Intelligence, Genes & Piffle

         

The Sept 13 issue of the New Yorker carries an article about Kathryn Paige Harden, who has had a star quality academic career until she became embroiled in the tar pit of genes and intelligence.

It was mentioned early on, Dr. Harden had been admitted to college with a full scholarship because she had a perfect score on her SAT exams. It is remarkable how those who extol the meaningfulness of IQ exams or any exams almost always have scored high on those exams.

I am still trying to ascertain exactly what questions are asked on these exams.

Wouldn't it be important to know what the questions are to be able to judge how meaningful the exams may be? But it is almost as if if the makers of these tests reveal the questions, then the tests will lose their usefulness.

The original IQ tests originated in tests developed by some Harvard professors for use in assessing recruits during World War One. They were looking for good officers amidst the crowds of men surging in. The exams had questions like who discovered the principle of volume displacement, Archimedes or Galileo?  Now, if you'd gone to Exeter prep school or Harvard or Princeton, you might have run across this sort of information, but if you were just off the farm, or worked on automobiles, maybe not. So the Army got an officer corps of aristocrats. 

Intelligence, in the 1920's when immigration restrictions were passed into law mostly was defined by how much like White Protestant males the immigrants were.

Dr. Harden

For some groups, particularly on campuses, the idea that "intelligence" is predetermined by "genes" is an anathema because it means trying to improve the performance and outcomes for many individuals, and more worrisome, for many groups, may be impossible, no matter how much government or institutional money is spent.

The famous case is Carrie Buck (Buck v Bell) in which the Supreme Court ruled Ms. Buck should be subjected to surgery to sterilize her because she was deemed to be of low intelligence and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice famously remarked, "One generation of idiots is enough."

And then there is the book by Charles Murray, "The Bell Curve" in which intelligence was said to be fixed in nature, presumably genetic, and thus fixed at lower levels in certain racial groups and higher in others.  Arthur Jensen also chimed in with work which suggested genes among some races simply limited their intelligence. 

So, against that sorry history, when Dr. Harden started studying twins in hopes of assessing the roles of genes in intelligence, she found herself lumped in with those demonized predecessors. 

On one level, it is almost self evident that genes must play a role in intelligence: Consider the known genetic anomalies, Down's Syndrome being the most common and widely known, where genetic, or at least chromosomal abnormalities virtually always result in cognitive impairment. 

On the other hand, exactly which genes are affected in Down's which result in lower intelligence are unknown.

For that matter, what is a gene?

Anyone who has read Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book, "The Gene" will know that genes are regions of chromosomes which seem to have some geographic/anatomical features and so are discrete in that sense, but they work by producing proteins and there are so many interactions among genes and among things which are not quite genes which affect their function, it is not exactly like simply pulling and plugging in hardware in a computer.

And what, exactly, is the "intelligence" Dr. Harden is measuring?

What exactly are the tests? What are the questions on those tests?

When you test a 3 year old and she tests out as a "genius" does she continue to test at genius levels for the rest of her life?

What about the kid who tests below normal at age 3? Is he destined to never test high?

And how does problem solving or spatial relationships play in with memory?

My younger son turns out to have a prodigious memory. When he was six, in first grade, he listened at the reading  group circle and recited the text for each picture as if he were reading, and it was only a sharp teacher who realized when you presented him with the same text in a different book he had no idea. She straightened him out quickly and he became a good reader, but he had used his memory to simply slide around the hard work of learning how sounds matched letters.  Same thing happened later when he was trying to learn algebra--he simply memorized problems but he could not abstract, until he was caught.  So he used his memory to outflank learning problems.  Today, he's a vascular surgeon and he reads thousand page fantasy novels relentlessly. Would you say he is not intelligent? Well, if you'd known him when he was 5 or 11, you might have.

He now has a daughter, age 3, who is clearly very bright. She learns song lyrics instantly and when a toy she was misusing was taken away from her and she demanded it back she was asked if she would stop misusing it, she paused and said, "I'm not sure I can guarantee that." So she's  bright. But will she continue to be bright or will she peak and others will surpass her? And what will her mathematical abilities be?

My senior  year in college, I took a genetics course. There was a lab part to it which involved cross fertilizing fruit flies and waiting for their offspring to hatch and counting how many flies had red eyes, how many white. It was drone work, required persistence, patience, tenacity. I was already accepted to  medical school. I had no interest. At a dinner before graduation, the professor of the genetics course pulled me aside to say he was dazzled by my final exam, which was mostly essays. I was surprised. 

"I haven't read an exam that good in I don't know how long," he said. 

I got a "B" in the course, despite my "A" final exam. I got a "B" because I had a low grade in the lab part of the course. You may say that grade was based not on my genetics "intelligence" but on my overall effort.  Intelligence is about something innate, not effort, is it not?  But I did not score high because there were problems which just did not interest me (the number of white eyes in fruit flies.) The judgment of my "ability" was based, in some part on the effort I was willing to expend. 

Similarly, I have no intelligence in crossword puzzles. Whenever Will Shorts come on NPR with his little quizzes: "What word beginning in T and ending in R is spelled the same forwards and backwards if you add two to each letter in its place in the alphabet?" Who cares?

Do IQ tests have problems which simply fail to interest the kids tested?

And then there is the New Yorker caption test. Every week three suggested captions appear below the previous week's cartoon. The suggestions come in from all over the country, from Montana to New York City. And each and every one of them is light years better than anything I had been able to imagine having struggled the week before looking at the cartoon. 

I submit that if you made cartoon captions a part of the SAT exams you would wind up with an entirely different sort of freshman class at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. 

Yesterday, I watched as my neighbor, Matt, and his son, a junior in engineering at the University of New Hampshire, worked on replacing the spark plugs in his car. They laid out the different nuts and bolts from different sections of the car on different colored plates, to keep track of each. They photographed each layer of the engine before they removed it and after, so they could reassemble it. They worked methodically and encountered different problems going in. A wrench kept turning in the wrong direction until they realized the switch on the wrench was catching on the backside of a wire which reset the direction. 

Matt was telling me about his  wife's friends who constitute "an eclectic" group. Matt's son did not know that word. Matt had used it correctly, but could not quite gather the words to define it as "a mixture of different types, a group of diversity."

Both Matt and his son are clearly highly intelligent but would the intelligence which guided them down to those spark plugs and allowed them to navigate their way back up again have shown up on Dr. Harden's intelligence tests?

Plea Bargaining Away January 6th

 

So Buffalo Man, aka QAnon Shaman, has met reality in the form of a jail and now he realizes there are grown up consequences to his role playing game which involved invading the People's House on January 6. 

We see this sort of thing all the time in hospitals, and I'm told it's true on battlefields, where the big, tough guys with all the swagger are suddenly faced with the reality of actual pain or life threatening circumstance and suddenly are weeping and crying for their mothers.

All that is easy to understand.

What is difficult to understand is why the prosecutors play along.

If I understand the idea of a plea bargain is to free up the court, i.e. the judges, and the prosecutors from all the effort, trouble, expense of a trial.

But in this case, is a trial, a public proceeding with witnesses and testimony and judges and juries not exactly what is required here? 

What are these prosecutors being paid for, if not to protect society?

As the  trial of the killer of George Floyd demonstrated, there is something therapeutic about the right kind of trial for the right kind of criminal. 

"Show trials" have got a bad name: The idea is the verdict is preordained. But the show is the point. Public opprobrium is the idea.

You may say, "But what if the jury lets him off?"

Well, that is a chance you take. But with the right venue, the likelihood this guy will walk is low.

The Nuremberg Trials were about this. 

Did they plea bargain with Herman Goering or any other Nazi at the trials of those men who brought mayhem and atrocities to Europe?

I want to see Buffalo Man on TV while witnesses testify to what they saw him do.

Lot of work, sure, but nothing compared to the work policeman and soldiers put in every day. Those white collared prosecutors can earn their pay and bring these miscreants to trial the way they are supposed to do.

Texas Anti Abortion Law: The South Secedes from the Union, Once Again

 

So, Texas has outlawed abortion and Mississippi will soon follow, as will, likely the entire Confederacy. 

Great cries have gone up from pro choice folks saying that a minority of White males have thrust this outcome down the throats of American women and the Right has triumphed through trickery,  through Mitch McConnell's corrupt bargain with the Evangelicals to buttress the Right flank with reliable anti abortion Supreme Court justices while they rammed through this unpopular legislation through state legislatures.

Mad Dog does not see it that way.

Defining abortion as any termination after a "heartbeat" is audible is the right of the people's representatives. Electing a President who promised to create a Supreme Court which would agree that termination of pregnancy after 6 weeks is is an expression of popular will. 

It is, in a word, democracy.

Drawing a line between what we call "infanticide" and abortion has always been a matter of popular will, much as some would say it's a matter of theology to be dictated by priests or a matter of law, to be dictated by courts.

The fact is, drawing that line is exactly what Justice Blackmun did in his famous 1973 decision, which most people have never bothered to read.

Mad Dog had read it, though. Mad Dog was astonished to see Justice Blackmun progress from a history of attitudes toward abortion toward a scheme for drawing the line at fetal viability--i.e., the point at which the fetus/baby can exist outside the womb, just as Mad Dog had done in 1969, when he wrote his senior thesis in college.

At Mad Dog's college, you had to write a senior thesis before you graduated, and Mad Dog, having majored in an interdepartmental major was allowed to write his thesis outside of a single department, e.g. Biology. So he chose an ethics professor from the Department of Religious Studies as his thesis adviser and chose "The ethics of abortion."

This professor was an ordained Episcopalian priest and Mad Dog met with him at least once a week to discuss his thinking about what constitutes abortion and what constitutes infanticide.

Mad Dog began with the proposition that until the baby is delivered and draws his first breath, it's abortion to interfere.  The Catholic Church, in its early days had said as much.

"Then, you have no problem with holding a scalpel in the birth canal, as the baby is hurtling down to be delivered, to see the light of day, and meeting that onrushing skull with a lethal blade?" the professor asked, blandly.

"Well, no, " Mad Dog, age 21, had replied. "That seems more like murder."

"Ah," the professor said, smiling faintly. "Then you have a problem."

Ultimately, Mad Dog looked through what others had said and what others said was the distinction between abortion and infanticide is all about line drawing and the line had been drawn all over the place by different people and different groups at different times.

Mad Dog liked the idea of drawing it at "viability" but as his professor noted, viability is a slippery margin: As medical science progressed, and as pediatric intensive care units improved, younger and younger babies could be delivered and rescued and survived. So in 1969 a baby born at 26 weeks had a chance, barely, but by 2020  who knew where that line would be? Right now, 22 weeks is likely not a viable time for most but a few can rarely survive.

Likely, today, it's closer to 24 weeks.

Blackmun drew the line around the end of the 2nd trimester, 27 weeks.

That was 1973.  

Had Mad Dog gone to law school after graduating college in 1969, he might have called Justice Blackmun up to congratulate him on joining him in a "great minds think alike" moment. But Mad Dog had not gone to law school. He had gone to medical school and 2 years before the Roe opinion abortion had become for Mad Dog not an intellectual exercise, but a very different sort of reality. By the time Blackmun wrote a recapitulation of Mad Dog's Roe opinion, Mad Dog had seen abortion in the real world. 

In 1971 Mad Dog was doing his first clinical rotation as a medical student on Obstetrics and he witnessed the "salting out" of a 22 week old fetus. This "fetus" or "kid" or "baby"  came out the vaginal canal after a catheter had been placed through the cervix into the womb and hypertonic saline (thus the name "salting out") had been infused until the uterus started contracting and the baby expelled. The obstetrician quickly captured this creature, this semi life form, and handed off to the circulating nurse who scampered out of the delivery room into an equipment room where she placed it on a stainless steel tray.  The nurse wasn't quite quick enough to elude the eye of the woman would would have been its mother, and glimpsing what the nurse held, she called out, "Oh, baby, I'm so sorry!"  

22 week fetus

Mad Dog looked at the conceptus, the best name he could think to call it. It was not breathing. It never drew a breath that Mad Dog could see. But it looked fully formed, like a tiny version of a baby about the size of a hand. It wasn't really alive, but it wasn't just formless tissue. "It's dying and it's barely been born," that Dylan line strikes a cord, although, it wasn't really dying if it's never actually ben alive. 

And Mad Dog thought to himself, "This feels wrong."

Mad Dog had seen a gynecologist scrape out the "products of conception" of an 8 week pregnancy and the doctor wiped his curette off on a cloth gauze pad and examined it after every few scrapes saying, "Yup, that's it." And Mad Dog could not see anything on that pad that looked remotely like a human being or like any defined structure. It looked like a few shreds of hamburger meat, not like anything living.

But that 22 week old conceptus resembled a human being. 

Mad Dog asked himself at the time, had he just witnessed a murder? Certainly the nurse and the woman from whom that entity had been removed seemed remorseful. But what was that thing? 

It was potential life, but not fully realized life. It did not breathe or move or look around with open eyes. But if there had been a law which said that any pregnancy that reached 22 weeks or even 20 weeks was protected, Mad Dog could have been persuaded.

So where are we now?

In Texas, it's 6 weeks.

Fetus 6 weeks

Even at 8 weeks, the conceptus looks more Martian than human.

But, right-to-life would argue, what does it matter what it looks like?

Fetus 8 weeks 

On the other hand, the same folks who say it doesn't matter what it looks like want to show mothers ultrasound images of their 6 week old fetuses, which, like clouds in the sky, look more like babies than the actual article does. The ultrasound is image + imagination, just like clouds.

8 weeks ultrasound

Looking like a dinosaur does not make a cloud a dinosaur.

Not a dinosaur

It's that old, "This is not a pipe" thing. The treachery of images.

If it has a "heart beat" the Texans argue, it's alive. The problem is: How do you define "heart beat"? There really is no true heart, as defined by the presence of fully mature heart cells until after 20 weeks. If it "beats" does that make it a heart? This heart beat argument is really just the audible version of "this is not a pipe."

Likely, the entire South and parts of the Mountain West will outlaw procedures to end pregnancy very early on--some states will say as soon as sperm meets egg. 

Women will then leave those states and seek their abortions in "free states" in the north or on the West Coast.

The question of whether there will be some 21st century version of the Fugitive Slave Act will ensue. What if a Texas woman terminates her pregnancy in New Mexico or California? What if a woman from Mississippi flies to New York City to terminate her pregnancy?

Will these women be arrested upon return to Texas or Mississippi?

If they chose not to return can someone in Texas sue that woman in Texas and demand she be extradited to face Texas justice in her home state?

Pro choice folks argue that this is all about a woman's reproductive rights.

They argue that a woman has a right to control what happens to her own body.

But the right-to-lifers argue that is true-- until there is another person's body at stake and just because that body happens to reside inside a woman does not give that woman the sole right to decide whether it lives or dies.

The captain and owner  of a steamship may have the right to sink his own ship. It's his property. But if there are people in the below decks hold, he cannot be allowed to use that ship as he sees fit, if he wants to sink it.

Texas has taken the whole debate to the extreme: It deputizes every person living in Texas as informants and gives them legal standing--informers can be rewarded with $10,000 if they get wind of a woman who has sought out and accomplished an abortion and these informers can sue a man who gives that woman a ride to a clinic in New Mexico.  Texas has become a Statsi state and turned into East Germany, or Hitler's Germany, more like, with citizens giving up Anne Frank to the local Gestapo.

But that's the South. From Texas across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, we expect as much. Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina are locks to follow suit. There may be some debate in Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, but they'll likely go that way.

North Carolina and Virginia might demur.

Oklahoma, Kansas, Utah are locks for outlawing abortion.

But this is, in the final analysis, the will of the people, of people speaking through their state legislatures to get what they want. 

We may not agree. We may not like it up here in New Hampshire, but that's their choice.

What we have to decide is whether or how much their preference for Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Jim Jordan, Mitch McConnell and Tucker Carlson matters to us.