Kevin MacDonald: A UCLA study points to very high heritability of IQ and behavioral restraint–probably the two most important traits in the modern world. It also points to the brain mechanisms responsible for differences in these traits. Paul Thompson and his colleagues
used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain’s axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain’s wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.
Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of “insulation” that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.
For example, the connections in the parietal lobe associated with math and logic are 85% heritable, while the connections in the frontal lobe responsible for working memory and for inhibiting impulsive behavior are 65% heritable. Behavioral restraint not really IQ but relate to behavioral control–things like being able to inhibit immediate gratification and plan for the future . These are traits that show important race differences associated with criminality, especially impulsive criminality (as opposed, say, to most white collar crime).
The difficulty for the left will be to convincingly argue that the sorts of interventions they have been championing will really change brain myelination. As noted in my previous blog, they seem to be running out of ideas on how to improve educability of low-IQ populations, and Head Start doesn’t work either. They may take comfort in the possibility that genetic engineering could actually do the trick:
And could this someday lead to a therapy that could make us smarter, enhancing our intelligence?“It’s a long way off but within the realm of the possible,” Thompson said.
Facing the Future as a Minority
Was the Immigration Act of 1924 Illiberal?
Wasn’t there a study some years ago showing a strong genetic component to criminality? It made quite a splash then, when the findings’ unfashionable implications were realized, it was flushed down the memory hole.
The PBS series NOVA had a program on epigenetics a while back and just watching it seemed that therein lies the silver bullet for the Left. They can now claim it really is environmental conditioning of the epigenome that produces bad outcomes, including the degree of myelination of nerves.
Epigenesis has been the darling of the left for decades. The procedure is to show eome real examples where environments make huge differences and then extrapolate that to IQ or behavioral restraint. But we just don’t know what environments these are that would unlock all that potential, and it looks like we are not going to find them. Kevin M
This goes along with last year’s studies associating certain intelligence factors with specific areas of the brain (especially the frontal and parietal cortices), showing that IQ depends on cortical thickness in brain regions that integrate information from different areas, and otherwise confirming parieto-frontal integration theory. Of course, such physical features of the brain are mainly under genetic control.
Yet other recent studies show that despite the usual counterexamples (Albert Einstein, Anatole France, “the man with no brain”, and so on), IQ correlates positively with brain size after all. This is exactly what Jensen, Rushton, and others have been saying for years. Again, brain size is largely genetic.
Other recent studies have seemed to show that activation of the prefrontal cortex may improve working memory, which in turn correlates with IQ, thus potentially enabling some people to realize slight IQ increases. Unfortunately, with Blacks and Latinos lagging behind Whites by a huge difference of 1-2 standard deviations, it is extremely unlikely that the mean IQ’s of these groups can be significantly raised with respect to that of Whites.
The writing is right up there on the wall for all to see, in boldface and highlighted in dayglo.
David Shenk’s new book ‘The Genius in All of Us’ attempts to explain why Head Start doesn’t work.
“In the mid-1980s, Kansas psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley realized that something was very wrong with Head Start, America’s program for children of the working poor. It manages to keep some low-income kids out of poverty and ultimately away from crime. But for a program that intervenes at a very young age and is reasonably well run and generously funded–$7 billion annually– it doesn’t do much to raise kids’ academic success. Studies show only “small to moderate” positive impacts on three- and four- year- old children in the areas of literacy and vocabulary, and no impact at all on math skills.
The problem, Hart and Risley realized, wasn’t so much with the mechanics of the program; it was the timing. Head Start wasn’t getting hold of kids early enough. Somehow, poor kids were getting stuck in an intellectual rut long before they got to the program– before they turned three and four years old. Hart and Risley set out to learn why and how.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/03/the-32-million-word-gap/36856/
Liberal Biorealist had an interesting post regarding the myelination findings a few months ago:
“Consider an analogy. Most people seem to take it as pretty well established that races differ genetically in the quality of their muscle fibers, and other aspects of their musculature, so that, other things being equal, members of one race — blacks with sub-Saharan African ancestors — tend to be faster sprinters than others. Granted this, is it in any way implausible races might likewise differ in the size and quality of their white matter as it pertains to IQ?
Of course it is not unlikely that exercise of the brain, in the form of stimulation, alters the size and quality of white matter. Certainly learning must affect the brain in some physical way, otherwise how might it take place? Yet return to the analogy of sprinting. Dedicated practice will improve the muscle and sprinting performance of virtually anyone willing to engage in it. Yet no program, regardless of its intensity and design, has proved adequate to turn whites or Asians into world record sprinters against the inherent advantages of blacks, nor, one would expect, would any regimen of exercise much affect a gap between the average sprinting performance of blacks on the one hand and whites and Asians on the other.
Why believe, then, that brain stimulation will prove adequate to removing average differences between the races in terms of IQ, or the hypothesized physical substrate for IQ, the nature of the white matter?
Again, one can always find a way to salvage the thesis of basic equality between the races on this score. One can dismiss the study of white matter as simply off-base and wildly speculative. One can say that all relevant white matter differences might be entirely due to proper stimulation in the environment. One can say that while such differences might be highly genetic within a race, there’s no reason to believe that they are so between races. Most of these arguments can be advanced pretty much regardless of whatever science might find, now or for some significant time into the future.
Yet their plausibility at some point surely dies even in the eyes of those who might most ardently wish to believe them. As science uncovers more and more precise physical correlates for IQ, as those are shown to be inherited, as those differences are shown to be reflected across races, and, finally, as the particular genes that effect those differences are in the future both identified and shown to be differentially distributed across races, then the vice of science gets the truth in an inescapable grip. And it is a truth in which genetics is the key to IQ.
Even at this stage, I believe, the hope for ultimate equality here is pretty much a hope for a miracle. The brain science recounted above is doing no more than converging on the only truth we might reasonable expect, given what we already should know if we have an inclination to objectivity, just as the identification of the genes involved will simply flesh out facts by now well confirmed in other ways.”
http://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/the-vice-tightens/
From the article:
They may take comfort in the possibility that genetic engineering could actually do the trick:
Since the linked article also states that “He said his team has already narrowed down the number of gene candidates that may influence myelin growth” one has to wonder what he means by “a long way off”. 20 years, maybe? That’s not long at all. Under its 1994 Eugenics Law China already forces pregnant women to get their embryos genetically assessed. The progress in identifying the relevant genes described here should make it relatively simple for them to start screening for intelligence very soon, if they are not already doing so.
This sort of gene therapy would be socially beneficial because it would increase educability and behavioral restraint. But it certainly would not be a panacea for White ethnic interests. Indeed, it would make these groups more competitive while not making them less ethnocentric.
On the contrary, I think there’s every reason to think that re-engineering other races to make them more resemble whites at the neurological level would tend to make them share the lack of ethnocentrism characteristic of whites. How could that not be true? Such techniques may well portend the end of racism on more than one level — not only by abolishing racial differences in IQ, but by eliminating even the psychological capacity for racism.
Further, genetically re-engineering whites to decrease criminality (i.e., increase “behavioral restraint”) will also be seen as desirable, and will certainly be done as soon as the technical means can be developed. It is even likely to turn out to have the same solution as for negroes, since although the negro rate of psychopathy may be higher, the genetic mechanism could well be the same. And on what basis could such a program be opposed? The answer is it can’t be and won’t be. Everyone already knows that what the system needs is better sheep, right? That is a foregone conclusion. So the white and negro races will both improve and move closer together in “behavioral restraint” as well. Yes, friends, it’s a wonderful world that’s in prospect!
And just what makes all of our amateur eugenicists here think that, once the technique of manipulating genes in order to increase IQ is perfected, a rigorous application of eugenics will leave everyone with exactly the same 160 (or whatever) IQ? (For an egalitarian perspective seems to be the prevailing view.) Certainly, there are a lot of necessary tasks in any society — the vast majority of tasks, in fact — that don’t require high IQ. If you give such workers a needlessly high IQ, you will only breed discontent and social unrest. From the technical perspective of a societal engineer that would be ill-advised; giving everyone a high IQ is a solution without a corresponding problem. Therefore, I consider it far more likely that a stratified, insect-like society will be the result of such techniques, the sort of society foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where the vast majority of workers are purposefully denied a high IQ, and some are even deliberately given a low IQ. Besides, the entire structure of human societies would have to be changed if everyone’s IQ were the same. Really high IQ has been a rarity all throughout human evolutionary history. It would be the ultimate in Bolshevism to reverse this, and would doubtless have many unforeseen, and possibly even catastrophic side effects.
Nevertheless, in spite of all cautions to the contrary, a white man’s brain in a negro’s body continues to be the Holy Grail most feverishly sought after by would-be racial egalitarians of all stripes, including eugenicists and many so-called white advocates. How to stop the negro’s disruptiveness and make him useful to the system, that seems to be the most burning question of the day. And it’s true that, if developed, these kinds of monstrosities will indeed be socially beneficial, provided that living in a raceless, carefully regulated insect-like society, where any racial differences that actually amount to anything have been abolished “for the greatest good of the greatest number” is beneficial!
We have met the enemy, and he is us!
Let these Frankensteins DREAM all they want of creating a PLANET OF THE APES, their world is about to collapse and, as the late great poet of America Ezra Pound called them, BIG JEW won’t save them.
Adam, if I were granted the proposition from some magical genie that he would increase every human being’s IQ (from the perspective of an IQ test that was standardized in a developed Western nation in the 2000s) to 160 and assuming other personality traits were unchanged, I would accept it. The risk/reward from that proposition is irresistible because I fear the downsides of the status quo more than the high IQ scenario. I’d risk whatever putative downsides that scenario poses for the chance of significantly increasing the possibility of the Technological Singularity occurring in my lifetime because I assume that a highly intelligent population will drastically increase the rate of technological innovation. (Maybe we might develop warp drive where the human species can now live in a happy socialist diverse
societygalaxy with other alien species :) although Star Trek does not have a sanguine view of eugenics in their canon since it created people such as Khan Noonien Singh. )BTW, since intelligence (by definition) is the ability to understand and manipulate novel and complex situations through superior information processing, whatever problems that should arise from such a society would be correctly identified and addressed effectively since the capacity for handling such those challenges would increase.
Wow, the enantiomer (mirror image) of our current situation: instead of the labor market being characterized by a surplus of people with low intelligence and a dearth of jobs for people with such capacities, there would be a lack of people willing to do low prestige and boring tasks. Again I’d risk that scenario than the status quo where many lacking the intellectual capacity to understand the world live their lives in a stifling disgrace mired in vapid humiliating jobs.
Richard Lynn in Eugenics addresses the issues of “too much intelligence”:
http://books.google.com/books?id=XaiF6MeXFmQC&pg=PA92#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Eliminating criminality through eugenic genetic engineering seems somewhat redundant when done simultaneously with the engineering of higher intelligence. One has to remember that most crimes are not committed independent of intelligence (or the lack of it in most cases) although one should consider the possibility of reporting biases since less intelligence people are more likely to get caught while the crime rate for the right side of the bell curve may be underestimated because they can use their intelligence to evade detection. People with low intelligence are likely to commit crime because they are unable to perceive the possible consequences of their actions and deliberate over the potential risk and rewards committing crime before acting (impulsive crime disproportionately committed by though with low intelligence fits this description) and, furthermore, they have less to lose from criminal activity since they are more likely to have less prestigious jobs and become unemployed. Increasing intelligence directly addresses these root causes of criminal activity although it may enable other forms of crime.
Why would highly intelligent blacks considered “monstrosities”? Looking at the definition of the word from an on-line dictionary, one of the definitions states “something deviating from the normal”. Aren’t whites with an IQ of 160 monstrosities too since they are four sigma individuals by the standard of contemporary standardized intelligence tests?
China? Why would China practice IQ enhancing eugenics? One obvious answer is that it would increase their ability to compete with other nations, but Adam speculates that it would causes internal social disorder and discontentment. Would such a eugenics program be contrary to the conservative collectivist hierarchical Confucianist nature of Chinese culture?
This is an interesting study you bring up Professor.
Have you heard of Epigenetics?
If evolution implies adaptation, where is the room for such adaptation in terms of intelligence? Surely our ancestors were significantly stupider than we are. Yet here we are – pretty smart. Somewhere along the line, something changed.
Either you assume that there was a primeval smart gene, that decreases and increases in the population depending on its reproductive success or failure, or – just maybe, there is some other adaptation space which requires no primeval smart-gene.
…the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.
By whom? These passive constructions are dishonest.
AngryJew: “If evolution implies adaptation, where is the room for such adaptation in terms of intelligence?”
You may be missing the point. We may have entered an evolutionary cul de sac by developing and applying life-saving technologies and establishing social norms that work against natural selection, which is the very basis of evolution.
“Surely our ancestors were significantly stupider than we are. Yet here we are – pretty smart. Somewhere along the line, something changed.”
Think again. A recent study based on a detailed reconstruction of the skeleton of Cro Magnon 1 (one of five Cro Magnon skeletons discovered in a certain French cave) confirms that the brain capacity of primitive European humans was 15-20 percent larger than that of their modern descendants.
Another recent study strongly confirms the positive correlation between brain size and intelligence. Put the two studies together, and one may readily conclude that humanity is undergoing reverse evolution.
What is the most natural remedial response to human reverse evolution in a free high-tech society which demands high intelligence on the parts of its citizens? Whether practiced distributively or differentially (as described by Huxley in his novel “Brave New World”), it’s called “eugenics”.
You can argue about what kind of eugenics would be best, but you cannot rationally argue that some form of it is not required.
S. Blumenthal wrote:
I’ve read somewhere that infants and toddlers brains have more connections between neurons than do adult brains. This enables them to pick up even very complicated languages by simply listening. As children mature, they lose many of these connections. There have been several attempts to teach language to feral children. They were largely unsuccessful.
High IQ individuals may have kept more of their brain’s neural connections as they mature. Schizophrenics may also have more neural connections. Their very active brains may bring on their delusions. There seems to be a connection between high IQ individuals and schizophrenia. Two examples that come to mind are John Nash of “Beautiful Mind” fame and Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber. Kaczynski holds a Ph.D from MIT in mathematics.
I think schizophrenics have a lower IQ than average and your reasoning linking intelligence Schizophrenia seems to be flawed as it is based only on two examples (Nash and Kaczynski). (I doubt Kaczynski was a schizophrenic too.)
I assume schizophrenics have lower IQs because they have a lower working memory measured in forward and backward digit span since I believe that working memory capacity IS (or at least limits) fluid g. This might imply that lower intelligence might be a cause of schizophrenia thus directly selecting for intelligence would be indirectly selecting against schizophrenia. Indeed, the “bad” SNPs of DTNBP1 are associated with schizophrenia and lower intelligence even in people without the morbidity of schizophrenia. But this is just one loci out of many (presumably rare variants that wouldn’t be selected in GWAS since the microarrays might not have the probes to assay for such variants and they are harder to test) and this does not provide sufficient data to provide generalizations about QTLs associated with schizophrenia and cognitive ability.
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/157/2/275.pdf
TGD says:
Two examples that come to mind are John Nash of “Beautiful Mind” fame and Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber. Kaczynski holds a Ph.D from MIT in mathematics.
Both the Soviet and the American systems have found it useful to depict their opponents as insane. This is what we should expect. Do you seriously think that any such totalitarian system is going to concede that people trying to destroy it have good reason for doing so?
Kaczynski isn’t schizophrenic. He’s just correct. Read the Unabomber Manifesto to find out why.
Kevin,
Maybe higher intelligence means less ethnocentrism since g and ethnocentrism are negatively correlated (of course, being intelligence and having ethnocentric thoughts are not mutually exclusive) based on their responses to these statements: ‘I wouldn’t mind if a family of a different race moved next door’’ (.79) and ‘‘I wouldn’t mind
working with people from other races’.(.76)’
http://www.psy.ed.ac.uk/people/iand/Deary%20(2008)%20Psychological%20Science%20iq%20enlightenment.pdf
As I argued before, explicit ethnocentrism is a signal for low intelligence and this is evidenced even by people (HBDers) who acknowledge racial differences in intelligence but are not ethnocentric (I still consider them “racist”) although they do have a propensity to disparage “inferior” races. (Ethnocentrism and racism are synonymous but not identical – for instance, MacDonald is moderately ethnocentric but not a “racist” as I detect no “racism” in his writings; most HBDers are racist, but not ethnocentric.) As you proposed, the way to make ethnocentrism look “respectable” is to disassociate from the Stormfront crowd and present your views using nuanced and abstract arguments.
Re Aki Izayoi: What about Jews? High IQ and ethnocentrism seem to go together. My view is that we White folks are more individualistic, leading to lower ethnocentrism and that IQ and ethnocentrism are fairly independent. The results of the study you refer to could be explained by the fact that smart people are subjected to more brainwashing when they go to college independent of social class. Kevin M
Thought I had read that IQ is very highly correlated with frontal lobe gray matter mass/volume.
Heck, what about North East Asians? High IQs and they’re pretty ethnocentric. More so than Europeans.
Heck, what about North East Asians? High IQs and they’re pretty ethnocentric. More so than Europeans.
And a mere 50 years ago we were highly ethnocentric. something tells me it wasn’t our genes that changed in that time period.
Agree that we were more ethnocentric before the half century of relentless propoganda, but there seems to be evidence that Europeans, Northern Europeans in particular, are an independent type. I see that point made a lot on these sort of sites and I tend to believe it.
me says:
Heck, what about North East Asians? High IQs and they’re pretty ethnocentric. More so than Europeans.
The supposed ethnocentrism of orientals is overrated. Of all interracial marriages in the US, the commonest pairing is white male/oriental female.
And a mere 50 years ago we were highly ethnocentric. something tells me it wasn’t our genes that changed in that time period.
50 years ago white people were nerving themselves up for racial suicide, which they carried out in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, followed in 1965 by the Immigration Reform Act. Pointing to Jewish efforts to pass these pieces of legislation doesn’t excuse the white enthusiasm for them too, of which there was plenty. The white and hugely popular Kennedys were big advocates of this racial destruction. Besides, already by 1957 the schools had been integrated by a white President, Dwight Eisenhower, and in 1948 white President Harry Truman had integrated the military, starting it on its way to being the showpiece of Affirmative Action and race mixing that it is today.
If that ridiculous track record is supposed to be that of a “highly ethnocentric” race, what could possibly qualify as not ethnocentric?
If that ridiculous track record is supposed to be that of a “highly ethnocentric” race, what could possibly qualify as not ethnocentric?
silly. 50 years vs 1500+ that european man was highly ethnocentric.
“The white and hugely popular Kennedys were big advocates of this racial destruction”
Teddy Kennedy caused the death of a young woman. So he was vulnerable to blackmail.
Re: Kevin MacDonald:
Maybe I didn’t articulate my response well. I still think that explicit ethnocentric and racist expressions are negatively correlated with intelligence. Being able to suppress expressing these thoughts (presumably inputs from modular system that causes one to gravitate towards ethnocentrism and kin selection) requires superior executive function which in turn is correlated with general cognitive ability and conscientiousness. In other words, ethnocentrism and kin selection are the default “setting” of the mind, and general cognitive ability allows one to override these settings.
Furthermore, not having a particularist ethical system and adhering to a more universalist morality such are characteristics of the post-conventional Kohlberg stages are a signal of general intelligence. Peter Singer’s preference utilitarianism, for example, is in Kohlberg’s sixth stage universal ethical principles since it demands one to regard the interests and preferences of different sentient beings equally leading him to reject nationalist, racialist, and anthropomorphically based ethics consider the latter to be “speciesism”. Understanding preference utilitarianism and its deductive reasoning and inferences on ethical issues such as animal rights, euthanasia, abortion, and immigration requires high intelligence because it uses abstract concepts (preferences, interests, sentience as these are words harder to define than concrete objects such as “bed”). It does require intelligence to explain why abortion or even infanticide is ethically acceptable while factory farming is abhorrent within the preference utilitarian framework. In the latter case of infanticide, it does require one to suppress their innate disgust in order to deliberate the ethical issue. In contrast, most people’s moral reasoning is concrete: I was a member on a Catholic message board and when they “discuss” the issue of abortion, it is deemed wrong because it kills a human being thus associating the moral protection of the fetus with the concrete label of “human”. According to Satoshi Kanazawa a “politically incorrect” evolutionary psychologist who supports Richard Lynn’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations thesis liberals (defined as people who put more weight on the interest of those genetically unrelated to them) are more intelligent than those who do not.
Jews and ethnocentrism:
The linked Ian Deary paper measures explicit racist or ethnocentric views using a questionnaire but not implicit attitudes. Having high verbal intelligence enables one to use precise, surgical descriptive diction in addition to the contrasting ability of using obfuscating sophistry to project a distorted representation of reality that would difficult for one to uncover if they do not also have high verbal intelligence. One does not need to use explicit ethnocentric language with high intelligence. For instance, in “Understanding Jewish Influence III”, you noted that the founder of the neoconservative movement, Leo Straus, advocated using a universalist exoteric language for outsiders while simultaneously using an esoteric particularist language for insiders.
Re me:
The intellectual elite were racially conscious during the early 20th century: for instance, this text from Civic Biology (the textbook used by John T. Scopes while teaching biology in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925) illustrates mainstream biological thought:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_Biology
Be that as it may, they are still more ethnocentric than Europeans.
Furthermore, not having a particularist ethical system and adhering to universalist morality are characteristics of being in the post-conventional Kohlberg stages which are a signal of general intelligence.
…anthropocentric based ethics while considering the latter…
I sound like Otis Mathis!!
(White nationalism could be posited using stage five which is based on social contracts and I do not consider that view mired in the conventional stage. Stage six, however, might be maladaptive in resource limited finite world. I wanted to clear this up because I did not want to imply that white nationalism operatives from a primative ethical framework although the framework probably needs further development.)
AI: “… the founder of the neoconservative movement, Leo Straus, advocated using a universalist exoteric language for outsiders while simultaneously using an esoteric particularist language for insiders.”
That seems to be taken out of context. Strauss was taking to his hyper-ethnocentric co-ethnics, who have a millennial experience decoding encrypted ethnic messages.
I do, however, believe that Occidental Whites can be “guided” in a healthier ethno-centric direction through implicit messages. The question is if we can afford experimenting with implicit messages the next 20 – 30 years. We’re running out of time.
“The results of the study you refer to could be explained by the fact that smart people are subjected to more brainwashing when they go to college independent of social class. Kevin M”
Yes. Even on questions that have nothing to do with Race, the higher IQ people will tend to give the more PC answer, no matter how factually false it is.
It is brainwashing via the medium of Education and socialization with politically Liberal Peers.
My view is that the main issue is ethnic interests based scientifically on Frank Salter’s work. It really doesn’t matter if another group has a few more IQ points on average; we have different ethnic interests from Asians and Jews, and I am sure that Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow are on board with that. Whites created the technology behind the modern world and I have no doubt that we would continue to be at the cutting edge if are able to carve out a White ethnostate in the future.
Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends!
The UCLA study cited in the original Kevin M. article doesn’t even come close to supporting the gross generalizations, conclusions, and non sequitur drawn from it in the article or in many of the comments thereafter.