No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

Okay, let’s do this. The author is Satoshi Kanazawa. The Journal is the Social Psychology Quarterly. And the paper is “Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent“.

Ignore for the moment that first stirring of doubt (more intelligent than what? Isn’t that kind of a glaring omission in a title?) because after all, it comes clear soon enough: smarter than conservatives. Smarter than religious types.

And doesn’t that just feel right? I mean, forget Sarah Palin. Forget Death Panels. Forget the hysterical screams of the boneheaded creationists demanding that we “teach the controversy”. Just last month the legislature of the staunchly right-wing South Dakota House of Representatives decreed that their schoolchildren must be taught that “astrological” forces affect global weather. Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

Liberals and Atheists are more intelligent than these guys? Seems like a no-brainer. The real puzzler would be how anyone could possibly be dumber.

So you have to love Kanazawa, even if he’s only put numbers to something we all knew anyway. You have to love him for his audacity in just coming right out and saying it, and saying it in a peer-reviewed journal at that. The tubes and the papers have already jumped on it, pro and con, given it the kind of profile that’s bound to have the Limbaughs and the Becks of the world spluttering in delightful, inarticulate outrage. Yes.

There’s just one problem. Kanawa’s basic premise sucks. And his data don’t support it—

Two problems. His premise sucks and his data don’t support it. Also, he contradicts himself within the same—

Three problems: his premise sucks, the data don’t support it, he contradicts himself, and his analysis—

You get the idea.

Start with Kanazawa’s “Savanna Principle”¹: “the human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment”. Fair enough. We have in-built behavioral subroutines to deal with recurring issues — mating, predator-avoidance stuff, and so on — that we don’t really have to think about. But then there are these other problems, novel challenges that our basic behavioral repertoire didn’t evolve to deal with, and that’s what we need general problem-solving intelligence for. So: enter the “Savannah-IQ Interaction Hypothesis”, which predicts that smarter people will be better than dumber people only at the kind of novel problems that our ancestors didn’t routinely encounter on the savanna: smart people will not have an edge when it comes to more familiar ancestral challenges like mating, interpersonal relationships, and “wayfinding”.

Sounds plausible, even obvious, until you read the examples Kanazawa cites to bolster his premise. Dumbsters have more kids than smartsters because modern contraception is “evolutionarily novel” and the dumbsters therefore just can’t get the hang of it. Smartsters “stay healthier and live longer than less intelligent individuals possibly because they are better able to recognize and deal with evolutionarily novel threats and dangers to health in modern society.” And my favorite of the lot: criminals have low IQs; the violence they habitually practice is a tried-and-true Pleistocene strategy for acquiring mates and resources; Law Enforcement is “evolutionarily novel” and thus harder for the dumbsters to get their heads around, so that

“…it makes sense from the perspective of the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis that men with low intelligence may be more likely to resort to evolutionarily familiar means of competition for resources (theft rather than full-time employment) and mating opportunities (rape rather than computer dating) and not to comprehend fully the consequences …”

By now, we know at least one of the lecture slots that Kanazawa fell asleep in during his undergrad career: the first session of “Stats 101″, the one where you learn that correlation is not causation.

Maybe, for example, dumbsters have more kids not because they don’t understand birth control, but because their religion frowns upon its use. Maybe some people are smart because they’re healthier and longer-lived, not the other way around — raised in a clean environment, unstunted by lead in the pipes or PCBs in the light fixtures, the workings of their minds uncompromised by malnutrition or disease. And maybe — just maybe — the “lower intelligence” of the criminals cited by Kanazawa is not what got them into a life of crime, but what got them caught so that a bunch of sociologists could cluck and worry over the stupidity of the criminal element in society. If they were marine biologists, they might drag a net through the water at a quarter-knot and then— confronted with a haul of creatures too slow-moving to amble out of the way — conclude that dolphins and sharks couldn’t exist because everyone knows nothing swims that fast.

Just maybe, some of society’s bad apples were smart enough to get into a job where violence was its own reward. Maybe some of them went into (oh, I dunno) law enforcement. Maybe some of them stayed on the wrong side of the law, but were smart enough to cover their tracks. Maybe the really smart criminals are the ones with the corner offices in much nicer digs than mere sociologists could ever afford.

Kanazawa does cite some interesting findings from previous research. I hadn’t been aware, for example, that dumb people tend to respond to the characters in TV shows as if responding to real friends, but that ” individuals with above-median intelligence do not become more satisfied with their friendships by watching more television.” Still, I’d feel better about those findings if they hadn’t come from two other papers by the same guy.

Continuing with his set-up (yes, dear reader, we’re still doing introductions — we still haven’t actually arrived at the study part of the study), Kanazawa makes a startling claim:

“The Savanna- IQ Interaction Hypothesis can potentially explain why more intelligent individuals are more open to new experiences and are therefore more prone to seek novelty.”

In other words, smart people are not just able to deal with evolutionarily novel challenges, they will actively seek such challenges out. This is especially remarkable given that the examples of “novel” challenges he’s cited to this point — droughts, brush fires, flash floods — are all things that would be actively avoided by anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together. But no. Smart people are open to new experiences. Smart people embrace novelty. Nobody’s ever chugged Drano? Now there’s a novel experience. Get Stephen Hawking over here. Anyone ever glue their penis to an acacia tree before? No? Where’s Craig Venter when you need him?

You can see where this is going. Liberalism is “novel” since it involves reaching a helping hand out to people in far-off lands— in contrast to the me-and-mine kin-selection of Pleistocene-era conservatism. (Personally, I don’t see why you couldn’t turn that around: Liberals treat people in far-off lands as kin because they’re locked into a primitive kin-selection subroutine they can’t change in the face of vaster populations.) Religion is a primitive trait resulting from paranoid pattern-matching, the tendency to see active agency in inanimate forces as part of a conservatively-erring predator-avoidance strategy; to not be religious is therefore “evolutionarily novel”. Vegetarianism and male pacifism are also singled out as smartster traits.

Oh, and the sex. “[T]hroughout human evolutionary history, men have mated with several women while women have mated with only one man”, Kanazawa claims, suggesting that he is unaware of the evolutionary significance of the Giant Human Male Penis². Male gorillas, for example — members of a truly polygynous species — have teensy little needle-dicks, because they don’t need anything larger; the dominant males are the only game in town as far as the females are concerned, because other males are excluded via physical force.

So why would we human males need big dicks? Two words: sperm competition. The only reason our sperm needs the added push of a big gun is to get it past all the other sperm that could be swimming upstream through the same plumbing. Hell, most of our sperm isn’t even designed for fertilization; most of those little guys just act as linebackers to block the competition.

The very existence of our proud and mighty male members is proof positive that human females are sluts. Kanazawa seems to kinda sorta acknowledge this is a footnote, but judging by the main text it doesn’t really seem to have sunk in. His prediction: that smart/liberal males will be more open to monogamy than conservative/dumb males, but that females in both camps will be pretty much the same.

So having set up the model, having set up his predictions, Kanazawa describes his actual research. His data: the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (follow-up questionnaires delivered to young adults who were previously surveyed as adolescents) and the General Social Surveys, administered by the University of Chicago. In both cases we’re talking about a series of 5-point scaled responses (agree strongly – disagree strongly) to questions about beliefs both religious and political, with the usual gamut of demographic data thrown in to give the X-axes something to do.

General Intelligence — the critical variable — was measured in two ways. For one part of the study Kanazawa used something called the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), which is evidently a measure of “verbal intelligence” that doesn’t correlate especially well with measures of “general intelligence”. Check the actual paper for the ugly details; here, suffice to say that correlations of 0.22 for first graders, 0.52 among third graders, and 0.52 among fifth-graders are described as evidence that “the PPVT becomes a better measure of general intelligence as children get older” — even though none of those correlations are very strong, and two of the three points are identical.

For a different aspect of the study, intelligence was measured, I shit you not,”by asking [the subjects] to select a synonym for a word out of five candidates” ten times. And even this lame-ass index was only done for half the sample!

So, big surprise. Kanazawa’s results bore out his predictions. Kind of. For example,

“Correlation between adolescent intelligence and the value on sexual exclusivity is r = .0572 among women, and r = 0.0849 among men. The correlation is statistically significantly larger among men than among women…”

And yeah, it is. But it’s also really, really weak. A perfect correlation is r=1.0. An r of 0.6 or 0.7 would be pretty damn good in a field ecology study. r=0.057? Dude, that’s a speck of dust on my binoculars. And when you consider how sloppy the measurement of “General Intelligence” was in this study, it’s really impossible to take any of these results seriously, no matter how nicely they line up with my own cherished preconceptions:

And then, sweet smoking Jesus, the discussion. I’ll limit myself to one example. Look at the following two quotes:

“Despite the fact that past studies show that women are more liberal than men (…) and blacks are more liberal than whites (…), the results here show that …”

And

“…despite the fact that past studies show that women are much more religious than men (…), adolescent intelligence is twice as strong an influence on adult religiosity as sex…”

Did you catch that? If Kanazawa’s conclusions are legit, then these two findings— that women are both more liberal and more religious than men — imply that women are both smarter and stupider than men (and that blacks are smarter than whites, but by this stage, who’s counting?). Kanazawa does not explain this contradiction. He does not address it. He gives no indication of even being aware that it exists, even though he wrote these sentences less than a page apart.

I have wrung myself dry. There is more to criticize, but I have made my point. So let me conclude by reminding you all that Satoshi Kanazawa works at the London School of Economics and Political Science — and if his work is any indication of the field in general, I can certainly see why economics is referred to as “the dismal science”. The science is, indeed, absolutely dismal.

It’s a shame, though. I really wanted to buy into this.

*   *   *

You may not be hearing from me for a while. Trial next week, and all. Hopefully, I shall come out the other side unscathed. If I haven’t posted by this time next week, release the hounds.

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¹Or Hagen and Hammerstein’s “mismatch hypothesis”, or Burnham and Johnson’s “evolutionary legacy hypothesis” — they all seem to be pissing on pretty much the same rock here).

²Or perhaps it is only suggestive of the possibility that he himself is unaware — for reasons I will not speculate upon — that human males even have relatively Giant Penises.

Okay, first up: the whole bench-warrant thing has been resolved. I am no longer a fugitive. I have a good lawyer (thanks, once again, to so many of you: speaking of which, gratitudinal e-mails now 52.8% completed!). Now all we have to worry about is a justice system that criminalizes the flinch response. Should be a cinch.

Even that eagle-eyed blogger who pounced on my no-show has backed off. In fact, he’s done more than back off; he’s scrubbed his blog to a squeaky Wattsless sheen. Within about fifteen minutes of my previous post he’d deleted not only the entry in which he’d called me out for standing up the court, but every other Watts-related post he’d made (and there’ve been a few, all of the smug-elitist-had-it-coming variety). All that remains is an echo on Icerocket…

and thirteen innocuous entries on subjects ranging from Haiti to solar power, stretching back to August 2008. The author describes himself as a lawyer from Indiana, which makes me wonder if he had some legal reason for scrubbing his journal so thoroughly and with such haste. The only time I’ve seen a faster response was when he first made the post that kicked all this off. I don’t know whether he was compulsively refreshing the online docket records every five minutes or someone was feeding him intel; either way, the man has reflexes.

But enough of that. I still hope to publish my screed on Kamazawa’s inoffensively-named “Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent” ¹ before too long, but since I’m currently backed up preparing for next week’s trial I’m going to distract you, yet again, with pretty (and undemanding) pictures. First up, another very cool impression of Sunday Ahzmundin and “The Island”, as imagined by Chris Butler for an upcoming audio presentation on Starship Sofa:

And here, the obvious Anglaisishness of the title notwithstanding, is the cover for the upcoming French edition of Starfish, which translates as “Starfish” because “Étoile de Mer” isn’t as catchy:

(The layout people might have to add a subtitle — “Maintenant, en Francais!” — to avoid confusion).

This cover resonates with me. Back in the days before my first novel ever came out — before I’d even sold the damn thing — I spent a fair bit of time fantasising about my ideal cover.  I imagined  a skeletally-enhanced, photophore-studded deep-sea fish on a featureless black background. Of course, I was delighted with the Jensen cover when I saw it (Tor did a really bang-up job with all the rifters covers), and put away my naïve fantasy in favor of the real thing.

Yet here it is again — arising this time from the imagination of Bénédicte Lombardo, my editor at Fleuve Noir (which I would link to here if only they didn’t keep telling me I was Forbidden every time I tried).  Apparently, Benedicté’s original vision was even closer to mine than what you see here — she, too, had imagined a highlit fish on a black background — but apparently a photographic negative looks better on the shelf.

So. Dreams come true.

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¹No, really! That’s actually the title!

Once again, I was going to do a science post today. I was going to review a recent paper purporting to show that athiests and liberals are smarter than conservative religious types, and (bet you won’t see this coming) I was going to savage it as junk science. And once again, the world has thrown a monkey wrench into my plans.

Apparently I am now a fugitive.

I didn’t show up at court this morning, you see. Neither did my lawyer. I did not show up because nobody told me that there was a hearing scheduled; my lawyer is on vacation all week, so it’s pretty safe to assume that nobody told him either. No matter. Bail has been revoked. A bench warrant has been issued for my arrest. And if I try to cross the border before this bullshit is sorted out, I automatically disappear back into an orange jumpsuit.

I’m not going to do that, of course. I don’t know whether this latest screw-up results from malice or incompetence, but it’s obviously bogus and will in all likelihood get sorted out before too long.  I wouldn’t have even mentioned it, except that — just a couple of hours after the event  —  the facts have already been twisted 180°, and deformed little buds of disinformation have appeared in the blogosphere.  Peter Watts Failed To Appear.  What Is Peter Watts Trying To Prove?  Oh, and Peter Watts Was Cruel To His Mother.

Just buds so far, as I say.  The raw data’s online on the St Clair County Court Docket, and as of 1422 EST I’m aware of only one blog that’s picked up the story and run with it.  But Jesus, that blog ran fast; I’d barely heard what had happened before the post was up.  So to be on the safe side I’m going to get out in front of it here,  try and squash it before it metastasises further:

Nobody told me, people.  Nobody told my lawyer. I did not boycott the court to make any kind of point or take any kind of stand.

This is just another fuck-up.  And I am not guilty.

I was planning on getting back to science this time around: an opinion piece on gengineered non-suffering livestock, perhaps, or a review of recent progress in telematter technology. But someone died last night, a distant member of my immediate family: someone I ended contact with years ago, save for one brief shining moment back in ‘08 when I appeared like the Ghost of Christmas Past in the nursing home hallway, spelled out the facts of life, and vanished forever.

The physical death of that organism, all this time later, is purely theoretical to me. It has no mass or inertia, no charge positive or negative. Everything’s already cancelled out. Sow; Reap; Finis. And yet by all accounts this should be a momentous occasion, should provoke some kind of spontaneous visceral or emotional response. It doesn’t. So I’ve experimented with alternate perspectives to see if I can stir something up — and I think I’ve found a viewpoint I can sort of get behind.

If you can’t respect the government, respect the people. If the Queen is corrupt, at least find something to admire in her soldiers.

The heart, for example. A muscle that beat nonstop every second of every day since 1920, almost a century’s relentless rearguard against entropy itself. Three billion beats in that time; four supertankers filled to the brim; two battleships lifted clear of the ocean. Or the eyes: miracles of incompetent design, photoreceptors straining for light through a tangle of cabling laid on top of them, not tucked away behind as any more-than-half-witted designer would have done. Sight is mechanical, did you know that? No digital electronics: pure clockwork, that far down. The visual pigment is a kind of spring-lever affair; the photon hits it and the pigment passes that impact upstream with all the elegance of a game of whack-a-mole.

Nine decades of parsing the world through those haphazard bits and pieces is nothing to sneeze at either.

The GI tract. The skeletal muscles. The pulmonary and lymphatic systems, the bone marrow, the semiautonomous mitochondria renting out space by their thousands in each individual cell.  Forget about that thinking neuronal mass festering up in the skull. It can’t even decide what persona to run, a few million synapses corrode and it turns from black to white. Whatever lived up there originally has been dead for longer than Andrew Ryan; the splicers have been running things for years. But down here in the gut, in the kidneys and capillaries; these are the rank and file, the actual citizens of this close-knit colony we call a person. And when the brain finally shuts down completely — when the chest stops moving and the pacemaker gives out and the telemetry clip comes off the finger — all those citizens keep plugging away, filtering blood or transporting nutrients in a world gone suddenly stagnant, still doing their best even starving for oxygen, even drowning in acid. Some of those valiant colonists keep going for hours, until the suffocating cold finally kills them off.

Good soldiers, our cells. Good citizens.

When you think of it that way, perhaps even this death is something to be mourned.

…who lives somewhere around Vancouver, and whose e-mail and twitter IDs have mysteriously vanished sometime in the past couple of months, whose sparse Google tracks lead to dead ends.

And who made a generous donation to the Squidgate/Kibble Fund before disappearing.  If you’re out there, in this universe or that parallel one, thank you.

(Thankyoumails 38% complete)

I’d like to, but am coming down with some kind of sore-throat/stuffed-sinus/flesh-eating-virus thingy, and have decided that I should probably quarantine myself today.  If any of you locals are going to be checking it out, though, I’d  be grateful for  an executive summary.

“Comparing moms to an octopus would be like pitting an army of savages against one well-oiled gatling gun sitting atop a hill. The mothers would charge the hill, hurling rocks and sticks; they’d roar righteous, compassionate battle cries of warriors who believe they are fighting for the betterment of humanity. They’d truly fight from the heart.

“Meanwhile the gatling gun would rotate in a precise semicircle and mow them down like dogs.”

••••••

Why has nobody told me about this until now?  What do I keep you people around for?

So just a day or so after we revisit “A Word for Heathens“  — a story exploring the social ramifications of neurotechnology that induces Rapture On Demand — here comes a paper by Cosimo Urgesi and his buddies showing a relationship between the posterior parietal cortex and something called “Self-Transcendence” — an index, if we are to believe the psych types, of spirituality.

What are the odds.

Urgesi et al’s paper (popsci reports here and here) doesn’t really tell us anything unexpected. The literature’s already rife with evidence that everything from “oneness with nature” to out-of-body experiences derive from the part of the brain that keeps track of where our various body parts are at any given time (our physical sense of self, in other words). The pious protagonist of “Heathens” remembers it thusly:

It’s like a magic trick, they said. Like static interfering with a radio. It confuses the part of your brain that keeps track of your edges, of where you stop and everything else begins—and when that part gets confused, it thinks you go on forever, that you and creation are one. It tricks you into believing you’re in the very presence of God. They showed us a picture of the brain sitting like a great wrinkled prune within the shadowy outline of a human head, arrows and labels drawing our attention to the relevant parts. They opened up wands and prayer caps to reveal the tiny magnets and solenoids inside, all the subtle instrumentality that had subverted an entire race.

Not all of us got it at first. When you’re a child, electromagnet is just another word for miracle. But they were patient, repeating the essentials in words simple enough for young minds, until we’d all grasped the essential point: we were but soft machines, and God was a malfunction.

I wrote those words almost a decade ago, and the research I ripped off was old news even then. What sets Urgesi et al apart is that they have moved beyond mere correlation and noninvasive MRI studies; this was manipulative, controlled experimentation on cancer patients, the surgical removal of neurons from that critical sliver of self, the comparison of spiritualistic tendencies both before and after the knife. And guess what: reduce the number of neurons in the posterior parietal, and transcendence — faith, sense-of-oneness,  even equanimity over your own medical plight — all that stuff increases.  Not so much, though, if you just cut around in there without removing any neurons.

It’s an elegant little study, and another carpet-tack in the casket-lining of the supernatural — yet still we tread so very lightly to avoid giving offence, to reassure the world that we sit atop some pinnacle. “We’re dealing with a complex phenomenon that’s close to the essence of being human,”neurojock Salvatore Aglioti tells Scientific American, as though we’re the only species on the planet whose brain has a subroutine for keeping track of body parts. “They need to be very careful how they word things as they proceed,” warns one of the comments on the same page, “there are people who will take great offense otherwise. It’s going to be important to make clear the FEELING may be biologically based, and make NO comment on the stimuli leading to the feeling.” Even Urgesi et al refer to spirituality, in their introduction, as “a view of the human condition in transcendent contexts and in relation to unseen realities/supernatural agents” (italics mine).

It’s cool, but it’s also a little bit sad. Still, there’s only one other neurological human-interest story this weekend: one of the pioneers working on those neural computers that will one day grow up and — ever-resentful of that hurtful nickname “head cheese” — turn against their creators to spread βehemoth across the globe, went all mavericky and gunned down three colleagues in what was initially reported to be a dispute over tenure but evidently wasn’t.

Man, I miss academia.

——————

Thanks to Bryan Allen and “rm3154″ (aka, “plate of shrimp”, for reasons which remain unclear) for the heads-ups.  Given how preoccupied I’ve been lately, it might have been months before I stumbled on this work otherwise.

Illo taken from Neuron 65, 313, February 11, 2010

This gorgeous and moody piece illustrates a chunk of my backlist.  Two guesses which one.

Another clip show, to clear the decks before I dive back into these gratitudinal e-mails (I’m sending thank-yous to everyone who donated to my legal fund. Even spending 60-90 minutes/day at this task, it’s gonna take forever to get through them all — but if you chipped in, you’ll be hearing from me. It may be in 2013, but you’ll be hearing from me).

BoY: I think we’ve officially run out of Best-of-Year collections for “The Island” to appear in. I’ve just printed out a contract for Hartwell & Cramer’s Best SF #15, which makes a total of five so far. On the one hand I’m glad this story went over so well, but on the other hand it’s supposed to be but one part of an epic story cycle.  Now, just thinking about continuing that project makes my balls crawl back up into my abdomen. There’s no way the next story can do anything but face-plant in the shadow of its predecessor.

See how I did that? Turned good news into failure? It’s kind of a superpower.

OOP: For those of you who’ve been wondering — and who haven’t checked out the thousand-and-one-SF-related sources that have been talking about this lately — no, my books have not all gone suddenly out-of-print as part of a dastardly Homeland Security plot to starve my income stream leading up to trial. Amazon has stopped selling all books from MacMillan (of which Tor is a subsidiary), as part of a war over pricing policy for Kindle editions. The subject has already received saturation airplay from sources far more knowledgeable than me, so I won’t go into any details here — except to say that from way down here, it looks like two 800-lb gorillas fighting over who gets to rip us off more.

AvaStarfish: As Michael_Gr and Greg Lemieux have recently pointed out, io9 has just posted John Pavlus’s essay on “Embodied Cognition“, which leads off using Bruce Jensen’s glorious cover art for Starfish; talks about “Avatar”, “District 9” and Ender’s Game for a couple of screens; then brings it all home with a brief-but-flattering nod to Gerry Fischer, the devolving pedophile fish-boy from my debut novel. I’m glad the little dude finally made the big leagues.

Shock: being both the game, and my reaction. Even those of you who haven’t played the brilliantly retro deep-sea underwater video game Bioshock will at least have heard about it: the unparalleled creepy ambience, the philosophical ambition, the metacommentary — and the most brilliant act of narrative judo I’ve ever seen in an FPS, in which the fundamental constraints of the computer-game format become an integral feature of the story itself.

Well, apparently the sequel is about to hit the shelves, and in a recent interview the  Creative Director of Bioshock 2 spills some of the influences behind this new iteration. Karl Marx. Jim Jones. John Stuart Mill.

Me.

No shit. Jordan Thomas says as much right there in his answer to the second question. And so let me just say, in between the squeeing, uh, 2K Marin? I’m available. And I just wrote this little story called “The Island” that’s actually based on an idea for a computer game…