Data: Current trends might be selecting for low self-discipline

In my view, people in the human biodiversity (HBD) community have a tendency to focus on the importance of IQ to the exclusion of other traits.  Don't get me wrong: general intelligence is IMPORTANT, but so are traits like conscientiousness. 

One reason why we don't write much about personality traits is that the science is not as developed. We typically have to rely on self-report data to measure personality, and such an approach has obvious limitations.

I agree with the view that educational level reflects conscientiousness as well as intelligence.  It's takes planning and self-discipline to stay in school and to spend so much time learning about topics that only we nerds find interesting.

Here's a bar graph depicting the current mean number of offspring for women ages 40-55 by years of education completed (General Social Survey, N = 1,443):

I assume that people with only a few years of education are immigrants from countries where this sort of thing is common.  Women with less than a high school education average more than three kids.  Compare this to the mean of 1.4 kids for those with 20 years of schooling.

Consciousness as well as IQ are heritable, so if I'm right that educational level reflects both, current social trends are selecting for low intelligence AND low self-discipline.  Not good.

The link between intelligence and cooperativeness

In a sample of almost 4,500 men, a positive correlation (.23) was observed between general intelligence and the general factor of personality (GFP). GFP captures one's ability to work well with others. According to the authors, general intelligence evolved to generate more resources while GFP evolved to secure a larger share of group resources.

The positive correlation suggests four types of people, two of which are more common and two of which are less uncommon. The more frequent types are smart-cooperative and dull-uncooperative people. Less common are smart-uncooperative and dull-cooperative folks.   

Good God Almighty

Good God Almighty, you can't read a single paper around here without there being some hysterical witch hunt surrounding it.

Read here about the controversy over Nyborg's paper that I described in the last post. 

It seems that the paper gave the ladies of the Arhus University Committee the vapors.  

The book burners never sleep.  

UPDATE: Here's an eloquent letter of support from Steven Pinker. And one by Henry Harpending.

Are men smarter than women?

According to the New York Times:

In a closely watched case, a sharply divided federal appeals court on Monday ruled 6-5 that a sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart could proceed as a class action for more than a million women. The suit is the biggest employment discrimination case in the nation’s history.

The evidence for discrimination that the plaintiffs offer is that while 65 percent of Walmart's hourly employees are women, only one-third of its managers are.

Let's pack it in and go home--I, for one, am convinced that Walmart places hatred of women above its desire to make a profit.

The Gods of Human Biodiversity must have been guiding my path today: I was in the middle of reading a research study on the male advantage in IQ when I heard about the lawsuit. 

For years I've assumed that men and women have the same average general intelligence. Why have I assumed this?  Because King Arthur Jensen told me so. In the g Factor. Now, I'm not so sure. 

In the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Danish researcher Helmuth Nyborg reviewed studies examining sex differences, and of the several methodological criteria set by Nyborg, only one study was adequate. Many of the criteria are technical, but the most compelling to me is that results depend a lot on the mix of subtests, some which favor males and some which favor females. The way around the problem is to maximize the number of subtests, which makes sense since general mental ability is supposed to penetrate a broad array of cognitive tasks.

The study that meets all of his requirements is by Colom et al. (2002) which gives a male advantage of 3.6 points. He then goes on to describe the results of his study based on two Danish samples--one of children and one of adults--where 20 subtests were given. (That's a lot). The male advantage in g for the kids was 3.15. When the adult sample was added to increase statistical power, the male advantage rose to 6.90 points.

Nyborg was then able to closely predict the observed sex gap in general intelligence with the sex difference in brain size (men have bigger brains--one-third of a standard deviation larger). The bigger brains give men 15 percent more neurons.  

Now a few IQ points doesn't seem like a big deal, but that gets magnified at the high end. Based on his Danish data, for every woman with an IQ of 145 or higher, you will get eight men.

We shouldn't be the least bit surprised to see men dominate the higher ranks of a large organization. And that's not even counting higher natural levels of ambition, competitiveness, and dominance.  

Makes me wonder about the sex of the plaintiff's lawyers.     


UPDATE: Dennis Mangan explains how biological differences explain lower pay for women here.