Analysis: IQ defenders feel vindicated

United Press International ^ | 6/24/2002 | Steve Sailer

[Publius6961]

In Illinois, we're finding that the error rate on Death Row is around 50%, and I'm talking people proven innocent by DNA evidence

I'll wipe the smirk off my face as soon as you give us some indication that you didn't pull this number out of your butt...
Is that including all those executed?
Just the ones who pursue appeals?
What?

It's all irrelevant anyway. That the system is not perfect is a specious argument.

Would you outlaw cancer surgery because 30% is demonstrably ineffectual?

My position on the death penalty is simple: I am as subject to being executed in error as anyone else. If I support it in spite of that risk, I have demonstrated the only societal and logical honesty necessary.
Surprisingly, it is not a risk I stay up nights worrying about...

[Age of Reason]

I question your assertion that people of equally 'abnormal' mental attributes(in terms of deviation from the norm),"...are equally handicapped."

Seriously. How can you possibly say that a quicker wit is a handicap?

They who die leaving the most numerous and most viable descendents win.

And people of normal intelligence are winning because there are so many of them.

People of average intelligence are smart enough without being too smart for their own good.

The optimal IQ is the average IQ.

[headsonpikes]

"And people of normal intelligence are winning because there are so many of them."

That's a jest, I hope. Surely you realize that it is the incremental growth of some fraction of the population that is of interest.

If we define the top 2% as intelligent(a la Mensa), then the fact that after a generation that proportion is little changed should hardly surprise the most diffident statistician.

"The optimal IQ is the average IQ."

You suffer from an advanced case of Procrustean scientism, perhaps. ;^)

P.S. I have the most 'viable' children of anyone in my graduating class from high school, and the highest IQ.

'Thus I refute you, Bishop Berkeley'. LOLOL!

[RonF]

"I'll wipe the smirk off my face as soon as you give us some indication that you didn't pull this number out of your butt..."

Review post #61 (I apologize for the formatting) and start wiping. That's an official stat. These are people who were not executed. Most of them were freed due to extraordinary circumstances, outside the usual appellate mechanism. This includes I believe two men who were put on death row by a judge taking bribes, who basically put them on death row to balance the books so that his record overall would look good. It also includes two men who were freed when a bunch of journalism students took an interest in a case, and managed to both impeach witnesses *and* dig up DNA evidence.

There's a difference in taking a 1 out of 3 chance to survive when there's no alternative, and taking any chance you might kill an innocent man when there is one.

[justshutupandtakeit]

If you mean corporations give to both sides because of expediency you are correct. However, they are hardly even handed. Enron compromised enough RATS that they cannot make it an issue because there is enough blowback to damage them.

Some companies favor one party over the other by a great margin because of ideology. Take Oracle, World Crossing, Arthur Anderson they appear to favor RATS. Lierman was one of AA's largest recipients. Gore Occidental Petroleum. Etc. Since the last two terms were RAT more of the corporate money went to RATS. Some favor RATS no matter which party is in power like Disney, Hollywood.

[Age of Reason]

I maintain the optimal IQ is the average IQ.

Think of other traits in humans and other life forms.

There is an optimal size for a species of tree: too high and a tree will likely be struck by lightening; too short, it will be in the shadow of its taller brethren and be starved for sunlight.

What traits are most frequently expressed in a species are those traits that are most fit, and therefore optimal in each generation--providing there is not a change to the environment of cataclysmic proportion.

Such a change may be upon us now with the accelerating growth of technology and population, though each may be racing the other to disaster, in which case the IQ you celebrate will have brought itself to its own extinction.

I suspect those aboriginal cultures that survived into the twentieth century were the cultures on the best track for survival of the human species.

Aboriginal cultures would measure mental ability by different standards.

Our minds are not bred just for reasoning; our minds have evolved to exercise a great many functions. In the past and in the future--if our kind has a future--reason may be the least of these.

[headsonpikes]

"Think of other traits."

I think of the size and strength of successful males in herd animals, not to mention predators. If IQ was a feature that 'crowded out' other survival traits, then you would have a strong point, but IQ is complementary to all other behaviors and attributes, AFAIK.

"...the cultures on the best track for survival..."

I think you have a romanticized view of hunter-gatherer lifestyles; that view is a product of your education, not your experience. Many surviving groups which instance 'earlier' expressions of social development are maladaptive and declining.

'How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree' is the problem of all neolithic-style chthonic cultures. Humans respond well to fresh stimuli and become quickly unhappy with boring and repetitive survival tasks. Good-bye Amazon rain-forest, Hello Rio!

"Our minds are not just bred for reasoning..."

Granted, but tangential, unless you can demonstrate that thinking about mathematics and other formal systems handicaps those brain-functions which are non-logical.(I include esthetics, emotions, and thrill-seeking as examples of such)

I recommend doing a Free Republic or Google search for 'Harrison Bergeron'. This short story may inspire an epiphany. ;^)

[The Raven]

The New York Times never disbelieved IQ tests. The just pretended to do that. Deep down inside, they also know the quickest way to world poverty, war, and destruction is to follow their liberal-based policies of taxing productivity and huge percentages of government spending.

They once chose Eisenhower for President. Straight socialism since then.

[Age of Reason]

I think you have a romanticized view of hunter-gatherer lifestyles; that view is a product of your education, not your experience.

No.

My view is a result my evolutionary design--those things I enjoy most are precisely those things suitable to surviving as a hunter-gatherer.

Consider kittens--they are designed to love hunting so much that they play at it.

Now consider human children--why is it natural for human children to love play but hate school?

It is because, like the young of other species, the play of children is the practice of skills needed for survival in a hunter gathering existence.

Evolution has instilled the desire for play as insurance the members of a species will practice those skills needed for survival, skills which are not exercised frequently enough in anger and so must be kept fresh through love of practice.

Were modern education and modern work suitable to our design, children and adults would pursue books and work with the same fervor they pursue sports, hunting, fishing, and shopping (shopping is gathering, except shopping is twice as much work as gathering; because in shopping we must first earn the money by unenjoyable work before we can enjoy the gathering experience).

Our bodies, too, are designed for these pursuits--exercise is not distasteful when we use our bodies in the pursuit of enjoyable activity.

Cats love their work so well that even kittens never tire of practicing the hunt.

And though the hunter gathering existence may be brutish and short, I suspect it wasn't all that bad in the days before human population reached such levels as to make game and land in ideal climates in short supply.

Certainly, the early humans must have prospered else their population would not have overgrown their natural habitat.

We moderns m-a-y live longer, but I suspect it is a happier existence to live fewer but fuller years.

Humans respond well to fresh stimuli and become quickly unhappy with boring and repetitive survival tasks.

LOL.

Outside of prison, there is nothing so devoid of stimuli, so monotonous, so un-free, so dirty and yet so sterile as living in a city . . . except perhaps living on a farm.

[headsonpikes]

I happen to share your view that we are adapted to socialize most happily in hunter-gatherer type groups.

But I ask you to account for the fact that Amazonian natives, for instance, love the excitement of city life as much as people raised in cities.

You may LOL and chortle at the notion that modern life can be as rewarding psychologically as a neolithic lifestyle, but I'm going to chalk that up to snootiness on your part. ;^)

I believe that the social forms developed to enhance survival over the last hundreds of centuries are sufficient to enable humans to weather the storm of urbanization and technological rationalization. We are a supremely adaptive species.

And I will reiterate my statement that yours is a view developed from reading about the concepts, not by lying in wait by a water-hole to kill an antelope. ;^)

[Age of Reason]

Realize that hunting and gathering hundreds of thousands of years ago was an easier endeavor than it has been more recently since the depletion of wild resources and the increased wariness of game from thousands of years of being hunted.

(Early visitors to the Galapagos and other uninhabited lands were amazed at the number of wild animals and at how easy it was to walk among a flock of birds who had not learned to "fear" hunters.)

As for higher and higher IQ's being an unmixed blessing, I don't buy it.

Our desires and bodies are not up to the solutions provided mankind through the technology the "geniuses" among us have generated--our pleasures are low tech, our motivations are low tech, and such things as higher mathematics, for example, are distasteful to the majority of people, who would rather think of something else.

Whether having a high IQ enhances an individual's chance of passing his genes along (and I suspect that having a higher IQ alone may be detrimental to reproduction--especially to someone whose other traits are average and to society as a whole; civilized people have less desire for children, decreasing birth rates--better birth control and safer abortions are the gift of "geniuses"), there is a good possibility that the marriage of high IQ and high technology may cause the extinction of mankind--or at least put a finish to the kind of culture that celebrates high IQ's and the technical innovations it can bring.

We in the West may now be passing out of the honeymoon period of the industrial revolution and into a world where placing reliance on the human race's other talents will be recognized as even more important than those other talents are now.

As for those surviving hunter gatherers who seem so enamored of our civilization on experiencing it, understand that our desires are tuned to a world where obtaining the objects of desire require some work, some exercise--and therefore require constant motivation from near insatiable desires (pet fish will often eat themselves to death, not being prepared by nature for the generosity of their human owners--like the Japanese who had no word for surrender, fish and humans too often have no concept of enough!)

That civilization can instantly gratify desires is by definition attractive, but in the long run unhealthy.

And there have been instances of primitives returning to their former lifestyle of their own volition.

There have also been instances where Western man has sampled the primitive and then fled to it, never to return.

[headsonpikes]

"There have also been instances where Western man has sampled the primitive and then fled to it, never to return."

Case in point, headsonpikes. ;^)

Seriously, I lived in the North for about a decade without running water or electricity, depending upon hunting for most meat, etc., etc.

Even the aboriginal trappers of my acquaintance enjoy such modern items as either amuse them or aid in hunting, etc.

OTOH, you have a point about most folks having very limited survival options; we are vulnerable to a die-off.

It still seems to me that the greater than vaerage ability to recognize patterns and manipulate logical symbols indicated by IQ tests can not be disadvantageous. You have not really explained why you think this is the case.

I freely concede that I'd rather go hunting with friends than shuffle papers with strangers. ;^)

[Age of Reason]

Err, I said, "There have also been instances where Western man has sampled the primitive and then fled to it [not from it], never to return."

More about this IQ stuff later.

[Age of Reason]

Seriously, I lived in the North for about a decade without running water or electricity

North sounds like a cold place for that experiment.

I suspect our forebears did not move north until they overpopulated the climates to which they (and we) are best suited.

No need need for hot running water in the right climate, for example. No need for heating or AC either.

More later.

[headsonpikes]

I think you've misread my response. ;^)

IQ tests are a poor substitute for rasslin' bears as a determinant of social status, but there appears to be little enthusiasm for reviving the more hearty customs of our ancestors. ;^)

All this is not as 'non sequitur' as it may read. ;^)

[Age of Reason]

You might enjoy this (if you have RealAudio/RealOne player):

http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/me /20020513.me.06.ram

(Actually, I suspect he's may just be a homeless guy who's got the author of a book about him and other dames as well as lecture audiences over a barrel and believing some really good yarns.)

[Age of Reason]

It still seems to me that the greater than average ability to recognize patterns and manipulate logical symbols indicated by IQ tests can not be disadvantageous. You have not really explained why you think this is the case.

At best, having an exceptionally high IQ probably does not confer an evolutionary advantage--and at worse, may confer a disadvantage.

IQ only serves us up until our inborn desires are satiated, beyond that it's useless.

More, a high IQ may confer a disadvantage by making the satisfaction of an individual's desires too easy--which can cause physical and mental and social problems.

We are social animals, and there is great safety in conformity--deviate too far from the norm in appearance, action, prosperity, or thought, and you will attract physical and social trouble from other humans and physical trouble other species.

There is the great pool of humanity to deal with--having a high IQ is a small thing compared to the other traits one needs to maintain one's standing among peers.

Having a high IQ might cause an atrophying of other human traits like aggression over generations, wich would put your descendants at a social handicap.

And that is just on the individual level.

On the level of our entire species, the technology that high IQ has brought us (IQ did not evolve to create high tech, by the way) also has its dangers for the human race--but that's another story.

There's more but no time now.

[headsonpikes]

"...but that's another story."

I'm getting the impression that's the issue you are actually concerned about--that somehow we are creating a technology-dependent way of life that leaves the vast majority of mankind vulnerable to mass die-off in the event of a destabilizing event.

Frankly, in terms of individual survival traits I find your arguments thin and unconvincing; there may be some basis for social concerns, however.

[Age of Reason]

Frankly, in terms of individual survival traits I find your arguments thin and unconvincing

I don't know about you, but I'm sure living around too many morons has taken years off my life.