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Delaying Gratification and Social Trust
1900 words
Tests of delayed gratification, such as the Marshmallow Experiment, show that those who can better delay their gratification have better life outcomes than those who cannot. The children who succumbed to eating the treat while the researcher was out of the room had worse life outcomes than the children who could wait. This was chalked up to cognitive processes by the originator of the test, while individual differences in these cognitive processes also were used as explanations for individual differences between children in the task. However, it doesn’t seem to be that simple. I did write an article back in December of 2015 on the Marshmallow Experiment and how it was a powerful predictor, but after extensive reading into the subject, my mind has changed. New research shows that social trust has a causal effect on whether or not one would wait for the reward—if the individual trusted the researcher he or she was more likely to wait for the other reward than if they did not trust the researcher, in which they were more likely to take what was offered in the first place.
The famous Marshmallow Experiment showed that children who could wait with a marshmallow or other treat in front of them while the researcher was out of the room, they would get an extra treat. The children who could not wait and ate the treat while the researcher was out of the room had worse life outcomes than the children who could wait for the other treat. These lead researchers to the conclusion that the ability to delay gratification depended on ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ cognitive processes. According to Walter Mischel, the originator of the study method, the ‘cool’ system is the thinking one, the cognitive system, which reminds you that you get a reward if you wait, while the ‘hot’ system is the impulsive system, the system that makes you want the treat now and not want to wait for the other treat (Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999).
Some of these participants were followed up on decades later, and those who could better delay their gratification had lower BMIs (Schlam et al, 2014); scored better on the SAT (Shoda, Mischel, and Peake, 1990) and other tests of educational attainment (Ayduk et al, 2000); along with other positive life outcomes. So it seems that placing a single treat—whether it be a marshmallow or another sweet treat—would predict one’s success, BMI, educational attainment and future prospects in life and that there are underlying cognitive processes, between individuals that lead to differences between them. But it’s not that simple.
After Mischel’s studies in the 50s, 60s and 70s on delayed gratification and positive and negative life outcomes (e.g., Mischel, 1958; Mischel, 1961; Mischel, Ebbeson, and Zeiss, 1972) it was pretty much an accepted fact that delaying gratification somehow was related to these positive life outcomes, while the negative life outcomes were partly a result of the lack of ability to delay gratification. Though in 2014, a study was conducted showing that ability to delay gratification depends on social trust (Michaelson et al, 2013).
Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, (n = 78, 34 male, 39 female and 5 who preferred not to state their gender) completed online surveys and read three vignettes in order—trusty, untrustworthy and neutral—while using a scale of 1-7 to note how likeable, trustworthy, and how sharing their likelihood of sharing. Michaelson et al (2013) write:
Next, participants completed intertemporal choice questions (as in Kirby and Maraković, 1996), which varied in immediate reward values ($15–83), delayed reward values ($30–85), and length of delays (10–75 days). Each question was modified to mention an individual from one of the vignettes [e.g., “If (trustworthy individual) offered you $40 now or $65 in 70 days, which would you choose?”]. Participants completed 63 questions in total, with 21 different questions that occurred once with each vignette, interleaved in a single fixed but random order for all participants. The 21 choices were classified into 7 ranks (using the classification system from Kirby and Maraković, 1996), where higher ranks should yield higher likelihood of delaying, allowing a rough estimation of a subject’s willingness to delay using a small number of trials. Rewards were hypothetical, given that hypothetical and real rewards elicit equivalent behaviors (Madden et al., 2003) and brain activity (Bickel et al., 2009), and were preceded by instructions asking participants to consider each choice as if they would actually receive the option selected. Participants took as much time as they needed to complete the procedures.
When one’s trust was manipulated in the absence of a reward, within the group of subjects influenced their ability to delay gratification, along with how trustworthy one was perceived to be, influenced their ability to delay gratification. So this suggests that, in the absence of rewards, when social trust is reduced, ability to delay gratification would be lessened. Due to the issues of social trust manipulation due to the order of how the vignettes were read, they did a second experiment using the same model using 172 participants (65 males, 63 females, and 13 who chose not to state their gender). Though in this experiment, a computer-generated trustworthy, untrustworthy and neutral face was presented to the participants. They were only paid $.25 cents, though it has been shown that the compensation only affects turnout, not data quality (Burhmester, Kwang, and Gosling, 2011).
In this experiment, each participant read a vignette and there was a particular face attached to it (trustworthy, untrustworthy and neutral), which were used in previous studies on this matter. They found that when trust was manipulated in the absence of a reward between the subjects, this influenced the participants’ willingness and to delay gratification along with the perceived trustworthiness influencing it as well.
Michaelson et al (2013) conclude that the ability to delay gratification is predicated on social trust, and present an alternative hypothesis for all of these positive and negative life outcomes:
Social factors suggest intriguing alternative interpretations of prior findings on delay of gratification, and suggest new directions for intervention. For example, the struggles of certain populations, such as addicts, criminals, and youth, might reflect their reduced ability to trust that rewards will be delivered as promised. Such variations in trust might reflect experience (e.g., children have little control over whether parents will provide a promised toy) and predisposition (e.g., with genetic variations predicting trust; Krueger et al., 2012). Children show little change in their ability to delay gratification across the 2–5 years age range (Beck et al., 2011), despite dramatic improvements in self-control, indicating that other factors must be at work. The fact that delay of gratification at 4-years predicts successful outcomes years or decades later (Casey et al., 2011; Shoda et al., 1990) might reflect the importance of delaying gratification in other processes, or the importance of individual differences in trust from an early age (e.g., Kidd et al., 2012).
Another paper (small n, n = 28) showed that the children’s perception of the researchers’ reliability predicted delay of gratification (Kidd, Palmeri, and Aslin, 2012). They suggest that “children’s wait-times reflected reasoned beliefs about whether waiting would ultimately pay off.” So these tasks “may not only reflect differences in self-control abilities, but also beliefs about the stability of the world.” Children who had reliable interactions with the researcher waited about 4 times as long—12 minutes compared to 3 minutes—if they thought the researcher was trustworthy. Sean Last over at the Alternative Hypothesis uses these types of tasks (and other correlates) to show that blacks have lower self-control than whites, citing studies showing correlations with IQ and delay of gratification. Though, as can be seen, alternative explanations for these phenomena make just as much sense, and with the new experimental evidence on social trust and delaying gratification, this adds a new wrinkle to this debate. (He also shortly discusses ‘reasons’ why blacks have lower self-control, implicating the MAOA alleles. However, I have already discussed this and blaming ‘genes for’ violence/self-control doesn’t make sense.)
Michaelson and Munakata (2016) show more evidence for the relationship between social trust and delaying gratification. When children (age 4 years, 5 months, n = 34) observed an adult as trustworthy, they were able to wait for the reward, compared to when they observed the adult as untrustworthy they ate the treat thinking that, since they observed the adult as untrustworthy, they were not likely to get the second marshmallow than if they waited for the adult to return if they believed him to be untrustworthy. Ma et al (2018) also replicated these findings in a sample of 150 Chinese children aged 3 to 5 years old. They conclude that “there is more to delay of gratification than cognitive capacity, and they suggest that there are individual differences in whether children consider sacrificing for a future outcome to be worth the risk.” Those who had higher levels of generalized trust waited longer, even when age and level of executive functioning were controlled for.
Romer et al (2010) show that people who are more willing to take risks may be more likely to engage in risky behavior that provides insights to that specific individual on why delaying gratification and having patience leads to longer-term rewards. This is a case of social learning. However, people who are more willing to take risks have higher IQs than people who do not. Though SES was not controlled for, it is possible that the ability to delay gratification in this study came down to SES, with lower class people taking the money, while higher class people deferred. Raine et al (2002) showed a relationship between sensation seeking in 3-year-old children from Mauritius, which then was related to their ‘cognitive scores’ at age 11. As usual, parental occupation was used as a measure of ‘social class’, and since SES does not capture all aspects of social class then controlling for the variable does not seem to be too useful. Because a confound here could be that children from higher classes have more of a chance to sensation seek which may cause higher IQ scores due to cognitive enrichment. Either way, you can’t say that IQ ’causes’ delayed gratification since there are more robust predictors such as social trust.
Though the relationship is there, what to make of it? Since exploring more leads to, theoretically, more chances to get things wrong and take risks by being impulsive, those who are more open to experience will have had more chances to learn from their impulsivity, and so learn to delay gratification through social learning and being more open. ‘IQ’ correlating with it, in my opinion, doesn’t matter too much; it just shows that there is a social learning component to delaying gratification.
In conclusion, there are alternative ways to look at the results from Marshmallow Experiments, such as social trust and social learning (being impulsive and seeing what occurs when an impulsive act is carried out may have one learn, in the future, to wait for something). Though these experiments are new and the research is young, it’s very promising that there are other explanations for delayed gratification that don’t have to do with differences in ‘cognitive ability’, but depend on social trust—trust between the child and the researcher. If the child sees the researcher is trustworthy, then the child will wait for the reward, whereas if they see the researcher is not trustworthy, they ill take the marshmallow or whatnot, since they believe the researcher is not trustworthy and therefore won’t stick to their word. (I am also currently reading Mischel’s 2014 book Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control and will have more thoughts on this in the future.)
Dysgenic Fertility and America’s Obesity Crisis
1050 words
The dysgenic trend currently occurring in America has implications for obesity as well. Since intelligence is negatively correlated with obesity, as America’s average IQ decreases, the rates of obesity in our country will increase. This is due to the high correlation between intelligence and obesity. As we continue to allow unfettered immigration into America, the average IQ of the country will decrease, while the amount of people that are overweight and obese will increase.
The ethnic differences in obesity rates lead more credence to what I am saying. As the demographics shift, more people will be overweight or obese due to having a lower IQ. Whites, too, are experiencing this dysgenic effect, as intelligent people of all ethnicities are not reproducing. As more and more genetically less fit individuals continue to have a higher rate of reproduction in comparison to intelligent individuals, this crisis will continue to persist.
Those with lower intelligence have less of an ability to delay gratification, which has a strong genetic component. As more people breed who cannot delay their gratification, the rates of obesity will increase in the country. Of course, the lack of ability to delay gratification comes with a lowered IQ. This is what we see in regards to sex. Those with higher IQs lose their virginities at a later age in comparison to those with lower IQs. Along with the data from Kanazawa that shows that more intelligent people have a lower BMI than those with lower intelligence, this study gives more credence to the theory that those with higher levels of intelligence can better delay their gratification.
JayMan says that there is evidence for an increased genetic load for those with lower IQs, which we can then reason that this also leads to a higher prevalence for obesity in low IQ populations. JayMan then says that many of the genes found to influence obesity seem to operate in the brain and that they have a pleiotropic effect, meaning that multiple genes affect one or more traits. With the increased genetic load comes with an increased chance to have a lower IQ and become obese, as these two things correlate with the lack of ability to delay gratification.
Of course, these problems persist due to modern medicine. With the advent of better medicine, it allowed us to beat diseases that formerly would have been devastating to the population at large. This led to an increase of alleles with negative effects in the population that continue to pass down through the generations. Along with these advances in medical technology, welfare and other government-funded programs also enable those that are less genetically fit. Since intelligence is correlated with ability to care for offspring, as well as r- and K-selected traits, those with lower intelligence exhibit more r-selected traits. This is why America is facing a dysgenic fertility crisis. Welfare props up those with less intelligence, giving them more incentives to breed. They then breed more low IQ children who then will live off of the government. This vicious cycle then continues unfettered due to how America’s dysgenic welfare structure is implemented.
Before the advent of modern technology, those who were less genetically fit didn’t survive to pass on their genes. But, in the modern day with all of our superior technology, this allows the less intelligent to breed when in the past they would have been selected out of the gene pool due to being less biologically fit.
Another variable that is involved with the dysgenic fertility of America is Mexican immigration. With the influx of illegal (and legal) peoples from the South of the Border, this is having both dysgenic effect on both the average intelligence of our country along with the average BMI. The average BMI for the average American male is 28.6. In the 1950s, 10 percent of American adults were obese compared to 35 percent of American adults today. Now, this has to do with ability to access food, as well as the effect of the media on children has a huge effect on obesity, due in part to not getting a full nights sleep, as that is correlated with obesity. However, an increase in genetic load, which also comes with a decrease in intelligence, has a lot to do with this as well. The increase in the BMI of the average American has to do with immigration as well. The rates of obesity for different ethnicities in America are as follows: 67.3% for whites, 75.6% for blacks, and 77.9% for ‘Hispanics’. So of course, with more immigration from the South of the Border, the average IQ for America is decreasing while obesity rates are increasing, due mostly to this illegal immigration.
Height and intelligence are both correlated. Ever since the advent of the industrial revolution, we have had an excess surplus of food. As Gina Kolata says in her book Rethinking Thin, an increase in obesity is inevitable. She says this since the increase in genetic height and IQ has occurred, so the increase in obesity follows with it. We need to influence those with higher IQs to have more children. Further, we also need to restrict immigration to only high-skilled immigrants (only when necessary) to reverse this trend that has been occurring since the 1960s. Though, with higher levels of intelligence one can forgo their urges and live a healthier lifestyle due to having higher cognition which leads to a better ability to delay gratification than one with lower intelligence.
Those with higher IQs make better choices on what to eat than those with lower IQs. This is shown in the BMIs of the intelligent and non-intelligent population. As more and more people with lower genotypic IQ come into the country, the quality of life will decrease as will the average intelligence of the country. In turn, the BMI of the average American will increase along with the decrease of our country’s average intelligence. To ameliorate this, we need to have extremely stringent criteria on who we allow into the country. An IQ test, to start, would be a good idea. As those with higher intelligence have less of a genetic load and have less of a chance of becoming obese than one with a lower IQ, the current dysgenic effect that this unfettered immigration is having on America can be lessened.
Climate, Violence, r/K Selection Theory and the Vindication of JP Rushton
1850 words
Why do violent crimes increase as temperatures increase? Why do violent crimes decrease as the temperatures decrease? These phenomena are noticed every year, and criminologists set out to find the relationship between climate and violence and whether or not there is a curvilinear hypothesis, which crime increases as the temperature increases, but at extremely high temperatures the crime rate begins to dip down.
When the weather gets colder, crime decreases. All though crime does decrease in the Winter months, crimes that take more planning, such as property crime and robbery increase. This is due, obviously, to the fact that people don’t want to spend too much time outside so they plan their crimes ahead to minimize the time spent outside whereas in hotter temperatures this does not occur. It is known that when it’s colder, resulting criminal actions are less random than those committed in hotter temperatures.
The two trains of thought for the temperature/crime theory are the curvilinear hypothesis, as noted above, and the linear hypothesis, which argues for that as the temperature increases, so does crime without a drop in extremely high temperatures.
Mishra (2014) showed that the relationship is not a curvilinear one, but that crime rises steadily as the temperature increases. Looking at Allahabad city, India from a 62 year period from the years 1952 to 2013 with the variables being temperature, humidity and rainfall, the results of the analysis shows that temperature has a significant effect on the proclivity to commit crime, as well as murder. Relative to the temperature, humidity shows a strong correlation with crime with rainfall showing a negative correlation.
Mishra took annual data from the National Crime Record Bureau with monthly data taken from the various police stations of Allahabad city. The temperature and rainfall data was taken from local news stations and the Indian Meteorological Department.
Results of his analysis showed significant correlations with violent crime and temperature (r=.75) with murders increasing as temperatures increase. The relationship between relative humidity and crime was strong as well (r=.68) with rainfall having a negative correlation (r=-.14). Out of all three of these variables, the average temperature has more of an effect on crime than relative humidity. Using a regression model, Mishra discovered a correlation of .56, showing that temperature alone accounts for 56 percent of the variation in crime pattern. Including all three variables in the regression model shows a correlation of .61. This confirms that among the climate elements tested that temperature itself had the highest effect on crime.
Figure 2 of the paper shows that as temperatures rise (starting at about 25 degrees celsius), that the crime rate increases.Since very high temperatures are associated with rainfall, there is a reduction in crime when this occurs, thermal stress is reduced. However, when rainfall and humidity were both unchanged, higher temperatures would not cause a decrease in violence. This result is inconsistent with the curvilinear hypothesis and does not support the claim that extremely high temperatures cause decreased violence.
Van Lange, Rinderu, and Bushmen (2016) thought of the model CLASH (CLimate, Aggression, and Self-control in Humans) which shows differences within and between countries and their proclivities for aggression and criminal behavior. With lower temperatures, along with seasonal variation like what is seen in Northern Europe, peoples had to adopt a slower life history strategy with more focus on planning for the future as well as a need for self-control due to the differing variations in climate and how that has an effect on acquiring food. The CLASH model further shows that slow life history strategy, thinking into the future and self-control are important determinants in predicting violence.
As I have discussed here before, r/K Selection Theory (Life History Theory) shows that those who live in colder temperatures adopt slower strategies which lead to more future planning along with more self-control along with more altruistic behaviors shown. In a more harsh environment, such as Africa, Latin America and other locations situated near the equator, faster life history strategies are needed to offset the harsh environment, which leads to evolutionary causes for earlier menarche in black and Mexican-American girls. Faster life history strategies are needed in locations near the equator due to the harshness of the environment. This is why Africans and other peoples located at or near the equator have more children, to offset the harsher environment. No planning ahead was needed, as most likely populations near the equator wouldn’t have lived long enough to see the delayed payoff. Conversely, those in northerly climes live longer due to the need to plan ahead, and along with this ability to plan ahead came higher intelligence, which leads to yet another selector for high intellect in populations that evolved further from the equator, earlier childbirth. On top of that selector, deleterious Neanderthal alleles decreased historic fitness levels 1 percent in non-African populations, which further lead to evolution of the ability to think into the future due to less children beared. Since the future becomes more predictable the further you travel away from the equator, it becomes adaptive for peoples to adopt a slower life history strategy out of necessity, as that’s the only way to survive and they will see the fruits of their self-control due to having a longer life expectancy due to superior future time orientation in comparison to those in southerly climes.
Since a faster life history strategy is correlated with threats of harshness and higher morbidity and mortality, from the life history perspective we would reason that those with lower SES would have to adopt a faster life history strategy in order to offset the fact that they are more likely to suffer premature disability or death. Lower SES is also correlated with other r-selected strategies such as earlier sexual activity (a variable correlated with lower IQ), higher rates of childhood pregnancy and childbearing, greater number of offspring and less care and attention shown to those offspring, this study. For the third time this month, proves Rushton right with his application of r/K Selection Theory on the three races of humanity.
Van Lange, Rinderu, and Bushmen state that neighborhood deterioration, assaults, muggings, drug addicts, and presence of gangs are associated with earlier and higher rates of sexual activity. Not coincidentally, this is seen in many majority black and ‘Hispanic’-majority cities in America. They also say that as resources become scarce that women gravitate towards men with more access to resources and those that will invest in their children’s reproductive values. Though this is hardly seen in low-income communities around America, you do see a lot of black women who gravitate towards the drug dealer or another black male who is involved with illegal activities who then acquire mass amounts of capital. This is an evolutionary strategy for all women, since money is correlated with intelligence and therefore a mate with more money has better means to take care of any offspring conceived.
The CLASH model extends r/K Selection Theory, particularly where r/K Selection Theory emphasizes unpredictability and harshness as a source of environmental stress, the CLASH model emphasizes predictability over environmental stress. That is, those who evolved in northerly climes can deal with stress better than those who evolved near the equator, therefore lessening the amount of crime in those populations due to them being able to constrain themselves more. The CLASH model proposes that the combination of predictability and control shape a slow life history strategy, future time orientation, with a focus on self-control. Moreover, in an analysis of 40 work-related values in 40 countries, it was found that the countries located the furthest from the equator tended to place a greater value on future rewards, such as perseverance and thrift.
In countries closer to the equator, according to the 2014 World Fact Book, the average age of first birth for a female was 20 years of age (the countries were the Gaza strip, Liberia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and various other middle African countries). Conversely, for countries further away from the equator, the average age of first birth was 28 years of age (Japan, Canada, and most European countries). Those populations that evolved in warmer climates where the changes in season are minimal with unpredictable harshness tend to enact faster life history strategies than those in colder climates.
The researchers state on page 31:
One standard deviation increase in temperature was associated with a 11.3% increase in intergroup conflict and a 2.1% increase in interpersonal conflict. Examples of interpersonal conflict include spikes in domestic violence in India and Australia, greater likelihood of assaults and murders in the USA and Tanzania, ethnic violence in Europe and South Asia, and civil conflicts throughout tropical climates. Hence, we conclude that it is both differences in average temperature and differences in seasonal variation in temperature that help explain cross-national differences in aggression and violence around the world.
And on page 41:
Assuming CLASH is accurate, it is interesting to consider that people’s thoughts and behaviors may be quite different, based on the physical circumstances their ancestors faced and that they face themselves. The world is getting smaller and smaller. Electronic and social media (e.g., WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, email) connect us to people all over the world. Yet, people coming from differing ancestral histories and living in different locations face challenges of self-control in a variety of ways. A businessperson from London may expect a response the next day, but the alliance in Nairobi may want to take at least an extra day. If CLASH is correct, the same pattern should hold for within-country differences between a businessperson working in Chicago and the alliance working in New Orleans, or between a businessperson working in Melbourne and the alliance in Brisbane or Cairns (with London, Chicago, and Melbourne being relatively more remote from the equator, and facing greater variation in climate).
The correlation between temperature, crime and life history strategies is shockingly high. JP Rushton is now vindicated from all of the derision he experienced in the 30 plus years he was pushing his r/K Theory. This shows implications for the European ‘refugee’ crisis as well, due to the higher rates of all violent crime occurring ever since this mass exodus from MENA (Middle Eastern North African) countries.
The CLASH model is a great compliment to r/K Selection Theory and goes deeper into why behaviors differ in human populations based where ancestral evolution occurred. As temperatures increase, so does crime starting at 76 degrees Fahrenheit, with there being a negative correlation for crime committed during rainfall. The CLASH model vindicates Rushton’s supposedly ‘wacky theories’ on race, evolution and behavior. Further, the CLASH model also shows another cause for the current situation occurring in Europe. The people flooding into the continent have ancestral ties to hotter climes. They then bring their genetic proclivity to commit crimes with them to the new area, which then increases crime. This is one of many reasons for the cucking of Europe. As we look more into evolutionary causes for behavior and those behaviors that lead to more crime committed, Rushton and others will be further vindicated and when this occurs, with ample data, of course, sensible immigration policy can be had to quell the amount of crime committed by ‘migrants’ and other immigrants into our countries.
In Defense of Jason Richwine
3900 words
I came across two articles today, one from The Atlantic and the other from judgybitch.com. Both have attacked Jason Richwine’s dissertation in which he calls for a change to the US immigration policy to turn away low IQ immigrants and only accept high IQ ones. I agree fully with this (if it’s completely controlled, of course). This would drop crime as well as save us more money in welfare and other government programs that low IQ peoples take.
By 2050, 9 out of 10 people in the US will be obese or overweight and by 2020 80 percent of US men will be obese or overweight. This is due, in part, to an influx of those with lower IQs from South of the Border. Jason Richwine’s argument for testing immigrants will, in turn, lower obesity rates in America.
Dr. James Thompson noted how continued mass immigration from the South of the Border would decrease IQ, this is a real and pressing issue. A country is only as good as its majority population and by allowing all of these low IQ people into the country, our country will transform into theirs, which is ironic since that’s the exact thing they’re running away from. You cannot run away from genetics. The overall ‘Hispanic’-white gap is 10.2 points or .72 SDs. That will lower the average IQ of the country even more, and in turn, give us all a lowered quality of life. The average IQ of Mexico is 88 (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002) so by allowing unfettered mass immigration without checking average IQs to see if they’ll be of any use to us as a country will lead to eventual irreversible effects if this isn’t stopped soon.
The first article I’ll look at is the one from The Atlantic:
Let’s start with the fact that there is no such thing as a direct test of general mental ability. What IQ tests measure directly is the test-taker’s display of particular cognitive skills: size of vocabulary, degree of reading comprehension, facility with analogies, and so on. Any conclusions about general mental ability are inferences drawn from the test-taker’s relative mastery of those various skills.
IQ tests test g or the general intelligence factor which encompasses all mental abilities. I guess the author of this piece has never heard of Raven’s Progressive Matrices. It’s a ‘culture free’ IQ test where the test is based on pattern recognition. No bias there.
Even then, if they don’t speak English and speak Spanish, they can get tests in their native language which are not biased. Gottfredson (1994) and 51 other eminent intelligence researchers signed a 25 point statement in which one of the statements was:
Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.
They will be given the nonverbal test (RPM, see below) or one in their native language, which still test the same underlying concept of the general intelligence factor.
They found that being raised by high-SES (socioeconomic status) parents led to an IQ boost of between 12 and 16 points – a huge improvement that testifies to the powerful influence that upbringing can have.
False. See below.
A study of twins by psychologist Eric Turkheimer and colleagues that similarly tracked parents’ education, occupation, and income yielded especially striking results. Specifically, they found that the “heritability” of IQ – the degree to which IQ variations can be explained by genes – varies dramatically by socioeconomic class. Heritability among high-SES (socioeconomic status) kids was 0.72; in other words, genetic factors accounted for 72 percent of the variations in IQ, while shared environment accounted for only 15 percent. For low-SES kids, on the other hand, the relative influence of genes and environment was inverted: Estimated heritability was only 0.10, while shared environment explained 58 percent of IQ variations.
Turkheimer was right that he did find gene x environment interactions that made genetic influences weaker and shared environment stronger for those from poorer homes in comparison to those from more affluent homes. Though most studies show no interaction effects, or interactions vary significantly.
Other studies have shown that heritabilities are the same both within as well as between white and black samples. That led Jensen to label this the ‘default hypothesis’. Researchers analyzed full and half siblings from the NLSY on three Peabody Achievement Tests. 161 black full siblings, 106 pairs of black half siblings, 314 pairs of full white siblings and 53 pairs of white half-siblings. with measures in math and reading. The best fitting model for all of the data was by which the sources of the sources of the differences between those within race and the differences between races were the same, at 50 percent genetic and environmental. The combined model (50/50) best explains it, whereas the culture-only and genetics-only models are inadequate.
IQ tests are good measures of innate intelligence–if all other factors are held steady.
This is wrong. IQ tests are fine all around the world. RPM is one of the best out there and correlates with g between .8 and .9.
But if IQ tests are being used to compare individuals of wildly different backgrounds, then the variable of innate intelligence is not being tested in isolation. Instead, the scores will reflect some impossible-to-sort-out combination of ability and differences in opportunities and motivations. Let’s take a look at why that might be the case.
Intelligence – g – is the same across every population in the world.
Comparisons of IQ scores across ethnic groups, cultures, countries, or time periods founder on this basic problem: The cognitive skills that IQ tests assess are not used or valued to the same extent in all times and places
This is why they get re-standardized.
Indeed, the widespread usefulness of these skills is emphatically not the norm in human history. After all, IQ tests put great stress on reading ability and vocabulary, yet writing was invented only about 6,000 years ago – rather late in the day given that anatomically modern humans have been around for over 100,000 years. And as recently as two hundred years ago, only about 15 percent of people could read or write at all.
Doesn’t matter. See Raven’s Progressive Matrices above. The general intelligence factor is the same in all populations around the world. There are ways to give intelligence tests, such as RPM, to those who don’t read or write.
More generally, IQ tests reward the possession of abstract theoretical knowledge and a facility for formal analytical rigor.
Abstract thought is linked with intelligence. Those with higher IQs are more analytical than those with lower IQs.
To grasp how culturally contingent our current conception of intelligence is, just imagine how well you might do on an IQ test devised by Amazonian hunter-gatherers or medieval European peasants.
I touched on this in my refutation of Robert Sternberg. The concept of g does not change over time. The more intelligent you are, the better chance you’ll have to survive in those places.
Such skills are used more intensively in the most advanced economies than they are in the rest of the world. And within advanced societies, they are put to much greater use by the managers and professionals of the socioeconomic elite than by everybody else. As a result, American kids generally will have better opportunities to develop these skills than kids in, say, Mexico or Guatemala. And in America, the children of college-educated parents will have much better opportunities than working-class kids.
Those skills are used much more in advanced economies because of higher average innate intelligence. The children of college-educated parents have much better opportunities than working-class kids because intelligence is strongly linked to socioeconomics status.
Among the strongest evidence that IQ tests are testing not just innate ability, but the extent to which that innate ability has been put to work developing specific skills, is the remarkable “Flynn effect”: In the United States and many other countries, raw IQ scores have been rising about three points a decade. This rise is far too rapid to have a genetic cause. The best explanation for what’s going on is that increasing social complexity is expanding the use of the cognitive skills in question – and thus improving the opportunities for honing those skills.
Let’s say Flynn is right. The average black now is as intelligent as the average white in 1945. That’s supposed to show that the race difference in IQ is environmentally caused because there hasn’t been that much genetic change in the white population and the IQ has allegedly gone up 15 points. So, you can have a 15 point difference created by just an environmental change, no one knows why. Some think better nutrition or malnourished brain, etc. That’s also a fallacy. Just because a change in one group over time is due to an environmental change, doesn’t mean, or even make it probable, that a difference between 2 groups at the same time is due to an environmental change. The Flynn Effect make’s that highly unlikely and here’s why.
The Flynn Effect, assuming it’s real, has been acting completely uniformly in every population. Any country you ask, the rate of increase is 3 per decade. That means it’s an environmental factor that affects whites and blacks the same way as well as the whole world. And as a result of this uniform environmental factor, you have a difference in IQ that’s being preserved. That would suggest that the response on the parts of blacks and whites is due to some non-environment factors, a genetic factor, which is making the difference in IQ remain constant as the Flynn Effect goes into effect.
What makes it even more unlikely, in the last 60 years, their environments have become very similar since segregation. These differences don’t exist now, they go to the same schools by court order, same TV shows, same movies, basically same environment for both, and yet, that increasing similarity in the environment, the Flynn Effect, the IQ gap has remained intact. Which means whatever counts for the gap is genetic and not environmental. The more and more similar the environment, the less and less of the difference can be due to the environment and the more and more it must be due to genes. So this 15 point gap surviving these changes in the environment, seems more and more likely to be genetic in origin.
So because this ‘Effect’ is the same across all populations and the gap didn’t close, that means it’s genetic. If the gap persisted even when IQs were rising 3 points per year, the B-W gap has still persisted, proving that it’s genetic.
That is why the Flynn Effect is irrelevant. This “Effect”, has been a slight upward trend in IQ, around 3 points per decade, which, in my opinion, has to do with the advent of better nutrition and an industrialized society. The rise in IQ started around 1880, almost perfectly coinciding with the industrial revolution in America. Along with a more industrialized society, it’s possible to give most citizens in the country good enough nutrition to where they are not iodine deficient (adding iodine to our salt boosted Americans IQs), as well as being deficient in zinc, iron, protein and certain B vitamins which the effects of not getting enough leads to the brain not growing to its full potential, which in turn leads to a lower IQ.
One more point on the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect does not occur on g, as it is not a Jensen Effect. Rushton defines Jensen Effect as follows:
Significant correlations occurring between g-factor loadings and other variables have been dubbed “The Jensen effect”.
…
Thus the secular increase in test scores (the “Lynn±Flynn effect”) is not a “Jensen effect” nor is this the first time the discriminating power of the Jensen effect has been shown.
The Flynn effect is acutely embarrassing to those who leap from IQ score differences to claims of genetic differences in intelligence.
Not at all, since it’s easily explainable by better nutrition since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It’s also not even on g so why this gets discussed is beyond me.
Specifically, it is based on the ahistorical and ethnocentric assumption of a fixed relationship between the development of certain cognitive skills and raw mental ability. In truth, the skills associated with intelligence have changed over time–and unevenly through social space–as society evolves.
The relationship exists and there is a strong correlation between cognitive skills and raw mental ability. More intelligent people have better functioning societies than less intelligent people. This is an objective fact.
But contrary to the counsel of despair from hereditarians like Richwine, those deficits aren’t hard-wired. Progress in reducing achievement gaps will certainly not be easy, but a full review of the IQ evidence shows that it is possible. And it will be aided by policies, like immigration reform, that encourage the full integration of Hispanics into the American economic and cultural mainstream.
Jason Richwine is correct. Progress in achievement gaps will not close, barring the continued dysgenesis that America is facing. Immigration reform will not change anything. They don’t want to assimilate; they want to come and leech off of our Welfare State. The denial of genetics and scholastic achievement won’t be able to be held for long. In this study in which Robert Plomin was one of the researchers, it was found that 60 percent of the difference between individual 16-year-old students in the UK could be attributed to genetic factors. We know that IQ is linked to academic achievement and since that’s heritable as well, we will soon see that race and ethnic differences in IQ and academic achievement are, without a shadow of a doubt, are real and do not exist because of any economic deprivation or some other kind of non-biologic factors.
For the second article, from judgybitch.com, in which she only says one correct thing in it and it’s:
Here’s a little pet theory of mine I’d like to throw out, just for the hell of it. I think humans prefer lighter skin and hair and eye colors because those tend to be the result of recessive genes. A man with darker tones who has a child with a woman of lighter tones will almost always see his genes expressed in the children. Dark tones tend to be dominant. The preference for lighter skin is a natural paternity test.
This is called sexual selection, which is natural selection which arises for selection of traits in the opposite sex. Selecting for certain traits which the opposite sex found appealing, for example, is how long hair got sexually selected for outside of Africa along with selection for hair, eye, and skin color. Selecting for these traits had them become more prevalent and they eventually stayed due to intense selection for them.
For example, Eurasian women got selected for beauty and Eurasian men who got selected for intelligence as men had to be more intelligent in order to hunt for food. Conversely, African women gathered and hunted for food and became slightly more intelligent than African men who became the more attractive sex (Fuerle, 2008).
But other than this she is wrong.
You know what IS linked very strongly to lower IQs?
Malnutrition.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041117005027.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2628311
http://www.nature.com/pr/journal/v5/n11/abs/pr1971371a.html
The idea is not even the slightest bit controversial. Children who are starved, especially in the earliest years of life, perform very poorly on IQ tests compared to peers who received adequate nutrition. Like, really poorly. IQ’s down around 60 (100 is average).
Let’s look at this world hunger map, shall we?
http://www.geographictravels.com/2008/07/world-hunger-map.html
Oh well now, would you look at that. Looks like it’s mostly black and Hispanic folks who are starving. And all those white folks are living life to the hilt, with full bellies and bright futures.
Must be a coincidence.
It’s not a coincidence. There is no coincidence that if you superimpose an IQ map over the world hunger map, that a super majority of the low IQ countries would have bad nutrition and be starving, whereas those higher IQ populations would have better nutrition and, therefore, higher IQs and lack of malnutrition and starvation. There are environmental factors involved in this, which I have gone through in my article IQ, Nutrition, Disease and Parasitic Load. Yes, those environmental variables decrease IQ; but in the case of Africa, if their full genotypic IQ were expressed in their phenotype, they would have an average IQ of 80, 9 points away from the lowest average European country which is Serbia at 89. They would then be able to have better functioning societies and not have to rely on outside aid. Though, their low IQs are the cause of evolution, those factors only cause about 10 points of difference (depending which of the variables I mentioned exist in those areas).
Let’s look at this map of food insecurity in the United States:
http://www.nextgenerationfood.com/news/food-insecurity-in-the-us/
Highest rates of food insecurity:
Mississippi
Texas
Arkansas
Lowest rates of food insecurity:
North Dakota
Massachusetts
Virginia
Gosh, I wonder where all the black and Hispanic people are? North Dakota, right?
According to the USDA, in a report titled Household Food Security in the United States in 2011, black and Hispanic families are more than twice as likely to experience food insecurity as white families (p. 11).
White 11.4% of families food insecure
Black 25.1%
Hispanic 26.2%
Gosh, I wonder where black and ‘Hispanic’ people are? Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas right? What is the cause of the food insecurity? Lower intelligence. What is lower intelligence highly correlated with? Obesity.
If you keep in mind the fact that obesity (especially as the result of heavily processed, nutrient deficient junk foods) is also a form of malnutrition, it seems to me that there is an entirely different explanation for why certain racial groups might tend to perform lower on IQ tests.
Sure it is. A big cause for obesity is lowered intelligence (Kanazawa 2007). What he found was that those studies that concluded that obesity causes lowered intelligence only observed cross-sectional studies. Longitudinal studies that looked into the link between obesity and intelligence found that those who had low IQs since childhood then became obese later in life and that obesity does not lead to low IQ. The average IQ for an individual suffering from PWS is 65 (Butler, Lee and Whitman 2006, p. 13), so that is one reason they have a tendency to be obese. He states that those with IQs below 74 gained 5.19 BMI points, whereas those with IQs over above 126 gained 3.73 BMI points in 22 years, which is a statistically significant difference. Also noted, was that those at age 7 who had IQs above 125 had a 13.5 percent chance of being obese at age 51, whereas those with IQs below 74 at age 7 had a 31.9 percent chance of being obese. This clearly shows that those obese individuals who score low on IQ tests, more often than not, are obese because of their intelligence. The lack of ability to delay gratification is also correlated with low IQ (Mischel and Metzner, 1982).
Becoming obese is largely in part related to environmental factors, but there are correlates with obesity and genetic factors, as well as racial and ethnic differences in obesity, which are due, in part, to environmental as well as genetic factors. All of these factors fall back to a) lower intelligence, b) differing physiology and c) differing nutritional habits. Lower IQ is the main reason, though, for these differences which manifest itself as differences in scores of cognitive ability. Those with lower scores than have higher chances of having negative effects in life, such as low SES, higher chance of becoming obese and so on.
Correlation is not causation.
This is the liberals word phrase they use when they cannot contest data and know it so use the same old boring phrase. When you get the same result over and over using the scientific method, then it’s safe to say that the same results and conclusions that get brought up time and time again are real and cannot be explained away by the correlation does not mean causation line.
And furthermore, I haven’t read Richwine’s dissertation, nor do I plan to, so I don’t know if he offered any tentative explanations for his findings.
Didn’t even read it and is giving a critique of it. How does that work?
It looks to me like Richwine is a gigantic racist asshole, because he is using his findings to try and limit the opportunities for Hispanic people to come to the United States, because dumb spics.
Lower IQ people commit more crimes than do higher IQ people. This phenomenon is well-noted that those with lower intelligence commit crime, as the average IQ of a criminal in America, is 85, whereas the average IQ for a juvenile is 92. The average juvenile IQ is higher because more often than not, those who are habitual offenders in childhood become habitual offenders in adulthood, and at adulthood IQ drops from childhood where the environment was able to artificially boost their IQs.
What if I’m right? What if IQ differences are traceable to malnutrition? That would indicate a whole different set of interventions and policies than just turn them away.
You are part right, but that won’t put any big dent in any genetic/phenotypic IQ differences and still, mass immigration from South of the Border still wouldn’t be OK in the first place.
In shutting down the conversation about race and IQ, Harvard students are explicitly saying they don’t WANT to find a reason behind low performance on IQ tests amongst certain racial groups. They don’t CARE why some groups are not reaching their full human potential. They don’t give ONE SINGLE FUCK about anyone other than themselves. It could be as simple as making certain children have access to proper food and nutrition.
I at least give her credit for acknowledging the biological reality of race and the reality of IQ. But she thinks that malnutrition plays too big a part in the ethnic IQ gap than it does in reality.
As I have covered here before, people will do anything they can to deny the validity of IQ tests. However, their explanations cut it.
People who attempt to deny biological differences in intelligence because they strongly predict positive life outcomes will do anything to deny their validity. But that doesn’t change how strong a predictor they are in regards to predicting both positive and negative successes in life.
Those who attempt to deny any differences between races, like Chanda Chisala (I know you can see this Chanda, still waiting for a response to the criticism of your horrible article that “redneck genes” are the cause for the black-white IQ gap), who are wrong in their premises on the cause as well as how to fix the gap. They will do anything to attempt to explain away a gap which is, at least, 50 percent genetic in origin.
The attack on Jason Richwine is because, of course, he’s right. They don’t want to admit he is right so they do whatever they can to discredit his argument, by calling him a ‘racist’. But that doesn’t negate his data, and as seen above, any arguments against Richwine’s dissertation are unfounded.
Germany is going to begin IQ testing their immigrants, why can’t we?
Differential K Theory, GFP, and the Evolution of Conscientousness
There is a link between higher IQ and higher ability to be more conscientiousness, which is then linked to the GFP or General Factor of Personality. Two meta-factors were identified beyond the Big Five Personality Traits and were described as ‘Plasticity’ and ‘Stability’ (Deyoung et al, 2002). To quote from the paper:
Stability subsumes Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability (the reverse ofNeuroticism), and Agreeableness, and refers to the extent to whichan individual is consistent in motivation, mood, and social interac-tions. Plasticity encompasses Extraversion and Openness to experi-ence, and refers to the extent to which a person actively searchesfor new and rewarding experiences, both intellectual and social.
Why did this evolve, especially so closely with high intellect? It evolved due to conscientiousness, which is defined as being thorough, careful, and vigilant.That, coincidentally enough, being needed to survive the harsh winters of Northern Europe and Siberia. Higher conscientiousness was is also another reason for the formation of European societies. With being able to be more conscientious, this, along with genetic pacification, is yet another cause for the cucking of Europe.
When our ancestors trekked out of Africa and into Siberia and Northern Europe, they needed differing abilities than those peoples who stayed in the more tropic climates. Those in the tropics, for the most part, could just lounge around all day. With food being readily available, there was really no pressing need to “save” or “partition” their findings (as Africa is full of mostly a hunter-gatherer societies). Conversely, in Europe and Asia, with harsh conditions in regards to their environment, which made food less plentiful than in the tropics, this meant that more cooperation was needed. Due to more cooperation being needed to survive, planning ahead (abstract thought) evolved to better help cope with the harsh environment.
The aforementioned factors in Europe and Asia then led to the higher rates of altruism seen today. Ancient Europeans needed to be thorough, vigilant and careful. Whether they needed to be careful with food storage, how much to eat, whether or not to help someone, etc, it’s clear that conscientiousness evolved with higher intelligence. Since higher intelligence is correlated with those three things involving conscientiousness, they evolved hand in hand, as selection only selects for good traits and discards the ones that aren’t useful.
These two environments that the three races evolved in then set the stage for what’s going on today. With Africans’ lack of conscientiousness, this leads to them not being vigilant, careful or thorough. This can be seen with how sloppy they are when they commit crimes. Their ancestral environment wasn’t conducive to conscientiousness, and in turn, higher IQ, so they evolved without the need of conscientiousness, as their societies (for what they are), function ‘well’ in their perception. This is yet another reason why that we cannot live together. Differing evolutionary strategies lead to these causes, yet we still think we can acclimate some peoples into society when their biology says otherwise.
JP Rushton proposed that the GFP (General Factor of Personality) and IQ were linked. It was found that the correlation between the GFP and IQ was -.23. The higher the g score, the higher the individual scores on the GFP. He noted that the correlation is so low, possibly due to the restricted range of the sample. Rushton provided an argument for the evolutionary process of cognitive ability and personality evolution. This is clear evidence of the GFP and IQ evolving hand-in-hand.
Lacking a high IQ, and therefore, lack of g, Africans (as well as other colored peoples), on average, have lower g and therefore lower conscientiousness, which then is a huge cause for crime. Increases criminality has been correlated, like I’ve said here before, to a lower verbal intelligence. Though this higher IQ and higher GFP is being taken advantage of. Ever since that fateful day in 1964, white pathological altruism has been taken advantage of. Those with lower conscientiousness know they can take advantage of those with higher IQ and higher conscientiousness as altruism is correlated highly with IQ and conscientiousness.
There is an altruistic personality; the altruist has a high IQ, is conscientious, and altruistic. Those on the opposite end of the spectrum, however, take advantage of that and this can be seen with the political climate around the world in regards to other races’ feelings towards whites.Conversely, those who are r-selected and have a low IQ and GFP tend to be more hostile and commit acts of aggression. This multiculturalism due to the altruistic personality on a large scale is one of the reasons for the mass immigration into Western societies. People, as a whole, become collectively altruistic. Then, those lower IQ, lower GFP, r-selected people then take advantage of the more altruistic people. They then turn into a parasitic entity, sucking the host dry before moving on to their next victim.
This is where a high GFP does not work, in multicultural societies. Of course, this is also due to ethnic dissimilarity, but the other thing I brought up along with that ethnic dissimilarity are all of the negative effects of those that are r selected, which, in their own societies is ‘fine’, but to who are K-selected and have complex societies, those behaviors are archaic.
There is a high correlation between low IQ, low conscientiousness, archaic actions, lack of abstract thought, and lack of society building. We know that those with lower IQs commit more crime on average than those with higher IQs.
This is why allowing non-Western people who are abnormal to our societies is a bad move, since they don’t share the same evolutionary track, and therefore, due to differing selections due to evolution, evolved differing behaviors to better adapt to the climate, environment, and surroundings.
Since skin color and IQ correlate at -.92, meaning the darker the skin the lower the IQ and vice versa, this is yet another great assessor on whether an individual has a high IQ, and is, therefore, conscientious. This is due to, as I alluded to earlier, the environment in sub-Saharan Africa being conducive to lack of ability to delay gratification. Due to that, we can infer, on average, whether someone will be conscientious or not. Since their ability to delay gratification is impeded due to certain evolutionary pressures not put on Asians and Europeans, they will, therefore, be less conscientious, which is a crucial building block in maintaining a successful society.
The research of Templer and Arikawa (2006) supports Rushton’s contention that higher intelligence develops in colder climates. They used 129 countries with primarily indigenous populations (Asia, Africa, and Europe) and correlated culture fair IQ (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2002) with temperature. In addition to temperature, Templer and Arikawa used skin color provided by an anthropology book (Biasutti, 1967). IQ correlated .92 with darker skin color, .76 with winter highs, .66 with winter lows, and .63 with per capita income. Previous research by Meisenberg (2004) reported a correlation of .89 between skin reflectance and IQ in a similar study. Templer (2010b) found a correlation of .96 between skin color measure used by the Templer and Arikawa and the one by Meisenberg’s skin reflectance. Because both measures were independently determined using different methodology, they both can be regarded as highly valid measures of skin color.
The cause of these two variables being correlated is evolution. They paired well with each other, so over tens of thousands of years, they got selected for with each other and persisted to today. Since we have modern societies and are much more civil (some of us), we can better see these differences in personality as well as behavior. There are This General Factor of Personality was able to evolve due to evolution in cold climates. The altered intelligence, which then altered personality. This r/K Life History Theory of Rushton’s blend’s beautifully with the GFP and intelligence. Evolution in cold climates along with genetic isolation caused differing evolutionary trajectories for each race/ethnicity which led to differences in crime, IQ, socioeconomic status, sexual maturity, cultures, and so on. There are clear genetic differences brought on by the environment (due to evolution), which leads to differing societies based on differing evolutionary trajectories. Conscientiousness and intelligence, the whole General Factor of Personality, evolved in Northern populations since it was more beneficial in that environment, and to survive, this is what done to adapt to the environment through natural selection, which then led to racial differences.
Germany Begins to (Slightly) Wise Up: Will Begin IQ Testing “Migrants”
800 words
Haaretz reported today that Germany was going to begin IQ testing on the ‘migrants’ to assess where talent and what occupational groups that they could put them in. This is a slightly positive change with all of the negativity this past year.
The mean IQ of Arab countries is 84 (Templer, 2010). With around 1.2 million ‘refugees’ coming from land and sea, assuming a SD of 15 (seeing as Arabs are Caucasian, I’ll assume a SD of 15), 50 percent of them fall at or below 84. So 600k at 84 or below. 16 percent fall at 100. 192k fall at 100. 12k at 120 and 1,680 fall at 130. 50 percent fall below 84. In America the average IQ for a repeat criminal is 85. With an IQ of 85, you can see that criminality begins to increase. This is due to lack of abstract thought(linked to verbal ability), which has them not think of the consequences of their actions before they act. At or below 85 is 1 in 6, 68% of the population is within 1 SD of 100, and 2.5% of people are 130 or more.
I can’t find any data on Arab testosterone at the moment, so I’ll just assume that it’s higher than Europeans due to the Arabs’ closer proximity to the equator (someone correct me if I’m wrong), as that’s why African’s testosterone is high. Due to higher average testosterone combined with low IQ, this leads to increased aggression along with increased sex crime, which is a cause for some of the sex assaults on European women by Muslim men. I can’t find anything on terrorist IQ, the closest I can find is how the FBI convinced a man with an IQ of 51 to attempt terrorist acts, though that’s an extreme case. Since low IQ is correlated highly with lack of abstract thought, it was easier for him to become convinced to do it. Like in most organizations, the more intelligent ones are at the top so they tell the lower IQ ones what to do. Though, by administering these tests, they will greatly lower their chances for another terrorist attack, seeing as those actions are correlated with low IQ.
In a study on prison inmates, IQ predicted inmate misconduct. Using a sample of 2500 inmates over 30 institutions from August 2004 to June 2006, it was found that those inmates who had higher IQs were involved in fewer incidents as well as being less likely to commit violent behavior. Verbal intelligence has been posited to be some of the cause for increased crime, seeing as verbal IQ is correlated with delinquent behavior, which is due to lack of abstract thought being correlated with lower IQ. With higher testosterone being correlated with low IQ and increased androgen sensitivity along with higher sperm counts (both are indicators of higher testosterone) being correlated negatively when measured by speed of neuronal transmission which causes a trade-off between g (general intelligence) and neuronal transmission, this shows that increased testosterone means decreased IQ. This is also seen with how higher IQ people have a lower sex drive.
I did say in my article Non-Western People are Abnormal for Our Society, that, as the title says, non-Western people are abnormal for our society due to not sharing our cultural values, which, we know is genetic. Though, higher IQ individuals will be better able to acclimate into society, as well as have a decreased proclivity to commit crime.
Since there are some evoultionary reasons for suicide bombings due to increased inbreeding this increased genetic similarity between them which led to increased altruism due to genetic similarity, by allowing those with higher IQs, this will lead to a greatly increased chance for attacks to happen as higher IQ people are better at controlling impulses.
This is a move I agree with. All countries should implement this procedure (obviously not enough to where it begins to displace the native population). With there being a cut-off limit on IQ, lets say 105 or even 110, that guarantees a high chance of those who are immigrating will be of value to the country and bring something to the table instead of the current situation with the benefits they currently receive (and lets be honest, you know these rules aren’t being followed). So by implementing this policy not only in Germany, but around the world, this would be a great thing for the West, to restrict immigration only to high-skilled workers, with a background check, intelligence test and someone with good credentials. Of course, only in sectors that really need the help. I of course advocate for the natives of any country to have first dibs when it comes to getting a job.
All in all, this is good move because a) rapes will be lessened and b) there won’t be as much individuals on welfare because there will be an (assumed) moratorium on those with lower IQs, leaving the higher IQ ones to find jobs and contribute to the economy.
Are There Genetic Causes for Obesity?
2500 words
We all know about the Healthy At Every Size Movement (HAES) and how they claim that genetics is the cause of them being overweight and or obese and that genetics is the cause that they cannot lose weight as well as other people. I’m not here today to defend that they are right and that’s why they can’t lose weight (because lets be honest, they have no idea what they’re talking about, nor can they reference any type of study that says it), nor am I here today to give any credence to the HAES movement. I’m here today to talk about genetic causes for obesity as well as causalities that people don’t talk about and believe that kcal in and kcal are the only factors in becoming obese (I have never, nor will I ever dispute that kcal in and out has been the biggest factor involving obesity, just there are underlying causes that people do not talk about, which is the a huge cause in keeping people obese). What people don’t understand is that there are underlying factors that no one talks about that lead to obesity.
When people say that there are no genetic underpinnings for obesity, they are speaking on a subject that they are extremely ignorant about. They always say “kcal in and out”. Right, which I have never disputed. Though, those same people cannot say a thing to the studies that I provide, because they cannot adapt to new information and just parrot the same things as if that disproves the studies that I link. Furthermore, obesity and diabetes (which there is a close relationship between the two), are both nowhere near close enough to being understood.
I have already covered here that ability to delay gratification has a genetic component, and that those with low ability to delay gratification, as noted in my post, had a higher chance of becoming obese than those with a better ability to delay gratification. Some people have said to me that the Marshmallow Experiment didn’t have anything to do with the ability to delay gratification, that it was something else entirely, but alas, the individual obviously said nothing more when I asked him to comment on the post so my readers can read the exchange.
You all know that I covered ethnicity and obesity, but I’m making this post to serve as a something to reference while in discussion with people, as well as educate people who don’t know about these studies.
As noted in my previous article on obesity, there are racial difference in obesity (that pretty much follow Rushton’s Rule). Of course there are socioeconomic factors that are involved there, but to say that there is no genetic component is intellectually dishonest. To believe that there are absolutely no genetic causes for obesity and that environmental factors means everything shows that that person has no idea what they are talking about.
According to a meta-study of twins and families, the heritability of BMI is between .75 and .82. This used mono and dizygotic twins, as well as having over 140 thousand participants. They observed 12 countries, all with differing racial/ethnic groups and the results were the same.
While in a discussion with someone, I got linked these studies: Obese toddlers have dramatically lowered IQ, Obese toddlers have dramatically lowered IQ 2 and Obesity lowers children’s IQ. This is hilarious. The causalities are completely reversed. I would love to hear the explanation for the physiological mechanism that has obesity lower IQ. Well, Satoshi Kanazawa tackled this in his study back in 2014, that low IQ leads to obesity, obesity doesn’t lead to low IQ.
A few of the highlights include:
- Cross-sectional studies conclude that obesity lowers IQ, whereas longitudinal studies conclude that those who become obese already have a low IQ since childhood
- Careful examination of longitudinal studies in Sweden, New Zealand and America clearly show that the casual direction goes from low IQ to obesity, not obesity to low IQ
- There is NO scientific evidence that shows that obesity leads to lowered IQ. There is, however, ample evidence, both in scientific theory as well as ample amounts of evidence that lower IQ people become obese
Individuals with IQs below 74 at 18 have BMI of 26.59 at 40, whereas those with IQs above 126 have BMI of 25.75 (P < 0.001). Similarly, there is a clear and monotonically negative association between intelligence at 18 and the BMI change from 18 to 40. Individuals with IQs below 74 gain 5.19 in BMI in 22 years, whereas those with IQs above 126 gain 3.73 (P < 0.001). Their conclusion remains identical even when they control for systolic and diastolic blood pressure, resting pulse rate, birth place, birth year, and education at conscription. Their results from a large population sample of Swedish men make it clear that it is adolescent intelligence that influences BMI in middle age, not the other way around
The fact of the matter is this: obesity does not lower IQ. Those with certain agendas would like you to believe that becoming obese drops IQ, whereas ample scientific data shows the opposite. Including this study which states that those in the cohort who became obese didn’t see a drop in IQ from childhood, instead, those individuals who became obese already had a lower IQ since childhood. You already know that I did not get a response to these studies. That’s because showing people that they’re wrong actually makes them believe their wrong beliefs more, especially if they have low self-confidence (how ironic).
There have been genes that have been found that are associated with binge eating. If a young adolescent has this particular variant on the FTO gene, they are 20 to 30 percent more likely to binge eat than those who don’t have the variant. This was observed in girls particularly, who were 30 percent more likely to binge eat if they had the variation.
Dr. Peter Atilla had a TED Talk on how obesity may be hiding an even more insidious problem. To quote from the transcript:
Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma, I never once questioned the conventional wisdom. I actually just assumed the pathologic sequence of events was settled science.
Three years later, I found out how wrong I was. But this time, I was the patient. Despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid to the letter, I’d gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome. Some of you may have heard of this. I had become insulin-resistant.
Now, most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance. Logically, then, if you want to treat insulin resistance, you get people to lose weight, right? You treat the obesity. But what if we have it backwards? What if obesity isn’t the cause of insulin resistance at all? In fact, what if it’s a symptom of a much deeper problem, the tip of a proverbial iceberg? I know it sounds crazy because we’re obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic, but hear me out. What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell? I’m not suggesting that obesity is benign, but what I am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils.
You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to partition fuel, as I alluded to a moment ago, taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately. When we become insulin-resistant, the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state. So now, when insulin says to a cell, I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, “No thanks, I’d actually rather store this energy.” And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it’s probably the safest place to store it. So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat.
You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat,whether we burn it or store it. This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo. Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life. And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job. Once you’re insulin-resistant, you’re on your way to getting diabetes, which is what happens when your pancreas can’t keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin.
But most important, I was left with these three burning questions that wouldn’t go away: How did this happen to me if I was supposedly doing everything right? If the conventional wisdom about nutrition had failed me, was it possible it was failing someone else? And underlying these questions, I became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance.
So what I’m suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance.Maybe we should be asking ourselves, is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people? What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening, an underlying epidemic, the one we ought to be worried about?
Let’s look at some suggestive facts. We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don’t have insulin resistance. And by the way, they don’t appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people. Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic diseases I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts. Now I don’t know why, but it might be because, in their case, their cells haven’t actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy. So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance, and you can be lean and have it, ******this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what’s going on.******
So what if we’re fighting the wrong war, fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance? Even worse, what if blaming the obese means we’re blaming the victims? What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong?
Personally, I can’t afford the luxury of arrogance anymore, let alone the luxury of certainty. I have my own ideas about what could be at the heart of this, but I’m wide open to others. Now, my hypothesis, because everybody always asks me, is this. If you ask yourself, what’s a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant, the answer probably isn’t too much food. It’s more likely too much glucose: blood sugar. Now, we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run,and there’s even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly. So if you put these physiological processes to work, I’d hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains, sugars and starches that’s driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but through insulin resistance,you see, and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising.
The fact of the matter is this: we need to look at any and all causes to do with obesity. To fully understand this disease is to look at any and all factors involving it. To discard theories and make new ones, or just disregard what was looked at. People who say that we shouldn’t look at these types of things really have no idea what they’re talking about. To fully understand a problem, we need to look at any and all causes that may be underlying.
I’m currently writing a research paper on Prader-Willi’s Syndrome (which I will post here when I’m done with it), and as I was watching the documentary, a few things jumped out at me:
- They are infantile
- They clearly have a lack of ability to delay gratification
- Prader-Willi’s people have an IQ, on average of 70
- Due to being infantile, they have a lack of ability to delay gratification, so along with that, they have lower IQs which is correlated with lack of abstract thought
To say that these people “can control themselves” and they “just need to eat less” is dishonest, to say the least. Those people with disorders such as these really have no say in the matter.
In a follow-up to the Marshmallow Experiment, studies were done on those individuals they could still find 40 years later. What was found that those who lacked the ability to delay gratification in pre-school ended up becoming obese. We need to identify those children with low ability to delay gratification because it’s clear that those with the lack of ability to delay gratification end up becoming obese in adulthood.
This is a favorite of mine. People may say “Fat shaming is good!!! It leads to people thinking about what they’re doing and, in turn, they will lose weight!!!” How wrong that is. Present research indicates that in addition to poorer mental health outcomes, weight discrimination has implications for obesity. ******Rather than motivating people to lose weight, weight discrimination increases the risk for obesity.****** Why people think that making fun of people will lead to weight loss is beyond me.
Interestingly, a slightly different pattern emerged when the analyses were based on measured BMI. When the sample with measured weight and height was limited to participants who were overweight at baseline, the risk of obesity was a little stronger but essentially the same (OR = 2.18, 95% CI = 1.04–4.45). In contrast, when this sample was limited to normal weight participants at baseline, there was not enough data for the analysis: of the 14 participants in the normal weight category who reported weight discrimination, none became obese
Similar to weight gain, weight discrimination was associated with remaining obese over the period between the two assessments (see Table 1). That is, those who experienced discrimination based on their weight were over three times more likely to remain obese at follow-up, rather than drop below the obesity threshold, than those who did not experience such discrimination.
The evidence is clear: weight discrimination actually increases the problem that people actually laugh at and make fun of people for. How ironic is that?
In conclusion (I will add to this post as new research comes out), to say that there are no underlying causes of obesity is intellectually dishonest. There are clear underlying causes to this obesity epidemic, which we need to look at any and all of these causes to fully understand obesity better (which we are nowhere close to understanding this problem).
The Marshmallow Experiment
1300 words
This is one of my favorite studies. It proves a genetic basis for the ability to delay gratification, as well as racial differences in the ability to delay gratification.
In the late 60s and early 70s is when these experiments took place. Walter Mischel who is now a psychologist at Columbia University, thought of a groundbreaking study to see the ability to delay gratification. Taking preschoolers, the researchers presented the child with treats such as marshmallows. The child was then told the researchers had to step out of the room for a few minutes. Before they left, they were told that if they didn’t eat any of the treats, they would get an extra treat. If they couldn’t wait, they were told to ring a bell and the researcher came back and they were only allowed one treat.
There were interesting ways in which some of the children who were able to prevent themselves from eating it. Some of them pushed it further away from them, turning around in their chair and singing songs to themselves to distract themselves.
He eventually developed a framework to explain the ability to delay gratification called a hot and cold system, to see explain why willpower fails.
The cool system is the thinking system, the cognitive one. Reminding you that you will get a reward if you wait. The hot system is the impulsive system, making you want it now and not wanting to wait for the other treat.
Years later, another researcher was able to track down 59 of the participants in the study. They then tested them again, and their self-control was the same.
Some important things were found from the studies. It predicts BMI 30 years later in preschoolers, they predict SAT scores, educational achievement, as well as significant correlations being found between seconds of delay time and cognitive and academic confidence and ability to cope with stress and frustration in adolescence.
MRI scans were also given to them where they were presented with tempting stimuli, those with low self-control showed differing brain patterns in comparison to those with higher self-control. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that makes choices, was more active in subjects with higher self-control. The ventrial seratum, which is thought to process desires and rewards, was more active in those with low self-control.
We see in this study that brain structures are involved in the ability to delay gratification, as well as psychopathic disorders. The hippocampus, which is associated with memory, and the nucleus accumbens, associated with pleasure, work together in making critical decisions of this type, in which time plays a role. Blacks have a smaller hippocampus, as well as nucleus accumbens due to having a smaller overall brain in comparison to whites and Asians.
In one study done in the 60s on East Indians and Negroes on the island of Trinidad, a major personality difference was expressed between the 2 groups. Many people said that the difference was that negroes are impulsive and would settle for next to nothing if they could get it right away, as well as not working or preferring to work and they preferred to accept smaller things immediately. But the Indians were able to deprive themselves and able to postpone immediate gain for a bigger gain in the future. The black took the smaller reward if they could get it right away whereas the Indian waited if they could get a bigger reward in the future.
They also say at the end of the paper that this has implications not only for the 2 ethnicities in the study but for further research for studies on relationships between personality variables and this type of behavior in our own culture.
They have also done this test on blacks and whites in the Caribbean as well as the US multiple times and are sick of doing it because the results are always the same.
Now that we have a background on the delay of gratification as well as some a study that shows how blacks fare in it, let’s see some real world examples.
We all know that blacks rape the most. They kill the most. They rob the most. They assault the most. All of that has to do with thinking in the now, ability to delay gratification. The gratification of them of raping, killing, robbing or assault. Because they have a smaller brain than we do, they’re not as developed in the areas of the brain that we are (which has to do with archaic hominid admixture in Africans). That leads to them only thinking in the now and not thinking about the future. That’s one of the causes for black over representation in murder and all other crime stats despite being 13 percent of the US population. They don’t think before they act, right when it pops into their head they act on it. With their low IQ on top of that, along with the smaller, less developed brain, leads to all of the impulsive behaviors that show itself in the crime stats on all the countries where blacks are the majority.
Ability to delay gratification is clearly largely genetic. I would reason that since Africans evolved in a hot climate where food is readily available, they didn’t need to do the planning ahead that Europeans and East Asians had to do. With the groups who weathered the Ice Age, they had to conserve their food and save it. This lead to an evolutionary effect over time, ability to delay gratification, along with high IQ and more altruistic behavior towards the group.
It’s the opposite in Africans and those who evolved in hotter climates closer to the equator. There was really no need to delay gratification for things such as food and other things of that nature because they didn’t evolve in the Ice Age.
This same trend holds true for all peoples who evolved close to the equator. So ability to delay gratification is correlated with ancestry, as well as skin color.
Another cool thing I just came across the other day is Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. It says that pacification proceeded slowly from the 5th to 11th centuries, because of the Church’s opposition to the death penalty as well as belief in a man’s right to solve personal disputes as he saw fit. They began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus that the wicked should die so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more often in the middle of the Middle Ages and by then they were putting to death .5 to 1 percent of men that generation, with the same amount dying at the scene of the crime or getting killed in prison awaiting trial.
The homicide rate plummeted from the 14th to 20th centuries. By then, most murdered were committed due to jealousy, intoxication or extreme stress. The decline in violence is attributed to more strict punishment as well as long term effects of cultural conditioning. Though, the new cultural environment may have selected against propensities for violence.
That is clearly the people with lack of ability to delay gratification being culled from society, which proved it with its murder drop in the 14th to 20th centuries.
In Sweden, those with a certain MAOA allele are said to commit between 5 and 10 percent of crime.
Sexual offending run in families.
Those are clear things that show a lack of ability to delay gratification, and as I have shown here it is genetic.
Those that live in/evolved in hotter climates have a higher propensity to commit crimes and other negative things to due certain pressures that they didn’t have to go through, leading to the long list of things that all strongly correlate with each other due to the reason (evolution and hot climate) why we are all different from each other.
NotPoliticallyCorrect 
