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?