohort of schoolchildren as they attended kindergarten to eighth grade. Results indicated that racial/ethnic minority children are much less likely than otherwise identical white children to receive an ADHD diagnosis. Children at lower risk include those displaying greater academic achievement, those with more frequent learning-related classroom behaviors, and those without health insurance. Boys, children frequently engaging in externalizing problem behaviors, and those raised by an older mother are more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD. Being raised by an English-speaking parent also increased the likelihood of diagnosis. In addition, and again after extensive statistical control, children diagnosed with ADHD were much less likely to use prescription medication for the disorder if they were Hispanic, African American, or of other races/ethnicities.

By the spring of eighth grade, ∼7% of white children received an ADHD diagnosis sometime between kindergarten and eighth grade. The comparable rates for African American, Hispanics, and children of other races/ethnicities were ∼3%, 4.4%, and 3.5%, respectively.

Figure 1 link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3691530/figure/fig1/
Figure 2 link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3691530/figure/fig2/

What this means, in my opinion, is that Whites, instead of just studying for exams/tests, should probably invest more of their time and resources in learning and practicing mind-and-body-calming techniques like mediation, breathing exercises, etc. before important tests (including IQ tests), exams, job interviews, etc.

I think what is important to reiterate is that IQ tests seem to measure and predict certain things very accurately, e.g., better cognitive performance/functioning under pressure/stress, educational attainment, income, possibly testosterone and dopamine levels, etc., but they do ironically/paradoxically only seem to test “intelligence” to a limited extent, at least that is my best, current understanding and interpretation of the data I have researched thus far.

This, in my opinion, also explains Mr. Piffer’s contradictory finding on COMT in East Asians. My guess is, that COMT does not operate “in the opposite fashion” in East Asians than it does in other populations, but that it is compensated for/balanced out by other (environmental and/or genetic) factors in those populations and cultures/regions; most likely lower testosterone levels in East Asians are the main explanation, again this difference in testosterone levels could either a have an environmental and/or genetic explanation:

However, COMT is only one of the many genes responsible for variation in cognition, although it is the best studied so far. Thus, it is probable that many other genes act along with COMT to explain cognitive and cultural differences. Particularly interesting is the relatively low frequency of COMT in East Asian populations (range 0.22–0.30), which contrasts with their reported higher IQ (105). In fact, a recent study (Wang et al., 2013) shows that the COMT polymorphism operates in the opposite fashion among Chinese subjects.

– http://www.unz.com/jthompson/genetics-of-racial-differences-in-intelligence-updated/#comment-1896274

Here is my dietary question for you now, how much does green tea affect testosterone levels in East Asian men do you think, and could this to some degree explain their mathematical aptitude compared to Westerners, and even more so compared to Africans, who seem to have the highest testosterone levels and sensitivity on average? Thank you.
[...]
Comparative rates of androgen production and metabolism in Caucasian and Chinese subjects.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9626146

[...]
Taken together, these studies suggest that environmental/dietary, but not genetic, factors influence androgen production and explain the differences between Caucasian and Chinese men.
[...]
A team of scientists from Harvard Medical School reported in the February 2003 issue of The Journal of Nutrition that green tea significantly reduced DHT and testosterone concentration in the blood.

– http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-flynn-effect-for-height/#comment-1853897

You spewed a lot of stuff. Caucasians are first, Asians second, blacks last. Everybody Westernizes, they never Easternize.

Are you Jewish, Asian, involved with Asians?

Knowing if someone is Jewish clears up the motives behind their arguments.

Caucasians are first, Asians second, blacks last.

I agree with this point of yours mostly.

Everybody Westernizes, they never Easternize.

I disagree with this assertion of yours. It is important to keep the distinction between “Westernization” and “Modernization” in mind in this context, and not to conflate the two, in my opinion.

Chapter 2: Modernization, Westernization, and Democratization

Of course, the unilinear view of modernization has often been challenged, particularly in the non-western world, but also by western scholars. In contrast to convergence theories like Fukuyama’s are theories of cultural variation, which assert there are different roads to modernization and different end states to the modernization process. According to the cultural variation perspective, modernized societies are not all the same. One of the most straightforward and articulate spokesmen of the cultural variation school is Samuel Huntington. In a pair of widely read essays in Foreign Affairs and a subsequent book, Huntington argues that while all cultures experience certain similarities in the modernization process, cultures still retain their unique characteristics. Even after modernization, societies can be quite different from each other.

Huntington pointedly attacks the notion that modernization equals westernization. He notes that drinking Coca-Cola does not make a Russian any “more western than eating sushi makes an American Japanese.”
[...]
Huntington maintains that differences between different civilizations around the world remain real and important despite the fact that societies are undergoing a common process of modernization.
[...]
In fact, Huntington sees western cultural influence slipping. Even as English is triumphing as the language of international business, because of demography and politics, the percentage of the world’s population speaking English as a first language has shrunk dramatically. Islam is rising as Christianity is receding as a cultural force. The sheer number of Muslims around the world will soon surpass the number of nominal Christians, and the numbers only hint at the differences between the two religions in the intensity of belief and direct influence over their societies. In recent decades in many parts of the world, especially in East Asia and the Islamic world there has been a resurgence of traditional societies. Huntington notes the phenomenon of “second generation indigenization” in which elites who have been educated in the West and taken their cues from western values see their children returning to their roots and consciously rejecting excessive western cultural influence.

– http://www.dflorig.com/CHAP2.html

“Are you Jewish, Asian, involved with Asians?”

No and why does any of that matter? How about responding to what I wrote? Assuming my motivation (a fallacy), isn’t now discussions work. Try again.

A more efficient brain would be a smaller brain as it would minimize birth complications, and minimize the chance of the mother and child dying when the child is born.

“leading to a switch to more efficiency instead”

What kind of efficiency? Large brains (and in turn large heads) need a wider birth canal and thusly wider hips. This is compounded on top of the climatic variation that selects for pelvic width—cold climates select for wider pelves whole hotter climates select for narrower pelves. Thusly, selecting for larger brains would impeded bipedal movement in both walking and running. This is best seen in elite running competitions where those with the correct morphology always win—people with narrower pelves and differing muscle fiber types, but the morphology is one of the driving factors.

There is a difference between humans and chimps and how the baby lies in the womb. Human babies are more oriented to the side and during birth the skill morphs to the pelvic canal, but complications are still had. So due to these complications and large brains not being needed for IQs in the modern range (IQ increased with a larger cerebral volume to a point, then began to decrease), along with people other TBI having IQs in the normal range, then it’s possible that some erectus had IQs in the modern range. Therefore large brains weren’t aren’t needed for high IQs and thusly expanded for expertise capacity since larger brains have more cortical columns in which to store information chunks. Large brains are not needed for IQs in the modern range.

Minor typo, one *a* too many, corrected: … again this difference in testosterone levels could either have an environmental and/or genetic explanation …

I developed a simple formula/model/system to identify geniuses:

These are the characteristics I am looking for: height and low testosterone as indicators/proxies for intelligence; “Nordic” phenotype (light eye pigmentation) as an indicator/proxy for creativity and curiosity.

– http://www.unz.com/jthompson/isteve-metrics/#comment-1823832

My model differs from IQ tests, in that it positively correlates with certain personality traits and conditions, which are negatively correlate with IQ test scores, like for example: insomnia, hyperactivity, anxiousness/impatience/restlessness, and possibly others, but these ones I am very sure about.

These difference are mostly due to my inclusion of light eye pigmentation as indicator for creativity in the formula/model:

I believe ADHD is a real thing, but I think it is a good thing, and even necessary for Civilization to progress and to evolve.
[...]
What are the hereditary factors? My study of these hyper children indicates that most — at least in my practice — are blue-eyed blondes or green-eyed redheads, Nordic types. I had the feeling that the Northern Europeans were restless in the old country, and when faced with the prospect of marrying the girl next door and farming for rest of his life, he decided to emigrate to the United States. Their restlessness forced them to keep on moving West until the Pacific Ocean stopped them.
[...]
I have argued before, that this creativity and genius (and also pathological altruism/idealism) common in Whites (Faustian Spirit) is attributable to light eye pigmentation (which suppresses the secretion of melatonin, and is not very common in Asians, thus their lack of creativity/gen[iu]ses) plus a high IQ

– http://www.unz.com/jthompson/isteve-metrics/#comment-1823832

I also believe, that light eye pigmentation is a or the major factor in insomnia:

In contrast, other studies have found that minorities are at lower risk of insomnia. A survey of over 17,000 adults revealed that Whites reported more trouble falling asleep and staying asleep than did Blacks and Hispanics.(51) Similar findings were reported in a diary study examining self-reported chronic insomnia in 769 adults.(52)

– https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3824366/ Kingsbury et al. (2013)

– http://www.unz.com/jthompson/isteve-metrics/#comment-1830062

This I see as the greatest weaknesses of IQ testing (my emphases):

The idea that human mental ability could be reduced to a singe number for ranking is highly counter-intuitive and should not be accepted without the strongest evidence. The existing evidence is only suggestive and not decisive: M.D. Lezak, “IQ: R.I.P.”, Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, vol.10, 1988, pp.351-361. In any case, lacking a definition of “intelligence” based in turn on a general theory of intelligence, it becomes difficult to know what it is that we are trying to measure. Thus we should be sceptical of Jensen’s claim that intelligence is a form of information processing, or that the study of a grab bag of physiological variables such as reaction times may substitute for intelligence studies.
By such reductionist accounts, present day computers, which even the strong programme in AI do not yet regard as “thinking machines”, are superior to humans. A present day non-thinking computer can be programmed to do better than humans (including East Asian and Jews) on many cognitive tests – remembering that computers can beat humans at chess. Further, we would also expect that “creativity” should be an essential part of “intelligence”. Yet IQ tests do not measure creativity and have never intended to: H.B. Lyman, “Test Scores and What They Mean”, (Allyn and bacon, Boston, 1998), p.41.

– https://thecross-roads.org/race-culture-nation/25-the-myth-of-east-asian-intellectual-supremacy

For another good discussion I recommend the following comment thread:

Both (reaction time) RT and digit span (DS) are useful measures of something going on in brain and they seem as the ones that have a high degree of scientific objectivity. However correlations of RT or DS with IQ are low (0.3-0.4), though in social sciences 0.3 correlation often is deemed significant.

– http://www.unz.com/isteve/what-if-charles-murray-is-wrong/#comment-1892133

Yes,
it seems that having a photographic memory does not necessarily/automatically mean a person is also intelligent; it can be a very useful/powerful ability independent from intelligence:

Eidetic Memory

Commonly referred to as “photographic memory,” eidetic memory is the ability to recall images in great detail after only a few minutes of exposure. It is completely unconnected to a person’s intelligence level and revealed in early childhood. But it is not found in adults, leading some to question whether it is a true condition at all.
– http://www.tuw.edu/psychology/science-behind-super-brains/

– http://www.unz.com/isteve/what-if-charles-murray-is-wrong/#comment-1892214

I also believe, that the Woodley Effect is real and is based on hard data, but it can also be explained , to a large degree, by two simple factors and changes in human behavior and physiology, in my opinion and according to my research; namely increases in the cases of myopia and increases in average human height

– http://www.unz.com/isteve/what-if-charles-murray-is-wrong/#comment-1892050

Low testosterone leads to a myriad of problems. Testosterone doesn’t cause violence. The correlation between Aggression and physical violence is .14. High testosterone also doesn’t cause prostate cancer.

More typos in my above comment, corrections: … which are negatively *correlated* with IQ test scores, like for example … & … These *differences* are mostly due to my inclusion of light eye pigmentation …

Low testosterone leads to a myriad of problems.

My main argument is, that lower-than-average — not abnormally or unhealthily low — testosterone levels make men (not women) more intelligent. If this is entirely healthy or not or if this makes a person more or less happy, successful, etc. is a completely different topic and discussion to have.

Testosterone doesn’t cause violence. The correlation between Aggression and physical violence is .14. High testosterone also doesn’t cause prostate cancer.

I am not quite sure, where in my above comment I brought up either aggression, physical violence, or prostate cancer in connection with testosterone levels???

We already had somewhat of a debate about this, here (your comment): http://www.unz.com/jthompson/isteve-metrics/#comment-1827274

My reply: http://www.unz.com/jthompson/isteve-metrics/#comment-1829793

In that exchange I agreed with many/most of your points and much of your research. I think this misunderstanding/disagreement between us, or that you have with me, is mostly about semantics/definitions.

Take care.

Since you had the courtesy to answer my question I will answer yours. I am not Jewish (also not Asian, as far as involved with Asians not sure what that means, I have a fair number of Asian friends but I assume you mean more than that).

IMHO a pretty good first cut at detecting bias is finding out if someone ranks their own group first in IQ. From the data I am aware of Jews and (East) Asians are close enough that it is hard to say definitively (and there is a tendency to split into smaller subgroups, e.g. the Ashkenazim, in an effort to take the honors). To be clear, IQ is not everything and there is much to be said for a common culture. When in Rome (or America, England, China, Israel, etc.) do as the Romans (etc.) do and all of that.

A more efficient brain would be a smaller brain as it would minimize birth complications, and minimize the chance of the mother and child dying when the child is born.

right, so
-> need for more brain power
-> simple truncation selection for larger brain size
-> birthing problems
-> switch to evolving a more efficient brain instead

aka path of least resistance

(if correct this could lead to two signals which might confuse the issue if researchers were only expecting one)

Maybe both physiological and psycho-cognitive features were parallely selected and not one cause the other. Albinos of whatever race are more creative*

“Both (reaction time) RT and digit span (DS) are useful measures of something going on in brain and they seem as the ones that have a high degree of scientific objectivity. However correlations of RT or DS with IQ are low (0.3-0.4), though in social sciences 0.3 correlation often is deemed significant.”

A single reaction-time test (decision-making time) may not have a high correlation with IQ or “g” (“general intelligence”), but a composite score (“factor score”) of multiple reaction-time tests DOES have a good correlation with g. In the same vein, a single IQ subtest may not have a good correlation with g, but in the context of developed countries, the composite IQ score DOES correlate well with g.

James Thompson has previously written on his blog about backwards-digit tests; the correlation with g is typically about 0.7.

In less developed countries, the correlation between IQ scores and g may be lower, but Wicherts found that scores on the Progressive Matrices (which are among the most commonly-administered IQ tests) in sub-Saharan Africa still correlate reasonably well with g (0.55). Jensen and Rushton found that the IQ difference between black Zimbabweans and white Americans is mostly on g. The Flynn Effect will likely result in a gain in African IQ scores vis-a-vis developed countries, but it seems unlikely at this point that the gap will completely close unless other forces intervene (e.g., dysgenic fertility and immigration in the West).

“ex oriente luxe”

For most of history this was true, maybe until the 60s….

In less developed countries, the correlation between IQ scores and g may be lower

It seems to me the causal chain here has two links:
genotypic g → phenotypic g → IQ test result
with the first link controlled by physical environment and the second link controlled by cultural familiarity with IQ test style thinking.
Does this sound reasonable? Any thoughts on which of the links is the greater problem in developing countries?

Thank you very much for your feedback.

This paper might be of interest to you, or maybe you are already aware of it?

Fractionating Human Intelligence
Hampshire et al., Fractionating Human Intelligence, Neuron (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2012.06.022

http://www.owenlab.uwo.ca/pdf/2012%20-%20Hampshire%20-%20Neuron.pdf

General Discussion
The results presented here provide evidence to support the view that human intelligence is not unitary but, rather, is formed from multiple cognitive components. These components reflect
the way in which the brain regions that have previously been implicated in intelligence are organized into functionally specialized networks and, moreover, when the tendency for cognitive tasks to recruit a combination of these functional networks is accounted for, there is little evidence for a higher-order intelligence factor. Further evidence for the relative independence of these components may be drawn from the fact that they correlate with questionnaire variables in a dissociable manner. Taken together, it is reasonable to conclude that human intelligence is most parsimoniously conceived of as an emergent property of
multiple specialized brain systems, each of which has its own capacity.

Historically, research into the biological basis of intelligence has been limited by a circular logic regarding the definition of what exactly intelligence is. More specifically, general intelligence may sensibly be defined as the factor or factors that contribute to an individual’s ability to perform across a broad range of cognitive tasks. In practice, however, intelligence is typically defined as ‘‘g,’’ which in turn is defined as the measure
taken by classical pen and paper IQ tests such as Raven’s matrices (Raven, 1938) or the Cattell Culture Fair (Cattell,1949). If a more diverse set of paradigms are applied and, as a consequence, a more diverse set of first-order components are derived, the conventional approach is to run a second-order factor analysis in order to generate a higher-order component. In order for the battery to be considered a good measure of general
intelligence, this higher-order component should correlate with ‘‘g’’ as measured by a classical IQ test. The results presented here suggest that such higher-order constructs should be used
with caution. On the one hand, a higher-order component may be used to generate a more interpretable first-order factor solution, for example, when cognitive tasks load heavily on multiple components. On the other hand, the basis of the higher-order component is ambiguous and may be accounted for by cognitive tasks corecruiting multiple functionally dissociable brain networks. Consequently, to interpret a higher-order component as representing a dominant unitary factor is misleading.