'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result | Hacker News Reader

'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

philly.com

267 pointsunfasten255 comments

Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act)

There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure) It's alcohol, a legal drug. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome)

My wife was a early-childhood development specialist at our local Easter Seals and the kids with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome were very sad. It's totally preventable, and the lack of understanding of consequences is devastating.

Agreed. Don't drink too much when pregnant. But, a short glass of wine once a week or so isn't excessive.

A glass of wine a _day_ wouldn't be excessive.

In 1970, a glass of wine a day was what the doctor suggested my mother should drink during her pregnancy.

A glass of wine a day, normal home glass rather than a pub glass, may be more than the UK recommended allowance for a female.

>It's totally preventable, and the lack of understanding of consequences is devastating. While the behavior that causes FAS is easy to stop for most women, for some segment of the population (those who are addicted to alcohol) it is seemingly impossible to eliminate or moderate alcohol consumption for even 1 week, let alone 9 months. The success of preventing FAS should correlate directly to advances in treating alcohol addiction.

Alcohol isn't really that dangerous for babies either. The prevalence of fetal alcohol syndrome is less than 5% for babies of women who drink more than 14 drinks per week during pregnancy: http://www.motherisk.org/prof/updatesDetail.jsp?content_id=2.... There's very little evidence that low levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy are bad for babies: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023984,00.ht.... Indeed, the available data shows the opposite: babies whose mothers drink lightly during pregnancy have better balance and higher IQs: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57589867/moderate-drinki.... This is largely due to maternal predisposition; higher-IQ women are more likely to drink during pregnancy.

It turns out that the placental barrier is pretty awesome.

You're presenting facts, the "total abstinence" people don't like that.

I find it funny how the "total abstinence" people come up with such amount of unproven facts, like "any consumption of alcohol" will cause harm. You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe.

This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works.

>You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe.

You are very, very wrong about this.

Yes, I said it wrong.

What I should have said is this: It's trivial to find a woman that has consumed alcohol during pregnancy

Especially in the cases of older woman (whose sons and daughters are adults now)

Can you really speak with such authority about all of Europe?

In Sweden, where I live, alcohol and pregnancy are not suppose to mix. For example, translating from http://www.vardguiden.se/Tema/Gravid/Livsstilsfragor/Alkohol... : "Since no one knows where the border lies, the recommendations in Sweden and many other countries are to not drink alcohol at all during pregnancy."

Or translating from http://www.lakartidningen.se/07engine.php?articleId=12235: "It's been known for a long time that alcohol consumption during pregnancy can damage the fetus, and most women also stop drinking alcohol when they discover that they are pregnant."

I'm lead to believe that the other Nordic countries are similar.

You're right, that's the recommendation

But about this I'm not so sure: "most women also stop drinking alcohol when they discover that they are pregnant."

Just like I and others are "not so sure" about your original statement.

Again I ask, how well can you claim to speak for the entirety of Europe? My observation is that Nordic women abstain from drinking during pregnancy at least as often as women who are native born to the US.

What would you accept as evidence that your original statement is incorrect? Perhaps the journal article "Alcohol consumption among pregnant women in a Swedish sample and its effects on the newborn outcomes", which finds: "Before pregnancy, 89% of the women regularly consumed alcohol and 49% reported occasional or frequent binge drinking. Nicotine was used by 15% before and by 5% during pregnancy. During pregnancy, 12% continued using alcohol and 5% also admitted binge drinking." ?

Compare this to the statement in "FOCUS ON: Biomarkers Of Fetal Alcohol Exposure And Fetal Alcohol Effects", which says that "roughly one of every eight women in the United States continues to drink during her pregnancy". 16% is higher than 12%, though I don't know the error bars to tell if that's significant.

If you don't like self-reported tests, then perhaps "Measurement of direct ethanol metabolites suggests higher rate of alcohol use among pregnant women than found with the AUDIT—a pilot study in a population-based sample of Swedish women" is useful. It concludes "Twenty-six women (25.2%) were identified as possible alcohol consumers by the combined use of AUDIT and direct ethanol metabolites."? (Note though that hair cosmetics and other things can cause false positives in a direct metabolites test.)

I interpret this to mean that 75% of Swedish women certainly do not drink alcohol while pregnant.

In other words, it's very easy in Sweden to find women who don't drink while pregnant.

Then for Germany, in "Smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption of mothers before, during and after pregnancy--results of the study 'breast-feeding habits in Bavaria" the researchers report "25.3% of the mothers reported any alcohol consumption during pregnancy, 69.0% of pregnant women were drinking caffeine-containing beverages. The consumption rates were reduced clearly during pregnancy."

And for France, in "Is pregnancy the time to change alcohol consumption habits in France?" reports that "A total of 52.2% of women indicated that they had consumed alcohol at least once during their pregnancy".

Why did you make such a large, encompassing statement about all of Europe, when (1) there is such a variable rate, depending on the country, and (2) it looks like better than even odds that a 'European' woman does not drink once she knows she's pregnant.

I agree with your broad argument, but it isn't clear to me if you are referencing actual studies. If you are, please at least state how you are finding them and/or the journals in which they are published so that others can do so too.

They're article titles, Google finds them easily.

Yeah, I thought the part where I said "journal article" sufficed, and that a trivial Google search would verify all of them. For what it's worth, I found the papers through PubMed searches.

I'm surprised sometimes the lengths people will go through in order to not admit they can be wrong.

You're just wrong. Of the Swedish mothers I know, they all stopped drinking when they became aware of their pregnancy. Any mother who didn't would be seen as a skank and probably would even be denied wine if she ordered it at restaurants. The general sentiment is that drinking/smoking/drugging pregnant women are trash.

This is exactly the kind of comment I wish I could downvote:

"You're presenting facts, {position X} people don't like that."

"I find it funny how {position X} people come up with such amount of unproven facts, such as {exaggerated position X straw man}. You'll be hard pressed to find {an anecdote that supposedly confirms position X}."

"This looks like it works as well as {position Y}."

Same with smoking. If someone sees a pregnant woman smoking, they lose their mind. I don't know the stats, but I know a lot of people walking around today were born to smoking mothers. Prior to 1980 or so, whenever the media campaign began, massive numbers of people smoked, including pregnant women who didn't know any better.

tobacco use and alcohol use are very different. We don't know if there's a safe level of alcohol, and we do know that it varies between different women.

We do know that any level of tobacco use is harmful to the mother and harmful to the child.

Please don't conflate the two.

> Prior to 1980 or so, whenever the media campaign began, massive numbers of people smoked, including pregnant women who didn't know any better.

You're ignoring all the people who were harmed by those smoking parents.

> We do know that any level of tobacco use is harmful to the mother and harmful to the child.

Every child born to a smoking mother is "harmed"? Depends on the definition of "harmed" I suppose.

You could replace "in Europe" with "40 years ago", perhaps. Maybe not "hard pressed", but alcohol consumption certainly was pretty common.

>You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe. //

Amongst most groups I know of, working class and lower-middle, a female refusing an alcolholic drink [at a party] is a sign that you think you're pregnant.

Total abstinence for the entire pregnancy? Wouldn't expect a huge proportion but as a comparison to normal intake it's going to look a lot more like marked abstemiousness than anything else. I think my wife probably had 1 or 2 glasses across each of her pregnancies.

>This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works. //

What are you trying to say here. That abstinence from sexual interaction doesn't prevent conception or transmission of STIs. Or maybe that abstinence from alcohol in pregnancy doesn't stop fetal alcohol syndrome. ?

Alcohol isn't really that dangerous for babies either.

So you're basically saying that it's OK to roll the dice with a child, since after all it's only a 20-sided die? That a mother's temporary gratification is more important than a 5% chance of your child suffering damage?

He said it was 5% for mothers that have 14 drinks per week or more. It will be much less (if not zero) for someone who has 2-3 drinks a week, which is his point.

I'm not informed on this topic but I'd like to point out that "14 drinks per week" is "two glasses of wine per day", which sounds like a lot less. You're not getting smashed or even buzzed on a couple of glasses of wine with dinner.

What does fetal alcohol syndrome have to do with intoxication?

10+% of women self-report as binge drinking during the first trimester, and the FAS rate is only about 0.05-0.2%: http://fasdcenter.samhsa.gov/documents/WYNK_Numbers.pdf.

From the UK drinkaware campaign website (government campaign), http://www.drinkaware.co.uk/check-the-facts/health-effects-o...:

>"The government advises that people should not regularly drink more than the daily unit guidelines of [...] and 2-3 units of alcohol for women (equivalent to a 13% ABV 175 ml glass of wine). ‘Regularly’ means drinking every day or most days of the week."

[175ml is about ¾ cup (USA) and the units above are about equivalent to a single pint of 4% beer]

FWIW If I have 2 glasses of wine I'll be "buzzed" because I don't drink every day. Take a month off from drinking, try two normal glasses (ie not pub measures) and you'll notice.

Your phrasing is frustratingly confrontational.

For example:

So you're saying that it's OK to roll the dice with a child, since after all it's only a 20-sided die? That forcing a mother to restrict all alcohol, and thus suffer stress (which we know to be harmful to the child) is more important than an unknown chance of the child suffering damage from alcohol?

Your phrasing is frustratingly confrontational.

So was the phrasing of the post I responded to. He didn't even raise the question of whether the mother's drinking might have benefits (such as the one you cite) which might outweigh the risk the alcohol poses to the child. He just said, "oh, it's not really all that dangerous". That, IMO, is not a justifiable mindset for a parent.

If there is no compensating benefit, then IMO a parent should not incur any avoidable risk to a child. There must always be a reason for incurring the risk, and it must be a stronger reason than "well, I like drinking". If the mother's stress level would really be increased that much by not drinking, then that could be a valid reason. (Though I would tend to be skeptical of such a claim; is abstaining from alcohol, for a person who is not an alcoholic, really that hard, hard enough to outweigh the risk to the child's health?)

> If there is no compensating benefit, then IMO a parent should not incur any avoidable risk to a child.

Wait, what? Are you actually serious? Not joking? I'm sorry to ask but I have a problem understanding people and I can never tell when people are pulling my leg or not. I almost never spot satire. So, if you're engaging in some devastatingly witty attack on something or other then I'm afraid it's gone right over my head.

> There must always be a reason for incurring the risk, and it must be a stronger reason than "well, I like drinking". If the mother's stress level would really be increased that much by not drinking, then that could be a valid reason.

We don't know if a pregnant woman drinking a couple of units a week is doing any harm to her child. Thus, the advice is to avoid all alcohol. But this has some disadvantages. It makes people ignore much clearer health advice. (This thread has someone suggesting that the drinking advice is similar to the smoking advice, as an example.) It also causes a great deal of stress to women. Some women may drink their regular amounts and then be very distressed when they discover that they are pregnant and have been drinking during the pregnancy. For most women the stress they experience is more harmful than the alcohol.

> (Though I would tend to be skeptical of such a claim; is abstaining from alcohol, for a person who is not an alcoholic, really that hard, hard enough to outweigh the risk to the child's health?)

Wow. That sentence bundles up so many misunderstandings of pregnancy and societal pressures and all kinds of stuff. It's too hard to respond to.

> There must always be a reason for incurring the risk

I'm quoting this part again because it's the core of your message, and it's very very wrong.

You assume that we know what the risks are, and that we can communicate those risks to pregnant women, and that they have power to control the risks they're exposed to.

Women undergo a bunch of prenatal checks. To get to those checks they have to use some form of transport. Are the risks of travel outweighed by the benefits of the prenatal checks?

What about different types of scans? There's no point in the 3d / 4d scans, and there's a possible risk of harm, so should the scans be banned? Or should we tell women not to get them? And who should we be criticising, the firms making money by pushing a possibly harmful but pointless scan to vulnerable women, or the women who get these scans?

(http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/02February/Pages/Warning-over-so...)

Are you actually serious? Not joking?

No, I'm not joking. Evidently I have a very different take on this subject than you do.

We don't know if a pregnant woman drinking a couple of units a week is doing any harm to her child. Thus, the advice is to avoid all alcohol.

Yes; we don't know if it will cause harm, and it's avoidable--at least, that's the assumption underlying the advice.

It makes people ignore much clearer health advice. (This thread has someone suggesting that the drinking advice is similar to the smoking advice, as an example.)

So you're saying that, if we tell a person that drinking might harm her child, and smoking might harm her child, she'll ignore the smoking advice because she doesn't agree with the drinking advice; but if we don't tell her that the drinking might be harmful, she'll be more likely to listen when we tell her that the smoking is harmful? (I haven't seen the subthread you're referring to, so I'm not sure exactly what the argument is.)

I see several problems with this argument. First, many (I would say most) people can drink in moderation without becoming addicted, and can stop drinking, if given a good reason, without suffering significant harm. That's not true of smoking; I'm not aware of any significant number of people who can smoke in moderation without becoming addicted, or who can stop, if they choose, without suffering significant harm in the short term. If a person is a regular smoker, quitting smoking is going to put them under severe stress. Obviously that changes the risk-benefit calculation, but the fact that such a calculation might apply to an addict doesn't mean it applies to a non-addict.

Second, given the overwhelming evidence about the health risks of smoking, a person who has chosen to smoke has already decided to ignore a lot of potential risk. I don't think such a person will be easily convinced to change that behavior if they become pregnant (and, as I said above, it will be very hard and stressful for them to change it even if they try to).

Third, you're basically saying we should hide facts from people because we don't think they will make wise use of the information. I'll comment on that further below.

It also causes a great deal of stress to women. Some women may drink their regular amounts and then be very distressed when they discover that they are pregnant and have been drinking during the pregnancy. For most women the stress they experience is more harmful than the alcohol.

I'm not sure I understand this argument. As you're presenting the situation, it doesn't seem like the choice is between drinking and less stress, vs. not drinking and more stress. The drinking is the cause of the stress: the woman is worried that she might be harming her child. The rational response to that is for her to stop drinking, not to try to convince herself that the drinking doesn't really incur any risk to her child so she won't stress about it.

As for discovering you're pregnant and worrying about the fact that you've been drinking, if you're that worried about the risk of drinking to your child, why wouldn't you stop drinking if you are engaging in activities that might get you pregnant, just to be safe?

You assume that we know what the risks are, and that we can communicate those risks to pregnant women, and that they have power to control the risks they're exposed to.

We do know that alcohol poses some risk to a developing fetus. That's all I was assuming.

I don't understand the problem with communicating the risk; there are plenty of links in this thread to sources that give information about it, so the information that alcohol poses some risk to a developing fetus is out there.

As for women having the power to control the risks they're exposed to, sure, nobody can control all the risks they're exposed to, but that's why I specified "avoidable" risks in the post you responded to. Consumption of alcohol strikes me as a risk that is quite controllable and avoidable.

Women undergo a bunch of prenatal checks. To get to those checks they have to use some form of transport. Are the risks of travel outweighed by the benefits of the prenatal checks?

It depends on the relative risk vs. benefit. See further comments below.

There's no point in the 3d / 4d scans, and there's a possible risk of harm, so should the scans be banned? Or should we tell women not to get them?

No, and no. We should make sure that accurate information about the risks and benefits is available, and let women make their own decisions.

And who should we be criticising, the firms making money by pushing a possibly harmful but pointless scan to vulnerable women, or the women who get these scans?

If the scans really are pointless but carry a risk of harm, then the firm deserves criticism. If the women decide to get a scan that they know is pointless (or that the best evidence available to them says is pointless) but carries a risk of harm, then they deserve criticism.

It seems to me that we have a fundamentally different view of how this process is supposed to work. You seem to be assuming that there is some central authority that needs to decide what information to release and to whom. I see this as a bunch of individual actors, each of whom has a responsibility to provide accurate information and to make reasonable decisions based on the information they have.

> We do know that alcohol poses some risk to a developing fetus. That's all I was assuming.

No, we don't. We know that a lot of alcohol poses some risk to some foetuses. We don't know that X drinks a week poses any risk to all foetuses. Maybe it's just harmful to foetuses who are compromised in some way? Maybe it's just harmful to foetuses with a genetic disposition to harm? Maybe it's not harmful at all? We don't know.

> I don't understand the problem with communicating the risk; there are plenty of links in this thread to sources that give information about it, so the information that alcohol poses some risk to a developing fetus is out there.

Some research is just poor quality. Let's ignore that for the moment, and assume that all research is good quality. Lots of popular media is hopeless at reporting science. See the links I posted earlier - that website has many examples of research that's reported with hyperbole, or reports that make mistakes with the statistics, or reports that ignore the research abstract and come up with their own pseudo-abstract which doesn't match the research at all.

And then people have different opinions. See, for example, the discussion around "controlled crying". Controlled crying practices exist on a spectrum ("Just let the baby cry it out" on one end, to over-protective helicopter parenting on the other) and we have a pretty good idea that over-protection is bad, and we have a pretty good idea that the extreme end of crying are both harmful. Yet there's a flood of information from both of these extreme ends. Parents will find it hard to find this information.

Let's not forget that parents tend to be sleep deprived and thus cognitively impaired too.

No, we don't.

Sure we do; you go on to say the same thing. You're just emphasizing the "we don't know" part, while I was emphasizing the "there might be some risk" part. We do not know that there is no risk, which, given that alcohol use is avoidable, is the point.

Some research is just poor quality.

Yes, that's true. But the belief that alcohol might harm a developing fetus isn't just based on research. It's also based on common sense: alcohol is known to have the potential to damage your body (at a minimum, harm to the liver and the brain is known to be possible). Why put such a substance into a developing fetus if you don't have to?

And then people have different opinions.

Yes, they do. If a person's considered opinion is that their enjoyment of alcohol is worth whatever risk they believe there is of harm to their child, that's their decision. I'm simply pointing out that, to me, it seems like a no-brainer: you're balancing something that's just recreational for you, vs. a possible harm to your child.

Parents will find it hard to find this information.

That's true of many aspects of parenting, yes. Which is why, as I said above, one shouldn't rely solely on that kind of information; one should also apply common sense.

Let's not forget that parents tend to be sleep deprived and thus cognitively impaired too.

The decision whether or not to use alcohol while pregnant does not have to be made in a cognitively impaired state; decisions like that about how to care for a child should be made before the situation becomes acute.

Plus, the sleep deprivation usually comes after birth, not before, doesn't it?

You're just emphasizing the "we don't know" part, while I was emphasizing the "there might be some risk" part.

Teach the controversy (a la Merchants of Doubt) vs the precautionary principle.

Small amounts of alcohol may even be beneficial. You may never find out if precaution is mindlessly carried out in absence of evidence.

I already allowed for that case; I said (several levels upthread) if there's a benefit to the mother that outweighs the risk of harm to the child, then the alcohol use is justified.

That said, AFAIK whatever benefits have been found for alcoholic beverages are not due to the alcohol, but to some other substance that happens to be in the beverage (for example, antioxidants in red wine). If there is a way to get the other substance without the alcohol, that would seem to be preferable since it eliminates the risk without sacrificing the benefit.

My understanding of the reason for total abstinence is while there may be a shoulder in the graph (eg. more than 5 drinks a week) beyond which FAS begins to take effect, nobody knows where that point is. It's not exactly the sort of thing you want to run a controlled test for.

It would be great if we could tell expecting mothers: "have two drinks a week, you'll be fine." We don't know, so "don't drink at all" is a reasonable statement.

The studies have not proven that there is a level of alcohol consumption below which there are no negative effects, but they fail to demonstrate long-term negative effects from low levels of alcohol consumption.

Now, absence of proof is not proof of absence, but in what other contexts do we tell people: the studies don't show harmful effects at low levels, but you shouldn't do it anyway because the studies haven't proven there aren't harmful effects at low levels? That's not how we generally do things. We only say "no" when we have actual evidence that some activity is harmful.

The reason we do it is not because science demonstrates there is a danger. We do it because we as a society love to control women, their behavior and their bodies, and pregnancy offers a great opportunity to exert that control.

It could also be a matter of public health advocates being savvy about how their messages are received. If we say it's probably safe to drink d drinks per week, then some percentage p of the population will assume it's okay to drink x*d drinks per week and may harm their babies.

Also, simple rules are easy to state and simple to follow. The words "never" and "always" are very clear and leave no room for misinterpretation.

However, if any of my speculation is correct, and public health messages are tuned to account for their real world affect, than perhaps there is a risk that they will loose credibility.

Saying "never" without a reasonable basis is a great way to lose credibility.

Sure, but "it would require a Ph.D. $3000 to estimate the amount you can safely drink over the course of a pregnancy, so the only accurate amount I can recommend that we know won't cause issues is 0" might actually be a reasonable basis.

An abstruse way of saying "I don't know what you should do" is likely not particularly credibility-enhancing either.

Absent the proper research, it seems to me like avoiding any possible risk would be the wise course of action.

That's absurd. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

Read it from the eyes of the patient. If they hear their doctor tell them that they have no clue, the patient is going to hear it as "I don't feel like dealing with you right now, go away", especially on a topic so extensively researched and debated. In this case they are the doctor, they should at least have a professional opinion, even if that opinion is "there's probably a safe level, but I have no way to figure it out".

We only say "no" when we have actual evidence that some activity is harmful....We do it because we as a society love to control women, their behavior and their bodies, and pregnancy offers a great opportunity to exert that control.

This latter theory is a bit silly.

In fact, we say "no" to all sorts of things regardless of evidence that the activity is harmful. Examples include modafinil, steroids and various other brain and body enhancers. More commonplace examples include salt, fat, carbs, second hand smoke, marijuana, gluten and foods not present in the cave man era.

I'm not familiar with the side effects of steroids, etc, but nobody tells pregnant women that they shouldn't eat any salt, any fat, any carbs, etc. Nobody freaked out at a restaurant when my wife ordered a nice ribeye or a piece of chocolate cake.

You miss the point. Without evidence, "they" tell everyone (pregnant or not, male or female) to avoid all sorts of things for imagined or minor harms.

And if you decided to light up and expose others to harmless secondhand smoke, "they" certainly would freak out.

> but in what other contexts do we tell people: the studies don't show harmful effects at low levels, but you shouldn't do it anyway because the studies haven't proven there aren't harmful effects at low levels?

Erm...in health and safety related contexts. At least in countries that care about those things. When it comes to someone's life isn't that hard to assume that if something is considered it could even be dangerous or not enough is known to advise staying away from it, rather than way and find out until experiments have shown otherwise.

Seems like a no brainier to me. To put it another way, if you are a parent, do you want your child or wife to participate in a study where she told to go ahead and drink 15 glasses of wine while pregnant so 20 year from then they can publish a paper on it.

To put it yet another way, each person has only one life and if they are told it is ok to consume a substance because there is not evidence it is harmful but then oops it turns out it is, they don't get a do over. It is not like buying a car someone saying, wash it with this new acid substance and it rusts and has to be replaced. You can replace a car, you can't replace your body.

Moreover. It is considered unlikely that alcohol will help in the pregnancy case. It seems at best it won't have any effect and at worst it will have a detrimental effect. Again, seems like a pretty good reason for the advice to stay away from it for 9 months.

> We do it because we as a society love to control women, their behavior and their bodies, and pregnancy offers a great opportunity to exert that control.

See now I don't know if you are serious or sarcastic. That is a pretty ridiculous argument. Sure go ahead and tell your wife, friends and family to drink so they can liberate themselves from the shackles of the Western Anglo-Saxon While Male Dominated Society

> Erm...in health and safety related contexts.

Exactly. The rule is not "put on your seatbelt except when you don't plan to exceed 10mph and there are no obvious nearby hazards, or if the windows are open and you're near a body of water," the rule is "always wear a seat belt."

If American society would tolerate it, surely we'd have anti-drunk driving laws that allowed no higher BAC than naturally occurs due to metabolism.

A specific 'health and safety' context where this exact issue comes up is actually with ionizing radiation (such as from nuclear reactors).

Humans (like most animals) actually have a remarkable ability to overcome low levels of radiation damage, by means such as genetic repair, programmed apotosis (essentially ASSERT()s in your own genetic code), and even roving patrols by your immune system that catch pre-cancerous cells.

The problem is that it is difficult to determine whether there is a real low-dose threshold, below which people do not suffer appreciable increase in health risk from radiation. Also, whether that threshold depends on the person, depends on prior exposure, depends on type of dose received, a combination of the above, etc.

The evidence leans heavily to there being a threshold much higher than the levels of radiation we'd ever encounter in day-to-day life (and possibly even there being a beneficial effect to low levels of radiation).

But our radiation health physicists (and UN health organizations) have tended to take a very conservative view and simply recommend that people minimize radiation exposure, at least until there is enough evidence to make very clear what a safe threshold level is.

  | We do it because we as a society love to
  | control women

This is a ridiculous claim. If anything erring on the side of caution and telling pregnant women not to drink alcohol falls under the "Think of the Children" banner. It's an effort to prevent babies from being born with issues, rather than some need to tell women to 'get back in the kitchen.'

Heh.

You don't think "Think of the Children" is part of the "Women need to be controlled" category? This is also where we get the notion that there is a magical mystical maternal mojo.

Women are resources, not players.

  > You don't think "Think of the Children" is
  > part of the "Women need to be controlled"
  > category?

Here are a few "Think of the Children" scenarios:

- Preventing child pornography

- Preventing child abuse

- Preventing children from hearing 'bad words'

- Stopping children from gaining access to violent video games

I fail to see how any of these is about 'controlling women.' I don't see how being generally concerned with the well-being of children (even if it's misguided) has anything to do with controlling women[1].

  > This is also where we get the notion that there is a
  > magical mystical maternal mojo.

How do we get this from "Think of the Children" + "Women Need to be Controlled?"

[1] I realize that some people's solutions to Think of the Children problems might involve 'controlling women,' but I fail to see how the entire "Think of the Children" category is a sub-category of "Women Need to be Controlled."

> I fail to see how any of these is about 'controlling women.'

Because you're looking at it in terms of public policy and law making (which is appropriate; "Think of the Children" is precisely such a public face). How do these scenarios play out in a domestic environment?

> How do we get this from "Think of the Children" + "Women Need to be Controlled?"

Because fathers are not expected to have such a strong connection to their children. The chain of command is "Man -> Mother -> Child". A woman's first and foremost responsibility, in this way of thinking, is the well-being of the child. Only when she can't handle it does she appeal to the man. The obedience of the child derives directly from the obedience of its mother.

Thus, the man's job in parenting is to provide from afar. He does not sully his hands by dealing with silly emotional issues; he brings bread home and punishes any misbehavior that isn't dealt with by the mother.

In this model of the world, the mother is useful only as an intermediary to handle messy things like diaper-changing and doctor visits and crying. She is the hammer that pounds down the nail. This particular role and objectification must be justified. That justification is that there is a Super Special Bond of Specialness that makes her uniquely qualified so that no one else could usurp her place.

Honestly, there is so much cultural detritus to point out as context that, if I made dealing with sexism my life's work, I could probably put together a book or two on the subject.

So my wife was a summer associate at a law firm while she was pregnant. The difference between having a drink with dinner and not drinking at all was the difference between being a regular summer associate, interviewing for a job, and "the pregnant one."

In our society, where drinking is an important social rite, not drinking makes you "the other" and we're tremendously eager to force women into that position based on little to no evidence that it actually has any impact on children at low levels. Even the justifications that are possible ("doctors say not to do it at all because women might drink too much") treat women like children instead of adults who are capable of evaluating truthful information from their doctors and reaching reasoned conclusions about their behavior.

In our society, where drinking is an important social rite, not drinking makes you "the other"

IMO, the appropriate response to that is to fix our society's attitudes about drinking as a social rite, not to use it as an excuse for women to risk harm to their children.

That said, if the woman's job is what's going to support the child, that does add an element to the risk-benefit calculation.

You're begging the question. There is no evidence of harm to children from light drinking during pregnancy. So you really have to question the motives of a policy that dictates women to engage in a behavior that excludes them socially for an imagined benefit to children.

Its one step above segregating women into sanitation tents during menstration. A policy completely disproportional to the underlying problem whose intent is social exclusion as much as anything else.

There is no evidence of harm to children from light drinking during pregnancy.

What's the limit of "light drinking"? Nobody knows for sure. If the woman were making a decision about her own risk, that's one thing; but she's making a decision about the risk to her child. That makes a big difference; when you're imposing a risk on someone else, the standard should not be "is there evidence of harm", but "is the risk avoidable". The risk of drinking is avoidable, so it should be avoided.

So you really have to question the motives of a policy that dictates women to engage in a behavior that excludes them socially for an imagined benefit to children.

I question the motives of people who claim drinking is so socially necessary that it's OK to socially exclude people who don't drink, and OK to exert social pressure on women to drink while pregnant even if it might harm their child.

But that's really a red herring, because you're misrepresenting the policy--at least, the policy I've been advocating in this thread. I'm not saying anyone should force women to not drink during pregnancy; I'm just saying that, IMO, whatever imagined benefits there are to drinking are not worth the risk to the child.

  > There is no evidence of harm to
  > children from light drinking
  > during pregnancy

To my knowledge, there are is no evidence that taking ibuprofen during pregnancy harms the child. Should a woman then ignore the medical recommendations that she not take it?

  > Even the justifications that are possible
  > treat women like children

There are plenty of cases where social convention and/or the law treat adults like children. This, to me, seems like something that only happens to be aimed at women because they are the only ones that get pregnant. This doesn't seem like a social convention that is targeted explicitly at women because people believe that women have no self-control, and would do keg-stands while pregnant if we didn't hold them to task.

Perhaps... but as a society, we also love to freak out about danger to children. The younger the child and the less-well-defined the risk, the better. FAS presses all the right buttons.

in what other contexts do we tell people: the studies don't show harmful effects at low levels, but you shouldn't do it anyway because the studies haven't proven there aren't harmful effects at low levels?

In contexts where the effects aren't suffered by the person making the choice, but by someone else that's at their mercy--in this case, the child. Making decisions about one's own risk is very different from making decisions about someone else's; the latter involves a much greater responsibility to avoid possible harm.

Go careful when recommending that pregnant women should drink, especially if you're quoting general media.

(http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/06june/Pages/daily-drinking-preg...)

> “Pregnant women can binge drink safely,” according to a report in today’s Metro. Expectant mothers should be able to “down up to 12 alcoholic beverages a week knowing it will have no ill effect on their offspring before the age of five”, the paper continued. Reports in several other papers were in agreement, with the Daily Mail claiming that a drink a day would not harm the baby’s development and the Daily Express reporting that 12 drinks a week is safe in pregnancy. So should pregnant women heave a sigh of relief and down a large glass of Chardonnay? Unfortunately, no.

(http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/06June/Pages/Misguided-claims-al...)

> “A glass of wine every day in pregnancy could be good for your baby,” is the entirely incorrect headline in The Daily Telegraph today. Other newspapers reported that drinking while pregnant does ‘no harm’, these claims are also misleading.

(http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/11November/Pages/Just-one-glass-...)

> has not been made clear in many of the reports, the researchers were also looking at foetal and maternal variations in genes thought to affect the metabolism of alcohol (how long it takes for the body to break down alcohol). Researchers then looked at whether these variations had an impact on the children’s IQ at age eight.

This is UK media, so "one drink" is "one unit", and that means 125 ml of drink of 8% Alcohol by volume. One bottle of wine (750 ml) at 8% has 6 units. Chardonnay is usually about 12.5% ABV, so a bottle has about 9.5 units. One unit of a 12.5ABV chardonnay is going to be 80 ml of wine. This is important because no one ever pours themselves 80 ml of wine.

>>> This is important because no one ever pours themselves 80 ml of wine.

Well, this is not completely correct - in wine tastings, for example, the recommended pouring usually is about 2 oz which is under 80 ml. Of course, tasting just once is another question that gets us back to the square one...

You make an excellent point.

A wine tasting portion is a sip, that you slurp up and then spit out. No-one (I imagine) thinks of that portion as a real serving size!

I never spit out when tasting wine, that seems pointless to me :) Then again, I'm not a professional or even in any manner advanced taster, I just do it for fun.

Why would you do that, I never even heard of this before.

>>Go careful when recommending that pregnant women should drink, especially if you're quoting general media.

I think there's quite a big difference between saying we have no evidence that alcohol consumption during pregnancy is unsafe, and recommending that pregnant women should drink.

> This is largely due to maternal predisposition; higher-IQ women are more likely to drink during pregnancy.

There is quite a huge deal of controversy around the heritability of IQ.

If anything, the story in this article shows that IQ is much more influenced by the environment than genetics.

My dad worked in an environment heavily impacted by the crack epidemic. It was real, and the hysteria was based on the horrific situations that that existed.

Smugly determining that "crack baby" was some racist code word cooked up to imprison black people is missing the point. Crack lowered the price point of cocaine dramatically, and was devastating to inner city communities.

You should note who the study didn't look at -- premature babies or the rates of premature delivery of crack abusers vs the average.

As the article notes:

Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results.

Nonetheless the head of the study does note that crack cocaine can induce premature labor, among other issues:

Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy. The drug can cause a problematic rise in a pregnant woman's blood pressure, trigger premature labor, and may be linked to a dangerous condition in which the placenta tears away from the uterine wall. Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems. On top of that, a parent's drug use can create a chaotic home life for a child.

I think the OP's point is that some (political) groups attribute minority group failure to advance socioeconomically to drug use, whereas this study suggests that poverty has a very relevant effect on child development (and thus prospects of long-term economic success).

That's not to say that there is no truth to the "crack baby" myth, but that like the "welfare queen" myth, it is part of a strategy to delegitimize welfare programs or socioeconomic criticisms by blaming the low-income groups for their lack of success.

Why is crack cheaper? Google and Wikipedia are quite unhelpful on this question.

I can't speak with any real authority, but I would suggest its down to the fact crack is cocaine mixed with further agents, allowing there to be a higher yield from the same amount of cocaine.

You'd have to also consider whether smoking the drug is more intense than sniffing, which would possibly compensate for the fact theres less cocaine.

Not a source per se, but some interesting info here on consumption methods: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/addiction/drugs/deliv...

This paper [1] backs up your hypothesis. "First, crack can be smoked, which is an extremely effective means of delivering the drug psychopharmacologically. Second, because crack is composed primarily of air and baking soda, it is possible to sell in small units containing fractions of a gram of pure cocaine, opening up the market to consumers wishing to spend $10 at a time. Third, because the drug is extremely addictive and the high that comes from taking the drug is so short-lived, crack quickly generated a large following of users wishing to purchase at high rates of frequency."

This DEA History Book [2], however, suggests the reasons might be partially economic. "Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent."

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fhlm_crack_coca... [2] http://archive.is/1wF5

For some anecdotal answers: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090531181900AA...

Who're you going to believe, a randomized controlled trial or your own lying eyes?

Hint: if you believe your own eyes, your sample size is one, confirmation bias and the availability heuristic are dancing the cha-cha all over your results, and you fail at science.

You fail at reading comprehension. The OP isn't trying to dispute the study with anecdotal evidence. He's simply suggesting that even though premature birth wasn't a consideration in this particular study, it nonetheless is an important factor when considering the broader effects of crack cocaine use. You can agree or disagree, but you may want to be a bit less smug when you do.

Having worked with a slew of severely developmentally delayed crack babies and alcohol syndrome kids, I am going to have to go with my own eyes.

This study did not include pre-term crack babies. That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users.

Crack or cocaine is very, very bad for development. It can create a child that literally cannot do anything for themselves and some that live in excruciating pain every single day of their lives (that is the very dark side of having such advanced neo-natal care).

Fetal alcohol syndrome is just as bad if not worse.

It is irresponsible to suggest otherwise. The fact that astute HN readers are looking at this and saying "See, it is overblown!" is very scary. That means the broader population reading this article is likely to do the same thing.

The writer of this article owes it to society to be very clear about the limitations and biases of this study.

>This study did not include pre-term crack babies.

It is entirely reasonable to select only full-term babies for the study. Including pre-term babies makes analysis more complicated.

>That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users.

Do you have some basis for that conclusion? It sounds reasonable (if beside the point), but are we working off of the folklore or facts?

>Crack or cocaine is very, very bad for development.

Did you read the article? They concluded after a long and careful study that poverty had a much bigger effect than cocaine use.

>It can create a child that literally cannot do anything for themselves and some that live in excruciating pain every single day of their lives (that is the very dark side of having such advanced neo-natal care).

Did you know that the NY Times and others recently recanted much of their sensationalist reporting of the "Crack Epidemic" http://retroreport.org/crack-babies-a-tale-from-the-drug-war...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-cra...

>Fetal alcohol syndrome is just as bad if not worse.

FAS probably is worse. If my recollection is correct, one needs to do a lot of binge drinking during the first trimester.

>It is irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

You mean it is irresponsible to disagree with you? No, skepticism and critical analysis are never irresponsible. It is irresponsible to falsely assign a cause to some phenomena or event, and set about treating that cause without ever checking to see if what you're doing is actually helping.

>The fact that astute HN readers are looking at this and saying "See, it is overblown!" is very scary.

No, it isn't. It means that people are reading and thinking instead of reacting to headlines and summaries.

>That means the broader population reading this article is likely to do the same thing.

What's your basis for that assumption?

>The writer of this article owes it to society to be very clear about the limitations and biases of this study.

The study was narrow in scope in order to obtain a clear and concise conclusion.

Note before you jump to a conclusion about the HN general consensus on in-utero cocaine exposure, is that nobody here has come out in support of it. Rather, at least my take on it (judging by a casual perusal of this paper) is that efforts to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, and developmental defects in early childhood by combating drug-use were misguided; and going forward those efforts should be focused on learning about and mitigating whatever the effects of impoverishment are.

Crack can trigger premature labor, as noted in the study. The hypothesis here is that more crack increases the risk of premature labor. It's a hypothesis that might be worth investigating, and I would be surprised if there was no effect observed. As to the extent obviously I cannot say.

> It's a hypothesis that might be worth investigating,

I don't disagree with that and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that such a study already exists.

>I would be surprised if there was no effect observed.

There are a lot of things that can cause premature labor. My personal opinion is that it is just as likely to be some stress otherwise related to their environment, or even stress related to the process of obtaining illegal drugs.

My guess is that if we controlled for environmental and purchasing stress, more crack use alone would lead to more stress, possibly in a dramatic way depending on the levels.

But premature crack-babies have health problems beyond being merely premature.

Yes, a related hypothesis is that more crack results in more health problems for a baby. If both are true, then by excluding pre-term babies you are excluding the ones with the most serious health problems.

>>This study did not include pre-term crack babies. >It is entirely reasonable to select only full-term babies for the study.

Premature babies account for between 1/5 and 1/4 of all births to crack using mothers. If you decide to ignore those in your study because you want to study something specific then you should make it very, very clear. And anyone reporting on it should make it clear as well. It is like studying coal miners, but only the ones that work in the preparation plant on the surface.

>>Crack or cocaine is very, very bad for development. >Did you read the article? They concluded after a long and careful study that poverty had a much bigger effect than cocaine use.

Yes. For this particularly culled population.

>Did you know that the NY Times and others recently recanted much of their sensationalist reporting of the "Crack Epidemic"

I don't know how that is relevant. I am basing my position on personal experience working with these kids.

>No, it isn't. It means that people are reading and thinking instead of reacting to headlines and summaries.

Frankly, just the opposite. Many, many people in this thread, including yourself, are reacting to this particular headline and summary.

>>That means the broader population reading this article is likely to do the same thing. >What's your basis for that assumption?

Induction. It may be unfounded, but if relatively smart people make a bad leap of logic it is not unreasonable to imagine that less intelligent people will make the same mistake.

>efforts to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, and developmental defects in early childhood by combating drug-use were misguided; and going forward those efforts should be focused on learning about and mitigating whatever the effects of impoverishment are.

>efforts to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, and developmental defects in early childhood by combating drug-use were misguided;

No, they weren't. Cocaine use does lead to disabled children, statistically speaking. Many of whom are premature. This was a study has no information on the amount of cocaine used throughout pregnancy, only that the mothers and children tested positive at the time of full-term birth.

All we can conclude from this study is that poverty is worse for kids than cocaine exposure near the time of full-term birth. It has no information for the 1/4 to 1/5 of the kids that are born to people that test positive for cocaine that are born prematurely and tend to have much more severe health and developmental problems. Not to mention the ones that don't make it to birth at all.

>If you decide to ignore those in your study because you want to study something specific then you should make it very, very clear.

There are a lot of things researchers want. They write grant proposals to study things which they can, at the beginning of the study demonstrate the possibility of obtaining a useful unambiguous conclusion. I don't get the impression that the researchers misrepresented their study. Is that what you're alleging?

>>Did you know that the NY Times and others recently recanted much of their sensationalist reporting of the "Crack Epidemic" >I don't know how that is relevant. I am basing my position on personal experience working with these kids.

Does your personal experience involve having read news articles like the one we're discussing, or watching television news covering the subject?

>>efforts to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, and developmental defects in early childhood by combating drug-use were misguided; >No, they weren't. Cocaine use does lead to disabled children,

If you have finite resources n to spend fixing problem p and you have been using solution x which after some time appears to have negligible effect, would you continue x, or consider looking for another solution?

>No, they weren't. Cocaine use does lead to disabled children, statistically speaking.

Where are the statistics? The news article is reporting a study that does not, or only barely supports that conclusion, suggesting that the Cocaine use may be merely incidental, and not causal.

>Many of whom are premature.

From the article:

  >Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems.

>This was a study has no information on the amount of cocaine used throughout pregnancy,

Is it even possible to conduct such a study? It would likely require clinicians to closely supervise pregnant women while the women were using illegal drugs.

>All we can conclude from this study is that poverty is worse for kids than cocaine exposure near the time of full-term birth. It has no information for the 1/4 to 1/5 of the kids that are born to people that test positive for cocaine that are born prematurely and tend to have much more severe health and developmental problems. Not to mention the ones that don't make it to birth at all.

What is your hypothesis for how the effects of poverty would be negated for the cohort/time period you're interested in?

>Does your personal experience involve having read news articles like the one we're discussing, or watching television news covering the subject?

I suppose technically, yes. But it also comes from my father working as a neonatologist and my own experience working with severely disabled children, many of whom were crack babies or suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, throughout my 20s.

> which after some time appears to have negligible effect

This is the problem. This study does not show that cocaine has a negligible effect. It shows that cocaine has a less than poverty effect for children that make it to term. Big, big difference.

>Where are the statistics?

Enjoy. Cocaine causes increased rates of premature birth (between 3 and 4 times the normal incidence). Premature birth, by itself, leads to severe developmental problems. Here are a few recent studies and surveys. [1], [2], [3], [4]

>What is your hypothesis for how the effects of poverty would be negated for the cohort/time period you're interested in?

You could look at women in poverty who give birth without cocaine in their system and compare statistics that way. It has been done. Prematurity is at about a percentage point higher for that group than the population at large compared to around 320% for those that test positive for cocaine.

[1] http://fn.bmj.com/content/94/5/339.short

[2]https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

[3] http://www.issues4life.org/pdfs/20110100ajog.pdf

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21257143

> This study does not show that cocaine has a negligible effect. It shows that cocaine has a less than poverty effect for children that make it to term. Big, big difference.

You're right, I overstated my claim. The effect is negligible with respect to the effects of poverty.

> Cocaine causes increased rates of premature birth

The studies you've linked do not support your statement. The studies say that cocaine use is associated with, not that cocaine is the cause.

re: [1] I never disputed that PT infants have developmental problems.

re: [2] "Studies revealed that in most domains, the neurobiological effects of PCE play a subtle role, with effects no greater than other known teratogens or environmental factors. Associations between PCE and negative developmental outcomes were typically attenuated when models included conditions that commonly co-occur with PCE (eg. tobacco or alcohol exposure, malnutrition, poor quality of care)." and "Preconception and prenatal cocaine use is commonly associated with poor pregnancy outcomes with psychosocial, behavioral, and risk factors, such as poverty, poor nutrition, stress, depression, physical abuse, lake[sic] of social support, and sexually transmitted infection. Illicit drug use during pregnancy is a major risk factor for maternal morbidity and neonatal complications."

re: [3] "Cocaine use during pregnancy was associated with significantly higher odds of preterm birth"

re: [4] "Prenatal cocaine exposure is significantly associated with preterm birth, low birthweight, and small for gestational age infants."

If you decide to ignore those in your study because you want to study something specific then you should make it very, very clear.

I don't know how cavalle could be more clear:

s/he's not judging the study design, but rather the popular report of the study results.

Is the newspaper report non-factual? It even mentions the researcher's caveat not to use cocaine during pregnancy.

"Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy."

fnordfnordfnord is right. I'll add: the article strongly implies that you were working with babies born into poverty, misdiagnosed and stigmatised as crack/alcohol babies.

You saw the outcome; you failed to adequately question the etiology. Those babies now have a mental label in your memory, "crack babies", which you use to reason from. But the label itself is incorrect.

A million times, no.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome has some very recognizable symptoms that have nothing to do with being born into poverty. A very specific skull shape for the worst cases, for one.

Crack babies not included in this study, the ones that are premature (20 something percent of crack user births fall into this category compared to 3-4% of births in general), also have very characteristic physical problems.

It is not poverty or malnutrition or stress that comes from poverty causing these very specific families of disorders. The crack kids are not coming from poor rural areas. They are coming from the inner city from crack using mothers.

Heavy crack users would have, I presume, a wide array of other problems, from bad nutrition to bad living conditions to physical abuse to child neglect. So singling out one chemical and attributing a problem of a life in complete disarray to it seems wrong, especially if statistics suggest otherwise. Unless you are looking for an easy political fix - we'd just eliminate crack and all problems would go away! But then it turns out chemical is not a problem, the life that makes using the chemical an attractive option is.

> Having worked with a slew of severely developmentally delayed crack babies and alcohol syndrome kids, I am going to have to go with my own eyes.

How many healthy kids born to crack-using mothers and severely messed up kids born to non-crack-using mothers did you work with to make a basis for comparison?

Wrong, but funny.

Caffeine is actually much more dangerous for babies than either crack or alcohol. After caffeine the second highest drug-related risk factor may actually be not smoking weed; that is, mothers who don't smoke enough weed during pregnancy may have a much higher rate of infant mortality:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/100/1/79

> mothers who don't smoke enough weed

I don't see any part where the talk about the "amount" of drugs consumed?

There were rougly 1600+ babies who were used as control and ~338 who tested positive for "weed". Some of the things that aren't broken down is the distribution for infant mortality. Perhaps there were outliers in the control group such as premature babies, which, if taken into account might explain some of the differences in mortality rates.

Very funny though, with actual data to back up some part of your claim, made me think... :)

> I don't see any part where the talk about the "amount" of drugs consumed?

What I meant is that if cannabis does confer some sort of protective benefit, then by definition the benefits would have to come from use that was above some minimum level, and perhaps also below some maximum level.

FTA

> Mortality rates between the drug-positive group or specifically, the cocaine-positive, morphine-positive, or cannabinoid-positive groups were not significantly different from the drug-negative groups (P < .3)

A number of 8.9 to 15.7 deaths per 1k live births doesn't necessarily imply a protective factor, especially when considering all the variable factors and a much smaller sample size compared to the drug negative group.

Also, caffeine isn't mentioned once on there, sure you don't mean cocaine?

More like science as hysterical racism. The "crack baby" mark was created by a bunch of terrible studies in the 80s, and seized on as convenient by a lot of terrible people. This is simply the last of a large number of studies that have found no relationship, all of which occurred well after the time when the term was useful to those terrible people.

This is science correcting itself after power has ceased to care what position science takes on the existence of the crack baby.

> Helps imprison the right sort of person.

While I agree with the general sentiment, it is worth noting that the original law that created the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine, the anti-druge abuse act of 1986, was supported by the congressional black caucus [1] because crack was such a serious problem in the black community at the time. So it was not a case of white people conspiring to put black people in prison, it was black people trying to impose prohibition on themselves, which of course backfired badly as prohibition always does.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_War_on_Drugs

Of the 110 "crack babies" followed for 25 years, only 12 finished college or were on track to finish college, while 2 were shot dead. So it's only 6 times more likely for inner city kids to graduate from college than to get shot to death?

If you're poor, and especially if you're poor and have the "wrong" skin color, people don't expect you to get a college degree, so people don't push you to succeed. It was always an unspoken assumption that I would graduate from college, and people around me set up my life that way.

Yes, the homicide rate is high, but I find the low college graduation rate more disturbing.

On a side note: shot, stabbed, or strangled doesn't make much difference to the homicide victim or their loved ones. Hopefully you'd have the same reaction if two of them were stabbed to death.

Any kind of murder is terrible. 2/110 is an extremely high murder rate. I realise the sample is not representative, but still...

> I find the low college graduation rate more disturbing.

I was thinking it is rather high, all things considered. The statistical norm would expect only about 25 people to graduate out of that group. It would be interesting to compare against people in similar situations, but without the crack influence. I expect that the attainment rate will be similar.

>people don't expect you to get a college degree, so people don't push you to succeed.

Is 'people' a euphemism for 'parents?'

I'm not the previous poster, and my experience is the exact opposite, but I don't think so. My parents gave me the least amount of pressure to go to college of anyone. Teachers, peers, and other people of the community were much more adamant about it. I even remember a few people lecturing my parents, not even me directly, over the importance of me going to college.

Not all communities, especially those on the poorer side, are like that at all. Education is even demonized in some locations. Parents are just a small part of the social attitudes towards such ventures.

I doubt it. Friends are very influential. I'm not sure about this, but I assume everyone in my high-school class went on to some kind of post-secondary education within the next few years. I would have felt very strange to not go to university. Everyone's doing it, y'know?

Is your hypothesis that people with an IQ of 79 could largely obtain meaningful college degrees if only given the proper encouragement?

Keep in mind this is Philadelphia, which although it's improving has historically had a pretty high level of gun violence and homicide. It's usually not the worst city in this regard (New Orleans or Detroit has had that distinction lately) but it's generally the worst among the large cities; for comparison in 2010 Philly had several times more homicides per 100,000 people than NYC (19.6 vs 6.4), and beat out Chicago (15.2) by a few points.

Probably more importantly these are not just "inner city kids". Nearly all of them are African American which means they are less likely to enroll in/graduate college overall; and they are all the children of parents who were addicted to crack at some point (and probably continued to struggle with it). That puts them at even more of a disadvantage.

The children had an average IQ of 79. Most people with that IQ are going to struggle mightily to attend college, let alone graduate.

Bad story design... trying to talk about the typical result, then late in the article drop the bombshell "The team considers Jaimee and her mother, Karen, among their best success stories.". If they "have to" go anecdotal, they could have at least picked the median subject. Like doing a report on the health effects of smoking, and intentionally selecting the healthiest 99 year old smoker in the world rather than the most likely outcome.

The most interesting part of the whole situation can be summed up by one of the lines describing the babies, "nearly all were African Americans." Even since the first days, It never was about medical issues or science, just a sorta-stealthy way to bash black folks. You'll note there was carefully no outage at the time, or long term medical study, at white coke snorting suburban women, although the blood levels of coke the babies experienced probably were about the same in the end. By analogy it would be like creating a social meme and scientific study of the negative pregnancy impact of malt liquor consumption (by urban black women), carefully ignoring the consumption of fruity margaritas (by suburban white women). Because you can't bash black people unless you can "other" them first.

I guess the two startup lessons are if you're trying to make median situation analysis, policy, and decisions, and you must use an anecdote, don't chose an extreme outlier, use a median... unless you've got an axe to grind and you're trying to mislead people, in which case unusual sample selection can be a powerful tool to mislead people. Startup lesson two is one popular way to scam people is to play word definition games as a strategy for divide and conqueror, so look out for that gameplay technique, and/or use word redefinition as a weapon of your own.

I found the success story important to heavier weigh the fact that cocaine exposure doesn't stunt brain development to a greater degree than general poverty. The author made plenty of other points about the tested groups not behaving other than expected given poverty as a common factor among them.

Bad story design...

I disagree. If you're trying to tell a compelling story, you want to reinforce the story that you're trying to tell in every way that you can. That makes it more compelling, and sells more page views.

The danger being, of course, that making reasoned decisions based on compelling story lines is dangerous. But this article isn't in that business - it wants to sell page views.

Journalists have a responsibility to the public that goes beyond page views. That is what makes them journalists.

If you wish to be consistent and say that the authors of the articles in virtually every blog of note are not journalists, then I will agree.

Unfortunately lots of people who have nothing resembling "journalistic integrity" make a living that way. If you're bored, you can turn on Fox News and see how quickly you can identify one.

"By analogy it would be like creating a social meme and scientific study of the negative pregnancy impact of malt liquor consumption (by urban black women), carefully ignoring the consumption of fruity margaritas (by suburban white women)"

If suburban white women consuming fruity margaritas were much more responsible with their drinking, so that they never consumed while pregnant, then we could study the effects of alcohol on pregnancy solely by focusing on the effects of malt liquor on pregnancy.

Crack use was widespread and used by poor pregnant women. Cocaine use has never been as widespread in suburban white populations. So researchers aren't being racist, they're investigating the problem where it actually exists.

Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results.

Doesn't this mean that their selection sample effectively excluded any babies that had a noticeable physical reaction (other than having cocaine in their system) to the effect of their mothers' cocaine use?

You can't study everything at once.

Yeah, I don't really get that part either. Prematurity is something that is itself heavily studied; prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to study.

> prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to study

It is a logical thing to study, and most likely is being studied, by someone else. After all, this study wasn't looking at premature babies. That doesn't prematurity with crack isn't a problem, only a different problem.

My issue is less with what the experiment studied and more with how it was summarized (particularly by the headline).

Except... How do you know which effects come from crack + premature without subtracting out just premature and just crack?

Designing experiments in this area is not my expertise, but my inclination would be "study premature babies with and without crack" You could also simply study premature babies in general, and then study why crack seems to cause more premature babies.

I imagine somebody who is actually in this field would not have much trouble designing experiments to study premature "crack babies". Premature babies are something they chose not to study, not something that cannot be studied.

Yea, the outcome can be summarized as "No significant effect of cocaine exposure seen in subset of fetuses that are not born premature." But all this tells you is that premature birth is a necessary condition for bad effects (if they exist).

They wouldn't be able to tell which babies were premies because of the cocaine, and which were because of other factors.

A study of only premies would be interesting, but might yield the same result as this study.

Highly unlikely. Prematurely born crack babies are often in very, very bad shape.

The rate of premature birth among all pregnant women is around 4.3% (that includes smokers and drug users so the rate amongst healthy non-smokers is even lower than that). Amongst crack cocaine users the number is between 17–27%. So the prematurity issue is pretty significant. You might even say dominant.

Ideally, in an experimental design you want to control all but one variable. In real-life human studies, you can almost never do this exactly, but you try to approximate a true controlled experiment as much as possible. In this case, the independent variable is cocaine exposure, and full-term birth is a controlled variable.

The provided justification ("so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results") is written in a somewhat self-gratifying way I think; simplifying the experimental design was surely another factor taken into account.

Excluding premature babies of course limits the study's relevance, though the results may be remarkable even if they only apply to full-term babies.

tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."

"Poverty: Not even once."

Since many people might not get the reference, this is a reference to the 90s "crack, not even once" canned media message. Related: Nancy regan's "just say no to drugs" from the 80s. In America, these simplistic sound bites seem to be our attempt at universal healthcare.

Damn lies and statistics, though. Being poor does not cause lower IQ, nor does lower IQ cause you to be poor. However, you'll find a lot of lower IQ people at poverty level. You can't guarantee that any college candidate that is poor is not going to excel, so poverty, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, should have absolutely nothing to do with acceptance into any organization, assuming that everything else is equal, which it isn't. Unfortunately clothing, shared experience and knowledge, language, etc. significantly influence testing and decisions.

Pretty sure growing up in poverty can negatively influence access to mentally stimulating things. Not saying that the number on the bank account directly influences IQ, but tackling poverty would probably have ripples in the school system too.

This is going in a bad direction for sure now, but here is this thing:

Some people, regardless of race, have lower intellectual capacity. That is what IQ tests try to measure, but fail to do completely because a lot is still based on education and experience that is difficult to factor out of the tests.

A greater number of those people that have less intellectual capacity are not going to be as financially successful. Unless you just make them. And that "making" them is as temporary as the funds that keep going to them. That is NOT to say that we should not feed the poor and hungry. We should! And, we should try to educate them more, because they need more help. However, that is charity. People deserve love, food, and shelter. But, we are not able to "bring up" people to a level that cannot be sustained because they don't have the intellectual capacity. That is why welfare fails and is taken advantage of. Unless you have some sort of medicine or medical treatment that can make people with less intellectual capacity have greater intellectual capacity to even everyone out, then it should be considered charity to help the poor- not some sort of way to make everyone smarter.

I get your point, I just don't think that "intellectual capacity" is really the limiting factor here. Education is a place where we really can make the pie bigger for everyone I think. And economics isn't zero-sum, we can at least try to make sure people can have 3 meals a day.

Also, I'm not completely convinced of the amount of importance of intellect by birth. But that's more of an opinion I hold, I have no evidence to back it up.

Except that intellectual capacity is evidently not the main factor in determining the poverty level of people; it's certainly among one of the variables, but the fact that poor people are better off in some systems and countries rather than others and social mobility also varies substantially, it means that there's a ton of things that can work as government policy to improve the situation.

Can't agree more with your first sentence and it's very depressing.

Relatives purchased tickets for a show for me and my son to go to featuring fighting robots. He was extremely stimulated by it, not surprisingly, and I so want to capture that enthusiasm towards some engineering (make a robot).

Without the wealthier relatives that stimulation wouldn't have been there. Without wealthier parents he's not going to (in short term at least) have access to resources to develop towards the potential educational outcomes from that experience.

Taking a world view we must be in the top reaches of wealth too I'd imagine. Sad.

> Being poor does not cause lower IQ

Down the page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 - we have lancewiggs saying that the results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty.

What basis do you have for your claim?

Here is the logic:

1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world.

2. Take all of their money away.

3. Give it to the other 50%.

Lets say we were able to do those three. Now do you think being poor causes lower IQ?

DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION!

I think if you take the babies of the smartest X% people in the world and raise them in poverty then yes, their average IQ will be lower than if they were raised in a middle class household.

Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.

You are confusing intelligence with intellectual capacity (IQ).

IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind.

Intelligence is building upon that.

Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.

"An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess intelligence."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

> A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.

I like to consider myself one of those people.

But I have to say, I can't imagine how my IQ would have stayed the same as I got older if I had not at least been able to eat regularly, drink clean water, make medical check-ups, etc.

I get what you have been implying, which is that a person's theoretical intellectual capability is not necessarily tied to their current intellectual capability. But the brain is an adaptive organ, not a monolith that comes out of the womb fully-formed.

It's at least possible (and likely, IMO) that there are various 'gates' in the development of the brain where if pre-requisites for development are not met, that the opportunity for that natural development gets closed off as the brain moves onto further forms of modification and maintenance of its neural net.

At some point the brain has to switch over from adolescent development to adult 'maintenance programming'. If you are resource-constrained during that adolescent phase it may be difficult to catch back up, even in a resource surplus as an adult. This would show as a lower IQ (even on an ideal IQ test), even though a higher IQ could have been achieved with proper 'care & feeding' as a child.

In other words, do I think the removal of something posited to be developmentally advantageous would lower IQ after the developmental period had passed?

No, I was saying that money in pocket != intelligence.

'Does not equal' is a very strongly bound form of 'cause.' I don't think you can meaningfully make that definition apply to the topic.

But money may = opportunity.

Step 1 is more like:

"Given all of the kids who would grow up to be the smartest 50% of the people in the world."

The problem is we are not able to predict this first step.

After a generation or two? Yes.

Consider the elements of an IQ test: vocabulary, pattern recognition, mathematics, abstract logic. What kind of environment would you think is more likely to teach children the things they need to do well on an IQ test?

I'm pretty sure they don't test vocab or math in an IQ test. I think you're thinking of the modern day SATs, which can be affected by poverty.

Nope. By "math" I was referring to number sequences (which number comes next...), as opposed to geometric patterns (which shape comes next...); by "vocab" I was referring to analogical questions (a is to b as c is to __).

If SATs are readily accepted to be affected by poverty, I fail to understand why IQ tests wouldn't be also.

Because IQ tests are administered across races, cultures, languages, education levels, and even age, and are normalized across these factors.

Obviously for vocab, a Chinese person would fail if they don't understand English, so they'd translate it. For a poor American, the vocab skills required on an IQ test are pretty basic.

Also, the modern SAT tests are stated by CollegeBoard[1] to NOT correlate to IQ anymore. They correlate to education.

You're conflating a test for knowledge vs a test for cognitive ability.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/view...

    American Psychological Association, 2003
    http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx

"People in Western cultures, he suggests, tend to view intelligence as a means for individuals to devise categories and to engage in rational debate, while people in Eastern cultures see it as a way for members of a community to recognize contradiction and complexity and to play their social roles successfully."

"Over the past several years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. Among the Luo people in rural Kenya, Grigorenko and her collaborators have found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts: rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skills; luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration; paro, or practical thinking; and winjo, or comprehension. Only one of the four--rieko--is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence."

"They also agree with studies in a number of countries, both industrialized and nonindustrialized, that suggest that people who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context."

"Many psychologists believe that the idea that a test can be completely absent of cultural bias--a recurrent hope of test developers in the 20th century--is contradicted by the weight of the evidence. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of several nonverbal intelligence tests that were originally advertised as "culture free," but are now recognized as culturally loaded."

    ScienceDaily, 2010
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121155220.htm

"The researchers also claim that African IQ test scores cannot be interpreted in terms of lower intelligence levels, as these scores have different psychometric characteristics than western IQ test scores. Until now, the incomparability of Western and African IQ scores had never been systematically proven."

    University of North Carolina, current curriculum
    http://www.unc.edu/~rooney/iq.htm

"In school settings, psychologists often joke that IQ is what IQ tests measure. There is a lot of truth to this adage. Ideally, IQ tests sample a wide range of experiences and they measure a person’s ability to apply learned information in new and different ways. They do not measure capacity or potential. They do provide information about cognitive skills at a given point in time.

Because IQ tests chiefly measure success in school, they are value-laden. Scores provide a statistical indication of the extent to which a person has critical schools and information, but they should not be directly equated with intelligence. Test scores are a useful index of ability, but they may reflect test-taking sophistication, personality, and attitudinal characteristics as well as learned and innate ability (Plomin, 1989)."

    Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence
    http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence

"But some thinkers cling to the idea that IQ measures an inborn intelligence that transcends culture and schooling. If that's true, one would expect that the most abstract, "culture free" elements of IQ testing wouldn't be subject to the Flynn Effect. But they are."

"In modern cultures, more emphasis is being placed on abstraction. Students learn algebra at an earlier age than they used to, for instance, but in addition our everyday lives are full of abstractions."

    The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UCSD
    http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Cole/iq.html

"This point was made very explicitly by a Kpelle anthropological acquaintance of mine who was versed in the more esoteric aspects of Kpelle secret societies and medicine (or magic, according to American stereotypes). We had been talking about what it means to be intelligent in Kpelle society (the most appropriate term is translated as "clever"). "Can you be a clever farmer?" I asked. "No," came the reply. "You can be a hardworking farmer, or you can be a lucky farmer, but we couldn't say that someone is a clever farmer. Everyone knows how to farm. We use 'clever' when we talk about the way someone gets other people to help him. Some people always win arguments. Some people know how to deal with strangers. Some people know powerful medicine. These are the things we talk about as clever.""

    Poverty Lowers IQ
    http://www.monitor.net/monitor/5-5-96/povertyiq.html

"Adjustments for socioeconomic conditions almost completely eliminate differences in IQ scores between black and white children, according to the study's co-investigators."

""The study strongly suggests that economic and learning environments of the home are the most powerful predictors of racial IQ differences in 5-year-olds," said Brooks-Gunn."

    Book Review
    http://bryanappleyard.com/flynns-iq/

"Human potential at birth is unchanged; we are not, in any fundamental sense, becoming a smarter species. But the way we live has changed. IQ tests were first established in the 19th century at a time when daily life was concrete and practical. The tests, however, had to be abstract to make them culturally neutral. People, therefore, found them harder because they were unaccustomed to such modes of thought."

"People became better at IQ tests and, steadily, the scores rose. So IQ scores are meaningless unless their date and social norms are taken into account."

(Note that this is a review of a book authored by James R Flynn, the discoverer of the Flynn Effect in IQ measurements. Previous HN commentary on this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461038)

I could pretty easily come up with a lot more like this. Or, you could strike up a conversation with HN user tokenadult, who is knowledgeable on the subject.

Either way, IQ tests are readily accepted now not to be a test for cognitive ability, and more researchers are adopting the view that it is impossible to separate cultural and environmental influences (and thus knowledge) from any other innate factors in IQ tests.

You really shouldn't assume that the people you're talking to don't know what they mean.

you are proving him right by copy and pasting results of a google trawl without any analysis or apparent understanding. "IQ tests are readily accepted now not to be a test for cognitive ability" is a bizarrely strong claim and so is the idea that it is "impossible to separate cultural and environmental influences". I think it's pretty clear that you are just looking for material to support pre-existing assumptions.

You don't seem like an idiot but all your comments in this thread seem to be making the same obvious error.

"Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.

IQ not intelligence. IQ is meant to be a measure of intellectual capacity. It is nonsensical to say that someone is unable to be intelligent because they are poor.

Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty. If we were able to teach good parenting skills, social skills, and ethics adequately in schools, and help them develop sense of community, then many of the problems (unrelated to genetics) related to intelligence being lower would go away. I hope if anyone takes home anything from what I'm saying, it is that you can't throw money at a problem like this. Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap.

However, back to the study. Genetic problems with IQ cannot be solved by money, period. Also, being poor does not make you have lower potential for intelligence. That has been my point all over this thread.

> Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty.

I appreciate that you are trying really hard to make an argument, but you literally have no idea what you are talking about.

I appreciate that you are trying to refute my argument, but just saying that someone does not know what they are talking about has got to be one of the least intelligent ways of doing so. Explain to me exactly how I am wrong. I see no other comments by you in this thread, so I have no idea what you are thinking. I'm not a mind reader.

This conversation is now a day old. Given current levels of attention spans, I am not sure that a response at this time would be useful, but nonetheless, you are right and I do owe you one.

First, I should point out that I speak from experience: I have been one of those poor children and have known many of them. I have experienced not having enough to eat and attended poor schools. Fortunately for me, these experiences were relatively short lived. However, because of those experiences, I retain a keen interest in the state of poverty, poor people, and how they live. Now, on to your points.

Obviously there are exceptions, but most poor schools do not have internet access for the students or computers for them. If they do have a library, it is generally inadequate and most are not encouraged to use it. The greater problem, however, is the issue of hunger; it is very hard to concentrate or develop one's self in a hungry state. Adults can, and do learn, to deal with the state of hunger but children do not. A hungry child is only interested in one thing and when the state of hunger persists, will adapt, however they must, to a life of hunger. That generally means they will make what we would consider poor choices.

> If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.)

Tarring poor people (or any other sort, for that matter) with some sort of genetic failing is a convenient way to explain why they are less successful than you are, but unfortunately sidesteps a whole set of other reasons (historical, social, political, geographic) than generally has a far greater impact on one's life than genes. I was born in Africa and was lucky enough to have parents who eventually ended up in the United States where I availed myself of the opportunities, etc. I am proud of my intellect and have achieved much because of it, but I would never claim that I succeeded merely because of it. I have met many smart people who were simply not as lucky as I have been to make that claim.

> and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty.

Here, the combination of factors listed seem to point to an urban American child. Problem is, there are many poor children in other countries who do not face these same pressures and yet, still have the same outcomes.

Parenting helps a lot. Community helps a lot. But if the lack of them were the problem, we'd see far less poverty than we do.

I'm afraid I've gone on for too long and will have lost some readers, but I hope this better explains my earlier posting and why I claimed that you did not speak from a knowledgeable position.

> Obviously there are exceptions, but most poor schools do not have internet access for the students or computers for them. If they do have a library, it is generally inadequate and most are not encouraged to use it.

I appreciate your response, but I believe that your experience is based of your childhood in Africa. In our local county library we probably have 30-40 computers available for free internet access. This was not the case 10 years ago, so perhaps you should visit the public library in the area of the U.S. where you believe that there is a lack of internet access and I would be surprised if at least one computer is there with internet access that could be used. I would bet that there is, and I doubt people would be discouraged from using it.

> Tarring poor people (or any other sort, for that matter) with some sort of genetic failing is a convenient way to explain why they are less successful than you are...

You missed my point entirely, I'm afraid. I don't think that poverty is genetically linked to lack of success. Poverty is not genetic. What I was saying was that if you have a group of people that are less intelligent because they are genetically predisposed to being less intelligent, then that group has a greater likelihood of being less successful and therefore poorer.

> Here, the combination of factors listed seem to point to an urban American child.

Everything I've been arguing about is about the U.S. I am definitely not speaking about Africa or other parts of the world, and I'm sorry that you took it that way. I think that there are a lot of places in the world in worse condition than in the U.S. I am only making the arguments I make here because throwing money at poverty does not help. It must be applied with care and education and guidance are even more important, at least when people are willing to listen and be taught. Unfortunately, some cultures and peoples are not interested in changing.

btw- just to be clear, I think that Africa deserves a lot more aid that it is getting, and the the U.S. has a lot of areas that could use more money- one of our largest cities, Detroit, just went bankrupt. And with atheism spreading through government, entertainment, and media support, the money given by the world's largest charity, the Catholic church, has started to go down because fewer are giving, which will affect the entire world. We definitely don't need to stop giving. We need to start giving. But the progressive, statist agenda in the U.S. unintentionally adds layers and layers of bureaucracy that poorly administer this money. I would be in favor of putting more money towards U.S. teachers (which should not be tenured but should be higher paid) and education in-general, and even smart housing programs that don't colocate the poor, but not welfare.

My responses are based knowledge of poverty in many parts of the world. I mentioned my childhood in Africa because my knowledge of it is deeper than that of most people discussing the issue. In addition, as I mentioned, I have a keen interest in the topic beyond my personal experiences.

The question of why poor people don't take advantage of the amenities available to them or, in other words, pull themselves up by their bootstraps (in this case, using computers with free internet access) does come up. The answer is that some do. But it is not the solution for everyone, just as it is not the solution for the rest of society. You might and I would, but I am an exception and would not expect others to follow the same paths I have.

On the issue of genetics, I understand you to be saying that only the stupid are poor. Sorry, genetics don't work that way and poor people aren't all stupid. There is just as much variation in their ranks as in others.

In any case, I think further discussion of the topic would be unproductive so I'll stop here.

I know the conversation is over, but

> Sorry, genetics don't work that way and poor people aren't all stupid.

If you reread what I've said in multiple places in this topic, I don't think that at all. In fact, that is why I started arguing with the initial post. To summarize:

1. Being poor does not make you stupid.

2. Giving money to the poor is best handled by an organization that can ensure the money is not being abused. In the U.S., the cost of adequate administration of aid to the poor is not possible, and they do such a poor job at it that welfare is abused to the point that it is hurtful to the poor because it keeps them down and dependent on the government or worse it keeps them using drugs. Charities such as the Catholic church which gives more money and time than any other organization including the Red Cross are better fit to do this, however the growth and acceptance of atheism/child abuse by priests/the economy/several other rights (gay right to marry, pro-choice, wanting openly-gay/female priests) issues continue to lower giving without a similarly efficient organization (nuns who work for room/board without families) getting those funds.

3. I understand that not all have the opportunities I've described (libraries, computers), and I think they should. It is more common in the U.S., and one of the main reasons it isn't used as much or in the right way is due to parenting and community. I think that we need to spend more time working on all of that, not just using the welfare system (which in the U.S. is a bureaucratic mess that is unable to effectively manage how funding is allocated).

IQ is not abstract 'perfect world' capacity. It's a reflection of how well developed your brain actually is (to the limits of what areas it can measure). Without nutrition, the brain doesn't build actual neural capacity, and the IQ is lower than well-fed peers.

> Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap.

Except that welfare actually works, and despite the fact that poor people are in general poor money managers, a marginal income that improves some environmental variables goes a lon way towards improving intelligence. Especially when it translates to greater food availability.

Especially when it translates to greater food availability.

The poor in the US do not suffer from a lack of food availability.

5.1% of poor children don't get enough to eat. For comparison, 5.7% of children above 4 x poverty line don't get enough to eat.

http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html

Food availability is a solved problem in the United States. Portraying it as a problem takes resources away from real problems which need to be solved.

If you take it merely as a question of caloric intake you're right. If you're talking about the cost of high-quality and nutrient-rich food, there's a long way to go. The massive subsidizing of junk food through corn subsidies does not help, but if you try getting those calories through vegetables and quality meat you may find it's out of reach for many people, and that does have an impact on intelligence and development, especially when those cheap calories lead to obesity, diabetes, and other complications.

...especially when those cheap calories lead to obesity, diabetes, and other complications.

If you are purchasing too many calories, you are wasting money that could be spent on veggies.

Poor parents raising their children badly is a real problem that should be solved if we want to improve the next generation. One possible solution is to constrain the food choices of the poor - replace food stamps with food boxes and fill the box with only healthy options.

This is already done through the WIC program. If you look at the shelves in the grocery store, you'll see the WIC label on certain foods. It does not stop poor food choices. The only way to make it work would be to shutdown all fast food restaurant and pull all crap off the shelves in the store, and that will never happen. Anything that can be abused to get more caloric intake for less money will be abused.

Unless every fast food restaurant is outlawed and shutdown and all crap food is outlawed and removed from the shelves of every store in the U.S., you are not going to stop anyone (low income or not) from eating it.

In fact, the U.S. actually provides incentives for companies to use high fructose corn syrup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5795478

And for those on WIC, while many crap items aren't on the WIC list, parents can still abuse it by buying things like only Cheerios for their kids to eat instead of veggies, etc. And yes, regardless of welfare, Obesity and diabetes are going to remain very common among the poor in the U.S.

IQ is not an objective measure of innate intelligence, hence it creeps up over time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Since this effect is so rapid (~100 years), it is unlikely be due to genetic changes. It's pretty clear that developmental and social factors are playing into IQ test results. Both of these are negatively affected by being born into a low income family (less access to food, learning materials, mentors, other IQ individuals, etc.).

"This is a population who is in need of early identification and support services. Consistent with previous research, our data suggest that children who grow up in low income households and who have experienced neglect are at risk for difficulties with cognitive and academic achievement. The importance of these findings cannot be overstated given that appropriate early assessments and interventions may help change developmental trajectories and long-term outcomes."

http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07/...

Is the concept of 'causes' so hard? Severe lack of money, over a period of years, causes bad nutrition which causes development to be impaired.

This causation takes time.

The amount of money at a specific moment is meaningless because it's 0% of the experimental window. Look at the average and compare it to food and necessity prices.

Attending college increases pre-college IQ scores a mean of just under 20 points (I don't recall the precise number from the study now, I remember it was between 15 and 20). That's not "smarter people get into college" - that's before-and-after on the same subjects.

Growing up wealthy entails a lot more advantages than four years of courses, at that.

I would like to see that study if you can find it. IQ is generally believed to become more genetic (that is, environmental effects start to wear off) as people get older.

Sorry, I hit up Google Scholar trying to find it but had no luck. It's not my field of expertise, so I don't know the proper jargon to throw in to get the right search results.

No, there's actually a good amount of evidence that poverty does in fact cause low IQs. For instance the divergence between the IQs of East Germans and West Germans during the partition, and the way they converged again after the Cold War.

It is true that people with low IQs will tend to become poorer (though conscientiousness is often a bigger factor), but reversion to the mean should limit the impact of that in the children of poor people.

EDIT: Here's a rather in depth article on the topic: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-... There's tons of evidence that at a population level wealth is the main driver of IQ differences, though genetics does play a large role at the individual level.

Be careful about causality and correlation. Poverty probably does not "cause" low-IQ, but poverty is a good indicator for low-IQ due to correlation.

Correlation between A and B does not imply causation from A to B, but it does imply causation there is some causation somewhere, from A to B or B to A or something more complicated. In those cases we have to step down a level and look at the particular mechanisms.

We can see some very good mechanisms for how a low IQ might cause poverty in most cases, but the specific reason I mentioned the East/West Germany situation is that it precludes any of the normal ways that people can sort themselves into poverty - it wasn't as if there was any huge migration in Germany that made all the smarter people end up on the west side of the divide. Can you provide a causal mechanism other than poverty->low IQ that could explain that?

Or how about all the immigrants from rural Ireland that had significantly lower IQs than the residents of the cities they immigrated into, but whose children and descendants had substantially the same IQs as other residents of those cities?

There's really a mountain of evidence that the causality here runs both ways.

Personally, I believe (!) in a causal chain like this: Poor people dream smaller (hopelessness,knowledge) -> less ambition (in school, career, wealth) -> less motivation (e.g. in IQ tests) -> envy -> aggression against wealthy people

Also what does "poverty" mean here? "Lack of basic resources", then practically nobody is poor in Germany due to our welfare system. Statistics use "less than 60% of average income" or something like that. Then we will never eliminate poverty, anyways.

To "solve" poverty I believe the big question is how to inspire people that it is possible to improve their situation? How to provide hope to poor people? In Germany I think it is intellectually realistic that anybody can improve, but people do not believe it. Essentially, (in the wealthy western world) poverty is not a technical problem, but rather an emotional one.

I do not care about IQ much. I do not know my own IQ. Since I am currently pursuing a PhD I am probably above average, but who really cares? Studies show that IQ predicts academic success, so it means something for high-education jobs. For creative tasks it's useless. Effectively, the IQ of a child only provides a hint about future career choices, but not about success or wealth.

First, it is indeed true that modern Germany has a fairly generous social welfare system and you could certainly argue that nobody in Germany is really poor today. But as you might know, during the Cold War Germany was partitioned into two separate countries, and while welfare programs were present back then did exist they didn't actually transfer money between the two countries. And since West Germany was much richer than East Germany, this meant that everyone in East Germany was relatively poor. Back when West Germany was much wealthier than East Germany the inhabitants had higher IQs than East Germans, but nowadays this is no longer true. Hence, evidence that wealth causes IQ differences.

Now, it might be that communism was crushing the hope of East Germans or something. That could also explain this particular difference. But we can measure social mobility and people's beliefs in social mobility across countries and see if it makes a difference. And as far as I can tell it doesn't, since social mobility and believe in social mobility are lower in most places today than they were in 1960, but the Flynn effect[1] continues to march on.

Having beliefs is nice and complex beliefs like those put us humans way above the vast majority of the lifeforms on this planet. But as someone pursing a PhD I would hope that you would examine the implications of your beliefs and test those implications against reality.

And IQ does have predictive power with respect to income[2], though not as strongly as other factors.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [2]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income

So the kids in the study were selected because their parents were poor, and the average IQ of the kids in the study was around 80. That certainly signals a correlation, and since these are kids and don't have agency over their economic situation, it suggests a direction of causation too.

Logically money should have no direct affect on intellectual capacity (e.g. see my other argument about taking the money away and giving it to someone else).

In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.

It depends on how you ascribe causation to hereditary factors. Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ? I don't think so, because a 4 year old has no agency over his economic circumstances.

I actually don't believe at a micro-level that causation comes into play at all. I was responding to the statement that at a macro-level there is probability of causation, and it is more rational that poverty is caused by stupidity than poverty causes stupidity. The latter is nonsense.

Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ?

No.

But it does make sense to say that a 4 year old is both poor and has a low IQ because his parents do. And this applies whether you believe that his low IQ is due to heredity or a poor environment caused by his parents.

How could it not have an impact on intellectual capacity?

Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development. This things are all much easier to access when you have more money.

> Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development.

But not so important that they would have a 40 point IQ difference. If it is, show me the studies confirming that.

Did you just pull "40 points" out of thin air because there are plenty of studies showing economic causes for smaller differences?

If your nutrition is poor enough you will be dead. It is well established that dead people necessarily have low IQs. Q.E.D.

Where do you pull "40 point IQ difference" from? The gap between these impoverished kids and normal is only 20 points. And that is easily explainable with nutrition, stimulation, and education.

To start look at http://www.thewayforwardproject.org/file_uploads/Gen10%20IQ%... for a meta analysis of thousands of studies finding that the IQ difference between growing up in an orphanage and foster care averaging 20 points.

Independently, the estimated difference between average IQ in the mid-30s and today is 20 points. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect for verification. In that time period the main things that have changed are nutrition, stimulation and education.

So there you have it. Two unrelated analyses of completely different things finding that nutrition, stimulation and education can explain 20 point IQ differences between otherwise similar populations.

> Logically money should have no direct affect on intellectual capacity

If intellectual capacity was purely genetic, this would make some sense. You can't buy better genes for yourself or your children. [1] However, intellectual capacity is demonstrably affected by a variety of environmental factors, including early nutrition, that themselves are strongly influenced by wealth, so we've got pretty good ideas of some of the mechanisms by which wealth influences intellectual capacity.

> In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.

I think you are confusing "rationality" with fit to your preferred, non-evidence-based, model of the way the world should work.

[1] Well, except that wealth affects mate selection opportunities, so, even with purely genetic intellectual capacity, wealth could plausibly have some influence.

Surely, they should have picked themselves up by their bootstraps by age 3.

Part of the IQ test includes vocabulary, and it's not that much of a leap to say that more highly-educated people have a broader, deeper vocabulary, even when controlled for cultural effects. A smaller vocabulary will give you a lower IQ. There are likely to be other factors affected by exposure to wider experiences than you might not get when impoverished; for example, in general, the more you handle numbers, the better you get at manipulating them.

Highly educated people might also have higher innate intelligence, which allows them to pick up words easier and develop larger vocabularies. Let's not forget that IQ has been shown to be significantly heritable by adoption studies.

There are also issues with using IQ as a proxy for... anything. Especially when we're talking about topics with strong racial components.

> tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."

It's a good thing to back up with a scientific study and facts, but I'd hardly call it surprising (the article did) except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like.

Another interesting part of the bias might be that I've never heard the term "crack baby" (or similar) outside the context of US ghettos, while cocaine is used globally in many countries.

except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like.

I think this is a very important observation. Sometimes poverty doesn't look anything like this.

I'd like to note that although I grew up in "technical" poverty, e.g. in a small rural community with a median income of $11,121, very few saw much violence or any of the markers of poverty lifestyle this article talks about.

Although my anecdote is not scientific, I do think this has much more to do with observed culture than with an arbitrary signifier like poverty. Urban poverty and rural poverty are entirely different things, for instance. As is transient and temporary versus chronic poverty.

Great point. I would love to see some study done around this. It's the combination of poverty and crime that leads to such disaster in most cases. It's not even a lack of community, in my experience both have very strong social ties to one another. Either way, it's a shame we still can't figure this out in America.

Crack Cocaine and Cocaine are not quite the same thing. Cocaine is known and used in the US as well. Crack was a US ghetto phenomenon, it is not used as some code-word for blacks.

The results are surprising in the sense that what was said, and generally believed even by professionals in the field, at the height of the issue was that it would be impossible for these children to develop at all. Poverty has a known affect on development, it was believed that these crack babies wouldn't even have the chance to hit that level.

The surprise comes from that the previous belief couldn't be more wrong. The actual effect was basically non-existent.

Crack Cocaine and Cocaine are not quite the same thing.

Do you have any links to support this? I had always heard that chemically, they are both "cocaine" and the "crack" preparation simply allows quicker intake and thus a faster high.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_cocaine

Crack is the freebase form of Cocaine. It is preferred for smoking (quicker intake ,less needed) because of the change in the evaporation point.

Oddly, Crack Cocaine is just the active ingredient (cocaine), powder cocaine is cocaine hydrochloride.

My original point is that no, calling it crack cocaine is not codeword for poor [insert racial slur for black people] doing stupid things, an assertion that the OP tried to make by implying bias in the article and saying the rest of the world just calls it cocaine.

More specifically, they're equivalent if you were going to freebase the cocaine. Freebasing powdered cocaine is possible, but its complicated and dangerous -- for instance Richard Pryor famously almost died from burns received while doing it: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20076864,00....

Crack is basically freebasing in kit form.

I think the restriction to babies born full term is extremely important.

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine, conditional on being carried to full term."

*When not taking into account prematurely born children, which among crack users is 17–27% compared to between 3-4% for the population at large.

How do we know it is caused by crack use and not by other factors that usually correlate with heavy crack use?

Because in areas with high poverty but low-cocaine use rates the pre-term birth rate rises (from 3.9% to 4.9%) but not as much as among crack-cocaine users (17%-29%).

> tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."

This is an interesting and almost 'common sense' observation about demographics. It is more difficult to thrive in a poor environment then it is to do badly out of a rich environment.

That's why we are obsessed about 'rags to riches' stories right?

Somewhere Charles Murray is reading this article and screaming "IQ! IQ!"

I've got to read that book, if only because of how frequently it is coming up in discussion recently.

It's a great read despite its "evil" reputation. You'll be impressed by how meticulous Murray is. His style is 80% evidence and 20% conjecture, and he is always careful to separate the two.

"Coming Apart" is also essential reading to understand modern society.

Source of a lot of the evidence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund

My old room mate did cocaine studies with pregnant mice. He'd inject pregnant mice with cocaine and then raise the mouse pups and place electrodes in on of the "pleasure centers" of their brains. He would then measure the curve of how hard the mice were willing to spin a wheel for a given amount of current into their brains.

The model was that mice willing to beat their bodies more for the same amount of stimulation were more susceptible to a wide range of addictions. He found that pups exposed to cocaine in utero did in fact as adults spin the wheel harder for a given amount of stimulation, indicating higher susceptibility to a wide range of addictions.

My old room mate would have really liked to perform the same study with nicotine, since many many more human mothers dose their fetuses with nicotine as compared to cocaine. For what the wild speculations of an experienced researcher are worth, he suspected that mouse pups exposed to nicotine would also be more susceptible to addiction (supposing he was actually measuring susceptibility to addiction).

However, politicians and lobbyists have made it much easier to get federal grant money for cocaine studies vs. nicotine studies, despite nicotine having a much larger impact on society.

On a side note: in 1999, 4.7% of US 8th graders were willing to admit to having used cocaine, so the test group appears to be below US averages for cocaine use, despite their mothers using cocaine. I imagine that being predicated upon having mothers caring enough to place their children in these studies, and mothers responsible enough to stay in contact with researchers, and the subjects knowing they were being studied, skewed the drug usage portion of the study. Nationally, (for those outside of medical trials) I can't imagine the cocaine use rate for those whose mothers used cocaine to be below the rate for those whose mothers did not use cocaine.

This is getting into questions you can't ask, and IQ is a severely flawed metric, but I wonder what the IQs are of the parents, and if the children's scores are higher or lower, and if we can rule out heredity.

The results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty as well.

Related: Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa

http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-...

That's a fun comment thread. Poe's Law illustrated beautifully.

Genetically sensitive designs for study of human behavior are the province of behavior geneticists (many of whom are first trained as psychologists, but at least two I know have undergraduate degrees in mathematics). One of the surprising findings of human behavior genetics is that ALL human behavioral characteristics are heritable. (It is an abuse of language to say "heritable" in this context, but the abuse is conventional and standard in the field.) So we can agree with the professional literature that your tendency to vote for one political party rather than another is heritable. Your attribution of causes for human differences (e.g., human differences in IQ) is also heritable. Your opinion about regulation of the Internet is heritable. Everything about human behavior is heritable.

Eric Turkheimer has recently been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, and he has the very kind habit of posting most of his peer-reviewed journal articles on his faculty website.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm

Lars Penke is another, younger researcher who posts most of his publications on his personal website.

http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html

I have the pleasure of meeting many other researchers in human genetics just about weekly during the school year at the University of Minnesota "journal club" Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology. From those sources and other sources, I have learned about current review articles on human behavior genetics that help dispel misconceptions that are even commonplace among medically or scientifically trained persons who aren't keeping up with current research.

An interesting review article,

Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

admits the disappointment of behavior genetics researchers.

"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it's easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science.

"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

is another interesting review article that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence:

http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur...

"At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]."

The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182

http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/...

looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection.

"Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic. We will understand them best through investigation of their manifestation in biological and social developmental processes."

Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological Science.

http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositiv...

"At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be temperedءs it has been in the medical sciencesآy a recognition that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects.

"Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the proliferation of potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not realize that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public may lead to incorrect perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as 'genes for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."

"They found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time."

That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%. C.f. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf

N.b. that some of these statistics are pretty wonky, e.g. they count getting beat up for your siblings as assault, or getting flashed as being a victim of sexual assault.

The average is misleading here. Where do you think those 1 in 20 kids mostly live?

1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have

No I wouldn't, because:

a) I doubt the age distribution for "kids who see people get shot in a year" is constant. The linked article doesn't include age distributions, but they surveyed children up to age 17, and I would expect many more 15 year-olds to see people get shot than 7 year-olds.

b) I doubt the system is stochastic. It's probably more likely for the 1 in 20 from year 1 to see another few of the 7 shots in those 7 years (due to geographic and socio-economic factors) than it is for the other 19.

In other words, even for a country where gun violence is rampant, a study population where 35% of children below 7 have seen someone get shot is far from average.

Good points. In terms of lifetime prevalence, that study says that, "Similarly, 3.5 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds had witnessed a shooting during their lifetimes, whereas more than one in five 14- to 17-year-olds (22.2 percent) had witnessed a shooting."

So the population in question is definitely no where near average, my was just that strictly in terms of the amount of violence witnessed, the differences probably aren't as great as one would otherwise assume.

What the hell!? One in five teenagers has witnessed someone being shot? I must live a sheltered life…

> E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%.

This is insane logic. Think about your 20 closest friends. Do you think that 7 of them saw somebody get shot by the time they were 7? I don't know where you grew up but that is definitely not my experience! Continuing the same reasoning, 60% of all 18 year olds should have seen someone be shot. Again, not where I come from.

Supposedly it is at least 22.2% by ages 14-17 though, so perhaps 25% by age 18. So it is the same order of magnitude at least as the naive assumption. My point is just that exposure to violence isn't especially rare across the entire population.

What's more likely, that seeing dead people and being poor lowers your IQ, or that having a low IQ means you'll end up poor?

They preselected a bunch of poor people, which means the low IQ could be explained by the fact that their existing IQ put them in this place in society along with the predisposition to cheap drug addiction.

It seems like what's most likely is that you didn't read the article correctly. They were measuring the IQ of the children, not the parents. These children didn't 'end up' poor; they started life that way. Their IQ was then 10 to 20 points below average by the time they were four, regardless of the parents' cocaine usage. Or are you suggesting that four year olds with low IQ are responsible for their place in society and the poverty of their parents?

IQ most likely has a genetic factor to it. Otherwise, evolution would be independent of IQ and our society would not have shown an increase in IQ over time (which studies have shown to be true). So no, I did not misread the article.

I got the part about not seeing a relationship between crack usage and mental functioning. It's a very interesting result. What I don't understand is "Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty."

Is there any data referenced in the article to actually support that claim? It's the central thesis here, and I don't see any supporting argument. I see some text around seeing people arrested, dead bodies, and so on, but there are lots of poor rural kids who never see that. This is much more a function of urban poverty.

Maybe I missed it.

>It was amid that climate that Hurt organized a study of 224 near-term or full-term babies born at Einstein between 1989 and 1992 - half with mothers who used cocaine during pregnancy and half who were not exposed to the drug in utero.

>All the babies came from low-income families, and nearly all were African Americans.

It wasn't in the article -- the past few years have been disruptive in the social sciences because of multiple replicated studies that show stress, including poverty stress (which is a well-quantified phenomenon) have a profound impact on working memory ("how much RAM your brain has").

Google it. I first read about it in the Economist, but really, it's where the conversation starts these days.

Brain damage is one of the main mechanisms by which poverty passes itself down to subsequent generations.

The lede is buried a bit:

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

TL;DR "White folks attack wrong devil, again. Lots of black folks dead or suffering, again."

It isn't science that's racist. What's racist is the thousands of brilliant minds that took THIS LONG to look in the right direction. Each one of them minutely racist on its own -- it was just one tiny blind spot. One tiny speck on the lens. On every lens.

That's all it takes to destroy a community. That and some SWAT boots.

This isn't in fact news, it has long been known that there is no scentific/medical 'crack baby' phenomenon, as documented in the wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure

What's perhaps more important to talk about is the demonstrated harm of poverty and violence on children.

"Crack baby" ALWAYS was simply a synonym for "poor and black".

It turns out that racism harms its victims. Who knew?

Do you think racism harms crack users more than their crack use?

So, vitamins are actually bad for you and there's really no such thing as a 'crack baby'.

It's a bad week for things I learned growing up in the 80s/90s ...

The study outcome is poverty has the bigger impact. Yet there is a lot of discussion about anything else like Alcohol etc. But think about the uncomfortable issue: What to do against poverty? Isn't it a hint that our concern should be "a human right to access minimum wealth" and how to enable it?

FYI, the information starts at paragraph 18.

Of the 110, two are dead - one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting - three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate.

It seems rather depressing to me that the college graduation rate by 23 is under 10%. Talk about different worlds

I've read that it's notoriously difficult to measure the impact of crack on prenatal development because so many crack-smoking pregnant women also smoke cigarettes, and the latter is so harmful already that it's hard to isolate the effects of the former.

That doesn't make a lot of sense since there are plenty of pregnant tobacco smokers that don't smoke crack.

I'm not following; could you elaborate?

The control group should be smokers not non-smokers and if all the cocaine using group are also smokers the difference should be the effect of the cocaine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-cra...

Great video from the nytimes on this story from may

"Jaimee Drakewood hurried in from the rain" What? This is supposed to be a scientific report? A lay science report? A newspaper? Why does the very first sentence read like a badly written paperback?

I guess it's time for a War on Poverty.

Make poverty illegal @ Jail anybody caught poor.

I thought we started that program in the 80s?

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

And yet somehow immigrants (Nigerian, Vietnamese, Romanian, Armenian) living in poverty somehow find a way to work hard enough to become successful. They make their own outcome. Why is it only the impoverished Americans that cannot succeed.

I think we have to look here at what it takes to succeed.

1. Dedicated parent(s). Two of them (a mom and a dad) can do far more than one so probability of success rises if both stick around. These inner city kids almost NEVER have a dad in the picture. This leaves mom to work or she is a complete welfare loser and probably on drugs too.

2. Standards/Morals. One bad choice can ruin a person's life. We all have turning points in life where we choose to take a hit off a pope, or pass on it. Have unprotected sex, or abstain. Assault someone, commit a robbery, ETC. These choices have a ripple effect on the rest of our lives.

3. Hard work. Why work if you can live off of the dole? Why work for white people and help their society since they are so racist? (this is a common attitude).

Immigrants come to America with almost nothing. They see opportunity though. They work hard and succeed. They stick together. Dad does not leave, mom does not smoke crack or sleep around. They have values, morals and a strong work ethic. This is what separates immigrants living in poverty and your more typical inner city situation in Philadelphia.

Whats the TLDR of the article?

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