How Stable Is Childhood IQ?

[T]he correlation between [an IQ] score obtained at 5 and the eventual adult score is probably no more than .5 or so. However, the main limitation seems to be unreliability of any single administration of the test to a child that young. Scores averaged over several administrations are a very good predictor already at a fairly young age. The average of three scores obtained at age 5, 6 and 7 correlates about .85 with adult score. This suggests that while it is difficult to measure a child's IQ in any single sitting, the IQ itself is relatively fixed already by age 7 or so . . .

This is using data in which the IQ was tested *three times* over the interval listed and the results averaged. A single measurement at age 5 would probably do worse than what is listed below. [N=61] . . .

age range correlation with adult score

42,48,54 months .55
5,6,7 .85
8,9,10 .87
11,12,13 .95
14,15,16 .95

. . . . another study of 80 kids [based on a single test at age 7] that appears in Bias In Mental Testing. . . found a .7 correlation between scores at 7 and 17.

From here.

Another study looked at pre-formal instruction number sense in two hundred children who were four years old and found that "the precision of children's estimations correlated with their math skill. That is, the children who could make the finest-grained estimations in the dot comparison task (for example, judging that eight yellow dots were more than seven blue dots) also knew the most about Arabic numerals and arithmetic.  According to the researchers, this means that inborn numerical estimation abilities are linked to achievement (or lack thereof) in school mathematics."
This is also supported by earlier research, with a sample size of sixty four, which use the same test involving estimating a number of dots in a time period too small to count them and comparing it to past academic performance.

Good "number sense" at age 14 correlates with higher scores on standardized math tests throughout a child's life up to that point and weaker "number sense" at 14 predicts lower scores on those standardized tests. . . . They then examined the teenagers' record of performance in school math all the way back through kindergarten, and found that students who exhibited more acute number sense had performed at a higher level in mathematics than those who showed weaker number sense, even controlling for general intelligence and other factors.

Thus, it both showed mathematical ability to be somewhat distinct from general IQ and showed that this measurement is strongly tied to academic performance in mathematics despite not having any formally overlapping content base.

It also suggests that tracking in educational instruction based on multiple middle school performances is as accurate as tracking at later points in an educational career in sorting students by IQ which is closely related to academic ability (although it lacks a component akin to conscientiousness).

The study does not test if it is possible to train children to develop number sense, something that is not generally done in modern math curricula, and if such training would bear fruit in generalized mathematical ability.  It also offers little guidance regarding the most sensible educational strategy to take knowing the some students have a greater aptitude for learning math than others.

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Another Not So Bright Texas Republican

Academic prowess is clearly not an asset in the task of becoming Governor of Texas or to becoming a GOP Presidential nominee.

First, we had George W. Bush (the GOP Presidential nominee in 2000 and 2004) who was a mediocre student at Yale in the era before admissions we are merit based as they are today (although his father, George H.W. Bush, was a quite intelligent man with real academic talent and senior civil service experience as C.I.A. director), who went on from the Texas Governorship to become President.

Arizona Senator and 2008 GOP Presidential nominee John McCain was also a mediocre college student at the U.S. Naval Academy:

McCain came into conflict with higher-ranking personnel, and he did not always obey the rules, which contributed to a low class rank (894 of 899), despite a high IQ. He did well in academic subjects that interested him, such as literature and history, but studied only enough to pass subjects he struggled with, such as mathematics.

Sarah Palin, McCain's Vice Presidential nominee was also a pretty mediocre college student and known for her lack of a command of policy issues on the campaign trail as well.

Now, Rick Perry, a 2012 Presidential candidate with the same political credentials as George W. Bush, however, makes George W. Bush look like a genius by comparison to any of these other candidates, given is truly dismal performance at Texas A&M. 

…In his freshman and sophomore year, Perry struggled with core science classes, earning D’s in several organic chemistry classes and C’s in general chemistry and physics.
But after Perry switched his major at the beginning of his fall semester in 1970, his grades didn’t improve. Perry got a C in Reproduction in Farm Animals, a C in genetics, a D in Feeds & Feeding, a C in Sheep & Angora Goat Production and two C’s in animal breeding classes.
Many of Perry’s other classes involved military education. Perry has previously credited his time in the A&M Corps of Cadets with giving him the necessary discipline to complete school.
Perry got two C’s in Development of Air Power and took four levels of World Military Systems, earning two C’s, a B and an A. The A was one of only two Perry earned at college — the other was for a class called Improv. of Learning.
The future governor only took one political science class while he was in school — American National Government, for which he earned a B. Other classes outside of Perry’s major included Shakespeare and Writing for Professional Men, which earned him two D’s.
Perry took two summer sessions before his senior year but still needed two more after the rest of his class graduated to complete a degree. He graduated in August of 1972.

Like George W. Bush, Rick Perry was a cheerleader in college.

While college grades are not the be all and end all of life, I'd think we could expect a bit more of people who want to rule the free world.

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Too Many And Not Enough Drugs Are A Critical Factor In Insane Violence

Severe mental illness is greatly reduced as a risk factor for violence in people who are taking their meds, and greatly increased as a risk factor for violence in people who self-medicate with illegal drugs.

The severely mentally ill make up only a minor share of violent crime perpetrators (and are often victims themselves), so treatment of the severely mentally ill isn't a major driver of violent crime, but they do, overall, have an elevated risk of committing violent crimes living in a world that deals with several mental illness the way that our society does. Also, they do represent a population for whom there is a fairly clear path to reducing violent crime commission risk. Moreover, some of the most sensational and shocking crimes in our society involve instances where severely mentally ill individuals run amok, even though these crimes are very rare and are difficult to predict or prevent.

[S]everely mentally ill people account for only 3 to 5 percent of violent crimes in the general population. . . . we refer only to severe mental illness—meaning schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or psychotic depression. . . .

In a 2009 meta-analysis, or quantitative review, of 204 studies exploring this connection, psychologist Kevin S. Douglas of Simon Fraser University and his associates found a slightly greater likelihood of aggressive behaviors among those with severe mental illnesses. Yet this connection is much weaker than the public seems to believe it is and does not necessarily mean that these serious disorders cause violence. The causation could be in the reverse direction: engaging in chronic aggression (stemming from some other source) may create stress that triggers the illness in those predisposed to it. Alternatively, a third factor could spawn both a psychiatric condition and violence. . . .

[T]he MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study in 1998, sociologist Henry J. Steadman of Policy Research Associates and his colleagues reported that almost a third of severely mentally ill patients with substance abuse problems engaged in one or more violent acts in the year after they left the hospital. For discharged patients who did not abuse drugs, the corresponding figure was only 18 percent. . . .

In its meta-analysis, Douglas’s team also flagged drug abuse as one of several factors that contributed to the connection between mental illness and violence. In addition, it found the link was even stronger for patients who suffered from delusions, hallucinations or disorganized thinking. Thus, a mentally ill person is more at risk of committing an act of aggression when that individual is also abusing a drug and shows particular symptoms. . . .

In the MacArthur study, Steadman’s team found no difference in the prevalence of violence between the severely mentally ill who were on their medications and mentally healthy people, whereas unmedicated patients lashed out at significantly higher rates. . . . improving adherence to treatment may lessen the chances that severely ill people will behave violently.

From Scientific American.

I am not quite as optimist as Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, who are the authors of this Scientific American article. For instance, individuals who have been hospitalized for mental health conditions (generally, because someone determines that they pose a risk of bodily harm to themselves or others as a result of one or more prior specific incidents), clearly pose a much greater risk to the public than individuals who have received merely outpatient mental health treatment. An 18% risk of engaging in violent acts is on the same order of magnitude as the risk that a felon about two years out of prison without incident will do so and is fantastically elevated relative to someone who has neither a criminal record nor a record of commitment to an institution for a mental health condition. A 33% risk of engaging in violent acts is on the same order of magnitude as the risk that a felon just release from prison will commit a new crime.

The claim that "severely mentally ill people account for only 3 to 5 percent of violent crimes" also fails to reflect that a much larger percentage of people whom the criminal justice system deems it necessary to incarcerate have moderate to several mental health issues. The number of mentally ill people in jail and prison vastly outnumbers the number of mentally ill people who are in civil institutional settings.

This account also fails to dissect the overall problem of mental health issues adequately. There are multiple very different paths linking mental health issues and crime.

One common path links traits like impulsivity, novelty seeking, and weak anger management capacity with "heat of passion" crimes, often under the influence of alcohol and aggravated by the possession of weapons. These traits do not mitigate guilt in the criminal justice system but often are considered in mitigation of a sentence for a crime.

A second common path links the concept of psychopathic absence of conscience, with pre-meditated crimes like first degree murder, serial rapes and fraud. The violent crimes seem to usually involve a plus factor of impulsivity with pscyhopathy. The white collar crimes and immoral but not illegal business practices tend to fit psychopaths who are at the opposite end of the conscientious to impulsive dimension of personality. Psychopathic traits, rather than being mitigating circumstances, are generally aggravating circumstances in the criminal justice system and closely overlap with circumstances justifying the death penalty.

The third common path is the one focused on in the article - the delusional, and also manic or depressed individual who goes amok, a path where illegal substance abuse greatly elevates the risk and taking prescribed meds

Fourth, a significant share of people who commit serious crimes are not mentally ill, per se, but are developmentally disabled, i.e. they have IQs so low that they are considered mentally retarded. In the extreme, a low IQ can affect guilt in the criminal justice system, but more often it mitigates a sentence and heightens scrutiny of the veracity of the individual's confessions to law enforcement officers, their capacity to carry out the crime, and their vulnerability to being framed or participating ineffectively in the criminal justice system. 

Fifth, a certain share of people who commit serious crimes do so in response to traumatic circumstances, extreme stress, abuse and manipulation, in a form of extended self-defense, in the form of poor judgment in connection with the mental breakdown of a not congenitally mentally ill individual, or in the form of an inability to resist the pressure from a dominant person in their life to commit a crime. Criminal justice responses to these circumstances are all over the map, sometimes producing leniency from one district attorney or judge or jury, while producing draconian responses from another just a few miles away.

READ MORE - Too Many And Not Enough Drugs Are A Critical Factor In Insane Violence

Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Today is the last day of school for my children in the Denver Public Schools (a few schools affiliated with the district have alternative calendars).

Honestly, as inconvenient as it can be to cobble together everyone's new schedules for the summer, it is a joy for the sense of rhythm it adds to life. I spend the majority of of my daylight hours in climate controlled office buildings, and Denver's weather is quirky enough that the conditions when I do venture out don't always give me a clear take on the season.

Like most jobs, my work is amorphous. I have many cases going at any given time and they almost never all stop at once. While I'm often very aware of the date, one month can blur into the next, and one year slides into another. Everything that I do except tax planning has rolling deadlines, not annual ones. I'm not the exception. A colleague of mine I had lunch with this week could figure out what year he started his current employment only in reference to the year that someone in the firm had a child.

Children ground you and give you bearings. Their schools years make your place in the seasons relevant to your life. Their well defined march from year to year is full of landmarks - entering elementary school, hitting double digits in age, entering middle school, and soon enough for me, the teen years, and high school. Life with one or two preschoolers is so very different from having children in school. Life before one of the kids is old enough to babysit has immense logistical differences from life after that point. Their school vacations, their school performances and awards ceremonies, their sports seasons, their report cards and their fund raisers add predictable highlights to the year. Without them to ground us, life might seem to go by in a fugue.

The end of the school year is also one of the dates, along with my birthday, my anniversary, New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, and the anniversary of my first admission to the practice of law that I step back and reflect on what I've accomplished in the past years.

The end of the school year, even more than my children's birthdays, is a day that I treat a bit like those signs that say "X days without accidents." I have gotten the kids this many years into their lives with parents who have stayed married, a stable home and school, and the kind of academic and social progress that they should have at this point. I'm someone who spends a lot of time reminding people of their mortality in connection with estate planning and probate work, and when I'm not doing that I'm often planning for worst case financial scenarios in asset protection planning. I also monitor the nature v. nurture debate on the context of the latest findings of psychologists and psychiatrists and neuroscientists and geneticists. So, I help but to ponder at the end of each school year, "what if I got hit by a bus right now?", how much of doing everything we've done to raise our children so far would stick and what might fall apart? How irrevocable are the benefits we've conferred upon them this year? How set are they on the courses of their lives?

The academic literature on this isn't terribly rigorous, mostly because people who have critical experiences tend to be undersampled.  Basket case parents usually don't adopt and thus, don't end up in adoption studies. Very few twins are separated at birth, because its cruel. Flakes on the brink of survival tend to not volunteer for longitudinal research studies.

There is a lot of literature on on the extent to which traits are hereditary and the point in time when academic achievement gaps start to manifest. This literature offers reassurance to the anxious parent. Statistically speaking, a much larger share of variance between people in a wide variety of traits than people who are not familiar with the literature would expect can be attributed either to hereditary effects, or to "non-shared environment" between siblings which mostly involves things other than the choices that parents can control in raising their children.

But, to be a pessimist and cast a necessary dollop of doubt upon these findings, a great many traits involve gene x environment interactions, and the vast majority of people whose experiences give rise to the estimates of heredity don't experience many major upheavals in their lives. Studies that select subjects based on shared experiences of major upheavals and traumas tend to see bigger environmental effects than studies of the general population that capture people who have experienced these things only sporadically.

For example, the research seems to indicate that the genetic component of IQ is basically a ceiling on a person's intellectual ability in the absence of negative environmental factors that drag someone down. For people in middle class or upper middle class environments that have few of these drags on learning, the genetic component of IQ is quite large. For people who grow up in poverty, the shared environment impact of poverty on family members which varies a lot depending upon the parenting present that can mitigate or aggravate these environmental drags on learning are far more important as a source of variation from one person to the next, than a person's peak genetic potential IQ which is very hard to achieve when one is in poverty.

Not all traits in a child's development are in formative periods at the same time either. The genetic and environmental influences of IQ have pretty much run their course by the time a child heads to middle school, if not sooner.  Most children have clearly left the path that includes anger management problems and disruptive behavior by then as well.  A tendency towards anxiety manifests extremely early, as does gender identity (i.e. viewing oneself as male or female, regardless of one's body or sexual orientation).  A child's capacity to delay gratification also appears to manifest quite early.

There is some psychological literature that indicates that middle school and high school are critical ages in terms of how a person will function later in life in intimate relationships. A nasty divorce or betrayal of trust by an adults through sexual relationships with a kid at that point in life can undermine a kid's willingness to make the commitments and have the trust needed to avoid stumbling blocks later in life in those relationships.  But, few people end up spending their lives with their middle school, or even high school, sweethearts.  Some people are more resilient than others in the face of trauma.  Some young people who are made into child soldiers or gang members will be forever stone cold, while others can be restored to some semblance of normalcy if intervention happens soon enough and their reentry to society is managed well.

There is anecdotal evidence that people tend to keep whatever hairstyle and fashion preferences they adopt in their early twenties for the rest of their adult lives.

For parents the goal posts keep moving. Just when you can be confident that you have finally cleared the hurdle of getting your kids on the right track in life in one thing no matter how much you screw up later, there is some new critical developmental hurdle to clear.

Of course, this isn't exclusively a parent's responsibility. Kids make good and bad choices in their own lives that start when parents no longer have effective absolute veto power over what they eat for lunches and snacks and continue well into adulthood. Academics and opera singers have critical developments they need to make in their career specialties that will influence the rest of their lives greatly, well into their thirties, long after most have left the nest. For political staffers and lawyers and management consultants and investment bankers and doctors, one's first few years on the job are typically when you develop your professional specialty, which can be very hard to predict based upon your generalized education before that point. Some people who move to a new country as adults will adapt fairly gracefully, even if they never entirely lose their accents, while others fail to thrive or "crack" psychologically at that point. A choice of a life partner can change who you become.

For better or for worse, my own tendency is not to second guess what I've already done very much - it is what it is, but to fret over how secure what has already been accomplished will be in the future and one what developmental issues are not yet set strongly for children of the same age and gender as mine. I'm sure that there are other ways of looking at it, and some are probably better than mine. But, these are the kind of yardsticks that come to mind almost involuntarily.

Similarly, it is hard for me to stay focused on what my children do well and could perhaps advance further doing, as opposed to focusing on the issues that they struggle with but need to master. Focusing on the negative can be discouraging to them, but every time I see an issue come up for one of my children that is a struggle, I hear a clock silently ticking away in my head. Is it too late to make real progress in dealing with this? And, of course, there is joy in simply seeing children cease to become abstract possibilities and become their own distinctive individuals on their own paths in life. Each time that they take one fork instead of another in life you can develop a better feel for the kinds of paths they will take in life as adults and who they are becoming. Is he outgoing or introspective? Will she be a tomboy or a girl who is all sugar and spice? How tall will they grow? What are their academic strong and weak points? How do they treat their friends?  What lessons are they learning from me by example?

Sometimes you can get ahead of yourself. My dear wife has been obsessing about where our children will go to college since they were in pre-school, although this urge has been tamed a little over time. I'm less like a "tiger dad" and more like someone reading all of the Harry Potter books from start to finish and impatiently driven by pure curiosity to see what ends up in the epilogue, perhaps at the expense of the joy of the journey, without as much emphasis on having any particular ending.  We each only have one shot for each child and we can only do our best and strive to improve.

READ MORE - Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Merit v. Money In College Attendance

At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme. . . . [A]t Amherst. . . 22 percent of students now receive federal Pell Grants (a rough approximation of how many are in the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution). In 2005, only 13 percent did. Over the same period, other elite colleges have also been doing more to recruit low- and middle-income students, and they have made some progress. . . . [But] a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students. . . .

[M]any of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all. . . only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores. . . .

[T]op colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. . . .

The United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students — graduate from four-year colleges.

From the New York Times.

Amherst's efforts (which increased financial aid and replaced loans with grants for working class and middle class students) and the fact that even low and middle income students with good grades and standardized test scores have greatly reduced college attendance suggest that the gap in selective college attendance and in college attendance generally is driven to a great extent by financial need, not just the fact that children of smart successful people tend themselves to be smarter than their peers on average.

College campuses would still have student bodies from families that are far more affluent than the population at large even in the absence of alumni preferences in admission and financial need barriers. But, the low rate at which low and medium income families who are academically strongest attend college makes clear that we do not have a meritocracy and are wasting much of our nation's precious academic potential.

These facts drive my inclination to favor heavy funding of scholarships that are based on a mix of financial need and merit, rather than across the board per student subsidies, as an approach for public support of higher education at the state level.

A large share of the benefit of state funding for higher education benefits families that are already very affluent and can afford high tuitions without support from state taxapayers. Also, another large share of state funding for higher education in the form of tuition subsidies is devoted to students whose weak academic preparation for college leaves them unlikely to succeed, and a very large share of these students either swiftly drop out, or have mediocre academic performance and learn little they didn't come into school knowing.

In contrast, working class and middle class students who have the academic ability to prosper in selective institutions of higher education are often pressured by short term financial pressures to forego educations that would help them prosper and improve their socio-economic status, and would help the state and the nation make better use of its available supply of human capital. The evidence that these students would have a high likelihood of graduating, have good academic performance while in school and acquire a lot of genuine increased knowledge in the process, while enhancing their life chances and economic productivity is overwhelming. The evidence that it is financial need that is the main barrier to higher education for these students, much of which is recited above, is also solid. The current system does not provide these students with the level of financial support necessary to be meritocratic.

One of the least painful ways to change this lack of meritocracy would be to concentrate funds currently handed out indiscriminately to lower in state tuition for all at public institutions of higher education to provide grant aid to students with strong academic ability and financial need, rather than using those scarce public funds less efficiency to subsidize students from high income families and students whose marginal academic performance and standardized test scores to date indicate that they are likely to benefit less from higher education.

For example, if subsidies were denied to in state students from the top 25% in affluence in the current student body and from students in the bottom 25% in academic ability (two groups with not all that much overlap in raw number terms), the per student state subsidy for the remaining students could be roughly doubled, greatly increasing the affordability of higher education for academically able students, with no change in overall higher education spending.

This change in policy would probably actually increase the number of degrees awarded by public institutions of higher education, because increased enrollment and graduation rates for academically able students with financial need would probably have more of an effect than the decline in the number of academically marginal students who still manage to graduate and in the number of affluent students who decide not to go to college due to the absence of a state subsidy.

Of course, more funding for higher education may still be necessary. But it may be easier to secure public support for this spending when it is clear that it is being spent only to help those students who have both financial need and strong academic ability, and hence is more likely to produce economic benefits for the society at large.

Also, rather than assuaging our collective consciences by believing that we are doing a favor to academically marginal high school graduates admitted to open enrollment college and community colleges with state subsidies knowing full well that they are very likely to drop out in a year or two, possibly with student loans to pay and no degree to help them pay for those loans, we need to look harder at what kinds of programs and assistance for these kids would be more likely to produce results for them, particularly for those students who aren't inclined to enter military service, which has historically been one of the main American institutions providing a structured start in life to kids who aren't college bound.

READ MORE - Merit v. Money In College Attendance

"Your Type" In Marriage Isn't Genetic

A new twin study finds that while people tend to choose spouses who are similar to themselves, that mate choice doesn't seem to have any other hereditary component. Twins choose spouses who are no more or less similar to them than non-twins.

The myth that boys tend to choose spouses who are similar to their mothers, while girls tend to choose spouses who are similar to their fathers, also doesn't stand up to empirical scrutiny. People tend to choose spouses who are more similar to them than their opposite sex parent.

The study (from here citing Brendan P. Zietsch, Karin J. H. Verweij, Andrew C. Heath, Nicholas G. Martin. "Variation in Human Mate Choice: Simultaneously Investigating Heritability, Parental Influence, Sexual Imprinting, and Assortative Mating." The American Naturalist, 2011; 177 (5): 605 DOI: 10.1086/659629) involved more than 20,000 subjects and examined traits including height, body mass index, education, income, personality, social attitudes and religiosity.

The only trend discovered, other than a strong tendency of people who choose mates who are like themselves in the measured traits at the time they meet (convergence towards each other in traits over time was ruled out), was a tendency for a woman's family background to influence her choices in terms of age and income.

The tendency to choose someone similar to yourself as a spouse is strongest for age, social attitudes and religiosity, moderate for IQ, education and physical attractiveness, and less strong, but still statistically significant, for height, weight and personality traits.

Pheromone transmitted information about a potential mates MHC complex of genes (related to immunity) influences someone's attractiveness but has essentially no actual impact on who people actually end up in a long term relationship with in the end. The degree of MHC similarity or dissimilarity in married couples is no different that would be expected from random chance.

People also tend to deceive themselves about what kind of person they want in marriage. There is little connection between self-reported preferences in a potential mate and the person that people actually chose to marry.

The study did not attempt to measure which marriages worked and which did not, only what kind of people individuals actually choose to marry in the first place. Thus, the study doesn't rule out the possibility that the best person for someone to marry has traits different than the person an individual is most likely to marry.

In a somewhat related matter, sexual orientation is almost completely unrelated to shared family environment or prevailing societal attitudes. A large (n=7600) twin study in Sweden found that sexual orientation was explained 0%-17% by shared environment (including familial and societal attitudes), 18%-39% by genetics, and 61%-66% by unique environment, "for example, circumstances during pregnancy and childbirth, physical and psychological trauma (e.g., accidents, violence, and disease), peer groups, and sexual experiences." The study was Niklas Långström, Qazi Rahman, Eva Carlström, Paul Lichtenstein. "Genetic and Environmental Effects on Same-sex Sexual Behaviour: A Population Study of Twins in Sweden." Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 7 June 2008 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-008-9386-1. At least in a large share of cases, there is a fair amount of evidence that sexual orientation tends to be congential and is related to some extent to genes and to some extent to hormone exposure in utero and possibly to other epigenetic or in utero enviromental factors.

READ MORE - "Your Type" In Marriage Isn't Genetic

The Sociology of Brain Disorder Treatment

There are two medical specialties that deal with brain disorders and conditions. One is neurology. The other is psychiatry. Where does one draw the line between the two?

Neuroskeptic compares the number of articles on particular conditions in leading academic journals for each specialty (Neurology and the American Journal of Psychiatry), to look empirically at how the line has been drawn within the medical profession.

The division doesn't seem to be very strongly linked to the extent that a condition is biologicallly based. As he notes:

Schizophrenia, which is probably considered "the most neurological" psychiatric disorder, is in fact the least talked about in Neurology.

Both mental retardation and autism are middle ground between the two specialties, with mental retardation leaning towards neurology, and autism leaning towards psychiatry.

Eyeballing the data, one way to think of the way that the conditions have been allocated is that psychiatrist deal with conditions that influence your personality and social interactions, other than pure cognition, while neurologists deal with other conditions and conditions that impact pure cognition.

This explains the mental retardation v. autism divide, for example. While both have a cognitive function element, explaining the neurological interest in both conditions, what distinguishes an autism diagnosis from a mental retardation diagnosis that is not autism is the diagnostic and treatment focus on how autism affects personality, social interaction and empathy, particularly in the case of autism spectrum disorders like Asperger's, where IQ is often in the normal range.

The gray area for ADHD, likewise, can be explained as a product of the lingering ambiguity over whether to think of the condition as a personality disorder that is a cogential part of who someone is, or as a developmental disorder of something large is part of a larger cognition process.

Psychaitry is concerned with "who you are" while neurology is concerned with "what you are" even though there isn't obviously any fundamental difference between the kind of brain functions that lead to schizophrenia and those that lead to congential epilepsy. The looming question behind Neuroskeptic's post is whether the divide says more about perhaps unfounded biases about mental health that pervade even the supposedly enlightened medical profession, than it does about science.

There are other ways to see the distinction, of course. One is that neurologists deal with issues that are believed to be exclusively "hardware" issues, while a core issue for psychiatrists is to parse "hardware" from "software" issues and address each appropriately. Some conditions may not neatly fit that divide today simply because historical ambiguity led a condition to be assigned to one category or the other, and given that all of the physicians involved have a similar allopathic medical background and training, there is no compelling reason to upset the apple cart of institutional and funding and bureaucratic arrangements based on the distinction at this point, even if it isn't terribly logical.

In the same way, no one is urgently pushing to have responsibility for counterfeiting enforcement removed from the duties of the United States Secret Service even though this doesn't logically have much to do with is primary responsibility to provide bodyguard protection to the President and other senior federal officials and candidates, because the skill set for the two tasks is similar.

Still, the divide has a strong impact on treatment modality. Neurologists use drugs and sometimes surgery, while seeing little place for therapy. Psychiatrists, while also prescribing drug treatments, recognize the value of psychological talk therapies as a complementary treatment modality to a much greater extent.

A footnote to the post in the study is also interesting:

"Gathering" this data took me 15 minutes. 20 years ago, it would have taken... well, you'd have had to read and manually categorize 30,000 abstracts. Even at 2 minutes per abstract (bare minimum) that's, er, 1000 man-hours of work.

READ MORE - The Sociology of Brain Disorder Treatment

Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.

Personality, IQ and Success

In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an  IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup.  Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000.  Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning.  Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.

Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.

More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament.  Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:

A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.

In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.

The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations.  Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:

[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).

Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.

Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:

Openness: 57%

Conscientiousness: 49%

Extraversion: 54%

Agreeableness: 42%

Neuroticism: 48% . . .

Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease.  . . .

Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.

Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures.  Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness."  This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.

The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.

Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary.  Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.


Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order).  ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.

The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.

Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more.  Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income.  In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):

Conscientiousness:  $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000

Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.

Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual.  The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.

Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.

These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.

This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.

Grit and Success

Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success.  The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit.  But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time. 

The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:

With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.

But:

Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."

In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a.  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices.  And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence:  "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence."  It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:

Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.

Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.

Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.

A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened  "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."

As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."

The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:

[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.

Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.

Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.

The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)

The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need  . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.

Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.

Poverty and IQ

So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.

We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved.  This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.

Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care.  While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range.  Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).

Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential.  These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life. 

With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:

[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:

If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.

This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result.  The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.

You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district.  A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.

In a nutshell

IQ,  which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population.  These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ.  Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.

Implications

This has several implications of importance:

1.  If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary. 

2.  While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.

3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes.  Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician?  Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?

4.  Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer.  Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.

5.  Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ.  Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers.  What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ. 

6.  Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person.  This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations.  Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.

7.  The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them.  Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children.  Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.

8.  To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures.  This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.

READ MORE - Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

Democratic socialists, including those in Britain, are much better at conducting very large scale, multi-purpose longitudinal studies than Americans, and those studies are starting to bear fruit. The British National Child Development Study tracks 17,634 children born in March 1958 for fifty years, checking in on the subject's progress at nine regular intervals from birth to the present and gathering detailed and accurate informaton each time from multiple sources in multiple institutions. What did they find?

In this article we assess and compare long-term adult socioeconomic status impacts from having experienced psychological and physical health problems in childhood. . . . Large effects are found due to childhood psychological problems on the ability of affected children to work and earn as adults and on intergenerational and within-generation social mobility. Adult family incomes are reduced by 28% by age 50, with sustained impacts on labor supply, marriage stability, and the conscientiousness and agreeableness components of the “Big Five” personality traits. Effects of psychological health disorders during childhood are far more important over a lifetime than physical health problems.

From Alissa Goodman, Robert Joyce, and James P. Smith, "The long shadow cast by childhood physical and mental problems on adult life", PNSA 2010.

The abstract poses the question as one of a particular childhood "problem" having a long term effect, but the results are equally consistent with the notion that psychological health has a large congential component, with much of the rest of the environmental component been based on the quality of one's early childhood environment, rather than later environment. In this view, the "problems" that a child experiences are simply manifestations of who a child is that persist throughout life rather than being the cause of later in life difficulties. In our mental health and IQ focused world, in which capacity to labor physically is largely unimportant socio-economically, it also isn't surprising that fitness that is physical, or the lack of that fitness is comparatively unimportant.

Alas, the early childhood window may be surprisingly narrow, and social class effects tend to be much more powerful than instructional effects. For example, according to another very large longitudinal study (n=13,776), the beneficial effects of full day kindergarten programs relative to partial day kindergarten programs in low income children tend to vanish by the third grade:

[T]he study found that the reading and math skills of children in full-day kindergarten grew faster from the fall to the spring of their kindergarten year, compared to the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten.

However, the study also found that the full-day kindergarteners' gains in reading and math did not last far beyond the kindergarten year. In fact, from the spring of their kindergarten year through fifth grade, the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten grew faster than those of children in full-day kindergarten, with the advantage of full-day versus part-day programs fading by the spring of third grade. The fade-out can be explained, in part, by the fact that the children in part-day kindergarten were less poor and had more stimulating home environments than those in full-day programs[.]

Social class linked intellectual achievement gaps are already great at age two.

Implications

The good news, for the parents of older children, I suppose, is that whatever good or bad your parenting has had on their lives, the older your children get, the less the quality of your parenting seems to matter. So, the pressure isn't as intense. A child's academic progress and character as a late tween is immensely predictive of the rest of the course of that child's life.

Then again, this may simply be a product of the fact that whatever parenting and educational quality was present early on continues to be present and having the same effect, with interruptions of these patterns being too rare to be statistically significant. Unless you are comparing kids who experience late childhood misfortune against their otherwise equal pre-misfortunte peers, you can really accurately measure the impact of those misfortunes on a child's life chances.

On the other hand, these studies are really terribly discouraging for those whose job it is to try to get people on track in life once their early childhood years have passed. The school system, for example, frequently becomes involved in a child's life only starting in kindergarten at age five or six years old, and the second study seems to suggest that it is already extremely hard to help kids who are developmentally behind at that point catch up to their more academically ready peers.

Needless to say, if your job is to turn around the lives of kids who have already started high school, fifteen years of accumulated inertia is just that much harder to reverse. If your job is to turn around the lives of adult prison inmates, the burden you must overcome is surely even more profoundly difficult to surmount.

As previous posts at this blog have noted, you may be born with a gene which is a powerful predicter of your capacity to sustain a long term marriage, and people who commit violent crimes as adults overwhelmingly are already continuing to have discipline issues that their peers have grown out of by the time that they are in elementary school: "it is extremely unlikely that an adolescent who has not been highly physically aggressive in the past will suddenly manifest significant problems with physical aggression." Such seemingly learned and social traits as succeptibility to bullying and one's likelihood of being a teenaged crime victim likewise show powerful genetic predispositions. The non-IQ factors that play an important part in life success seem to manifest just as early in life as academic ability does: Your ability to defer gratification at age four turns out to be a powerful discriminator for your life success a decade and a half later. Children likely to grow up to be psychopaths already start acting differently at age three (also here). A group of three non-IQ related genes can account to up to a 0.5 point difference in your GPA on top of any IQ effect.

We may live in the post-nature v. nuture synthesis of genes x enviroment, but the more we know, the more predictable our lives seem to be. For us, like characters in Greek tragedies, it seems that knowing our fates offers us surprisingly little help in changing our fates. Our genes are seemingly immutable, and most mental health genetic conditions are incurable, even if they are treatable in some cases. Many psychological predispositions have no established treatment. Even if you know you have a gene that makes you likely to have short lived relationships, there is no drug you can take to fix that and no solidly evidence based therapy that will solve your predisposition. Gene therapy hasn't reached that point yet, and given the implications it would have for personal identity and neurodiversity in society as a whole, perhaps this is a good thing.

Our enviroments, while theoretically mutable, aren't easy to change. And they seem to matter. People in the top fifth of the income distribution are twenty-eight times as likely to attend a selective college as those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, for example. We don't choose our parents, and it seems as if those of us who are raised by someone other than our parents are usually worse off in the bargain - although perhaps starting off in a spot like that leaves one off poorly even with great improvement. And, of course, unlike J.K. Rowling or Eminem, most of us who find ourselves in poverty don't readily emerge from it to great riches by virtue of our intellectual talents. Parents who know that their poverty and lack of education is dragging down their children have little capacity to do anything about it. Even the heart wrenching option once available of sending tween or teen children into domestic service for a more prosperous family, or a scholarship funded tenure at a boarding school, in hopes that some of the benefits of that social class will rub off on them has largely vanished as options. Assortive marriage trends are reducing the availability of marriage as a means of class advancement, and American social class lines are deeper than those in contemporary Europe or earlier eras of American history. Just about the only thing a parent can do to improve the environment that the parent provides his or her children is to transform him or herself, which is a profoundly difficult matter.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people do indeed change sometimes. But, the overwhelming weight of the statistics and studies tell us that this is the exception and not the norm, and becomes ever more exceptional as we get older. Kids who are well behind grade level in reading in the third grade are almost certainly not going to go to Harvard, are exceedingly unlikely to go to medical school or law school, and will have to struggle mightily and have considerable good fortune to earn a college degree of any kind. Kids who are perfect angels in fifth grade are exceedingly unlikely to have criminal justice problems or violence issues in the remainder of their lives unless they have a family history of a late manifesting mental health condition like bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or substance abuse, or experience a brain injury, or sustain PTSD.

I don't want the world to be this way. I'm a liberal. I believe in progress and opportunity and social mobility. I value education. Environment does matter, especially for the less well off, even if they can't change that environment themselves.

But, one can't simply ignore what study after study after study tells you either. One can look for loopholes and exceptions and ways to beat the system. There clearly are some and they should be leveraged for all that they are worth. The more I read these studies, the more that I am forced to conclude that policies designed to secure social justice have to focus more on developing meaningful productive paths for the people who we have in our society, and less on trying to transform people into something that they are not and cannot reasonably aspire to become -- especially for older youths and adults for whom the die is more firmly cast.

READ MORE - Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

There are lots of differences between the prevailing American model and the Japanese model for K-12 education. One of those differences is that Japanese schools often have class sizes that many U.S. schools would consider unacceptably large, but use these larger class sizes to make it feasible to pay teachers higher salaries and generally, to build up the prestige of teaching as a profession. Also, many tasks that would be done by paid staff in American schools, like a significant share of the janitorial work and photocopying, is done by students in Japan, again, freeing up resources for higher teacher salaries. American law professors routinely teach classes of ninety students. Almost no high school teachers in the United States do that, although such large class sizes are unheard of in Japan.

Nicholas Kristoff argues, reasonably, that teachers are underpaid:

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

He also cites some studies that argue that good teachers produce good student results, although the general trend is that instructional inputs are related only dimly as second or third order effects to student academic performance and life success.

But, part of the reason that demonstrated results from instructional inputs are so equivocal, is because almost everybody is using the same basic model: 180 days a year of school for days of less than eight hours, modest amounts of homework, teachers mostly drawn from conventional teacher certification programs in public schools with reasonably similar class sizes, and low career long pay prospects for someone with a college degree. Private religious schools don't pay teachers very well either. There are differences, but those differences are mostly modest.

A few elite secular private schools pay teachers very well, but given the elite character of the incoming student body which is overwhelmingly either upper middle class, rich, or extremely academically talented, it is hard to tell if good teachers or good students are driving the results. Also, these schools typically have not only highly paid teachers but very modest class sizes, which make their model unattainable without immensely larger K-12 budgets.

The public will simply does not exist to pay for a system of public schools where the average student-teacher ratio is 8:1 and the average teacher makes $90,000 a year. The more typical story is like this one from today:

The fifth-largest school district in Colorado this afternoon expects to announce $30 million in cuts — including jobs and student activities, as well as increased class sizes — to meet its 2011-12 budget.

Today at 3:30 p.m., Adams 12 Five Star Superintendent Chris Gdowski will announce the proposed cuts, including an anticipated 185 job cuts. Last year, the district cut 188 full-time positions. Over the past five years, the district has cut $38 million from its budget.

For the 2010-11 school year, the operating budget was $268.8 million, about 88 percent of which was devoted to employee salaries and benefits.

Even if we did, we wouldn't get the results you see at Groton in classes full of kids who are two grade levels behind by the third grade, may not get a square meal on the weekends, have an older sibling in a gang, live in a single parent home with a parent who dropped out of high school, and are intermittently homeless. Government stinginess towards children in the United States is not limited to education spending.

On the other hand, the Detroit model: dramatically increasing class sizes while paying their teachers 30% below the going rate for teachers in the state, despite the fact that they are teaching students with the greatest educational needs, and simultaneously increasing commuting time for students on their way to and from school, is pretty surely not a good way to improve educational quality either. To some extent, you get what you pay for.

Nobody has ever tried in recent history for a sustained period to set up a K-12 education system in which entry level teachers teaching ordinary average neighborhood kids are paid as much as entry large law firm lawyers in the same area, and can expect to receive that kind of compensation for their entire careers, but teach very large classes by American standards with very little staff assistance.

Of course, it isn't at all easy to break out the impacts of particular parts of the Japanese or American models. The Japanese spend more days in school. A larger share of American kids are college bound than in Japan. Cram school for college entrance exams to supplement ordinary high school education are the norm. Japanese educators are less reluctant to use drill and kill instruction methods, and more liberal in putting social pressure on kids to perform though public disclosure of academic performance. Extra-curricular activity participation is more of an expectation in Japan. Many American kids have more educational choices that comparable Japanese kids. American higher education, particularly at the graduate level, has a better reputation for rigor than Japanese higher education. American teachers have a much larger proportion of very low income students and far more students who are non-native speakers of the language of instruction. Japan starts foreign language instruction sooner and has very little sex education.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, given the tendency of K-12 education systems to pay teachers of older students more than teachers of younger students, the evidence on educational performance and education seems to indicate that the importance of educational quality is greatest when kids are youngest and lower when kids are older. Kids who need remedial work upon entering college were mostly behind already by the time they were in the 6th grade.

If we are to set compensation based on potential lifetime educational performance impact (and no school system in the world does this, to the best of my knowledge, although many do mandate smaller class sizes for younger students), we should be paying the highest salaries to pre-school and kindergarten teachers, the next highest salaries to elementary school teachers, the next highest salaries to middle school teachers, and the lowest salaries to high school teachers. Instead, the pay of teachers seems more closely related to the proportion of the teachers who are men, which is greatest for the older ages. As usual in the American labor market, the supply of similarly skilled labor is more important in setting compensation levels than the value of what workers produce.

But, moving in the direction of the Japanese business model for teacher pay, and paying early education teachers much more than we do, is certainly something worth considering.

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Does Prenatal Testosterone Make You Smart?

Prenatal exposure of higher levels of testosterone turns out to be a relatively easy thing to measure because it manifests in a person's second to fourth digit ratio on their hands. Previous studies of digit ratio have suggest that this exposure may increase one's likelihood of being homosexual. A new study suggests that it may increase one's odds of having an IQ over 130, adding to prior work showing connections to primate social behavior, math test scores of seven year olds, and sports performance in women, to name just a few.

Scientists have also discovered a type of cell in the intestines that produces opium-like substances called tuft cells.

Also, in proof that probably dubious seeming experiments can produce good results, Japanese scientists have discovered that soaking superconductor material in Sake dramatically increases the rate at which the superconductors are produced. Further experimentation determined that superconductor materials prefer red wine to whiskey, suggesting that the alcohol itself is probably not the critical factor.

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Short Takes

* Spinal fluid biomarkers can distinguish between people suffering from Lyme disease (a tick carried infectious agent), Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (probably a viral condition with a long latency period), and uninfected individuals. This is important first, because Lyme disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can present with similar symptoms, and second, because diagnosing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and even finding ways for sufferers to convince people that they have a genuine biologically caused disease rather than simply being lazy, is a major challenge.

* The Kalash people in a remote part of the Hindu Kush Mountain range are one of the most genetically distinct populations in the world. When one has a computer break the world's autosomal genetics into the most distinct possible seven clusters, the clusters that you get are: African, European, South Asian, East Asian, Papuan, indigenous American and Kalash.

Their Y-DNA haplogroups (from a sample of about 43 people) are as follows:
L3a 22.7% (most common in Pakistan)
H1* 20.5% (most common in South Asia)
R1a 18.2% (most common in Eastern Europe and South Asia)
G 18.2% (most common in Southern Europe, Anatolia, Druze, Brahui and Pashtuns)
J2 9.1% (most common in Anatolia and where Indo-Europeans have had an impact)
R* 6.8% (most common in Thailand, Indonesia, the Phillipines and Australian aborigines)
R1* 2.3% (most common in indigenous Americans)
L* 2.3%. (most common in South Asia)

Their mtDNA haplogroups (from a sample of 44 people) are as follows:
pre-HV 22.7% (most common in Socotri, North Africa, Iran and Arabia)
HV* 4.5%
H 4.5% (the modal haplogroup of Europe)
U2e 15.9% (most common in South Asia)
U4 34.1% (most common in Central Asia)
U7 2.3% (most common in South Asia)
J1 2.3%
J2 9.1%
T* 4.5%

They speak a language from the Dardic branch of the Indo-European family (one of the more basal of the Indo-Iranian part of the late language family), and practice a polytheistic religion.

They are between areas that areas typically Central Asian and areas that are typically South Asian in genetic makeup. Their traditions place them as a lost contingent of Alexander the Great's army, but given their uniparental markers, the genetic makeup, their particularly contingent would have had to have picked up members mostly from the area from Anatolia to the Hindu Kush. Their Dardic language is also an anomaly for an isolated community claiming to descend from the Greeks, they lack common distinctively Greek uniparental markers, and their religion is close to Hinduism than it is to Greek pantheistic beliefs. An origin a millennium or two earlier (if not much more ancient) would seem to be a better fit for the facts.

Given their autosomal makeup, any new arrivals in the region from somewhere would have had to either admixed substantially with a relict population that was largely wiped out or overwhelmed genetically elsewhere such as Europe and Central Asia's pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers, or South Asian hunter-gatherer populations disrupted by Munda, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan populations respectively. Alternately, they might have undergone significant selectively driven evolution analogous to that found in Tibetans as a result of living at high altitudes. The case for incorporation of a relict Central Asian hunter-gatherer population is most strongly supported by the modal mtDNA haplogroup U4, which was one of the second most common types found in ancient DNA from Central Asian hunter-gatherers.

* There are a couple of kinds of invasive ants that have an unusual reproductive system. Future queens are clones of the current queen. Future drones (reproducing males) are clones of their fathers. Workers, who do not reproduce, have a mix of the queen and the drone's genes similar to that of ordinary sexually reproducing animals. (I'll try to find a reference later).

* As a thought experiment, it is interesting to consider would it would look like to have a society where a human or near human species with reproduction system in which only half of women had children, but they had an average of four and a half surviving descendants, assuring the replacement of the species. There are several different permutations of this that would be possible. Half of children could be gay. Half of the children could be infertile (perhaps clones of their same sex parent, or perhaps surgically or chemically neutered). Half of females could be in "harems" like those of alpha dominated gorillas or lions, and only alphas might have the pheromones necessary to trigger reproduction. One imagines that such a society might resemble the Byzantine courts.

Alternately, one could imagine a society where half the women were in a social class that averaged surviving three children, while the other half the women were in a social class that average one surviving child. A study of the vital statistic of a Bronze Age society in Spain based on its burials and the inferred diets of the dead, which showed a minority elite with a high protein diet surviving at much greater rates than a "middle class" (perhaps soldiers) or an even more deprived underclass (perhaps servants or slaves), with this kind of demographics.

* There is a tendency in Anglo-American political economy to imagine a society with strong property rights and weak governments as a "state of nature" against which political action should be measured. But, this sense is to a great extent ahistorical, particularly in farming and more urbanized societies. The oldest Minoan Linear A script is preserves administrative records of ration distribution systems, basically welfare states, that had strong parallels in Sumeria, Egypt, the Hebrew Bible and Rome - i.e. all of the major civilizations of the Mediterranean of the Copper Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, and arguably via feudal societies into to the Middle Ages. There also seems to be evidence that these were command economies in which soldiers played an integral economic part, perhaps along the lines of the large role played by military owned enterprises in the civilian economies of modern Egypt and China. Likewise, fedual societies were basically agrarian economies run on a military footing with involuntary serf labor.

Decentralized market driven economies with contract rights and private property as an important organizing principle doesn't really emerge as the predominant component of the economy until after the Middle Ages end in Europe.

* NPR made some notable observations about the Middle Eastern oil states that are experiencing revolutions at the moment. Generally speaking, these states don't impose significant taxes on non-petroleum activities. Oil money funds government operations including strong military forces and a significant welfare state. This helps explain why the oil rich states of the Middle East have managed to survive while being so undemocratic. Historically, constitutional monarchy and republican government in cases like Rome, England and France have their roots in the need of a monarch to obtain consent of representatives of people who were going to be required to pay taxes to support the state. Taxes are the price of democracy.

* Some of the dates assigned to remains used to argue for an early presence of modern humans in Europe engaged in relatively primative economic industry have been revised upon further examination to more recent dates. Remains previously touted as more than 30,000 years old, which had "long been considered to be the earliest evidence of the remains of modern Homo sapiens anywhere in Europe" in Southern France and Southwest Germany have been re-examined within the last decade and determined to have actually been less than 10,000 years old.

This also influences how one conceptualizes the Chatelperronian lithic industry in Europe, which in turn relates to how smart we think the Neanderthals were. The prior and more primative Mousterian industry is clearly associated with Neanderthals. The industry that follows the Chatelperronian is associated clearly with modern humans. The Chatelperronian has traditionally been associated with Neanderthals as well, but some researchers have argued for it as "an independent development by Neanderthals (d'Errico et al. 1998)" while others "see the Chatelperronian as the result of the acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans (Mellars 2005)." People care, because if the Chatelperronian was an independent Neanderthal invention, then maybe they were pretty smart and advancing their technology just as the humans did when climate conditions improved. In contrast, the opposite extreme would be to argue that admixture of modern human traits into Neanderthal populations is the only reason that they were able to innovate as much as they did even in the relatively primate Chatelperronian era. Between the two extremes is the possibility that the Neanderthals were capable of mimicing modern human Upper Paleolithic lithic industries, even if they would have been hard put to develop it themselves.

John Hawks, approaching the same underlying question of Neanderthal intelligence from another angle wonders if the ability of people born blind to repurpose their visual centers for language doesn't suggest that language is less hard wired, and hence, less likely to require genetic evolution, than has been often assumed: "Kaschube and colleagues showed that the apparent developmental robusticity of the visual cortex could be maintained by simple rules of self-organization. It doesn't take specialized genetic control to create a visual cortex, it just takes information structured in the right way to flip a few genetic triggers" and the right kind of environmental exposures. As he explains:

The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.

I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all.

My second speculation: If the language environment determines the instantiation of language processing, then brains must be substantially different in the way they process language. Children experience different language environments -- not only different languages, but different microenvironments within language communities. Only strong genetic controls could canalize brains despite the differences in their language environments. In brains where language processing emerges readily in the visual cortex, genetic controls cannot possibly synchronize brains in the face of environmental variation.

* A case is being made that the strong genetic discontinuity between South Asia and Southeast Asia, despite the lack of an obviously inpenetrable geographic barrier is attributable to the effects of the Toba volcano erruption, that while not wiping out the modern human population in South Asia, did seriously disrupt and reshape it:

Oppenheimer . . . [suggests] that the prolonged ash cloud could have devastated all or most of India, especially both M and N related populations in the east and south, closest to the volcano. He hypothesizes that this area could then have been repopulated by M dominated groups immigrating from the east, who might then have spread, in a cline, to the rest of the subcontinent, while N-related groups to the west could have repopulated India from that region. This could have left India populated by more recent M and N hapolotypes than those found farther east[.]

He also associates this event with the distribution of tone languages which are found in Africa, "scattered among so many indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, southern China, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Melanesia" and in "northernmost reaches of the Indus valley . . . "would have been a likely spot where a branch of the Out of Africa migrants, who could have broken from the main group to travel north along the banks of the Indus, might have been able to survive the effects of Toba with their African traditions more or less intact. If tone language was part of their HMC inheritance, then that could explain the prevalence of tone language in this area today." Suggested musical linkages that might be legacies of this connection are discussed here.

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