Good Entropy

Nature, nurture and noise » Gene Expression

The basic problem with the interpretation above is that it limits “innate” influences to “genetic” ones. Just because some trait is not genetic does not mean it is not innate. If we are talking about how the brain gets wired, any number of prenatal environmental factors are known to have large effects. More interestingly, however, and probably a greater source of variance across the population, is intrinsic developmental variation. Wiring the brain is a highly complex procedure, reliant on cellular processes that are, in engineering terms, inherently “noisy”. Running the programme from the same starting point (a specific genotype) does not generate exactly the same output (the phenotype) every time. The effects of this noise are readily apparent at the anatomical level, when examining the impact of specific mutations, for example. In many cases, the phenotypic consequences are quite variable between genetically identical organisms, or even on two sides of the same brain. (If you want to see direct evidence of such developmental variation, take a directly face-on photograph of yourself, cut it in half and make mirror-image copies of the left and right sides. You will be amazed how different the two resultant faces are).

From Megan McCardle

In a discussion of the causes of the Financial Crisis:

Confirmation bias: The tendency to look for data that confirms your theory, rather than data that falsifies it. Yes, we all know how this works in politics, but it’s a much broader problem. People will repeatedly devise tests that give positive proofs of their theories, but much less often devise tests to falsify them.

And this harmonious chord from Hamming referencing Darwin:

Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind.

The series of posts by these three authors illustrates, in microcosm, the melange of criticism commonly marshaled against mainstream science on intelligence in order to seem to discredit it without actually engaging its large interlocking body of evidence. Indeed, the criticism succeeds precisely by avoiding such engagement. There are two general strategies for avoiding the totality of relevant evidence: (1) create doubt about some small portion of it as if that isolated doubt nullified the totality of evidence, and (2) put unwelcome evidence off-limits by labeling it immoral or ill-motivated.

The game here is not to suppress discussion of genetic differences but to suppress knowledge of phenotypic differences. The latter make the former more plausible, so the specter of genetic causation is used as a club to beat back scientific knowledge about racial disparities in developed abilities, whatever their origins.

Original Article here
More thoughts by Linda S. Gottfredson

from The IQ Conundrum at Cato Unbound

FOXP2 and the Evolution of Language

This article addresses the history and the significance of the discovery of the relevance of FOXP2 in the development of speech. It is a remarkable scientific detective story that has been in the making for some time. In its earlier stages, there was serious disagreement within the scientific community about how the scientific findings should be interpreted, and this was set against a background of sensationalist reporting by the popular press.

and further on…

Human mind needs human cognition and human cognition relies on human speech. We cannot envisage humanness without the ability to think abstractly, but abstract thought requires language. This finding confirms that the molecular basis for the origin of human speech and, indeed, the human mind, is critical. Ultimately, we will find great insight from further unravelling the evolutionary roots of human speech – in contrast to Noam Chomsky’s lack of interest in this subject