Category: IQ and Heredity

An interesting email from Volkmar Weiss in Leipzig

Today, encouraged by the discovery of the major genetic background of skin color of the white race, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=16357253&itool=iconabstr&query_hl=2  by using HapMap data, see http://www.hapmap.org , I had the idea to apply the same approach to IQ.  If the data of a century of IQ testing are not complete nonsense - see e.g. http://www.vdare.com/misc/051207_rushton_fallacy.htm and www.volkmar-weiss.de/table.html for further data and links - there should be a striking difference in allele frequencies between Eurasians on the one hand and Blacks of the other.

At our current state of knowledge, the genes DCDC2 and NQO2 have the highest probability to be correlated with general intelligence (IQ), see http://www.volkmar-weiss.de/intellig.html . Both genes have one common polymorphism, coding nonsynonymously. The allele frequency of the A allele rs2274305 of the dyslexia-gene DCDC2 is about 0.28 among Eurasians and 0.99 among Yorubas from Nigeria, about 0.80 among African Americans (known to be admixed with some white genes), see http://www.hapmap.org/cgi-perl/snp_details?name=rs2274305 . 

However, according to my data and theory, see http://www.volkmar-weiss.de/majgenes.html , a higher frequency of the rare allele among Eurasians should be correlated with a higher mean IQ of the population. Clearly, this is not the case with this SNP.  The frequency data of DCDC2rs2274305 contradict the major gene locus hypothesis. However, this SNP of DCDC2 could be of secondary importance to IQ. (Population data for the frequency of the deletion of DCDC2, said to be involved in reading ability, have not been published up to this day.)

NQO2 also has only one common polymorphism, coding nonsynonymously, namely rs2756081 (identical with rs1143684). 

The allele frequency of the C allele rs2756081 of NQO2 is about 0.25 among Eurasians (0.41 in Tokyo in a sample, which is not in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium) and 0.00 among Yorubas from Nigeria, about 0.02 among African Americans, see http://www.hapmap.org/cgi-perl/snp_details?name=rs2756081 and http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/snpview?snp=rs2756081 . These data are fitting perfectly. Could this already be the solution or could it be pure coincidence? At the moment, any direct evidence of a relationship between the genotypes of NQO2 and IQ is still lacking, for DCDC2 we have incomplete evidence.

If we align the genetic code of Homo sapiens and the chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, in both species NQO2 is coded by 231 amino acids. However, at the position 47 of rs2756081, see http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/alignview?class=Homology&gene=ENSG00000124588&g1=ENSPTRG00000017670&seq=Pep&format=mega  , human Blacks are coding FF (phenylalanine) as chimps and a number of other mammals, and Eurasians with an above average IQ are coding LL or LL (leucine), below average FF.

If the necessary direct empirical evidence will be be found, it will be a shock for many. But scientists discover facts and do not create them. The bearer of the message is not its inventor. The society will have to face the truth.

I have already published this text on my homepage and posted to http://hum-molgen.org/bb/Forum9/HTML/000080.html  . When we all will be a step further and wiser, it will be the accomplishment of thousands of research workers, and my personal merit will be a very small one and, I hope, will not perish uncited.

As I started 37 years ago to hit this target and to discover the genetic basement of social stratification (and not the differences between races), I was a very young man. 

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, December 22, 2005 at 06:30 PM in IQ and Heredity
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Steve Pinker gives talk on the genetic intelligence of Jews.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/12/jews_on_jews_jews_are_great.php
Jews on Jews: Jews are Great
Steven Pinker Discusses “Jews, Genes, & Intelligence” at the Center for
Jewish History.

by MAGGIE WITTLIN * Posted December 9, 2005 12:16 PM

Of the twelve billion people who have graced this earth, fewer than one hundred have earned the title of “Gentile Adored by My Jewish Grandmother.”

Mark Twain successfully infiltrated the order when he penned Concerning the Jews, an article discussing the intellectual prowess and survival skills of the Jewish people. The membership otherwise consists largely of Europeans who helped Jews during the Holocaust and political leaders who have gone out of their way to make peace with Israel.

Three University of Utah anthropologists have done their darndest to reach that rarified group close to my grandmother’s heart: Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending collaborated on “The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” a paper recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Biosocial Sciences. In the article, they unveil a theory for why Jews have an average IQ that’s one standard deviation above the European norm.

Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Monday, December 19, 2005 at 07:55 PM in IQ and Heredity
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Ecological correlations between IQ, skin color, temperature and GDP per capita

Here is some cool research that is about to be published in the journal Intelligence, though this research is unlikely to get a lot of press in the MSM.  The researchers (Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa) computed the correlations between the predominant skin color in 129 nations, GDP per capita, high and low mean temperatures in the summer and winter, and skin color.  The correlation between predominant skin color and population IQ was ? 0.92!  The meat of the data is presented in the Table below.

Continued...

Posted by J Richards on Friday, December 9, 2005 at 12:47 PM in Anthropology,  IQ and Heredity,  Psychology,  Race realism
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Another biological influence at work

“Scientists have discovered why some shorter children do worse at school than taller youngsters.  A team from the University of Bristol found that children with lower levels of a height controlling hormone also had lower IQs. The study is the first to make a link between the insulin-like growth hormone and intelligence.  Professor David Gunnell and his colleagues measured levels of Insulin Growth Factor IGF-I in the blood of 547 children, who also took an intelligence test at the age of eight. When the researchers compared IGF-I levels in the youngsters in the study, they found a significant link between the growth hormone and intelligence. For every 100 nanograms per millilitre increase in IGF-I levels, the IQ increased by three points.

At the moment scientists do not know what happens in the body to link poor growth and impaired development in the brain. But one explanation could be that growth hormones also affect brain development. They said this effect seemed to be restricted to the verbal component of IQ, as the link was not seen in other tests ...  The study, part of the long-running Children of the 90s project, is published in Pediatrics”

More here

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, December 1, 2005 at 06:08 AM in IQ and Heredity
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Top Ecological Correlations With IQ: -Blacks, +Nordics, -Binge Drinking

The top State-wide ecological correlations* with IQ are rather fascinating**.  Make of them what you will but here are the thoughts that occur to me.

Continued...

Posted by James Bowery on Wednesday, November 23, 2005 at 06:16 PM in IQ and Heredity
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IQ is the Froggies’ problem

The latest post from Chris Brand:

After two weeks of French Arab-Africans rioting, and without a mention of IQ or intelligence in the media, Steve Sailer easily supplied the answer: here. The truth is that most societies (apart from Britain at the time it was at loggerheads with America) fancy ‘slave’ labour; and low-IQ slaves can be controlled by heavy religion – as was the lot of Blacks in the U.S.A; but once the religious brakes come off, the ‘Whites’ flee (as from Rome c. 300) and the riff-raff take over. All this is being mimicked today as Dutch and Danes apply furiously to emigrate to Australia and New Zealand.

Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, November 15, 2005 at 06:31 AM in IQ and Heredity
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France is forty years behind the United States in affirmative action.

The riots in France over the last couple of weeks are a very interesting twist on a new form of terrorism. It has been used in the United States by Blacks during the 60s to demand a bigger piece of the economic pie, and it worked. We capitulated to their terrorist demands; they were rewarded, but not satisfied. Their low average intelligence makes outcome egalitarianism very difficult to get people to buy into—people do not like giving resources to those who do not deserve it.

In the book Welfare, Ethnicity, and Altruism, edited by Frank Salter, it has been observed that socialism is easier to accept by a homogenous people, where kinship reduces animosity towards the unproductive. The Scandinavian countries, Germany, France—are all examples of cradle to grave money transfers to anyone in need or just lazy. That could begin to change, as Islamic minorities demand more benefits while being unable to compete in technological societies.

Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Saturday, November 12, 2005 at 11:06 AM in IQ and Heredity
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Group differences in IQ

This issue was in the news not long ago but it has now made the front page of “The Australian”, Australia’s national daily (issue of Sat., Oct 1) so it is good to see that the “incorrectness” of discussing IQ now seems to be waning.  And the article that the headline leads to is unusually comprehensive so I am going to quote a little more from it than I usually would.  The article does of course include comments from feminists about the issue but they are long on abuse and short on facts.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, October 2, 2005 at 07:50 PM in IQ and Heredity
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Can We Address the Root Causes of Immigration?

I have certainly heard a lot of liberals claim that if we just give a lot of foreign aid to the Third world, then no one would have a reason to immigrate to America.  Marcus Epstein has an interesting article debunking this concept.  He gives a number of reasons why this policy will not work, but ignores perhaps the most important one: IQ.

At the end he says “Cultural, historical, and other factors that cannot be changed anytime soon will probably mean that some countries are always going to be poorer than other countries”  Perhaps he meant to include IQ in “other”.  In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhannen look at the IQ’s of the countries where post-1965 immigrants, and the trend is clear: low IQ immigrants flood into High IQ countries.  Low IQ countries can never be close to as prosperous as high IQ countries, and immigrants from every failed society will always want to come to prosperous countries.  No amount of foreign aid, humanitarian intervention or government reform will change that.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, August 14, 2005 at 01:33 PM in IQ and Heredity
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Intergenerational mating

I have received the following request for information about what seems an interesting hypothesis

Someone once told me the sex drive of older women had an evolutionary effect on the intelligence of humans.  We know that a 15 year-old boy has the capacity to fertilize a 20-40 year-old woman and have a baby.  But as the boys grow old (probably beginning from the age of 18) their capacity to fertilize and sex drive continue to decrease.  Naturally, a 45 year-old woman has more sex drive than a 45 year-old man while a 60 year-old woman has more sex drive than a 60 year-old man.  We all know that MARRIAGE is a social fiction and it has no scientific basis in nature because nature supports polygamy (many wives) and polyandry (many husbands).

We know very well that a gigolo is a 15-25 year-old boy who gives sexual services mostly to 40-60 year-old women.  An old woman isn’t sexually satisfied by the performance of her husband and she looks for a younger guy.  Of course the marriage contract makes such betrayals difficult.  But when there was no marriage 10-40 thousand years ago it is likely that old women had sex with young boys.  This must have had a big effect on evolution.  We know that the whites and the East Asians owe their high IQ to cold climates (http://www.harbornet.com/folks/theedrich/JP_Rushton/Race.htm).  Less intelligent men failed to hunt successfully in cold weather conditions and died.  Also the women chose the more successful men for mating to have better children in the future.  So the less successful men were also eliminated by the women by being not chosen (if not dead).  This is the classical theory which we all know.

But is it possible that another third factor might have been influential?  Let’s suppose that there are 100 men and 100 women at the ages of 15-30.  Normally the 100 men might have sex with the 100 young women.  But as we know that the old women (40-60 year-old) have more sex drive than the old men (40-60 year-old) they will of course prefer the young men for sex if there is not a legal contract like marriage among the couples.  A 20 year-old man will surely prefer a young woman for sex if he is attractive enough (successful in hunting = intelligent).  Otherwise he will have to have sex with old women and will never have a child. He won’t disturb (rape) the young women as he is sexually satisfied.  And even among the animals we know that the old females do have sex with much younger males. The same goes for humans. In fact the sex drive of older women seems to play an interesting role in evolution.  The older women aren’t satisfied sexually by the old men and they are forced to have sex with the young (but less successful and intelligent) men.  They prevent the unintelligent men from having children and increase the IQ of the society in the future. When there was no marriage contract in the society (10 to 40 thousand years ago) even if only 5 percent of the young men were prevented from having children by being monopolized by older women in every generation I can imagine that it must have had a big long-term effect on evolution.

The theory (if it is not a joke) seems interesting to me but I couldn’t find anything about it on the internet.  I would be pleased if you know anything about this subject.

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, June 22, 2005 at 09:26 PM in IQ and Heredity
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What is so hard about IQ heritability for people to understand?

Having little IQ myself, of course, I tend these days to leave the subject to those MR bloggers better informed about it than I.  However, this story caught my interest and concerns something - IVF treatment - about which I do know a little.

Children whose mothers underwent a new form of IVF treatment introduced in the 1990s appear to be brighter than those conceived naturally, it was claimed today.

There had been fears that the procedure, known as Intra-Cellular Sperm Injection (ICSI), may increase the risk of slow development and behavioural problems.

But a new study suggests that, far from being disadvantaged, ICSI children develop higher IQs than children born as a result of natural conception.

The reason is thought to be psychological rather than biological.

... Those in the ICSI group had an average IQ level of 112, compared with 107 for the children not conceived through IVF.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 at 01:22 PM in IQ and Heredity
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Closing in on the intelligence genes—at least some Jewish ones.

The most sensitive and explosive battle within academia, education, and public policy is whether intelligence is innate or genetic—and if it is primarily innate between individuals is it innate as the average intelligence difference between races? This is the primary fear that a host of academic and public employee advocates has with regards to mental ability. If it is innate, or primarily genetic, then numerous programs from Head Start, higher teacher salaries, along with the civil rights movement, are dead. Blacks are not discriminated against but rather they are behind other races on numerous factors of well being because they have on average low intelligence. It is simply their lot in life to be where they are.

The general pecking order of average intelligence goes something like this: Ashkenazim Jews 115; East Asians 105; Whites 100; Amerindians and most Hispanics 90; African Americans 85; and sub-Saharan Africans 70. By the same order, accumulation of wealth, the level of income, achieved academic success, etc., also follows closely with the average IQs of these six racial groupings. So far, the left has claimed that White racism has made Hispanics and Blacks look less intelligent than Whites and the outstanding family discipline and educational encouragement has boosted the intelligence of East Asians and Jews. The problem is, no one has been able to show exactly how these environmental differences alter the expressed intelligence of individuals or races. Genetics is merely denied as the primary difference, and anyone who says differently is a racist.

Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Saturday, June 18, 2005 at 08:37 AM in IQ and Heredity
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It’s all in the genes

UCLA brain mappers track down IQ and find it is highly genetic:  “UCLA brain mapping researchers have created the first images to show how an individual’s genes influence their brain structure and intelligence.  The findings, published in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, offer exciting new insight about how parents pass on personality traits and cognitive abilities, and how brain diseases run in families.  The team found that the amount of gray matter in the frontal parts of the brain is determined by the genetic make-up of an individual’s parents, and strongly correlates with that individual’s cognitive ability, as measured by intelligence test scores. More importantly, these are the first images to uncover how normal genetic differences influence brain structure and intelligence. Brain regions controlling language and reading skills were virtually identical in identical twins, who share exactly the same genes, while siblings showed only 60 percent of the normal brain differences. This tight structural similarity in the brains of family members helps explain why brain diseases, including schizophrenia and some types of dementia, run in families. “We were stunned to see that the amount of gray matter in frontal brain regions was strongly inherited, and also predicted an individual’s IQ score,” said Paul Thompson, the study’s chief investigator and an assistant professor of neurology at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging.”

Religiousness too, is highly hereditary:  “A study published in the current issue of Journal of Personality studied adult male monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins to find that difference in religiousness are influenced by both genes and environment. But during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, genetic factors increase in importance while shared environmental factors decrease. Environmental factors (i.e. parenting and family life) influence a child’s religiousness, but their effects decline with the transition into adulthood. An analysis of self-reported religiousness showed that MZ twins maintained their religious similarity over time, while the DZ twins became more dissimilar. “These correlations suggest low genetic and high environmental influences when the twins were young but a larger genetic influence as the twins age” the authors state”

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, May 12, 2005 at 09:32 AM in IQ and Heredity
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