Wednesday, 30 July 2014

Morning sickness and child intelligence


Morning sickness may mean healthier, intelligent baby opined the headline, and although no link was given, the journal and lead author were mentioned, which lead me to a brand new meta-analysis of the effects of treated and untreated morning sickness on child development. Within that analysis there is one 2009 paper by Nulman which included intelligence testing. So, the “news” is five years old, but interesting nonetheless.

Long-term Neurodevelopment of Children Exposed to Maternal Nausea
and Vomiting of Pregnancy and Diclectin. Irena Nulman, MD, Joanne Rovet, PhD, Maru Barrera, PhD, Dafna Knittel-Keren, MA, Brian M. Feldman, MD,
and Gideon Koren, MD. (J Pediatr 2009;155:45-50).

In a study comparing long term development of children whose mothers suffered from NVP to children born to women not experiencing NVP, Nulman et al. recruited 3 groups of children: 45 born to mothers with NVP treated with doxylamine–pyridoxine, 47 born to mothers with untreated NVP, and 29 born to mothers with no NVP. Children aged 3–7 years received a comprehensive set of psychological tests including measures of intelligence, neurocognitive abilities and behavior. Mothers were assessed for IQ, socioeconomic status and educational level and severity of their NVP symptoms. Although all children scored in the normal range for IQ, those who were exposed to NVP scored higher than the non-exposed group on performance IQ (P < 0.02), NEPSY verbal fluency (P < 0.003), phonological processing (P < 0.004), and McCarthy numerical memory (P < 0.004). Regression analysis adjusted for child’s sex and age identified the predictors of enhanced results to be NVP severity and maternal IQ.

Children’s intelligence was evaluated with the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence–Revised (WPPSI-R) or the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale
of Intelligence, Third Edition (WPPSI-III) which provided an index of Verbal IQ (VIQ), Performance IQ (PIQ), and Full-Scale IQ (FSIQ). Children also underwent: 6 NEPSY subtests (Visual Attention, Verbal Fluency, Comprehension of Instructions, Visuomotor Precision, Sentence Repetition, Narrative Memory); the Preschool Language Scale (PLS-III or PLS-IV); the Beery Developmental Test of Visual-Motor
Integration (VMI); Wide Range Assessment of Visual Motor Abilities (WRAVMA) Pegboard and Matching subtests, and 3 memory subtests of McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities (Pictorial Memory and Forward and Backward Numerical
Memory). All tests administered were applicable to the range of ages in the study cohort. In addition, mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Conner’s Parent Rating Scale questionnaires to assess child behavior and attention problems for children aged 3 to 17 years. The physician also assessed children’s general health, weight, height, and head circumference. Maternal FSIQ was determined with the Vocabulary and Matrix Reasoning subtests of Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI). SES was measured with the Hollingshead Four Factor Index, which provides a 5-point social class ranking (1 = high, 5 = low) on the basis of parents’ education and employment.

The key findings are in Table II.

                              NVP+diclectin(45)  NVP no diclectin(47)  No NVP(29)

Mother’s tests
WASI Full Scale IQ  107.5 sd 8.8           108.9 sd 11.7          106.3 sd 11.6     NS

Children’s scores

WPPSI Verbal IQ     112.2 sd 13.4          112.9 sd 13.57        110.3 sd 17.9      NS
Performance IQ       120.9 sd 13.9          112.6 sd 13.1           114.9 sd 14.2   P .010
Full Scale IQ             118.7 sd 13.4          114.6 sd 12.8           112.0 sd 15.5     NS

Comment: The mothers are slightly above average, the children apparently very much above average. Either the fathers are all extremely bright or the tests for the children are over-estimates, perhaps a standardisation issue. It would appear that Performance IQ is about 4 to 6 points higher in mothers who were treated for morning sickness, though this is not statistically significant in these small samples. There were significant differences in fluency, phonological processing, and pictorial and numerical memory.

NEPSY Verbal Fluency   11.85 sd 2.57      11.55 sd 2.50         9.93 sd 3.06   P = .013
Phonological Processing 11.02 sd 2.81       10.75 sd 3.31        9.07 sd 3.44   P = .033
McCarthy Pictorial Mem 12.43 sd 2.97      10.37 sd .32        10.62 sd 3.21   P = .017
Numerical Mem               11.68 sd 2.21       11.39 sd 2.30       9.77 sd 2.32   P = .018

If you close your eyes, forget about treatment, and just compare the results for those mothers who had nausea and vomiting against those who did not, the results look more clear cut, with a 7 point Performance IQ difference:

Test Scale/subtest                              NVP (n 92)                 No NVP (n29)    P value
WPPSI Performance IQ                  116.7 sd 14.1                109.6 sd 13.4       .02
NEPSY Verbal Fluency 1                     1.7 sd 2.5                     9.9 sd 3.1          .003
NEPSY Phonological Processing        10.9 sd 3.0                   9.1 sd 3.4          .004
McCarthy Numerical Mem Forwds    11.5 sd 2.2                   9.8 sd 2.3           .004

There is something here to warrant further investigation, even though the samples are small and there is some cherry-picking of significant results. It would certainly be good to follow up these children and test them now that they are older, because the measures of general intelligence will now be better predictors of the levels they will attain in adulthood.

Morning sickness, the authors speculate, may indicate that the child is receiving a better hormonal environment, boosting their system integrity at the cost of the mother having more physiological demands being made of her, and consequently feeling ill. It constitutes an interesting leading indicator of intelligence.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to replicate Dan Freedman’s baby studies on newborns, or Simon Baron-Cohen’s attentional studies on newborns, then if any of this stuff is true then within 30 hours of birth we should be able to pick up some predictors of later intelligence. Worth a look.

Finally, this being a monarchy, the newspaper story was illustrated with a Royal baby. This reminds me of a remark made to me some years ago: if intelligence depended upon the richness of the environment provided to babies, the Royal Family should be the brightest people in the world. Which they may be, your Royal Highness.

Tuesday, 29 July 2014

Avoiding death: a few ideas

The Deary gang are at it again, this time looking at US health data to show that reaction times are related to mortality. Naturally, I did not wish to think about this paper whilst lying supine on the beach, but now reality presses in on me again, mixed with post-holiday good resolutions regarding exercise and restraint in all pleasurable matters. Although the subject of mortality is dispiriting, imagine my joy to find that their first table consisted of means and t tests, the sorts of statistics I can understand.

Reaction Time and Mortality from the Major Causes of Death: The NHANES-III Study. Gareth Hagger-Johnson, Ian J. Deary, Carolyn A. Davies, Alexander Weiss, G. David Batty

In a meta-analysis comprising 16 studies of over one million participants, a 1
standard deviation increase in cognitive ability in childhood was associated with 24% lower risk of mortality. Reaction time and cognitive ability may both predict mortality risk because they both measure important aspects of neuropsychological functioning or reflect the integrity of one or more bodily systems. However, reaction time is also seen to explain the IQ-mortality association suggesting that it may mediate the association between more complex cognitive processes and mortality. The analytic sample comprised 5,134 adults (2,342 men) aged 20 to 59 with data on reaction time and who were followed for mortality for 15 years (378 deaths).

So, here in Table 1 are a few tips to keep you alive: better to be a woman than a man (though chopping off reproductive organs and taking hormone tablets will not help you, however appealing the ploy may be as a conversational gambit); probably best not to belong to an ethnic minority (American blacks and Mexicans); possibly worth completing your schooling; certainly worth while not being in a lowly occupation and on a low income; and certainly unwise to be a regular smoker and drinker (though no risk in being overweight or obese, or eating saturated fats). Of course, not all of these are under your control, because although most of us aspire to high status, high income jobs, others want them as well, leading to competition and consequently to social stratification. Blood pressure is a risk factor (probably a consequence of other factors) but serum cholesterol is not.



Into the familiar list of health warnings (notice that in this sample many apparent risks do not prove significant) enters the one behavioural measure, not a full IQ test but a lowly simple reaction time test, which proves to be as significant as the other most significant factors.

No variables attenuated the associations fully, suggesting that the association between simple reaction time and mortality is independent of socio-demographic, socio-economic, health behaviors and CVD risk factors.

It would appear that reaction time gives us an indication of system integrity, a hypothetical construct which determines physical health and is associated with having a sharp and alert mind. Just in case you were considering it, it is not possible to improve simple reaction time by continual practice. Ian Deary tried it by doing the test every morning for about three months, and found that such improvements as were possible were achieved on the second day, and with absolutely nothing thereafter.

So, if you are lying on a  beach, there is no need to practice fast reactions, but you might consider not smoking and drinking and eating so much, once the holiday is over.

Thursday, 24 July 2014

We need to talk about intelligence


Prof. Dr. Stefan Schweinsteiger’s essay on the catastrophic demise of German higher education has quickly drawn an appreciative audience of 700 readers and prompted several emails which have been sent to me directly. Here is a conversation between Schweinsteiger and Messi, a university student.


I am starting to believe that it is urgent that we spend time thinking how to deal with individual differences rather than just resisting the conclusion that they exist at all. It upsets me very much that German education is so adamantly against testing. Putting our heads in the sand gives us all a "good conscience" of the condescending sort, but makes the real underlying problem worse. My environment has always made me believe that it's all nurture and that even thinking about genetics is a very
slippery slope. My personal interest in this debate is completely independent of why people are more or less intelligent. I just want individual students' actual performance to be recorded (by real diagnostic exams, for instance) and correlated with their grade, degree, and resulting intellectual standing. And not just gender, or race, "migratory background" as they call it Germany. So my beef with the German education policy is that there is no form of quality control, not for the student, and not for the universities.


Differences in personality and cognitive ability will cause difficulties even if they are not genetic in origin. Imagine a virus that has infected everyone, but due to chance affects some more than others, and has the effect of lowering IQ to varying degrees. Imagine that we have absolutely no hope of curing the virus by modern medical methods, and that it seems extremely unlikely that a cure would ever by found.
This situation would in fact come close to resembling the present state of the affairs. A key difference, of course, is that my virus is random in its effects, so racial & class differences in intelligence would not exist, but that apart from that my scenario would produce the same normal distribution of ability that we see today. You would still face the same problems produced by cognitive inequality that we do. In the real world these are unfortunately compounded by ethnocentrism & group differences in personality, as if the problems of cognitive inequality were not severe enough.

As you rightly say, accurate individual testing to vital to ensuring genuine meritocracy. There still are always going to probably be some scenarios in civic life where ethnic group profiling is regrettably necessary (think airport security screening procedures), but within the spheres of education and employment, we have the power to eliminate those scenarios altogether. Discrimination may take other forms than racial - we all have a tendency to conflate extraversion with intelligence. Arthur Jensen tells the story of asking a teacher in a class to pick out the brightest and dullest children for him to test. The “brightest” one, a boy, was extremely confident, extraverted, and entertaining, attacking all the test questions with relish. The “dullest”, a girl, was shy, quiet, retiring, and gave all her answers very slowly and hesitantly, even to the straightforward questions. But she scored 116, whereas the boy only scored 105.

Individual & group differences in intelligence also should make us think twice about some of our social policies. The effect of the European Union’s open borders policy is to free the doors for the middle to upper-middle of the Eastern European ability distributions to move here (immigrants tending to be of higher IQs than the mean of their nation of origin). Testing shows that for most European nations (such as Poland), the mean IQ is effectively identical to that of the UK. Thanks to the vagaries of history (Poland, and much of Eastern Europe, having been screwed over so extensively by first German fascism and then Russian communism), UK plc has a chance to replace the lower-ability quartile of its native workforce with higher-ability immigrants (who’s working in all of London’s coffee shops?) Since IQ is correlated with job performance, even for relatively unskilled labour, business cannot fail to benefit. America seems to be doing something similar along racial lines; mass immigration of higher-IQ Hispanics to replace blacks. This is undeniably good for business and for economic growth, but the wider social costs remain as yet unknown. The signs are not promising. I love having my coffee served in the morning by sparkly, sexy young Italian or Spanish ladies fleeing endemic corruption, rigid labour markets, and sky-high youth unemployment at home.  Immigration generally comes with a lot of benefits for white, well-connected, smart people. But for society as a whole?

The usual response of our pro-immigration elites is that education will solve all our problems and allow all to participate in the service economies of the 21st century on an equal footing (if you’ve ever read The Economist, in particular, you’ll have seen this line trotted out a lot). It’s clearly delusional. Jobs, no less than items in a test battery, have a g-loading (if you want to read more on this, Linda Gottfredson wrote many brilliant and clearly written papers, most of them freely available here: If you don’t have the required cognitive competence for a job, you simply won’t be able to do it well, or even at all. The powers of education to instil this competence in people have been wildly overstated (as really should be known by now, particularly in America, where they have decades of evidence from Head Start). Our elites would do well to learn from Edward Gibbon, who memorably wrote: "the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous". A significant part of the solution involves educating the political and business castes (as well the general public) who are painfully blind to a large number of ill-known but crucial facts. To date, the differential psychology community has failed to have much influence in crucial spheres. It's time to fix this, both through engagement with today's elites and through the education of the leaders of tomorrow.

Join the conversation.

Friday, 18 July 2014

Leberwusrt University, somewhere in Germany

The catastrophic demise of German higher education

Prof. Dr. Stefan Schweinsteiger [*]

To respond to Dr. Thompson’s request to describe our university standards, I will describe the educational situation at the university that I work at, Leberwurst University [*]. Even though in Germany education policy is determined by the federal state, Leberwurst University is a fairly typical German university, and its educational policies and standards are similar to most of the many other German universities that I know.

Before I go into the horrors of Leberwurst education standards, first a bit of background, so the reader knows “where I’m coming from”. In my admittedly layman’s view (I am not an expert on education), the central aim of education is that students acquire certain skills and or knowledge which they did not possess before. In order to achieve this goal, two things need to happen. First, students go to an institution (for instance, a university) where they engage in intensive interactions with qualified experts who will teach them the required new skills and knowledge. Also, in order to facilitate the learning process, the students also do home assignments etc., supervised by the teacher. Secondly, in order to ensure that the students actually have acquired the desired skills and knowledge after the educational experience, the students are tested, for instance by taking verbal or written exams, doing home assignments, writing essays, etc. These tests enable the institution to establish the degree to which the student has become skilled and knowledgeable, usually with the help of a ‘grading system’ that quantifies the level of expertise that the student has reached. Testing students serves the purposes of quality control, both at the student level (universities, and presumably, the students themselves, want to know how competent a particular student has become) and at the university level (universities want to know how effective they are at educating students).

You may perhaps be yawning already, but trite as this all may sound, the German higher education policy does not share these assumptions at all. Generally, the aim is not to change students into more competent and knowledgeable people, but rather to give as many members of the population as possible a certified university education. The difference between educating people and giving people a certificate of education is comparable to the difference between a country increasing its GDP on the one hand, and simply printing more money on the other. This rather odd goal is motivated by the noble political ideology of Chancengleichheit (“equal opportunity”), which is also why our students have to pay nothing at all (as in: zero Euros) for the privilege of receiving a university education. At the end of this essay I will explain why and how the German education policy nevertheless manages to severely obstruct equal opportunity.

In Leberwurst University, the simple education strategy outlined above completely and utterly fails, for the following reasons.

First, it is forbidden for teachers to require their students to be present. I do not mean “mentally present” here; I mean, “physically present at the location where the education actually takes place”, e.g., a classroom or a lecture hall. It is forbidden to record the absence or presence of the students, and it is most certainly forbidden to use presence or absence of students as a criterion for grading, or for deciding who ‘passes’ or ‘fails’. This is not only the policy of the management of Leberwurst University (although it is) but it is also official federal state policy. We even got an official letter from the Federal Ministry of Education that told us that we are not allowed to require students’ presence, as this would violate educational law in that it would restrict the students’ Studierfreiheit (“freedom of study”) and even more serious, it would violate constitutional law because it would restrict the students’ Handlungsfreiheit (“freedom of action”). So if we as teachers require students to be educated at a certain location, we are illegally restricting them in their personal freedom. The consequences of this policy are disastrous. First of all, a very large percentage of students actually hardly ever show up in their seminars. Usually they drop by once or twice to get a bit of a taste of what’s going on, and that’s about it. For large lectures this is not much of a problem, because if students really believe they can pass the exam without the lectures, that’s their problem (more on this later). But for small and intensive seminars, where texts are discussed, techniques demonstrated, exercises explained and discussed, etc. etc., it is simply not possible to engage in meaningful educational interactions if the majority of the participants in this interaction is physically not present. Also, the few students that do show up occasionally are usually different ones every week, so it is not possible to build on material that has been covered before, forcing the teachers to make little stand-alone sessions without any cumulative coherence whatsoever. Another interesting consequence is that students sometimes enlist in two or three simultaneous courses, reasoning that if they don’t need to be present, they might just as well be absent at three courses at the same time. Finally, student evaluations of teachers become irrelevant and even absurd, if the students filling in forms about what they thought of the quality of the teaching have never even showed up at the actual teaching.

Now some may argue: why not just do a tough exam at the end of the course, and then the students who weren’t there will simply fail. Fail they will, but there are three reasons why this strategy does not work. First, a large majority of courses do not require a grade. For instance, in the BA program I teach, students will have to complete 25 courses (i.e., seminars, lectures etc.). Of these 25 courses, only four require a grade. The other courses require instead something called aktive Teilnahme (AT), “active participation” which is a very Orwellian name because it neither involves activity nor participation. To get AT, the students have to do something at least vaguely related to the content of the course, usually give a short talk about one of the articles they read, or hand in a summary or protocol. But the thing is: we are not allowed to judge (grade) the quality of the work that is handed in; we are only allowed to assess whether they have done it. The important legal criterion here is whether they have “put in some effort” (which the students can always claim to have done, and we can never disprove it). So if their requirements for AT in Wurstology 101 are “hand in an essay about the contemporary pricing policy of German wurst” and the student hands in a text saying only “I never eat wurst because I’m a vegetarian, so I have no idea”, they have formally complied with the request. And then there is literally nothing the teacher can do to stop this student from getting the AT certificate. Even if the student has otherwise never even been present at the course at all, doesn’t even know the name of the teacher, and everyone knows that the student’s knowledge of Wurstology is absolutely zero.

Second, even for those courses where grading is still allowed, you just can’t get away with failing 95 out of a 100 students. The management will sternly tell you that either your standards are too high, or you are a bad teacher, or both. And if you then tell the management: “no, but they just don’t show up when I teach”, the common reply by the management is “well, then your courses are apparently not attractive and student-friendly enough”. Also, failing students often results in legal procedures initiated by the students (which they very often win) and in any case in having more students to deal with in the next semester, because at Leberwurst, students can repeat courses indefinitely, as often as they like. So there are many strong incentives for teachers to give up their academic standards and just pass everyone at some point in time. The management’s pressure to pass students is to a large degree caused by pressure from the federal state government to lower the quota of students who fail to get a degree, so failing 95% of the students, no matter how justified, will lead to all kinds of (usually financial) negative consequences for the university and the faculty.

Which brings us to the next point: grade inflation. The German grade system is numerical with 1 meaning “excellent”, 2 “good”, 3 “satisfactory” and 4 “sufficient”. But giving someone a 2 or worse often results in either suicidal or legal behavior by the students, so the actual realistic margins are between 1 and 2. Even then, students getting a 1.7 often angrily demand an explanation why they didn’t get a 1.0. So when some funding organization once asked us to give them the list of the 5% best students on the basis of grades, we could not comply, because if a massive majority has an average of 1.0, the best 5% are simply not definable. So we were then asked to “intuitively” identify the best 5% of our students, which we can do, of course, but it obviously defeats the purpose of using a grading system. Even more absurd is the grading system of PhD theses. In our neighboring country The Netherlands for instance, the qualification “Cum Laude” is rather rare and indicates an exceptional performance of the PhD candidate. In Germany, the same qualification “Cum Laude” actually means: “dear candidate, please take your thesis and please discretely take the back exit and never show yourself at this university again, because we are extremely disappointed in your thesis”. We now have “Magna Cum Laude” and the highest, “Summa Cum Laude” for the acceptable and the good thesis respectively. At least, that was the case 15 years ago. Now the Summa is becoming the new norm, and it is seen as an “affront” to give someone anything lower than Summa. Interestingly, many German applicants who only have the default “Cum Laude” are undeservedly seen as geniuses in other countries, where this inflation has not taken place.

It is also not allowed at Leberwurst to require students to have successfully completed course A before one can follow some course B. So we cannot require any foreknowledge for any of our courses, except for the first year in which a few elementary courses have to be completed. This makes it very hard, if not impossible, to go deeper into complicated topics, because there are always some students lacking the necessary background, slowing the entire educational process down to a near-halt.

Generally, the students are very powerful at Leberwurst, and most of them are interesting in doing as little as possible while still getting their certificate as fast as possible. Professors are perceived as authoritarian relics from the past whose only elitist goal is to prevent students from getting the degree they deserve as a birthright. Students are fundamentally against any form of testing for which they can fail, and often have the political power to get to a large degree what they want, because the German educators are very reluctant to compare students and judge them qualitatively. The very idea that there are better students and worse students is strongly discouraged in our current educational ideology.

A good illustration of the mentality of the German student at Leberwurst is the following anecdote. A teacher was very annoyed by the fact that her students didn’t read the texts they were supposed to read. So she said: OK, you know what? Go home, read the text, and we’ll discuss the text next week. Instead of feeling ashamed about not having read the text, the students immediately went to the Dean to complain that the teacher was not fulfilling her legally required 9 hours of teaching per week.

The consequences of this type of educational environment are catastrophic. Leberwurst University is getting a very bad name in German industry (as are German universities generally), the students that leave Leberwurst with a certificate have hardly learned anything, and have acquired a very bad working mentality in the process.

Another thing that we can learn from this German educational “experiment” is that education is a contract between teacher and student. If one of these parties does not fulfill their side of the bargain, no education is taking place. Even the best teacher in the world cannot teach students anything if do not show up and invest some effort. Not only is this student-teacher dynamic very detrimental for the students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills, another not unimportant effect is that it really kills any residual didactical motivation in the teachers. And staying motivated is hard enough already for German professors with their legally minimal teaching load of nine hours per week.

As a final remark, the German educational policy seems to be a classic example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. If everyone can get high grades and a certificate without any form of talent and/or hard work, a smart person from a poor socio-economic background cannot distinguish her or himself from a not-so-smart person from a rich family. So by giving everybody effectively the same high grade or qualification, the end result is that the person from a poor background is deprived of the possibility to let his or her qualifications compensate for the cultural disadvantage. In the end, employers who need to select the best people cannot do so on the basis of grades, and will be tempted to look at less relevant aspects such as accent, manners or clothing style, in other words: indicators of social class.

[*] For reasons of anonymity, these are not real names.

Monday, 14 July 2014

University Standards: Yahoo University, USA

An American correspondent writes to me about university standards.


U.S. & my specific university-the whole spectrum. You can major in physics or fashion merchandising.


Politics. At the center of the university is an emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. This emphasis is seen by the newest building constructed at the center of campus (the multicultural center) during an extremely tight budget. This emphasis is seen in faculty awards in which numerous are given for excellence in diversity, whatever that means, and only one for research. My guess is that preference is given for those who research diversity.

I identify this emphasis as a hindrance for education because the focus is ideology and not “truth”. The two are at odds and ideology has been chosen.

3 How many of your students are able to follow “College Format”, which means that although they attend lectures they can also learn based on gathering and inferring their own information, and establishing and applying general principles rather than following checklists. They do their own reading and show autonomy in learning. Learners are expected to search for faults in what they are taught. They can deal with tasks which require the application of specialised background knowledge, dis-embedding the features of a problem from a text, and drawing high-level inferences from highly complex text with multiple distractors. For more guidance, they will be in the top 5% of the population, or better still, top 2%.

A handful. I don’t have a good feel for the “college format” concept so I can’t estimate a percentage.


I am having trouble understanding this question. Is it asking if students receive extra points on exams for having lower abilities, kind of a sliding scale? If this is the question the answer is no. If it is asking if teacher evaluations are adjusted for student ability, the answer is no as well.


Yes, but it is not encouraged. Your student evaluations would suffer. If untenured, you would risk receiving tenure. If tenured, you risk performance pay raises.

Besides no one likes being disliked or the extra work that results from unhappy and failing students.




Given the focus of the university the ability = diversity and those who are more diverse are given awards.


As with the level of difficulty for the courses I have tried to balance honesty/integrity and living in the real world teaching at my university. The direct question of group differences finally came up in a graduate course I was teaching last fall. I said I don’t discuss the issue in class because anything I say will most likely be misconstrued and that I would be more than willing to direct any interested students toward readings that would introduce them to multiple sides of the issue.

We had read a little bit of Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate and he mentions something about group differences in this particular summary. A student brought a section to the attention of the class that alludes to group differences in intelligence. The student’s intention was to cast the whole reading as bullshit because of this allusion. When I responded to the student that group differences were an empirical, not political question (a question I would personally not discuss), I got the feeling that this seen as an unsatisfactory response on my part.

It was interesting, I believe the students wanted me to dismiss the possibility of group differences out of hand, but they couldn’t argue against it being an empirical question. This seemed to bother several of them even more.


I can’t get my head around this question either.


Comment: I look forward to hearing from other readers.

Wednesday, 9 July 2014

University standards

It is probable that many of my readers work in universities. I would like to hear from you, wherever you are in the world, about a number of matters:










I am happy to receive short essays provoked by these questions, rather than just comments, though those will also be welcome. I will present each as a separate posting under University Standards.  I also understand that you may wish to write to me directly, and ask for your contribution and your university not to be identified. Inventing a name for your university might help. For such matters send me an electronic mail addressed to my first name James followed by a full stop and then my surname Thompson followed by curly a and then “university college london” as initial letters only, then dot “ac” dot “uk”

That should fool everyone, shouldn’t it?

Tuesday, 8 July 2014

A secret between the two of us









Monday, 7 July 2014

An Editor’s real opinion of peer review


Richard Smith has retired from the British Medical Journal, after 25 years. I met him in 1984 when he was reporting on a conference I was attending, and after having listened to most of a symposium he offered to leave the room, to write up a journalistic summary, and to return to present the results, thus getting us to appreciate what journalists were looking for, and how they worked. It was a generous offer, though some felt there was no point asking a general journalist to deal with even mildly technical matters. He returned with a good piece, though several conference participants still griped about journalists. The general reaction was “Better a paper never read than a readable summary which didn’t quite get the subtleties of our deliberations”.

Now Richard has written his swansong, equivalent to HMG Ambassador at the end of his posting writing back to the Foreign Office to tell them exactly what he thinks of the locals. Of some interest to me are his caustic words on peer review:

Peer review is still in the dark age with most journals,11 12 and the BMJ has not progressed far. After centuries of being unexamined, the sacred process of peer review has been shown through research to be slow, expensive, ineffective, a lottery, biased, incapable of detecting fraud, and prone to abuse.11 12 Evidence for its upside is sparse. Through our collective failure of imagination it is still, however, the least worst system, and the best strategy seems to be to try to improve rather than replace it. My vision has been that a clumsy black box should become an open scientific discourse conducted in full view and real time on the web. This vision is not widely shared, and even with the BMJ we've got only as far as letting authors know the name of reviewers.

Richard’s plea will sit well with many commentators on this blog and elsewhere.

I find he is a fan of CP Cavafy, whose poem Ithaka gives him the title to his farewell: “Hope your road is a long one, Full of adventure, full of discovery”. Cavafy, the master poet of Alexandria has a talent for the long view. His magisterial and valedictory poem Apoleipein o Theos Antonion  The God Abandons Antony was read at Jackie Kennedy’s funeral. For personal longevity however, I best recall The Afternoon Sun which Lawrence Durrell mentioned in his Alexandrian Quartet. In fact, I think I remember the poem better than the quartet.

BMJ Editor farewell here:

Cavafy canon here:

Sunday, 6 July 2014

Mutilated genitalia, mutilated statistics?









Bindell gives the following figures on page 14:

(NSPCC, 2013a).


















Thursday, 3 July 2014

Generational conflict








Where does culture, oops, female genital mutilation, come from?


Many years ago it was common to feel sympathy for citizens living behind the Iron Curtain, because their press was severely controlled. Even though their main newspaper Izvestia was called “the deliverer of messages", derived from the verb izveshchat "to inform"and "to notify" it left many messages undelivered and failed to notify the population about many matters. For example, they were rather late to admit the Americans had landed on the moon, and late and dismissive about the meltdown of one of their reactors at Chernobyl, though that eventually changed when the reactor kept burning and the nearby company town had to be evacuated.

So, I hope you will feel sympathy for those who rely on the BBC for their news, as I often do. Here is a BBC news item today (broadcasts on the topic were being shown last night)

Failure to stop FGM is a 'national scandal', say MPs.


I certainly agree with that. Here is the link to the full story:

Perhaps saying “the full story” is being too generous. The story certainly includes this line: “Practised in 29 countries in Africa and some countries in Asia and the Middle East”. However, it does not say who practices this cultural habit in the UK. If there is a scandal, it is usual to identify what sort of people are perpetrating it. I presume that although the MPs blamed a "misplaced concern for cultural sensitivities" for inaction, the BBC maintained its usual stance of cultural sensitivity for the perpetrators wielding their razor blades.

The Wikipedia entry is better:

FGM is practised as a cultural ritual by ethnic groups in 27 countries in sub-Saharan and Northeast Africa, and to a lesser extent in Asia, the Middle East and within immigrant communities elsewhere.[8] It is typically carried out, with or without anaesthesia, by a traditional circumciser using a knife or razor.[9] The age of the girls varies from weeks after birth to puberty; in half the countries for which figures were available in 2013, most girls were cut before the age of five.[5]

The practice is an ethnic marker, rooted in gender inequality, ideas about purity, modesty and aesthetics, and attempts to control women's sexuality.[13] It is supported by both women and men in countries that practise it, particularly by the women, who see it as a source of honour and authority, and an essential part of raising a daughter well.

So, Wikipedia actually says “and within immigrant communities elsewhere”.

I presume, but cannot confirm, that the UK figures are related to the cultural/genetic origins of the people, as Wikipedia suggests, but if anyone has data about the continuation of this foul practice in European countries, I would be interested to see the findings.

If it is necessary to send it to me in Samizdat form, using the Gestetner Cyclostyle duplicating process which I un-fondly remember using in 1968, then I am willing to meet you on a park bench somewhere in London. As Vladimir Bukovsky summarized it: I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it."[1]

Sounds like blogging, doesn’t it?

Tuesday, 1 July 2014

Where does culture come from?


How does yoghurt differ from Los Angeles? Yoghurt has more culture.

HBD Chick asks me Where does culture come from? How does it arise? Where are its roots?

Two human abilities are required for human culture: imitation and memory.

Imitation requires close observation, as one human (who could do something else) finds a reason to notice what another human does, and that some benefit probably results to that human from his action that can also be obtained by the observer who imitates him. Brain is required, even for plagiarism.

Memory is needed, particularly to remember the individual steps that must be taken, and to work out the contexts in which the imitated behaviour can be utilised again. If the crucial steps can be remembered in rhyme or better still, written down, one can pass on the tricks to the next generation.

So, culture is the cultivation of the mind (the soul, Cicero thought: cultura animi) which makes it more productive than it would have been in its wild state. It transforms milk into yoghurt, land into crops, rocks into bronze. Culture provides the petri dish were useful things thrive.

One of our greatest cultural achievements in terms of consistent product was the Olduvai Tool Set, a collection of stone implements our ancestors made, with minimal variation, for 600,000 years.  In that era we were very conservative or not very bright, most probably both.  If only Microsoft could quit playing around with their software, and accept that an operating system has to be rock solid before all else. Quit messing around with the commands I have learned over the years. They are part of my cultural heritage: don’t trash them. Every keystroke is a Buddhist temple to me, and I don’t want corporate Taleban terrorists dynamiting my skills.

Of course, a cultural tradition can outlive its usefulness. Restrictions on eating pork make less sense once a cultural has ubiquitous refrigeration. Culture can keep the wrong things going: stoning people to death; cutting of bits off reproductive organs; sticking to stupid ideas. Petri dishes sometimes help mould to flourish.

Do long-lasting cultural habits suggest genetic causes?


In the Boston Review has Philip Cohen reviewed Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance” in a piece entitled “Don’t Trouble Yourself”. A couple of points caught my attention. In the last paragraph of his section entitled “Descent into Racism” (this may give you a flavour of the mood) Cohen writes:

Obviously, Wade offers no evidence to support his genetic story of Africa’s poverty because none exists. In the absence of evidence, Wade resorts to homicide statistics. Most countries in sub-Saharan Africa have higher homicide rates than the rich countries, which he calls “a difference that does not prove but surely allows room for a genetic contribution to greater violence in the less developed world.” This contradicts the basic logic of science. As the biologist H. Allen Orr points out in his devastating review, the existence of a difference is not evidence for any one cause of that difference.

Here is the relevant section from Orr: “But if the issue is whether people differ innately in a behavioral trait, a material line of evidence cannot be that people differ in the trait. They may easily differ for other reasons. (Do differences in currency have a genetic basis? After all, there are differences in currency!)”

The argument is true as far as it goes. By leaving out intelligence differences Wade has weakened his explanation of economic differences. However, the currency analogy is interesting. A long established currency would be evidence in favour of something which led to restraint in financial matters for generation after generation. That the name of the British currency is still the “pound” is trivial compared to the fact that it is the world’s oldest currency still in use. So, either solely cultural, or genetic and cultural forces have maintained this store of value since Anglo-Saxon times. The “culture only” explanation is interesting, because it suggests that a habit, once established, will continue, like motion in frictionless space.  This is not entirely silly: culture is a collection of habits, and a habit may persist simply because no-one can be bothered to change it (like calling the currency “the pound”). There are still little roads in the City of London which reproduce paths up from the river landing piers. Now that everyone has built their houses it would be tedious to destroy that street pattern. Worse, it would lead to the loss of some good pubs, for whose customers in the late evening the zigzag nature of the thoroughfare is so well suited.

However, that behavioural inertia would suggest that colonial practices should have stuck in Africa. The railroads should still be there, and all the heavy equipment, all well maintained. Why did that not often happen in Africa? Why did not the African and Indian peoples build on these cultural traditions to make sure there citizens travelled in the carriages, and not on the carriages? Why did Malaysia, post liberation, do better than Kenya, which was predicted at the time to be the likely winner?

So, a difference between genetic groups does not of itself prove a genetic cause, though of course it suggests it, rather in the way that finding health and lifespan difference between social classes suggests that status and resources are part of the cause of the observed differences in life outcomes.

It seems the key attraction of culture as an explanation of behaviour is that it is like mercury, flowing everywhere, adapting to everything, and moving on without leaving a mark. Culture accounts for a people not changing, for a people changing a bit, and then for not changing again.

Although I am not in the prediction business, I wonder what the culture-only protagonists would predict for North Korea? It certainly seems a very different country from South Korea. As Jayman has noted, it may not be a full genetic match, because we do not have genomic data from North Korea. On the basis of the East German experience, if the two countries were to be unified today I predict it would take one generation for the North Koreans to almost catch up with the South Koreans in terms of enterprise and innovation. Specifically, that after 25 years the new generation in the North will be very much like the next generation in the South. All this assumes that the South, as seems likely, supports the North for about 25-40 years. So although the main effect will be over in a generation, this implies that residual effects last two generations. So perhaps we have to say that cultural effects can be reversed in two generations and genetic effects somewhat changed if you implement very strong selection for 16-24 generations.

Is there any state of the world the culture-only hypothesis denies?