Half Changed World

WBR: Intelligence and How to Get It

As promised, here's a review of Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.  it's the book that Nicholas Kristof's column a couple of weeks ago was based on.  The book jacket describes this book as "the authoritative anti-Bell Curve" and indeed, much of the book is  a full-out attack on the claim that intelligence is primarily determined by genetics and that any attempts to improve outcomes for members of disadvantaged groups are doomed.

To be honest, the "how to get it" part was the least interesting part of the book for me, because it covered ground that I already know about -- Perry Preschool, KIPP, Carol Dweck's work on the "mindset" that effort matters more than inherent ability.  That said, Nisbett does a good job of writing about these issues in a non-technical manner, and I'm hopeful that he will influence public opinion.

The "intelligence" part of the book was far more interesting, because Nisbett is implicitly arguing with both the strong hereditarians who believe that intelligence is overwhelmingly genetic and that environment (including parenting) doesn't matter much, and with the liberals who aren't sure exactly what is meant by "intelligence," and are pretty skeptical that intelligence tests are picking up underlying ability rather than leaning.  The first two chapters (and a more technical appendix) are aimed squarely at these issues, and should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to talk about intelligence.

Nisbett argues that the high estimates for the genetic component of intelligence are overwhelmingly based on twin studies, and especially adoptive studies, and these don't haver nearly as much variation in environments as there exists between families overall.  He also notes that overall IQ levels have risen steadily over time, far too quickly to be accounted for by natural selection (if you look at the raw scores, rather than the normed ones which are forced to have a constant mean of 100).  Addressing the question of racial differences in IQ specifically, he points out that the black-white gap has also decreased significantly in the past decades, and that African-Americans with a higher percentage of European genes do not have higher IQs than African-Americans with fewer European genes.

I'm going to end this review where Nisbett begins the book, on the question of what is intelligence.  Even after reading the book, I find it hard to define.  Nisbett is clear that he believes that schooling does increase intelligence, and that scores on even the most abstract and supposedly culture-free components of the IQ test (such as the Raven progressive matrices*) improve markedly with practice.  So he doesn't agree with the opening quote from Cyril Burt that intelligence is "inborn, all-around intellectual ability.. inherited, not due to teaching or training... uninfluenced by industry or zeal."  But he also thinks it's a real characteristic, distinct from specific knowledge of a subject.  In some ways, he almost seems to define intelligence as that which is measured by IQ tests, which is a strong predictor of academic and career sucess although not the only factor in either (with effort, emotional skills, self-discipline, and motivation being the strongest non-intelligence factors in these).

* For what it's worth, I would have chosen a different answer than the "correct" one on the sample problem given in the book, and still think that my answer is equally plausible.

We have got to try this

I don't think I ever posted about the "science share" at D's school in the spring.  He really wanted to participate, so we looked in our kid science books for something easy, and decided to bring in a big bowl of oobleck, which is just cornstarch suspended in water.  It's got some really weird properties -- if you apply pressure to it, it acts like a solid, but if you just hold it in your hand, it acts like a liquid.

As it turns out, it was a huge hit.  Pretty much every kid who walked by wanted to feel it, and half the adults were asking us "what is that stuff?"  It was pretty chaotic, because between trying to watch N, stop kids getting oobleck all over the place, and racing to the bathrooms for more paper towels, we clearly needed at least one more adult than we had.  But it was also a ton of fun.

Today, gizmodo had a link to a video of what happens when you mix oobleck, a metal pan, and a loud subwoofer.  We have got to try this.

NASA Kids' Club

We had some very impressive thunderstorms this afternoon, and the picnic we were going to attend to was canceled.  N had a party to attend, so I let D spend extra time playing on my computer.

I had promised to look on NASA's web site for pictures from the new Mars lander, and we did find some fine images, but the hit of the day was the NASA Kids' Club.  Lots of games with a space theme, some more overtly educational than others, organized by difficulty level.  You can send your name to the Moon.  And, new today, Buzz Lightyear travels with the shuttle to visit the space station.

I also signed D up for his own Galaxy Zoo account, and he passed the qualifying test with ease, but didn't have patience to classify more than half a dozen or so objects.

Plastic bags

One of the sections of The World Without Us that caught my attention is the description of the gigantic collection of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific ocean.  It was running around in the back of my head last week when I read the NY Times article about how Ireland has essentially stopped using disposable shopping bags, driven in large part by a 33 cent per bag tax.  Meanwhile, D has been learning about recycling at school, and I've been trying to use that as a starting point for a broader lesson about the environment (and turning off lights when you leave the room, please).

So we've decided to see if we can break the plastic bag habit.  We'll keep track of how many we take in each month, and see how low we can get the number.

I understand that giving up plastic grocery bags isn't going to save the world.  And there are plenty of things that involve plastics that I have no intention of giving up.  But it strikes me that using disposable plastic bags in no way improves my quality of life.  It's just a habit.  And one that we can choose to break.

We've got some canvas bags already, and I went ahead and ordered some folding ones that I can keep in my purse so I always have one with me.  We'll see how it goes.

Updated:

So far, so good.  We've had some slip-ups, but have been using them more often than not (and often forgoing the plastic bag even when we didn't bring the grocery bags).

Jo(e) has a great post up about reusable bags.  She argues that the problem is that they're so convenient that they get used for everything BUT groceries.  But if you buy enough of them, they become ubiquitous, and you stop having to worry about what you did with them.

The World Without Us

Last night I was far too distracted to write a book review, but I do want to get back into the habit of writing them.  This week's book is The World Without Us, by Alan Weissman.  As suggested by the title, the book explores what would happen to the Earth if humans simply disappeared one day (whether abducted by aliens, taken in the rapture, or killed by a highly specific virus that left everything else on earth alone).  How long would our creations last?  Would the damage that we've done to the environment be healed, or would our chemical and nuclear facilities wreak even more havoc left untended?

Weissman uses these questions as launching points to explore a range of phenomena, from the Korean DMZ as wildlife refuge, to vast underground cities in Turkey, to the dead zone at Chernobyl, to the question of why there are almost no mega-fauna left anyplace on earth but Africa.  (Weissman's answer is that African megafauna learned early to be wary of humans, while the great animals in other parts of the world were taken by surprise by the dangerousness of these apparently helpless primates.  As I write this, I'm not sure why Asian elephants and tigers are an exception to that rule.)

The wide range of topics in the book are both a strength and a weakness.  Weissman's conclusion is that almost all traces of humans (except for bronze statues and radioactivity) will be erased, given enough time.  But because he jumps from issue to issue, having read the book, I still don't have a specific sense of what the world would look like in 5 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years.

It's hard to read the book, and not be horrified by some of the things that we're doing to the earth -- driving species to extinction, filling the oceans with plastic, changing the very climate.  But it doesn't point to obvious solutions, and can leave you with a sense that nothing we do at this point can fix things very much.

Health and parenting

I was intrigued by this story in the Washington Post on Monday, reporting on a study that examined the cost of childbearing on parental health. The researchers took advantage of the huge amount of geneological data collected by the Mormon church, and studied the effects of family size on both parental and child health.

As you'd expect, the odds of dying in childbirth or immediately thereafter rose for women the more children they had borne.  But the odds of dying in the next year rose significantly for women even after the first few months, and for men as well.  In an online Q and A, the reporter said that the findings held across imputed socioeconomic status, which suggests that it's not just a matter of having too many mouths to feed.  The article suggests that the findings may be a sign of the health impacts of stress.  Children in large families were also more likely to die than those in small families, possibly due to inadequate supervision.

I wasn't surprised to see that children were more likely to die in childhood if one of their parents died before they reached age 5.  I was surprised that this finding was so much stronger for maternal death than paternal death.  I can see how maternal death would be a disaster for an infant, but my stereotypical image of pioneer families makes me think that loss of a father would be a greater disaster for older children.  But there may have been more social support for widows and their children than I imagine.  (I also think there may be some bias introduced by the sample design, which is limited to couples who were each married only once; my impression is that both widows and widowers tended to remarry out of simple economic necessity.)

Given both smaller family sizes today and better medical care, I'm not sure if this study has any practical implications today, but I thought it was interesting.

Conservatives and evolution

Ben Adler at the New Republic interviewed a bunch of conservatives about their opinions of evolution, intelligent design, and what should be taught in public schools. It's quite a fascinating read.

I was particularly struck by James Taranto's casual reference to public schools as "government schools" -- a subtle echo of Grover Norquist's more agressive statement that "The real problem here is that you shouldn't have government-run schools." 

I was also dumbfounded by David Frum's statement -- after saying that he does believe in evolution -- that "I don't believe that anything that offends nine-tenths of the American public should be taught in public schools. ... Christianity is the faith of nine-tenths of the American public. ... I don't believe that public schools should embark on teaching anything that offends Christian principle."

Ok, but does that mean that he thinks teaching evolution offends most Christians?  I think the vast majority of Christians agree with the theory of evolution and have no problems with it being taught in schools.  Interestingly, I argued the same point last week over at Raising WEG, in response to Mia C's question "But will any of the religious parents be discussing evolution and atheism with their children?"

***

Updated: Via Right Magazine (found by following my inbound traffic), I've learned that Frum says he was misquoted.  He writes: "I have no idea what proportion of Americans object to the teaching of evolution, but I very much doubt that it's 90% or even 50%."

That's a relief. 

IQ, Class and Genes

After reading the NYTimes series on class, and my post about it, a reader emailed me to suggest that the discussion of inherited position within a "meritocracy" was ducking the question of genes and IQ.  For example, one of the strongest predictors of how well kids do in school is their mother's level of education.  Is this because well-educated mothers read to their kids a lot and use more extensive vocabularies, or because they continued in school because they were good at it, and they passed those genes onto their kids?

It's a fair question, and the truth is almost certainly a bit of both.  A paper by Erik Turkheimer et al. a few years ago found that among very poor families, the environmental conditions were more important than genes in predicting IQ, while among middle- and upper-income families, genetic factors were dominant.   The published article is pretty technical, but there's a nice layperson's discussion of it and interview with Turkheimer available from Connect for Kids.

This research suggests that there's a threshold level below which children aren't able to develop to their full genetic potential.  But above that level, what parents do isn't as critical (at least with regard to IQ) as we often think.  As Turkheimer says in the interview:

“In the range where a lot of people spend their time…you know, ‘Should I hang the black and white mobile over my kids’ crib?’ kind of thing, it probably does not matter.”

Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History

"Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History" is the title of an essay by Stephen Jay Gould, originally published in Natural History magazine, and later included in his essay collection, The Flamingo's Smile. Gould was an elegant writer, and the essay is worth reading in its entirety. (To read beyond the page in the link, increment the page number in the URL by one.) Gould's argument is, first, in support of human equality as not just a moral principle but a scientific fact -- at least with respect to racial differences. He writes: "Human races are not separate species (the first argument) or ancient divisions within an evolving plexus (the second argument). They are recent, poorly differentiated subpopulations of our modern species, Homo sapiens, products at most of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and marked by remarkably small genetic separations." But then he goes on to point out that there's no biological reason why this had to be the case. There could conceivably have been more than one human species, both intelligent, but with meaningful biological differences. How we would have treated each other in that case -- what rights and obligations we would have -- is a fascinating topic for thought. I was reminded of this essay upon reading in paper today that researchers have found remains on Flores island of a new human species that they think lived about 10,000 years after the Neanderthals had become extinct. And it ties in with my thoughts yesterday about whether it's a good idea to base our moral arguments on factual premises. A small request: Some of you may have heard about the controversy that erupted earlier this year when someone discovered that when you entered the word "Jew" into Google, the top link was to an anti-semetic site. The response, after a flurry of initial accusations, was a campaign to get people to link the word "Jew" to its entry on Wikipedia, as I just did. This is now the top result of a google search. Well, in searching for this essay on line, I discovered that the top hit on "human equality contingent fact history" is for David Duke's official website. Ugh. If you find this as horrifying as I do, please consider providing a countervailing link to the actual essay, like this: Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History or to Gould's page on WikiQuote, like this: Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History Thanks. November 4 update: The David Duke site is no longer the first result on Google -- now this site is. Not quite what I had in mind, but at least anyone coming here will be pointed to the full article.

The role of research

In this week's New York Times Magazine, there's a nice article about the 22-year-old daughter of a lesbian couple. They suggest that she's one of the oldest children deliberately conceived and raised by a homosexual couple (as opposed to having been born before one of their parents came out). This seems plausible to me -- I grew up in Greenwich Village, and attended what is probably the only public elementary school in the US that is next door to a gay bookstore, but to the best of my knowledge, none of my classmates had gay or lesbian parents.

However, the part of the article that caught my attention the most was this comment by Judith Stacy, a sociologist who rejects the conventional wisdom that the children of gay and lesbian parents are no more likely to be homosexual than the children of heterosexual parents.

''My position is that you can't base an argument for justice on information that's empirically falsifiable in the long run,'' she said. ''If your right to custody is based on saying there are no differences, then research comes along and says you're wrong, then where are you?''

This point has wide applicability beyond the specific question raised in the article. One example that comes to mind is child care. The research at this point is pretty darn inconclusive. There's some evidence that kids in child care have better cognitive skills, some evidence that they are more aggressive (although within the range of normal kid behavior), some evidence that very long hours of child care in the early months may have negative effects, especially for shy kids. It's all based on observations, rather than on rigorous evaluations, so anyone who says that they have proof of causation is lying. (For a solid review of the data, my favorite recommendation is Working Families and Growing Kids, by the National Academy Press.)

But let's say a report came out next week that had solid clear findings suggesting that children who spend their first two years in child care have worse outcomes than children who spend them in primarily parental care. What would we do? Would we ignore the findings, saying that they're just another way to beat up on working mothers? Would we demand higher quality child care? Would we demand that the government provide childrens' allowance to enable low- and moderate-income parents to cut back on work? If no possible research findings would change the policies and practices that we support, we should acknowledge that they are based on our normative values rather than on facts.

A recent study found...

Articles about two studies on the causes of childhood leukemia crossed my desk this week. The first reported on a study published in Cancer Causes and Control which links it to what mothers ate in the year before they became pregnant -- the more protein, vegetables and fruit the mothers ate, the lower the risk of cancer. The other reports on a paper presented at a British conference suggesting that night-time exposure to light could be a cause of leukemia.

I have very mixed feelings about studies like these. Leukemia is a horrible disease, and of course we'd want to do what we could to reduce the incidence of it. But it's bad enough having a child with a life-threatening disease without having to worry that you might have caused it. Parenting these days seems to be an endless litany of things that you shouldn't do.

I confess -- my 3 1/2 year old likes the light on at night, and since he and his brother share a room, that means the baby is being exposed to it too. Not only do I feed them YoBaby yogurt (which the puritans on my moms email list disapprove of because it has sugar added), I let them have cake and cookies too. My older son only eats vegetables when I hide them in muffins. He only brushes his teeth once a day, and we haven't started brushing the baby's teeth yet. Shoot me now.