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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Parasite load seems to affect negatively cognitive abilities.

Decreased Parasite Load and Improved Cognitive Outcomes Caused by Deworming and Consumption of Multi-Micronutrient Fortified Biscuits in Rural Vietnamese Schoolchildren https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144834/

Parasite load explains 67% of the worldwide variation in intelligence: "Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2010...

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From the scond paper:

"Templer & Arikawa (2006) also found that average IQ correlated significantly with average skin darkness (r = −0.92). The authors offered little explanation of why this trend exists, except that they believed skin colour was related to exposure to certain climates over evolutionary time."

I doubt that scientists today would dare to make such statements, for the fear of being "cancelled".

It is very hard to create unbiased IQ tests. There will always be cultural differences and differences in opportunity.

IQ tests should be taken with a grain of salt.

It also depends on what you think is important. Smart people are not always wise people.

I certainly agree with that. Nonetheless, being myself one of the "darker" skinned ethnicities, I see no offence in the statement that as a whole, darker nations seem to have lower IQ, there might be thousands of reasons for that; for some nations, colonial opressions, for some it might inherent biological reasons.

The problem with saying it, is even if you mean IQ is academically the average result on a particular test design, people understand it in common English to mean something more like 'value as a member of society'.

I dunno. There are "Raven's Progressive Matrices" which have no language component, but they have been cracked for a long time.

If you look on the net you will hear that some celebrity (say Alyssa Milano) took an IQ test and got a crazy high score.

There are just 60 of them so it is not hard to practice and I am sure there is some racket of psychologists in Hollywood who coach people to take the test and then send them to the psych across the street to get them tested.

Science should not be concerned with the interpretation of its discoveries.

Interpretation is an inseparable part of science. Take the issue of race for example. People since the 30s have repeatedly pointed out that there's no consistent biological basis for race. The concept is just flat out not biologically rooted. Yet scientists kept using it because it was convenient and they came from a worldview where race was very much a reality. Thus studies were (and continue to be) done on the basis of biological racial categories.

Not sure about races, but one can certainly tell the difference between ethnicities; I can tell apart a Russian and an Armenian for example, with more than 75% success rate. Therefore there certainly is difference between people in different geographic areas. If people have differences in their outer appearances, there might be differences (not very large, obviously) in the way their neural systems work;denying that, IMO is a very ideological position.

It's the consensus of the vast majority of relevant professionals that "humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct categories", i.e. races. That quote comes from the ASHG [1], but another relevant field is anthropology where again, the largest professional organization (the AAAS) says the same thing [2]. The AAPA concurs [3]. If you think these associations might be a little biased, someone published a national survey of anthropologists a couple years ago confirming these views [4].

Some technical caveats: So yes, on some level you can approximately group sets of people into things roughly matching modern broad racial categories on the basis of genetics. This isn't because of anything real (i.e. there's nothing all members of a group share that doesn't exist "outside" them), but simply because you can broadly categorize any large set of things, regardless of whether those categories are actualized. Race as a social construct (e.g. identifying someone as "black" or "caucasian") is absolutely, undeniably a thing. It's simply not reflecting an underlying biological reality. There are also people in the community who argue that even if racial categories aren't biologically actualized, they're still useful (or that the definition I gave previously doesn't apply), but that's a much more complicated matter for which entire libraries' worth of debate exist.

[1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(18)30363-X [2] https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I... [3] https://physanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statemen... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5299519/

Differences in opportunity, in the formative years, will actually make a person dumber, and that is likely permanent. The IQ test doesn't cause such an effect; it just reveals it.

Since tests are necessarily biased, maybe the way forward is to tune the bias to the test subjects. Then, out the window goes "standardized", at least for that interpretation of "standardized" which means everyone takes exactly the same test. (And which is never literally true, because year over year, you cannot use exactly the same test questions.)

I think tests tuned to cultural differences would never fly in America because the idea is contrary to political correctness. Everyone is equal by definition, why would they need a special test. Cultural differences, what? We are all Americans; gear the test to American culture!

And then, what if it turns out that members of a certain minority group do better on IQ tests designed for them, yet is is found that white, upper-middle class kids also do better if given those tests? Oh the horror: members of minority X are actually dumb, and the test they are given isn't actually tuned to them culturally, but nothing more than dumbed down. The conservatives would have field day.

I would hope they wouldn't dare to do so as the scientific community aren't particularly accepting of papers espousing the correlation of airplane usage to autism diagnoses either. If the public is now more aware of garbage science used to promote political ideology, it means we have a more educated and scientifically engaged population than before, and who are capable of helping stunt wasteful research.

"garbage science used to promote political ideology".

It goes both way. Anyone who suppresses politically incovenient, yet relevant information about minorities, actually doing disservice to them; it is a worst kind of racism and "white privilege", to set arbitrary boundaries what is true and what is not wrt to some group of people.

IQ tests were invented to justify a belief that white people were superior - literally by eugenicists.

How is it "white privilege" to say we should reject a test design that was designed to support white supremacy?

Rockets were designed to kill people, now they take us to space. A test is just a tool. How you use the tool is what matters most.

In the context of medical research specifically, different groups experience different health issues at different rates. It's important to understand these differences so that we can help the groups in question, or to gain further understanding into what causes the issue as we search for a universal improvement.

I took it several times, and have not seen anything racist in them, being non-white myself.Just geometric and word puzzles. In any case, brushing off a test, just because you do not like the results and its origins, without actually researching why the scores are lower, is actually disrespectful to those who indeed scored lower.

Did you know it's illegal in the state of California to administer an IQ test to a black child? [1] This is a fantastic episode from radiolab about the history of IQ tests in the US and goes into how a test can be racist even without seeming so.

[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-mis...

No I did not. Nor I believe that properly constructed test, with all explicit cultural references removed can be racist. Asians, straight from Korea or China, with some basic knowledge of English are able to reach normal or above normal results on IQ tests.

IQ tests were invented to identify children with learning disabilities. People have been (mis)using them in various ways ever since.

Some would indeed try to use IQ tests to validate their prejudices and proclaim that "science says dark-skinned people are not as smart as asians". Um, no. Science says we should stay humble and ask questions.

>Anyone who suppresses politically incovenient, yet relevant information about minorities, actually doing disservice to them; it is a worst kind of racism and "white privilege", to set arbitrary boundaries what is true and what is not wrt to some group of people.

People bringing up racial crime statistics as a valuable scientific avenue of investigation has contributed to hurting and discrediting me and my community throughout my life and historically. Even if the correlation exists, can we meaningfully act on it other than as a mechanism for discrediting programs that holistically address the issue in a system where guilt by association or ethnicity means nothing?

Denouncing statements about correlations between autism and airplanes haven't done people with autism a disservice in this sense either; it's driven research towards holistic and sensible studies and interpretations.

I hope one day you do not dismiss the issues that minorities like myself have encountered for generations as "white privilege" in the future.

Correlation is not causation. Beyond just the fear of "cancellation", which certainly exists, any good scientist would want to find an airtight causal mechanism before publishing a socially and morally disturbing statistic that would hark back to unscientific eugenics movements from before the discovery of DNA.

And, call me a canceller myself, but somehow I doubt any such causal mechanism would actually be intrinsic to the human populations themselves. Such a strongly disadvantageous mutation as decreased cognitive ability would get weeded out by natural selection: you don't spend 20% of the body's calorie budget on an organ that isn't doing its job.

It saddens me greatly to think that scientists could not share data that they can't fully explain if it has any possible social injustice angle to it.

How many scientific breakthroughs across history took more than one person to figure them out and where subsequent thinkers built atop foundations and tidbits of those who went before them? (Almost all of them, IMO.)

Imagine if in the early days of AIDS, we couldn't talk about the role HIV might play in AIDS for fear that it would cast a negative light on communities affected by AIDS.

Imagine if we couldn't talk about the effects of parental, community, and early educational involvement in children's outcomes in life until we had perfect proof. Imagine we couldn't talk about the effects of inter-generational poverty until we had perfect proof.

"Until we have airtight causal links, we need to keep this quiet" is certainly not the way to make the fastest nor most effective scientific progress.

On the other hand in the day and age we live in we could certainly approach such an issue. The concept of 4chan is that everyone is anonymous therefore nobody ever gets special treatment based on their identity only the contents on that which they share. If you create a publishing platform for scientists that allows them to publish anonymously it will be the contents of the papers that will be evaluated strictly and no reputation damage is involved, maybe even let them digitally sign it in case they ever wish to show that they themselves wrote the paper if it became significant enough.

Anonymity is a weak (but better than nothing) solution to this problem.

The stronger solution IMO is "publish what you observed, what you conclude from it, what you think good next steps are, and provide your signature and contact information" and let people openly collaborate and build on each other's work.

Imagine if Linus Torvalds published the first version of Linux anonymously. Would we be in the same spot now as a technology society if collaboration were limited to anonymous, arms-length interactions on public channels?

This makes me think of TrueCrypt, and all sorts of other pieces of software released only under online aliases.

"Such a strongly disadvantageous mutation as decreased cognitive ability would get weeded out by natural selection".

Yeah, right, then the only living large animals would be humans.

Brain and body go together. Other animals have adaptations to their ecological niches. We have our adaptations to ours. Powerful brains are one of our adaptations to our niche, and an organism that has to live in our niche without our adaptations isn't going to do very well.

As soon as the cognitive capacity is sufficient for survival in some particular environment, there won't be any pressure for improvement of that, because it might in fact lead to maladaptive consequences, such as rise in depression and psychiatric disorders. Instead, there will be pressure for some physical fitness, improved immunity etc.

That's a misconception. The role of the brain our biology is not to direct somatomotor behavior, but visceromotor behavior. That is, the brain regulates the inside of the body. Increased cognitive capacity is largely directed to improving metabolic efficiency, immunity, and other basic bodily functions -- manipulating the external world is a bonus.

The higher levels of human intelligence are more useful for navigating the social than the physical environment, and obviously the social environment can vary drastically depending on where you live.

Half of the "fear of a standardized test planet" is that a certain fraction of elite children are as dumb as posts.

SAT prep courses help a little but won't bring them into the normal range. Their parents are big donors and make the case that they're doing a favor to the smart kids by hooking them up with the economically connected.

Harvard puts up Dan Bell's "Whiz Kids" to the task and discovers that standardized tests discriminate against minorities as much or more than they discriminate against their donors, so Stephen Jay Gould got grants to write books for ten years about how bad IQ tests are.

In that first paper, it does not seem to indicate that there was a difference in the level of cognitive improvement in the albendazole + fortified biscuits group versus the placebo + fortified biscuits group.

I mean anything that is as closely associated with poor socioeconomic development as parasite load would explain 67% of worldwide variation in intelligence...

How about inside United States?

Parasite prevalence and the distribution of intelligence among the states of the USA https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

> we found that the correlation between average state IQ and infectious disease stress was − 0.67 (p < 0.0001) across the 50 states. Furthermore, when controlling the effects of wealth and educational variation among states, infectious disease stress was the best predictor of average state IQ.

Yes, even in the US, even controlling for wealth and educational variation, I'd expect a high correlation to show up.

I have an adopted child who is not exactly the brightest. Like 91 iq I think from state testing. Was a sweet child.

We always assumed it was from bio mother drug use. We have since met various bio grandparents, etc.

Apparently reduced IQ just runs in the family.

The variation in intelligence may explain parasite load.

That seems unlikely. Parasites are pretty good at infecting their hosts, and for a long time, there wasn't really a good way of getting rid of them once they were inside you.

Your point proves what I said, actually.

If for long time there were no means to get rid of worms, how come the difference in intelligence that allowed to invent a cure for worms to be?

I see "worm free living" as a consequence of higher intelligence than vice versa.

Ok, but how? Taking medicine doesn't require intelligence so the only deciding factor is whether you get treatment or not. Does your doctor give you an IQ test and deny treatment if your score is too low?

Two hypothesis: higher IQ people learn hygiene sooner and manage to avoid getting infected. Higher IQ parents provide both better hygiene and high IQ genes and nurture.

I have one more - smart people taste bad.

Being smart helps you get a good job and be rich.

With those come good health insurance, being able to afford co-pays, being able to take time off work to go to the doctor, being able to comply with complex instructions like changing your diet, being able to research your diagnosis even if it's in lots of long latin words, being able to tell good advice from bad when researching online, being able to take time off for treatment or recovery, knowing the magic incantations to get yourself taken seriously, knowing when it's a good idea to get a second opinion and how to go about that, less stress caused by financial worries or job insecurity, etc etc

"More intelligent environment" may prevent one from even contacting anything that can get one worms.

For example, most first world urban kids do not eat berries directly from the bushes. These berries they eat are controlled for worms among other things.

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