Monthly Archives: February 2016

Another reader takes an IQ test

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 52 Comments

A reader recently took the WAIS-IV IQ test and asked me to comment on his scores.  I’m not a professional in this field, but I do know a bit about this, so I decided to take a look.

Subject describes himself as a modestly successful 30 year-old male holding down junior leadership positions in stakeholder engagement, and even holding down decent employment during a brutal recession in Alberta, Canada.
In high school, he got As in Social Studies and English with little effort, but almost failed Grade 11 Physics with “a proportional grind”. Subject reports having little mechanical skill beyond being able to change a car tire, and is a social science grad student with minor skill at statistics.
Although I’m not a professional, during a brief email exchange, Pumpkin Person observed good executive functioning and thought organization skills, and no signs of socio-cognitive impairment, however there were very slight indicators of anxiety and obsessive compulsive traits.
Subject revealed that the biodemographic analysis predicted his overall WAIS-IV IQ quite closely.

 

His scores on the WAIS-IV were as follows (U.S. norms):

Vocabulary IQ 135

Similarities IQ 135*

Information IQ 125

Overall verbal reasoning: IQ 138

Matrix Reasoning: IQ 115*

Block Design:  IQ 115*

Visual Puzzles: IQ 110

Overall perceptual reasoning: IQ 116

Digit Span: IQ 130*

Arithmetic: IQ 120

Overall working memory IQ: 129

Symbol search: IQ 120

Coding: IQ 135*

Overall processing speed IQ: 130

Overall global IQ: 136

Subtests with asterisks are those subject feels might have been compromised due to his knowledge of the Wechsler subtests.  When I remove these subtests from his profile, and prorate with the remaining “uncompromised” subtests, his composite scores decline somewhat, but the pattern of strenghts and weaknesses remain:

Overall verbal reasoning: IQ 136

 

Overall perceptual reasoning: IQ 111

 

Overall working memory IQ: 122

 

Overall processing speed IQ: 122

Overall global IQ: 129

However it’s unclear whether subject really knew enough about said subtests to justify their removal.  Given the amount of subtest scatter, it could just be a coincidence that subject performed worse on the subtests he knew little about, so I would not necessarily recommend removing the “compromised” subtests.

Pumpkin Person’s unprofessional recommendation:

It’s hard to tell subject anything about himself that he hasn’t figured out already.

Although subject is above average in all areas measured by the WAIS-IV, he is WAY above average in verbal reasoning, and has credentials in a verbal field (social sciences), thus, he should stick to jobs requiring written and/or  oral communication, and theoretical work, and avoid jobs requiring visual or spatial practical problem solving, unless he has a passionate interest in them.  The combination of extremely high Vocabulary and Similarities suggests he might be potentially quite good at writing.

And although subject describes a minor talent for statistics, his relatively weak (though still above average) spatial abilities, combined with the fact that Arithmetic is his lowest non-visual score, suggest he should probably avoid math related fields as well, unless he has a strong interest in the subject.

Overall, subject’s IQ is in the “Extremely bright” range.  Such people typically find work in high status occupations and although it’s unlikely that even someone this bright will become a multi-millionaire, they typically earn a very comfortable living, acquiring high five figure incomes by their early 30s.

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Ashkenazi IQ & the paradox of the breeder’s equation

25 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 37 Comments

Scientists Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending wrote a paper explaining how Ashkenazi Jews could have evolved IQs about a standard deviation higher than the European and Middle Eastern populations they split off of, in such a short period of time (less than a 1000 years).  They argue that because of the historic correlation between genetic fitness and wealth and because of the correlation between wealth and IQ, there was rapid selection for IQ.  They write:

Assume, for example, that the correlation between income and IQ is 0.4 (about the correlation in the United States today) and that individuals in the top 10% of income have twice the average fitness. The mean wealth of parents would be .16 standard deviations above the population average and the mean IQ of parents would be 0.4×0.16 or 0.064 IQ standard deviations, that is 1 IQ point above the population mean. This is the selective differential, and with a heritability of 0.8 IQ would increase by 0.8 points per generation. In 500 years—20 generations—average IQ would increase by 16 points.

Of course all this assumes relatively independent genetic effects (a reasonable but unproven assertion), but aside from an overly generous estimate of narrow sense heritability, the scenario they paint sounds plausible at first glance.

But then I wondered, if you can get a 16 IQ point increase in just 500 years from such a minor selection effect, then why do we only see about a 15-20 point IQ gap between blacks and whites?  Afterall, the ancestors of whites and blacks have had different selection pressures for at least 50,000 years, and presumably, the challenges of adapting to cold winters likely selected for higher IQ in non-Africans during all that time, so either the cognitive demands of cold winters were very small, or, there’s something wrong with the breeder’s equation.

I think part of the explanation is that the breeder’s equation has diminishing returns.  You might start out with a 0.4 correlation between IQ and income among incipient Ashkenazem, but with each generation of selection, the cognitive variance of this population shrinks slightly, and with the reduced variance, the correlation between IQ and incomes shrinks slightly (in the restricted population) and the parent-offspring IQ correlation also shrinks slightly, because range restriction tends to reduce correlations.

The rest of the explanation might be Charteruse’s claim of environment dependent genetic effects.  In other words, a population might be hyper-selected for genes that make them smart in medieval Europe (and similar societies like modern America), but when the environment changes dramatically, those same genes stop enhancing IQ, or even reduce it.  Perhaps only when a population is repeatedly selected for IQ in many different kinds of environments does it evolve environment independent high IQ genes.

Because if selection for IQ were really as easy as the breeder’s equation implies, then you would expect different populations to differ in IQ (and other polygenetic traits) by much greater amounts than the evidence shows.

GCTA & independent genetic effects on IQ

22 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in heritability

≈ 35 Comments

Scientist Steve Hsu writes:

GCTA (Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis)…allows an estimation of heritability due to common SNPs using relatively small sample sizes (e.g., a few thousand genotype-phenotype pairs). The new method is independent of, but delivers results consistent with, “classical” methods such as twin and adoption studies. To oversimplify, it examines pairs of unrelated individuals and computes the correlation between pairwise phenotype similarity and genotype similarity (relatedness). It has been applied to height,intelligence, and many medical and psychiatric conditions.

Apparently this technique has been used to show that (fluid) IQ has a narrow sense of heritability of at least 51%.  Not quite the 80% heritability found in twin studies but keep in mind, the latter measures broad sense heritability.

Of course as commenter chartreuse has noted, all of these studies are based on local populations so they don’t prove that high IQ folks are truly genetically smarter than low IQ folks; rather they may only show that high IQ folks have genes that are compatible with a specific environment.  If their genes were planted in a different time and place,  low IQ people might have higher IQs than high IQ people.

In order to show independent genetic effects (geneotypes that are smarter in virtually every environment), charteruse feels you would need a study of people, preferably of similar genetic background, living in different countries.  He recomends a sample taken from the entire developed World.

On the other hand, I would recommend doing a study comparing unmixed African Americans (whose ancestors had been in the United States for centuries) with unmixed West Africans living in the same part of West Africa.  Despite having the same genetic background, the latter score much lower on IQ tests than the former, presumably because of the extreme deprivation of the Third World compared to the First World.

If you had a 1000 pairs of such unrelated individuals (with one member of each pair being an unmixed African American, and the other being a West African) and you found a high correlation between IQ similarity and genetic similarity among coethnics living in such radically different environments, then this should be convincing evidence of independent genetic effects on IQ

Independent genetic effects

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in heritability

≈ 40 Comments

Anytime HBDers show commenter “Charteruse” evidence that IQ is substantially heritable, he dismisses it because it doesn’t show independent genetic effects.  In other words, twin studies and adoption research has more or less proven that that genes cause IQ within Western countries, but they have not yet proven that genes cause IQ in a wide range of environments.

In other words, if you score low on an IQ test, and then you read that IQ is highly genetic, you do not have to feel genetically inferior, because it could be that your genes only impair IQ in Western societies.  It could be that those same genes, if reared in the rain forest or the Arctic, with different foods and experiences, might make you incredibly brilliant.

Now if you have Down’s Syndrome, you would likely have an extremely low IQ in any environment, regardless of whether you were raised in the Arctic, the United States, or the jungles of Africa, but if you’re just a regular low IQ person, we just don’t know, because all the heritability studies have been confined to a small range of environments.  For example, when psychologists study identical twins raised apart, the twins and their co-twins were raised in the same country, often in the same town, so we don’t really know how highly their IQs would have correlated if they had been separated into radically different environments.

The father-child IQ correlation

It’s well known that the IQ correlation between fathers and sons is 0.45.  Part of the reason the correlation is this high is because assortative mating, where men mate with women of similar IQ, which maximizes the genetic similarity between parent and child.  I calculate that if men mated with women at random, the parent-child IQ correlation would drop to 0.3.

We know from adoption studies that how you were raised has almost no measurable effect on adult IQ within  the range of most American homes, so if men just donated their sperm to random women, and did not even meet their kids, the father-child IQ correlation would still be about 0.3.  A 0.3 correlation implies that the sperm of a man with an IQ of 145 will likely produce a kid that is 21 IQ points higher than the sperm of a man with IQ 75, even though the mother is chosen at random and neither she or the kid have any contact with him.

But what if we had a random sample of 1000 white American men donate their sperm and had their IQs tested, and then we paid a 1000 female San women living a hunter-gatherer life style in Africa to have their babies and raise them to adulthood.  If at adulthood, we tested the offspring using a version of the WAIS adapted to San culture, would we still find a 0.3 correlation between the offsprings’ IQs and the IQs of the American fathers they never knew, or would we find that genes that enhance IQ in America do not correlate with high IQ in this radically different environment, or worse still, correlate negatively?  Would the offspring of IQ 145 men still be 21 IQ points higher than the offspring of IQ 75 men?

If the father-child IQ correlation could transcend such radical differences in environment between father and child, then we could say there are independent genetic effects on IQ within the normal range of IQ variation, but if not, we would be forced to conclude that the high reported heritability of IQ is misleading.

Perhaps it would be more ethical to do the study the other way around.  Have random women in America paid to have and raise the baby of random San men.  Either way, this is a study that could easily be done.

Discussion

My own view is that the cognitive difference between humans and chimps are caused by independent genetic effects.  That is, in almost any environment, humans will be smarter than chimps.  I also think the IQ differences between the three largest most well established races (Negroids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids) are caused by independent genetic effects, because these are very ancient and have had tens of thousands of years to evolve under many different kinds of circumstances.

I am not however 100% sure that the IQ differences within macro-races (East Asians > Native Americans or  Ashkenazi Jews > Whites > Arabs) are caused by independent genetic effects, because some of these differences supposedly evolved so so recently (Ashkenazi Jews > Whites) and do not appear to be corroborated by differences in brain size, so  more evidence is needed.

I’m also skeptical that the IQ differences between individuals are caused mostly by independent genetic effects.  As commenters Charteruse and Swank have noted, if IQ was highly selected during human evolution, then there should be relatively little genetic variation among humans (since all the low IQ genes were weeded out), especially humans of the same ethnic group.  We know that in any correlation, when there is extreme range restriction, correlations tend to shrink, so the correlation between IQ and genes should be small among humans.

That’s not to deny that the 10 IQ point difference between Ashkenazem and Whites is genetic and could not have evolved in the last 800 years, however it might imply that the difference is not an independent genetic effect.  In others words, if Jews and Gentiles were raised together in a radically different environment like the arctic or the jungle, the IQ gap might vanish, or even reverse, but no such studies have ever been done so we don’t know.

But it’s worth noting that genetic mutations that enhance IQ seem surprisingly rare.  For example, we’ve heard of genetic disorders that impair IQ or genetic disorders that enhance traits like height, but the evidence for genetic disorders that enhance IQ is slim.

If IQ enhancing mutations are rare, then evolution can only raise IQ by acting on existing genetic variation, and because there’s already been so much natural selection for high IQ in humans, such variation can not be that great.

 

 

 

Were Native Americans too smart to be slaves?

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 70 Comments

hqdefault

One of the biggest mysteries of history is why did White Americans travel all the way to sub-Saharan Africa to get slaves, when they had a huge population of Native Americans they could have enslaved.  One reason is that Native Americans were more respected than Blacks.  But why?  In searching for answers,  Dinesh D’souza suggests three reasons in his book The End of Racism:

  1. Native Americans were respected because they lived in the Americas, which Whites viewed as a paradise.  The Garden of Eden.  By contrast Blacks lived in the thick dense burning hot jungles of sub-Sahara, surrounded by incects and massive snakes.  Whites viewed Africa as hell on Earth.
  2.  Native Americans were reddish in skin tone, and that’s a colour Whites respected.  By contrast, Blacks were blackish in skin tone an that’s a colour Whites (and all races) associated with darkness and evil.
  3.  Englishmen discovered Blacks at the same time they discovered chimpanzees, and in the same place: Africa.  This caused scientists to look for similarities between Blacks and monkeys such as prognathism.

And so it is for these three reasons that Blacks were considered subhuman enough to be slaves, but Native Americans were considered noble savages who reminded Whites of their own ancestral past.

But that still doesn’t fully explain why Whites would risk their lives and travel all the way to Africa to get slaves, and so we see on pg 85, the biggest reason Native Americans weren’t slaves:

…Indians proved quite adept at escaping, and when this happened they faded into the landscape; it was extremely difficult to retrieve runaway Indians who knew the territory.  By contrast, Africans could run but they could not easily hide.

So unlike Africans, Indians could adapt: take whatever situation they’re in, and turn it around to their advantage.  As my high school chemistry teacher would say “That’s really what intelligence is.”

So in sounds like Whites got so tired of being constantly outsmarted by their Indian slaves that they risked their lives traveling all the way to Africa to find slaves who couldn’t outwit them.

This might explain why Native Americans, despite being the most socially and economically disadvantaged people in society, score 10 IQ points higher on the SAT than African Americans do, even though African Americans are part White.  If African Americans did not have White admixture, they might score close to a full standard deviation behind Native Americans.

Scholar J.P. Rushton argued that Mongoloids were more genetically advanced than Caucasoids who were more genetically advanced than Negroids.  Rushton believed this because Mongoloids were the newest race, and had the most ice age exposure, while Negroids were the oldest race, and had the least ice age exposure.

I find it interesting that even the least intelligent form of Mongoloid (Native Americans) outsmarted the most intelligent form of Caucasoid (Europeans), during slavery.

I also find it interesting that Native Americans were able to independently create a civilization, something not even Whites did!

Racial differences in SAT scores

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 20 Comments

college_admissions_test1

Image found here

Commenter chartreuse argues that not only is the SAT a valid measure of intelligence, but that it’s even better than official IQ tests.  I wouldn’t go that far, but the SAT is unique in that it’s been used to collect data on millions of test takers.  For that reason, it’s an especially reliable source for documenting racial differences in IQ within America.  One can convert SAT scores on the post-1995 SAT into IQ equivalents using this formula I created:

IQ equivalent (U.S. norms) = 23.835 + 0.081(new SAT score)

One problem is that although the SAT is given to an enormous sample of Americans, it is not given to a representative sample of Americans.  Only about the most academically successful third of American 17-year-olds take the SAT,  however one might crudely adjust for this filtering.

For example, the average white SAT taker has an SAT score of 1068 which equates to an IQ of 110 (U.S. norms); 107 (U.S. white norms).  But we know that the average IQ of all post-boomer Whites is 103 (U.S. white norms); 100 (U.S. white norms).  Thus in the chart below, I just assume that the college bound segment of each race is 7 IQ points higher (U.S. norms) than the general U.S. population for each race:

race mean sat of college bound seniors mean iq equivalent of college bound seniors (u.s. norms) mean iq equivalent of college bound seniors (u.s. white norms) mean estimated iq in the general u.s. population (u.s. norms) mean estimated iq in the general u.s. population (u.s. white norms)
asian americans 1091  112  109  105  102
whites 1068  110  107  103  100
american indians 982  103  100  96  93
mexican americans 916  98  95  91  88
puerto ricans 917  98  95 91  88
other hispanics 932  99  96  92  89
african americans 864  94  91  87  83

If anything, the chart above overestimates the general population score gaps between different races, because it assumes a 7 point IQ gap between the SAT population and the general population in every race, but in non-Asian minorities, that gap could be larger because a smaller percentage of those races go to college, and thus the college bound elite are even more filtered for ability.

It should be noted that the relatively small gap between Whites and Asian Americans might be because (1) the SAT does not emphasize spatial ability, and (2) Asian Americans are not equivalent to East Asian Americans, but include non-white caucasoids and southeast Asians who have australoid admixture.

What was Ronald Reagan’s IQ?

16 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 16 Comments

official_portrait_of_president_reagan_1981

Commenter “Tenn” asked me to estimate the IQ of several people, most notably Ronald Reagan, and what better day to do so than President’s Day?

In 2005, Reagan was elected the Greatest American of all time.  He was unbelievably influential because not only was he President for eight years, but his Vice President became President for four years, and his Vice President’s son became President for another eight years.  The Democratic party was so shell-shocked by Reagan’s success, that they moved economically to the right during the Clinton administration.

Reagan was influential, not only in changing the trajectory of American politics for decades, but was instrumental in making America the World’s sole super power.

Historians can debate whether his influence was positive or negative, but anyone who changed the World as much as Reagan did, would likely have an IQ way above 100.

On the other hand, as far as I know, Reagan was the only U.S. President to have been mentally impaired during old age.  Thus by definition, Reagan’s IQ during old age, was in the bottom 2.27% of American Presidents. This might be an underestimate because some U.S. Presidents have not (yet) lived to old age, on the other hand it might be an overestimate because Reagan might still have been the only one to become impaired, even if there had been 88 Presidents.  But assuming it’s roughly correct, it implies that if all 44 U.S. Presidents took an IQ test when they were very old, Reagan would have likely scored two standard deviations below the average U.S. President.

Of course, the relevant question is not how Reagan would have scored when he had Alzheimer’s, but how he would have scored at his peak.

In one of the most fascinating studies in the history of psychometrics, Ian Deary and a team of other scholars, tracked down 101 people who took an IQ test at age 11, and tested them again at age 77, on the exact same test!

They found a 0.63 correlation between IQ measured at 11 (by age 10,  IQ more or less stabilizes within measurement error) and IQ tested 66 years later.  Because the sample was somewhat restricted (the standard deviation was only 77%  of the national SD), the 0.63 correlation underestimates the relationship in a representative sample, however since the IQ variance of U.S. Presidents is similarly restricted (they seem to have a mean IQ of about 130  with an SD of 12, compared to the national white average of about 100 with an SD of about 15),  I will use the 0.63 correlation.

So if Reagan’s elderly IQ was two standard deviations below the elderly IQ of the average U.S. President, his peak IQ was likely 2 SD(0.63) = 1.26 SD below the peak IQ of the average U.S. President.  As mentioned above, U.S. Presidents have peak IQs (U.S. white norms) of about 130 with a restricted SD of 12.

Thus:

Reagan’s likely peak IQ = -1.26(12) + 130

Reagan’s likely peak IQ = 115

The standard error of the estimate is 9.32, so you might say with 95% confidence that Reagan’s peak IQ was anywhere from 96 to 134.

Conservatives might argue he had a towering IQ of 134, since he was a supremely important President who wrote eloquent love letters to wife Nancy, but arrogant liberal professors might argue he was closer to 96 since in their eyes, he did enormous damage to the most vulnerable in society.

9.32 points might seem like a large standard error, but it’s actually smaller than the standard error you would get if you tried to predict someone’s Wechsler IQ from their SAT scores, or if you tried to predict someone’s Raven IQ from their Stanford Binet IQ.  Psychometrics is an inexact science.

 

 

The IQ of George H.W. Bush

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 15 Comments

In honor of President’s Day, I am going to do a few posts today about U.S. presidents, but because it’s also Family Day (here in Ontario), I will start by discussing the Bush family (a family of Presidents, thus combining Family Day and President’s Day!).

A reader asked me to estimate the IQ of George H.W. Bush and this is fairly easy, because we know from SAT scores that his son (George W. Bush) has an IQ equivalent of about 125 (U.S. norms).

The IQ correlation between one parent and one child is 0.45, so if all we knew about George H.W. Bush was that his son has an IQ of 125, our best guess for George H.W. Bush’s IQ would be 45% as far from the U.S average as his son:

Expected IQ = 0.45(25) + 100

Expected IQ = 111

However we also know that George H.W. Bush is a U.S. president, thus when guessing his IQ, we should regress the expected IQ, not to the average of all Americans, but to the average of American presidents, which appears to be about 130.

The average U.S. president would likely have an offspring with an IQ of 30(0.45) + 100 = 114, so George H.W. Bush has a son that is 11 points above the average of presidential kids. Thus George H. W. Bush would have an expected IQ of:

Expected IQ = 0.45(11) + 130

Expected IQ = 135

So my guess is that George H.W. Bush was about 10 IQ points smarter than George W. Bush.  This may help explain why the father had the good sense not to topple Saddam Hussein, but the son didn’t.

However his son is 11 points smarter than the average President’s offspring.  This may help explain why the son was smart enough to become President just like his Dad, something the vast majority Presidents’ kids never come close to achieving.

Now, some might object that in a restricted sample like U.S. presidents, the parent-child correlation would be lower than 0.45, however since that correlation was likely derived from testing offspring when they are very young, and since George W. Bush was tested near adulthood, it’s probably an underestimate anyway, so reducing it in a restricted population would be redundant.

Of course, this is just a rough statistical prediction, and should not be considered a substitute for actual test scores.

 

Pumpkin Person breaks up with his fiancée

14 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in pumpkinperson

≈ 47 Comments

I wanted to post something about love in honor of Valentine’s Day.  Long time readers know that I have long had a fiancée  and we had plans to marry in 2016.  Tragically, our relationship has ended, but as my hero, the late New York Times columnist David Carr observed, all good things must come to an end, and when they do, you can either be bitter that they ended, or grateful that you ever had them at all.

Bill O’reilly, Howard Stern & the dangers of testocracy

13 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 18 Comments

I was watching Bill O’reilly interview Kristen Powers (who I adore) on Fox News tonight and once again he was complaining about how unrealistic Bernie Sander’s socialist vision was, but then he made a good point about the authoritarianism of socialism.

He said that had he been British, he never would have become a successful talk show host, because they gave all the kids a test at 16 and if you do poorly, you’re not allowed to go to college and are confined to the working class.  O’reilly said he would have flunked the test because was a thug at 16.

I believe the test Bill was referring to is the 11+ exam, which I assume people took at 11, not 16.  But O’reilly’s point still stands.

According to the internet, Bill O’reilly scored an astonishing 1585 on the older much harder version of the SAT. equivalent to an IQ of nearly 170, but I saw an episode of his show where O’reilly laughed at the fictitious number as an example of why you should never believe what you read on the Internet. He said his actual SAT scores were nowhere near that high.  Indeed they were low enough that he attended the same college as Howard Stern (who also claims to have unimpressive SATs) and who O’reilly remembers because Stern was the only student on campus taller than he was.

But years later, O’reilly realized that if he wanted to be taken seriously in the elitist world of media, he would have to get a better degree.  He became a student at Harvard, and the fact that he, like Howard Stern, dominated extremely competitive and verbal industries, indicates high IQ, so why the mediocre test scores?

Is the SAT biased against kids from working class schools?  Probably more than official IQ tests are.  Another factor could be that if IQ becomes increasingly genetic as we get older (as some studies suggest), tests taken at 17 or younger do not fully reflect genetic ability.  A final possibility is that these men are just not that smart.  Although Stern has many signs of high IQ (super rich, Jewish, super tall) his scatological humor indicates very low IQ.and after September 11th, he recklessly encouraged the U.S. to bomb any Muslim country at random, at least according to Bill Maher.

Bill O’reilly seems very smart sometimes and also has signs of high IQ (very rich, funny, Harvard degree, very tall), but his small looking cranium, extreme patriotism and disdain for Noam Chomsky, indicates a closed mind.  Also eminent scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins considers him unintelligent, so that carries some weight.

But regardless of how smart O’reilly and Stern might be, I’m glad their unimpressive test scores did not prevent them from reaching the top of American life, because that’s what makes America so fascinating. The market decides who is king.