Cognitive Science

The Problem With Innate Differences

drorzel — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 14:48:00 +0000

The Problem With Innate Differences

In yesterday's post about the experience of science, I mentioned that I had both a specific complaint about the article by Alexandra Jellicoe (which I explained in the post) and a general complaint about the class in which the article falls. I want to attempt to explain the latter problem, partly because I think it will be useful, but mostly because it's stuck in my head, and I need to at least type out the explanation before I can move on to other things.

The article in question doesn't contain all of the elements I'll mention below, but I think it clearly falls into a class of articles that I find troublesome. A slightly snarky summary of the class would be: "Women are innately more cooperative and intuitive than men, and how dare you suggest they're bad at math!" The problem with these articles is that they're trying to walk a difficult line, and they're often not clear about what it is that they're doing, to bad effect.

The Jellicoe article that started me thinking about this is only explicitly making one claim: that women and men have different innate tendencies with respect to how they work. This is essentially a scientific claim, an assertion that research shows that men and women have different neural structure, and that the observed difference in approaches to problem solving is innate to the sexes, and not the product of socialization.

There's a second, implicit, claim in the article, though, which is that this is the only relevant difference when it comes to science. If, as the article asserts, the real problem women in science face is that the structure goes against the innate operations of their brains, that implies a belief that there is no sex-specific difference in aptitude for science (whatever that might mean-- numerical abilities, spatial skills, one or more of the many other things that have been suggested over the years).

This is the problem area, though. Because if you're going to claim that science is inherently sexist because of the innate structure of women's brains, that means you have to at least allow the possibility of other sex-specific differences. Which necessarily means allowing the possibility of some factor that makes women less inclined to pursue science, or less well suited to a career in science. If brain structure and not socialization is responsible for the different ways men and women behave, then there's a chance that there's some other difference in brain structure that makes women less likely to become scientists even when conditions are less oppressive than the description I took issue with yesterday.

So, really, what articles of this type are trying to do involves two scientific claims: first, that research supports the idea that men and women are best suited to different styles of interaction; and second, that research does not support the idea that men and women differ significantly in their general aptitude for science (again, whatever that may mean). I think it's perfectly legitimate to make an argument along these lines. It would not be without controversy, but what little I know of the research in these areas suggests it's possible to do.

The problem is, these are often not treated as two scientific claims, but rather one scientific claim and one that is more in the line of a moral principle. That is, the suggestion that women are innately different than men in the way that they organize their activities and work with others is a scientific matter, and a reasonable topic of discussion and research, while the claim that women might have less aptitude for science than men in some vaguely defined but innate way is completely outrageous, and making that suggestion is the kind of thing that should cost people their jobs.

I hasten to add (though it probably won't do any good) that Jellicoe's article doesn't explicitly do both of these things, and I am not familiar enough with her writing to know whether she does so elsewhere. The article just started me thinking about the subject, and led to the realization of why I find arguments from innate differences so dodgy, which is that the scientific version of the first claim does not fit comfortably with the moral version of the second.

If you're going to assert that the structure of science and its institutions is inherently biased against women due to innate differences in brain structure or chemistry or whatever, you have to also allow the possibility that innate differences make women less inclined to be scientists for some other reason. Trying to treat one of these claims as a legitimate argument backed by research while the other is a graven-in-stone moral principle doesn't work, and gives the impression that it's only acceptable to discuss innate differences between the sexes when those innate differences are flattering to women. Which is a ridiculous way to have a discussion, and leads lots of people to not wanting to discuss the subject at all.

(In a way, this is sort of the mirror image of my reaction to discussions of innate differences in IQ-- in that case, they're so often used as cover for creepy racism that any mention of IQ makes me take a step back. In this case, the claim is positive, rather than negative, but it's the same sort of "this won't end well" indicator.)

My personal, almost entirely anecdote-based, opinion is that if there are any innate differences in either cognitive structure or scientific aptitude, they're vastly smaller than the individual variation in those properties. The vast majority of the observed difference between men and women strikes me as social, not biological in origin. This is, however, not a claim that I am in a good position to back up with piles of research, my study of the subject being limited to the occasional unavoidable Internet discussion.

I may, however, be willing to illustrate the claim with adorable toddler pictures. So, you know, there's that to look forward to.

drorzel Sun, 10/24/2010 - 10:48

Tags

Academia

Brain & Behavior

Politics

Psychology

This post nicely spells out issues that I hadn't clearly recognized yet. Thanks.

The research clearly shows that innate differences in maths ability are completely swamped by discrimination, when it comes to the leaky pipeline. Women do just as well as men now at the lower levels - after only 30 or so years of trying. But at every level, the FRACTION of women in STEM fields drops. Especially at the postdoc level. Especially when there aren't enough jobs for Big Buddy's golden boys.

I don't think you have grasped the full implications of the moral argument.

Suppose we have a significant societal activity X (such as science).

Suppose society has two large populations A and B (such as men and women) with some scientifically proven difference in the tendencies as to how they work.

Now on to the moral claim. You are still trying to take the moral claim as a claim that general aptitude of A and B at activity X are equal, and understanding that claim as an empirical statement about the world.

Moral claims, however, are not empirical statements about the world. They are tautological, definitional statements about the world we wish to have.

What the moral claim is saying is that if there is something about X which favors A over B (or vice versa), then there is something fundamentally immoral about the way X is practiced. It does not matter what this something is. This something could be a scientifically proven innate difference.

It could be that this scientifically proven innate difference is fundamentally important to the practice of X, in which case we have to balance the fundamental immorality of practicing X with the fundamental immorality of not practicing X or not practicing X optimally. (Presumably, the practice of X produces some important benefits for society, so not doing X as well as possible has a moral dimension.)

First, between Alexander Woo, Alexander Jellicoe, and me, there are a lot of Alex's here! :)

Second, even if we're going to ponder genetic factors in gender disparities, we can run into problems even if we don't consider theories of women being (on average) less likely to possess some particular talent due to genes. (I hasten to add that there is zero evidence that would justify pondering such a theory.) We could posit that women are in fact as good or better at everything, but because of difference in how they think (on average) they are especially good at some particular activity. If so, then the theory of comparative advantage would suggest that women should focus on that, and if that activity is not science, well, there you go, men get to have science to themselves.

Now, I'm not endorsing that theory. Far from it. There is abundant evidence of sexism driving away talented women. There is little or no evidence of inherent differences that would favor women, and zero evidence of inherent differences that would disadvantage women. When Jellicoe starts postulating that women just think differently, she isn't just granting legitimacy to theories that Larry Summers and his ilk would like to ponder. She's also discounting the effects of the very real sexism that women encounter, something that has zero to do with their genes and everything to do with the unethical behavior of many men.

So, enough of the essentialist/genetic arguments.

Some of us women in science have been uncomfortable with this sort of "difference feminism" for a long time, for this very reason.

Mary,

The problem with arguing against "difference feminism" is that it's really hard to argue against a theory that is on the surface entirely flattering. You either have to be all "Nuh-uh! Women are NOT all that great at communication and collaboration and creative thinking!" or argue what I did in my comment, which comes dangerously close to "Well, if you really want to go there, then let's have at it!"

Either argument is hard for a decent person to pull off. It can be done with some relative anonymity (although a few people here know who I am, there's no shortage of Alex's in science) and the option to revise before hitting "submit". Both of those advantages are present online. But sitting in a workshop or meeting, in person, well, not so much.

See "The Blank Slate" by Stephen Pinker about how a moral imperative about how our brains *must* work shouted down research about how they really worked for a long time. The idea was that there was no human nature at all, that it was all nurture, and thus anything bad we did was because society was so evil. The notion of nature, so the argument went, was just a horrible conservative plot to instil social darwinism or eugenics or some such. Unfortunately for the moral argument, the reality was that there is such a thing as human nature, and how you turn out is a product not just of nature, not just of nurture, but of some complicated mix of both. (I think psychologists all pretty much agree on this right now, although I also think they still get into big arguments about whether its 45%/55% or 55%/45%....)

The danger of tying a moral principle (i.e. nondiscrimination) to a moral assertion about the nature of something in reality (i.e. that women and men possess exactly the same aptitude for "math", whatever that actually means) is twofold. First, your adherence to your moral principle can blind you to research that contradicts it. Second, if research does contradict it, it undermines the basis for which you've argued for your moral principle. The moral principle of nondiscrimination stands on its own, even without the need to assert that there is no intrinsic difference between how men and women think, I believe. And, as somebody else noted, if there are any differences, the effect of those differences is at the moment completely overwhelmed by the systematic sexism that has existed and continues to exist.

Yes, Rob has nicely summed it up. I think we all agree that the post in question is very icky, but our host is often negligent in noting the proven discrimination that exists.

Unfortunately for the moral argument, the reality was that there is such a thing as human nature, and how you turn out is a product not just of nature, not just of nurture, but of some complicated mix of both. (I think psychologists all pretty much agree on this right now, although I also think they still get into big arguments about whether its 45%/55% or 55%/45%....)

This might be a problem for moral arguments that assume equality of all individuals. If nature imposes differences between individuals, well, then it does.

However, it is not automatically a problem for moral arguments that propose statistical equality between groups. It may be that not all individuals are good at math, and some of those individual differences are derived from nature rather than nurture. However, the natural components of math ability could still be evenly distributed among groups, so that while no 2 individuals are guaranteed to have the same mathematical ability, the number of mathematically talented men and women (or whatever other groups you wish to compare) will still be equal.

Hello Chad

Many thanks for adding to this debate. Your views are most interesting.

I am keen to reply but currently waylaid by work. I hope to have some time to post something this evening!

Very best
Alex

I am completely with Chad on that any innate differences are much smaller than the variations within the respective groups. Very often when I read this type of discussions and the original articles that provoke them I suspect that the generalizations that authors make about "the female way of thinking" and various other fuzzily defined concepts are very biased by how that specific author perceives her own thinking and rationalizes her own experiences with hard science. And when said author is a social scientist/humanitarian, as most of them are, that is a strong bias indeed. I am a female physics researcher and I find that I think much more like my colleagues of either sex than any of the humanities-minded people I met. I am a bit worried about what it means in terms of education majors figuring out the best way to teach kids science...

I'm down with that. I also only have personal experience to draw on, but I have seen enough "intuitive" men and "left brain analytical" women to know that it isn't the y-chromosome causing these traits. There are brutal, politicking, agressive women as well as men. And there are some guys who are gentle and always show respect even in heated debate. So I am not seeing the "women are from Venus, men are from Mars" thing. Too many Venusian men and Martian women out there for me to buy that.

Also, separating out the issues being raised is necessary.

Institionalized sexism needs to be confronted, and rooted out wherever possible. I have seen no disagreement on that principle here.

But I agree that different styles of working are far more individual-centered than due to any blanket principle that, socially and psychologically, men are one way and women are another.

And the debate wades into muddy water when the issues are all confused and people make big unprovable assertions.

This American phenomenon with girls and science is curious and weirdly alien to me. Here in Finland, the case of women and science is completely opposite. Even in my line of study of molecular biology, the majority of students are women. And everybody here says that "girls are way better at math than boys", and that "boys need more attention to do well in school" and so on. It's just so... Weird to think that having too few women in science is a problem somewhere. In other places than saudi-arabia, obviously.

apparently Jelllicoe has been reading too much of Luce Irigaray's rants
to believe that science is not much more than an exercise in phallocentric
discourse hence turning women off.

However, I think there's milage in the assertion that E=mc2 is a "sexed
equation" because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that
are vitally necessary to us"; and in the assertion that fluid mechanics is
unfairly neglected because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to
"masculine" rigid mechanics.

A blog on this will be highly illuminating !

I think another screening of

I am certainly not fully up on the research on the difference sex plays in cognitive abilities, but what I see is that asking that question is often considered to be taboo, which I find sad. There is certainly good reason to suspect that there would be some difference, considering that we know how different the average body chemistry between men and women is, and how chemistry in the brain has such a strong effect on people. (We also know of such major variations even within the sexes about body chemistry...) I think, without strong evidence, the default position would be that differences between the sexes exist, on average, although what those differences are to me seems completely unknown. The important question in my mind isn't whether differences exist (I think its interesting, but ultimately unimportant in its answer), but whether or not we treat the sexes differently because of it.

And, the answer is no, we shouldn't treat the sexes any different, because, as Chad says, the variation between the sexes seems so much larger than any differences in the averages. Not everyone becomes scientists, and the people who do are generally really good at whatever cognitive functioning is required by that branch of science. They are at the tail of the bell curve so to speak already, so differences in the averages are really irrelevant and should never play any difference in opportunities available for one sex over the other.

Ahh ... another desperate "scienceblogs" topic revisiting a pedantic, offensive question everyone but the author internally resolved in 500 B.C.

Golf Clap for 'scienceblogs.'

What's next, 'innate differences' between white and black male scientists?

"The problem with arguing against "difference feminism" is that it's really hard to argue against a theory that is on the surface entirely flattering."

I think a good policy is to define "sexist" as "unjustifiably biased towards one sex or the other", and then avoid making or entertaining sexist statements. If it has been shown that women develop social skills more easily than men (or something like that,) that claim is not sexist - it's fact, and it shouldn't be over-stated (ie. used to support sexist ways of thought) or understated (ie. ignored because it superficially resembles a sexist idea.)

Apparently positive stereotypes are still unfair and can still be harmful - it's just because they're stereotypes. Men are supposed to be "strong" - this sounds nice, but it really means that men will be socially punished for being emotional, something which I, for one, like to do some times. Men are supposed to be good at things like math, engineering, and building because they're "logical" and "methodic" - this sounds nice, but men who choose to go into theatre or dance are ridiculed because of this apparently positive stereotype. There are many such oppressive, apparently positive (and often scientifically unfounded) ideas about both femininity and masculinity, and few of them are worth seriously entertaining. The bottom line is that each person is complex, and it's impossible to categorized people in a substantial way based on their gender or sex. To deny this by collapsing the world into dichotomies (regardless of whether they sound flattering) will hurt any project we could undertake to try to minimize sexist, because it would base those projects on sexism.

We be symbolic

razib — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:25:18 +0000

We be symbolic

The Evolution Of Symbolic Language by Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough. Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain is a book I liked a great deal, though in hindsight I don't think I had the background to appreciate it in any depth (nor do I now).

razib Wed, 03/17/2010 - 23:25

Tags

Cognitive Science

Language

Terrence Deacon

Symbolic Species sounds like an interesting book worth checking out. However if you felt you didn't have the necessary background to really appreciate it, I'd be concerned about my own ability to do so. Exactly what background knowledge do you think would be useful in reading it?

Also, in my googling I found that John Hawks did a blog post about Deacon's ideas a few years ago; I found it useful as a quick summary. Deacon's upcoming book Mind from Matter also sounds interesting based on the title, but I couldn't find any real information about it online, at least in a quick search.

Deacon is what we should be talking about when we talk about evolutionary psychology.

Re Terry Deacon (et al), see:

http://onthehuman.org/2010/02/on-the-human-rethinking-the-natural-selec…

Thanks to Charles Wolverton for the "On the Human" reference, which seems to be the longer original from which the NPR article was adapted, with a bit more detail. Another article I found interesting was an interview with Deacon that touches on a number of different topics around the evolution of language, including the differences between speech and writing in terms of their support in the brain.

Also, re my comment above on the paucity of information on Deacon's upcoming book Mind from Matter: That's apparently a new title. Deacon was previously planning to call the book Homunculus, which reminded me of Wallace Shawn's scene in Woody Allen's Manhattan. Thank goodness he changed his mind.

You should also check out the comments section of the "On the Human" reference provided by Charles Wolverton. It contains some fascinating insights from some of the leading thinkers in language evolution and associated disciplines, including: Mark Turner, Derek Bickerton, Salikoko Mufwene, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and many others.

Having only had a cursory glance at the comments (some of which almost match the length of the initial article) I think Deacon's response aptly sums up the difficulties surrounding language evolution: "To approach this complex mystery with the respect it deserves, however, we must be prepared to give up on simple one trick accounts, innate mentalese, miraculous mutations, increase in general intelligence, and so forth, and embrace its complexity as a semiotic-biological-epigenetic-social phenomenon whose structural features reflect the convergent co-evolutionary interactions of all these levels of causal process."

dev -

That interview was especially useful for my purposes. Thanks a bunch.

Anthropology as a dog side-effect skill

razib — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:36:30 +0000

Anthropology as a dog side-effect skill

Social Cognition in Dogs, or How did Fido get so smart?. This you know:

Domesticated dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to understand human communicative gestures. If you point to something the dog zeroes in on the object or location you're pointing to (whether it's a toy, or food, or to get his in-need-of-a-bath butt off your damn bed and back onto his damn bed). Put another way, if your attention is on something, or if your attention is directed to somewhere, dogs seem to be able to turn their attention onto that thing or location as well.

Amazingly, dogs seem to be better at this than primates (including our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees) and better than their nearest cousins, wild wolves.

But there are two explanations for how/why dogs are better than primates at this task:

And so it was that biological anthropologist Brian Hare, director of the of Duke University Canine Cognition Center wondered: did dogs get so smart because of direct selection for this ability during the domestication of dogs, or did this apparent intelligence evolve, in a sense, by accident, because of selection against fear and aggression?

I didn't even consider that it would be anything except for direct selection. In any case, read the whole post for a run-down of the paper, but here's the blogger's conclusion:

So, these results appear to support the correlated by-product hypothesis, and not the selection for communication hypothesis. It suggests that the evolution of social cognitive abilities in domesticated dogs mirrors that process observed in the experimentally domesticated silver foxes, and that it was a by-product of selection against fear and aggression. To really really get at this question, a study of wolves should be conducted as well.
More broadly, the social intelligence hypothesis (which is another way of framing the selection for communication hypothesis) asserts that primate (and human) intelligence was driven by the need to predict and manipulate the behavior of others, by reading subtle cues in their behavior. These findings suggest that human intelligence may have evolved, instead, as a by-product of selection against fear of and aggression towards others.

razib Thu, 02/25/2010 - 10:36

Tags

Cognitive Science

Dogs

Social Psychology

So it was a happy accident.

Dogs can not only look where you point, they can learn to look where you look. I found this out when I had a Doberman pinscher. Walking through the woods, I could see over brush he couldn't see through. When I'd react to something, he'd rear up and look at where I was looking. He was using me to spot wild animals for him, usually white tails, but the occasional badger or woodchuck. (He was on a leash strapped to my arms, so no worry. He loved seeing wildlife.)

That is interesting. Fortunately the article is open access.

"These findings suggest that human intelligence may have evolved, instead, as a by-product of selection against fear of and aggression towards others."

Which, I'm guessing, as an informed (hopefully) layperson, is co-related to selection for cooperation? Which is tough if fear of others is a significant factor.

I wonder if Chimpanzees bred for tameness over as many generations as those Russian foxes would develop anything interesting.

"To really really get at this question, a study of wolves should be conducted as well."
and
"I wonder if Chimpanzees bred for tameness over as many generations as those Russian foxes would develop anything interesting."

I am sure that both experiments would prove quite interesting. As human society becomes richer and overcomes our current climate change, resource depletion, and other difficulties, I expect that there will be a 'careful domestication' of quite a few species....

Wolves would probably be a 'redomestication' of dogs...but the experiment could be made more interesting by doing the selection with wild wolves.

In the case of chimpanzees (or gorillas...) it could become quite interesting if after several generations of selecting for mellowness the 'uplift' project starts _also_ selecting for intelligence and communication skills.

Grizzly bears would make an interesting domesticate.

Keil's question regarding selection for tameness in chimps is one that has interested me for some time. In comparison with the Siberian fox-farm experiment, it's interesting to note that while tameness was the factor being selected, the resulting offspring developed other observable traits that point suggest features we associate with dogs and their presumed juvenile wolf developement; floppy ears, curly tails, pigmentation effects and even barking.
I've also seen videos of researchers conducting some of these intelligence tests contrasting how dogs seem to understand that where their human companions point is where they should direct their attention, whereas wolves don't do this. I wonder if this behavior might be something wolves have as juveniles but loose when they enter adult phase. It would seem that for young wolves who are learning from adult wolves that might be a valuable capability and they might only need that when they're in their young learning phase and loose it when their roles as adult are established or fixed at which time their focus is solely on status within their packs rather than trying to learn from their parents.

Obviously if one astute biologist can select silver foxes for non-aggression and eventually succeed in creating a tame, family friendly fox, another can select non-aggressive African zebras, breed them for a dozen generations, and create a fine riding and hauling zebra. Of course, selecting for non-aggressiveness may create unexpected secondary physical characteristics i.e. a 'checkerboard hide', but wouldn't looking like a Checker Taxi be appropriate?

My dogs seem to be able to understand almost everything we say and do. It is hard work to keep anything secret from them. For example, if I am packing for a trip, I have to carry things a bit at a time (in a deliberately casual manner, as if I was taking out garbage or something) into the garage, and pack the suitcases in there where they can't see me. We have brought them with us on a lot of trips, and if they see suitcases they would get all excited and assume they were going on the trip.

They get very excited about going for walks and car rides. If I were to ask my husband "when shall we take the dogs out" they would start jumping around and barking and acting crazy in anticipation, and we would have to go right then. So instead I say "when shall we go.. ahem", but they have figured that out too. In fact, if it is mid day on a weekend, they know they are probably going to get a walk and they watch us like hawks. Any time I talk to or even just make eye contact with my husband they are alert, and looking back and forth between us, trying to figure out what will happen next. You don't have to do anything obvious like rattle a leash. It is almost as if they can read minds.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/110517234/abstract?CRETRY=1&…

A Chimpanzee breeding program was performed in the 80's-90's, although, but they didn't select for any traits, the only purpose was to breed test animals in captivity.

And with animal rights progress, this happened;

"1995 - A moratorium on the breeding of federally-owned chimpanzees was put in place by National Institutes of Health, due to a "surplus" of chimpanzees after the realization that the chimpanzee is a poor model for HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus)."
http://bit.ly/d5Ios3

As part of the thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond asserted that one reason for the success of Eurasia compared to Africa is that Eurasia had the great good luck of having many large animal species that turned out to be suitable for domestication, while Africa had few or none. (Remember his famous comment about how history might have been different if Zulus had been able to ride rhinoceroses?) One example of this that he gave was the Zebra, which he claimed was fundamentally just too mean to be domesticated.

I thought of this when, a couple of years ago, I attended a performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Some of the acts had zebras performing along with horses in the ring. Since I had internalized Diamond's argument at this point, I found this kind of startling! I paid close attention to the performance, and noticed that the more complicated maneuvers seemed to be reserved for the horses, while the zebras went through somewhat simpler paces. Nevertheless, the zebras were clearly well trained and controlled. It makes me wonder just how difficult the domestication of zebras in Africa really would have been, and if anyone there had ever even thought to make a serious effort.

Dogs aren't generally smarter than wolves, just socially smarter, while humans are generally smarter than chimps.

One of my dogs has a dry, flaky nose, and sometimes I put ointment on it, which she hates. She always gets anxious when sees my eyes focusing on her nose. She doesn't mind me looking at her face in a general way, or looking into her eyes. But as soon as I focus on her nose, she will get upset, try to escape, growl, etc.

Dogs are a parasitic species bred to be emotional prosthetics for humans.

Elands tame easily. I think Diamond's argument about domestication in Africa is plain wrong: likely true in Australia, though.

On elands and bison, by the time the domestication experiments were tried, oxen were scarcely used any more as draft animals, and as meat animals they couldn't compete economically with cattle which had been bred for slaughter for centuries. The failure of those experiments means nothing.

I loved GG&S, but I took it as a grabbag of interesting facts and arguments. His global arguments weren't convincing, though it was certainly stimulating. He resembles his mentor, McNeill, in this respect. There's a midpoint somewhere, but academic historians have ended to be too cautious rather than too bold, so Diamond has had a good effect. "Big History" (Craig Benjamin, David Christian) now seems to be a trend.

I'm rambling, I guess, but the time has come for a history of the oxcart to go along with the histories of the domesticated camel and horse, iron, salt, cod, etc. The early Indo-Europeans relied on oxcarts, and oxcarts were a factor in the American west into the second half og the 19th century, and in underdeveloped areas even today. They're geared down compared to horses and are more functional on bad or non-existent roads.

The mule, an infertile hybrid between a donkey and a horse was a highly valued work animal pre 1900 back to ancient times. Where the story gets wierd and worth investigating is that the mule was always the product of a male donkey and female horse, the reverse the product of a female donkey and male horse was called a hinny and considered a worthless work animal. Now it makes sense that a mule could be larger than a hinny because its mother was so much larger. It also makes sense that the hinny could be rarer than the mule for biological and mating behavior reasons. But all kinds of physical and behavior attributes reliably change depending on who is the mother and who is the father. A hinny always nieghs like a horse while a mule always brays like a donkey. I could go on at length on what I believe to be fertile territory for futher research but then I'd be hyjacking the thread. Mind you the experts on these seperate behaviors are from the 19th century and earlier. George Washington was one of the first promoters of mules while he said a hinny was vicious beast that would wait twenty years to exact it's revenge.

Face recognition is highly heritable

razib — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:42:44 +0000

Face recognition is highly heritable

Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable:

Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face recognition ability. Low correlations between face recognition scores and visual and verbal recognition scores indicate that both face recognition ability itself and its genetic basis are largely attributable to face-specific mechanisms. The present results therefore identify an unusual phenomenon: a highly specific cognitive ability that is highly heritable. Our results establish a clear genetic basis for face recognition, opening this intensively studied and socially advantageous cognitive trait to genetic investigation.

In other words, the strength of face recognition does not seem to track other intelligence test results much at all (including tests which measure verbal and visual memory). Rather, it seems to be a domain-specific competency, rather than emerging out of general intelligence. And, the variation in face recognition ability is highly heritable.

What's going on here? A reasonable guess for me is that the ability to recognize many, many, different faces isn't something that came up for most of human history. Even in a pre-modern village you'd see the same people over and over. By contrast, if you work in sales you probably need to juggle a lot of faces & names to be successful.

Remember that if a quantitative trait is highly heritable then by definition that means that directional selection wasn't operating to drive genes to fixation so that the population was monomorphic in trait value. In English that means if there was a huge benefit to being able to recognize hundreds of faces very well in the past, then we would be able to recognize hundreds of faces very well to the same extent. As it is the strongly for face recognition has to be more complex, with the direct selection applicable being some sort of balancing selection.

Citation: Jeremy B. Wilmer, Laura Germine, Christopher F. Chabris, Garga Chatterjee, Mark Williams, Eric Loken, Ken Nakayama, and Bradley Duchaine, Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable, doi:10.1073/pnas.0913053107

razib Wed, 02/24/2010 - 13:42

Tags

Cognitive Science

face recognition

Going on the results of the twin studies I would say we cannot conclude much about the general population! Twins are more alike than most random members of the community, especially in age and experience- so their brains may cover a smaller range of development and experience than is possible in the broader community. Because their scores on tests of abilities will be closer to each other, they produce smaller ranges and variance and I think there is more chance of a Type 1 error. With face recognition, you have a mix of multiple skills being tested: there is the general recognition that something is a face, not a ball; there is recognition of the spatial proportions of human faces changing with age and the ability to recognise the combinations of facial cues that indicate universal emotions (which seem to be impaired in autism and Asperger's people)- plus lots of others eg. mirroring and imitative skills which allow empathising with emotions witnessed.
Of course, we all see families around us where general facial recognition seems to be inherited when it is in deficit- a friend of mine and his son are pretty hopeless with recognising their own distant acquaintances- so we're also surrounded by people who have inherited some of the ability to be good at this as well. However, I think it's too early in the piece to conclude that human evolution hasn't required us to be pretty excellent at face recognition as a species because we've also lost our smellivision along the way!

A reasonable guess for me is that the ability to recognize many, many, different faces isn't something that came up for most of human history. Even in a pre-modern village you'd see the same people over and over.

Could the ability to recognize lots of different faces have initially been a side-effect of the ability to recognize subtle differences in emotional states of people from their faces?

I think of this in conjunction with the lost of olfactory receptors -- in tribal life we may have identified people at least as much by smell as visually, whereas in a more dense population setting that's less feasible due to all the odor crosstalk.

There is a brain area specifically for face regognition, so it is a discrete neurological function separate from general memory areas. There are people with an inability to recognize faces of those who are familiar to them. Google "prosopagnosia"

The New York Times on Amy Bishop

razib — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:20:45 +0000

The New York Times on Amy Bishop

Covers all the major angles. Nice that there's a newspaper which can support this sort of reporting (on the other hand). Not surprising that Amy Bishop seems to have some history of delusions of grandeur, she's claiming that both she and her husband have an I.Q. of 180. That's 5.3 standard deviations above the mean. Assuming a normal distribution that's a 1 in 20 million probability. Of course the tails of the distribution are fatter beyond 2 standard deviations than expectation for I.Q., but at these really high levels (above 160) I'm skeptical that most tests are measuring anything real.

razib Sat, 02/20/2010 - 09:20

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Cognitive Science

amy bishop

My understanding is that the Wechsler scales are the only universally respected IQ tests. The ceiling on the Wechsler is 150, if I'm not mistaken. I once read an article comparing testees' Wechsler results with their scores on another scale, the old Standford-Binet. The two tests tended to yield identical IQ scores for people in the low average, average, and high average categories (IQ's of roughly 90 to 119). At higher levels, though, the Binet yielded scores higher than the corresponding Wechsler score. For individuals in the superior range (120 to 129 IQ), the difference was usually two to six IQ points. For individuals in the very superior range, IQ 130 and above (two or more standard deviations over the mean), the Binet score was usually ten to 50 points higher than the testee's corresponding Wechsler IQ. So, who knows what a claimed IQ of 180 really means.

"Have you ever been convicted of an offense other than a minor traffic violation?" Amy Bishop, who took a tenure-track job there in 2003, answered the question with a simple "no."

Technically, she was correct.

No "technically" about it. It was an easy answer to an easy question: she had never been convicted of anything. The question was not "Have you ever done anything that some people think should have been prosecuted?"

Habeas corpus is in bad shape. We might as well forget about it, because no one believes in it any more, not even on the liberal New York Times.

john, i kind of had the same reaction too.

This story is most depressing and shocking as is any incident that is out of character for its time, place and actors. That said, the ivory tower of the academia is a place where huge egos are at play. Given the territorial battles, pressure of peer reviews and the all or nothing tenure games, that Amy Bishop is an aberration rather than the norm, speaks well of the academic community. On the other hand, Amy Bishop's loose canon nature may have gone unnoticed or unsuspected precisely because she was in a profession that is not "expected" to spawn or breed violence.

Bishop may not have been as brilliant (or at least, not as productive) as the media and many of her colleagues think she is. This blogger seems to have ferreted out a lot about her background including a publication that is extremely fishy. (Look at all the Andersons)

http://www.dovepress.com/effects-of-selective-serotonin-reuptake-inhibi…

Mr. Miller [her lawyer] said Dr. Bishop told him that biologists do not make much money in academia, and added that she and her husband each had an I.Q. of 180.
----------------------------------
She surely must have some sort of narcissistic personality disorder. Even if it were true about the IQs it certainly seems like a strange and random thing to share with your lawyer. Perhaps she bragged about the IQs to deflect attention away from her lack of money and her loser husband, who probably doesn't have any income. He must be a bit crazy himself to have put up with her all these years.

Academic killing sprees aren't all that rare. Theodore Streleski, Valery Fabrikant, and Gang Lu arq three others, and you could probably throw in the Unabomber.

Not getting tenure at Alabama U. is pretty low on the not-getting-tenure ladder.

AMY BISHOP: MURDER FOR A HIGHER PURPOSE?

Some say there is a delusional mania or grandiosity that drives the great minds to produce brilliant scientific breakthroughs, a compulsive-obsessive, competitive drive that wonât nor canât take a back seat to rejection. Whether this is true or not is yet to be proven. However, when I encountered the case of Amy Bishop, it somehow reminded me of the insane, radical philosophy of the protagonist in the novel Crime and Punishment by Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Perhaps Dostoevskyâs character contains a clue to understanding her nemesis.

An impoverished student, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, devises a plan to murder and rob an elderly pawnbroker to solve his financial problems. His moral dilemma is whether it is acceptable to murder âan evil, worthless parasiteâ in pursuit of higher purpose. By rationalizing himself as Napoleon, he justified his behavior. The novel explores the moral and psychological dangers of Raskolnikovâs âradicalâ ideology. He commits the crime with the belief that he has a strong emotional and intellectual foundation to deal with the ramifications...

http://nahupsi.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/amy-bishop-murder-for-a-higher-…

Face recognition not correlated with IQ

razib — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:51:36 +0000

Face recognition not correlated with IQ

Heritability of the Specific Cognitive Ability of Face Perception:

What makes one person socially insightful but mathematically challenged, and another musically gifted yet devoid of a sense of direction? Individual differences in general cognitive ability are thought to be mediated by "generalist genes" that affect many cognitive abilities similarly without specific genetic influences on particular cognitive abilities. In contrast, we present here evidence for cognitive "specialist genes": monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic twins in the specific cognitive ability of face perception. Each of three measures of face-specific processing was heritable, i.e., more correlated in monozygotic than dizygotic twins: face-specific recognition ability, the face-inversion effect, and the composite-face effect. Crucially, this effect is due to the heritability of face processing in particular, not to a more general aspect of cognition such as IQ or global attention. Thus, individual differences in at least one specific mental talent are independently heritable. This finding raises the question of what other specific cognitive abilities are independently heritable and may elucidate the mechanisms by which heritable disorders like dyslexia and autism can have highly uneven cognitive profiles in which some mental processes can be selectively impaired while others remain unaffected or even selectively enhanced.

Here's some more from ScienceDaily:

For the study, Liu and his colleagues recruited 102 pairs of identical twins and 71 pairs of fraternal twins aged 7 to 19 from Beijing schools. Because identical twins have 100 percent of their genes in common while fraternal twins have just 50 percent, traits that are strongly hereditary are more similar between identical twins than between fraternal twins. (Identical twins still show variability because of the influence of environmental factors.)

Participants were shown black-and-white images of 20 different faces on a computer screen for one second per image. They were then shown 10 of the original faces mixed with 20 new faces and asked which ones they had seen before. The scores were more closely matched between identical twins than fraternal twins, and Liu attributed 39 percent of the variance between individuals to genetic effects. Further tests confirmed that these differences were specific to face recognition, and did not reflect differences in sharpness of vision, general object recognition abilities, memory or other cognitive processes.
In an independent sample of 321 students, the researchers found that face recognition ability was not correlated with IQ, indicating that the genes that affect face recognition ability are distinct from those that affect IQ. Liu and Kanwisher are now investigating whether other cognitive abilities, such as language processing, understanding numbers, or navigation, are also heritable and independent from general intelligence and other cognitive abilities.

I've blogged about prosopagnosia before, which is a much more extreme manifestation of lack of face recognition than they're talking about here. These "face blind" individuals are shockingly common within the general population, 1 out of 50 humans. I haven't heard it reported that these individuals are particularly unintelligent, so it stands to reason that there'd be no relationship between intelligence and the ability to recognize faces. I happen to know some individuals with this issue, and they've developed "tricks" to compensate, so I know firsthand that they're not necessarily a dull lot.

So how to reconcile the heritability of IQ with domain specific competencies that exhibit modularity? I think the model in terms of genetic architecture is pretty simple. General intelligence is a quantitative trait characterized by a normal distribution; the bell curve. This is because variation on the trait is due to many genes of small effect; i.e., each genetic variant which controls variation of IQ has only a very small effect on the trait. By contrast, imagine that face recognition is controlled by a few genes of large effect, for example, five genes controlling most of the variance of the trait. Even if these five genes which control face recognition ability also affect intelligence, their contribution to the variance on the latter is going to be trivial because any specific gene has only a small effect, at least in the normal range. I assume that this sort of dynamic could characterize many domain specific cognitive traits.

Citation: Heritability of the Specific Cognitive Ability of Face Perception, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.067

razib Tue, 01/19/2010 - 18:51

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genetics

Behavior Genetics

cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive Science

Psychology

Not surprising. I've trained artificial neural networks to recognize faces better than most humans. Facial recognition is just an algorithm, related to cognition in the same way as being able to multiply large integers in one's head.

A person with poor cognitive ability of face recognition is highly likely to find the Visual-Spatial Processing Part of an IQ-Test a hard or even insurmountable task. The lacking points in this field will lower his IQ-overall-score, generally taken as the measure of intelligence.

Apart from that I can confirm from personal experience that far below average face recognition capability can go along with pretty good results in the other parts of an IQ-test.

The study confirms my point of view, that Visual-Spatial cognitive intelligence should be separated from general intelligence.

althor:

A person with poor cognitive ability of face recognition is highly likely to find the Visual-Spatial Processing Part of an IQ-Test a hard or even insurmountable task.

Was that in the study or is it a prediction on your part? I don't have access to the journal right now, but they mention nothing about it in the abstract. Since it seems contrary to their stated conclusion, it seems like it would be pertinent to mention there if so.

Our brains have a lot of resources dedicated to facial recognition. It's not at all obvious (well, not to me) that an allele causing a defect in that system need do so at the level of visual-spatial processing.

I have pretty high IQ on the tests, but I suck at facial recognition.

In anything but good light, or even just out of context, I can completely fail to recognize people I don't know really well. I've been sworn at (!) more than once for failing to speak to people I know but simply failed to recognize. It really seems to upset people.

My wife has Capgras Delusion and no longer recognizes me as her husband. Terrible torture for me and her, as she once was the love of my life.

Cardio = higher IQ (?)

razib — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:33:37 +0000

Cardio = higher IQ (?)

Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood:

During early adulthood, a phase in which the central nervous system displays considerable plasticity and in which important cognitive traits are shaped, the effects of exercise on cognition remain poorly understood. We performed a cohort study of all Swedish men born in 1950 through 1976 who were enlisted for military service at age 18 (N = 1,221,727). Of these, 268,496 were full-sibling pairs, 3,147 twin pairs, and 1,432 monozygotic twin pairs. Physical fitness and intelligence performance data were collected during conscription examinations and linked with other national databases for information on school achievement, socioeconomic status, and sibship. Relationships between cardiovascular fitness and intelligence at age 18 were evaluated by linear models in the total cohort and in subgroups of full-sibling pairs and twin pairs. Cardiovascular fitness, as measured by ergometer cycling, positively associated with intelligence after adjusting for relevant confounders (regression coefficient b = 0.172; 95% CI, 0.168-0.176). Similar results were obtained within monozygotic twin pairs. In contrast, muscle strength was not associated with cognitive performance. Cross-twin cross-trait analyses showed that the associations were primarily explained by individual specific, non-shared environmental influences (â¥80%), whereas heritability explained <15% of covariation. Cardiovascular fitness changes between age 15 and 18 y predicted cognitive performance at 18 y. Cox proportional-hazards models showed that cardiovascular fitness at age 18 y predicted educational achievements later in life. These data substantiate that physical exercise could be an important instrument for public health initiatives to optimize educational achievements, cognitive performance, as well as disease prevention at the society level.

The figure to the left is pretty striking, though the general correlation between intelligence and overall health has been long known. I'm not too sure if I really accept that this correlation is as causal as they say it is, but it probably can't hurt to encourage for moderate exercise within the population. So even if this is another spurious correlation which leads to educational programs which don't have the effect intended (increase IQ), it wouldn't do that much harm, and perhaps might result in some good.

Citation: Maria A. I. Ãberg, Nancy L. Pedersen, Kjell TorÃ©n, Magnus Svartengren, BjÃ¶rn BÃ¤ckstrand, Tommy Johnsson, Christiana M. Cooper-Kuhn, N. David Ãberg, Michael Nilsson, and H. Georg Kuhn, Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood, PNAS 2009 : 0905307106v1-pnas.0905307106.

razib Sun, 12/06/2009 - 22:33

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Cognitive Science

Culture

I would have thought it was at least as likely that the causation went in the opposite direction (intelligent people deciding to get fit).

Still, it does make you wonder where all the highly unfit nerds (and brain-dead jocks) have gone. Stereotypes just ain't what they used to be.

Yeah but that cohort of Swedes had great music by ABBA to dance to, so you didn't have to twist their arm to get them into a cardio routine.

"Still, it does make you wonder where all the highly unfit nerds (and brain-dead jocks) have gone. "

The mistake is to equate high-IQ people with nerds, who are a non-representative subset of high-IQ people. High-ranking doctors, lawyers, and businessmen are really smart, but they're not nerds. As a result, they're not horribly out of shape, they don't subsist on a 7-11 diet, and they aren't afraid to talk to girls.

i'm not sure i agree with agnostic. maybe nerds just get older and adjust a little.

my doctor and lawyer friends are still nerdy in many ways. some are in shape, eat okay and aren't afraid of talking to girls. maybe i have a different view of nerd-dom, but these are all friends i grew up with who were on the math or academic team who played video games. there aren't many badges of nerd-dom more visible than that.but every one of us played hard at street basketball and took our lumps in backyard football. one of these nerds went to stanford and walked onto their basketball team, having never played for the high school team.

most still play video games as a hobby and some still have nerdy quirks. some of them speak to their peers in razib-esque language, some spend ungodly hours min/maxing their video game character, and others feel more comfortable talking about hypothetical wars in minute detail than going clubbing. but they are all doctors and lawyers.

speak to their peers in razib-esque language

wtf is that supposed to mean dawg?

This discussion is quite entertaining so far! The nice thing about this study is that all cliches that you can find in a society, the nerd, the jock, the gamer, the clubber, the lawyer etc. are included in the study. It is population-based! So, if this correlation still hold with all these "extremists" included, well, then perhaps exercise has a positive effect on average Joe.

I think he means using a vocabulary that is unintelligibly large to mere mortals.

In so doing, he has invented a new adjective which shall now irrevocably become part of the language.

When I was at university, the nerds threw frisbees to each other instead of playing real sports like erm cricket.

Incidentally, you notice that the "big three" are supposed to be medicine, law and engineering, but we poor bloody engineers are never cool or rich. Why?

err, correction. the friend i said that walked onto a basketball team actually walked onto caltech and not stanford. i think they ran an 11 year losing streak, so i suppose it's not very impressive to walk onto that team.

Maybe some of us unfit nerds would rise to even godlier heights of epistemological insight if we went for a jog every now and then. After all, how do we know we know as well as we could know?

Most people are not stupid (?)

razib — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:07:06 +0000

Most people are not stupid (?)

More Singularity stuff. I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid, says Eliezer Yudkowsky in response to my summary of his talk. The last line of his post says: "I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid." So the issue is craziness, not stupidity in Eliezer's reading. The problem I would say is that stupid people have the "Not Even Crazy" problem. They often can't get beyond their basic cognitive biases because they don't have a good grasp of a rational toolkit, nor are they comfortable and fluent in analysis and abstraction. I can grant that many smart people are wrong or crazy, but at least there's a hope of having them internalize Bayes' rule.

razib Fri, 10/09/2009 - 08:07

Tags

Cognitive Science

Singularity Summit 2009

This came up in the schizophrenia thread, and I think that normality itself can be the problem. Someone who lives their life defensively (to avoid problems) and conventionally will be normal, which is a rather passive state and means little more than doing your job, paying your bills, obeying the law, and not doing anything weird enough to upset people.

I think that when people talk about stupidity they're often talking about conventionality and fear of difference.

"stupid people ...often can't get beyond their basic cognitive biases because they don't have a good grasp of a rational toolkit, nor are they comfortable and fluent in analysis and abstraction": quite. But you can still learn useful amounts from them if you talk about concrete experiences they've had. Just ignore their attempts to generalise from them.

I get uncomfortable when scientists talk about stupidity. It's kind of like legacy Yalies reflecting on how disgusting it must be to be poor. It's also a very unscientific term. I get particularly uncomfortable when they say someone is stupid rather than that someone has acted stupidly, which is marginally better.

Cognitive biases? A good scientist is a person who has a strong cognitive bias (a non-conscious emotional preference) in favor of evidence-based rationality, at least in their field of expertise. They may have studied and discussed the philosophy of science and appreciate the power of rationality in understanding nature but they don't re-examine it constantly while going about their work. It's internalized and acts non-consciously to effectively perform its behavior guidance function. Even good scientists though, don't allow this usually beneficial bias to rule all areas of their lives nor at all times. Another way to say that is that in some areas of their lives and under some conditions stronger biases than their bias toward rationality will become dominant. That doesn't make them stupid, just human - and probably far more likely to survive than a Mr. Spock.

Very smart people can make very bad behavior decisions and acquire highly irrational beliefs. When someone calls another stupid, what has usually happened is that some of the latter's biases (internalized beliefs) have threatened their own; enough so that it feels good (lessens the emotional discomfort of the threat) to insult them.

I get particularly uncomfortable when they say someone is stupid rather than that someone has acted stupidly, which is marginally better.

Pray tell, why? Do you believe that people do not have differences in intelligence? I would like a backstory on why you consider "stupid" to be a term unbecoming of a scientist.

I'd make a distinction (I'm not sure of the precise definitions, but hey!) between irrationality, and low intelligence. I've met plenty of people who were pretty thick (ie conventionally stupid), but still capable of rational thought within their limits, including some with serious cognitive impairments. And I think anyone who went to university has met at least one academic who was totally incapable of applying their intelligence to real life, or indeed any discipline outside their own. (Ours was a logician, and we really used to wonder how he managed his daily commute in safety.) Of course, you get the reverses too: stupid people without the sense to come in from the rain, and people who are both smart and rational.

Meng, my primary discomfort with stupid is that it is a subjective judgment often even meant to be insulting. When a scientist makes a judgment it should be separated from subjectivity as far as possible. They should not only arrive at their judgment objectively but should be prepared to show how any subjectivity was prevented from entering into it. That's especially true if they wish to claim some scientific credibility for their judgment, which is how most assertions on this topic are put forth in this blog. I have other complaints about its use that focus on its implied reference to an inaccurate model of how brains produce behavior. But we have to get past the subjectivity problem before that one becomes even relevant to the discussion. I hope I answered the question you asked.

Meng, my primary discomfort with stupid is that it is a subjective judgment often even meant to be insulting.

Well, intelligence is a highly prized attribute among humans, so it's hard to imagine a word that would describe a lack of intelligence that could not be used as an insult. But if you read what Razib said, he's not affixing stupid as a label to an individual in the form of an insult, but rather saying that most of the population lacks the intellectual ability to live up to Eliezer's prescriptions.

Now, it may be correct that he was misrepresenting what Eliezer said or that he is flat out wrong in his conjecture, but it seems rather silly to say that a word that has insulting connotations cannot be used at all.

As for subjectivity, intelligence is usually a pretty poorly defined term, but all evidence suggests that there are indeed differences in ability to perform various mental tasks among a population. Obviously how you make your judgment as to which criteria you are going to use to constitute "intelligence" and where you draw the line for stupidity is indeed subjective, but it's not devoid of meaning and one can use it legitimately in conjecture.

Finally, to tie this together, this blog really doesn't consist of all science all the time, as evidenced most proximately by the next post. Flippant, oversimplified summaries are quite prevalent on blogs, even those that have the word "science" in their url.

Of course, this is a rather small issue and I don't care to continue discussing it. If Razib wants to defend the use of the term (he hasn't so far, so I don't know why he would now), that's his prerogative, but honestly this discussion takes much more time than it's worth.

> it's hard to imagine a word that would describe a lack of intelligence that could not be used as an insult

It's actually not that hard to do - only, it would definitely have to be some idiotic septa-syllabic phrase. Not facile for communication purposes. That's why reading even highly technical blog posts is so much more fun than reading papers. About half of the stiff language use found in papers actually furthers precision, and the other half is just a costly signal meant to display intelligence and make the whole thing seem more abstruse than it really is. For some reason no one talks like that on the internet even if they are making a very complex, nuts & bolts technical point.

Meng, I'm not sure I understand Razib's views on this well enough to criticize them. I wasn't disagreeing as much as expressing an area of discomfort. Most comments on blogs are attacks and defenses of existing beliefs. Very little reasoning goes on to actually examine the beliefs that are being attacked or defended - but a lot of mental energy goes into tactics, insults, riposts and such.

You are correct that "intelligence is a highly prized attribute among humans". I think it is perhaps overvalued in terms of its survival benefits. Most behavior decisions in adults - regarding important matters in life - are determined according to beliefs that we acquired long ago - that were probably not adopted as the result of a rigorous logical examination. Usually we adopt beliefs because our family or our friends hold them and they serve to cement our membership in those groups and also because they fit with and support our most important existing beliefs.

I think it is a rich topic for discussion which I hoped to encourage with my comments.

Going for the pain of paying

razib — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:59:57 +0000

Going for the pain of paying

For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit:

Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard reported that for the first six months of this year, the volume of purchases on its debit cards increased 4.1 percent, to $160 billion, in the United States. Spending on credit and charge cards sank 14.8 percent, to $233 billion.

"Consumers are rational thinking individuals, and they're going to shift their behavior in a way that fits with their current economic situation," said Scott Strumello, an associate with the Auriemma Consulting Group, a Long Island-based payment card advisory firm. "They're thinking more seriously about it, and many may decide, 'I'm going to use debit where I can and reserve credit for larger purchases.' "

I think really what's going on here is that people are embracing the pain of paying; when you decouple time of payment from what you're purchasing that tends to result in more purchase than would otherwise be the case. A perfectly rational individual wouldn't need to make a distinction between debit and credit, what does it matter if you pay for a latte tomorrow (that is, it comes out of your account tomorrow) vs. the next billing cycle? No, people are rational about the fact that they are irrational. Pay later = buy more, pay tomorrow = buy less. If you want to buy less then heighten the immediacy of the cost.

razib Thu, 10/08/2009 - 12:59

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I got a debit card because I wanted to be able to access my ATM rather than asking the bank people for a withdrawal. Never bothered to get a credit hard. I received offers in the mail when I was in college, but I didn't see the point when I didn't have a job. I guess I'm being irrational in that if I used a credit card I'd get some rewards for spending (apparently financed by retailers who pay the credit card companies to drum up more spending), but I also should have started contributing to my 401K a long time ago.

Addiction is not a "disease" (?)

razib — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:07:55 +0000

Addiction is not a "disease" (?)

Recently I listened to the author of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene M. Heyman, interviewed on the Tom Ashbrook show. A lot of the discussion revolved around the term "disease", which I can't really comment on, but a great deal of Heyman's thesis is grounded in rather conventional behavior genetic insights. In short, a behavioral trait can have a host of inputs, and is often a combination of environment & genes developing over a lifetime. Alcoholism is not much of an issue among observant Mormons because of their environment, not their genes. Heyman points out that whereas some behavioral phenotypes, such as schizophrenia or autism, are extremely difficult or impossible to cure through one's own personal choice (i.e., for schizophrenia you may need medication, while many autistics are what they are no matter the drug or environment), addiction therapy can work and so change the expression of the trait. Additionally he makes some important criticisms of the methodologies of clinical studies of addiction which seem important to me, primarily that there is a strong selection bias in these samples which overstates the inability to control impulse in individuals prone to addiction (similar problems probably resulted in an overestimate of the concordance for homosexuality among twins).

But the bigger issue is the same as the one that crops up with obesity, what role does personal responsibility and public policy play? Many of the critics of Heyman seem to be suggesting that he is reverting to blaming someone with an illness. The fat acceptance movement makes similar arguments. These issues, and the fact that policy and culture revolve around them, mean that we have to begin to rethink our conceptions of free will, choice and decision making. It isn't about people being good, bad, irresponsible or moral, it is people being who they are, and confronting the cards they're dealt.

razib Sun, 08/16/2009 - 13:07

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I guess the problem is its virtually impossible to distinguish the relative importance of the environment and genotype for a particular trait. Without being able to distinguish the difference, it's hard to decide whether it's better for people to 'know' if they have these traits.

If I found out I had a particular set of genes for fatness, would just having that knowledge increase my chances of becoming obese? At the moment, I think I'm at a good weight (a rare thing for a female to think!) although I think I do eat too many chocolate biscuits. However if I found out I was more predisposed to being fat - would I begin eating more biscuits without realising that I was? I could quite easily have genes increasing the risk of obesity, since most of my relatives on my mothers side are obese and I doubt I've been lucky enough in the genetic lottery to only get the genes from my father's side.

Would I slowly become fatter and fatter? Maybe I would think it was just 'meant to be', rather than because I was in fact consuming more sugar and fat. Perhaps some of my 'free will' will be taken away, because I will no longer believe I can resist these foods. Would it then be my fault I became fat? Of course it could have the opposite effect, and I might cut out the biscuits completely (although that would be a sad day!).

Of course this is all hypothetical since I don't think we will be in a position to tell someone they're meant to be fat for a long time! But I do think we are currently in a place where people do realise they may be predisposed to things like obesity, and maybe the state does need to think of ways to deal with this, because it could potentially make the problem worse with people feeling they have no choice in how they turn out.

lisa, if you have a predisposition to X which is not something you want, you should change your environmental inputs, right? i don't seem to have an issue with alcohol addiction, so i drink regularly/socially without much worry.

Addiction Causation

Hypoism
http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/

Right, I'm Irish (American) and I grew up knowing several alcoholic relatives who had basically destroyed their lives by drinking -- lost marriages, lost careers, lost anybody giving much of a damn about them, etc -- so I consciously avoided getting drunk or high out of the fear that I might really like it. I got semi-drunk in college a few times, but otherwise always limited myself to maybe 2 beers at a party. Possibly overly paranoid, but seeing a few lives ruined up close will do that. Drunkard, penniless middle-aged men are very, very sad sights to see.

"Perhaps some of my 'free will' will be taken away, because I will no longer believe I can resist these foods. Would it then be my fault I became fat?"

Regarding free will, I think you have to distinguish between micro-decisions and macro-decisions. At the micro level you may encounter chocolate biscuits and face a decision whether or not to eat just one more, and for genetic reasons you might be indeed be predisposed to eat another (or at least, to do so more often than other people might). However at the macro level, as Razib notes, you are free to take any number of actions that would change your environment and make it less likely that you'd over-indulge in chocolate biscuits. For example, you could buy them only in very small packages, have a friend buy them for you and just give you one or two, or not have them in your house at all.

Having free will doesn't necessarily imply that you have (or have to have) total freedom of action on every decision, uninfluenced by your personal genetic makeup. In fact, it may be a more significant exercise of free will to order your life at the macro level so that certain decisions at the micro level are avoided or pre-determined for yourself. Daniel Dennett addresses this question in his book "Freedom Evolves", and notes that "the policy of preparing oneself for tough choices by arranging to be determined to do the right thing when the time comes is one of the hallmarks of mature responsibility".

I didn't follow your remark about "an overestimate of the concordance for homosexuality among twins". Could you expand on that?

What I've heard is that if one twin is gay there is a 50 percent chance the other will be too. This figure is quoted to argue for a genetic component to homosexuality, which seems fair enough. But then the existence of a genetic component is used to argue in turn that gender preferences are fixed, that you are born that way, and therefore there is no need to worry about children being "turned gay" by greater visibility and social acceptance of homosexuality. Nobody every seems to point out that the 50 percent figure in fact implies that the environment has just as strong an influence as genetics, which would seem to suggest that worries are indeed warranted!

So anyway, I would be interested if you think the 50 percent figure is inaccurate, and if so how.

What I've heard is that if one twin is gay there is a 50 percent chance the other will be too.

probably 25. the original studies were probably selection biased toward twins who were both gay.

. Nobody every seems to point out that the 50 percent figure in fact implies that the environment has just as strong an influence as genetics, which would seem to suggest that worries are indeed warranted!

it doesn't necessarily imply that one can learn to be exclusively homosexual at all (though it might). consider if homosexual orientation is "fixed" during the fetal stage due to a random developmental switch or infection. twins may have a genetic makeup which makes this more likely, but does not guarantee it. but if there is a random element to this then you'll have a lot of discordance, that is, where one twin is state X and another is state Y.

In Mark Kleiman's recent diavlog with Virginia Postrel he mocked how the disease-model of addiction has no produced no fruit while cracking down on it like a criminal behavior works.

The stigma for mental illness is still going strong, and this is certainly part of it. Disease isn't the most well defined term in medicine anyway. The fight over the word seems really silly to me. I want to toss in type II diabetes to be debated along with alcoholism to show an interesting contrast in the attitudes people display.

I agree that if you find you have a predisposition to something you 'should' change your behaviour. However, people don't always behave how they should - I often see my mother who is diabetic snacking on things like chocolate eclairs, telling herself she's been 'good' today so she can eat them. This is despite the fact my grandmother, died at around the age of 40 essentially because she didn't control her diabetes. She also mocks my uncle who is diabetic, because he has a much more stricter control over his diet than her.

I think you may see a similar thing with people who think they have a predisposition to being fat. They eat more food than people with a normal weight, often not realising they are (While not a scientific study, I did watch a television program with someone overweight who thought they ate the same as their underweight friend, and in fact this wasn't the case). Then they blame the fact they are fat on their poorer metabolism etc. I think in many cases people will do exactly what is bad for them, mainly because they kid themselves it's not their behaviour that's the problem. Giving someone another reason to think it's not their 'fault' and it's just in their genes could make the behaviour worse.

Then again, if I found out I was diabetic I definitely would stop eating chocolates, so maybe it's easier to change your behaviour when you KNOW it's bad. With obesity, it's easier to think you won't be the one that gets the health complications. If I found out I was more likely to become fat, I would correctly think that since I'm not overweight at the moment and I do eat chocolate biscuits that stopping that behaviour isn't necessary. Which could then lead to the scenario of me eating more and more.

I don't think homosexuality is really a discrete trait anyway, so I think you're asking the wrong type of question. If a person has sex with some one of the opposite sex 499 times and once with a person of the same sex, are they gay? What about 50/50? What about virgins, can their "orientation" truly be determined? Isn't masturbation "homosexual" in the strictest sense of the word?

Sexuality is a hugely complex behavioral trait, and its going to be a long time before we understand its genetic and environmental components. I think address it in the gay/straight paradigm isn't helping understand it.

Herbert Fingarette has written about the disease metaphor. The medicalization and therapization of personal and social problems is one of the weak spots of liberalism.

Once the argument about "free will" vs. cause-and-effect models of behavior arises, the confusion becomes inpenetrable. The cause-and-effect models statistical analyses are not necessarily much good either.

I haven't seen Kleinman's piece, but I'm not sure that cracking down on alcoholism as criminal behavior works that well either. Sweden has minimized a severe problem by heavy taxation and restrictive laws, though.

I like Dennett's quote.

probably 25. the original studies were probably selection biased toward twins who were both gay.

This would be very interesting! Anything you can link to?

My own suspicion is that homosexuality -- like other forms of deviant sexuality that nobody claims are genetic (S&M, for example) -- is to some degree triggered by random influences in childhood.

I base this in part on memories of my own childhood: My interest in the opposite sex was mostly intellectual (I figured out how the plumbing worked quite early) up until puberty, when all of the sudden I actually started to feel it. It just isn't all that hard to imagine some random encounter -- even some random image in a movie or on TV -- sending me down the other path!

The question of when the random environmental influence occurs still remains, and of course if it's pre-natal then you can still say that people are "born that way". But if the true number is really 25 rather than 50 percent, the exclusive "born that way" scenario become that much harder to argue.

You cannot will what you want.

Heyman points out that ... addiction therapy can work and so change the expression of the trait.

He is full of shit. For "bad" addictions (ethanol, morphine, nicotine) addiction therapy does not work. Never did. Unless you count 5% success rate as "working". Truth is, the long-term abstainers that come out of therapies come in two cohorts: those that were ever only heavy abusers, never truly physiologically addicted and those who are white-knuckling it for some time (suffering every day of their life; most of those eventually relapse). That's your typical 5%. The rest can't manage even that over tha course of a single year.

The "incurability" of many "true" addictions isn't surprising at all. The hard addiction is an imprinting effect - a newly grown population of neurons with a long-term memory of exposure and axonal connections to the reward circuit. Getting rid of the addiction is similar to unlearning riding a bike. Almost impossible to do - unless you are brain dead! And as long as a slightest shadow of memory remains, the Pavlov's dog inside you is liable to react to all kind of cues and stresses that poise a relapse.

All of this obviously has a lot of intercepts with genetics. And, while obvious, most of the details remain totally obscure. Giving enough ground to the self-serving assholes like Heyman to declare
that, basically, all addictions are life style choices and/or moral defects. Do you think Heyman will ever be willing take up a two months heroin addiction course to prove he is right? Personally, I'd give my house to him for just trying it honestly. LOL. It's easy for me because I know he won't. No way! This kind of people people never puts their lives where their mouses are.

DK's post is 100% assertion with no evidence or argument. Perhaps it's part of a larger, more intelligent debate, but we can't knbow that from what he or she has written.

Recovery is heavily ideologized and there's tons of money in it, so discussions tend to veer off into dogma.

Who is this Heyman...I've never heard of him. Does he have any qualifications relevant to this topic?

I believe that the current evidence in the fields of motivational theory, psychopharmacology of drugs of abuse, and neurobiology adds up against this guy.

DK's post is 100% assertion with no evidence or argument. Perhaps it's part of a larger, more intelligent debate, but we can't knbow that from what he or she has written.

Obviously, I am not going to write a literature review for you here. (Particularly because a better done review would be the size of monograph). Do your research, acquaint yourself with the the basics of primary data. If you do have a very specific question or objection, name it and I will be happy to provide a concrete response.

For now, let me give you a primer: In global health terms, the worst addiction is to alcohol. The largest and perhaps the best study of the best known therapies so far (some of the best drugs with or without the best shrink approach so far) was "Project Combine". There are many publications but the main one is JAMA, 2006, 295(17):2003-17. Read it. Table 9, entitled One-Year Posttreatment Drinking Outcomes is probably the most damning. To be crude, the summary: Nothing truly works.

Recovery is heavily ideologized and there's tons of money in it, so discussions tend to veer off into dogma.

That's exactly right. Except that you got it wrong :-) in that the dogma (prevailing meme) is that interventions work. But the actual evidence that they do is slim to none.

To quote Elyse:
Who is this Heyman...I've never heard of him. Does he have any qualifications relevant to this topic?

Formally, yes. In reality, no. Heyman is a hack who, while having a tenure at Harvard, has a record of original research thinner than that of any half-decent postdoc. His

I believe that the current evidence in the fields of motivational theory, psychopharmacology of drugs of abuse, and neurobiology adds up against this guy.

Of course. Only in something as soft as psychology at Harvard can one survive publishing so few papers with so little insight written so poorly. These days, the guy wouldn't make it out of any self-respecting graduate school. A total joke every way you look at.

A sample: "The results showed that the persistence of sweetened-alcohol reinforced responding could not be explained by differences in baseline response rates or the reinforcing properties of saccharin. Rather, the findings were consistent with the idea that the rats were defending baseline levels of alcohol-plus-saccharin consumption."

Translation: Rats really like ethanol, and they like it even more when it tastes good.

Another: "Individuals who smoke cigarettes regularly but do not become dependent on them provide a unique opportunity for studying the factors that inhibit drug dependence. Previous research on this population, sometimes referred to as 'cigarette chippers', showed that they did not differ from regular smokers in terms of smoking topography (e.g. puff number and duration) and circulating nicotine levels, but that they did show more self-control according to answers on a questionnaire. We evaluated the generality of this finding using a behavioral choice procedure. ...[snip - DK] These findings are consistent with the view that chippers are less impulsive than smokers."

Translation: Nicotine addicts really are addicted.

This is the sort of groundbreaking research that allows Gene Heyman to pretend to be an expert...

Obviously, I am not going to write a literature review for you here.

Nothing but your own arrogance prevented you from giving us a few titles. People at GNXP welcome documentation.

I really don't have a dog in this fight. By your tone, however, you are not someone I would expect to get a good answer from.