Genes, IQ and "Race Realism"

Now here's a news story guaranteed to get all the usual crackpots abuzzing over the holiday season.

DALLAS — Scientists in North Carolina say they have identified a gene that affects IQ, a finding that, if confirmed, would be a significant step toward understanding the genetic basis for intelligence.

The new research could also have ethical implications because the effect of the gene appears to be quite dramatic: The scientists say that males who inherit a particular version of the gene have, on average, an IQ that is 20 points lower than males who don’t.

[...]

The researchers studied about 300 children with an average age of 10. The children, all Caucasian, came from six counties in the Cleveland area. As a group, males — but not females — who had the variant gene had IQ scores about 20 points lower than males who didn’t.

This variant would seem to be less than a total obstacle to joining Mensa, however.

Jirtle cautioned that inheriting the different version of the gene did not guarantee a lower IQ. Although as a group average IQ scores were lower, there were still males who had the variant gene and a higher IQ. (Two boys with the variant version of the gene had very high IQs of 160, Jirtle said.) And males with the more common form of the gene can also have a lower IQ.

I can just see the crackpots rubbing their hands with glee right about now: could this be the magical gene which "explains" why blacks are doomed to fall short in the intellectual stakes?

Jirtle predicts that about 25 percent of Caucasians carry the variant gene. An international database that catalogs genetic variation states that the variant gene was found in 28 percent of Japanese living in Tokyo and 24 percent of Han Chinese living in Beijing. The variant gene was not found in a population of Yoruba people living in Ibadan, Nigeria.

At this point the "race realists" leap up into the air shouting "YES!!!! OMGWTFBBQ!!!!"; the thing is, though, that the absent variant in the Yoruba is the one that supposedly lowers IQ in Caucasians ... Bow down before the brilliant Yoruba, ye mighty, and despair!

I'm just joking, of course: as I've explained at length previously, I think it's the height of stupidity to expect a gene variant which has effect A on population X to have the same effect in population Y, and in any case, as Jirtle's work hasn't even been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet, let alone met the acid test of replication, you can count me as sceptical that this research has any real value whatsoever (that the effect seems sex-linked just buttresses my disbelief). That said, one thing this report does illustrate is that I was justified in pointing out the curious bias "race realists" [sic] have when it comes to such studies, to wit, the expectation that any genetic findings which show up as underpinning intelligence and which vary between groups must necessarily do so to the detriment of "blacks" (of which the Yoruba are but one group amongst many). For all one knows, when all the data comes in, it might be that the underlying genetics point in precisely the opposite direction to that the "race realists" have always been expecting it would, though my own suspicion is that no consistent "racial" differences in intelligence will ever be found.

[Via Slashdot, which is carrying this story.]

Comments

[Barkeley]

For a particular website somewhere in the blogosphere (the site's name rhymes with Eugene Express), this seems to be, shall we say, an uncomfortable development. I have seen comments like

"...am dubious that this current claim will turn out to be true."

"...this is exactly the opposite of what the Jensen-Rushton theory would predict."

"a 20 IQ hit is too much. no way."

"They don't even say if the IQ hit is for homozygotes or not"

I don't believe I saw the same level of skepticism when Lahn's paper came out. And I definitely haven't seen certain people breathlessly spreading the supposed implications of this particular research even though Lahn's own finding has yet to be replicated (not that the lack of replication cast any doubt on his finding).

[Abiola]

"I don't believe I saw the same level of skepticism when Lahn's paper came out."

Well, of course, we already know what the facts must be, don't we, so any research which contradicts what we know must be of no merit! Still, I'm sure some of them will find a way to twist these reports to service their agenda anyway, no matter how farfetched the "logic" [sic] required to do so will need to be.

[Chuckles]

My initial thoughts were exactly the same when I saw the news a couple of days back. How about the fellows who keep on insisting that the evidence keeps turning out "the way it should" and hence supports their hypothesis?

[...I think it's the height of stupidity to expect a gene variant which has effect A on population X to have the same effect in population Y...]

Not to mention the myopia of the "realists" considering that they dont have any idea of how many "genes" affecting IQ exist - or their specific effects. The hullabaloo over Lahn was really quite childish - especially with regards to those who immediately generalized to intelligence. It speaks to their illiteracy, I think - more folk taxonomy and less science on their part.

Again, it says something about the bias of these people (their Kuhnian paradigm) i.e. the research they are interested in isnt going in the other direction, i.e. genes that depress IQ but are absent in non favored populations.

This is another perfect example of social narratives influencing "science".

[Kevin Donoghue]

Reading James Watson's "DNA" recently, I was a bit surprised to learn that his IQ score was a modest 122. That demolished (a) my last excuse for my lousy academic record and (b) what little faith I had left in IQ as a measure of anything worth bothering about.

But even if we (pretend to) take the idea seriously, doesn't it make sense that Africans would have keener brains? Their ancestors had to survive in an environment where much of the wildlife is seriously hostile, whereas mine haven't encountered anything much worse than a wild boar in a very long time.

[Abiola]

"doesn't it make sense that Africans would have keener brains?"

It's a theoretical possibility, but somehow I doubt it. Ignoring for the moment just how easy it is to cook up "just so stories" one way or the other (e.g. the old claim that whites were naturally more intelligent because of the harsh requirements of the European winter), the fact is that in West Africa - the most densely populated part of the continent - many peoples have been farming for at least as long as groups like the Germanic tribes or the Yayoi settlers of Japan, and agriculturalists tend to be so fertile that dangers like predation don't make any real difference to population growth.

My expectation is that for every gene of this sort we'll find in one group, there'll be another which has been selected to make up for its downside, with everything coming out in the wash across "races." To the extent that certain groups are somehow intellectually advantaged by selection, they're likely to be much smaller than entire "races", e.g. perhaps the San of Southern Africa, the Yanomamo of South America and the peoples of Papua New Guinea are the true intellectual supermen of our species, and they've just never had the chance to strut their stuff in a modern context yet.

[Jim]

"little faith I had left in IQ as a measure of anything worth bothering about."

No lie. The core silliness of the whole debate is all the whiote coat seriosity of the claims and counterclaims about the impeccabililty of methods when the basic issue is as yet so poorly defined. What exactly is intelligence? It seems to be treated as a static trait, when it could just as validly be described as an activity. That BTW is a better etymology of the word anyway. This is one reason the tests are such poor instruments; how do you measure something you can't even define?

The "race realists" are about as much of an issue as UFO enthusiasts, but this crap does affect real people when it comes to public educational policy.

"Intelligence" literally means "plucking [from] among" , making sense out of a tangle. Teachers know from careers of experience how little this is some inherent trait and how much it has to do with prior experience - a third language is always easier to learn even if it is completely unlike your second language, music students have a leg up on math, on and on. And the tests themsleves have to be written in one form of the language rather than another, (I know kids should learn the academic standard of the language, but intelligence tests should test intelligence rather than language.) and that introduces a bias, use these examples from real life rather than others, and there's another bias, and so on.

This is one big reason that the tests are such biased instruments. How can you correct for differing levels and varieties of life experience in formulating your test?

"But even if we (pretend to) take the idea seriously, doesn't it make sense that Africans would have keener brains? Their ancestors had to survive in an environment where much of the wildlife is seriously hostile, whereas mine haven't encountered anything much worse than a wild boar in a very long time."

1. Saxons?
2. And other than the English, there isn't much more vicious than a wild boar. A boar will open you up like a trout.

[David B]

For the benefit of those who may be mystified by some of the above comments, the following comments were made (not by me) when this story was reported in GNXP:

"The Dallas news article says that they have not published this yet in a scientific journal. They said that the data was presented at a meeting in North Carolina. Randy Jirtle is a researcher at Duke who has been studying the IGF2 receptor for many years. The IGF2R gene is imprinted in some mammals but not in primates. The IGF2R gene had previously been connected to IQ by Plomin's group in 1998, Plomin retracted the claim when a much larger cohort failed to show any association.

I am dubious that this current claim will turn out to be true. They measured 300 ten year old caucasian children, the effect was only seen in boys and the variant allele presumably linked to lower IQ is present in about 25% of caucasians. Thus it appears that the group with the putative effect was only about 40 boys. In ten year olds the environment still accounts for a large portion of the variation in IQ. Also they said that the variant allele had a massive effect of depressing average IQ by 20 points--yet they had two boys with the supposedly deleterious variant allele who had IQs of 160 (that does not sound too plausible). The lower IQ-associated variant allele was absent in Africans and present at higher levels in Asians than in Caucasians, this is exactly the opposite of what the Jensen-Rushton theory would predict."