March 11, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:29:12
4025 The Neuroscience of Intelligence | Richard Haier and Stefan Molyneux
The Neuroscience of Intelligence Summary: "Compelling evidence shows that genetics plays a more important role than environment as intelligence develops from childhood, and that intelligence test scores correspond strongly to specific features of the brain assessed with neuroimaging. In understandable language, Richard J. Haier explains cutting-edge techniques based on genetics, DNA, and imaging of brain connectivity and function. He dispels common misconceptions, such as the belief that IQ tests are biased or meaningless, and debunks simple interventions alleged to increase intelligence. Readers will learn about the real possibility of dramatically enhancing intelligence based on neuroscience findings and the positive implications this could have for education and social policy. The text also explores potential controversies surrounding neuro-poverty, neuro-socioeconomic status, and the morality of enhancing intelligence for everyone. Online resources, including additional visuals, animations, questions and links, reinforce the material."Dr. Richard Haier pioneered the use of neuroimaging to study intelligence in 1988, is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, is the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal “Intelligence” and author of "The Neuroscience of Intelligence."Order Now: http://www.fdrurl.com/neuroscience-of-intelligenceWebsite: http://www.richardhaier.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/rjhaierYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well. I'm here with Dr.
Richard Heyer. He pioneered the use of neuroimaging to study intelligence way back in 1988.
He is the professor emeritus at the University of California in Irvine.
He is also the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Intelligence and author of a book that literally had me up till two o'clock in the morning, The Neuroscience of Intelligence.
The website is richardheyer.com.
And twitter.com forward slash R-J-H-A-I-E-R. Dr.
Heiner, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Well, it's nice to see you.
Always happy to talk about intelligence.
It is quite the topic.
And it is quite the topic because it does have a certain kind of forbidden fruit to it.
And it was fascinating to me.
I knew some of the history all the way back to the 69 paper from Lynn, of course, through the bell curve controversies and other things.
But it is amazing to me how this discipline has moved forward at all over the last half century, given the ideological and funding, not just problems, but opposition that it's faced.
Well, there aren't that many researchers who specialize in intelligence, because following Arthur Jensen's infamous paper in 1969, Intelligence research went from a very popular topic, especially among educators, to radioactive almost overnight.
And it was extremely difficult to get grants to study anything.
Any grant that had intelligence in the title was a non-starter.
It was not going to be funded.
I was funded mostly from grants to study Down Syndrome.
And I used to study Down syndrome with brain imaging because people with Down syndrome are at high risk for Alzheimer's disease.
But of course I needed a normal control group.
And so the normal control group got all the same intelligence measures and all the same neural imaging and I was able to publish papers about intelligence funded in part by that Down syndrome research.
Right. So let's dive into some of the three, sort of three myths that I have, I first came into studying intelligence with these three myths.
Number one was that it was almost exclusively environmental.
Number two was that smart people were, you know, like they have the glasses, the pocket protectors, they're, you know, 98 pound weaklings and so on.
And number three was that it changed, of course, according to environment.
Now, oh, I guess I could throw a fourth one in there, which it was possible to be highly specialized in one area and then inept in others.
You know, the story of the sort of focused genius who can't, you know, cook an egg kind of thing.
So what has science revealed about these kind of prejudices about intelligence?
Well, most of the prejudices...
Like all myths turn out not to be true.
You can see why some of them became popular.
It just seems as if environment should have something to do with intelligence.
And if you ask parents of one child, they believe environment is everything.
If you ask parents of two or more children, they know environment cannot be that powerful.
Anyone who's raised two children who have different temperaments and have had those different temperaments literally from day one knows that there's an unfolding of nature that has to have a major genetic component.
So what we know now, in my view, it's incontrovertible that genes play a major role in intelligence.
We know that intelligence can be defined and measured scientifically for such research, and the best definition turns out to be a general ability that's common to all specific mental abilities, and IQ tests are a good estimate of this general ability.
Right. And it is funny, too, because you know, I think obviously better than I do, that just when you think you know something about intelligence, the ground shifts under your feet and you end up sort of as a babe in the woods.
Because I'd heard, of course, that intelligence was...
They're 50% genetic, and I think, as you point out, after the age of 18, it's over 80% explainable by genes.
My understanding was it was around 80%, but sort of middle age or later.
And so the refinement of that data is pretty significant.
It starts off relatively small, like the genetic influence, as you point out in the book, at the age of 5 is like 27% explained by genes.
But as we just get to basic adulthood, genes seem to accelerate more and more in the dominance over the final measures of intelligence.
And people think this might be because as you get older, you choose your own environments more than when you're a child.
And you choose environments that tend to go with your intellectual ability.
And so environment kind of feeds back on this.
None of what we know is written in stone.
Science is a progression.
We know more and more.
And when you know a lot about a certain thing, about one aspect of intelligence, then you have new data and you get better questions.
And we're getting deeper and deeper into what the nature of intelligence is.
When I was a graduate student in 1971, when I started graduate school, The major question was, is there a genetic component to intelligence or not?
And now we are looking at DNA and the molecular genetics of intelligence.
So clearly that question has been answered definitively.
And we have many more mysteries and many more challenges because to answer a question like, What do intelligence genes do in the brain to make intelligence?
That's an extraordinarily complex set of puzzles.
A lot of work will go into understanding that and it will take many years.
But in my view, it's not an infinite problem.
It's not an unsolvable problem just because it's complex.
And it seems to involve a huge number of extraordinarily expensive supercomputers, which, of course, is a big challenge as well.
Now, let's just slice and dice the language a little bit at the beginning to make sure that people know what we're talking about.
And the three I think that we want to divvy up is intelligence, IQ, and G, because those show up, of course, quite a bit in your book and I assume in our conversation.
So how should people slice and dice those in their minds to begin with?
Well, intelligence is a word, a broad category of virtually every kind of mental ability test.
It's what we typically mean when we say smart, okay?
And some people are smarter than others.
They have more, and the reason is they have more intelligence than others.
But if you look at all the different mental abilities And you devise ways to measure each one and then correlate the scores on all those different mental ability tests.
Turns out they're all correlated with each other.
And that implies that they all have something in common.
And what they have in common is called the G-factor.
And it was first identified by a guy named Charles Spearman around 1905.
So it's been around, that concept of the G-factor, it's been around more than a hundred years.
And it's the basis for most scientific research on intelligence, this common factor.
And the common factor accounts for roughly half of the variance among people on intelligence.
So G is not the same thing as intelligence, but it's probably the single biggest component of intelligence.
IQ is a test score.
It's the way it's used in everyday conversation, it's used synonymously with intelligence.
But really IQ is a test score that turns out to be a good estimate of the g-factor.
And the reason an IQ score is a good estimate of the g-factor is that standard IQ tests are not just one test, they're multiple tests And the scores of those multiple tests are summarized in the one IQ score.
And the G factor is best estimated from a battery of tests, even though some tests are more G loaded than others.
But overall, the IQ test and the standard IQ test, not some of these online things, but the standard IQ test is a good estimate of that G factor.
And because the g-factor accounts for at least half of the variance in intelligence That's the thing that most intelligence researchers have been studying.
Right, right. Now, to break IQ out of the test score requires, I guess, two things.
One is that we push back against the argument that it's culturally specific.
Do you know what the word regatta means?
Well, if you're not in the inner city, you might not.
And also that we have a way of showing how IQ scores break out into wider life outcomes.
And if we can, of course, push back against cultural specificity and we can link IQ to, I mean, we'll talk in a bit about the brain that it measures, the size of the brain and the thickness of the white matter and so on.
But if we can break IQ out of the test and show how it has ramifications in real life, I think it gives a kind of legitimacy to it that is not well understood.
Well, it turns out the IQ score and this is not new, it has been known for decades.
The IQ score just by itself predicts all kinds of life success.
People say, well, that just means the test is testing what we think is successful.
But, you know, this could be academic success, it can be vocational success.
IQ even predicts mortality.
That, you know, there was a terrific study in the United Kingdom.
It started in the late 1930s, where they tested every single child in the United Kingdom on the same day on an intelligence test.
And these people have now been followed up.
They're in their 80s now.
And if you divide this group of all of the children, By their IQ score when they were 11 years old into the top 25% and the bottom 25% and the 25% is in the middle, in the quartiles. And you look at how many are still alive when they're now like 80 years old.
It turns out about 70% of the highest IQ group is still alive and only about 42% Of the lowest IQ group is still alive, and this is in a country that has national healthcare.
So everybody has access to healthcare.
It's why this is the case is a mystery, but when you have a study with a whole country as a sample, you have to pay attention to this.
And it's one score taken at age 11.
The famous Terman study of intellectually gifted took Students with high IQ scores and followed them as they went through life and it turned out they were very successful individuals.
They still had high rates of divorce and difficulties in life.
You're not immune from the vicissitudes of life, but they were very successful.
One score taken early on.
The Hopkins study of mathematically and scientifically precocious youth I started in 1971, the year I started graduate school at Hopkins.
And I actually worked in that study.
I passed out the pencils when they gave junior high school kids the SAT math test.
And they found junior high school students who could score on the SAT math as high as Hopkins freshmen.
And it turns out they've now followed these kids.
For more than 40 years, and that one score, taken at age 11, predicts all kinds of success.
That study has been replicated and repeated in many places, and it turns out these scores are very predictive.
You can argue with what success means.
You can argue that one score could never really characterize a person, and all that is true.
I heard one critic say that it would be, claiming that an IQ score is a good measure of intelligence is like trying to have one number that compares computers.
Computers differ in processing speed and memory and all kinds of variables, and he thought this analogy made the case.
But in fact, if you think about it, there is one number that predicts Something about computers.
That's the price.
And if you know nothing else about computers, and you have two computers and, you know, one costs $1,700 and one costs $800, well, you can imagine that the $1,700 one is going to do more for you.
It's going to be more powerful.
And you don't have to know anything about processing speed or RAM or anything else.
So, uh, the IQ score turns, oh, let me talk about bias just for a second.
This has been studied for decades.
There are ways you can tell if a test is biased.
And it turns out there is no empirical argument that supports the idea that IQ tests are culturally biased or biased in any other way.
I could talk all day about how this is done, but for example, one of the subtests On an IQ test is general information.
What does the word regatta mean, for example?
Oh, I'm sorry, that would be on the vocabulary test.
But it certainly seems like that would be culturally biased.
But, you know, smart kids everywhere will know what that is, unless smart kids don't.
And it turns out that the vocabulary test and the general information test, like how far is it between New York and Washington, things like that turn out...
To show the least difference between groups.
Things like how many numbers you can remember in a sequence, you know, if I say seven, one, six, eight, two, four, and ask you to repeat them backwards to me, that ability turns out to be one of the biggest differences between groups.
That's far less apparent that that numerical memory ability would be cultural.
So, there's a lot of work on this.
If IQ tests were biased, it would be easy to dismiss all the results of IQ tests.
And let me just say one more thing about IQ scores.
It turns out they're correlated with brain characteristics like gray matter and white matter.
And if IQ tests were just meaningless, you wouldn't find these correlations with the brain.
IQ tests predict success.
For every group, equally well.
So it doesn't matter what group you're in.
If you have an SAT math score of 500, odds are you're not going to be that successful in engineering schools.
Not a perfect predictor, but...
And the history of it, I had the impression that it started as a way of differentiating whether the people should be sent to the front lines or work more in operations in the First World War.
But it goes even further back than that to Binet.
I wonder if you could tell people why intelligence testing, again, more than 100 years old, why it was started in the first place?
Well, in the French school system, it turned out they had special schools for children who were not Intellectually capable of performing like other schools, and they wanted remedial education.
But many teachers sent students who were behavioral problems to these special schools, not because they didn't have intellectual ability, because they just wanted to get rid of them out of the classroom because they were behaviorally difficult.
And the French Minister of Education wanted to put a stop to this abuse.
And so he asked Binet to devise a test that could independently assess the intellectual ability of the students so teachers couldn't do this anymore.
So it had a perfectly positive rationale behind it.
And that was the origin of testing individual differences in intellectual ability within a school system.
Nowadays, most Teachers have such a negative view of intelligence.
The word intelligence hardly appears in debates about education nowadays.
When intelligence is the single strongest predictor of educational success, define it however you want.
The student's intelligence is the single strongest predictor.
From a market standpoint, of course, educators are offering improved skills, improved capacity to succeed.
And there is, of course, some enlightening slash depressing research that comes out of Charles Murray that says education doesn't matter a huge amount relative to something like the hardware between the ears, the IQ tests, and the speed of processing and even brain size to some degree seems to have a lot more to do with it than what kind of school you go to.
And this predates Charles Murray by decades.
So in the 1960s, when President Johnson launched the War on Poverty and programs like Head Start, there were blocking, it's not the, is it the Jenks Report?
But at any rate, there was an elaborate empirical study of all the schools and what school variables predicted success, because all schools were not equal, clearly.
And the idea was that students who went to schools that didn't have resources and didn't have good teachers, that accounted for why students in those schools didn't score as well on cognitive ability tests.
Virtually every education person and every educational psychologist in the country believed that if you change the schools and made them equal so that the poorer schools were equivalent to the more well-off schools, the achievement gaps would disappear.
And the idea was to have compensatory education.
Head Start was originally a program for a compensatory education.
Well, it turns out that even the earliest studies showed that the thing that predicted school success more than school and teacher variables was the student's intelligence.
This was known in the 1960s from very large, well-done studies.
And these studies have been repeated over time.
They always come up with the same result.
There was another study done in the United Kingdom where every single student got an intelligence test when they were 11 years old.
All of those students were then tested four years later on 20 different subjects in school.
And they combined the scores on their 20 different subjects, their achievement tests, into a single school achievement score.
And they tried to predict it with Ratings of the schools, the teachers, the quality, the amount of money spent, and so on.
And the one variable predicted two-thirds of the variance in school achievement.
And it was the IQ score at age 11 predicted their achievement when they were 15 years old.
One score.
I mean, well, the idea was that intelligence predicted two-thirds.
All the school variables together About 10%.
School and teacher variables, about 10%.
Again, the sample size is the entire country.
So, these are powerful studies.
And it turned out, in the history of intelligence research, Jensen's 1969 article was all about evaluating these compensatory education programs that were designed to raise IQ. That was their purpose.
And virtually every psychologist thought this was going to work.
And it turns out, Jensen evaluated it and presented very compelling evidence that it didn't work.
The opening sentence of his famous paper was, we've tried compensatory education and apparently it's failed.
And then he went on to talk about why that might be the case and he raised the idea that maybe intelligence has some genetic component.
That's not that malleable.
And that article became infamous and misinterpreted and overnight made intelligence research radioactive.
And I will just point out one more thing.
Today we no longer talk about compensatory education.
That term has disappeared.
We talk about early childhood education.
And that comes from a recognition that early childhood education Whatever benefits it has, and I'm sure I know it has benefits, but one of those benefits is not raising IQ. There's no evidence that smaller classes or any kind of early childhood education actually raises intelligence.
Well, and he did face not just, of course, professional backlash and funding cuts, but he faced direct violence as well because there were people who were very upset with what he did.
And the thing that breaks my heart, Dr.
Heyer, just to sort of veer off into the personal for a moment, and this seems to be repetitive, in intelligence research is at the end of his paper...
He does talk about, okay, well, if we have this as a reality, if we accept this as a potential reality, it needs further exploration, but it will have important ramifications on the kinds of education we can tailor towards people or groups with different abilities.
And what I think of is the opportunity costs of just stuffing that down the memory hole that we have decades and decades, hundreds of billions of dollars throughout the West in misapplied resources that could have been applied to actually help Children to improve their capacities, but instead was burned on the lawn of political correctness for this egalitarian dream of perfectly equal outcomes.
And the opportunity costs of denying this to me is maybe two, three generations of missed opportunities.
There have been missed opportunities and it is still extremely difficult to have a conversation within academic education circles about the role intelligence plays.
So I presented some of this data from the UK study showing that intelligence predicted two-thirds of school achievement to some educators and some of them walked out.
They just didn't want to hear this.
I understand that and it just means that people like me have to work harder And this is why I'm hoping that my book gets some traction in education circles.
Because the minimum, maybe the maximum, that I hope is that the word intelligence and what we know from modern research about intelligence gets into the conversations about educational policy.
It's not even present.
You know, you could take All the white papers, you know, you get PDFs of all these reports and, you know, common core arguments and, you know, you can enter the word intelligence and say, find the word in the document.
It's virtually never there.
It's just not part of the conversation and it needs to be.
I don't know what the outcome of the conversations will be, but some recognition of tailoring education To the needs of the student rather than the needs of the administrators, I think would be kind of a welcome conversation.
Well, trying to have a conversation about education or even society without taking into account the biological influence on intelligence, like trying to navigate the world while thinking it's flat.
I mean, you'll get someplace you just won't actually get where you want to get because you haven't taken into account the reality of the physical environment that you're working within.
Well, you know, it's true.
One of the problems when you start discussing the genetics of intelligence is that people assume if intelligence is mostly genetic, that means you can't change it.
That means you're limited.
And what we know about genes doesn't support that assumption.
We've known for a long time that genes are probabilistic.
Not necessarily deterministic.
There are some genes that are deterministic.
If you have the genes, you're going to get the disease, like Huntington's disease.
But many genes are probabilistic.
So if you have a genetic propensity for high cholesterol and some other risk factors for heart disease, you are at a risk, at a statistical risk for heart disease.
But we know you can lower that risk through diet and exercise and lifestyle changes and reducing stress.
So we know that genetic risk can be modified.
When you start talking about intelligence, it's not so clear, but you have the enormous potential to be able to tweak the genetic biological mechanisms That influence the brain that are responsible for intelligence.
So that I can imagine at some point we'll understand the neurobiology of intelligence well enough to change it.
To increase intelligence.
We're not there yet.
But imagine this is what scientists are doing for schizophrenia and for depression and for a host of medical illnesses.
The more these things are genetic, the more they're biological, and the more you might be able to understand the biology and change it, possibly through environmental lifestyle changes, but more likely through drugs and other ways to influence the biology of the brain.
This is where the neuroscience of intelligence is going.
This is What I talk about in the book and why I'm optimistic, but also we're not there yet.
The problem with my book, I will tell you, is the title.
The Neuroscience of Intelligence is not a best-selling title.
Fifty Shades of the Neuroscience of Intelligence.
What's that? Fifty Shades of the Neuroscience of Intelligence, maybe.
Yeah, well, you know, that's one of the chapters.
Book four in an erotic journey to the brain.
There you go. I tried with my publisher to get them to have a colon after the neuroscience of intelligence.
And I used permutations of every Dan Brown title I could find.
Unlocking the pinching code of your brain.
Unlocking your inner genius.
The problem is I talk about why that's not possible so easily.
So the best title I came up with was the neuroscience of intelligence Yeah, and I definitely want to get to creativity a bit.
I just want to point out as well with regards to tests.
The idea that bias exists in these tests that are designed, of course, to help Grab people who are talented, put them into higher education and launch them to a successful career.
These things need to be very finely calibrated for success because you don't want to miss people who could succeed and you also don't want to put people in the program displacing other people who won't succeed.
So there has to be a very strong calibration, and it's, I assume, recalibrated as the IQ test is repeatedly, to make sure that you identify the most talented people regardless of gender or ethnicity or whatever it is.
Because as a school, you want to get the talented people and make sure you don't waste your resources on the less talented people.
So it has to be a real-world measure that goes not just from the test through school, but also as an institution, you need to have your degree really mean something in the outside world.
So if you had some way of tailoring a degree and a test to produce good outcomes that didn't translate into success in a professional world, your school would go out of business.
So there is a strong incentive, a pipeline, to try and align all of these things so that what you're measuring is very real and tangible so that your institution has value.
Yeah, and that is a problem with higher education because many institutions that Have overemphasized opportunities for people who don't score high, for example.
In some ways, it's a good thing to give people a chance, as long as your overall standards aren't decreased.
And anyone who's worked in universities, as I have for 40 years, sees a trend that's disturbing.
In terms of what the degrees mean, in terms of what the expectations are of students.
It's not an insurmountable problem, and it hasn't destroyed universities by any means, but there are debates going on within universities about what the balance should be, and I think these are healthy debates.
Well, here's a big challenge, of course, and we might as well touch on this.
I think it's had obviously less effect to the sciences than it has in the humanities.
But this cause and effect reversal that seems to be so common in policy these days, which is to say, well, there are a lot of tall people playing basketball.
So if we take everyone and put them on a basketball team, they'll get taller.
And the idea is like, well, you know, that the top 10 percent of people who used to go to college, you know, is successful and wealthy and happy and healthy and so on.
And the reality is somehow college is a magical place that changes your intelligence.
And so the more people we stuff into college, the more people we're going to get out who were like that original 10%.
It is not working out.
You, of course, when you cast the net, I think it's like 40, 50% sometimes of after high school people go to higher education.
If... As you point out in the book, there is these overwhelming influences of genetics on intelligence, then by casting the net wider, you end up inevitably having to lower the standards, thus destroying the value of the education, even for the formerly smart people who would have benefited from it.
It's a problem. It's a real problem, and science doesn't have the answer to this problem.
These are social goals.
This is why we need public discussion.
I just wanted the public discussion to include the actual Data about what we know about intelligence, what we know about academic success.
The idea that education is your ticket, that's a correct idea.
But what kinds of education and does everyone need to go to college?
Other countries have technical schools with great success.
Not everybody needs a liberal arts degree.
And there are differences between the humanities and the social sciences and the harder sciences.
These differences have always existed.
We just have to be honest about them and have conversations.
And what you see sometimes when you have speakers shouted down...
I personally have never been shouted down when I talk about intelligence.
I do a lot of public speaking.
I find the public in general has a real hunger to understand these things.
Parents want to know what they can do for their children.
I mean, you can talk about how bad intelligence is and success and all that stuff, but most parents would choose to do things to maximize intelligence for their children.
There is, and I think there is a kind of cruelty aspect to it, Dr.
Haya, which is that if you take less intelligent people, put them through a college degree, having to lower the standards along the way, social promotion or whatever, then, of course, they graduate with debt.
Now, of course, they've calculated their ability to repay their debt, or maybe somebody has convinced them that, because they said, well, you know, on average, you know, the people who graduate from this college go on to make a certain amount of money.
And if they then don't find it easy, as I think they won't, to translate it.
Their lower intelligence into a higher salary, then you've loaded them down with debt without giving them the ability to repay.
And in trying to help them, I think you've actually put them behind the eight ball for quite a long time.
It's even worse than that because your example is people who successfully finish the program and then go out into the real world.
It's often the case that students are accepted into programs Even though the indicators are they won't succeed in those programs.
And many students come to university, especially students that don't have educated parents.
They come to university with the idea that if they work hard, they can be successful in anything they choose.
You know, it used to be the American dream was, you know, you work hard, you'll be successful.
But that's morphed.
Into, if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be.
There's a world of difference between those two things.
No matter what, no matter how hard I worked, I was not going to be a successful theoretical physicist.
You know, and I don't know what things I missed in my childhood that would have made me a theoretical physicist.
But it just doesn't work that way.
And so you have, I know cases in the university of students getting into math majors or engineering majors with SAT math scores way under 600.
The odds of success are very small for them.
And no matter how hard they work, when they find they're always at the bottom of the class They're completely dispirited, demoralized, because they think it's something wrong with them.
Whereas, once they transfer out into other majors, they do just fine.
It's just they don't have the mathematical ability.
They may have a high G, but without enough mathematical ability to succeed in something that's math intensive.
And these students really go through hard times.
I mean, to find Their niche in the academic world.
Most of them have a niche, but it's hard to find.
Right. And of course, the whole point of testing is to help guide you to where your abilities can be put to maximum use, both personally and socially.
And when you start jigging with the entrance exams, then you do start giving people – it's like price controls in a free market.
They give the wrong signals about scarce resources and productive uses.
Let's talk a little bit about something that people – I mean, they know the bell curve in general.
I've talked about this before and talked with Charles Murray directly about this.
But I think it's worth a refresher because you had a very compelling part in the book, Dr.
Heyer, about you measure height, you're measuring something mathematically stable, and it's easy to see and so on.
But with IQ, you know, people sometimes think, well, you know, boy, 140, that's got to be twice as smart as 70.
And 70, of course, is the top, what's the bottom 2% of the population, certainly of whites.
How can people best conceptualize what it means to be high or low in the IQ range?
Well, an IQ point is not like a meter or a yard or an inch.
Those things, I mean, if you say that men on average are taller than women, no one says, well, that depends on what kind of tape measure you have.
Because a tape measure, you know, it's a standard thing, and an inch on one tape measure is pretty much exactly the same as an inch on the other.
There's no error variance in that kind of measurement.
When you're talking about a mental ability test and a score, that's not the same thing.
IQ scores have meaning only relative to other People.
It's a different kind of scale.
I don't want to get too technical about it, but it's a different kind of scale.
And so IQ scores are best understood as percentiles.
If you're in the top 1%, that has some meaning compared to if you're in the 50th percent.
But you can't really quantify it so that The statement that a person with an IQ of 140 is twice as smart as a person with an IQ of 70, that makes no sense.
There's no metric there.
As you say, one is in the bottom couple of percent and one is in the top couple of percent.
That rank order is meaningful.
Right, right. The difference between someone with an IQ of 132 and somebody else with 133 or 134, those differences are essentially meaningless.
The measurement challenge as well, as you point out, you know, a lot of the research is done with a very small sample group or a group of cognitive elites where there's not enough of a spread to really measure things.
So, what are the challenges when it comes to designing these experiments to make sure you get a wide enough group that your results can be replicable and meaningful?
Well, interestingly, many of your listeners may know about the current So-called replication crisis in psychology that many, many studies just failed to replicate.
Also true in cancer research, horrifyingly.
We have concepts like the implicit bias test and mind growth set.
And these are widely accepted concepts, but it turns out it's very hard to replicate the original studies.
One of the Possibly the most replicated finding in all of psychology is the finding of the g-factor and that it predicts life and academic success.
That has just been replicated hundreds if not thousands of times.
So it's very strong replication.
And one of the reasons it's replicated so often is the sample sizes tend to be very large.
What's happening now on the cutting edge of intelligence research with genetics and neuroimaging is the sample sizes are getting to be huge.
One of the underappreciated advances in this kind of science is the sociological development of consortia where different research groups around the world are pooling their resources.
With standard protocols.
So now we have these consortia getting neuroimaging, cognitive testing and DNA samples on thousands of people.
Some of the genetic work with DNA and educational attainment as a proxy for IQ have hit a million samples.
A million people.
So the sample sizes now are getting large enough to detect small differences.
And the bigger the sample sizes, whatever differences you find will tend to be more robust.
So the whole field is moving in a direction that it will likely increase replicability.
And this is always a good thing.
Especially on controversial things like genetics.
Now, this thing that you also talk about this, and I'm just going to throw in a tiny pitch here to just people, you know, pause the interview.
I'm fine with that. Pause the interview.
We'll be here. When you get back, go buy the book because you absolutely need to read this.
It's just a fantastic book and also very accessible.
And I wanted to compliment your elegant pen for transcribing these ideas in a way that people like me can digest relatively easily.
One of the things that you talk about is when you're smart, you end up in this situation where you tend to be surrounded by smart people.
You go to college or, you know, even if you don't, you just tend to end up surrounded by smart people.
If you're smart, you probably come from a smart family.
And so your family's smart.
Your extended family is probably fairly smart.
And you had a sentence here that I thought was really powerful where you say it's really hard for people with high G to picture life with low G.
And a statistic that you have just blew my mind.
This is a quote from the book.
Only 4% of the white population is in the top category and can complete tasks like using a calculator to figure out the cost of carpeting a room.
Requires identifying the area, converting to square yards, and multiplying by the price.
Now, I don't – I paused on that.
And I was sitting there thinking, OK, well, who do I know who wouldn't be able to do that?
And I came up with like zero, zero people that I know who would not be able to do that.
And this, again, Charles Murray talks about this in one of his recent books, but this idea that we're becoming so G-segregated...
That it's like the class system that's talked about the Marxists, except it's more of an IQ stratification in society that is making it harder and harder, I think, for us to kind of understand what is outside our layer or our bubble.
Oh, this is absolutely true.
That example you gave comes from something called a functional literacy test.
It was kind of a national test.
That example is several years old now.
But... It's surprising when you ask, you know, people to do certain things, what people can do and what they can't.
And in that example, it's the conversion of square feet to square yards that a lot of people just can't get.
You did say that, you know, if you're smart and you hang around with other smart people, you may have a smart family.
That last part is not necessarily true.
This is the great thing about the genetic component of intelligence.
Genetics is really the great equalizer.
So that, you know, if you ask very smart people, was there ever a moment in your early life when you realized you were smarter than your parents?
You get some interesting answers.
Many people say, you know, I did realize that You know, when I would ask my parents for help with the homework and they just didn't get it and I hadn't explained it to them, that kind of thing.
A lot of people just don't understand the question and they can't relate to that question at all.
And some people say, are you kidding me?
My father is a rocket scientist.
My mother, you know, is a physicist.
I'm not nearly as smart as they are.
And these are very accomplished people who would say this.
And it's true that some of the great geniuses in history come from very modest backgrounds, very modest intellectual backgrounds.
Well, this is the churn that is really quite fascinating and shows up in economics with the phrase, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, or rags to riches to rags in three generations, because there is, of course, a regression to the mean, and there's this great churn that happens, which dissolves classes.
And I think that's a very, very important point to make.
Now, a sentence here, because I think for some of the people who are listening, they'll be like, okay, well, why is this so controversial?
The fascinating thing is it's a lot less controversial in China.
China being able to study, they have 4,000 researchers and like 100 supercomputers at one to two million bucks a head that are, and I've talked to some Chinese researchers in the area and how far they are moving.
One of the challenges in the West is this multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural differences.
So your sentence here is, unfortunately, psychometric research on intelligence has often been portrayed as damaging to a progressive social agenda because there are substantial average test score differences among some racial and ethnic groups.
Now, again, with all due sensitivity to the challenges of the topic, I wonder if you could help people to understand why that is, well, what that is and how challenging it is to talk about.
People think, people misunderstand that a lot.
It's like, true or false, men are taller than women.
That statement is false.
The true statement is, on average, men are taller than women.
There's a world of difference between those two things.
There's a tremendous overlap.
And when you find average differences between any groups, whether they're ethnic or racial or whatever, You have to emphasize that there's a tremendous amount of overlap, and you cannot predict a person's IQ score from knowing what group they're in.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's not logical. Racists, of course, take this information and say, see, I told you so, because they're seeing a bimodal distribution with no overlap.
But the racists, fortunately, are a relatively small Part of the problem, the bigger problem is that when you start talking about genetics of this difference, now you're talking, people are assuming a determinism and that one group is genetically superior to another.
This is very dangerous and it's also not the case that logically follows From genetics on any particular trait.
And I do want to say that at this moment, we don't know that average group differences on IQ have anything to do with genetics.
The working hypothesis is that whatever factors affect individual differences in IQ among, within any group, whatever those influences are, there'll be the same Influences on group differences and if genetics plays a role then maybe genetics will play a role in group differences.
It's becoming, in my view, an irrelevant conversation.
Well, I just want to reinforce that point that you could never judge any ethnicity by group averages, of course, and I really wanted to reinforce that.
And also the question of superiority or inferiority is scientifically illiterate from my standpoint, because although the races have been separated by tens of thousands of years, they have adapted to local conditions.
If that has produced differences in intelligence, these are mere adaptations to local environments, and there's nothing to do with superiority or inferiority.
It is simply the way that evolution plays out.
And I just really, really want to enforce that point because I don't want people taking false pride over accidents of evolution or history or casting aspersions based on that.
These are merely adaptations to local conditions.
Maybe the winter is a little harsher and required certain different adaptations, but it has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority because that doesn't make any sense when it comes to evolution.
That's correct. And what's happening, the reason in my mind the The conversation is almost irrelevant now, is because we now are collecting DNA, very large numbers of people around the world.
And rather than categorize people by race or ethnic group or by religion, people can be characterized by their DNA ancestry into populations.
And then you can look at Genetic differences.
You can count the genes.
Not all genes are equally frequent in every group.
That's why there are more blue-eyed people in some parts of the world than in other parts of the world.
And as we learn more about intelligence, it may be that one set of genes is more important for intelligence in this DNA-defined group than a different set of genes in that DNA group.
There may be overlap in those genes.
We just don't know what this story is.
But the real hope, the real hope is that once the genetic, once genes are identified, this is only the first step in what is a nightmare process.
And the nightmare process is to figure out what those genes do, how they function, and then to figure out what turns those genes on and what turns those genes off.
Because genes are dynamic.
They turn on and off through your lifespan.
But we don't really understand what those triggers are.
The first step in a nightmarish process, I heard that in a Churchillian voice.
I just wanted to tell you that right up front.
So let's look at the blank slate.
This is fundamentally or interestingly enough how I was raised to understand things was it was a blank slate, 100% environmental and so on.
And this is how I was educated early on.
And so it's been quite a challenge for me to make this.
Leap, but I did sort of, as a public thinker, say I'm going to follow the data wherever it leads, no matter what challenge it is to my early thoughts.
But you have a sentence here that encapsulated a lot, where you said the blank slate is an empirical hypothesis about the functioning of the brain and must be evaluated in terms of whether or not it is true.
The modern science of mind, brain, genes, and evolution are increasingly showing that That it is not true.
And that is a wake-up call, I think, for a lot of people who claim to be data-driven about where the science currently is.
That sentence was written, actually, by Steven Pinker in his book, in his 2002 book, The Blank Slate.
I was quoting that sentence.
I wish I had written that sentence.
It's a beautiful sentence.
And for anyone who still believes the blank slate is a viable hypothesis, They should read Pinker's book, The Blank Slate.
He goes through it in excruciating detail about why that just doesn't match the empirical data.
Now, where the negative for intelligence seems to show up is that it seems, the analogy that I've used, and let me know if it makes any sense, is if you grow up without enough food, without enough nutrition, you may end up not reaching your genetic height.
And if you have enough food, then you will reach your genetic height.
However, getting more food doesn't make you taller.
And this seems to be analogous to me to we know how to break, in a sense, intelligence, you know, excessive trauma, deficient nutrition, and so on.
We know how to break IQ. We just don't know how to make it.
And that has been the big chimera that we've been following for decades and spending untold amounts of money, which has failed to materialize not just how to stop it from falling, but how to get it to increase.
We don't know how to increase it, but my hope is that when the genetics and the neurobiology are understood, then we'll be able to tweak the relevant brain systems to make people smarter.
As far as I'm concerned, the holy grail is to be able to take every single person and shift them, you know, half a standard deviation higher would change the world.
Five points would change the world, really.
There are 51 million Americans right this minute who have IQs under 85.
51 million.
Of them, 14 million are children.
If you have an IQ under 85, you are not a strong candidate for college.
If you have an IQ of under 85, Finding gainful employment that pays enough to support yourself, let alone a family, is extremely challenging.
So what do we do for people who have, through no fault of their own, this kind of cognitive limitation in a modern society that requires complex thinking and problem solving for most high-paying jobs?
Now, you know, one thing I discussed with Jordan Peterson when I did a podcast with him is this concept of a universal basic income.
And while I can understand many arguments against that, you know, if you take the view of a person who's at the lower end of this distribution through no fault of their own, through no fault of anyone's, how do you help those people navigate everyday life?
And so a universal basic income, I think, is a reasonable thing to discuss, at least, you know, when you're talking about people at that end of the curve.
Well, this is very interesting to me.
I'm reminded of way back in the day, people used to blame biological problems like epilepsy on demonic possession and assume that this was the result of somebody dabbling in the black arts or being horrifyingly mystical or subject to the whims of the devils or whatever.
And with enough science and knowledge, we now recognize that this is of course a physical medical issue that can be treated and dealt with.
And there is of course a downside to this radical egalitarianism and environmentalism.
You can be anything you wanna be.
Okay, there's an enthusiasm that can be generated that sometimes has people think they can fly off cliffs to their doom.
But at the same time, there's a moral judgment on people who fail to achieve in this blank slate hypothesis.
People who fail to achieve high status or high station, well, they must just be lazy.
They didn't try hard enough. And there is a dark side to this radical egalitarianism that is very often not discussed.
And I'm with you. Like, I mean, I don't view whatever intelligence I have as, you know, just some personal virtue of mine.
I mean, it's something that I happen to inherit.
As you happen to inherit, as other people happen to inherit less capable brains, it's not their fault.
They're not lazy. They're not bad people.
And whatever we do, I'm a big fan of charitable private solutions.
I'm very suspicious of the government solving these kinds of problems.
But regardless, it is an essential question.
To ask, which is, if we take out the moral element, and I'm not saying that there's no moral element.
As you point out, high IQ is no guarantee of success.
There are people who take their gifts and squander them.
But to at least reduce the moral grandstanding that occurs, which is most often used to demonize smart people rather than to demonize dumb people, but it is nonetheless a dark side of this egalitarianism that remains fundamentally undiscussed, I think, in the public sphere.
Well, you know, you could have kind of a political view that government's role is to give everyone a chance, an equal opportunity.
Nothing wrong with that.
The real test comes when people have their chance and they fail.
Do you say, well, you had your chance, you failed?
Like Homer Simpson, Bart, you tried and you failed.
The lesson is never try.
You know, so you just write those people off.
Or if they're failing because they're just not cognitively equipped to succeed in modern life, is there nothing to be done to help those people?
I tend to think that if people try and they fail, it's not just their tough luck.
I mean, the society can be helpful, especially a rich society.
But at the same time, of course, if we shield people from the consequences of their failures, then ambition tends to get blunted.
So it is a very delicate balance.
I'm much more for the free market determining that balance rather than the state.
But I think we can both agree that it is something that we really need to understand.
I mean, you've, of course, studied this for a long time.
What is it like for people?
Let's say you don't know a lot of people who have IQs under 85.
What's the day like?
What's the challenge like?
What can they do and not do that we may take for granted?
Have you ever watched Judge Judy?
Yes, I have, in fact, watched Judge Judy.
Well, there are people who appear on Judge Judy who just cannot get what she's saying when she tries to explain concepts.
And you can see from the way they discuss their problem, why they're there, and their daily life, that they have a lot of trouble navigating daily life, resolving conflicts, Getting high paying jobs, consistent employment.
These are all problems.
Imagine you find yourself in a foreign country for the first time.
You're by yourself.
You do not speak the language.
You're picked up as part of an experiment.
You're blindfolded and you're dropped off way the heck in the country somewhere.
And you are given the task to find your way by yourself to a certain address hundreds of miles away.
Okay, what are you gonna do?
You're gonna feel stupid because you can't communicate with anybody, right?
You can't read the local language, so you can't read the trains, you can't read the signs.
That's kind of the feeling, I imagine.
People with lower IQs have when they try to fill out their taxes.
I have that feeling when I try to fill out my taxes.
I mean, we all have areas where we feel stupid, especially when you travel and you really don't know the local customs.
Imagine going through everyday life.
One of the researchers I know you've spoken to, Linda Gottfridson, has said that life is one long mental test battery.
This is true.
And it is very hard to imagine what it's like to live everyday life with an IQ of under 85.
Now, 85 is the low end of normal, by the way.
You get down to 80, 75, this is, you know, the military in the United States has a cutoff of around 85.
Because they know that people under that, very difficult to train for any job in the military.
And the military excels at training people.
And if they won't take, you know, people below a certain cutoff, it tells you something.
And there's a lot of jobs in the military that aren't too tough.
You know, like that old phrase that says in the military, if it moves, move it.
If it doesn't move, paint it.
I mean, there's a lot of jobs that don't require a lot of IQ and they can't find uses for those people.
Well, 51 million Americans have IQs under 85.
This is a giant number of people.
Now, somewhere around 40 million people in the United States live in poverty.
What do you think the overlap is between those two groups?
0.8. Just off the top of my head.
So, if you could increase intellectual ability, By understanding the genetics and the neurobiology?
Isn't that a good thing?
You know, think about this for a second.
Imagine the homeless problem.
Very complicated problem on how to fix the homelessness problem.
Some proportion of homeless have schizophrenia.
And it could be a fairly substantial proportion.
So if you study the genetics of schizophrenia and you find out the neurobiology of schizophrenia and thereby you come up with a better treatment that essentially cures schizophrenia or treats it to the point where people can be taken off the street, suddenly you've had a major impact on the homelessness problem.
It is like insulin for diabetes.
It changes the entire or inoculations and so on.
It changes the entire landscape.
And I also wonder sometimes just based back on the marshmallow test, which is, you know, you get kids who are very young and you say, Here's a marshmallow.
If you don't eat it, in 15 minutes, you'll get two.
And this is also a very strong predictor, which I think shows that intelligence has some relationship to deferral of gratification.
I wonder what it would be like to go through life having very little control over my impulses.
You know, like I want something, I take it.
I get angry, I yell.
You know, like I just, you know, my boss annoys me, I'm just going to throw something at him and so on.
Like with very little impulse control.
Life would be really, really challenging because a lot of success is the deferral of gratification.
It's true.
And intelligence is one of those things that if you have it, you tend to take it for granted.
Some of the biggest critics of intelligence research are very, very bright people.
And when you talk to them personally, they really demean The concept of intelligence and their own intelligence.
Yet at a faculty meeting when you're deciding who to hire, all they talk about is how smart is the guy or the woman.
Well, it's funny that when your own personal well-being has to do with an accurate judge of intelligence, you tend to be a little bit more invested in the reality of the topic.
Whereas if it's just some policy or program that affects kids in another district, it's wholly different.
Now, I really, really appreciate your time here.
I just wanted to mention, of course, I will be sending out course credits to everyone who completes this podcast, which means nothing because I have no accreditation.
But I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the really powerful new stuff that's in the book about...
The relationship between testing and the physical infrastructure of the brain, the substructure of the brain itself.
And actually this, because you were talking about the stuff you were doing in the 80s, has more of a pedigree than I thought it did.
I wonder if you could just talk about some of the stuff that you've done.
And man, where does stuff stand now, which is staggering.
This feels like a new Copernican revolution in the brain.
Well, yes, I think it's a golden age of brain research now, driven mostly by technology.
And it's the technology of neuroimaging and it's the technology of genetics.
Those two things that are now being used together in the same studies that have tremendous potential to unlock these secrets of the brain.
But back in the mid-1980s, there was a development in brain imaging called positron emission tomography.
This was long before MRIs, magnetic resonance imaging.
Positron emission tomography actually came first.
It really started around 1980, but around 1985, I moved to the University of California, Irvine, where they had acquired a PET scanner.
And so I was one of the first psychologists to have access to this machine.
And a PET scanner makes pictures of brain function based on radioactive sugar.
So you inject this radioactive sugar, the brain uses sugar for Energy, the more a part of the brain is working to solve a problem, the more radioactive sugar goes up there and you can make a picture of this.
It's a phenomenal technology.
And in 1988 we published a paper, it was really the first paper, using this technology to study intelligence.
Because we injected the radioactive sugar while people were doing a high-G test of problem solving.
And all we wanted to know was what parts of the brain light up when people Are doing an intelligence test.
And we thought we would see the frontal lobe and, you know, maybe some other areas.
And we did see the frontal lobe, but there were areas not in the frontal lobe, which was kind of a surprise.
But the real surprise was when we correlated the amount of brain activity in these hot spots with the performance on the IQ test, the intelligence test, the correlations were negative.
In that the smartest people Had the lowest brain activity in these areas that were related to performing the test.
Which was very surprising.
And we decided this was suggesting evidence for an idea of brain efficiency.
That it wasn't how hard your brain worked that made you smart, but how efficiently your brain worked to make you smart.
And this was way back in 1988.
And brain efficiency studies of intelligence have continued and we're still not exactly sure how robust brain efficiency is and under what circumstances you see it and under what circumstances you don't see it, whether there are sex differences in brain efficiency, whether the efficiency occurs in the same or different places for different people.
It just opened up a whole area of research.
But we also have learned That intelligence is not solely a function of the frontal lobe, which was the prevailing view at the time, that executive function and rational thinking came from the frontal lobe.
We now know that there are areas distributed across the entire brain that, like an orchestra, work together to produce higher cognitive abilities like intelligence.
And that individual differences among people in intelligence It has something to do with their differences in brain structure and function.
We know this now from hundreds of neural imaging studies.
The real advances now, you know, my study in 1988 had a sample size of eight people.
You know, scans cost $2,500 at the time.
It was very expensive to do this.
Now, these consortia that I mentioned earlier They now have hundreds of people, sometimes thousands of people, with MRI scans.
MRI is a much easier technology to use than PET because it doesn't require any radioactive material.
So PET was kind of intrusive because you had to inject this stuff.
MRIs, you can fall asleep in the scanner for a structural scan, it doesn't matter.
For a functional scan you can do the same kinds of problem-solving and without injecting anything.
So we now have really hundreds of these brain scans and it turns out you can predict IQ scores from a combination of brain characteristics.
So you have these neuroimaging studies that are moving toward brain fingerprints where a person's brain structure and function is so unique It's like a fingerprint.
And so that you can identify a person basically based on their brain structure and function, and it turns out some characteristics of that structure and function predict IQ scores.
And the prediction is getting pretty strong.
On the other hand, you have genetic researchers where they're taking genetic markers and aspects of the DNA The sequence.
And they're predicting IQ. And they're getting pretty good at it.
Now, when I say pretty good, the latest predictions are around 10% of the variance in IQ can be predicted just from some genetic sequences.
But a year ago, that number was only 2 or 3%.
And my guess is in genetics, there's going to be like a Moore's law That every year the amount of variance in IQ you can predict just from the DNA sequence, that will double.
So very soon we'll be predicting 60, 70, maybe 80% of intelligence just from a DNA sample.
And then you have the neuroimaging data predicting, and when you combine the neuroimaging and the genetic data, You're going to be able to predict IQ pretty well from that.
Pretty good for something that's alleged to be a meaningless score, isn't it?
Well, and pretty good for something that's supposed to be culturally subjective.
Your brain matter, your brain mass, your brain configuration, the glucose, this is not cultural, and therefore it is important.
Now, this book, I've got to tell you, I mean, I've read some challenging books, exciting books.
This is way up there for me.
I followed it fairly well, but it was kind of like holding on to a well-greased roller coaster.
There were times where I felt I was about to lose my grip.
Here's a sentence, two sentences, which if you could break it out a little for me, I couldn't quite...
Get it. So you wrote, in the 22 men, statistical analyses showed that high math ability went with greater activity in the temporal lobes, the lower left side parts of the brain that include important memory areas like the hippocampus, during the problem solving.
This was just the opposite of efficiency.
In the 22 women, we found no systematic statistical relationship between mathematical reasoning ability and brain activity, even though, as you point out in the book, the women were solving the problems just as well as the men do.
And, of course, this has come up with James Damore and Google and this question of different brain patterns, brain chemistry, brain activity between men and women.
What does this mean, what you said here?
I couldn't quite parse that out in my brain.
The first thing I want to point out is that I was talking about a study we did way back in 1992.
At the time, comparing 22 men to 22 women, With an N of 44 on PET scanning was unprecedented.
It was an extremely large sample.
Today, 22 versus 22 is far too small to make any conclusions.
What we found in that early study was a sex difference, that the parts of the brain that were activated while men performed SAT math problems, those parts of the brain were different than the parts that the women apparently were using, even though both groups solved the problems equally well.
That, to us, indicated that there are different patterns of brain activity that lead to the same performance, and that men and women, matched for performance, might get to those solutions using different brain areas.
Now, what's still controversial is whether or not men and women, matched for ability, use the same or different parts of the brain.
That 1992 study really needs to be replicated with a larger sample.
To my knowledge, it has not been.
There are highly replicated studies showing that there are some small average differences between men and women on certain cognitive tasks.
There are many cognitive tasks where there are no difference.
Some of those differences are in favor of the women and some are in favor of the men.
It's not clear what those small average differences mean when you're at the extreme end of the distribution.
So at a place that hires people at the high end, whether or not they have as many women to choose from is really the issue.
But the women that work at the high end are likely to be every bit as good as the men at the high end.
It's really a question of what is the size of the pool.
And this is very controversial.
It's called the right tail hypothesis.
You know, when you talk about height, on average men are taller than women.
For every woman who is over six feet tall, that's really the extreme for height for women.
Do you know how many men are over six feet tall for every woman who's over?
In a certain age category, the ratio is 2,000 to 1.
Now, that's kind of an extreme example, but the point is that when you get out to these extreme tails of the distribution, even though the average difference is relatively small, it can have a big impact about the number of people out there in the tail.
Whether this is true for Whether this accounts for any of the male-female differences in representation in different fields This is still an issue.
Yeah, 2001 is less.
I mean, I've read that some of the higher IQ levels, there are sort of 12 to 1 men to women.
And this is something that is going to have an effect on hiring patterns at the higher IQ levels.
But I've also heard that there's fewer women at the bottom as well.
So you can take your dice rolls as you like.
No, that's all statistically true, but it doesn't really, those statistical generalities don't necessarily help you with a decision about to hire this person or that person.
The real problem is if you assume that a 50-50 male-female distribution in your workplace is your goal, well, you know, you can achieve that goal easily for some jobs.
For other jobs, Where the high end, you might have a difference, it's going to be a little bit harder.
Not impossible, but the real pernicious thing is when you decide that discussing these things is hate speech.
And that pretty much ends any reasonable conversation.
One of the most interesting things about that Hopkins study I told you about that started in 1971, They've now done a 40-year follow-up of several hundred people who were identified, you know, around age 11 and 12 for having high SAT mass scores.
And they've now identified many women and followed them for 40 years and many men followed them for 40 years.
So the women are just as good as the men at this very, very high end of the distribution.
And it turns out what the women report in these surveys that are done, the women are now 50 years old.
I'm 55 years old.
They've had careers. They tend to say they preferred more of a balance in their life between home, family, and work.
And they were unwilling to work much more than 40 hours a week at their job.
Whereas men were more likely to say they would work 50, 60, 70 hours a week at their job and had less of a family commitment.
That accounts for at least some of the differences between men and women in certain professions.
Now it becomes an interesting question.
If that's true, and women prefer to have careers in medicine, even if they're mathematically very able because they, or law, because they prefer working with people rather than things like engineers, do we really want to change that?
Is it really Important to have a 50-50 distribution in all fields.
If it is, we have to start discouraging women from going into psychology.
About 70% of the PhDs in psychology are women.
Well, I also wouldn't want to be in a situation where we discourage women from having children or breastfeeding.
I mean, this question of success, if you look at success just in terms of income, that is a narrow mammon-based view of material success.
Success in terms of happiness is much more well-rounded.
And I'm not at all convinced that I could make a case to the women working 40-hour weeks.
Boy, if you work 70 hours a week, you'll be so much happier.
And isn't really that the point?
I'm not one to tell people what mix of work and family and I think the world is more fair than we think, but just not in the way that we want.
Right, because the world is fair in terms of you've got some great statistics near the end of the book, where you talk about to study 641 Brazilian school kids.
Socioeconomic status did not predict scholastic achievement, but intelligent test scores did.
You got 3,233 adolescents in Portugal, parents level of education, predicted intelligence in the children regardless of family income.
You may have a monk who can read 12 languages who makes 500 bucks a month, but he's gonna pass along that intelligence.
So the world is fair and there is a churn.
Just because you're born poor doesn't mean that you have to stay poor.
Just because you're born rich doesn't mean you get to stay rich.
And there is a churn in genetics with regards to intelligence.
But because we don't have the levers, we don't know how to change this, the world is fair, just not in the way that we want it to be fair in that we can as yet control it.
And your question is, how can I make the world fairer?
Yes. So where do we stand in gene manipulation?
Because the reason I bring all of this stuff up, I'm sure you understand, is because I actually want to really help the world to improve.
I want people to have more enriching lives, more choices, more options, and science.
And given that we've poured massive amounts for more than half a century of social resources into trying to change the environment to improve intelligence and failed almost universally, We do need to look to alternatives, and those alternatives may be troubling to people, but I don't think we should be so troubled that we end up not actually helping people.
And so where do we stand in finding the levers that can give us control over some of these outcomes?
The science of it is progressing toward finding those levers, without question.
You mentioned the Chinese before.
They have a national commitment to do this, almost like a moonshot program.
Allegedly, there was a poster on the wall at one of these Chinese institutes that said, genes are the future, and they are interested in intelligence genes.
They made this a priority.
And at the same time, we have genetic technologies like this technology called CRISPR, Which is a way to edit genes in a way that those changes can be passed along to the next generation.
And this CRISPR technology, as I understand it, is relatively easy and inexpensive to apply.
So a lot of genetics labs can do it.
So that if you find a gene for an illness that's bad, CRISPR has the Potential for fixing it and not only fixing it but fixing it in the next generation as well.
It's an extremely powerful technique and When you Now that doesn't mean it's gonna be easy.
I mean the best guess now is that there are probably a thousand genes related to intelligence each one with a tiny effect and And each of those thousand genes interact with all the other genes.
So this is a hard problem.
But once you start to figure that out and you combine it with technologies like this CRISPR technology to edit and change genetics, then you have a very profound potential to start tweaking a person's genome In a way that might increase intelligence.
That potential, I think, is higher than the potential of tweaking their environment or their schooling to increase their intelligence.
And that's why I think we need public discussions like you and I are having to make people aware of these things, that it's not science fiction, it's coming.
It might come from China first, but we don't want to be caught behind on this.
Because I think everyone would agree that any country's science and technology is what drives their economy, which is what drives prosperity and quality of life for their citizens.
And so, you know, if there's a smart gap between countries, and some countries can manipulate genes to, you know, To speak to this gap, I mean, this is something that we have to start discussing.
I don't know what the political answers are to this.
I don't know what the policy answers are.
But one of the questions will be, if it becomes possible to change your genetics to increase your IQ, who will have access to this?
Will it be so expensive that only rich people can afford it?
Would it be something like Would it be mandated that all insurance policies must cover?
If we had a National Institute of Stupidity instead of a National Cancer Institute, would they be funding ways to cure low IQ genetically?
I mean, it's kind of funny to have a National Institute of Stupidity, but if you start thinking about low IQ as kind of a problem, a brain problem, I don't want to call it a disease, But a brain problem?
Then how do we fix it?
Or do we just kind of let nature take its course and say, look, we need the full range of people and it's not up to us to manipulate these things.
Unfortunately, the technology is moving forward, so these capabilities will exist.
Well, and the reality is that we are long past the point of head in the sand.
Because, you know, when I grew up, there was a nuclear race, there was a space race, and now there's an intelligence race.
And it is going to occur in China.
I've had researchers on this very show saying that China is within arm's reach of IQ 200 babies.
I'm sorry, that's going to be tough to compete with in the international sphere.
And so, us refusing to talk about these issues isn't going to make them go away.
It simply hands the advantage to other people who may not quite have our best interests at heart in the long run.
And it is a form of abandoning science and abandoning possibility and opportunity that is going to have extraordinarily deleterious outcomes, I think.
Because this is going to be developed one way or another.
And we can either be part of it or we can be, I think, a victim of it.
And I think I know which way I'd prefer that we go.
Right. Well, unfortunately, now in our country, we're living in a time that's profoundly anti-science.
We have many government heads and important agencies who are overtly anti-science.
I don't understand it, but it's not good.
And it's not good in general for many scientific things.
And for the kind of things we're talking about here, which are kind of far out, not many people are talking about manipulating genes to raise IQ. This is not really a public conversation.
And to the extent it is, it's usually framed in some negative context of eugenics or racism or something like that.
Because it is a real topic.
It's an important topic.
And the science is moving on.
And I hugely appreciate your time today, Dr.
Heyer. I also hugely appreciate the book.
It's called The Neuroscience of Intelligence.
We'll link to it right below.
Just go buy it. Go read it.
And talk about this with people.
You know, he can do his work.
I can try and bring the experts on and give them a public view to millions of people.
But it is up to individual conversations.
You're going to have credibility with those around you.
That Richard doesn't, that I don't, have conversations with people around you about these issues.
Yes, they may get tense, but that's part of the excitement of moving forward.
The website, richardhayer.com, twitter.com forward slash rjhayer, of course.
And really appreciate your time today.
Hope that we can get some books into the hands of people, and I hope we get to talk again soon.
