Tag Archives: Robert Sapolsky

Discussion about Free Will & some guest thoughts from our very own Anime

01 Thursday Feb 2024

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In light of all this discussion about the soul, I thought this interview with Robert Sapolsky was relevant. Sapolsky is a fierce opponent of free will which he defines as a behavior that has just occurred, completely independently of the brain’s history (including genetic history).

Actually, as James Flynn has hinted, the closest science has come to proving Sapolsky’s definition of free will is “non-shared environment” which psycholgists define as the correlation between identical twins raised together subtracted from the correlation between the same person measured twice on some phenotype. Since that former correlation measures both genes and the only environment you were raised in, the fact that it’s still less than the correlation you have with yourself implies there is something about you that transcends both your seed and the garden you were planted in. 

Of course Sapolsky would scoff at the idea of calling this free will, as there are all kinds of environmental affects independent of the family you were raised in such as peer groups, that special teacher who inspired you, the media etc. Indeed Jensen argued that shared environment was a great many mico-biological effects like getting punched in the head in the playground to getting less oxygen in the womb. However until non-shared environment can be explained, it continues to be described as “luck” and luck is just unexplained variance. What’s interesting is that while shared environment goes from about 40% of the variance to zero as we move from childhood to later adulthood when it comes to IQ, non-shared environment stays at 20% across the life-span which as Flynn noted, is exactly what you’d expect from “luck”.

Speaking of IQ, our very own Anime (aka Illumanaticatblog) had some random thoughts on the WAIS he wanted to share:

Thoughts on Robert Sapolsky

15 Sunday Nov 2020

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I’ve long argued that the higher your IQ, the less likely you are to believe in God and it often takes an extra high IQ to reject religion when you were raised in a religious home. The brilliant Robert Sapolsky (who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University) is a great example. Despite being raised Orthodox Jewish, he achieved secularism by his early teens, which evolved into atheism, and eventually utter atheism. My own unpublished research suggests that creationists average about 15 IQ points lower than non-theists. Extrapolating from here, it would be interesting if agnostics (like me) are less intelligent (on average) than atheists who are less intelligent than utter atheists but I don’t know if the relationship is quite that linear.

I’ve also long argued that the higher your IQ, the less racist you are and Sapolsky is also very non-racist. Alt-right commenters like “Philosopher” will think “he’s just pretending to be non-racist to manipulate gullible goyim into race mixing so they’ll be easier for Jews to dominate” but in fact we see that he is anti-racist even when his own ethnic interests are on the line, stating:

We humans are like most other social primates in that we very quickly, very unconsciously, very automatically tend to divide the world into “us” and “them”…I grew up as an Orthodox Jew, which was the religiosity that I broke away from. Now I am part of the way-too-small community of Jews who are anti-Zionist. It’s a little bit horrifying that among American Jews, 99 percent of the time, you’re finding people whose views are very different from my wife’s and mine. We’re not fans of what has been done in Palestine over the last 70 years.

This shows his non-racism is not an act, but a genuine product of high IQ. The fact that the negative correlation between IQ and racism might exist even within the Jewish community suggests the correlation is largely causal, and not merely an artifact of high IQ Westerners being brainwashed by liberal propaganda. Although intelligence is the ability to adapt, being too smart is genetically maladaptive in dominant races because the high IQ are abstract enough to pursue moral interests which typically conflict with the dominant group’s genetic interests.

Sapolsky is an excellent lecturer and I especially enjoyed his talk on behavioral genetics. He thinks classical twin studies where heritability = 2(MZ twins raised together corrrelation – DZ twins raised together) overesitmate heritability because, like many liberals, he thinks MZ twins raised together are not only more genetically similar than DZ twins raised together, but environmentally more similar (so the correlation difference can not be exclusively credited to genes).

He’s also skeptical that the MZ twins raised apart correlation = heritability because even separated twins may have correlated environments.

He alludes to an idea I never considered that would seem to solve both those problems:

Heritability = 2(MZ twins raised apart correlation – DZ twins raised apart correlation).

Has anyone ever calculated this?