> identical twins raised apart were still in the womb at the same time.
This made me think: since the womb environment is important, how is the environment of a womb shared with a twin different from that of a womb all to yourself? How do we know that twin studies are a good guide to non-twin IQ in the first place?
From: (Anonymous) 2012-12-24 04:26 pm (UTC)
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Interesting thought. Quick, someone do twin vs triplet studies! (Assuming the effect is linear... )
You note that Shalizi gives the impression of being an extremely bright fellow. You should also note that he has a clear political agenda and is cognitively motivated to find arguments and evidence against the hereditarian position. The conjunction of these two facts provides, I think, a good reason for discounting the evidential force of his apparently sound arguments. If the facts didn't support his case, he would probably still be able to come up with persuasive arguments for the same conclusion.
Yeah, I'd like to do that, but his arguments seem pretty good (also, everyone in this field seems motivated by an ideological agenda, so it doesn't really change his position relative to anyone else). Did you read the piece? Find any particular holes in them?
Twins sharing a womb compete for resources meaning that being in the same womb could increase the variance of IQs between twins. Correcting for this resource conflict effect would cause us to increase our estimate of the genetic component of IQ variance in the general population.
From: danarmak 2012-12-24 06:41 pm (UTC)
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By that logic, if the total resource pool is bounded, twins should have lower IQ than the general population. Which would be another reason twin IQ would not be a good guide to IQ in general.
This doesn't control for all in utero effects, but shared placenta identical twins are more similar to each other than separate placenta identical twins, to a statistically significant degree. Edited at 2012-12-25 03:28 am (UTC)
Speaking of shared environmental factors, even though I really hate when people are overly PC with their terminology, I still flinched at your use of the word "retarded". Is that still a technical term, or is there a concise way of expressing the same affliction without using the R word as a descriptor? Even something as simple as "persons with retardation" as opposed to "retarded people", that is, treating it as a separate condition inflicted on a person rather than a measure of that person's identity, can go a long way along the PC scale (at least, that's what I've gathered re: persons with disabilities).
Retarded is a technical term for people with IQ under 70 accepted by for example the ICD. I am wary of replacing it for a few reasons. First, kind of annoying that scientists have to change their language in deference to the public misusing it. Second, euphemism treadmill - I expect the public to misuse the next one just as much. Third, the main candidate for replacement, "mentally disabled", seems especially bad in that if it gets euphemism treadmilled to "stupid person I don't like" the same way "retarded" did, then all of a sudden all disabled people are caught up in its halo. "Person with retardation" is worse in a few ways. First, it confirms that this is a Bad Thing. When there's something that's not Bad, we don't pussyfoot around it - when I say "blond person", no one corrects it to "person with blondness", so the very fact that I'm trying it is suggesting they must be an inferior person who needs protection from their qualities in a way that just describing them with a technical term isn't. Second, it makes it sound like retardation is a separate "thing"; this might sort of make sense in conditions where it's due to a specific disease, but in a lot of cases they just have really low IQ. Imagine reworking "short person" to "person with shortness". All of a sudden it's like they have an affliction. Third, I can't immediately think of any evidence for the belief that [adjective] [noun] is a way of saying that the noun is more fundamentally adjective than [noun] with [adjective] is; this seems to just be an affectation used in situations like this one? Nevertheless, I've changed it to "mentally disabled" in order to avoid a fight. Edited at 2012-12-24 11:41 pm (UTC)
Eh. The older I get, the more I incline towards the idea that IQ tests don't actually measure intelligence, they just measure how well you do on tests. And certainly there are tricks and shortcuts and rules for answering questions that, once you know (or have been taught them) mean you score higher. I've done it myself; taken a test where I didn't know the particular knack for a certain question, then later on when I run into that question again, I know the 'rule' for solving it and so I do better on test no. 2 rather than test no. 1 not because I have had a sudden boost in intelligence but because I know the trick.
Look, if you want smart kids, then your best bet is to have them born to well-off parents who can provide a stable family life, proper nutrition, good schools and enrichment activities out the wazoo, and where there is a family background of having had good nutrition, stable homes, good schools and plenty of extra-curricular activities.
You might be the world's greatest composer of music for the harpsichord, but if your life options are a minimum wage job in a box factory and you've never even seen a harpsichord, then your talents are going to go unrecognised.
Yes, you can learn to do IQ tests better and thus get a higher score... but that's not really a good argument against them, given that they still give valid results if you haven't had practice. If you aren't trained on them, they correlate pretty reliably with various life outcomes, but if you get an inflated score on a test because you've practiced, your inflated score no longer correlates with life outcomes.
Which is exactly what we'd expect to happen if they did measure some real talent, given that your performance on anything is a combination of talent + practice and it's impossible to create a meaningful test where practice gave no additional gain. As long as you haven't had any extra practice, the test measures solely talent and is reliable; and then when you get more practice, the test starts becoming increasingly unreliable.
Though that's assuming that we're talking about an IQ test in the style of Raven's matrices, which is a purely abstract test of a kind that a person likely haven't encountered before. The picture gets somewhat more complicated if we're talking about something like a "define this word" problem, where you will already have gained practice on the problem domain from your daily life. But it looks like smarter people tend to both learn the meanings of words faster, and to also like spending more time doing stuff like reading that will increase their vocabulary... so performance on such a test will still correlate with intelligence when age and culture is controlled for, though there will be considerably more noise in the results. Which is probably a big part of the reason why tests like Raven's matrices are considered much better measures of intelligence.
From: (Anonymous) 2012-12-26 02:05 am (UTC)
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The book you want is probably not Dobzhansky's "Genetic Diversity and Human Equality," but his source, Heber's "Rehabilitation of Families at Risk for Mental Retardation" project (n=40). I don't know what 1968 document Dobzhansky cites, but here is a 250 page version from 1972: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=ED087142
From: (Anonymous) 2012-12-26 03:04 am (UTC)
dk | (Link)
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I think it is important to ask yourself why you care about heritability and assess each piece of evidence in light of each reason you might care. reasons to care: designing methods of parenting and schooling; eugenics; genetic engineering.
In particular, why you care about heritability determines whether you care about narrow or broad heritability.
Maternal effects are pessimistic for each of those three goals, at least as phrased. If maternal effects turn out to be eating licorice while pregnant, that's an easy effect to exploit; but if they are about malnutrition at an early age, that's hard to discover and hard to fix.
A common implicit argument that Shalizi only implicitly addresses is that "identifiable environment explains no variance, therefore IQ is not malleable." Proportion of variation only address why the currently existing population varies, not what might cause it to vary in the future. Iodine supplementation is a powerful intervention, but most populations either use it everywhere or nowhere, so it explains little of the variance within those populations. That Heber has a magic touch endowing 37 points of IQ is compatible with high heritability because he has only touched 20 kids.
But if Heber says that he did it by following standard advice, he is simply mistaken. Heritability and its complement, the variance due to environment, do tell us about the power of common environmental differences. If it is true that shared environment has no effect, then Bryan Caplan is correct.
In the paragraph about heritability of IQ at different ages, this sentence is incomplete:
That makes sense; at 3 you would expect.
"I'm ... more interested in the fact that IQ tests are clearly measuring something and we can use that to find things out about this mysterious idea of 'intelligence' even if it turns out to be something else entirely." Well said. But you could say it even better if your ontology condoned mereological promiscuity, and its parallel for properties. In other words, let's just call this thing "intelligence" even if it isn't a basic, tidily encapsulated causal nexus in neurology or cognitive psychology. So what if it's an amalgam? A pencil is an amalgam of wood, graphite, metal, and rubber, and you don't need the concept "pencil" to do science, but that doesn't mean there are no such things as pencils. Edited at 2012-12-30 03:55 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous) 2013-01-04 12:49 pm (UTC)
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Heber's results are very dubious, because he went to prison for embezzling much of the funds of that very expensive IQ study. Moreover, at age 14 the treatment group's advantage had narrowed to 10 points, and even that difference probably did not represent real gains because there was no difference in school achievement between the treatment and control groups. There are other problems with this study, including the fact that Heber never subjected his interpretations or data to peer review. There's a Wikipedia article on this study under the name Milwaukee Project.
Fetal effects are unlikely to a be a source of twin similarity in IQ. It's more likely that they are a source of twin dissimilarity, i.e., non-shared environmental variance, because twins compete for resources in the womb.
The argument that there are substantial gene-environment interaction or correlation effects that inflate IQ heritability estimates is now essentially dead due to studies like Davies et al. in Mol Psychiatry. 2011 Oct;16(10):996-1005.
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