What is so hard about IQ heritability for people to understand?

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 21 June 2005 18:22.

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.

Well, private medicine is very expensive ... and assisted fertility treatment is not only expensive, it is potentially on-going. What’s more, all else being equal you tend to get what you pay for. Down-market dives just don’t deliver the results. In our time the gleaming, up-market Lister Hospital, just over Chelsea Bridge, had a success rate of about one in three. It was pricey on a one-off basis but promised a strong probability of success. Along the river, on the other hand, the repulsive Hammersmith Hospital encouraged its prospective Dads to produce a sample in togetherness - no arrangements being in hand, so to speak, for privacy. Its success rate was one in fourteen.

IVF treatment obeys the Lynn-Vanhanen rule. The intelligent will have the best outcomes. IVF is a formidable personal challenge for women, and not exactly a bean-feast for men. You have to have resources, inner and outer. The more of both you have the greater your chances, on average, of success. It is, therefore, a deeply selective medium from a reproductive stance. Intelligence is a given and so the news that Belgian psychologist Lize Leunens, of the Free University in Brussels, finds an IQ premium in IVF children over the naturally conceived is wholly to be expected.

And yet ... Lize can’t say so. Instead, “The reason is thought to be psychological rather than biological.” So according to Lize the psychologies of IVF parents - ie the blasted environment - make the vital difference. It’s leftism ... again. Lize operates under the assumption that we are all equal. Therefore, those advantages in IQ accorded to the children of IVF-treated parents, which she has successfully measured and verified, are automatically only explicable through doing better in a much better family environment.

Couples seeking IVF treatment tend to be older than average and have a history of fertility failures. As a group, they may be especially dedicated parents willing to devote extra attention to their children, which could have a knock-on effect on their children’s development and intelligence, researchers believe.

This would be easy to test. Take some low-IQ couples. Give them treatment. In due course measure the IQ of the children born to them. The result will show that things ain’t so great thinking-wise - and leftists will rush to averr that “psychology” as a bromide for environment is the cause. But ... comparison with the results already achieved by Lize will reveal the shining truth.

Exuent Boasian deceptions, affirmative action, No Child Left Behind, socialism in general. Not difficult, really.

Tags: IQ and Heredity

Comments:

Posted by JRM on Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:02 | #

Interesting….It hadn’t occured to me that fertility treatments were eugenic. Good post.

Posted by ben tillman on Tue, 21 Jun 2005 23:34 | #

The reason is thought to be psychological rather than biological.

Profoundly stupid. Something cannot be psychological without being biological.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 21 Jun 2005 23:56 | #

Not if you think evolution stopped at the neck, ben.

Posted by john fitzgerald on Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:46 | #

The article says the children “develope higher IQs”, and some enviroments are going to be more conducive to realising inate I.Q. potential than others, breast feeding and nutrition being important factors.
Developing higher IQs and someones actual inate potential are very different.
Jensens paper “The Locus of the Modifiability of G is Mostly Biological”
goes into this.
http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000012/

Posted by jonjayray on Wed, 22 Jun 2005 05:16 | #

David
Good post. I am also an IVF father so have thought about it too.

The IQ level you report is very high—confirming my view that BOTH selection for smart parents and better nurture is at work. Nurture effects are however in general small so genetic selection would still be the main influence

Posted by Rational Islamophobe on Wed, 22 Jun 2005 05:51 | #

Excellent comment, Guessedworker.

With caesarian sections and IVF it seems that there is a decoupling of natural selection with the natural birthing process that will only continue to grow.

I wonder how long it will take before someone starts cloning the most wide hipped, easily birthing women and implanting in them embryos consisting of a mix of larger headed, extremely intelligent, resource acquiring males. In fact, you could do the same process with the women as well, optimize for easy birthing of big heads while the men are optimized for resource acquisition.

You would probably also have to breed for lowered sex drives in the women so they didn’t flee the farm and get knocked up by strangers.

Looks like the technology is already on the horizon, who will implement it? Us or our enemies?

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 22 Jun 2005 11:16 | #

John F,

My layman’s view of IQ and breast-feeding is typically uncomplicated. During the greater part of his 300,000 arising Homo Sapiens did not, in infancy, suck at an Avent teat. Intelligence does not “develop” through breast-feeding. Its normal development is arrested through bottle-feeding.

I relished this passage from Jensen’s paper (thank you for the link):-

This whole line of theorising and hypothesis testing characterises what the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos termed a ‘progressive’ research program, in contrast to a “degenerating” program, which can predict nothing but can only explain (or explain away) empirical findings after the fact by proliferating often mutually inconsistent ad hoc hypotheses (Urbach, 1974). I notice there are few complaints about “speculation without evidence” when racial differences in g or any other behavioural traits are attributed to purely social-cultural factors. Even the author of a recent book that discusses how biological or genetic factors may explain the observed Black-White differences in certain types of athletic performance has been accused of racism, called a Nazi, and the like, despite the fact that his findings are not at all judgmental and his research was assisted and praised by several African-American coaches in various sports (Entine, 2000). A hypothesis, whether proposed by saint or sinner, is objectively either right or wrong. Social egalitarianism or other political philosophies and ideologies are not part of the science of mental ability, and my book intentionally does not touch on them in the least, although that is not to imply that these topics are unworthy of serious discussion in their own right.

Posted by ummjack on Wed, 22 Jun 2005 18:33 | #

OK, so you’ve got children with high IQ - but they’re being raised without siblings, or with one carefully spaced sibling, in controlled environments, educated with extreme liberal bias (I am the product of the kind of education the children of the elite receive so I know whereof I speak), are faced with the aging of their parents during their adolescence, and their most important influence is a woman whose identity was formed not as a mother, but as a professional.

What kind of eugenics is this exactly? I live in an expensive American coastal city, so I’m not making this scenario up out of thin air. I know these children and they’re bright but they’re so fragile they break if you look at them funny. Their parents don’t know how to parent and defer to experts at every opportunity. The experts really like to put the kids on stimulants and anti-depressants. And it probably goes without saying - they have no manners.

These children are going to be unemployable. They’re going to propped up by their parents’ money, but no amount of IQ is going to make up for the fact that no one can stand them. They’re going to have drug problems, they’re going to be totally unable to form and maintain stable partnerships, and they’re never going to be able to delay gratification for long enough to achieve thei goals.

If you want to see real eugenics, look for a counterculture that supports breeding when the woman is actually fertile, and high maternal investment in offspring.