Energy

I

I ran into my sister-in-law, then my brother, at indoor lacrosse this week.  We don’t see them much but it is always a pleasure. Yet at nearly every encounter something is said which highlights for me how different that side of the family is from mine. No recitation of the words and description of facial expressions would reveal to an outsider what I mean by that.  Yet many of you will recognise the phenomenon from your own families.

I became a cat in a dog family when my mother remarried. (I hate cats and would like to stick them with that side of the description, but they are dog people and very good ones, so it would be unfair.) Such introductions are usually a prelude to criticising relatives, however subtly, in the manner of a 19^thC novelist gaining revenge on those who did him wrong.  20^th C too, come to think of it.  If anything, this is the opposite.  Twenty years ago, I would have made an effort to show that my microculture, my tribe, had superior qualities, illustrated by anecdotes that put them in a bad light, however subtly.  My review is more mixed now.

Describing one microculture versus another lends itself to phrasing that sounds critical.  If I say “they don’t tend to be a reflective people,” that sounds just a touch disdainful in my culture.  Yet I am increasingly convinced that much of the reflectiveness in my A& H culture is a waste of time.  Only in the minds of a few does reflection actually produce much of value.  For the rest, it is mostly dreaminess, rationalisation, rumination.  That trait is essential to the survival of all tribes, but like most traits, a lot of it lies around in the population without visible positive effect.  Thus, not being “reflective,” means one has energy left over to do other things.  Which my stepfamily does, and very well.

I should note that I consider such qualities to be largely hardwired, though both the reflectives and the actives believe the others could be like them if they “just tried.”

II

Steve Sailer notes that we have excellent and numerous ways of measuring intelligence, but none for “energy,” which is perhaps equally important;

My father is 94. He never smoked, drank only moderately, and comes from a high energy family that needs to be moving all the time. His nephew, my hippie cousin, for example, was an organic farmer for decades, and now that he has a desk job, he spends about 25 hours a week at the gym. When my cousin came for a visit to his parents in Arcadia, CA, at the age of 51, he hiked to the top of Mt. Wilson, a 5,000 foot ascent, every day for two weeks. It's unfortunate that social scientists don't seem to have a reliable quick test of energy the way they have tests of intelligence, since it's obvious that energy differs widely among individuals and is important in influencing life outcomes.

I have said “adaptability, switching sets” will be the ability that will knock intelligence off its perch as most important going forward; most self-help business strategies have ideas of focus and discipline at their core.  Those who succeed often credit hard work, and there is certainly a great deal of truth in that, however much data that overlooks and self-congratulating it sounds.  I think there is a strong relatedness to these described qualities, and I agree we do not measure them well.  They don’t present similarly.  The manic hustle of the entrepreneur looks nothing like the more linear focus of my stepfamily (they never dabble in anything, they either do or don’t do) but I think there is some commonality.  There is a personal energy in them that is not merely cultural and trained, but seems present from birth.  Culture and values reinforce this and refine it, but it is simply visble in them from the start.

Nor is it a single, off-on quality among even those who have it, but a continuum.

My mother used to say that my stepfather was unable to do nothing. Mind and body were always working.  Not plodding – he was too sharp for that word to apply – but dogged, certainly. He had few activities outside of work, but those few received due focus and attention in their time.  He acquired more activities the longer he was married to my mother and our culture.  He was Connecticut Yankee, whose many family lines had come to Hartford and New Haven in the 17^th C and generally prospered – none spectacularly, but many significantly. They seek prosperity and security, but great wealth doesn’t seem to hold much temptation for them.

They are the heart of the Business Tribe, certainly.  All traits need to be found in all tribes for anyone to produce anything of value, but there are skill sets more common in one group than another.  I am quite puzzled over the whole issue of focus and direction for this energy.  The Arts & Humanities Tribe*, whatever my criticism of us, displays far more focus over short bursts than the Business Tribe – a laser intensity for hours in rehearsal, editing, and performance.  At the other end of the spectrum, the Science & Technology Tribe is simply legendary for ability to put in 100-hour weeks for weeks or months to bring a project to fruition.

Perhaps that is its own answer – those who can switch their focus, not in distraction but by design, are the ones who use their energy most efficiently.  Again, I’m not sure one can change oneself by simply deciding to.  We can bend ourselves somewhat at need, but I doubt not permanently. Dei Gratia Sumus Quod Sumus By the grace of God, we are what we are. (motto of the prior borough of Barking, in London.)

*Upon further review.  Only Arts, not Humanites, for that manic intensity.

III

Some thoughts about athletics.

People will claim that sports develop disciplined effort – Benjamin Spock states definitely that “Crew made me,” giving him the discipline he needed to make it through med school.  Others will say that sports simply reveal it.  Let us grant that there are different sports requiring different skills, and that most or all virtues that sports teach could be learned elsewhere – in scouts, in music, in part-time jobs.

Nonetheless, there is correlation between athletics and energy, fairly obviously, and the further connection to the Business Tribe may not be simply a case of Old Boys’ Network in play. Athletics does not create the energy, and may not be uniquely good at developing discipline.  But teenage participation in athletics may be an indicator that the person has the requisite energy.  This connection between adolescent sports and adult status seems stronger in the white, black, and native communities, less pronounced in the hispanic, Asian, and Jewish communities. These latter groups may in the past have participated largely to obtain status in majority-white communities.

All sorts of people participate in youth athletics, and there are many ways to succeed.  I don’t think there has ever been much of an automatic ticket that youth sports punches for later success.  Rather, they may both result from the same quality of disciplined energy.  I wonder if reflexes and hand-eye coordination are even more specific correlates. Successful adults get together for all manner of activities – it was clubs, bowling, and bridge in the 50’s,  – but in business, golf predominates with racquet sports second. Skiing, far more of a suburban upwardly-mobile pursuit than skating or snowmachines, is a reflex, controlled aggression sport, and foot-eye coordination may be identical to hand-eye. (What other sports do business gravitate toward in non-snow areas?)

IV

The mention of athletics comes in because my stepfamily excels at them – sorry I didn’t make that explicit.  Multisport, All-State, several were DII or DIII All-Americans.  They largely drop those after college and switch to golf, with some tendency for women to ski.  Their sports of choice were lacrosse, baseball, hockey, basketball, soccer – all team, all hand-eye.  But though it was their pattern which spurred this line of thought, I was specifically excluding them while writing the last section, not wanting a dozen individuals to be my sample set.  I am casting about in my mind among the people I remember from school, those my boys went to school with (and their parents), folks I work with or go to church with now, folks I have read about.  I would greatly appreciate all of you doing the same, reflecting – hey, that’s our culture, right? – on your own families and coworkers.  I’m trying to build a theory here. I am operating from the traditional view that this energy - this gumption, this pep, this moxie, vim & vigor, dynamism, get-up-and-go, animal spirits – is more pronounced in America than elsewhere, and one of our defining traits. 

These sorts tend to marry each other, correct?  A man from the Business Tribe may take a Science & Technology or Arts & Humanities wife, yet is she ever one of the driven obsessive or dreamy reflective ones?

Socially, are they all over the map in tendency?  Do we see the same percentage of the garrulous, the standoffish? How does the energy play out socially?

Evolution - Creationism Series

Reposted from July 2010. Nothing new to see here, but folks might like the review.

Creationism and Politics
There are some interesting practical considerations, however, and that might be fun. (For me, that’s who.) Volokh Conspiracy recently had a thread about a 7D creationist running for political office, and whether that should be an automatic disqualifier. As an evangelical and an evolutionist, the question interests me.

Thought Experiment: Genesis and Science
If the first eleven chapters had somehow gone missing for centuries and were only recently rediscovered, it would be academics telling Christians they should accept them gladly, and the fundamentalists who would resist this most strongly.

Evolution and Young-Earth Creationism
Impressions Versus Science

If you bing, google, or yahoo up “first humans” you get a collection of estimates of upright figures who lived somewhere further than 2 million years ago. Artistic images from the Olduvai and Laetoli discoveries likewise show bipedal creatures, a bit hairier than us, heads a little different, but clearly meant to emphasise their similarity to us. They hold hands. They look off to the horizon. I will call this the National Geographic impression, as that is the popular-culture representative of the textbooks and educational videos which teach that view.

Evolution and Young-Earth Creationism 1A
Journal entries for grad student assigned to watch earth develop.
2,100,000 years. No change to report. This batch got smarter than the other apes and then stopped dead. I think we should drop humans as a study.

2,200,000 years. There might be some hints of progress here, but I'm probably imagining things because I want to see it. Hope springs eternal in the Martian gazorninplat and all that.

Evolution and Young Earth Creationism 2
It was pretty clear what I was driving at with the contrast between the National Geographic 2M+ years impression of the origin of humanity versus the Genesis impression. For 97% of that 2,300,000 years, those creatures didn’t have sophisticated language as we know it.

Rapid Language Development
There are lots of genetic and cultural foundations to language that likely developed in spurts over time. Yet some final genetic piece seems to have been a tipping point that sent communication from primitive to complex very rapidly

Founding Population
We pulled the beginning of behaviorally modern humans from over 2 million years ago down to something like 50,000 - perhaps even 10,000 years ago. But there are other objections to the Genesis account. It narrows the founding population to two people, Adam and Eve, for example

Location, Location, Location
When we compared anatomically modern humans (minimum 2M years ago) to behaviorally modern humans (max 60K years ago), I gave a hint that even stricter definitions of behaviorally modern humans might bring our definition even closer than the important dividing line of the emergence of language. Because Ice Ages forced the widely-spread peoples into now-tropical areas, we seemed to learn to interact more peacefully about 18,000 years ago.

Impossible Things
We change our thinking not because we find one impossible thing in our old beliefs, but because we find too many


To Correct Impressions
As historian Paul Johnson notes, both the Wellhausen (Critical Method, Documentary Hypothesis) followers and the fundamentalists had a comforting simplicity to their ideas: The fundamentalists that the Bible was always literally true word for word, the scholars that it never was.

Maybe The Schools Are Okay

Whenever I'm linking to Sailer or VDare, people might already be prepared to wince, because it tends to be info that if true, we might keep quiet about anyway. I absolutely get that. People have decent, kind, smart, hardworking friends who they don't want to come even close to offending. They would poke out an eye before letting a friend think "Does he really think that about...me?" But there are local policy decisions all over the country that flow from this. Improving schools is good, but punishing teachers and schools for wrong reasons doesn't get us very far. We have had repeated national panics and complaints as long as I can remember about the schools, and all the bad, stupid stuff we doing.

Yet what if our schools are doing a better job than any other country in the world, but we are just measuring wrongly? What if all those other countries aren't eating our lunch? What if we were #1, or at least consistently in the top few, in educating our children? Wouldn't our rhetoric and solutions be different?

Here are the data on the primary international test. The short version (qualifiers below) is that Asian-American students outscore Asian countries/regions; White American students outscore all those white European countries: American Hispanics outscore all Latin American countries; African-Americans outscore African and Caribbean nations.

 Qualifiers: Shanghai, and sometimes Singapore and one of the coastal provinces of China are roughly the same as Asian-Americans, who are largely descended from those areas.

Finland and New Zealand may be a little ahead of white Americans.

No African nations compete, so the comparison data is sketchy. But as best as we can tell, African Americans outscore all other blacks in the world, probably by a large margin.

Maybe Sailer is wrong, badly wrong, not just because we don't like the implications but because he has made major errors. Fine, then. But if he's even close to right, then what are all these federal initiatives and school programs even about? And why are are we forever kicking millions of teachers teachers as if they have made some major screwups, letting down the nation and the kids, if it's just not true?

 Interesting tidbit: the Finnish schools are apparently very laid back, the NE Asian schools rigorous and intense, but both produce excellent students.

Identical Twins

There is currently a run on articles trying to generally invalidate the idea of identical twins. Steve Sailer, predictably, is all over the issue, and notices some of the undercurrent motives.

Over the last few decades, Galton's older half-cousin Charles Darwin has been promoted from secular sainthood to his current role as the Jesus of Atheists. But, the rise of Darwininsm in prestige has not been an unmitigated blessing to the world, so Galton has come to play the role of scapegoat, or devil. Since Darwin, the secular redeemer, is, by definition, above sin, all sins associated with Darwinism must be the fault of the designated devil, Galton.

Sailer, among others, are noting that these genetic differences between identical twins are not especially important in terms of the research we use twin-ness for. Related links at his site.

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Miller and Kanazawa

I really wanted to love this book. I was hoping for the latest in evolutionary biology research – it’s got that; I wanted it in summary form, without all the arguments about methodology and who’s the current fair-haired child in the field – it is that; I was hoping for clear and even clever prose – it’s got that, too.

It’s got all the main things I wanted. Why then, would I give it only three-and-a-half stars?

Evolutionary biology has an overriding weakness, as a field. All its evidence is necessarily indirect, and involves a fair bit of guesswork. I write this as one who believes their way of looking at human behavior has a great deal to offer – certainly more than the “everything is cultural” liturgies we were made to recite when I was in college. (The authors suggest that this is still the dominant philosophy in the social sciences.) Much of what we do now derives from adaptive patterns that worked well in a hunter-gatherer context, but are more ambiguously useful now. Mate-selection and sexual behavior have attracted most of the attention in the field, but family structure, trading and trust behavior, and even political and religious attitudes have been examined in terms of evolutionary biology.

But this book is a bit too far over-the-top in its insistence on biology. It declares that evolution essentially stopped 10,000 years ago – I think there is ample evidence that’s not true; It makes a big deal out of slight differences, as in the book’s title research, which reveals one of those 51-49 important-over-time divergences that don’t illuminate much of our daily life;* it accepts highly-suspicious numbers at face value to bolster its claims. For example, it accepts for 90% of the book the dubious claim that 10-30% of American children have different fathers than are claimed on their birth certificate, before acknowledging just at the end that the 4% number suggested by better research is the more probable.

Flowing from the indirect evidence is an even greater weakness, a willingness to accept just-so stories as the most likely explanation for a behavior unless someone can disprove it. Thus, Beautiful People has a lovely, entirely plausible evolutionary explanation of how religion came to be. But Nicholas Wade’s Before The Dawn reports an entirely different, equally plausible explanation. They are not quite mutually exclusive, but they have nothing to do with each other. Evolutionary biology abounds with these stories, that just make sense explaining everything. Sometimes they do. Sometimes further research on related topics confirms the original explanation repeatedly.

Sometimes not, and the just-so story fades into oblivion, with all the claim-makers whistling innocently that they were nowhere near the place. Weakness of the field. (See Dubbahdee’s comment under Wayfinding for another example of a possible, plausible, but perhaps completely bogus explanation.

My other complaint is that the book takes too long to get airborne. If you need an introduction to the basic concepts of evolutionary biology, plus some strong arguments why the cultural explanations don’t hold, then the first 70 pages won’t annoy you. I was expecting more, and they annoyed me. Though it was fun to see the myths of Margaret Mead, the Gentle Tasaday, and Chief Seattle exploded back-to-back-to-back.


*The Wymans had four generations of sons only – we’re not pretty, but we’ve worked hard at upgrading the stock for beauty the last three generations – and now we’ve got daughters dominant (exclusive, in my line). So I was particularly interested in what the title was all about. Pretty minor correlation.

How We Give Directions

We have long noted that men tend to give directions, and perceived routes in terms of an overhead map, while women tend to prefer navigation by landmarks. It's not a pure situation - I'd say it's about 80-20. My oldest son prefers landmarks, I know women who prefer overhead. But the difference is pronounced enough that when giving directions, my wife will give directions to a female, I will give them to a male.

I have not found in the scientific literature this exact characterisation, but the strongly related distinction of using cardinal directions versus landmarks is common. It may even be a more accurate distinction than the one I stumbled upon on my own.

Family history.
Jonathan and Ben are remarkably similar in abilities. Yet there was a sharp difference in the math scores of their standardised tests, which Jonathan attributes to doing poorly on spatial reasoning. As he is noticeably less comfortable with maps, this seems plausible. But we had a recent conversation that demonstrated that he has spatial memory of the landmark sort far in excess of what I can do. His memory for the layout of the church we attended 1987-91 or thereabouts was far superior to mine. In fact, I could recall only one feature of the lower floor, while he "walked about" in it effortlessly. The literature suggests were I to see it again I would find my way easily. But I am unable to recreate it. I find, in fact, that my remote memory for interior spaces is quite poor. I can only envision them by indirection: reasoning from outside appearance what must be inside, coupled with hazy recollections of single objects, building back and forth from such clues. Cheats, really. Tricks. Houses I lived in. Schools I went to. There is no interior space from my childhood that I can recreate by entering a door and walking accurately through the place.

So it's interesting that one method is considered the better by the people who make up tests, though each has places of superiority. It's not entirely arbitrary. As travel and need for distance navigation increased - and it was primarily males who made the trips - the need for this overhead mapping would be increasingly favored. It is more abstract. In terms of moving civilisation forward, it's smarter. But there is a cost, because using that ability tends to make local navigation weaker.

Landmark navigation is done much better when it is conscious, ticking off sights in the mind as they pass, but apparently a good deal goes on without effort as well. Over time, the schema builds itself. Landmark is far superior on a small scale.



One of the difficulties of navigation turns out to be switching sets, whether that is switching from landmark to cardinals or switching scale in either. For example, when going on a long highway trip I am using map/cardinal directions almost exclusively. But if I get off at an exit in search of gas or food I am thrown into a different scale. If the distance to the Cracker Barrel is less than a mile and involves few turns, I just automatically stay with landmarks, going in and out by signage, without converting it to overhead in a different scale. But as I go further down the secondary route and no Cracker Barrel has shown up, I waver, I hover between choices. I have not been creating an intentional landmark map - has my automatic landmarking been sufficient to get me back? Or should I switch to a new, small-scale cardinal? Further complicating the event might be the parking lot and entrance into the little four-business cluster which includes the Cracker Barrel, which is on an even smaller scale. Yes, I can see back where I come from, but I will get turned around twice, and as I come back to the highway, I might no longer have an intuitive sense which direction I am supposed to take it. Landmarks and cardinals have interfered with each other.

We learned the neighborhoods we grew up in entirely by landmark. My last one, in high school, I had actually already had in my overhead map before arriving, but the landmarking, far more useful on a smaller scale, overwrote the old data. The earlier neighborhoods are intimate landmark-memory sections inserted into a larger overhead now. At the fringes, my navigation-storage hovers back and forth.

If I were to color on an overhead map what childhood areas I have stored in landmark form, it would not be a circle or region, but individual streets only: between the route to my grandmother's and the route to the library there are many streets that I walked occasionally, or looked up those avenues while walking a usual route, but they are mostly stored in overhead grid in my memory. Landmarks stop abruptly at the Y, at church, at Bunny's Superette. After that it is terra incognita. At those spots I switch to overhead.

The term used in research is Wayfinding, and there are discussions of You Are Here maps, gender differences, relying on GPS, routefinding improvement, and a dozen other byways. The types of navigation are also called egocentric and allocentric, sans the connotations they have in discussions of social phenomena. I'll have some fun with these in the next post. Uh, a future post. For now, I've given all of you plenty to think about and comment on. I'll bet your guesses anticipate some of what I'll be mentioning from the research.

Incest and DNA

My son in Nome, referencing another grim situation that has come across his screen, said that the joke about the villages is that a virgin is defined as a girl who can run faster than her father. “The Villages” means almost entirely Native populations, Yupik and Inuit. I had heard the sad joke about other places many times – first, I think, about the peninsula counties of Maryland in the 18th C, though the reference was to being able to run faster than one’s uncle. The accusation has been made about Appalachian areas as long as I can remember (though those often took the form of cousin-marriage jokes), and I am starting to hear that incest is distressingly common in some African groups recently coming to America. There were towns and village sections of NH that were rumored to be incest-ridden – being familiar with the dark side of social histories in this state over the last 35 years, I can confirm that some of the rumors, at least, are true. (I have no sense there is any ethnic difference, BTW.) I had only heard of brother-sister incest in professional settings, never in news stories or general discussion, but that is being acknowledged recently. We have long known that step-relatives are far more risk to children than blood relatives, and the data are bearing this out.

We have lived in a swirl of rumor with little data all these years, and the excesses of recovered or implanted memory have added to the confusion. We have speculated whether certain cultures are more prone to incest, but our knowledge has been so limited that this has been irresponsible. I have suspicions on that score, but disbelieve them myself. We have identified some common themes that seem to be holding up – that older siblings are more likely to perpetrate on brothers and sisters when no father is present; that father-daughter incest is more common when the mother is unavailable, depressed, or loses to her daughter in some competition for power in the family; we have wondered whether particular dislocations of culture, such as expulsion or refugee status, create an increase because of the thoroughness of family breakdown, though that is only theory.

That drug and especially alcohol abuse co-occur is one of the strands of information we actually do know with confidence at present.

We are about to start knowing the answers to these questions. And some among us are going to be harmed by it and fight to insist it isn’t true. If whites of certain groups or subcultures show up badly, expect an increasing in them pointing out terrible things that black or Hispanic people do – unless of course there are subgroups of blacks or hispanics exposed under the same light. This will be knowledge we don’t want to have, but we will have it. I don’t know whether we’ll be able to disguise the truths on this one.

One note on how cultures that are either prone to such breakdowns or have such breakdown thrust upon them have been able to survive darwinian selection, given that more children with disabilities would seem to decrease group survival: think of it as natural selection in high gear, if tribes leave the weak behind. There will be little or no greater chance of exceptionally good genes for survival, but the bad genes will be expressed rather than being carried in secret, and weak lines culled. Rather chilling, even if one is considering our ancestors of 100,000 years ago. We may all have benefited from it.

Another Conversation

This time I would like to connect you to a conversation. Steve Sailer had two posts related to his review of Francis Fukuyama's new The Origins of Political Order, plus comment on the research on poverty and "depletable willpower" in an article at The New Republic. (Bird Dog at Maggie's linked to that earlier this week as well.) These posts included links to two fascinating sites I was previously unfamiliar with - hbd chick and Steve Hsu's Information Processing blog.

From sailer's original:

Unfortunately, Fukuyama never gets around to wrestling with the obvious question that has been central to the study of ethnic nepotism since Hamilton made explicit the genetic basis of tribal altruism in a 1975 paper: Who, exactly, are your kin? Where do your relatives end? The answer is: It depends. You grapple with this same question in your daily life, where the answers turn out to depend upon circumstance

hbd chick suggests that the forbidding of cousin marriage by the Roman Catholic church, centuries ago, contributed mightily to the greater cooperation among peoples and the expanded boundaries of what people considered "their tribe." This led to ultimately to ideas of nationhood founded on something other than relatively local blood ties. She references this a lot on her site, but perhaps it is best to start here, on the disappearance of European tribes.

Browsing her site, she also links to people kicking Steven Jay Gould, and discusses the weaknesses of moral arguments about what is "fair" in who lives on what land. My kind of blogger. And Sailer is also kicking Gould for the same reason this week, as is anthropologist John Hawks, who I have linked to before.


Hsu's site speaks to intelligence testing, racial differences - with an
emphasis on asian vs white - wealth distribution, the personality needed
for startups and the crossover dribble in basketball, Yeah, I'm in the right
territory with this guy, too.

And a really good site leads you pretty quickly to excellent commenters, to other sites, asf. I'll be browsing these for awhile,

Skills To Teach

My wife put me on to this article at Tweenteacher describing what skills "business and college leaders" think should be taught for College and Career Readiness. It's not a bad looking list at first glance, and while folks might well argue whether other skills should be added, it's hard to argue with the Top 5 she whittled her list of 13 down to

Collaboration
Communication
Problem-Solving
Questioning
Independent Learning

Yet as I read the essay, reflecting on my growing conviction over the years that genetic and prenatal influences are far more determinative of human outcomes than we used to credit, I wondered if the whole article exaggerated the importance of what a middle-school teacher contributes to the final product.

The next question is, are teachers at least using these 5 in their everyday lesson planning? And if so, how? The key is to use these skills to promote content in lesson planning, note taking, and assessments.

Over the next few weeks I’ll share some lessons that you can do to address these skills and for you to mull over for Someday or use on Monday. Hope you’ll share some of your lessons with me and my readers in this thread as well. After all, collaboration is a key future skill and one that must be modeled by the teachers in the room.

I commented there, and expand upon it here.

This is not What Should Be Taught. This is a list of how we currently describe what bright, socially skilled, motivated students do already, and the businesses and colleges are telling us no more than “Hey, we’d like to have bright, motivated, socially skilled students. Make us more of those.” Most good students will pick up a lot of these skills on their own even with bad teachers. Even good teachers will have a hard time bringing these forth from dull, unmotivated students.

We all like to think what we do is important, perhaps even crucial or life-changing. It helps us get up in the morning and plow into the day's work even when we feel dull and unmotivated ourselves. Teaching is valuable and should be done well. But I think it is valuable primarily for the 10% of students whose life course is in doubt. Many will succeed in bad schools, many will fail in good ones. Guaranteeing them enough safety to concentrate, enough materials to have something to put their brains to work, and enough skill and good will from the adults to keep from damaging them, and the school has done 90% of its work. It is valuable to move even a small percentage of those from F's to D's, or from C's to B's, by better instruction. But moving kids from F's to C's, or C's to A's? That's rarer, and I think well less than 10%. Retrospective anecdotes tell us that some teacher rescued or ruined us by something they said or did. Eh, probably not.

I give the Buddha credit on this one. When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

That IQ Research

I am sure that Steve Sailer is more thorough and more clever in reviewing the IQ research reported yesterday, but I am disciplining myself to do this without assistance.

The quote at the end of the article tells you what you need to know about the rest of the research. This is where she wanted to go all along:

Instead of limiting ourselves to narrow standardized tests, we might seek as well directly to assess motivation as well as creativity, practical skills, wisdom, and even ethics. If we did, we might find our society advancing to levels of economic productivity and, for that matter, well-being that we previously believed to be out of reach.

Yes, and boo'ful kitties as well.

I have little doubt that the study tells us a little something, but not quite what Duckworth thinks. That motivation influences scores is rather obvious, but perhaps it does need to be studied and teased apart a bit. Here's the thing: high motivation doesn't raise one's score much, but low motivation can certainly depress it. Thus, when the films are reviewed for sign of ebbing interest, they are picking up the losses. If one transfers thinking about this over to athletics, my statement about motivation becomes clearer. A good athlete, with training, he might cut as much as minute off his time in the mile run. If motivated by a coach, a drill instructor, a competitor, or a corny movie, might cut 10, 20 seconds off his best time during that training, especially at the beginning. And that's it.

But a less good athlete can lose a lot more than a minute by being unmotivated. He can slow to a jog, or even a walk, completing the task only for politeness or because others are yelling. In fact, it will usually be the less good athletes who do this, and the poor athletes most of all. The bad singers will get quieter, try to turn invisible, not show for practice. Unskilled artists will try to just get out with a dashed-off sketch. People like succeeding at things, and so keep doing things they are good at. Things they aren't good at, they will focus on less, unless there is some other draw - social, monetary, guilt.

This is surprising? Is this the great new knowledge in understanding IQ scores, that the kids with 120 IQ and above will fight for every point, while the kids at 85 may blow off subtests they are particularly bad at and drop to 81?

It seems a strawman that Duckworth is arguing against, that there were people who viewed IQ tests like a Sorting Hat, a smart-o-meter that reads your brain wand the dial hits a number installed at birth? Has she met such folks? There are people who take the stability of IQ more seriously, much more seriously, than Duckworth does, and have evidence to back it up. She hasn't dented their view with this.

Kenyan Distance Runners

Evidence accumulates that there are slight genetic advantages of Kenyans from the Rift Valley which help them run better at distance. These include less bulky calves and ankles, more slow-twitch fibers in their muscles, and (somewhat relatedly) more efficient use of oxygen by the muscles. West Africans, in contrast, are seen as having some genetic advantages that make them better in explosive strength sports, such as sprinting or jumping.

It bothers some people no end that there might be genetic advantages in one group versus another, because who knows where that might lead? So they go to great lengths to prove that all differences are environmental. This can lead to ridiculous claims. The study's data points screamingly points to genetic factors, which for some unexplainable reason, the article insists are environmental factors.

That said, it pays to be clear exactly what "genetic factors" mean.

1. At an elite level, even slight advantages may be great.
2. Traits we regard as under our control, such as tenacity, coachability, or pain threshold, might be just as heritable as calf size.

But most importantly, 3. Each of these traits is a single advantage, not a general advantage for "modern distance running." There has been no selection over the past 10,000 years for traits that will make you "travel across the ocean and run specific distances on the flat in special shoes." There are any number of traits that could be advantageous in distance running, or any other sport. The Kenyans have a specific suite of tiny genetic advantages. Other combinations of genetic difference might work as well, or better. Frank Shorter had a VO2 maximum that exceeded that of the Kenyans. Put that together with one other genetic trait and it might be a world beater.

This has larger implications for all genetic differences between groups. A demonstrated advantage in reflexes, IQ, cold tolerance, stress tolerance, or nasal cuteness might be quite real, but not the whole story. Genes matter, and those who play the "follow your dreams" game of pretending otherwise are being viciously cruel to young people. But there is more than one way to skin some, if not all cats. A little wisdom, a little perspective, and something similar to the dream might be found.