A few weeks ago I reread large portions of A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. There were several chapters near the end which focused a great deal on the men that Galton mentored; from his protege Karl Pearson to the eventual nemesis of the Galtonian tradition in biology, William Bateson. In particular, I was struck by the social and scientific dynamics of the first 10 years of the 20th century, when Mendelism broke onto the scene and slowly eroded the primacy of biometrical theories of inheritance. A deeper exploration of the topic can be found in Every ratio 3:1!!!, a review of Will Provine's The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. The short of it is that Bateson was right, Pearson was wrong.
The inevitable outcome was clear soon enough, Pearson and Walter Weldon had the advantage in 1900, as they were in many ways the heirs of the Darwinian tradition during a period of relative eclipse. But over the decade acolyte after acolyte of the biometrical school defected to the Mendelian camp. It was an acrimonious and personal battle, and to a large extent it seems that ego got in the way of clear thinking as the pieces necessary for the reconciliation of biometry and Mendelism were already there. For some reason it took R. A. Fisher in 1918 to finish the job, but by then Pearson's biological ideas were moribund, and perhaps fittingly he was superseded by Fisher as the eminent statistical scientist of the day (see R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist).
Nevertheless, Pearson was a genius. He was the one who formalized many of Galton's intuitive statistical ideas, and he is arguably the father of mathematical statistics. His interests were broad and wide ranging, from mathematics to German philosophy and literature, and Left politics (he was a socialist). Though William Bateson was certainly a competent scientist he was mathematically inept, and this posed serious problems in terms of his higher education. He had to make recourse to an extended period of special tutoring so as to pass the math requirements at university. From what I understand as it was he barely made the grade. From what I have read about these two individuals I think it is plausible that they were about 2 standard deviations apart in intelligence. Pearson likely had an IQ of no lower than 140, and possibly as high as 160, while I would guess that Bateson was in in the 115 to 130 range. Bateson was smart, but it is clear from the biographical data that he was weak when it came to analysis and abstraction. In contrast, Pearson was unquestionably a master at any academic endeavor at which he tried his hand.
And yet Pearson was wrong and Bateson was right. In A Life of Sir Francis Galton the author notes that to Bateson Pearson's mathematical models were absolutely impenetrable. But nevertheless he was confident enough to assert that Pearson was wrong; he had the facts, and the facts suggested to him that Pearson was wrong. If Pearson's formal theoretical structure was coherent it was still based on false premises. I won't attempt to recapitulate Pearson's model of heredity; it's confusing, perhaps I'm stupid, and it's wrong anyhow. Pearson's derivations might have been brilliant, but they were a house of cards, and Bateson saw through it because he had grasped reality by the tail and diagnosed the joints around which nature was carved. The elucidation of the structure of DNA ultimately validated in a biophysical sense the truths of Mendelism: inheritance as a discrete and digital process.
I'm not here claiming that William Bateson had a "sixth sense" about the nature of reality which compensated for his lack of analytic power vis-a-vis Karl Pearson. Bateson was rather late to the game when it came to accepting that chromosomes were essential in mediating the Mendelian process. Perhaps when it came to his instincts in regards to Mendelism he was just lucky, though his greater familiarity with the empirical data in comparison to Pearson is likely to have been very important. Pearson was a theoretician, Bateson was an experimentalist and observationist. As I note above, the biometricians probably slowed the advance of evolutionary biology by several years, perhaps a decade, due to their use of political capital in appointments and funding to resist the rising tide of Mendelism. The emergence of a mathematically fluent partisan of Mendelism in R. A. Fisher sealed the deal because his work tied all the lose ends in terms of showing how a large number of genes could easily produce the continuous traits which were the bread & butter of the biometricians. But I think this episode is illustrative of a reality in regards to natural science: it's a noisy process fraught with human error and egotism, but in the end Nature renders the final verdict. I've lingered on Pearson's cognitive brilliance because it seems rather clear that the mathematical wizardy he employed intimidated many empirical biologists, including William Bateson. The emperor had no clothes, and it took years to come to an agreement as to that fact.
To some it can be likened to the reaction of biologists and geologists to the pronouncements of Lord Kelvin that their inferences about the age of the earth had to be wrong because of the nature of physics. Kelvin's brilliance was undeniable, and the prestige of physics was based on the proven power of its method, but in the end he was wrong, and the biologists and geologists were right.
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Of course Fisher beat them both, and was smarter than both, so smarts win after all!
It's a modern day scientific parable.
But Kelvin had a point, which was that known mechanisms couldn't produce solar energy over the hundreds of millions of years or longer posited by paleontologists. Neither knew it, but the contradiction pointed to atomic energy.
Random thoughts on this:
1. Smart people often fall in love with their own intelligence and often use it to rationalize their own pet theories. Smart women are especially bad for this, but it affects everyone with any brainpower.
2. Perhaps being smart but not that smart tends to give one a sense of humility.
3. I tend to think that returns on intelligence tend to rapidly diminish past an IQ of 130 and that an IQ over 140 is essentilly useless for anything that doesn't involve heavy duty mathmatics.
obvious though: thursday, you're IQ is in the 130-140 interval i assume? ;-)
The average Harvard undergrad is probably 140 or 145, and they're the ones who become arts and humanities professors. IQ isn't math smarts; it's sorting through a mess and drawing out a pattern, then comparing patterns you've drawn out from different messes: putting it all together, seeing the big picture, etc.
I don't doubt that "big idea" people in the humanities are 140 and up. Again, that's just what you'd find among Harvard undergrads -- not giants by any means, 6'6 for American males. But definitely head and shoulders above the average person.
Actually, I'd disagree, Thursday. There is a place for those in the humanities with superhuge brains, namely in translation work. I know a dude who basically taught himself Turfanese from original texts, philological work and god knows what sort of cognitive fire. This is on top of knowing Chinese, Classical Chinese, Japanese, Classical Japanese, Farsi, French and German. Considering it took me two years for low-level fluency in Spanish and four years for low-level fluency in Japanese, I figure it takes stratospheric IQ to hit the high notes in languages.
Curiously, as I published a few years ago, in the last third of his otherwise well-known paper Mendel showed how his theory explained continuous variation. There was thus no need for the biometrical war.
Considering it took me two years for low-level fluency in Spanish and four years for low-level fluency in Japanese, I figure it takes stratospheric IQ to hit the high notes in languages.
i bet you this sort of child-like ability to learn language is an orthogonal trait or talent. i speak as someone who is very bad at learning languages, probably around or below the population norm.
Razib:
I was basing my comments on:
1. Estimates of Darwin's IQ at only about 135
2. Literary geniuses that seem comparatively dumb, like Victor Hugo, Balzac, Tennyson, Whitman, Yeats.
3. Charles Murray's contention that you only need about an IQ of 120 to do strong work in the humanities.
See here. I think IQ helps and maybe "essentially useless" is a bit strong, but I do think that in the humanities there really are a diminishing returns on IQ past a certain point.
Though, yes, my IQ as best I can tell from converted test scores and a couple online IQ tests is just under 140, so I may indeed be biased.;)
Agnostic:
Why this fixation on Harvard grads in the humanities? Care to name names for people who have made real contributions, not just become "names." My impression, and it is just an impression, is that Harvard grads aren't really much better at producing great work than people from more run of the mill universities. As Harvard and other places like it have become place where only high IQ people enter, I think we will continue to see more really good work from talented people who couldn't get into the best schools.
A couple examples. One of the best newer poets out there, Mark Doty, went to Drake University in Kentucky. Another, Thylias Moss, went to Syracuse and didn't finish.
Also, how recent is that average number. Have we had time to see how productive those relatively recent graduates have done. Again I refer to my Murray post where he points out that going to an Ivy grad program used to only require an IQ of about 120 to 125.
Spike:
Literary translation is something I know a fair bit about and those guys don't seem all that smart to me. IQ may indeed be useful in decifering languages from scratch.
Again I discuss translation in the above post.
Thursday: An ability for analysis and abstract thinking is just as important in politics and history as it is in math. That ability to make connections that others can't see shows its usefulness in many aspects of life.
http://manwhoisthursday.blogspot.com/2007/04/iq-and-literature.html
An ability for analysis and abstract thinking is just as important in politics and history as it is in math.
The best political writer out there right now seems to me Steve Sailer, and I don't think he has a 150 IQ. He's just curious, data oriented, and honest. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy too, but probably not up at the level of our Harvard educated poli-sci scholars.
Again, it's not that higher IQ isn't helpful with everything, it's just that there are diminishing returns.
thursday and interlocutors, while not make recourse to the gss. filter for profession, major, or something, and check the dependence of SEI or INCOME on the variable WORDSUM.
IQ and IQ-tests are mostly a waste of time anyway. They measure things by a very strict definition of 'intelligence' and are useless in almost any meaningful context.
Razib:
I think we're talking about high level intellectual achievement in the sciences and humanities. I'm not sure how the gss data on income would help.
This stuff is hard to test, though we will probably get there eventually. I cheerfully concede that my comments are mere informed speculation, which I hope will be useful in formulating testable hypotheses for future researchers.
Oh I was using Harvard figuratively, like people in that tier of the education system. Most bio blurbs I read of "big thinkers" in the humanities include going to such a school. Jacques Barzun went to Columbia twice, Samuel Huntington went to Yale and Harvard... there's probably a good objective list out there that I could look through.
I don't have the link handy but recently heard you can graduate from yale with iq in the low 40s.
Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses the evidence for evolution and how Kelvin got it wrong here.
Lab Rat is quite right, IQ is an entirely unhelpful measure of anything other than the ability to do an IQ test. I suggest reading Peter Medawar's essays on the subject for some of the best debunkings of the subject I've ever encountered.
Surely "stupid" and "smart" are inadequate terms. Who made the better contibution to science? Pearson obstructed the development of the discipline so there is nothing admirable about his stance. If anything, it teaches us to reject any arrogance when dealing with other scientists.
The physicist Michael Faraday had very poor mathematical intuition, yet had the insight to conceive the idea of an electric "field", a keystone in throretical physics up to the present day.
Surely "stupid" and "smart" are inadequate terms. Who made the better contibution to science? Pearson obstructed the development of the discipline so there is nothing admirable about his stance. If anything, it teaches us to reject any arrogance when dealing with other scientists.
The physicist Michael Faraday had very poor mathematical intuition, yet had the insight to conceive the idea of an electric "field", a keystone in throretical physics up to the present day.