Some Good Questions

And then this question of intelligence, -- are we too much, too readily impressed by mere articulateness?  I mean, is Raymond really a more intelligent person than the subaltern here who has commanded Indians all his life? How would Raymond come out of it, if he were suddenly put into a position of responsibility and authority?  How would his appreciation of the finer shades serve him then?  And which is the more important?  Or is it merely a question of difference, not of degree?

Besides, so far as feeling goes, I suspect there is as much feeling in the terse remarks of the subaltern, -- "Jolly day, -- jolly the mountains look, -- topping view," --as in any amount of verbiage.

-- Vita Sackville-West, writing to Virginia Woolf from Tehran, 23rd February 1927

[The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Morrow, 1985), p. 178]

Mensa for Dummies

John Scalzi posted a grab of one of his tweets this morning:

It was prompted by the ongoing Sad Puppies vs. Social Justice Warriors "kerfuffles surrounding science fiction and its awards, there have been a couple of people (and their spouses, declaiming about their beloved) who have been slapping down Mensa cards as proof that they (or their spouse) are smart."  Scalzi explained, in his trademark style, why doing this tends to prove the opposite.  For example:

Your Mensa card does not mean you know how to argue. Your Mensa card does not mean you do not make errors or lapses in judgment. Your Mensa card is not a “get out of jail free” card when someone pokes holes in your thesis. Your Mensa card does not mean that you can’t be racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted. You may not say “I have a Mensa card, therefore my logic is irrefutable.”

Good enough.  The comments under his post are another matter, however.  They fell into two main groups. In one group, the commenter would mention that he or she had attended Mensa meetings, even joined for a while, and found the people in the organization to be mostly pretty nice people.  The other group declared that they'd never joined or gone to a meeting, but all the Mensa members they'd met were jerks.  I found this latter group fascinating, because despite their evident conviction of their own superior intelligence, they were making a fundamental logical mistake, one that Scalzi himself didn't: they were generalizing an entire group based on their experience of a few, probably unrepresentative, members.  Analogous stereotypes are "All the Christian fundamentalists I know are hypocrites," "Did you ever see a fag who wasn't effeminate?" (actual example), "All heroin addicts started out on pot, so smoking pot will turn you into a heroin addict."

(Just for disclosure's sake, I have never joined Mensa or gone to a meeting.  The Mensa members I know in person are quite nice and bright people, and the Mensa jerks I've encountered were all online, trying to establish their intellectual credentials by bragging about their IQ scores or their Mensa membership.)

Some of the discussion focused on IQ tests and SATs.  Several commenters pointed out the uselessness of IQ tests as a measure of intelligence.  One riposted:

IQ tests (what Mensa uses) are tests of aptitude. They are basically measuring how easily and quickly you will learn and absorb concepts of all types, and solve new problems. How accurate they are is almost beside the point because really they are irrelevant in most situations including arguments about topics.

How easily you could learn is not a measure of how much you know.
If two people sit down to learn a skill and one can attain expertise in 1 hour and the other needs 1.5 hours that is interesting. However if the first person never spends the hour learning the skill then the second person is absolutely the one you want around when you need that skill set.

IQ tests do not measure aptitude.  As far as I know, no one knows how to do that.  IQ tests mostly measure what you already know, or know how to do.  I last took an IQ test in high school, and I don't recall any part of it devoted to how quickly I could learn a skill; nor, from what I've read about the IQ controversies, has such an exercise become part of the test since then.

Similarly, the SAT, which was based on the Stanford-Binet IQ tests, was originally "called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then the Scholastic Assessment Test, then the SAT Reasoning Test, and now simply the SAT."  The College Board. who owns the franchise, explains that it "tests the skills you’re learning in school: reading, writing and math. Your strength in these subjects is important for success in college and throughout your life," which sounds like what used to be called an achievement test.  It is not an aptitude test, and it's not even a very good predictor of college success, though that's its usual rationale.  This commenter's confident assertions are interesting; they seem to have no basis in fact, and I wonder where he or she got them.

Another commenter, a former Mensa member, wrote:

I studied rhetoric in school and my mom was a physicist; what I learned from this background is that the way to persuade people is to provide relevant and verifiable evidence.

I think this person may be confusing "is" and "ought."  I also value relevant and verifiable evidence, but I've learned to my disappointment that many, even most people, don't.  The way to persuade people in the real world appears to be to assert, as loudly as possible, that your opponent is fat or Republican or a libtard or a funditard or an asshole.  This approach is more "natural," and much easier.  It's also more effective, from what I see.

For example, this morning a liberal / progressive friend of a friend shared this meme on Facebook:

According to Snopes, Palin didn't say this and wasn't even on Hannity on that date.  I pointed this out in a comment on the Facebook post, exulting sarcastically that liberals aren't gullible or dishonest like Republitards.  Of course the person who'd posted was displeased -- she reacted exactly like the right-wingers I know react when I point out that they've posted something bogus, asking why I was on her timeline and getting indignant about my meddling.  Mockery is a very private thing, especially when you're posting it in public on Facebook.  One hears that social media are an echo chamber, that people want to engage only with people who share their politics; to a great extent that's true, as this person showed.  And I suppose we need places where we can find others who share our opinions and prejudices, but we also need to engage with people who don't, or the social and political changes this person hopes for will never happen.

Back at Scalzi's blog, the same commenter continued:

Anti-intellectualism is hardly the worst form of prejudice, but I know people who have been hurt. Also it’s like fat-shaming; we’re not a protected class and some people think it’s okay to show disrespect.

This lament was oddly off-topic.  The Sad Puppies clearly see themselves as intelligent, and intelligence of certain kinds as important and a sign of one's value.  They may well be anti-intellectual, since they associate what they call Social Justice Warriors with a kind of pointy-headed intellectualism that is widely devalued and mocked by people who think themselves intelligent.  "And let’s be honest — we all know someone who’s pretty book-smart and pretty life-stupid," wrote another commenter, providing an example of this distinction.  I can't recall where, but not too long ago I read something where the writer distinguished between being intelligent and being an intellectual.  I think of an intellectual as someone who works with more or less abstract ideas; an engineer or other scientist may be highly intelligent but no good at dealing with ideas, and dismissive of those who can.

As for the rest of his remarks: Being in “a protected class” doesn’t mean that others can’t “show disrespect” to you, nor should it. “Protected class” is a problematic legal term which means that the law will protect you from certain specified and more-or-less carefully defined forms of discrimination. But showing disrespect is fine, and hardly anyone really believes that it isn’t — except disrespect to themselves. For example, almost everybody wants respect for their religious affiliation, and discrimination based on religion is forbidden by Civil Rights law in certain spheres. But just about everybody has some religious class — liberals, fundamentalists, “Cafeteria Christians,” etc. — they love to mock and disrespect, and they’d be outraged if anyone told them not to. And the other part of the First Amendment guarantees our right to do so, as it should.

So sure, it’s perfectly okay to show disrespect to intellectuals, or to the intelligent.  It's not necessary to define bookish kids as a "protected class" to protect them from the bullying they too often face at school.  But kids who aren't "smart" also face bullying and contempt at school, including from their teachers, and they also need help from those around them.  If anything, they are probably more vulnerable than the smart kids: I know people who've been hurt.

I've mentioned before the graduate student I once knew who told me, sweetly and almost shyly, “I don’t say this to many people, but I think of you as my intellectual equal.” I thanked him, embarrassed, because I realized that though I hadn’t thought about it before, and don’t go around making such comparisons in the first place, I didn’t consider him my intellectual equal.  But, as Scalzi noted this morning, what he said revealed more about him than it did about me.

Credit where credit's due: I stole this post's title from another of Scalzi's commenters.

By the Waters of Babylon 5, We Lay Down and Wept

A friend of mine posted this quotation from Babylon 5 on Facebook today:

"... intelligence has nothing to do with politics."

Since I don't watch TV, I don't know the original context for this line, so it might be less offensive there.  As it stands, though, it annoys me.  My first reaction was to comment, "It had damn well better start, then."

Noam Chomsky has often said, and I agree, that politics isn't rocket science: unlike physics or some other sciences, it doesn't require highly specialized thinking to talk or think about sensibly.  He says this because governing elites often try to dismiss criticism by giving the impression that their critics lack the rarefied knowledge necessary to understand why it's necessary to kill dusky foreigners or immiserate the poor while enriching the rich even more.  He also says it because many of his fans think his political opinions and writings come from the same kind of intelligence involved in his linguistics work, which he has always (rightly) denied, because ironically enough, his fans are trying to put him on a pedestal to let themselves off the moral and political hook: in order to criticize the government you have to be able to 'deconstruct' the lies our rulers tell, or some such, and only Chomsky is smart enough to do that.  Chomsky insists that ordinary people are perfectly capable of learning what they need to know about government policy and action, and make judgments about it.  So if this line was meant to imply that you don't need to be Einstein to speak up or act in the political arena, fine.

My friend just told me that the line meant something very different in the context of the program, but taken out of context and posted on Facebook it will probably be read differently by other people besides me.  (From his description, it sounds like it may have been an allusion to Mae West's quip, "Goodness had nothing to do with it!")  Standing by itself, it sounds like a popular cynicism that turns up all over the political spectrum, about politics as a dirty business, politicians as stupid and corrupt -- as if they were a separate and inferior breed of subhuman, like menial workers whom the respectable classes can safely despise.  Aside from the fact that the politicians were probably voted into office by those same cynics, their attitude easily flips over to eager naivete and a gushing cult of personality when a fresh, articulate young candidate comes along, promising a new frontier, hope and change.  This one, his devotees believe, will be different from all the others, and they don't take kindly to having their noses rubbed in reality.

I admit, it does seem that a career in politics, especially, depresses intelligence.  I've written before about the way that Barack Obama seems to have become progressively stupider the longer he's in national politics, from his prose style (which became noticeably slacker and more vacuous just between Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope) to his grasp of history and the Constitution.  But that suggests that structural factors are at work, as they are in poverty for example.  Poor people aren't poor because of their nature, but because of the structure of the society in which they live; career politicians, I submit, aren't stupid because they're just naturally dumb, but because of the systems they inhabit on the job.  That means we need to figure out what in the system produces the dumbing-down, and try to change it.  Sure, that will take intelligence, but an intelligence that as far as I can see is in everybody's reach.

We're All Dumb Here

I got email from a regular reader about this post, praising it and including a link to this post at another blog covering the same topic.  That blogger, Dave Cohen, had come up independently with some of the same criticisms I had, especially on the untestability of Gerald Crabtree's speculations, but I disagree with him on enough points that I thought I'd do an encore.

My main complaint is that while Dave Cohen quibbles with Crabtree's assumption that human beings are becoming less intelligent, he declares that "contemporary humans [are] more out of touch with Reality than they used to be", from which he draws the conclusion that we/they are "crazier than they used to be."

Technological "improvements" in mass media have created a situation in which the consensual Reality is now almost wholly defined by other humans whose conscious or unconscious agenda constantly shapes our perceptions of what's going on. In that sense, for contemporary humans, physical and psychological Reality can hardly be said to exist. Thousands of years ago, humans could perceive directly what was happening around them and to them. That's not the case anymore. Now there are layers and layers of obfuscation separating humans from direct apprehension of events. In Crabtree's terms, direct evolutionary selection pressures no longer exist. You are usually not killed off by the person right in front of you (although that still happens). Now you are screwed by a sociopathic banker on Wall Street who you don't know and who doesn't know you.

Wow.  Where do I begin to say what is wrong with this passage? The "consensual Reality" is only consensual if we give our consent; and even the most plugged-in person still has to fill his or her belly, keep his or her body warm, evacuate waste, and deal with fleshly morbidity and mortality.   Those "other humans whose conscious or unconscious agenda constantly shape our perceptions" don't necessarily, or even probably, know what they're doing, but anyhow human beings have been 'shaping our perceptions' with language for tens of thousands of years now.  One might well say that having "layers and layers of obfuscation separating from direct apprehension of events" through language and cognition is exactly what makes us different from other species, the core of human nature.  But Hurricane Sandy is a reminder of how fragile our cognitive bubble is, and we still manage to function when things break down.  The "consensual Reality" includes the measures that kept the death toll from Sandy comparatively low in the US, and that's pretty real.

It's significant how the nature of the evolutionary pressures "you" used to face have altered as the game of Telephone proceeds.  Crabtree thought that our distant ancestors had to survive in a hostile environment ("a hunter gatherer that did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter"), the Bizjournals writer wrote in terms of keeping a jump ahead of saber-toothed tigers, and Cohen selects "the person right in front of you" as an example of "direct evolutionary selection pressures [that no] longer exist," though in fact homicide not only still happens but is still a significant cause of death for human beings.  All three could be examples of selection pressure, but they're all largely secondary.  In fact we don't usually know what selection pressures lead to the extinction of a species.  (What killed off the dinosaurs is still debated, for example, as is what happened to the Neanderthals.  A lot of the explanations one hears are wishful fantasy.  The more we learn, the less we know.)

Cohen claims:

For example, polling reveals that Americans have no clue about the extent to which this society has been divided into Haves and Have-Nots. And last week, 120 million Americans voted for Democrats or Republicans, pretending all the while that it matters whether one political party or the other holds power, although the relatively low voter turnout was encouraging. Both political parties have sold them down the river over the last 30 years. Generally speaking, social realities have been nearly obliterated.

Really?  Polls reveal that Americans have no clue about the class divide?  Polls are tricky things, but his claim is debatable, to put it gently.  Por ejemplo (via):

Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.

Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents say the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy; a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.

I'll concede that our rulers and corporate media elites are out of touch with reality in many areas, but most Americans?  There's evidence pointing in the opposite direction.  The real problem is that the voting system is so set up that we have no one to vote for.  (I remember with pleasure Barbara Ehrenreich's satirical piece on the heartbreak of whiteness, when she pointed out that African-Americans had shown their superior intelligence because 90% of them had voted against Ronald Reagan.  It's hard to argue with that.)

Cohen's assertion that direct evolutionary pressures no longer exist is hogwash.  Such pressures do exist, but they affect us differently than they did a million years or even a couple of centuries ago.  Yes, human beings have changed our environment, but that began with the invention of tools and even more, with control of fire.  Fire and clothing enabled us to live in conditions we never could have survived otherwise.  We did this, not by changing our biology, but by creating an artificial environment through culture. If you want to worry about our distancing ourselves from "reality," our ability to live in frigid climates is the original sin.  Culture, which enables us to pass along what we've learned in a Lamarckian transmission of acquired traits, is the bubble that protects us from the "natural" world, but is itself a product of the natural world.

Our cultural bubble doesn't protect us from "selection pressures."  We've overcome many of the diseases that used to shorten our lives, but new ones keep turning up.  Did there used to be so many children with cancer?  But in evolutionary terms it doesn't matter: if the environment wasn't congenial for one reason or another, no species would "succeed."  When the environment becomes less congenial, any species will "fail."  We can't know in advance what will kill us off, but at present, despite climate change and its attendant disasters, with seven billion human beings on this planet we're far from extinct.  It doesn't matter whether we are becoming less intelligent: we're still here.  As I said in my previous post on Crabtree, intelligence is not a prerequisite for evolutionary success anyway.

Cohen proclaims:

Technologically clever, yes, but generally intelligent? No! The fundamental irrationality, the tendency to believe in invisible beings who watch over them, the belief in magic, the unwarranted optimism, the stubborn, false Hope which flies in the face of Reality, the tragic lack of self-knowledge—these, and a thousand other flaws have always been there.

No one knows what "generally intelligent" would mean.  Our "irrationality" hasn't kept us from flooding the planet with ourselves, so it's not entirely unreasonable to suppose that it contributed to our evolutionary success; "the tendency to believe in invisible beings" produced science as well as magic -- the two aren't as different as science cultists would have you believe.  Like many other people, Cohen fantasizes about a presumably unflawed intelligence, and while I don't mean to be complacent, no one has any idea what unflawed intelligence would be.  It's one of those invisible, imaginary beings Cohen dislikes.  Then there's the fantasy of an intelligence unemcumbered by a body of flesh, a intelligence free of irrationality, an intelligence without -- "Hope"?  Beware of wishing for "self-knowledge": you might get it.

I've long been baffled by this misanthropic dismissal of human intelligence.  The most extreme case I can think of was someone on the first computer BBS I frequented, back in the mid-1980s.  He said that he didn't think there was such a thing as human intelligence; there might, he allowed, be such a thing as real intelligence somewhere else in the universe, but not among Homo Sap, and not on this planet.  That was interesting in so many ways.  First off, since he wasn't intelligent by his own assumption, why should anyone take him seriously?  We're all dumb here -- you're dumb too, or you wouldn't be here.  Second, "intelligence" is something that most of us ascribe to human beings, and to a lesser extent to other animals.  It has no meaning except as a trait human beings have, and until we actually encounter "intelligent" extraterrestrial organisms, we won't have a basis for comparison anyway.  It's sort of like saying that there's no such thing as human beauty, except that we human beings do perceive beauty in other animals, in plants, in inorganic things (from quartz crystals to the Grand Canyon), in natural phenomena like sunsets or the night sky.  I suppose that a human being could decide that no human beings are beautiful, that only seal-point Siamese cats or the Andromeda galaxy are really beautiful; but I would reply that while it's fine for him, I (like many other people) do find many human beings beautiful.  Beauty, like intelligence or goodness, is in the eye of the beholder.  If everybody is ugly, then nobody's beautiful; if everybody's dumb, then nobody's dumb.  Or at least, some are dumber than others.

Finally, a good many people (usually male, I think) believe that computers are intelligent, and fantasize that machine intelligence will be the next evolutionary step in the ascent to Godhead.  The superintelligent computers will take care of us, or at least those of us who devoted ourselves to their service and support. Since there is no ascent, and no Godhead, this is just another one of the irrational fantasies Cohen derides.  I'm not claiming that humans have the best of all possible brains.  What I am claiming is that we don't know and can't know what a better brain than ours would be.  At this point, our sample for intelligence as Cohen conceives it is precisely one: us.  Just to say that is to see how pitifully self-aggrandizing it is.  Right now we have no grounds at all to declare what superior intelligence would look like, even if "superior" has any meaning.  But even if Crabtree were correct about the decline of human intelligence (and to repeat, he doesn't seem to have any evidence at all for that claim), it could easily be that the decline is the result of selection pressure, and the next step up the Great Chain of Being, Homo Doofus, is waiting in the evolutionary wings, waiting for his moment to come.  It's what Nature wants!

Dumb Humans Think Humans Getting Dumber

Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me referred today to a study that claims human beings aren't as intelligent as they used to be.  I'd seen it mentioned once last week, but forgot about it; after an online search I realized that it was getting a fair amount of attention, so I read some of the articles and decided it was something I wanted to write about.

First, though, go back to this unrelated (or is it?) story from last March.

Work by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and then-colleague Justin Kruger found that “incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas,” according to a report by Life’s Little Mysteries on the blog LiveScience.

“Very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.

What’s worse is that with incompetence comes the illusion of superiority.

The irony in that last sentence sails over the researchers' heads, of course.  Hold that thought as I proceed.

Back to the articles (two so far) published by Stanford geneticist Gerald Crabtree on diminishing human intelligence.  I did some looking around for more information; tried to find Crabtree's articles themselves, but though I found the journal online through the university, I couldn't find the articles themselves.  I'll keep looking.

But for now, none of the reports indicate that Crabtree presented any evidence that human intelligence is in fact decreasing. Here's a summary of his argument from the Daily Mail:

Based on calculations of the frequency with which deleterious mutations appear in the human genome and the assumption that 2,000 to 5,000 genes are required for intellectual ability, Dr Crabtree estimates that within 3,000 years, about 120 generations, we have all sustained two or more mutations harmful to our intellectual or emotional stability.

Also, recent findings from neuroscience suggest that genes involved in brain function are uniquely susceptible to mutations.

Dr Crabtree argues that the combination of less selective pressure and the large number of easily affected genes is eroding our intellectual and emotional capabilities.

There is, I admit, no evidence Crabtree could present on human intelligence in history, because we have no good measure of intelligence for humans today (or any definition of intelligence that would enable us to measure it), and even if we did, we are unable to apply those measures to people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.  So what Crabtree has here is at best a hypothesis that he can't test, nor has he any prospect of being able to test it.  (Readers who take IQ tests seriously might want to recall the Flynn Effect, a documented rise in IQ scores that has been observed since the beginning of IQ testing.  But again, there's no way to administer IQ tests to our cavedwelling forerunners.)  According to a New York Daily News story, "Crabtree estimated that within 3,000 years, humans will endure two or more mutations harmful to our intellectual and emotional stability." Now, there's a testable prediction -- all we have to do is wait three thousand years, and then Dr Crabtree can collect his Nobel Prize!

So how does Crabtree argue for a decline in human intelligence?  He uses a well-worn canard, that human beings have gone soft over the millennia because we don't have to dodge saber-tooth tigers anymore.  As this writer quotes him:

"Needless to say a hunter gatherer that did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died along with their progeny, while a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus," Crabtree explains.

Crabtree gets a point or two for mocking the people who think they're the smart ones, but that may be why this blogger -- Web Editor for the San Francisco Business Times -- isn't all that impressed.  Still, he does a good job on a much quoted passage from the paper:

"I would be willing to wager that if an average citizen of Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions," writes Crabtree (whose knowledge of Athenian history may not be quite as good as his obvious expertise in genetics -- he's chosen a date from the Dark Age in Greece, when writing was forgotten and "citizen" was a bit of a stretch, centuries before democracy, Pericles and his ilk -- ah, but I digress; read on, perhaps that's his point after all).

"We would be surprised by our time-visitor's memory, broad range of ideas and clear-sighted view of important issues. I would also guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues," he goes on.

He adds, "I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago."  So that's all right then.

I really must track down a copy of the paper, because I find it hard to believe that this drivel was published in a professional, peer-reviewed journal of genetics.  There's no science here, just speculation and fabulation: "I would be willing to wager ... We would be surprised ... I would also guess ..."  That and $2.50 will get you on the Metro.  It might fly on an Op-Ed page somewhere, but a scientist is supposed to give support for speculations, not just toss them out and treat them as fact.

It appears that Crabtree and his colleagues got their chronology mixed up in more serious ways. They place the peak of human intelligence before humans emerged from Africa, about 2 million years ago, with the long downhill slide following.  By two to six thousand years ago, most of those damaging mutations would have done their work.  There's no reason to believe that people who lived no more than six thousand years ago would be that different from people today -- but they would, on Crabtree's assumptions, be much more like us than they'd be like our shared African ancestors on the savannah.

The Daily Mail continued:

But the loss is quite slow, and judging by society's rapid pace of discovery and advancement, future technologies are bound to reveal solutions to the problem, Dr Crabtree believes.

He said: 'I think we will know each of the millions of human mutations that can compromise our intellectual function and how each of these mutations interact with each other and other processes as well as environmental influences.

'At that time, we may be able to magically correct any mutation that has occurred in all cells of any organism at any developmental stage.

'Thus, the brutish process of natural selection will be unnecessary.'

"Magically"?

There is a lot of question-begging going on here: one is that "intelligence" was a crucial factor in human survival.  It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to escape from saber-toothed tigers; many non-human species have done at least as well as we have in that area.  According to the San Francisco Business Times writer, Crabtree considers "building a house, washing the dishes and putting them away (yes, that's one of his examples), or surviving in the jungle" to be examples of high human intelligence in action.  He has an odd concept of intelligence.  Did our ancestors two million years ago wash dishes?  But again, surviving in the jungle and building shelter are not specifically human abilities.

The only criterion that really matters in natural selection is reproductive success, and human beings have done quite well at that -- too well, in many people's view.  Maybe "intelligence" isn't as vital to human evolution as we like to think.  The canard on which Crabtree builds his case, that Homo Sapiens spread all over the planet, in all kinds of hostile environments, by somehow escaping selective pressure, is an absurd misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection.  But it's a popular one. Someone posted this, linking to the Daily Mail article: "There's no longer survival of the fittest. Intelligence isn't necessary to simply survive."  Like many people this person misunderstands "survival of the fittest."  It doesn't mean fitness according to an abstract conception of superiority; it means fitness in a given environment, and has no meaning outside that environment.  In an environment where intelligence hindered reproductive success, less intelligence would be fitter and the environment would select for it.  If Crabtree were right, that would be exactly what has happened: as human beings became less intelligent, we became more successful.  (It wouldn't necessarily follow that lower intelligence was being selected for, of course.)  But whatever role intelligence played in human evolution -- and we don't really know what role it was -- intelligence of the same kind and level wasn't necessary for reproductive (and therefore evolutionary) success in most species.  This is so basic that I feel foolish spelling it out like this, but there it is.  Insofar as human activity has changed the environment, we have affected natural selection -- but we haven't bypassed it, let alone eliminated it or triumphed over it.  (For example, if our invention and use of antibiotics has led to the emergence of resistant strains of microbes, that's natural selection in action.  Scientists weren't trying to produce resistant strains; they were an unintended and unwelcome outcome of their work.)

The Independent quoted a grumpy geneticist on Crabtree's papers:

“At first sight this is a classic case of Arts Faculty science. Never mind the hypothesis, give me the data, and there aren’t any,” said Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London.

“I could just as well argue that mutations have reduced our aggression, our depression and our penis length but no journal would publish that. Why do they publish this?” Professor Jones said.

Notice that, contrary to Professor Jones, Crabtree isn't "Arts Faculty."  Like Jones, he's a geneticist, the head of a laboratory at Stanford Medical School that studies Developmental Genetics, Chemical Biology, and Chromatin Regulation. In fact it's usually faculty in the humanities who criticize this kind of biological reductionism.  As Mary Midgley wrote in Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985): 

The effect [of specialization] is to leave many of today’s physical scientists rather unpracticed in general thinking, and therefore somewhat naïve and undefended against superstitions which dress themselves up as science.  Creationism, for instance, cuts no ice at all with humanists and social scientists.  Nobody trained to think historically is in any danger of taking it seriously, least of all theologians.  It makes its academic converts  among chemists and physicists – sometimes, alarmingly enough, even among biologists [24].

But Jones is right that Crabtree doesn't seem to have any data aside from some irrelevant (at least, their relevance isn't evident) calculations of the frequency of malign but unknown mutations that might affect human intelligence.  There's nothing necessarily wrong with putting out untestable speculations, but they don't constitute confirmation or proof of anything.

So why do "they" publish this?  I wonder that myself.  But it's easy to see why it got so much attention.  The thesis is a popular one among social Darwinists, who like to think that the race has gone soft due to luxurious living, and the Stupid are inheriting the earth, instead of their own superior selves. Which takes me back to the quotation above: With incompetence comes the illusion of superiority.

Traditional Intelligence Researchers Strike Back

Glenn Greenwald recently linked to a post by Andrew Sullivan lamenting liberals' lack of love for President Obama (hey, you "conservatives" can have him, Andy!). After I'd looked it over I noticed that Sullivan had written the day before about "The Study of Intelligence." I knew he'd had some stupid things to say about that in the past, so I decided to bring myself up to date.

Sure enough: The study of intelligence has, according to Sullivan, "been strangled by p.c. egalitarianism." Anyone who's still using "politically correct" seriously is a fool; in his boot-licking piece on Obama, Sullivan complained "If I hear one more gripe about single payer from someone in their fifties with a ponytail, I'll scream." Well, if I hear one more gripe about "p.c." from a balding right-winger with a goatee ...

Sullivan went on: "The reason is the resilience of racial differences in IQ in the data, perhaps most definitively proven by UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen", and quoted the article he'd linked on the subject:

"Jensen is still greatly respected by many traditional intelligence researchers," Garlick says. "By 'traditional intelligence researchers,' I mean researchers who still value IQ and continue to do studies that evaluate the effectiveness of IQ in predicting outcomes, or studies that examine possible mechanisms that may cause differences in IQ. However, due to the unpopularity of Jensen’s findings, this group of researchers is now very small.

Well, no, the reason isn't "the resilience of racial differences in IQ in the data", it's doubts about the validity of IQ as a concept. (A good place to start informing yourself on this would be Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.) The writer of the Alternet article complains, "Somewhere along the way, the very idea of intelligence became politicized." Nonsense. The very idea of intelligence was politicized all along (and Sullivan hopes to continue the grand tradition), but especially since the original Binet intelligence tests were modified for use in the US by researchers at Stanford. "Its legitimacy as a field of study, as a measurable quality -- on par with height, eyesight and hand-and-eye coordination -- and as a concept came under fire." Well, there's your problem right there: you can't assume that intelligence is a trait like height, you have to prove it, and attempts to prove it have failed. Significantly, neither Sullivan nor the Alternet article even mentions The Bell Curve, a reminder that biological-determinist claims about intelligence and IQ could still get a rapturous reception in the US as late as 1994. Yet again, Andrew Sullivan shows that not knowing what he's talking about never inhibits him from taking a firm stand.

"The right response to unsettling data is to probe, experiment and attempt to disprove them - not to run away in racial panic. But the deeper problem is that the racial aspects of IQ have prevented non-racial research into intelligence, and how best to encourage, study and understand it," Sullivan concluded. Given the deranged lies Sullivan likes to tell about Noam Chomsky, I can't resist quoting what Chomsky wrote on this very subject forty-odd years ago:

In fact, it seems that the question of the relation, if any, between race and intelligence has little scientific importance (as it has no social importance, except under the assumptions of a racist society). A possible correlation between mean IQ and skin color is of no greater scientific interest than a correlation between any two other arbitrarily selected traits, say, mean height and color of eyes. The empirical results, whatever they might be, appear to have little bearing on any issue of scientific significance. In the present state of scientific understanding, there would appear to be little scientific interest in the discovery that one partly heritable trait correlates (or not) with another partly heritable trait. Such questions might be interesting if the results had some bearing, say, on some psychological theory, or on hypotheses about the physiological mechanisms involved, but this is not the case. Therefore the investigation seems of quite limited scientific interest, and the zeal and intensity with which some pursue or welcome it cannot reasonably be attributed to a dispassionate desire to advance science. It would, of course, be foolish to claim, in response, that “society should not be left in ignorance.” Society is happily “in ignorance” of insignificant matters of all sorts. And with the best of will, it is difficult to avoid questioning the good faith of those who deplore the alleged “anti-intellectualism” of the critics of scientifically trivial and socially malicious investigations. On the contrary, the investigator of race and intelligence might do well to explain the intellectual significance of the topic he is studying, and thus enlighten us as to the moral dilemma he perceives. If he perceives none, the conclusion is obvious, with no further discussion.

... The question of heritability of IQ might conceivably have some social importance, say, with regard to educational practice. However, even this seems dubious, and one would like to see an argument. It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps largely so. Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society? [from For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973, p. 361-362]

More or less Sullivan's position, you can see, only better informed and more intelligent. I also want to quote this passage from the same essay:

Similarly, imagine a psychologist in Hitler's Germany who thought he could show that Jews had a genetically determined tendency towards usury (like squirrels bred to collect too many nuts) or a drive towards antisocial conspiracy and domination, and so on. If he were criticized for even undertaking these studies, could he merely respond that “a neutral commentator ... would have to say that the case is simply not settled” and that the “fundamental issue” is “whether inquiry shall (again) be shut off because someone thinks society is best left in ignorance”? I think not. Rather, I think that such a response would have been met with justifiable contempt. At best, he could claim that he is faced with a conflict of values. On the one hand, there is the alleged scientific importance of determining whether in fact Jews have a genetically determined tendency towards usury and domination (an empirical question, no doubt). On the other, there is the likelihood that even opening this question and regarding it as a subject for scientific inquiry would provide ammunition for Goebbels and Rosenberg and their henchmen. Were this hypothetical psychologist to disregard the likely social consequences of his research (or even his undertaking of research) under existing social conditions, he would fully deserve the contempt of decent people. Of course, scientific curiosity should be encouraged (though fallacious argument and investigation of silly questions should not), but it is not an absolute value [360].

One major problem with Sullivan's claim is that it was researchers like Jensen, who "politicized" the study of intelligence by tying it explicitly to race. (I remember Sullivan himself speculating, in a piece for the New York Times Book Review, that East Asians might have higher IQs than whites, based on their test scores and school performance in the US. He had no evidence for the notion, he just liked the idea for some reason.) In a racist society like this one, such claims can never be innocent. As the Alternet article admits, there has been plenty of other research on intelligence in recent decades; I can only conclude that Sullivan doesn't like it because it's not politicized enough to suit him.

Sullivan also assumes that racial differences in IQ can be dealt with only by "disproving" them. As Chomsky indicates, though, they're not of any scientific importance, and they can only have political importance to racists. Political equality isn't tied to IQ scores or even a hypothetical better measure of intelligence. So, why is Sullivan so obsessed with the question?

From there I somehow found myself reading Michael Ruse's blog / column at the Chronicle of Higher Education. (You'll remember Professor Ruse as the man who believes that rape means "fucking the female if [a man] gets the chance," without asking another male's permission.) In a post on Darwin, Ruse wrote:

About thirty years ago, there was a huge debate among evolutionists about the applicability of the theory to social behavior, particularly to human social behavior. Arrayed on one side were a number of scientists, including our own David Barash. They argued that using Darwinian Theory casts considerable light on human behavior and society. Arrayed on the other side were many other scientists, including the late Stephen Jay Gould. They argued that Darwinian Theory does nothing but uphold the status quo – capitalist, racist, sexist. At least [Robert J. Richards] and I like each other and respect each other. Barash versus Gould put one a bit in mind of American politics. And I am not sure that ultimately they were (or would be now) any closer to settling their differences.

Ruse's characterization of Stephen Jay Gould is false; considering that Ruse lived through the period he refers to and participated in those debates, I don't think it's going too far to call it a lie. (Ruse and Gould also participated as expert witnesses for evolutionary theory against Creationism on at least one occasion.) The two positions Ruse sketches so casually aren't even really opposites. Gould and those unnamed "many other scientists" argued that their contemporaries who tried to apply Darwinian Theory to human behavior and society were misrepresenting Darwin, and doing bad science. I haven't read much of Barash's work, but Gould was a very civil debater, not like "American politics" at all. It was some of his adversaries, like Richard Dawkins, who acted like the Tea Party Movement. The same is true of Gould's colleague and ally, Richard C. Lewontin, as you can see by reading his articles from The New York Review of Books and the ensuing exchanges with his critics, collected in It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York Review Books, 2001); he concentrated on scientific questions while his opponents, like Stephen Pinker, simply red-baited him.

American Atheists have re-entered the lists for this year's War on Christmas season, with a series of billboards (h/t to JV). "37 Million Americans Know MYTHS When They See Them," reads one, with pictures of Poseidon, Jesus, Santa Claus, and Satan. Sigh. I'm a bit more careful in my use of words like "myth," but leave that aside for now. The point I want to make now is that scientists and secularists keep coming up with myths of their own, like Ruse's about the debates over evolution and social behavior. It's a myth in the strict sense: a story meant to express certain truths (or truthinesses) about a society, thereby promoting solidarity within the group. In the broader, less careful sense, it's a myth in that it's clearly and simply false. Sullivan is religious, of course, but his account of the study of intelligence, which appeals to science, is also a myth in both of those senses.