“Squid Ink”
A common piece of advice that I’ve heard with the release of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance is that in order to get people to accept the findings of HBD, you can’t be too honest and direct with the reality of the situation. That is, you can’t tell the full scope of the truth of what we know. Rather, you need to insert a bit of “squid ink” into the water to blur your actual claims. You need to say things that are somewhat untrue but might be a bit more palatable to apprehensive audiences. One example is Wade’s stress that the understanding of inherited differences between people and the effects of these on national outcomes is largely “speculative.” Another is the common behavioral genetics trope that the sources of human differences are “nature AND nurture,” being a 50-50 mix of each. Robert Plomin’s constant stress of the likelihood that “gene-environment correlations” are ultimately behind heritability estimates is yet another example.
There is little to no truth in any of these claims. But they all have one thing in common: they all leave the door open to the “environment” – that is, they leave the impression that controlled environmental manipulation can greatly affect behavioral and societal outcomes. For better or worse, Westerners, especially the more Left-leaning ones, are social engineers at heart. They have an innate belief that we can engineer a better society if we try hard enough – the Utopian Vision, as discussed by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate. Those that accept the role of heredity, frankly, merely see it as another obstacle to overcome in their hopes of engineering a better world. Hence, the advice is that if we want HBD to gain widespread acceptance, we can’t be too “hard” with our claims, regardless of how true they actually are. How would these people then receive the true realities of the situation then? Like:
- Every single human behavioral trait is impacted by genes, usually considerably so.
- How you raise your kids has virtually no impact on how they turn out. That is, nurture appears to matter little in the end.
- For that matter, contrary to what we’ve been told, it doesn’t look like peers matter too much, either.
- We have been so far unable to find much of anything in the environment that leaves a lasting impact on intelligence or behavioral traits.
- Indeed, this is largely true of health outcomes. “Lifestyle” (say diet and exercise) doesn’t appear to be primarily responsible for differences in illness or lifespan.
- One class of agents in the environment that the evidence does seem to be pointing to that can impact health and behavior are pathogens, and many, if not most, have yet to be discovered. These infections can cause chronic disease, like cancer and perhaps heart disease, and can even alter behavior, most poignantly in the case male homosexuality.
- While we know the grand-scale environment can make a difference, as seen with rapid secular changes, this seems to primarily occur because of alterations in the incentive structure or through hitherto unavailable possibilities (e.g., cars, internet, oral birth control). Changes here quite likely aren’t easy to execute in a way that achieves controlled outcomes.
- Given the high heritabilities of behavioral traits and the lack of clear environmental mediators, differences in “culture” (especially within a given time period) are largely due to genetic differences between people. That is, differences between all human groups (races, ethnicities, social classes, or whatever) are all to some degree due to genetics, and perhaps mostly or almost entirely so.
- Your birth family/clan heavily determines your eventual social status. Social status is in fact as heritable as height, and decays very slowly generation after generation in all different social systems across different countries. Social mobility, by and large, doesn’t exist.
- This scales up to larger groups: the average intelligence and distribution of behavioral traits of a nation or a race/ethnicity within a nation are overwhelmingly the primary determinants of its outcome and social structure, and not its resource wealth or historical circumstances (generally).
- Indeed, these imply that all of human history is largely the result of the churning of these behavioral and intellectual differences, enabled by technology (which itself is a function of the people).
Would a speaker that said all these things get a lot of play? Would a book that laid bare the case for these rather than took the more muted tack that Wade’s did be well received? What do you think?
I will say one thing: with all these considered, it’s hard to escape the seeming importance of eugenics, if crafting a better society is what you’re after. Indeed, if that’s your goal, eugenics – in one form or another – does appear to be your only avenue.
These represent pretty much the case made through out the nearly 200 posts on this blog. It is my belief that if we are motivated by the desire to clear up falsehoods, then better to tell the actual truth, rather than give watered-down and ultimately incorrect information about the science. But then, I’m opposed to propagating falsehoods in general, so maybe that’s just me.
I’m not a marketer, so I can only do what I know. Maybe these facts, as true as they are, are just not digestible by people, not yet and perhaps not ever (or at least for the foreseeable future). Who knows? But I personally don’t see the sense in it. After all, a mistake often spreads faster and further than the correction to it, so better to get it right the first time, I say. If you’re going to do it, better to do it right. However, I honestly don’t know. What are your thoughts?
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JayMan's Blog 
We can engineer a better society without the use of eugenics or genetic changes. To claim otherwise is ludicrous. Over the past hundred years, tribalism, poverty and violence have greatly declined, and (some factors of) intelligence have increased –– although the genetic propensity for poverty, violence and stupidity increased substantially.
Has tribalism, for that matter violence, actually decreased over the last century?
Sure poverty has decreased. But that has occurred through massive technological change. We are running up against the limits of that in developed world, and some parts of the developing world (Africa) will likely miss much of that.
Technology can affect things, often in unpredictable ways, but there’s only so much to do there without genetic change (at least for the foreseeable future).
No, they haven’t Albert, except that technological change engineered primarily by European whites has (temporarily) reduced poverty in many areas due to external exploitation of natural resources. There are numerically more tribal and clannish humans than ever, and they have not been able to successfully adopt western civilization, chiefly because they lack the right genetic traits. For example, if all non-Africans disappeared from S.Africa tomorrow, who believes that they could maintain their current economic or political status rather than turning into Zimbabwe?
Why not blog this stuff under your own name? Do you work in such a precarious position up in Maine that that would get you fired? You may not be a marketer, but I suspect you’d acquire a soupçon of polish if you dropped the pseudonym. And you’d be better positioned to suggest to Wade and others how to make their cases.
I’ve always assumed that Jay is his real name.
But seriously, that sounds like a bad idea, unless one likes getting personally hate-targeted in real life.
I came here to say the same thing. He’s been brave enough to share pictures of his newborn son as well as his location; I think it’s okay to reveal his true identity. It will give what he says much more clout, and he will be taken more seriously.
You seem to suggesting that any attempt at reasonable caution is disingenuous. However, both Razib Khan and Steve Hsu have written much more nuanced posts in which they suggest that your position, generally speaking, is possibly correct but that we don’t have anywhere near enough evidence for your level of certainty. I am sure you have read both so I won’t bother repeating them.
It’s one thing to say here’s the evidence that evolution has been recent, copious and regional and that it involves the brain and another to simply assert that their are innate racial iq differences. It is reasonable to say that their are plenty of holes in an environmental account of IQ, but not that we know for certain what the genetic basis of IQ is.
In general I find that much of the HBD style discussion of the develoment/history of the world has the feel of crude 19th century world history. Just because genetic factors play some part in history doesn’t mean that everything can be subsumed into them. It is obvious that on both recent and historical scales that groups of people, with the same ancestry, can have radically different fortunes.
It is just my opinion but you could dial back the certainty from 110% to about 80%.
@Test Subject:
How about Greg Cochran?
Yeah, a lot of the apparent waffling depends on your precise claim. As per Misdreavus’s tweets featured in my previous post, that biology is behind racial/ethnic differences is a given. We don’t hear too much talked about Dan Freedman‘s babies for some reason. We have plenty of evidence for national/racial/ethnic IQ differences and the biological basis of these (e.g., national/racial achievement output, global consistency, lack of convergence among long-resident populations). We also do indeed have some genetic links, even if many older ones are false positives, including EDAR and ALDH2*504Lys. There is no question that biology is behind group differences to some degree.
What is debatable, at least at this point, is to what degree that is. The genetic component is looking is good, and evidence is mounting. The non-genetic component? Not so much.
What we also don’t know, at least not for sure, is how many of differences came to be, evolutionarily. That is the realm of speculation, although we do have some support for certain ideas from the evidence there, too. But, as I am apt to say, establishing that differences exist does not depend on establishing how they came to be. They are separate issues entirely. But they are often conflated in discussion about them.
Are you sure about that? Like whom, exactly? Is Korea your example?
I think it’s pretty safe to say that inherent behavioral differences have played a big role in the course of history. And no, I’m not saying that biology explains ALL of history. Chance and technology are also factors. (But, then, where does technology come from?)
I’m not sure which is more of a problem — biologists/geneticists who hold HBD to a much higher standard than they would demand for any evolutionary speculations unrelated to human differences, or social scientists/humanists who find the application of sociobiology to history & society “too crude”.
The sceptical scientists usually demand genomic evidence, even though such evidence is pretty sparce in general, for any proposition. Also those people usually know very little about the social sciences and they don’t take the powerful “social phenotype” evidence for HBD very seriously. No one finds it remarkable — and I mean really remarkable, for it has never been done — that Clark has documented in microdata (wills) an actual eugenic effect in historical time. This has got to be as close to an actual witnessing of human evolution by natural selection as it is possible to get. It is literally comparable with lepidopterists discovering that moths changed colour in response to the industrial revolution — a pure phenotype evidence that biologists have little problem accepting as signs of natural selection. Actually, in some ways Clark’s evidence is better than the moths. No one actually counted the eggs laid by the moths with the better-adapted colours. Clark counted the “eggs”.
But social scientists and humanists don’t understand the power of that phenotype evidence, either. (Hence, a fellow economic historian mocked Clark for publishing “Some Observations on Suffolk Testators, 1423-1688” and calling it “A Brief History of the World”.) One reason may be they don’t know the science. But there’s probably another reason.
[1] ”One example is Wade’s stress that the understanding of inherited differences between people and the effects of these on national outcomes is largely “speculative.”
[2] ”This scales up to larger groups: the average intelligence and distribution of behavioral traits of a nation or a race/ethnicity within a nation are overwhelmingly the primary determinants of its outcome and social structure, and not its resource wealth or historical circumstances (generally).”
[3] “Indeed, these imply that all of human history is largely the result of the churning of these behavioral and intellectual differences, enabled by technology (which itself is a function of the people”
I unreservedly agree with #2 but #3 requires qualification because the aggregation of the micro (the genetic facts at the individual level) into the macro (at the level of countries, regions, etc.) is often non-linear and involves a random component. So the “churning” requires more description than a mere magnification of the individual-level traits. As someone who is primarily interested in how psychometric & behavioural-genetic facts translate into economic & political outcomes at the national, international & historical levels of aggregation, I can see how Wade’s presentation of Clark (for example) looks implausible to people, especially to those who are less interested in biology & genetics than in the social sciences. The Clarkian thesis is vulnerable to attack on historical grounds — e.g., were the 800 years prior to 1800 really as Malthusian as Clark’s thesis requires ? — for which you have to have a grasp of the relevant historical issues to argue back. Clark’s thesis also suffers from a serious misapprehension. Many many people — including people who know and like Clark — mistakenly believe that Clark was trying to explain the rise of England as opposed to everyone else. But Clark actually models the rise of NW Europe using England as a case study, and the subtleties of the difference need to be understood.
I said : ” No one actually counted the eggs laid by the moths with the better-adapted colors “. I should qualify. You did have Kettlewell’s and Fisher’s experiments, but these experiments were spurred by the industrial melanism hypothesis. Clark’s “survival of the richest” observation gets dismissed by scientists and the public.
@pseudoerasmus:
Well put!
““Lifestyle” (say diet and exercise) doesn’t appear to be primarily responsible for differences in illness or lifespan.”
Or perhaps, to put it more precisely, ordinary variation in so-called “lifestyle”, disassociated from behavioral proclivities that are rooted in the genes, play a negligible role in long term health outcomes (e.g obesity).
I mean there’s no way that force feeding people with cheetos won’t cause them to gain weight in the long term. take away the high calorie sources of nourishment, and obesity becomes a negligible problem.
The question is *why* certain people have a proclivity to indulge in these behaviors to begin with, once an array of other alimentary options are available? Hardly anyone bothers to devote some serious reflection as to why diets fail so often in the long run, why drug addiction is so difficult to treat for certain individuals, and why some people never take to the bottle (in spite of considerable peer pressure).
@Misdreavus:
I’d say the stronger form is probably more correct. Force feeding might cause someone to gain weight, and forced fasting might cause most to lose weight, but the evidence that ordinary behavioral proclivities, even those that are heritable, leads to obesity, say, isn’t as strong as we’d think. It is even weaker when we are talking adverse health outcomes (e.g. heart disease) or shortened life.
Obesity has been linked to low IQ, impulsiveness, lack of self-discipline etc. But sure, the market for disease theories is bigger.
In my experience Liberals and Conservatives (especially those in the great meaty mass of the bell curve) are inextricably wedded to the influence of the environment, of the family, of parenting, of peer group, of educational attainment. Everyone wants to believe that they can be in control of their own destiny and that of their children. I often wonder if this is simply a fundamental human need that I appear to somehow lack. So much art and writing has been devoted to this concept: the intractable nature of fate, the struggle to wrest control away from the unseen forces pulling the strings. I read such things and I think: “Why so much struggle? Why spend so much time thinking and praying about what your god or gods are planning for you? Why not just live, just be?” Maybe I’m the broken one.
@Sisyphean:
Some of that is a general Western thing, I suspect. Even Western conservatives, while more inbred than liberals likely, are outbred globally speaking.
But it’s more than just that. Future post…
the public prefers science that removes limits, rather than science that explains/predicts/understands limits! (& individual exceptionalism rather than most people are average). hopefully, the extreme blank-slatism movement is receding & the pendulum is swinging back, but there’s no guarantee the pendulum won’t suddenly do elliptical loop-de-loops.
the blank slate view is bizarre for its a priori belief that all population groups are = on all traits (equal population mu’s) which requires if a smart person from one group died, a smart person from another group must immediately die in order for the population means to remain absolutely equal at all times.
maybe the public could first accept group differences in variances/standard deviations before they could accept mean differences. i doubt much of the public understands variance, tho. or overlapping normal curves.
I would say we do have two current mostly unacknowledged eugenics programs in the US, one negative and one positive. Only problem is that with the positive program, those people are having the least amount of children. anyways, good writing as always Jayman
Good post, but it is just not true that environment doesn’t matter.
Plainly if my kid runs with a gang they are more likely to get shot or turn to a life of crime.
Plainly most of the illiterates in India could be literate under the right environment. Basic literacy in America is near 100% and we have plenty people on the left end of the curve.
How do you explain the Flynn effect if not my improved nutrition (environment)?
On the other hand, maybe you are right to emphasize the hereditary aspect uber alles, because that is what is glaringly lacking in policy. You can give people a great environment and still lose civilization if your society changes to where it lacks the proper innate/genetic characteristics.
@Dan:
Let’s get it right: I didn’t say the environment doesn’t matter. Never have.
Would your kid run with a gang? Why does a kid that does so end up with one? That’s the problem with peer group research.
Actually, allow me to outline a basic problem with all your thought here: how do you know? You are presupposing that environment works in these ways. If you then appeal to correlations, then you suffer from the problem of all of social science: how do you control for the genetic confound?
Sure, I made that point to Elijah above.
I’m questioning the whole nutrition bit (see the WW II Dutch famine). As for the Flynn effect, see Elijah’s paper.
I’m starting to notice that when people say I say “environment doesn’t matter” (when I don’t say that), it’s because I said the way they think the environment matters doesn’t. Sorry, environment isn’t anything goes. Sure, some forces in the environment have an effect, but we can tell you which ones certainly and very likely don’t.
@Dan:
Thanks for the compliments by the way!
Flynn Flynn Flynn Flynn ! I hate that monosyllable. When someone as well informed and intelligent as Tyler Cowen can keep repeating that every time the subject of IQ comes up, you know there is something seriously wrong. Even Flynn himself acknowledged (or seemed to, at some point), what’s driving the Flynn Effect is what drives the racial gap in IQ.
…IS NOT…
The amazing part about differences in population intelligence levels is: 1.how highly correlated these “unreliable” measurements world wide are with intellectual achievement and economic success, and 2. how easily they are explained by environmental factors including isolation, lack of intellectual work in the population, bottlenecks, etc. I guess some scientists (and economists like Greg Clark) are just incredibly lucky.
“They have an innate belief that we can engineer a better society if we try hard enough – the Utopian Vision, as discussed by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate.”
That is true. From The Better Angels of Our Nature:
“Figure 7–10 plots the surveyed annual rate of rape over the past four decades. It shows that in thirty-five years the rate has fallen by an astonishing 80 percent, from 250 per 100,000 people over the age of twelve in 1973 to 50 per 100,000 in 2008. In fact, the decline may be even greater than that, because women have almost certainly been more willing to report being raped in recent years, when rape has been recognized as a serious crime, than they were in earlier years, when rape was often hidden and trivialized.”
Dude, man up and publish a book.
You have 200 long ass blog posts, that would easily give you a 500 page book with or without all the pictures/figures.
I’ll buy it.
Books–> wider readership–> ??
Blog –> hbd circlejerk
Wade might be understating the case, but aren’t you overstating it?
For instance, it makes good theoretical sense that male homosexuality would be caused by a pathogen. The hallmarks are there (twin discordance, nothing showing up in gwas, low heritability). But do we *know* that it’s caused by a pathogen? No, we don’t. We’ll know it’s caused by a pathogen when someone’s got some bacterium in a test tube, isolated from the womb of a mother who birthed a gay child, that reliably turns rat embryos gay. Right?
Basically, I think overstating the case is more damaging to the HBD movement than understating it, at this point.
@Virtue:
Let’s put it this way: go ahead and bet the farm on it.
I’d agree. I’m not overstating anything here.
Remind us just how and why you consider yourself a liberal? Is there such a thing as good public policy in your opinion? Can you imagine public policies that would make all or most groups better off than they are now?
@Luke Lea:
I think Gregory Clark’s thoughts on the matter cover it well. Did you see his video on his latest book?
I am 70 years old. I was the baby of the family. My oldest nephew is 66 years old. His mother, my sister, had nine children. I watch all of her children from birth onwards. All of them were raised by the same parents in the same home. All of them had fully formed characters by age 2. All of them are different from each other. None of them has ever changed their basic character.
Regarding the squid ink: I think Steven Pinker and others use caution because there is something in psychology called Anchoring and Adjustment: people make their minds up and then adjust to minimize cognitive dissonance rather than for actual realism. So if you want to influence people in the right direction you have to look at how much they are willing to change. Look at Pinker’s success and compare it with Judith Rich Harris. He coaxed people to adjust a little and they did. She asked people to pull up the anchor and drift far away, and they ignored her.
I don’t know what the perfect strategy is; clearly the evidence against the old Enlightenment worldview is mounting so much that a clean break may be a less painful option for some people. So perhaps you’re on the right track. But I think you should consider marketing as a way of getting to the truth, and also consider that speaking frankly can scare people away from the truth. It may sound a bit sordid, but it’s no different than adding a beautiful picture or a joke to a blog post to make it more digestible.
@Staffan:
Unfortunately, I’m not a marketer. That’ll be my wife… 😉
“Your birth family/clan heavily determines your eventual social status. Social status is in fact as heritable as height, and decays very slowly generation after generation in all different social systems across different countries. Social mobility, by in large, doesn’t exist.”
This seems to conflict with the oft-repeated claim that IQ is a strong predictor of success. To use Robert of Arabia’s example, say his nieces and nephews had a wide IQ range. If they are a working class family how could the high IQ children be successful without some serious social mobility?
@Casey:
IQ is strongly predictive of success. There is a large variation in life success within a family, just less so than the general population (often with a different mean).
Hmm, okay, but focussing on the mean still doesn’t explain why the successful high IQ sibling isn’t an example of social mobility. Social mobility happens to individuals, right? We expect significant IQ differences in families, yet it is true that we don’t see a lot of social mobility.
So IQ is important, but doesn’t really overcome class background, which is what some of us have been saying all along. Or, possibly “social status” and “success” aren’t exactly the same thing…
Sorry that’s ‘focusing’ lol.
Forgot to ask: what sort of range would you typically expect in a family, say again a large family with the same two parents as in the above example? Has that been studied at all- would appreciate links if you’ve blogged about that, thanks.
Definitely, there are some scientists that are biased against any correlation of race with trait, that isn’t explained away by social inequalities, instead of genetics. But I see a lot of those whom identify with the HBD crowd accept a lot of exploratory studies, sometimes flawed, too eagerly.
That’s why a lot of straw man arguments have become common tropes. But the tropes against some scientists are also very common, even when the evidence is well presented.
Well, that’s why I try to filter that rubbish here, even that coming from within the HBD-sphere.
Reblogged this on The Ratliff Notepad.