Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

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I am afraid Paul Krugman's take on Gould is pretty accurate:

"Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading."

He certainly misrepresented data in Mismeasure of Man:https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

I do find it amusing how people who claim intelligence is 100% environment are also terrified of letting others select for intelligence. It is almost like they know, deep down, that it will work. That intelligence, like almost every other trait we have measured, has a very large heritable component: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

I'm not sure I would put much stock in an economist's assessment of a geneticist. Brilliant people have a terrible habit of assuming that their brilliance in one area implies an elevated ability in other disparate fields as well. Criticism of Gould among biologists is rare and far between from what I've seen.

>"That intelligence, like almost every other trait we have measured, has a very large heritable component"

The problem is what do you mean when you say "intelligence". We can easily measure physical traits like height, weight, strength, etc. But intelligence is practically impossible to measure and define in any meaningful way. IQ tests have been thoroughly debunked as highly dependent on cultural biases and assumptions of learned knowledge. There is no one single measure you can look at and determine the intelligence of an individual which could possibly be predicted by genetics alone.

Gould was a paleontologist, not a geneticist. Gould's reputation is zero in evolutionary biology, an industrious fool.

See this letter to the editor if you want to see what the giants of evolutionary biology thought of Gould:

John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists." (NYRB, Nov. 30th 1995, p. 46). No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is experiencing now that his actual standing within the community of professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known. If what was a stake was solely one man's self-regard, common decency would preclude comment.

But as Maynard Smith points out, more is at stake. Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory" -- or as Ernst Mayr says of Gould and his small group of allies -- they "quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of [biology's] leading spokesmen."[1] Indeed, although Gould characterizes his critics as "anonymous" and "a tiny coterie," nearly every major evolutionary biologist of our era has weighed in in a vain attempt to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher profile Gould has inundated the intellectual world with.[2] The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism -- so properly are we all -- it is that his reputation as a credible and balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those who are in a professional position to know: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html

>IQ tests have been thoroughly debunked as highly dependent on cultural biases and assumptions of learned knowledge.predicted by genetics alone.

They really, truly have not been debunked. If you are willing to read a short book on the topic, I would recommend this one which has an epub version here: https://archive.org/details/IntelligenceAllThatMatters/page/...

If you are interested in the truth, I ask you to approach this subject bloodlessly, as you would a programming problem. Read the book I linked to. Then re-read Measure of Man, if you must.

But before you do, allow yourself to consider that bio-determinism is allowed to be true. There is no god or law of physics that prevents this from being the case. Imagine that these were just brute facts. If they were, your actions may change but your normative commitments do not have to.

I think if you read the literature neutrally, you will find g-factor is basically coherent and well-motivated, and intelligence is heritable. But when reading on matters touched by ideology, I think it is important to allow yourself to believe you can be persuaded.

Let's say we lived in the centuries old, long debunked eugenicist's fantasy you think is reality.

We'd sooner use gene editing to make people more empathetic, briefer in their words, less absolutist, less looking at things as "programmer problems," less engineery. Higher "EQ."

Empathy measures correlate with IQ: https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2019-schlegel.pdf#page=4

Goulds argument is that different cases have different causes. The difference between my brain and a chimp is mostly genetic. The difference between brains in the neighborhood I grew up in and the brwins in a more wretched to2n are mostly environmental. The act of measuring heriditability without the context for what effect you are analysing is as meaningless as reporting means without variances. Have youbactually read this work? It is primarily a guide to avoiding conceptual phallacies that preceed the experiments/numerical analysis.

I haven’t read Gould, but from what you describe- the people running the studies aren’t dumb, they’re aware of these difficulties! That’s why they use all sorts of means (statistical control, twin studies, etc etc) to get around them, in addition to using compilations of studies from different populations and methods to drive conclusions.

That would be an experimental error. Conceptual error means they take experiments that show that within a homogeneous population, the variances in intelligence (begging the question of "are there multiple types of mind skills which are heriditable?") are 50% or whatever explained by genetics. Then they apply these to explain variances between groups, e.g. US African-Americans compared to US European-Americans.

The fallacy is made clear if you look at something less charged like hight. Clearly, in your town, height variance is mostly due to genetics. However, in genetically similar groups over time, heights have been gradually increasing over the generations. This increase is not because heights are being genetically selected for but because the genome codes for an organism that can grow taller or shorter in different conditions, and these places (e.g. Europe) are providing the "grow tall" conditions. Places that aren't providing these conditions are not seeing their children grow them taller.

Now, height is a lot easier to measure than intelligence, and a lot less politically weighted by the various movements to promote racial inequality. But the conceptual fallacy is the same.

Note that Gould is explicitly attacking a "races are genetically different in some substantive intelligence fashion" movement of his time, using the oddly similar movements from prior times. This eugenics thru biotech argument is not currently racially motivated, but western cultures have suffered thru a number of "eugenics by positive means -> eugenics by racism" shifts in the near past, so we are a bit twichty about it.

tldr: No studies about individual variation will tell you about between non-random subgroup variation.

>This increase is not because heights are being genetically selected for

Can you explain how you know this? Taller people, in general, are often considered more desirable mates. Wouldn't this lead to such people having more children which would lead to, well, average increases in height?

Until they have a bunch of bruises on their foreheads from low door frames! Cancels the effect.

Or cancer. The heavier you are, the more cells you have. More cells you have, well more potential for cancer.

Not OP, but the reference was clearly to increases in height during very short time frames from a natural selection point of view, eg in post WWII Europe.

Krugman’s own thinking about economics (and the role of public intellectuals) has changed a lot since 1996. I am curious if he still feels that way about Galbraith.

You are quoting an economist that publicly said that the internet and crypto currency were worthless.

You'll select for something, sure. The fear is it will lead to a monoculture that ultimately leaves us worse off

That would happen if you cloned one person a million times, but with all the tradeoffs of genetics I doubt there even is a single conclusion to be reached

how does a lack of algebra infer the no smart people are stuck in dead end jobs?

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