Some Notes about Psychology and Intelligence

“More about Intelligence” summarizes research findings reported by Gregory Cochran (West Hunter), John Ray (Political Correctness Watch), and James Thompson (Unz Review: James Thompson Archive). This is an encore presentation, with notes from Cochran, Thompson, and two other sources. The scope of these notes is a bit broader than intelligence, as you will see.

Cochran leads off with comments about the transgender fad:

Progressives mostly think that “that gender is a matter of identity, not biology, and that refusing to recognize a person’s gender identity is an outrageous offense.” While Terfs [trans exclusionary radical feminists] believe that “women are a subordinate social class, oppressed due to their biology, and that there’s nothing innate about femininity. They think you can’t have a woman’s brain in a man’s body because there’s no such thing as a “woman’s brain….

Well, obviously it’s difficult for some ex-Navy Seal to have ‘always felt like a girl inside’ if there is no difference between male and female brains. So, will smoke now start coming out of progressive ears, as they endlessly say “does not compute”?

I doubt it. They’re perfectly capable of believing in incompatible theories – there’s no logical contradiction if you never logic in the first place. But if by some chance it does bother someone, here is the resolution:

Progressives and Terfs are both wrong: sex differences in behavior have biological roots – men and female brains are different. I mean, if male rhesus monkeys like toy trucks and females rhesus monkeys don’t, as they do, it’s hard to attribute to social pressure. Boys are much more likely to like rough-and-tumble play, blah blah blah. The stereotypes are true. Trans men aren’t little girls inside, anymore than someone with a Napoleonic complex is ‘really’ Corsican. They’re just crazy. Now that craziness probably has some biological origin, but we don’t understand it. Even if it does, it is likely that the form of that craziness is shaped by social influences, just as Malays run amok with a bloody kris rather than going postal with a Glock….

If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to make it so, with advanced biological engineering. [“Internal Contradictions,” December 12, 2015]

(For more in that vein by Cochran, see “Not Bad. Could Be Better“, April 17, 2017.)

James Thompson has more about sex differences:

It is a measure of the quality of British life that one of its longest running TV programs is “University Challenge”, a quiz show for university students. Yes, it has always been a minority interest, but it is a showcase of talent, an astounding example of what bright young people can get to know in roughly 25 years….

I have not checked these figures, but the final winning teams since inception number 184 contestants, of whom only 16 were women, so their representation is roughly 9%.

I am not writing for a national newspaper, but I take a more measured approach than to ask for quotas. What do we know about general knowledge and sex differences outside this particular TV format?…

Lynn and Irwing argue that men have always been better at the Information (general knowledge) subtest of the Wechsler test, an important finding because the of the care taken over the representativeness of the standardization sample. Furthermore, boys are better at girls on wider general knowledge in 26 European countries….

the observed male advantage in University Challenge is not an artefact of selection for a TV program, but an established aspect of sex differences in knowledge. Since men are better at general knowledge, and are usually more variable in ability (larger standard deviations) than women it would make sense that there would be fewer women selected for local university team membership, and progressively far fewer in winning teams. As you push out towards higher levels of general knowledge there are about 10 very knowledgeable men for every equally knowledgeable woman. [“Intelligence and General Knowledge: Your Starter for 10“, April 11, 2017]

And more:

Here is a very interesting paper on sex differences in brain size and intelligence, notable for linking people’s brain scans with their detailed intelligence test results….

Men’s brains are bigger than women’s, even when controlling for bigger body size, which means they should have higher intelligence, though the evidence for that is conflicting. Most researchers find no notable differences overall, saying that different strengths and weaknesses balance each other out, but Lynn and Irwing (2002, 2004) argued that adult males are almost 4 IQ points brighter than adult females. The authors of the present paper have found one of the largest MRI samples available, each scanned person having done 10 cognitive tests, which is what makes this study particularly interesting….

The tests were used to create an overall g score. Correlations with this overall g measure and brain measures are not large, but for both males and females the highest correlations are with gray matter volume….

Once again, I recommend that men pay close attention to the largest sex difference, which plays out in their favour: spatial orientation, in which they have a 6 IQ points advantage. I recommend that women play close attention to Episodic memory in which they have an advantage of 4 IQ points, giving women the upper hand when remembering male transgressions. Those particular findings hold up even when you control for g, so they are very real cognitive sex differences, and are mostly across the board of the abilities measured….

This study supports the minority position of Lynn and Irwing, that men are about 4 IQ points brighter than women, an across-the-board advantage, plus better spatial ability, and that part of this difference may be attributed to brain size….

As usual, a small difference in means has larger consequences at the extremes. If one assumes a 4 point difference straddling the mean, then women will be 98 to men’s 102. Keeping the standard deviations to 15 for both sexes, and setting the cutoff point at IQ 130 then 3.1% of men and 1.6% of women pass the threshold, meaning 65% of the brightest people will be men. [“Women’s Brains “, April 24, 2017]

Thompson followed up with this:

[A]s you may have read in my last post “Women’s brains”, when a large sample of people have their brains scanned, men are 3.75 IQ points brighter than the women, but there is no difference between the two on the standard deviations of intelligence, so that goes against the general pattern of the findings.

Richard Lynn (1994) argued that some of this confusion arises because so many tests of intelligence are carried out on school age children, and since girls mature faster than boys, so they lead in intelligence initially, but when boys finally mature at roughly 15 year of age, men end up a little brighter than women, by about 4 IQ points. This finding has been supported by various studies, though some find male advantage sooner in child development.

Now a new study has been published which shows a male advantage appearing by the age of 10 in Nigeria….

[M]ale advantage is evident by age 10 and increases with age. So, this is another finding which strengthens Lynn (1994) and in this sample puts the age of male advantage back to 10 years of age. This might suggest that Africans mature faster than Europeans, for which there is some evidence, but it seems to be part of a bigger picture of early male advantage in general intelligence. Measured at age 18-19 when students are entering the workforce, or higher education, this is a massive 7 IQ point male advantage. If one takes a broader view, and takes the almost 4000 strong sample of 15 to 19 year olds, the difference is still a 5 IQ point male advantage. [“Sex Differences in Intelligence in Nigeria“, May 9, 2017]

Elsewhere, F. Roger Devlin reviews a book by Roderick Kaine:

There are several well-established differences in cognitive functioning between men and women. First, adult men appear to have a three to five point advantage over women in average IQ. Second, and more important, there is a much wider range of variation in male intelligence, with more men at the highest and lowest levels, and with women tending to bunch in the middle. Third, women tend toward greater verbal ability, while men have greater mathematical ability and much greater visuospatial ability.

One consequence of these differences is that men greatly outnumber women among high achievers in engineering and the hard sciences, a circumstance which, in the author’s words, “engenders astonishing levels of envy among some women.” Elaborate but unconvincing theories revolving around discrimination and “stereotype threat” have been elaborated to account for these differences and justify preferential treatment of women in these fields.

Yet these differences in cognitive ability can easily be explained by studying the human brain. Male brains on the whole are 8 to 10 percent larger than female brains, and controlling for body size differences does not eliminate the difference. The correlation coefficient between brain size and IQ is about 0.35 or 0.4 when the most accurate measuring techniques are used. One area, the inferior parietal lobe, is 25 percent larger in males. The male brain also has about 15 to 16 percent more neurons than the female.

As a proportion of the brain, men have significantly more white matter than women and women have more grey matter than men. Unadjusted for overall volume differences, however, men have about the same amount of grey matter as women and the male advantage in white matter is even more profound….

An exception to the pattern of greater white matter in the male brain is the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the cerebrum. Females have proportionally more white matter in this particular region than males, making for better communication between hemispheres. Testosterone promotes interconnectivity between parts of the brain, but the lower connectivity between hemispheres in the male brain means that the effects of testosterone are largely limited to promoting interconnectivity within each hemisphere separately. So the overall pattern is more connectivity between hemispheres in women, and more within hemispheres in men.

Together, asymmetry between hemispheres and differences in connectivity patterns probably explain why men excel at visuospatial reasoning and women at verbal reasoning as well as why these two abilities are found to be inversely correlated once the influence of general intelligence is factored out (as components of g they are directly correlated)….

[O]f course, not everyone is able to appraise the facts rationally. In particular, as Kaine puts it, “the male advantages in technical ability and IQ . . . often engenders astonishing levels of envy among some women.” And these women wield so much power in the contemporary West that even standardized test designers live in fear of them. What might be termed “resentful woman theory” holds that boys and girls are born with equal ability in all domains, but that systematic bias from schools, parents and society at large puts girls at a disadvantage.

As the author shows, there is a good deal of evidence to contradict such claims. Among takers of the SAT test, girls outnumber boys by 27 percent. The girls also have higher Grade Point Averages, with 44 percent more of them earning a perfect 4.0. The girls have enjoyed more years of coursework in all subject areas surveyed, including math and science, and have taken more AP courses, again including math and science. There is even some evidence of teacher bias in favor of girls, which Kaine speculates may be due to girls’ advantages in a number of behavioral traits unrelated to raw intelligence, including organization, dependability, self-discipline, and submissiveness to authority figures. [“Why Most High-Achievers Are Men [& Why We Cannot Afford Sexual Egalitarianism]“, Truth Is Justice, November 6, 2016]

(See also: Gregory Cochran, “Old T-Rex“, West Hunter, March 20, 2017.)

What about women in the workplace? The author of this post notes a Bloomberg piece

warning that economists are “worried” about the economic implications of women’s decisions about how to balance work and family. Women’s workforce participation has dipped since its peak two decades ago, and encouraging more women to work outside the home could boost our economy. Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank, has some advice for the U.S.:

“To keep women and men productive in the labor market, it is a good idea to have supporting institutions that can ease some of the burdens of both single parents and married couples with children.”

That’s certainly sound advice [or maybe not: TEA]….

[The proponents of such policies really] want America to embrace the European approach and have the government provide or require businesses to provide extensive paid leave and other benefits.

Devlin puts it this way:

The feminists whose demands created our present employment regime want, in effect, for the cost of women’s behavior and decisions to be externalized to employers, customers, fellow employees and tax payers. Indeed, once all these hidden costs are factored out, it is unclear just how many “working” women are actually engaged in any sort of productive labor; the author suggests that the numbers may be as low as 30 percent….

I turn from the war between the sexes (or between radical feminism/political correctness and the facts) to the intelligence of East Asians. This is by Ryan Faulk (“IQs of East Asians“, Truth Is Justice, May 10, 2017):

One of the major arguments against heredetarianism is the claim that East Asians’ higher IQs than Europeans is merely a result of effort, and are in fact an example of effort raising the IQ of an entire group by about 4 points relative to 100, which is presumably what they would score if they were as “lazy” as Europeans.

There are 3 reasons to be highly skeptical of this claim:
1. The results of East Asian adoption studies
2. The global patterns of East Asian IQ scores and low verbal IQ relative to their other scores
3. Facts strongly suggestive of genetic causation of the White-Asian differences – such as myopia, the scores of mixed-race East Asians and specific gene variants East Asians have compared to Europeans….

After presenting statistics that support each claim, Faulk concludes:

For any of these things in isolation, you can come up with an environment-only explanation.

The problem is that so many lines of evidence point to genetics, and an environmental explanation would have to explain the pattern of intelligence in East Asians (relatively lower verbal) and higher IQs – all around the world and for decades.

It would have to explain the intermediate scores of mixed European-Asians, the coincidences of higher rates of myopia and East Asians having certain alleles that predict higher IQs.

Not only can a genetic explanation explain this data – all of these things positively bolster a genetic explanation, while an environmentalist orientation would at best just have to cope with all of this.

Affirmative action has done much harm in the United States, but it’s not going away anytime soon. As long as it’s still around, let’s have some affirmative action for males and East Asians. It’s their turn.

Recommended reading:

Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence“, Journal of Biosciences, Vol. 38, No. 5, 659-93 (September 2006)

Elan Miller, “The Cherry Picked Science in Vox’s Charles Murray Article“, Medium, May 18, 2017

Shivali Best, “‘Smart genes’ Account for 20% of Our Intelligence“, Mail Online, May 22, 2017

Rich Harridy, “52 Genes Associated with Intelligence Discovered“, New Atlas, May 22, 2017

Suzanne Sniekers, et al., “Genome-wide Association Meta-analysis of 78,308 Individuals Identifies New Loci and Genes Influencing Human Intelligence”, Nature, May 22, 2017 (abstract)

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