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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:49
What You Didn't Know About IQ | Kevin M. Beaver and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, this is Stephan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
We're thrilled to have Dr. Kevin Beaver with us.
He's a professor at Florida State University and is an expert on bio-social criminology.
And yes, you will not leave this interview without knowing exactly what that means.
It's the biological and environmental factors involved in crime and anti-social behavior.
He has published a wide variety of books and articles.
Recently, a study with five colleagues on what to me is a very surprising result on the degree to which Parenting has an effect, or rather a non-effect, on IQ versus the role that genetics play.
Thank you so much, Dr. Bieber, for taking the time today.
Well, thank you for having me.
Was this a surprise?
Okay, before we get into whether it was a surprise for you, what were the results that you found in this study?
Yeah, so basically what we did in this particular study is we were interested in examining the effects that different parenting measures, different measures of the home life had on intelligence in adolescence and early adulthood.
And there's obviously a lot of research out there linking different dimensions of parenting and different dimensions of the family to variation in IQ scores.
But what much of this research does not take into account is the role that genes play.
And what I mean by that is that parents and children obviously share 50% of the genes.
And so if we don't take that into account, any so-called parenting effect or any so-called environmental effect might really just be unmeasured genetic influences that are being sort of picked up by those environmental measures.
And so we wanted to address this issue and address this possibility that others have raised and that others have written about.
I mean, in an empirical way.
And so what we did is we exploited an adoption-based sample, and we compared whether the parenting behaviors of adoptive parents predicted IQ scores of their adopted adolescents, and ultimately they matured into young adults.
And so we were looking to see whether parenting in Adolescents predicted IQ in adolescence and adulthood.
And what's very eloquent about this design is that the parents, adoptive parents and their adoptive children, don't share any genetic material.
And so any effect that would be detected would be sort of strong evidence of a causal effect.
And when we actually analyze the data in this way, The results revealed that the parenting measures had virtually no effect, no statistically significant effect on the IQ of their children in adolescence and adulthood.
Which is of course quite shocking to a lot of people.
I guess the analogy that popped into my head is that, I mean, we certainly know how to traumatize children through child abuse and so on, but have negative effects on their brain development and social development.
But to me, good enough parenting is sort of like height.
You can stunt a child's growth by not giving the child enough food during stages of development, but you can't make the child taller than its genes are going to allow.
Would that be fairly close as a way of looking at it?
No, I think it's a great way of looking at it.
Most parenting is good enough.
Even in our study where we're looking at variation in parenting, there's not the parents that show up consistently that are locking their kids in the cupboards or the closets and only feeding them bread and water once a day.
Would that type of parenting environment have an effect?
Certainly it's going to have an effect.
But when we look at parenting, even quote-unquote bad parenting in most samples and in most environments is relatively good enough that it's not going to have a dramatic effect or a drastic effect on IQ.
And the other thing is that in our study, we were looking at parenting-related influences that were occurring during adolescence.
So we were not looking at the way that parents raise their children in the very first few years of life.
We were looking at parenting behaviors that were occurring in adolescence and whether those parenting behaviors linked up with adolescent and early adulthood IQ.
Yeah, I mean I think it would be fairly safe to assume that the parenting had not undergone radical reversals from early life.
I assume there'd be some continuity of parenting from early childhood through to adolescence.
Absolutely, I mean that's what research shows.
Parenting tends to be highly stable and so you wouldn't expect to see drastic differences that occur over those different developmental time periods.
Now when I talk about IQ in this philosophy show, people, particularly younger people, are quite confused because maybe they never heard of the bell curve or the other books which seem to indicate that IQ is a fairly strong predictor of long-term life direction and success and so on.
So if we're going to think about IQ, why should we care about it at all?
What does it predict or to what degree does it influence where people end up?
Well, IQ is one of those variables, one of the very few variables that predicts most everything that we look at.
So it predicts health outcomes, it predicts mortality, early life mortality, it predicts how much money you'll make over your life course, your salary, whether or not you'll have contact with the criminal justice system.
I mean, so it predicts a wide array of behavioral and social life outcomes And so I think that for no other reason to study it, there's probably only one, maybe two other variables that we could really even think of that would have such diverse effects that are detected across a wide range of heterogeneous samples.
And it's a consistent effect.
It's a consistent finding.
And the degree to which it's genetic, of course, is the degree to which it is a challenge to change, right?
I mean, studies that I've read have indicated that you can't really budge.
I mean, you can certainly budge it downwards through negative problems, a lack of stimulation and so on, but budging it upwards seems to be quite challenging.
I think I read somewhere that the testing between the ages of 11 and 77 found It's basically a two-in-one chance that your IQ won't have budged by more than a few points even over that wider time period.
Absolutely.
Intelligence is one of the most stable traits that we know of, and so where you fall in relation to everybody else at, say, the age of 10 is going to be a very good predictor of where you fall in In contrast to everybody else at the age of 60 or 70, so you don't see much change at all over the life course, and the change that you do see tends to be relatively minor.
So maybe a couple IQ points up or a couple IQ points down, which is probably nothing more than just pure randomness.
Yeah, absolutely.
Would you say that socioeconomic status is less of a predictor than IQ for life direction and where you end up?
So is SES less strong of a predictor than IQ?
Is that what you asked?
Yeah.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, if you look at intelligence, it's going to predict quite strongly all of these various life outcomes.
And SES tends to have significant effects, but it depends on what you're looking at.
I mean, when you look at criminal behavior, SES doesn't have that strong of an effect on individual criminal involvement.
And so without a doubt, these two things are tied together, SES and intelligence.
So trying to pull one apart from the other can be difficult.
But what we see is that when we look at those, if we were just to look at individuals from say low SES areas or low SES families, the respondents or the participants who have the highest IQs tend to have very positive outcomes.
And so it appears that The individual differences in IQ are one of the strongest predictors of these life outcomes and that's regardless of what type of SES background they come from.
With regards to criminality, the literature that I've read Dr. Beaver seems to go in a number of different directions and I can almost feel the ideological confirmation bias running like a ritual of self-delusion through these articles.
But there does seem to be some correlation between an 8 to 10 point lowering in IQ and an increased likelihood of criminal behavior.
Of course, some people say, well, yes, but it's the lower IQ criminals who tend to get caught.
But this even holds true with self-reported crime, which would not, I think, which would control for that.
What, in your view, is the relationship between the IQ bell curve and the criminality bell curves?
Yeah, I mean, it's a really great question.
And there are many different mechanisms that might link the two together.
I think to start with, though, what I'd say is that there's, among criminologists, there's a lot of those who simply reject the possibility that IQ is even related to crime.
And so you talk about an ideological bent to things.
If you were to comb through the criminological literature published in criminology journals by criminologists or other social scientists, you see very, very little detail, very little studies, very few studies examining the role that IQ plays in the development of criminal behavior.
And that's largely because, at least in my view, that it's sort of one of those ideological stances.
It's a political minefield, if you will, if you were to walk into looking at those associations.
Much of the literature that you do see that has come out that's looked at the link between IQ and crime or the link between IQ and different types of antisocial behaviors typically comes from Individual difference research or personality researchers.
And so there's not a lot of research, not a lot of contemporary research that's looking at how and in what ways sort of the IQ bell curve would map up to variation in criminal behavior.
And I think that's really handicapped our ability to explain in detail and to sort of unpack the mechanisms that are at play that's going to tell us how and in what ways Variation in IQ is going to contribute to variation in criminal behavior.
But there's no doubt there's going to be multiple sort of pathways, if you will, that link the two together.
We just don't have a lot of empirical evidence testing those different pathways.
I mean, I think you mentioned one like differential detection.
You know, stealing a car outside of a police station is probably not the best idea, and it's probably something that's going to get you caught.
Well, who are the most likely people to do that?
Probably individuals with lower levels of IQ, lower levels of intelligence.
But there are other factors that could play a role as well, in terms of being able to channel your resources and your skills into pro-social versus anti-social behaviors.
And so if you're of higher IQ, you should be able to adapt to the environment in a way that's going to be a much more pro-social advantage.
It's going to lead you into pro-social activities, things like going to college, getting a job, getting a high-quality job, staying on task, excelling at that job, being able to follow directions and so on and so forth.
So it's really going to confer an advantage in terms of being able to be adaptive.
Why do you think it is politically incorrect to study IQ and crime?
I guess if it's considered to be environmental, then there would be things that the government could do, unlike the sort of failed Head Start program, or things that society could do to improve IQ.
But if it is genetic, then if you are going to map genetics with crime, is that where the sensitivity is?
I have a little trouble understanding why it's taboo.
I mean, I think it's a great question.
You know, it's going to be because of a number of different factors that intersect together.
You've got IQ that's intersecting with crime, that's intersecting with this high heritability or this high genetic effect, that's also intersecting with SES, that's also intersecting with race differences.
And so depending on the story that people were to tell, it could be quite difficult to explain away Why we see differences between IQ in different racial and ethnic groups and why different racial and ethnic groups might be more or less involved in criminal behavior.
And so people start to get a little bit worried about what this might mean in terms of implications, in terms of policy recommendations, in terms of explanations, and in terms of how society might view the potential causes of crime.
And what we tend to see is most criminologists sort of bury their head in the sand and just not even talk about it.
So we don't even, in my home field of criminology, we don't really even talk about intelligence.
I mean, the research that I've published on intelligence and crime hasn't been published in criminology journals.
It's been published in individual differences journals, personality journals, and that's because trying to get a fair shake at these criminology journals, it just wouldn't happen.
And that's why there's so very limited research, at least in my view, on crime and IQ and how the two are mapped together.
Yeah, I mean, and with all the caveats being that nobody knows the answers to this, of course high rates of criminality within the black community are often explained, you know, history of slavery, racism in society, in particular in the police department and so on.
One alternative explanation, which again is to my knowledge not verified and may never be verified, is to say if Criminality is associated with lower IQ, and if the data which is talked about by Charles Murray and Dick Herrnstein in the bell curve is correct, and blacks score a standard deviation below whites and even below Asians, then if lower intelligence is associated with higher criminality, and if blacks are testing for lower intelligence, that may be a contributing factor.
Is that a fair way to summarize it?
That's what some of the people are concerned about.
And taking it a step further, if IQ is relatively immutable, and so your IQ score is relatively immutable, there's nothing that we can do.
I think that's the part that scares people.
So if IQ is a cause of crime, let's say, and we know IQ scores vary across racial groups, and so what does that mean?
How could we prevent crime if we can't change IQ scores?
And so then, It drums up all the concerns about will there be a new eugenics movement and what can be done and all that stuff.
And so I think it really scares people away from even moving into the area of studying IQ and crime in a scholarly and sort of transparent way.
And of course, I mean, among the general population who aren't particularly well versed in statistics and so on, I think there would be a concern of promoting racism because although looking at IQ scores across a general population may help us to understand very broad social trends, it does us absolutely no good in evaluating any particular individual and people may conflate those two differences and you may end up with a negative view of a group which is unjustified in dealing with individuals within that group.
Absolutely.
I mean, what we learn from statistics and from statistical procedures that are published in journals does not translate into being able to talk about individuals.
So we might know that there's this association or we might find that there's a robust association between low IQ scores and criminal involvement, but that doesn't mean that if you or anyone you know has a low IQ score that they will, for certain, go out and commit crime.
All we can talk about is what's found in the sample, And what's detected sort of at the aggregate level if you will, but it tells us nothing about individuals and it can't be applied to individuals.
Yes, I mean that's certainly a very important point to make that the vast majority of people or a significant majority of people with low IQs have nothing to do with criminal behavior.
It's a minor tendency.
Now, as far as the IQ tests go, what I found interesting was the degree to which there are various aspects of the IQ tests which seem to have different relationships in predictions of potential criminality.
For instance, lowering of verbal intelligence or deficiencies in verbal intelligence seem to be somewhat related to increased potential for criminality.
Has that been your understanding of it as well?
Yes.
I published some work looking at verbal IQ and criminal involvement, and that's exactly what we found.
We detected some significant associations between the two.
We didn't have measures of performance IQ or spatial IQ or things like that, so we were forced into focusing on verbal IQ.
And the question always comes up, well, why is this the case?
Why do we see this?
Again, there's not enough research out there to really get at those underlying mechanisms that might account for the statistical association, but some of this makes sense.
It can make intuitive sense if we're just speculating as to what's going on.
If you're unable to express yourself through words or you're deficient in being able to verbalize, it's going to get you into situations You might not be able to get out of it.
It's going to put you in a situation where it might be very difficult to find your way out of it other than doing something wrong.
You know, you may be more likely to express yourself through physical aggression than through, you know, sort of talking your way out of a problem.
I always talk to my students and say, you know, think about if you get pulled over by a police officer for speeding.
Some people are just very gifted verbally, linguistically, and they can talk their way out of it.
And that might sort of explain at least some of the reason why certain, why verbal IQ might be linked up with different types of anti-social behaviors, criminal involvement, arrest, things like that.
Well, and it's what we usually say to children who are being aggressive, you know, use your words, right?
I mean, and I think that's... Exactly.
And use them in a way that's effective.
So, I mean, if you're pulled over for speeding, You can try to talk your way out of it.
One way to for certain get a ticket would be to look at them, look at the police officer and say, well, why aren't you out fighting real crime?
You know, that's going to get you a ticket very quickly.
Also, if you're unable to express yourself, if we're in a situation, for example, where, again, the example I always use with my students is, let's say I came into class and I said, and I took away your ability to talk.
And I said, OK, everybody in here gets an F. There's no debates.
There's nothing about that.
Everyone gets an F. And I walk out of that class.
There are two things that students could do.
One, they could come up and physically assault me, in which case sort of the physical assault's going to take precedence and they're going to get arrested.
Or second, they could sit down after I leave, when they sort of get their words back, and they could think together and say, OK, he can't just give us all Fs.
Let's go to the dean.
Let's go to the president.
Let's write something up.
And they could grieve it in a way that they're going to win.
In one case, they're fighting me, they're assaulting me, with good reason, I'm failing them, but they're going to get arrested for that.
In the other case, they're sitting down, they're using sort of intelligence, they're using their verbal abilities, and they're crafting a response that's going to get them sort of in the winner's seat, if you will, And they're going to get the grades that they deserve.
And I'm going to get, you know, reprimanded or fired or whatever it might be.
Right.
Now, the finding that parenting styles or even to some degree parenting quality had little to do with IQ was shocking enough.
But, of course, it gets even worse because some of the slight effects that you do find are in what could be colloquially called the exact wrong direction, maternal attachment negatively associated with IQ in children.
I wonder if you could break that down a little bit for people that when you intervene to improve oftentimes it seems to make things worse.
Yeah, I mean, statistically speaking, it's not uncommon to have these signs flip if it's not a real effect.
And so, what I mean by that is that if the true effect of, say, parenting on an outcome, in this case, intelligence, is zero, then because of chance fluctuations in data, what you will see sometimes is a significant effect in the opposite direction.
And so when reading across studies or even reading within a study and you see signs sort of flip around and go in the opposite direction of what was predicted, it could mean that, you know, what we had thought would have a positive effect actually has a negative effect or vice versa.
Or it could simply be just a function of statistics and really is nothing more than a statistical or methodological artifact.
And so that's not a caution against.
In terms of interpreting relatively small effects that are going in the opposite direction.
All right.
Now there's something that I have found in doing research on criminality, which is contrary to what you read in the media.
It seems to be on significant decline over the past 10 to 15 years.
And I have, of course, read a good deal to the degree to which single motherhood or single parenthood is associated with negative outcomes for children.
But at a time when single parenthood is on the rise, criminality appears to be declining significantly.
And again, this is all very loose correlations and it doesn't, of course, go lockstep with each other.
But I wonder if you could talk, if you have any knowledge about that discrepancy between the rise of single motherhood, which is associated with some negative outcomes for children, particularly young men, and a decrease in the prevalence of violent criminality.
Yeah, you know, again, it's a really good issue to bring up.
And I haven't given a lot of thought in respect to single motherhood and violence, or single motherhood and criminal behavior.
There is no doubt this downward trend, and we have crime rates at nearly an all-time low.
But nobody really knows why.
Nobody knows why we've detected this significant downtrend.
There's different explanations that have been advanced.
You know, the fact that we've locked up so many people, or, you know, the legalization of abortions now starting to have effects, and that's why we see this downward trend in criminal behavior.
But not all of these sort of facts fit together, and I think that you bring up one of many different sort of anomalies that are occurring, where we see this criminogenic risk factor.
We found that it's been associated with crime, and so we would expect that if that risk factor becomes more concentrated, if it becomes more prevalent, that crime should become more prevalent as well, but we actually see the exact opposite.
And the reasons for that are probably quite complex.
But what I would sort of just throw out there is that, you know, many of these risk factors, whether it's single motherhood, single parenthood, whatever it is, oftentimes are moderated or contingent on other factors as well.
And so it could be that something else is in the environment or in the individual that's moderating that particular effect.
There was a study that was done, I forget how many years ago, But they were looking at whether sort of a broken home, whether the absent father was always bad.
And what they found was that, in fact, if the father is a criminal or if the father is antisocial in some capacity, it's better that the father is not in the household rather than to keep the father in the household so you can claim that you're from a two-parent household.
And so I think it's those types of sort of complex associations that are oftentimes missed in studies or that oftentimes aren't fully modeled in statistical design, that really make sense when you think about them.
And it sort of gives us those fine contours of what's likely going on as opposed to these broad brushstrokes where we're looking at saying, well, single motherhood is bad or single parenthood is bad in all instances, when in fact it's likely a positive, at least on childhood development, when in fact it's likely a positive, at least on childhood development, in Yeah, and let's not even get started on the degree to which the prevalence of violent video game playing does not seem to be associated with a rise in crime.
Exactly.
Now you have forthcoming, well this is 2014, I don't know if it came out or not yet, demonstrating the validity of twin research.
in criminology.
Now, twin research, of course, is the holy grail of genetics versus environment.
Not that it's perfect, but it's the best, as far as I understand it, that people... it's the best data that you can get to try and tease out the relationship between the two.
What does this paper or article attempt to establish?
So, twin research is sort of the gold standard that's used to quantify genetic and environmental influences, and it's been used for hundreds of years.
And it's been used in thousands of studies to estimate the genetic and environmental influence on virtually anything you can think of.
Anything that can be measured has probably been studied with a behavioral, genetic, or twin-based research design.
It has a number of assumptions that have to be met in order for the results to be deemed reliable and valid.
And so one of them is an equal environments assumption, which essentially says that identical twins, their environments can't be any more similar than fraternal twins or non-identical twins environments.
If the environments are more similar for identical twins and those more similar environments are the result of things that are occurring external to the individuals, So parents treating children, identical twins, more similarly, just because they're identical twins.
And doing that more similarly in comparison with fraternal twins, that can actually produce biased estimates.
Most people argue upwardly biased estimates of the heritability or of the genetic influence.
And so a lot of social critics and those who are against genetic research hang their hat on this equal environments assumption and say, oh, it's ludicrous to believe that identical twins' environments wouldn't be more similar than fraternal twins' environments.
And there's actually a good deal of research that's addressed this possibility, that's looked at it quite closely, and that has even looked at it in a way so that, well, let me back up, so they've looked at it to see Whether, in fact, the differences in environments between identical twins and fraternal twins, whether those differences are due to things that are external to the individual or whether they're the result of genetic influences.
And so if two identical twins both excel, say, at sports, we're going to see the parents probably pour more resources into sports for these identical twins than they would for fraternal twins.
Where one twin excels at sports and the other doesn't like them at all.
And so in that case, people said, well, look, the Equal Environments Assumption is violated, right?
Because they're treating their identical twins more similarly than their fraternal twins.
But since it sort of emanates from the individual, that's not a violation of the EEA.
So it's a little more complex than just looking and saying, oh, identical twins are treated more similarly.
But in short, that's one of the key assumptions of twin-based research.
There are other assumptions as well, but those are typically not talked about because they would reduce heritability.
And so most of the people that have a problem with behavioral genetic research designs are sociologists or those individuals who are against a genetic influence.
So they're only going to focus on the assumptions where they can say, well, look, all these heritability estimates are overly biased.
And so what happens?
Was in our flagship journal, the American Society of Criminology's flagship journal was called Criminology, a paper was published.
It was a non-quantitative paper.
It was really nothing more than an editorial.
It was written by a couple sociologists.
And they took the task, basically all the work that's been done by bio-social criminologists, including myself, and said that all of it's wrong.
All of this research is wrong because the studies violate the Equal Environments Assumption.
They had no data.
They've never published with twin data.
They brought up nothing new.
They actually cited one study or one individual, I think it was 75 times, and they basically just borrowed all of their work and just cited that.
And they concluded by saying that we should ban all genetic research from criminology.
They didn't say ban, they said that we should put an end to all heritability studies that use twins.
And they also said the same thing for adoptees and so on.
So this was published last year.
It was published without being reviewed by any expert in behavioral genetics.
The reviewers were not knowledgeable in behavioral genetic designs, and the editors of Criminology did a relatively poor job of trying to, in any way, vet it so that it was a study that could be defensible.
Because there are issues.
I mean, there is no such thing as a perfect research design.
But when we move so far as to say, hey, let's ban research, let's put an end to research, and then we publish that in a flagship journal, flagship journal of criminology, sends a message to the rest of the field that there's something wrong with this body of research.
And so myself and about five of my former students and one of my colleagues, we wrote a response.
And that's what you're picking up on, demonstrating the validity of twin research.
We wrote a response.
We used data.
We used simulated data.
We showed that the Equal Environments Assumption, violating the Equal Environments Assumption, at most, probably inflates heritability by about .05.
So, if the heritability assumption is .5 and we violate the EEA, the heritability is probably really .45.
But we also looked at some of the assumptions that would down sort of deflate heritability and found evidence that those would or deflate heritability by about 0.05.
And so they tend to cancel each other out and we're left with a heritability estimate that's quite accurate in the research. - Okay, okay.
Now, just one last question, Dr. Beaver.
Obviously, I hate to drag researchers into any kind of policy debate or question, and I recognize the sensitivity of all of that.
And my bias, which I hope is not completely biased, is I tend to come from a skepticism, a great skepticism, of social engineering projects to raise IQ across the board for poor people or various groups.
But what are your thoughts about the degree to which external social programs can change the kind of data that you're studying?
So, the extent to which they can change IQ?
Yeah.
The social programs designed to change... Yeah, the Head Start programs and the programs that are designed to try and close gaps in IQ to sort of squish down the bell curve.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know of any reliable data or study that's been published, you know, and replicated showing that these types of social programs have any significant effect on achieving increases in IQ or reducing disparities.
I think it'd be a great thing to be able to change IQ only for the positive.
So to be able to elevate people's IQ and sort of make things more equal.
But I haven't seen any data published where that's the case.
And if it has been published, it might be a single study.
I've never seen it replicated.
So I'm very skeptical of sinking billions of dollars into these programs if our intent is to raise IQ scores and to decrease or decrease the disparities that might exist.
These programs might be good for other reasons, but when it comes to intelligence, I don't see it as having much of an effect, any effect at all.
Yeah, and just because I'm sure I'll get deluged with studies that show this, there have been studies, to my knowledge, that show a short-term increase in test scores, but shortly after the children leave these programs, like within a year or two, the test scores tend to sink down to where they were before the program started.
So, I think I'm fully aware, and maybe you can back me up on this, that there are studies that show short-term increases, but they don't tend to be sustainable over the course of childhood.
Right.
And you know, much of that is likely the result of sort of teaching to the test or test, you know, learning about that's not IQ per se.
It's getting at sort of a testing ability.
If we could accurately measure G, right, and do it in a way or intelligence in a way that isn't sort of teaching to the test, but really just measuring and quantifying raw intellectual power.
I've never seen a study that does that and as you mentioned, that has a long-term effect.
And that has even a meaningful substantive effect.
I mean, we might see something where, you know, a study shows a two or three IQ point gain, but is two or three IQ points even all that meaningful?
I don't know if we would even be able to detect it in everyday life, but someone who has an IQ of 115 versus 113, I don't know that it's meaningful.
But yeah, there certainly can be short-term gains on certain types of tests, but nothing long-term and nothing where we're radically changing individuals.
Because the two or three IQ points isn't going to be all that meaningful.
But really, I think what these programs would want is to take someone who has an IQ of, say, 75 and get their IQ score up to 95.
And I've never seen anything like that.
Yeah, it's a great shame.
And there is a kind of heartbreaking element to it because we do like the idea of the malleability of humanity to, especially in a democracy, wherever we get the vote that we could try and get people not necessarily take down the high points of IQ, but at least push up the lower points of IQ.
But it doesn't seem to be that's where the biology and the genetics point is.
So, I just, I mean, we'll obviously link to the work in this show.
I just wanted to express my sincere appreciation for you dabbling in challenging data and challenging material.
There is, as Charles Murray has pointed out, this is quite a deal of hostility flowing out towards people who are following the data towards the significant influence of genetics.
But, you know, I'm very much an empiricist that you follow the data wherever the data leads and try and put aside as much as possible ideological preferences.
I think you've done a very admirable job just looking at it from the layperson outside.
And I just wanted to express my appreciation for you pursuing this line of inquiry, despite the fact that it can ruffle some feathers.
Well, thanks.
And for what it's worth, I think there are very few empiricists in university life, particularly in the social sciences.
I think much of it is just ideological and publishing towards certain outcomes.
Thank you very much.
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