Correcting the Critics of Nicholas Wade & MAOA

Critics of Nicholas Wade’s latest book, A Troublesome Inheritance, have tried their best to pull discussion away from science and into the fluffy philosophy of racial semantics. They figure that if discussion never escapes the bog of racial constructivism, then no need exists for consideration of anything specific that would threaten or offend the modern paradigm. Wade deserves credit for effectively anticipating the critics’ points and blame for entertaining the critics’ points. However, Wade interrupted anthropological meanderings about the lack of perfect racial boundaries by introducing the subject of the warrior gene, monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). This is a specific gene with allele frequencies in a specific promoter sequence that differ tremendously by race.

Science reporter Fiona MacRae conveyed her alarm with the headline, “Author: Africans prone to violence.” The body of her article offered no attempt to dispatch with the inconvenient gene, but I have collected all such attempts to put on display right here.

An unremarkable dismissal presumably became a centerpiece due to its placement in the pages of Wade’s employer, The New York Times. Science writer David Dobbs provided glib assurance.

He tells, for instance, of specific gene variants that reputedly create less trust and more violence in African-Americans and, he says, explain their resistance to modern economic institutions and practices. Alas, the scientific literature he draws on is so uneven and disputed that many geneticists dismiss it outright.

One recurring motif of MAOA skeptics is stealing tactics from global-warming skeptics. After all, Dobbs is only a journalist. One must not expect him to conduct a thorough survey or even read a meta-analysis of 31 published studies on the gene. One should simply trust that the “many geneticists” he had in mind have some grasp of the evidence.

Many—143 to be exact—population geneticists published a five-sentence letter in The New York Times Book Review. The brief letter explicitly thanked Dobbs and falsely accused Wade of claiming that natural selection “led to worldwide differences in IQ test results.” Columbia University biologist Molly Przeworski was one of the five geneticists who authored the letter. She told a Canadian radio program, “We just don’t have any of the types of genetic variants that are associated with societal or social or behavioral changes that he’s speculating about.” So, not only do population geneticists object to Wade’s book and dismiss outright the scientific literature for MAOA, but they also categorically rule out having any knowledge of any behavioral genes. (I presume that she did not mean that no human has genes that influence behavior.) Ironically, Przeworski also wrote a study with two other signatories to the letter, Yoav Gilad and Karl Skorecki, that contributed to the outright dismissed MAOA scientific literature. Wade cited their study to suggest that natural selection had acted upon this gene. However, that is not a study of a behavioral phenotype. In fact, I did not recognize any names on the letter as having contributed to behavioral research on MAOA. Certainly none of the authors of the two studies on the MAOA-2R allele that Wade singled out (and pointed out was about fifty times more common in African-American men) signed the letter. Contrary to popular perceptions, geneticists are not the leading experts on behavioral genetics. I have been tabulating the academic backgrounds of authors of MAOA research studies. Out of 76 studies, 67 percent had psychiatrist authors. Only 43 percent of studies had a geneticist author. 20 percent had neuroscientist authors, and 18 percent had psychologist authors. One author, criminologist Kevin Beaver, writes on the subject of biosocial criminology. No one writes about “biosocial psychiatry” because the transition from Freudian psychotherapy to the management of psychotropic drugs has been nearly uniform. Psychiatrists understand that some behaviors reveal mental illnesses, and targeting the relevant neurotransmitters, as the MAOA enzyme does, can save lives. Indeed, criticism of MAOA research does extend to criticism of the relationship between neurotransmitters and behavior, which some scientists openly mock.

Another letter signatory, University of Pennsylvania geneticist Sarah Tishkoff, seemed to be working from the same script as Przeworski when she told science reporter Ewen Callaway, “We don’t have any strong candidates for playing a role in behaviour.” I wonder what standard of evidence Tishkoff awaits. Besides the aforementioned 31-study meta-analysis by Ficks and Waldman, a 27-study meta-analysis by Byrd and Manuck confirmed that MAOA has a powerful effect on antisocial behavior when coupled with childhood maltreatment. Both meta-analyses determined that the research did not show evidence of publication bias. This forest plot from the study just screams the words “uneven” and “disputed,” does it not?

University of North Carolina biologist Joseph Graves, Jr. signed the letter and reviewed Wade’s book, saying “Similar just-so-stories appear throughout the text including his discussion of the MAO-A gene and aggression.” A “just-so story” is supposed to be unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Research on MAOA has verified its effect on behavior. If the evidence had failed to show an effect on behavior, it would have falsified the hypothesized role of MAOA. MAOA research has many facets, such as the purported stronger effect of MAOA-2R on violence than MAOA-4R or even MAOA-3R. Some facets are supported by evidence but not adequately replicated in multiple samples. The unwillingness of scientists to further replicate the effect of MAOA-2R since its discovery in 2008 or the interaction effect of MAOA-3R with low IQ in no way makes those findings legitimately unfalsifiable. Labeling scientific claims as “just-so stories” is a convenient way to dismiss scientific evidence without offering alternative hypotheses or evidence and has been used to describe the theory of evolution and global warming.

Harvard geneticist Daniel MacArthur diligently covered all of his bases. He signed the letter and put out clear statements both for (“[T]he evidence for an association between the [MAOA] VNTR variant and antisocial behavior is substantially more consistent than most of these associations. This may well be one of the rare cases of genuine associations.”) and against (“By historical analogy, most if not all of this [MAOA] literature is wrong and will soon be forgotten.”) the conclusions of MAOA research. Speaking of history, I wonder how perceptions of a connection between genetics research and reactionary ideas would impact genetics research funding.

Though University of North Carolina anthropologist Jonathan Marks could not sign the geneticists’ letter, he did show them that flippant dismissal of MAOA science need not be so lacking in flowery finesse.

Rather, he takes an enormous leap and speculates retrogressively that groups of people may simply differ in genes that affect personality and behavior. In his earlier book Before the Dawn (2007), Wade opined freely about the possible existence of ping-pong genes among the Chinese. Now he speculates about genetic propensities for violence among Africans, obedience in Chinese and capitalism in Jews. Mercifully, he stops short of inventing genes for basketball, laundry and stand-up comedy.

I am sure that he meant no implied insult of Chinese people’s ping-pong skills. Unlike ping-pong, violence is universal not only to humans but also to the entire animal kingdom and portions of the plant kingdom. Though none of these people mentioned it, scientists discovered Brunner syndrome, which is marked by aggressive behavior apparently resulting from a completely nonfunctional MAOA gene, over twenty years ago. This lack of a functional MAOA gene also is present in some unusually aggressive mice. Scientists who attempted to interact with these MAOA-knockout mice found themselves in a real-life reenactment of Tom and Jerry.

Science writer Meredith Knight similarly described the twenty years of replicating the influence of MAOA on aggressiveness as a new, fragile overreach.

The scientific community largely agrees that Wade oversteps when making any claims about race, genetics and behavior, largely because evidence linking genetics and human behavior is so new and somewhat fragile. Even linking genes to major mental health disorders, like schizophrenia, is contentious. Relating genes to a more qualitative characteristic, like aggressiveness or social obedience seems rather an overreach.

Lest one think only liberal academics and reporters volunteer such brief, zero-substance slights of MAOA science, Charles Murray claimed MAOA was a case in point of “tentative and often disputed” findings. Like the others, Murray’s brevity probably resulted from a lack of expertise that unfortunately did not accompany a more modest assertion. During Murray’s first public mention of Wade’s book (at the 45-minute mark), Harvard Professor of National Security and Military Affairs Stephen Peter Rosen brought up MAOA to Murray, confusing its gene-environment interaction with “epigenetics.” The environmental variable is measured in the environment, but that does not mean its mechanism of effect is nurture or epigenetics (which can also be influenced by genetics) rather than genetics.



Reporter Robert VerBruggen questioned whether Wade’s treatment of MAOA and other research relating to race was “suitable for a book aimed at the general public.” Apparently attacking MAOA science is suitable for the popular press, so why would defending it not be? I do not think most violent racists think about MAOA allele frequencies. Just as climate-change science belongs in many public policy discussions, well-reasoned and respectful discussion of MAOA can appropriately inform some social-justice debates and courtroom deliberations.

As Willamette University biologist Christopher Irwin Smith and author Alondra Oubré demonstrated, brief dismissals of MAOA research can make sense for a deluded scientist or writer because writing a lengthier composition will fill the Internet with more falsehoods and risk overspill. University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen wrote a somewhat lengthy critique, and it contains a number of mistakes, but perhaps these were honest mistakes.

Wade devotes considerable attention to MAO-A, the gene that encodes the enzyme monoamine oxidase A, which is related to aggression. He singles out studies showing that a rare version of the gene is associated with violence in U.S. male adolescents. Out of 1,200 young men surveyed in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, eleven particularly violent young men carried the 2R version of MAO-A, subsequently known as the “warrior gene.” Nine of those eleven were African American, comprising 5 percent of the black male adolescents in the study…. Now Wade is off and running. He has a gene variant that is more common (though still rare) among black men and is associated with elevated rates of violence.

First, these basic facts need clarification. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health deliberately oversampled African Americans with college-educated parents. Mixed racial ancestry is common among African Americans, so allele frequencies that are higher among African Americans than whites are probably even higher still among West Africans. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health contained nine African-American men with MAOA-2R based on interviewer-assessed race and ten based on self-reported race, constituting 5.2 percent or 5.5 percent of the African-American men, respectively. The term “warrior gene” dates back to a 2004 Science article by Ann Gibbons and explicitly refers to MAOA-3R, the most common allele of this VNTR promoter as providing a predisposition to violence, compared to MAOA-4R, which is the allele most common in white people. So, the relationship between MAOA and violence is already well-established in a large collection of research for a version that is not rare in any group.

This may be true. But it certainly overstates the strength of the case. Consider that, in the Adolescent Health data, black male adolescents were more than twice as likely as whites to report having committed an act of violence. If you found any gene that happened to be correlated with violence, chances are good it would also be correlated with race. Confirmation with more powerful genetic testing methods may strengthen this case in the future, but Wade’s inflated interpretation is not justified by the existing evidence.

This suggests that Cohen did not understand an extremely important fact about Beaver et al. That study compared African-American men with MAOA-2R to African-American men without MAOA-2R. Sociological inequities for African Americans could not confound a study that only included African Americans. The amount of African ancestry could confound, but that could result from genetic associations rather than class associations, since the percentage of African ancestry and class are probably not perfectly correlated.

Sometimes in genetics there is some gene or coding that produces some measureable effect, and that’s how most people seem to think about genetics most of the time – there is “a gene for” something. In the days before today’s genome-wide association (GWA) studies, before scientists had the means to investigate hundreds of thousands of genetic markers at a time, they often looked for effects of such “candidate” genes. This approach was valuable, especially when the role of specific genes was known (as in the case of the BRCA1 gene, associated with higher risk of breast cancer). However, with most diseases, and even more so with behavior, which is presumed to be more complicated than single-gene mechanisms, candidate gene studies were (are) often fishing expeditions, with a high risk of false-positive results, amplified by selective publication of positive findings. It is quite possible that’s at least part of what happened with MAO-A and aggression.

Genome-wide association studies on the genetics of violence and related mental illnesses have only used single-nucleotide polymorphism arrays, so far. Scientists can only study repeat polymorphisms like this promoter for MAOA with candidate-gene studies until whole-genome research technology becomes more advanced and widely available. However, the discovery of Brunner syndrome does not deserve to be called a “fishing expedition.” The rare missense mutation is virtually deterministic in its influence on behavior. Diseases like Norrie disease take out both MAOA and MAOB function and result in a severe set of morbidities. The standard GWAS attack on candidate-gene research that Cohen is repeating is flawed even for single-nucleotide polymorphisms but certainly lacks relevance for MAOA research. Meta-analyses for MAOA replicated the original findings, and the Byrd and Manuck meta-analysis found the effect was “no less likely to replicate in studies with sample sizes larger (or smaller)” than the original finding “or in studies published later.”

Most studies about MAOA have been gene-environment interaction studies, where some version of MAOA has a statistical association with a behavior only in the presence of a particular social factor, such as a history of child abuse.

No, they have not. Studies on the “main effect” of MAOA (the effect of MAOA on antisocial behavior without an interacting variable) began years earlier than the gene-environment interaction studies. The Ficks and Waldman meta-analysis of the main effect included 31 studies. The Byrd and Manuck meta-analysis of the gene-environment interaction only included 20 studies for the analysis of men.

First, that 2R version of MAO-A is very rare, and the two studies Wade cites about it … both used the same sample from Add Health – 11 boys with the variant. Two studies doesn’t mean two independent results. You could never get a drug approved based on that (I hope). Second, as far as I can tell there was no strong reason a priori to suspect that this 2R variant would be especially associated with violence. So that’s a caution. I have to say, as I did in the review, that it may be correct. But the evidence is not there (and you shouldn’t say “not there yet,” either). Those two studies are the entire evidentiary basis for Wade saying that genes that shape social behavior vary by race (“one behavioral gene … known to vary between races”.) I didn’t find any other studies that show MAO-A 2R varies by race (though maybe there are some).

No, research established the effect of MAOA in alleles that are not rare. When the Food and Drug Administration approves a drug, doctors receive wide leeway to prescribe it off-label and at dosages they deem appropriate. So, why should MAOA-2R not constitute a higher dosage of “warrior gene”? The strong a priori reason to suspect that MAOA-2R is especially associated with violence is that the study by Guo et al that Cohen reviewed also included an in vitro analysis of gene expression, which showed much lower expression for MAOA-2R. Brunner syndrome shows the effect of having an MAOA gene with zero gene expression. There are two additional studies on MAOA-2R and aggression in the Add Health sample. (I also would like to see more research on this in other samples.) However, the list of studies that establish differing allele frequencies for MAOA-2R, MAOA-3R, and MAOA-4R by race is long, and I have been attempting to tabulate them in a convenient table.

In fairness, even Wade’s treatment of MAOA research was good but not perfect. He repeatedly referred to MAOA-2R as “two promoters.” It is actually two repeats of a DNA sequence within a single promoter. The distinction is important because MAOA actually does have multiple other promoters, including one other found to affect antisocial behavior in women more than this one, and this relates to Wade’s attempt to downplay the importance of MAOA.

Second, a large number of genes are evidently involved in controlling aggression, so even if African Americans are more likely to carry the violence-linked allele of MAO-A promoters than are Caucasians, Caucasians may carry the aggressive allele of other genes yet to be identified. Indeed a variant of a gene called HTR2B, an allele that predisposes carriers to impulsive and violent crimes when under the influence of alcohol, has been found in Finns. It is therefore impossible, by looking at single genes, to say on genetic grounds that one race is genetically more prone to violence than any other.

Determining the relative importance of MAOA compared to all other violence genes poses a significant challenge, but scientists have not even determined the importance of MAOA to overall aggression heritability, yet. Perhaps the controversy surrounding MAOA research or Wade’s book could convince the National Institutes of Health to fund a very large, international study to attempt to replicate and fully quantify the effects of every MAOA allele for every single-nucleotide polymorphism and promoter, every gene-environment interaction, every gene-drug interaction, every gene-hormone interaction, every gene-gene interaction, and every epigenetic effect together in the same study. Clues do exist that this single gene deserves all of the attention that I have been giving it. The fact that MAOA research has discovered so many of these interaction effects could be evidence of the gene’s high importance. The other 2008 Guo et al study of MAOA-2R that Cohen did not review determined that the allele affected violent behavior more than two other candidate genes known for their effect on the neurotransmitter dopamine and that it had a large gene-environment interaction effect, as well. Brunner syndrome, itself, provides another clue. If MAOA is unimportant compared to unidentified functional alleles of other genes, why have scientists not discovered those through rare knockout polymorphisms?

Wade is pointing out such a knockout polymorphism syndrome for HTR2B. Like Brunner syndrome, only a small number of known cases exist, and that study claimed it was “apparently exclusive to Finns,” 1.2 percent of whom have it. Seven cases of the HTR2B knockout allele did not induce violent behavior, whereas Brunner syndrome research uncovered only four cases of MAOA knockout allele without accompanying antisocial behavior in men. HTR2B is on chromosome 2, and MAOA is on the X chromosome. So, men with an MAOA knockout allele have no MAOA enzyme. Men with the HTR2B knockout allele still have some HTR2B function except the one homozygote, and 1.2 percent is not the true allele frequency; 0.68 percent is. The hemizygosity of X-chromosome genes could increase their importance for behavior and help explain why men tend to commit more violent crime than women. Alcohol use precipitated 94 percent of violent crimes among these men with the HTR2B knockout allele. Follow-up research looked for personality effects of other alleles of the gene and came to contradicting conclusions.

Whatever evidentiary gaps exist should be taken to signify the need for more research, not an excuse for ignorant dismissals of the decades of existing research. I have good reason to interpret many of the listed errors and misjudgments as dishonest, politically motivated opposition to science. Oubré tried to pass off her work as a serious “reality check” for MAOA research. Her essay was full of careless errors, including completely wrong numbers taken from Wikipedia vandalism and attributed to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. When I corrected the errors, her reply was complete denial (“I did not use Wikipedia for this article. Cheers.”), followed by admission with hysterical defensiveness against my unrealistic demand for correctness (“You imply that I should have a wider grasp of the literature on the MAOA gene, as though I am obligated to make this my raison d’etre…. Am I entitled to even have a life?”). When I suggested that the essay was a criticism of Wade’s book because she cited his book in a critical way, she responded that she had not even read it. Her editor’s response to me was initial denial, continued refusal to make a correction, and the statement, “I see not taking others seriously is your modus operandi.” Well, it is not simply a matter of an inability to take Alondra Oubré seriously. I am actually wondering whether anyone should take seriously anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, or population geneticists.










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Inscrutable Voters

Debates about religion fascinate me, and I confess that I have always felt more inclined to the skeptical side. However, I have to respect the sheer cynical self-centeredness of Pascal’s wager. Fortunately, a new and equally pragmatic contention has arisen before my death: Republicans must convert to atheism to win the Asian vote! At least, that is my summation of the reaction to an exit poll from the recent presidential election that revealed strong support for President Obama among Asian Americans. Steve Sailer questioned the validity of this exit poll, but if there is one salient lesson from this election, it would have to be that polls are always right. The concern seems to center on the belief that Republicans swung too far towards the religious right by choosing a Mormon Massachusetts governor. LDS is a strict, conservative denomination, but I implore for imperturbation for two reasons: one, Mormons are a collection of happy-go-lucky genealogy and board-game enthusiasts, and, two, Mormonism might follow the trajectory that I predict for Scientology. When Scientology becomes the largest religion, a sealed envelope will provide L Ron Hubbard’s final testament: “Gotcha! Hope you enjoyed it.” In any case, the facts on the ground hardly matter when the libertarian elite must spin a loss to thwart populists with pitchforks. Who knows? Maybe in fifty years, the Asian vote will grow significant enough to turn this strategy into a comeback.

My first encounter with this strategy was on the site of temperamental science blogger Razib Khan. He did not so much lay out a plan as call everyone retarded for not seeing how obvious it is that Asians moved left as a direct consequence of losing their religion. “It’s not even in the class of a non-obvious prediction. Rather, the description screams at you.” To bolster his argument, he began swearing.

Soon thereafter, author Charles Murray joined in. “Republicans are seen by Asians—as they are by Latinos, blacks, and some large proportion of whites—as the party of Bible-thumping, anti-gay, anti-abortion creationists.” By creationism, he means the absurd, literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, not the process by which liberals and libertarians create new rights out of nothingness. Murray might have a point. Why could not Governor Romney have paused his gay-bashing for a proper discussion of the issue of, say, taxation policy? Come to think of it, some of my best friends are Asians, and they see the Republican Party as the party of fat-cat, universal-healthcare-bashing global-warming deniers.

So, Murray and I seem to be on the same wavelength, but then I came across a curious statement. “Politically, a college education is a wash—in the General Social Survey, almost identical proportions of college graduates identify themselves as liberals and conservatives.” Razib contends that religious beliefs recently precipitated an attitudinal shift, and Murray describes this Asian political persuasion, while postulating that education played no role. Since Murray co-wrote The Bell Curve, perhaps he has noticed the radical improvement of SAT and ACT scores among Asians that could easily rival other cultural shifts, and since he works for a conservative think tank, perhaps he understands that university culture tends to espouse a certain ideology of its own. Though Asians are so much the Other that social scientists still label them “other race,” as the General Social Survey (GSS) does, Asians nevertheless adapt well. Confucius said, “Speak with sincerity and honesty, be humble and respectful, and you will get along even if you live among the barbarians.” Chinese people are the Asian prototype of nice folks who blend with the scenery. They adopt Islamic last names in Muslim nations and Christian first names in the lands of the West. Some Asians fled Communism, as Murray noted, but the Chinese diaspora was considered a bastion of Marxist agitation just a generation ago in pre-independence Singapore. How hard is it to imagine that some Asians adapt to the university ideology? In addition, I have noted previously that high intellect is more associated with liberal values and that the SAT is an IQ test, though not by design.

Murray is mostly correct about political ideology and education. This scale of conservativism is from one to seven with four being “moderate” and one being “extremely liberal.” Only those with graduate degrees are much more liberal than people with other education levels. However, for education to be “a wash” for Republicans, should not party identification receive the attention?

Education is not “a wash,” but it appears to be the opposite of my expectations. The scale extends from zero to six with three being “independent” and zero being “strong Democrat.” Republicans sensibly educate themselves to the level of a bachelor’s degree, before seeking out the upper-middle class and a house in the suburbs. Benighted high school dropouts are more conservative than they are Republican probably because the uglier aspects of conservativism that Murray so detests define their values. Indeed, high school dropouts are the least likely to agree that humans evolved from prior species.

Now to the premise, have Asians changed their political views? Since the GSS had not been using Asian as a race in its primary race survey question, I have graphed each Asian ethnic category. For conservativism, the main trend appears to be a reduction of statistical noise as the sample size increased. Filipino-Americans had the largest sample, followed by Chinese-Americans. Japanese-Americans, with the least, had about half as many respondents as the Filipinos and Chinese. Therefore, perhaps the uptick of Chinese-American Republicanism since 2008 is a real shift to the right. The conservativism trend for this group does echo party affiliation.

The evidence for an Asian political shift in the GSS is either not there or perhaps starting towards the political right, at least for the Chinese. The survey’s most recent results were 2010, but if Khan is right about religious beliefs playing the dominant role of influencing votes or if my hypothesis was right that the academic or intellectual progress was having an effect, I would have expected many years demonstrating a political shift, barring inadequacies of the survey. Surely, the study acknowledges that Asians have advanced in their educational accomplishments.

Yes, it does. The GSS also contains Wordsum, a ten-word vocabulary test that has some correlation with intelligence. Given the very clear evidence of improvement for Asian Americans on both the SAT and the ACT, as well as the improved education levels, one would expect a positive trend for Wordsum, too.

Unfortunately, these scores show no such evidence. Any number of explanations could address the discrepancy, while allowing for one’s personal biases to enter the equation. Those with contempt for Asians could find fault with the college entrance exams or explain away SAT scores as soulless cramming endeavors. Asian defenders can point out that the GSS has a small Asian sample size of about a thousand cumulatively over 38 years rather than the SAT’s tens of thousands each year, that a short vocabulary test does not represent general intelligence as well, or that a high proportion of Asians are not native-English speakers. The scores appear unbelievably low for Asians. For instance, in 2010 the average Indian American had a lower Wordsum score than the average African American. Indian Americans have the highest household annual income of any Asian-American ethnic group at over $90,000, which is more than twice that of the average African-American family.

An ongoing debate in America concerns whether Hispanic people are a race or are mostly members of the white race, having Hispanic ethnicity. Since they are the largest minority, they might account for the bulk of those in the graph delineated as “other race,” whose scores seem flat and at about the level of African Americans. Ron Unz recently asserted that the GSS shows dramatic score improvement for Mexican Americans. Apparently, the blog, Inductivist, first noticed this.

Here we see Ron Unz’s “super-Flynn effect,” through which “ the Mexican-American Wordsum-IQ increased from 84.4 in the 1980s to 95.1 in the 2000s, while the rise for American whites was from 99.2 to 101.3.” Wait! I see that just prior to the super-Flynn effect an even larger super-dimming effect from 1976 to 1982 deflated Mexican-American scores in many fewer years. Likewise, Puerto Ricans’ Wordsum average fell from over five to under three in only two years! Come to think of it, Japanese Wordsum average rose six points from 1990 to 1991, (which I attribute to the release of the Violator album by Depeche Mode). The GSS sample is 4.1% Mexican-American. Mexican Americans are 10.5% of the US population. So, one can imagine that earlier decades of survey samples had small numbers for this group, which would explain the noise in the graph. This teaches the valuable lesson that graphs reveal truths better than carefully selected numbers.

If the Asian sample is not large or representative enough to properly detect shifts of voting behavior, improved intellect, or even a ballpark range of Asian intellectual abilities, I can muster little confidence in any information that I can glean for this group. However, I decided to create more detailed graphs of each Asian ethnic group for political views, Wordsum scores, and educational attainment to look for patterns. Most had none.

Despite the apparent recent trend toward conservative politics, Chinese people do not appear to have clear links between politics, education, and scores. On the political-ideology graph, notice the unwillingness of Chinese people to be extremely anything.

For Indian Americans, I do see a consistent pattern that the most educated and intelligent have recently started becoming more conservative and Republican. Consistency between graphs does not discount issues with sample size, but the recent years for Indian Americans with graduate degrees look smoother, which could reflect an increasing sample thanks to the H1B visa program. Contrast that with the noise in a graph for Japanese people.

Coulter’s Fallacy

Using Wordsum, the GSS can check the purported relationship between liberal political views and intelligence. For political ideology, the relationship presents itself. However, party affiliation appears different.

These graphs do not control for any confounding variables, and race is an obvious potential confounder. However, the associations also appear when the graphs are limited to white people, except for strong party identification in recent years.

Republicans tend to be smarter than Democrats, but liberals tend to be smarter than conservatives. Republican strategists should take note of the obvious strategy to appeal to the stupid vote. Maybe they already have. On the contrary, the party has been focusing on reaching out to minority voters, and the following graphs give some indication of the results:

The graphs are distorted by the designation of “other race” as being worth three points, whereas African Americans are worth two points. (At least it is not three-fifths.)

Minorities should be joining the GOP by the boatload, considering effusive praise like this from author Ann Coulter:

That’s why our blacks are so much better than their blacks. To become a black Republican, you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow. You have fought against probably your family members, probably your neighbors. You have thought everything out, and that’s why we have very impressive blacks in our party.

According to the GSS, their blacks are actually better than her blacks. Perhaps that is changing for those who are the strongest Republicans, but the sample size for that group is likely to be very, very small.

What Republicans really hunger for is the Hispanic vote, so I present this very important graph about Mexican Americans:

At first, a pattern might not jump out, but if one stares long enough, everything makes sense. Then, if one closes one’s eyes, a photo negative of the graph will appear.

Republicans commit a basic error when envisioning Hispanic Americans or African Americans as “natural conservatives” in that they conflate conservativism and Republicanism. Minorities tend to identify with conservativism much more than the Republican Party.

For some, the vagueness or emptiness of the term conservative might allow for posturing about values or lifestyle. Still others actually embody the vulgar close-minded thinking and parochialism that puts off Murray. It helps to consider how some socially conservative beliefs are natural reactions to some unhealthy societal changes, and values that sustain a family contrast with the blandness of haggling over the budgetary pie for already well-off interests. Confucianism serves as a fine example of an Asian social philosophy that contrasts with the libertarian, Randian individualism. Murray is right to defend science and reason, but the best strategy to win the votes of Asians and others is an intelligent populism.

Intelligence

This page will serve as a permanent index of all of my writings on intelligence and psychometrics.

The Post-Racial Era is Over – January 8, 2010

Smart People are Educated, Greedy, Sexist Bigots – July 20, 2011

Meet Towelie, the IQ Test of the Future – August 27, 2011

The SAT’s Cohen’s d & the Topography of IQ Denialism – September 2, 2011

The SAT in Red, White, and Brown – September 18, 2011

Girls Versus Boys: The Final Battle – October 9, 2011

Racial Amplitudes of Scholastic Aptitude – April 11, 2012

The SAT Bell Curve – April 25, 2012

Just Say No Limit: Trayvon, Dextromethorphan, Marijuana, and MAOA – July 5, 2012

The Hispanic Asian Flynn Effect – August 5, 2012

Genes Dealt Made Asians Svelte – September 10, 2012

The SAT Zombie Apocalypse – September 29, 2012

Arthur Jensen & JP Rushton – November 1, 2012

Inscrutable Voters – December 6, 2012

Scientists Rediscover the Violence Gene, MAOA-2R – December 30, 2012

The SAT-ACT Score Map – June 10, 2013

Black Suits, Gowns, & Skin: SAT Scores by Income, Education, & Race – October 24, 2013

Parents’ Income Poorly Predicts SAT Score – July 4, 2014

Merit’s Liquidity – October 18, 2014

Meet Towelie, the IQ Test of the Future

Popular culture warrants serious study. Take, for example, the 1991 movie Boyz N the Hood from the short-lived black-whining-drama genre. The film was almost universally praised despite its predictability and clichés. A major plot point hinged upon the SAT test, which used to stand for Scholastic Aptitude Test before it stood for Scholastic Assessment Test before it officially did not stand for anything. The omniscient, two-dimensional father figure in the movie gave us a pat summary of the SAT and IQ tests. “Most of those tests are culturally biased to begin with. The only part that is universal is the math.” However, data from the College Board disproves his assumption.

Below is the Black-White SAT score gap in standard deviations using College Board data that is available online from 1996 onwards and some additional data that Herrnstein and Murray obtained and published in The Bell Curve.


So, the “universal” math portion of the test produces a larger gap than the “culturally biased” verbal portion. The gap has clearly shrunk since the mid-70’s but is now flat and might even be slightly increasing. This could mean that racial egalitarianism has reached diminishing returns in Black college preparedness. When the pool of participants increases, it tends to create downward pressure on SAT scores because the proportion of people attending college is increasing and adding students who would not have been prepared to go to college in previous eras. To test whether the growth of Black SAT participation is responsible for the lack of decline in the Black-White SAT gap, I added a bar graph for the percentage increase of Black participants minus the percentage increase of White participants.


This shows that the percentage of Black people taking the SAT has been increasing faster than the White percentage, but the size of these increases does not seem to clearly coincide with changes in the gap. Compare this to the gaps between Asians and Whites.


Asians are also taking the SAT at a more accelerated participation rate, but their scores are also improving relative to Whites. They have reached parity with Whites on the verbal and written tests, while their math performance is increasingly surpassing that of White students. Consequently, the notion that cultural bias influences scores would be more logical in support of the conclusion that the strong performance of Asians is not yet at their potential, rather than the conclusion that Black students are suffering from such a bias.

Perhaps in response to such data and the attention brought to it by the bestseller status of The Bell Curve, egalitarian psychologists proposed a concept in 1995 called “stereotype threat,” the idea that internalized stereotypes in test takers undermine performance. My initial reaction to this notion was that the egalitarians were making a desperate reach for an untestable hypothesis for the sake of plausible deniability. However, it appears that this notion has led to an interesting array of research and a number of applications besides the Black-White score gap. They also traded relevance and subtlety to attain testability. After all, implying insults to black students before a test is not exactly standard proctoring procedure.

Now that the evidence for a high heritability for intelligence is stronger with corroborating lines of evidence, it is clear that the future of IQ testing will jettison the test experience altogether. In other words, the future of IQ testing will be examination of its physical underpinnings, including but not limited to genetic tests. A recent “debate” of two YouTube personalities featured an egalitarian who copied the questions from an inquirer speaking with controversial University of Western Ontario scientist JP Rushton. In the interview, the Black Al Jazeera journalist Rageh Omaar asked Rushton, “What then are the genes that determine intelligence? What are they? Can you name them?” The question was probably disingenuous, since it is easy enough to find out that genetic studies show no powerful IQ loci. However, the more up to date reply would be that naming most of them is possible if one has time because a recent study of 600,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms showed that they account for 51% of fluid intelligence. The study was not an exhaustive examination of human genome variation because there are many more differences yet to be studied in the many less common single nucleotide polymorphisms, as well as copy number variants and variable number of tandem repeats. A more detailed understanding could come from studies like the one being led by University of Oregon scientist Steve Hsu, who is developing a genome-wide association study of people with an intelligence level of about three standard deviations above the mean (an IQ of 145) or higher. Tellingly, his study is supported by a third-world country that has a serious need for reform of its own scientific establishment. I would suggest that fear of understanding the genetics of IQ plays a role in the potential for China to overtake America in this area.



Unlike twins studies, genome-wide association studies would advance race realism because probably most IQ variants affect IQ in all humans who have them, and the distribution of these variants in not likely to be geographically uniform.

Therefore, the future of the popular critique of IQ will be less Boyz N the Hood and more Gattaca. In Gattaca, a space flight company surreptitiously obtains genetic information from its employees, making the film a depiction of a horrific dystopia in which unhealthy people are prevented from being astronauts. IQ geneticists need an equally powerful pop culture icon to humanize their research.

After the popping of the dot-com bubble, much speculation and excitement turned to nanotechnology. Drugs would be programmed to target pathology with no fear of side effects. Plates would be programmed to tell us about food content. Computers would be woven into garments. Self-replicating nanobots would perfect manufacturing and become a new type of pollution. Enter Towelie. Towelie first appeared on the program South Park ten years ago. He is an RG-100 Smart Towel designed by Tynacorp with a computer chip and a programmed “TNA” to sense a person’s body moisture, beat the average person at chess, and become a weapon of mass destruction, should he fall into the wrong hands. None of this mattered to the boys of South Park because they were busy trying to find their stolen Okama GameSphere, which Stan’s mom bought for “only $399.99.” (All in all, that is fairly useful advice for the computer industry, considering that it is coming from a cartoon.) I would nominate Towelie to be the mascot for tomorrow’s IQ tests. Towelie clones would isolate DNA from hair or skin cells, decode the genome, run an IQ gene algorithm, and wirelessly transmit an IQ range estimate. All liberal handwringing about IQ validity would be moot. If only we could get Towelie to lay off the weed.