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Sex and IQ
By Scott Jameson
800 words
Long and short of this issue is that something has to explain why most of the really, really smart people are men. There are two hypotheses: men have a higher mean, and men have a higher standard deviation. They don’t really have to compete, and so some people believe that both are true. Some believe neither, of course.
Let’s start with three facts:
- Women tend to get slammed by men on Raven’s Progressive Matrices; the second graph in the post linked above details this. It’s a difference of 5 IQ points on average, quite a bit, certainly more than on other IQ tests.
- Women tend to lose even harder in visuospatial measures. John Loehlin pointed out in The Handbook of Intelligence that the gap here was a whopping 13.5 points.
- Raven’s is so g loaded because your score is primarily driven by spatial and verbal-analytic abilities.
The biggest subtest difference is spatial, and I think that likely explains the abnormally large differences in Raven’s scores. Other IQ tests, like the SAT, hardly use visual abilities. Women do about as well as men on the SAT. I’ve also seen the White-Asian gap smaller on the SAT than in other IQ tests, and that gap is also driven in large part by spatial scores. Conversely you might expect the SAT to go better for a hypothetical demographic that scores well in math and verbal abilities, but not especially well in spatial. By hypothetically I mean that these people make up like a fifth of the kids at the Ivy Leagues, even more than you’d expect from an average IQ of, I don’t know, 111ish.
Off topic: these differences are probably going to be slighter still now that they’re fastidiously removing every useful element of the test in an effort to make it less “biased” by race. I wonder if colleges will just throw up their shoulders and start looking for kids who do well on the ACT. Moving on.
There are other sex differences in subtest scores. Pulling from Loehlin again: “females tend to have an advantage on verbal tests involving the fluent production of words belonging to a category, such as synonyms.” Women are known to do better on verbal than on math.
Loehlin also points out that girls do better at math in early childhood, but that boys outstrip them by the time it, uh, matters, when they take standardized tests in adolescence.
I have a wild hypothesis that men and women respectively being more oriented towards mathematical and verbal thought corresponds to observed differences in interests. Women are known to read more often than men on average, whereas male dominated activities like sports and video games often have a distinctly mathematical bent. My spurious hypothesis is that doing these different things differentially develops their abilities, constituting an example of crystallized intelligence rather than fluid intelligence; alternatively, they were differentially selected for ability to perform well on tasks that their respective sex does more of, in which case the abilities are innate.
Even if they aren’t innate, it’d be an instance of secondary heritability because evidence tends to show male-female personality differences as innate; in this scenario they are innately prone to practicing different abilities to different extents.
Loehlin points to Hedges and Nowell’s 1995 meta-analysis, showing a higher male variation in IQ and elucidating a few more small subtest differences. I’ve lifted a meaty bit here:
On average, females exhibited a slight tendency to perform better on tests of reading comprehension, perceptual speed, and associative memory, and males exhibited a
slight tendency to perform better on tests of mathematics and social studies. All of the effect sizes were relatively small except for those associated with vocational aptitude scales (mechanical reasoning, electronics information, and auto and shop information) in which average males performed much better than average females. The effect sizes for science were slightly to moderately positive, and those for perceptual speed were slightly to moderately negative. Thus, with respect to the effect size convention, these data suggest that average sex differences are generally rather small.
In summary:
- There are sex differences in scores of various IQ subtests, including but not limited to female orientation towards verbal and male orientation towards mathematical ability.
- The largest of these differences is a substantial male advantage in spatial ability.
- On any IQ test that doesn’t weight subtests such that men and women perform equally by default, men tend to score a hair better.
- Men also have a higher standard deviation in IQ.
There are more male geniuses, particularly with respect to mathematical genius. There are also more mentally retarded males. I just explained why men tend to populate CERN, NASA, Silicon Valley, and lists of who’s died in the Running of the Bulls.
Getting Omega 3s in the public diet
by Scott Jameson
An earlier post established that Omega 3 fatty acids are an important nutrient of which hardly anybody is getting enough, and that this deficiency is making us Westerners a bit dumber and a bit crazier on the whole. Description sometimes obligates prescription, so this post is where I spitball about possible solutions, and welcome you to join me in the comments.
I’m reminded of the gubbermint mandating the lacing of our salt with sorely needed iodine, or the enrichment of white flour with nutrients lost in the removal of the bran and germ as well as the bleaching of the endosperm.
For yourself and your family, fish oil pills are fine- kelp oil if you’re one of those people. But we need solutions that work for nearly everybody, and the brilliance of the examples I listed above is that everybody eats that stuff (bread and salt) and now it’s laced with nutrients they’ve been needing. So we could produce N3s at low cost and legally mandate that certain foods contain them. Chia is a promising source: it’s cheap, it’s loaded with N3s, and it doesn’t taste fishy. Flax also works, but it’s loaded with phytoestrogens. Tons of seeds have those, I think Chia as well, but I’ve been told (incorrectly?) that flax is a particularly bad offender. Anyway, how do we load Chia or a similar seed into people’s diets?
Omega 3 eggs are one way to go. Chickens metabolize plant ALA (such as from chia or flax) into DHA and store both in their eggs. Just as we made use of the auroch and tarpan’s efforts to have a brain, we can hijack the chicken’s futile attempts to provide brain-material for her nonexistent offspring, using her eggs as a vehicle to get N3s into ourselves. It’s as simple as a mandate that a certain percentage of all chicken feed must be N3 rich seeds and/or insects.
Another obvious place to look is the plant oils that go into our food. Check out the table on the Wikipedia page for ALA: soybean and rapeseed oils have a pathetic showing for ALA content, and they’re put in absolutely everything. The State mandates that all gas will be a bit ethanol: why not all soybean and canola be 10, 20% Chia or some comparably high ALA crop?
It’s worth pointing out that you can genetically modify ALA rich vegetable oil to be on a quality closer to par with fish oil, having some of the ALA converted into the more useful EPA. Forget any concerns about GMOs you may have because the oils I’m talking about lacing with GMOs are already themselves GMOs.
We also must mandate that all infant formula be laced with N3s: EPA and DHA in particular, and tested for stuff like mercury if it comes from fish. You probably know at least one person who is autistic because they were bottlefed.
Comment your potential solutions below. I want to hear them. Double points for anyone playing the game on hard mode: free market solutions (libertarians) or animal-free solutions (vegans). If you try both, you’re a masochist and you need help.
You Are what you Eat, Including Brains
by Scott Jameson
850 words
I’ve been thinking about Omega 3 fatty acids (N3s) recently. We’re clearly adapted to getting more of them than we’re actually getting.
Children whose mothers took fish oil (chock full of N3s EPA and DHA) during pregnancy have higher coordination, and they are smarter, although that difference may not persist later in development. RaceRealist has written about N3s and PISA math scores before.
Here’s a paper summarizing many of the known benefits of fish oil supplementation. Goes over some of the aforementioned results regarding kids, and also shows random improvements such as helping people with Alzheimer’s maintain weight.
A lack of N3s is associated with depression, coronary artery disease, maybe even autism. N3s are known to lessen autism symptoms. This is probably an immune thing. Sulforaphane, an anti-inflammatory agent, is known to reduce autism symptoms, and other research has elucidated the relationship between N3s and the immune system.
This is delicious fodder for a post of its own. There’s a mass of papers about the relationship between autism and the immune system; N3s being neuroprotective and correlating negatively with likelihood of autism/severity of autism symptoms vindicates the idea that autism happens when your immune system cooks your brain (neuroinflammation). You would expect males to be whacked harder by this because they’re not good at producing the important N3 docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Thus, males ought to have higher autism rates- and they do.
Anyway, here’s what I’m getting at. Either N3s are a counter-intuitive miracle drug, or they’re just an important nutrient of which many of us do not get enough. The latter, I should think! The lemonade that can and will be made from these lemons is that widespread N3 deficiency gives us an opportunity to understand one of the ways that a human brain can get messed up. But we still want to fix the problem- more on that in my next post.
Our ancestors probably got more N3s than we do. They’ve been estimated to, anyway. (Second study mentioning our ancestors’ higher N3 intake.) If they didn’t, they might’ve been selected for better processing of alpha linoleic acid into eicosapentaenoic acid and subsequently docosahexaenoic acid, which real-life humans aren’t great at. As it stands, humans need either a whole bunch of excess ALA to convert to EPA and DHA, or we could have EPA and DHA straight. The excess ALA idea probably isn’t something you can rely on for your N3 needs, but certainly ALAs are better than nothing.
Seeds would’ve been a part of the diet back in the Paleolithic. Flax, an example of a seed rich in ALA, was known to humans quite a darned while ago, so seeds might have been a source of these critical nutrients. It’s worth noting that the first paleolithic diet estimation study linked in the previous paragraph pegs hunter gatherers as getting way more ALA than modern folks do.
Of course, many populations would’ve lived near oceans or at least rivers and lakes, where they could’ve gotten N3s from fish and seafood.
Some of it must have come from insects, themselves actually having a decent amount of N3s.
I’ve got an even weirder guess, though: bioaccumulation in land animal tissue. This possibility must have been important for peoples like the Botai culture with extremely narrow (Tarpan-based) diets, which likely didn’t include enough seeds, insects, and/or seafood. Animals can’t produce N3s of their own, but they eat ALA, convert it into EPA and DHA, and send a lot of it up to the brain, where it’s needed, with the result being that the brain has a lot more and higher quality N3s than any of the plants from which the N3s were derived.
Grog the caveman could’ve gotten a bunch of N3s from his favorite treat: scrambled auroch brains. Many of his progeny carry the practice into the present day, to the disgust of other living humans. Being that humans and our relatives are disgusting in general, Neanderthals occasionally even ate each other’s brains, and according to CNN, they’re still at it!
Nonhuman brains had to be the more popular option, then as now; mentioning the whole cannibalism thing is a bit of a non sequitur I shoved in for sheer entertainment value. But I suspect that there are several reasons we Westerners don’t get enough N3s: we don’t eat brains anymore, we don’t eat bugs anymore, and we don’t get as many ALA-rich plant oils as we used to. Perhaps we’re not getting enough fish, or perhaps the fish we’re getting are less likely to be fatty (e.g. salmonids, tuna, schooling fish) and more likely to be lean (cod, pollock).
Somehow or other we ought to get N3s back in our diet. Could save some kids from autism or, failing that, improve their prognosis. Again, it could increase our math scores, too, particularly in women. Closing part of the gap with other nations and between our sexes- two birds with one stone for our educators- and a boon for our engineering departments as well. Which is a boon for everyone.
The stakes are high. Who can save us from our collective state of starved brains? I’ll post my ideas soon.
Chewing the Cud
by Scott Jameson
RaceRealist and I have been ruminating on a lot of stuff lately. Here’s a fun one: what economic system works best relative to what we know about human health? In my mind there are two approaches: the libertarian approach, and quasi-fascism.
In the libertarian approach, there’s no regulation of sugar placed in our food. That’s already the case. But here’s an improvement: you don’t have to pay for anyone’s gastric bypass after they overeat that sugar.
In the fascist approach, there is regulation of sugar, because a fascist state does not allow people to poison each other for profit. You still have to pay for others’ medical expenses, but those expenses will be lower.
Here’s an advantage to the libertarian approach. In that society, the people who stuff their faces and refuse to get off the couch- who are dumber and lazier on average, probably- will have a higher mortality rate on average. Eugenics need not cost a dime.
But you run into a snag, sand in the gears of your hands-off system, when Big Food kicks out a whole bunch of crappy dietary advice, at which point a minority of reasonably intelligent people will be led astray, perhaps to the grave. How could a libertarian society stop that from taking place? Would it even bother? Could the system broadly work in spite of this snag?
A libertarian society doesn’t pay for idiots to have children. That’s good, but half of your population (women) are unlikely to ever support it. Women don’t do libertarianism; observe Rand Paul’s demographic Achilles Heel on page 25. When women asked men what to do about so-and-so’s eighth unpaid for child, we’d have to look them in the eyes and give a deadpan “let’s hope private charity can handle it.” There was a time, before FDR, when women would’ve accepted that answer. They were still in the kitchen back then, and I don’t know how to put them back there.
A fascist society has more hands-on eugenics, possibly genome editing or embryo selection. Also good. Expensive, but obviously worth it.
We welcome your input on these issues.
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As an aside, White men are well-known as the most conservative, small government, nationalist group out there in our current political atmosphere. I always hear people spewing the schmaltziest nonsense about the values of the Founding Fathers. They were, relative to our political compass, nationalist libertarians. Accordingly, modern nationalists and libertarians do best with the exact same demographics that used to vote on candidates back then: property-owning White men. The sole reason that Ron and Rand Paul couldn’t get elected is that they are too similar to the Founding Fathers. Any other candidate who blathers on about the Founding values is simply a liar, and their obvious lies show a disrespect of your intelligence.
If you’re a libertarian, but not an ethno-nationalistic and patriarchal thinker, then you simply haven’t gotten the memo: women and minorities do not want to create the same world that you do, nor will they ever. Evolution gave us women who want social safety nets and other races which are better off if they parasitize off of your tax dollars. All of the most libertarian societies that ever existed (early US, ancient Athens, Roman Republic) were entirely run by White men, and adding women to the electorate gave us the welfare state. Aristophanes was right.
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We’re also ruminating on the difference between IQ and expertise. I know of no mentally complicated task of which one can be a master without being intelligent. Take the IQs of chess grandmasters and you will find no morons.
Contrast that with purely physical activities. I bet you there are some really stupid people out there who are great at dancing for example. A prodigiously capable cerebellum may not predict an equally capable frontal lobe.
Discounting tasks which exclusively require things like simple physical coordination, muscle memory, etc, I ought to think that IQ is the biggest component of expertise.
Stockholm 5000 BC
by Scott Jameson
350 words
Stockholm Syndrome is when you identify with people who capture and, in some cases, abuse you. I’ve heard two pretty good explanations for this phenomenon. One is that female mammals like powerful male mammals. Makes sense. The other is that abducted people are attempting to maximize their own chances of survival, and perhaps those of any children they already have. Also makes sense. Let me present a third.
Intra-female competition. Imagine that a woman from tribe B is forcibly inducted into tribe A. The women from tribe A know all of the customs of tribe A, speak the language and so on, and they have known the men from tribe A since childhood. All else equal, what does the woman from tribe B have going for her- novelty, perhaps? That’ll wear off pretty quick, likely faster than it takes for her to get familiarized with her new culture. How can she possibly compensate? How can she compete with the women from tribe A for quantity and social status of offspring?
Lots and lots of asabiyah. If she were that much more devoted to her captors, to their religion, and so on, the men may admire her, or perhaps begin to consider her truly one of “their own,” thereby reducing the disadvantage by comparison to the women from tribe A.
All of these line up with the common belief- which I cannot seem to find strong evidence for or against, but here’s a study that mentions a sample of 21 Stockholm cases wherein 18 were women– that women tend to “suffer” from Stockholm Syndrome more often than men.
It’s not a disease in the Darwinian sense, it’s a behavioral response mechanism. The more accurate term is Capture Bonding.
Any one of these three hypotheses may explain it, or perhaps any combination of the three, or maybe something else. You would have to determine selective pressures operating on women currently in a situation wherein capture bonding is common, for example determining which behaviors enabled one war bride to have more children than another. Anybody up for some field work with Boko Haram?
Between-group Differences in Obesity Rates
By Scott Jameson
670 words
I’ve been active in the blogosphere for around 24 hours now and I’ve already gotten a negative response from someone who happens to be wrong. That’s a win in my book.
The argument we’re having is, as best I can tell, why some populations out there just don’t have obesity as an observed phenotype amongst their members. TL;DR: Pumpkin Person and Robert Lindsay believe that genetics explain why there are no obese New Guineans. But it ain’t so.
The original context is an old Pumpkin Person post. Much of what he’s saying here doesn’t seem too off-base; for example he says that behavioral genetics may explain much of the differences in BMI between individuals within the same population. True. It is possible that some people are genetically inclined to eat more or unhealthier foods, rather than simply being genetically inclined to putting on weight regardless of what they do.
As an aside, genotypes that affect how you digest things also probably explain part of the BMI gap between skinny folks and fat folks within the first world. The APOA2 gene for example has a recessive allele that is associated with higher BMI in people who eat more saturated fats. The interactions between genes and environment which determine BMI are complicated and not yet fully understood, but I’m willing to bet that being genetically worse at processing certain nutrients is a part of the problem, and that being genetically inclined to stuff your face is a part of the problem as well. PP is probably right about that issue.
Where he and Lindsay get it wrong is using examples of people from Podunk, New Guinea as evidence for obesity “being genetic” (relative term). Obesity is a gene-environment interaction such that, without certain environmental inputs, you simply won’t get the phenotype. History tells us that that input is processed carbohydrates.
There was a time when people could have used Australian Aboriginals or Inuit or Pima Indians as examples of groups of people who just don’t have obese folks amongst their numbers, just as Lindsay did with a few populations. Homo sans lardicus. Then the White Devils showed up with their refined Einkorn wheat products and their firewater and so on. Now those populations have fat people in them.
There’s an ongoing debate as to whether some populations are more resistant to the fattening effects of processed carbs or not. My guess is, the answer’s yes (and you’d look at Europeans and East Asians to see the more carb-resistant people, in theory) but that topic would merit its own post. That being said, every population in the world will almost assuredly have obese people in it after you introduce processed carbs. All of the populations that were introduced to this diet, now have fat people in them.
Heritability of BMI is high within the first world because the relevant environmental input is pretty uniform: everybody has access to potatoes, everybody has access to broccoli. As PP points out, which you’re likely to eat and how much you’re likely to eat likely depends on your genetics. As I point out, how your body processes the nutrients also has a likely genetic component. But the environmental contribution to our within-population differences in BMI is low (~20%) because we all have access to roughly the same stuff.
Rural New Guineans, lacking a bunch of processed carbs, could hardly get fat if they tried their best to. That’s a big between-population, nonheritable cause for a phenotypic difference; this means that environment probably explains most of the BMI gap between them and us. If I wanted evidence to refute Lindsay’s assertion that New Guineans are skinnier thanks to genetics, I’d find a population of urbanized New Guineans somewhere with higher average BMI. Such a group would have New Guinean genetics but a “developed” environment vaguely similar to ours; if they were fatter than their rural ken, then Lindsay’s hypothesis that New Guineans are just genetically obesity-free would be falsified.
SAT and KFC
by Scott Jameson
700 words
For my first post on this blog, I thought I’d talk about something relevant to the mission of the blog: Political Correctness. I’m very grateful to RaceRealist for inviting me to hop on board here (although I should put out the categorical disclaimer that me posting here is not in and of itself an endorsement of any given thing he’s said over the years).
This is going to be something of an opinion essay about why denying reality is silly: because you still have to live in it. Most of my content is going to be more empirically driven, as you’re used to on this blog. Bear with me.
The SAT’s name change story is a classic case of “Political Correctness,” and is mirrored by KFC’s story of adapting to new nutritional standards. For those out of the loop: after the public realized how unhealthy fried foods are, Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC. The point was to make the unhealthy nature of the food one conceptual extrapolation away from the name itself, in hopes that the public would not bother to recall what the “F” stood for.
SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” It was (and is) a test to determine how apt you are for scholarly endeavors. Put bluntly, it’s a somewhat sloppy IQ test oriented towards scholarly settings in particular. Of course, that name was too accurate, so it fell out of favor. The public does not want to live in a world wherein poor students are less apt than rich students and Black students are less apt than White students, and so the Scholastic Aptitude Test became the Scholastic Assessment Test. In order to be offended by that, you have to remember that what’s being assessed is aptitude and that nothing has changed. Like “KFC,” it was one conceptual extrapolation away from the reality at hand. Most people were probably too harebrained to see through that.
For some reason, they kept rolling with it. It became an alleged Reasoning Test, and then simply a series of letters that used to be an abbreviation: “the SAT,” no doubt an homage to The Colonel and the chicken he hawks. They’re both just a series of letters now – the unpleasant realities contained therein have been conceptually sterilized. Like the SAT, the nutritional content of the chicken hasn’t changed as much as the name has.
You may suspect that I’m simply flinging excrement in the general direction of The College Board, but there’s a point to what I’m saying here. What we call “Political Correctness” is a pervasive scrubbing of reality out of the consciousness of the public at large, especially the young. There was a time when people were allowed to say things like “I do not enjoy living around Blacks/Whites/Hispanics/whomever.” “Political Correctness” entered from stage left, and then Boomers had to say “bad schools” and “bad neighborhood” instead. Odds are, the Boomers understood the connotative meanings, at least at first. But if you asked millennials what those terms are, I’d bet on most of them actually being ignorant enough to think that the schools are themselves the problem. Nobody ever pointed out to these kids that almost all of the “bad schools” – the schools with low average test scores – are simply full of Hispanics (Mestizos) and African Americans who have low average test scores regardless of what school they’re in, and that the supermajority of all of the “good schools” aren’t. Anyone who doesn’t know this has been deliberately rendered ignorant of a reality that is important to their lives.
What we call “Political Correctness” is in fact the successful, systematic obfuscation of reality, and having reality perpetually hidden from you is dangerous. That is why we at this blog are NotPoliticallyCorrect. As long as I’m here, I can promise you my best attempt at discovering and conveying the truth in the NotPoliticallyCorrect fashion exemplified thus far by RaceRealist: bringing you interesting truths, obscure truths, and of course, controversial truths.
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I’m not the first to make the SAT-KFC comparison, by the way. After I wrote this article, I looked around for sources only to dredge this up.
NotPoliticallyCorrect 