Why hereditarians are wrong

Argument 1) TEH brain size!
This argument rests on all five of these assumptions:

1. Racial differences in brain size exist
2. Racial differences in brain size are entirely or mostly due to genetics
3. Such differences are large enough to explain group differences in IQ
4. The relationship between brain size and IQ is causal
5. Between-group comparisons show a consistent relationship between brain size and IQ

The first of these assumptions may be true, as Rushton has reported in many studies (e.g. Rushton & Ankney 1996; Rushton 1992, 1994), though there is reason to believe that these studies, and others with similar conclusions, are seriously flawed (Cain & Vanderwolf 1990; Kamin & Omari 1998). Moreover, Rushton's work on this topic has been criticized for using data from museum collections of skulls. These samples are obviously not representative, given that they were often compiled in the 19th century, when the belief in a link between brain size and racial differences in personality traits was widespread (Weizmann et al. 1991, p. 46). It has also been criticized for lumping together data on skulls from disparate populations ("aggregational errors", as Cernovsky (1993) has called them) and for "adjusting" for body size without a clear reason (Winston 1996). Even if it is, though, it doesn't matter, as I explain below in discussing the four other assumptions.

The second of these assumptions may also be false. As Nisbett et al. (2012, p. 146) noted, "Brain size of full-term Black and White infants is the same at birth, and several postnatal factors known to reduce brain size are more common for Blacks than for Whites."

What about the third?
Kamin & Omari (1998, later K&O) maintain that this assumption is false, writing: "Possible relations between head size and measured IQ are so small that they cannot possibly explain black-white differences in IQ." Rushton & Ankney (2000) responded by criticizing this review for four detailed reasons, as they outline in their paper's abstract. They go into a lot of detail arguing that K&O ignored "...the relation between brain size and IQ established by magnetic resonance imaging and the race differences in brain size established by MRI, autopsies, and endocranial volume". However, they do not seem AFAICT to address the "they're too small point" K&O made.

More recently, Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan (later WBD) went into more detail on this point, writing, "Given the correlation between cranial capacity as measured externally and intelligence of around .20 (Rushton & Ankney, 2009), the Black-White gap in brain size cannot explain much of the IQ gap. Even if cranial capacity had a causal effect on g, then the Black-White gap in brain size cannot explain more than: .6*.2*15 = 1.8 IQ points. If we were to believe that the IQ gap between Africans and European Whites is 33 IQ points (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2006), then the brain size gap could explain a staggering 1.8/33 = 5% of the IQ gap. Thus, even under these terms, 95% of the IQ gap is left unexplained by brain size. With a correlation of .33 between brain volume and IQ as based on modern techniques (McDaniel, 2005), the gap in brain size can explain only 2.98 IQ points or 9% of the IQ gap."

The fourth assumption may be false as well. "It is not clear, however, that the relation between brain size and IQ is causal. There is conflicting evidence as to whether there is a correlation between siblings’ brain size and IQ" (Nisbett et al. 2012, p. 142).

So this leaves us at the fifth and last assumption. "Brain size differences between men and women are much greater than the race differences in brain size, yet men and women have the same average IQ" (Nisbett et al. 2012, p. 146). This point is also made by WBD, who note that "Another problem with the brain size hypothesis lies with the fact that sex differences in brain size are larger than race differences, yet studies involving representative samples, broad cognitive test batteries, and sound statistical methods consistently fail to show a clear sex difference in g."

Argument 2) Forensic anthropologists can identify race, therefore race is biologically real!
This argument is not uncommon, including from actual scientists, such as Sesardic (2010, p. 55), who wrote that "forensic anthropologists are quite successful in correctly inferring a person’s race from the skeletal characteristics of human remains". There are many situations in which race identification is used regularly in modern American society, such as to determine the race of a deceased individual in searching for their potential killer (Slate 2011). It has also been used to determine whether Kennewick Man was Caucasian, Asian, or something else entirely. (ABC News 2000). Given that this can be done pretty accurately, doesn't this prove that race exists? 

No, partly because classifying people into groups from which individuals can be reliably identified leads to ridiculous categories--wayyyy more than just a couple "races" that are traditionally defined (Ousley et al. 2009). As Sauer (1992, p. 107) noted, "the successful assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of the race concept, but rather a prediction that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular socially constructed ‘racial’ category". Ultimately, accurate assessment of race comes down to the information that the researcher has before making the assessment--without it the results can be ridiculously wrong (Konigsberg et al. 2009).

The traits used to identify remains of people from geographic regions (East Asia/Africa/Europe) aren't adaptive, they're totally random, as C. Loring Brace pointed out in 1995, when he wrote: "The significant identifying features of a given region then are stochastically determined and are not the products of natural selection. If they are valuable for purposes of identification, they have no coherent adaptive, that is, biological, significance."

Argument 3) It's always been this way!
Differential k theory, as defined by Rushton (1988), holds that not only can humans (yes, all of them) be classified into one of three races (namely, Mongoloids, Caucasoids, and Negroids), but also that these races consistently differ in multiple important respects, differences which cannot be explained by non-evolutionary/non-genetic factors. Problem is, the parameters being claimed to be due to evolution have changed WAAAY too fast to be due mostly, much less completely, to genetics. This is a problem because in order for these sorts of theories to be true, these parameters (fertility, IQ, infant mortality, etc.) should be pretty stable over enough time (at least many millennia for sure) for humans to evolve separately into distinct "races". Perhaps the best summary of evidence showing that it hasn't always been this way was provided by Weizmann et al. (1990), who noted in their paper's abstract that "Changes in human life-history traits are so rapid that there is no need to posit genetic selection to explain intergroup variation."

For instance, Rushton (1988, p. 11) wrote this of his theory's predictions: "...the more K the family the greater the spacing between births, the fewer the total number of offspring, the lower the rate of infant mortality, and the better developed the parental care." He goes on to claim that these predictions have been validated with the human species, and that the patterns just described are seen consistently when comparing Negroids (Africans), Caucasoids (Europeans), and Mongoloids (East Asians). As Wicherts et al. (2010) note, however, "In much of the twentieth century, fertility and infant mortality rates have been much higher in China than in European countries. This is inconsistent with Rushton’s assertion that East-Asians are more K-prone than Europeans." This is a similar conclusion to that reached in 1988 by Zuckerman and Brody, who noted that in Rushton's work, "Everything is assumed to be on a primarily genetic basis although sexual mores have shown remarkable changes in a single generation." Besides this, more recent evidence suggests that gestation time is longer, and maturation earlier, among whites than among Blacks or Asians (Patel et al. 2004). Recall that Rushton's theory claims that the order of gestation time is shortest in Blacks, longest in Asians, and intermediate in whites. Either his sources are outdated or they were never representative in the first place. Hmm...

Looking at IQ makes the problem of short-term change especially duh-obvious, given that the Flynn effect has been known to psychologists for over 30 years, and it has occurred on a huge scale (5 to 25 points/generation) (Flynn 1987). Wicherts et al. (2010) note that: "Knowing that national IQs can fluctuate by more than a standard deviation over 50 years, we may question the relevance of contemporary national IQs to peoples that lived thousands of years ago." 

The best quote to close out this section came from Zuckerman (2003), who wrote that "To suggest that the behavior of modern descendents of these ancient regional ethnic groups is a function of evolved genetic mechanisms which are specific to their ancestry is not a plausible hypothesis. The more recent history of ethnic populations is much more relevant."

4. "The environment has nothing to do with it!"
The differences in gestation period discussed above are probably due to environmental factors, like disadvantage and discrimination (Sorbye et al. 2016). In any case, they don't seem to be due to genetic or normal sociodemographic factors (Migone et al. 1991).With regard to maturity, Mendle et al. (2007) noted that "Implicit in any discussion of racial differences in pubertal timing in American girls is the dangerous conflation of race with socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status, and not race, affects known predictors of pubertal timing such as nutrition, environmental stress, and family composition. In fact, Obeidallah et al. (2000) established that documented differences in age of pubertal onset between Caucasian and Latina girls disappeared after controlling for socioeconomic status." Similar results for sexual behavior have been reported by Cunningham & Barbee (1991), who found that "...differences in black versus white birth rates were strongly associated with differences in infant mortality rates. As black infant mortality rates declined, black birth rates also declined at rates parallel to that of whites." 

And this isn't even getting into the fact that the differences claimed to exist by hereditarians haven't been found in all studies on the subject, as Lynn (1989, p. 5) pointed out: "...a recent report to the National Academy of Sciences (Hayes, 1987) cites two sources reporting that sexually experienced blacks had intercourse slightly less often than whites (i.e., Zabin & Clark, 1981; Zelnick, Kantner, & Ford, 1981). In addition, there are apparently data inconsistent with Rushton and Bogaert’s (1987) claimed race differences in age at menarche. Gregerson (1982) reports that Cuban and Hong Kong girls have the earliest average age of menarche- just over 12 years-while the Greenland Eskimo. South African Bantu, and New Guinea Bundi have an average age at menarche of over 15 years. While these counterexamples and failures to replicate do not disprove Rushton and Bogaert’s (1987) claims, they do challenge the apparent unanimity of the findings reviewed by these authors and raise questions about the validity of the reported race differences." 

Sources:
ABC News 2000: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98485&page=1
Brace 1995: https://www.astm.org/DIGITAL_LIBRARY/JOURNALS/FORENSIC/PAGES/JFS15336J.htm
Cain & Vanderwolf 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019188699090185T
Cernovsky 1993: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-rushton-cernovsky-j-of-black-psychology-1993.pdf
Cunningham & Barbee 1991: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/009265669190016J
Flynn 1987: http://www.jugendsozialarbeit.de/media/raw/flynn1987_What_IQ_tests_really_measure.pdf
Kamin & Omari 1998: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/008124639802800301
Konigsberg et al. 2009: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.20934/abstract
Lynn 1989: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.876.8834&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Mendle et al. 2007: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273229706000773
Migone et al. 1991: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-3016.1991.tb00724.x/abstract
Nisbett et al. 2012: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf
Ousley et al. 2009: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21006/full
Patel et al. 2004: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/33/1/107/668109
Rushton 1988: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-r-k-theory-sex-rushton-personality-individual-differences-1988.pdf
Rushton 1992: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016028969290017L
Rushton 1994: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0160289694900027
Rushton & Ankney, 1996: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03210739
Rushton & Ankney, 2000: http://atavisionary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Size-matters-Rushton.pdf
Sesardic 2010: http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race.pdf
Slate 2011: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/01/alas_poor_yorick_or_is_it_othello.html
Sorbye et al. 2016: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1521693415001613
Weizmann et al. 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-07104-001
Weizmann et al.,1991: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/race-r-k-theory-rushton-weizmann-canadian-psychology-1-1991.pdf
Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan 2010: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909003675
Winston 1996: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-rushton-winston-j-of-social-distress-the-homeless-4-1996.pdf
Zuckerman & Brody 1988: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988901365
Zuckerman 2003: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902003628

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-3016.1991.tb00724.x/abstract
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6545.pdf
http://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/forensic-anthropology-and-race

Anatomy of a scam

This kinda story is right up my alley (as my parents often like to say) because it involves 1) Calvin and Hobbes (of which I have been a huge fan for almost my entire life), 2) something fishy that has received almost no attention in the media (mainstream or otherwise), and 3) something that is fishy in a way that irritates me, as it already has numerous other fans of the original strip.

First, some background: this story concerns the fictional book "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie", which is referenced in a decent number of C&H strips as a children's bedtime story that Calvin loves, but his dad hates (at least in later strips). We never learn anything about what happens in this nonexistent book, because though it is clear that Calvin's dad does read it to him in multiple strips, the scenes where he reads the actual book are always omitted. (C&H originally ran from 1985 to 1995, which is important to this post, as will become clear soon.)

So there was never a real book by this title--at least not until December 1, 2004, when "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie" was published by Hamster Huey Press. According to the Calvin and Hobbes Wiki, this press never published anything besides this book. More concerning, this "publishing company" is not affiliated with Universal Press Syndicate, or with the author of Calvin and Hobbes itself (Bill Watterson), so they clearly have no right to use any content from C&H. However, Joe Mason, in an email to the website Museum of Hoaxes in 2005, said that "I don't think titles are copyrightable, so this may even be legal". A quick Google search turns up an article on The Balance which also says that book titles aren't usually copyrighted (at least in the US). So it's likely that this "book" isn't violating any copyright laws.

The now-offline website for Hamster Huey Press says that it "...is owned and operated by Paul Spadoni." A commenter at Museum of Hoaxes named Ian has noted that: "The vast majority of the positive reviews seem to be from people who live in Gig Harbor or Port Orchard, Wash. (somehow, this isn't surprising in the least). As has been noted, http://www.hamsterhuey.com , http://www.hamsterhueypress.com are both registered to Paul Spadoni of Gig Harbor. And http://www.calvinandhobbesfanclub.com ? Lindsey Noelle (supposedly the webmistress) also apparently hails from Gig Harbor (as indicated by her glowing review of "Hamster" on Amazon.com), but not surprisingly, a WHOIS search reveals that the site is registered to (tada!) Paul Spadoni. I guess that explains why most of the "content" on the site revolves around promoting "Hamster Huey" - any actual Calvin & Hobbes content is just to set up the association - to falsely establish that this is indeed THE "Hamster Huey" of C&H fame. 

What is now the firt [sic] (earliest) review on Amazon.com is written by a "Randall Spadoni" (hmm, think maybe he's related to Paul Spadoni?), in which he writes "FOR A STORY WRITTEN AROUND A TITLE, this one's pretty good." [my emphasis]. There you have it, folks!" The book's author and illustrator are listed as Mabel Barr and Nick Goettling, respectively." 

The part of this story that really seems to get my goat, however, is that the vanity publisher of this "book" (which may not even exist, as Mason suggested) stretched their "biography" of Barr (who herself may not even exist) on their website ridiculously thin when it is obvious that she is either a nobody with no literary experience or accomplishments or does not exist at all, e.g. saying she has been "a storyteller nearly all her life". What this all reeks of is vagueness to explain the inability of anyone to verify anything about the "author".

New blog about gun-related issues

Just a heads-up to my readers: I have just started a new blog dedicated to debunking bogus arguments against gun control, in the vein of TalkOrigins (about evolution) and Skeptical Science (about global warming). You can visit this blog here. (Note I have also moved all my existing "evaluating gun arguments" posts there, and I will post all of them there, not here, from now on.)

What is a "Dunning-Kruger conservative"?

As I define it here, a "Dunning-Kruger conservative" (abbreviated "DKC") is a right-wing commentator/blogger/troll/whatever who acts like they know almost everything about an issue, and their position is unassailable, when in fact they barely know anything about that issue, and it is not difficult for most people to demonstrate why they are wrong. The term is named after the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people who are bad at something tend to think they are much better at it than they really are (Dunning & Kruger 1999).

Examples of DKCs are prevalent online, and are easily identified by people who speak loudly and confidently while embarrassing themselves by being wrong about almost everything they say. For example, Ben Shapiro, Tomi Lahren, and Paul Joseph Watson all fit the definition very well.

Their arguments can take many forms, one of which is easily identified by the word "basic" or other synonyms--e.g. "Ben Shapiro DEBUNKS 'White Privilege' myths using basic statistics", claiming that liberals ignore or deny "basic biology", Milo Yiannopoulos ostensibly debunking BLM with basic statistics, etc. What these arguments purport to say is that not only are SJWs wrong, but also their wrongness can be understood very easily by anyone who knows even the most basic aspects of the issue under discussion. What they actually reveal, however, is that those who understand only very superficial aspects of an issue (e.g. the existence of XX and XY sex chromosome pairs) tend not to understand other, more complex aspects of it (e.g. the evidence that gender identity has a biological basis).

All the reasons Rushton was wrong, in one post

Some people have claimed that critics of the work of infamous race scientist J. Philippe Rushton can't point to any methodological issues in his work, and instead must attack it simply for being "politically incorrect", "racist", etc. These arguments have even been made by people who really ought to know better. When you see someone make this claim, point them to this post, which compiles all peer-reviewed critiques of his methodology.

Racial differences in things like criminality and maturation rates may not even exist as Rushton claimed:
Gorey & Cryns 1995

Rushton misused r/k selection theory:
Anderson 1991
Weizmann et al. 1990
See esp. this quote from Weizmann et al. (1990) on page 3: "...it is precisely this extended and oversimplified version of the r/K model, with its rigid specification of traits, that has been embodied in Differential K theory." This comes after them noting that the more sweeping and extended versions of the r/k selection model have been criticized extensively by some researchers.
Graves 2002
Zuckerman 1990 (full text available for free at this link) See p. 60 (of the book): "...Rushton's theory is contrary to the evolutionary theory on which he bases his conclusions..."
Also, there are inherent issues in using the r/k model, which is supposed to apply to between-species differences, to explain within-species differences:
Fairchild 1991

Rushton is wrong about crime:
Gabor & Roberts 1990
Cernovsky & Litman 1993
Neapolitan 1998
Lynch 2000

Rushton is wrong about brain size:
Cernovsky 1990
Cernovsky 1991
Cain & Vanderwolf 1990
Willerman 1991

And also about sexual behavior:
Lynn 1989a
Lynn 1989b
Zuckerman & Brody 1988 
Cunningham & Barbee 1991
Note this quote from Zuckerman & Brody's abstract: "Data on sexual behavior is based on small and unrepresentative samples of blacks. Sizes of heads and genitals are compared with no obvious connection to the primary issue of biological fertility strategies. Everything is assumed to be on a primarily genetic basis although sexual mores have shown remarkable changes in a single generation."

LOL, he's even wrong about being censored by the "politically correct" establishment in academia!


He's also been caught misrepresenting and selectively citing sources: 
Weizmann et al. 1989
Cernovsky 1995: See p. 673: "...Rushton (1990a, 1990b, 1990c) also repeatedly misrepresented findings by Beals, Smith, and Dodd (1984) on cranial capacity." And at the bottom of the same page: "Rushton (1990a, 1990c, 1991) also misrepresents the evidence for racial differences in brain/body size ratio."
See also Fairchild 1991, p. 106, where he notes that Rushton is guilty of "repeated misrepresentations" of his cited sources.

Examples of Rushton misrepresenting sources include him citing the work of Tobias (1970) without mentioning his caveats regarding the validity of his own data (Fairchild 1991, p. 106-7; Weizmann et al. 1990, p. 9). These caveats include "...equating subjects on age, sex, body size, cause of death, time since death, method of preservation, temperature, and the methods employed in removing and preparing the brain. In addition, brain development is plastic, and brain size may be affected by early environmental factors. Because of all these difficulties, Tobias (1970) concluded that no adequate racial comparative studies had actually been conducted" (Weizmann et al. 1990, p. 9).

He also falsely claimed that papers by Ho et al. supported his claims of genetically determined race differences in brain size--they do not. In fact, Ho et al.'s reviews of their own research concluded that environmental factors best explained race differences in adult brain size (Fairchild 1991, p. 107).

He also inappropriately aggregated data on disparate populations:
Lieberman 2001
Cernovsky 1993

He also used unreliable sources:
Here, for instance, is what Weizmann et al. (1990, p. 8) write about a paper Rushton co-authored in 1987 (Rushton & Bogaert 1987): "One of the major sources for their conclusions is an alleged report of an anonymous French Army surgeon (1896), a curious source for reliable data." Weizmann et al. continue by writing that: "While Rushton and Bogaert (1987; Rushton, 1988a) describe the work as an example of the "ethnographic record," it might more accurately be described as an example of nineteenth century "anthroporn."...This work is filled with internal contradictions." And later on the same page: "It should be noted that the French Army surgeon (1896) is not an unimportant source. It is Rushton's (Rushton, 1988a; Rushton & Bogaert, 1987) only source for the "data" on racial differences in clitoral size and on the placement of female genitalia. It is also the only source which contains comparative "data" on male genitalia from all three racial groups, and the only source (e.g., Rushton, 1988a) at all for data on erectile "angle and texture" ("Orientals parallel to body and stiff, blacks at right angles and flexible." p. 1015)."
Weizmann et al. 1991 (p. 7) also make this point about another one of the sources cited in the same paper: "This is an article by P. Nobile (1982) which is identified in their bibliography as an article which appeared in Forum: International Journal of Human Relations. Professor Vidmar's colleague, Michael Atkinson, could find no library listing of this journal (nor could we), but he finally tracked it down. As Professor Vidmar writes: "it is more commonly known as the Penthouse Forum, and can be purchased from the covered display rack at your neighborhood Mac's Milk Store (Vidmar, 1990).""
Cernovsky 1994 criticizes Rushton's theory for being based on "weak trends in excessively suspect data sets", and also claims Rushton's work is based on "weak, biased, and unrepresentative data".
General failure to replicate results:
Peregrine, Ember & Ember 2003 
See also Neapolitan 1998 and Cernovsky & Litman 1993

And he defined his 3 main "races" inconsistently in different parts OF HIS OWN BOOK- I don't think people realize how big a deal this. It doesn't get much more dishonest than internal inconsistency in a blatant, desperate attempt to create the illusion of support for your theory. Specifically, Peregrine, Ember & Ember (2003) note that "...in Race, Evolution and Behavior, he says that Filipinos and Malays are “Mongoloid” and includes Malaysia along with the Philippines and Indonesia in comparing crime statistics but excludes all three from his analysis of cranial capacity; that the Indian subcontinent is “Caucasoid” but excludes 26 Indian samples from his analysis of cranial capacity; that Amerindians are “Mongoloid” but excludes 20 Latin American populations (especially Bolivian and Peruvian) on measures of cranial capacity; and includes the Caribbean in crime statistics but excludes Caribbean island states as “European/Negroid” mixtures for the purpose of comparing cranial capacity."

He is also wrong about twinning.

And about penis size:
Weizmann et al. 1990, p. 8: "Much of Rushton's other data (Rushton, 1988a; Rushton & Bogaert, 1987) on penis size relies heavily on studies based on Kinsey's data, which, as Zuckerman and Brody (1988) point out, can hardly be considered representative."

Environmental explanations make more sense than genetic ones:
Mealey 1990: "I concur with Rushton in the belief that different human groups utilize different strategies, but find the differential use of species-wide, environmentally contingent tactics a more parsimonious explanation than genetic differences."

Is IQ really related to fertility (or other things)?

Boutwell et al. (2013) examine the association between fertility rates and IQ on the county level in the United States. In doing so, they attempt to test Rushton's evolution-based "differential K theory", but ignore the fact that fertility rates have changed significantly even on the national level in recent decades (Wicherts et al. 2010). This suggests that they've been changing even more on the county level. They also ignore decades-old research suggesting that environmental factors can account for the race differences in fertility Rushton claims are due to genetic factors. As Weizmann et al. (1990, p. 6) noted, "Bean and Swicegood (1985) conclude that one can predict the birth rates of female minority group members from the educational attainments of their respective mothers (p. 21)." Zuckerman & Brody (1988) also noted that despite assumptions to the contrary by biological determinists, "there is no evidence that fertility itself is heritable."

Boutwell et al. (2013) state, in their introduction, that "IQ levels, for instance, correlate with gestation time during pregnancy (Rushton, 2004), disease rates (Templer & Rushton, 2011) and life expectancy (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012)."

The first of these sources says NOTHING about IQ being associated with gestation period, and instead finds an association between an "r-k life history factor" that correlates with gestation period with a correlation coefficient of 0.86. What is most concerning is that this finding is based on "...a large data set of life-history variables on 234 mammalian species"--so it wasn't even based entirely, or even mostly, on humans!! Yet these "biosocial criminologists" are so desperate to make their point about IQ being the be-all and end-all in determining societal inequality, that they'll blatantly lie about what a source actually shows/says. 

So the Templer/Rushton source they cite for the "disease rates" thing did in fact report a positive correlation between a bunch of state-level variables, namely, "IQ, skin color, birth rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, HIV/AIDS, violent crime, and state income". Of course, as mentioned above, some of these variables have been changing a lot in recent decades, which casts doubt on evolutionary and/or IQ-based explanations thereof. As Wicherts et al. (2010) noted, "In much of the twentieth century, fertility and infant mortality rates have been much higher in China than in European countries. This is inconsistent with Rushton’s assertion that East-Asians are more K-prone than Europeans." 

As for the IQ-life expectancy relationship, the source they cite does indeed say that "All the correlations [between national IQs and health] are negative, showing that the populations of higher IQ nations are more healthy" (Lynn & Vanhanen 2012, p. 6). But the fact remains, this doesn't prove any kind of cause-and-effect relationship. As Wicherts et al. (2010b) noted, "Templer claims that the “potential of national IQs as explanatory variables” is demonstrated by correlations of national IQ with variables like GDP, adult literacy, and life expectancy. A glance at the correlation matrix in our primary paper shows that other variables associated with development have the same explanatory power as national IQ. For instance, the correlations reported by Templer (2008) are easily replicated by replacing national IQ with Proteins g/day/capita, child mortality rate, or secondary school attendance. This means that these variables have just as much explanatory power as does national IQ." There's also, of course, the potential for the ecological fallacy to affect any relationships found in this type of research (e.g. Ellison, 2007).

Addendum: Boutwell et al. (2015) claim that "Rushton's (1985a) application of life history theory to human differences has fared well at organizing the correlations of a host of human outcomes into a coherent evolutionary framework (Figueredo et al., 2006; Nettle, 2010; Rushton, 2000; Wang, Kruger, & Wilke, 2009)." Hoo boy, let's break this down. 

So Figueredo et al., 2006 does say that "A number of independent literatures consistently describe a positive manifold of correlations among many common human behavioral traits considered “social problems.” Theories derived from the Standard Social Science Model do not fully account for this positive manifold or cluster of “social problems,” but Life History Theory does because it instead construes such clusters to be coordinated arrays of contingently adaptive life-history traits." So that checks out, though this claim that you can't explain it without invoking evolutionary biology seems rather fishy--correlation is not causation, and these factors could certainly be related without any biological factors involved.

Nettle, 2010, however, doesn't even mention Rushton or his theory at all, nor does Wang, Kruger, & Wilke, 2009.

Rushton, 2000 is Rushton's own book, hardly a reliable or independent validation of his theory.

Later on, we see "Although our evolutionary history has placed us as a species on the K end of the life history spectrum, natural variation is expected to position some individuals further from K than others (Rushton, 2000). Individuals falling relatively further from K will exhibit faster maturation and lower levels of parental investment (Rushton, 1985a). Additionally, they will display greater mating output (i.e., more effort invested in mating, instead of raising children), higher rates of disease and shorter life spans (Rushton, 1985a, 2000, 2004)."

Truly, it is absurd that they keep citing Rushton's work uncritically without even mentioning any critiques of it.
Sources:
Boutwell et al. (2013): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691300189X
Boutwell et al. (2015): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178915001184
Ellison (2007): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/135910707X180972/full
Lynn & Vanhanen (2012): https://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/EconPsy/2/Lynn_Vanhanen_2012_National_IQs_-_a_review.pdf
Templer & Rushton (2011): http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/IQ-Skin-Color-Crime-HIV-AIDS-and-Income-in-50-U.S.-States-2011-by-Donald-I.-Templer-John-Philippe-Rushton.pdf
Weizmann et al. (1990): http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-r-k-theory-rushton-weizmann-canadian-psychology-1-1990.pdf
Wicherts et al. (2010): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909002475
Wicherts et al. (2010b): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909003675
Zuckerman & Brody (1988): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988901365

What is the minimum % of the popular vote needed to win the electoral college?

I have tried to answer the question of what the min. % of the popular vote is needed to win the electoral college. CGP Grey tried to answer it in his YouTube video "The Trouble with the Electoral College", and he concluded that it was 22%. But that video was made 6 years ago, and I think it used the entire population of the state instead of the voting-eligible population. So I tried to answer the same question using more up to date data and the voting-eligible population of each state. The answer appears to be higher than CGP Grey's number: specifically, it appears that you need at least about 24.1% of the popular vote to win a bare majority (in this case, about 52%) of the votes in the electoral college. The way to do this is to win the 40 least populous states and the District of Columbia, while losing all 10 of the other states. You also have to get just 50% + 1 of the popular vote in each state, and there have to be no third-party candidates to make winning any of these states easier/harder for you. The data from my Excel spreadsheet is here in case you want to fact-check me on this.

How to defend the indefensible: a comment on Gottfredson (2013)

In a recent hagiography about prominent "race realist" psychologist J. Philippe Rushton (who died in 2012), Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware claims that "Rushton is a scholar and gentleman but it appears that his critics often act like neither" (Gottfredson 2013). She supports this claim by discussing what happened when Rushton's work was criticized in an article published in a respected journal, arguing that the resulting controversy illustrates how "mob science works to ‘‘discredit’’ valid research and enforce collective ignorance about entire bodies of evidence." Here, I argue that Gottfredson is full of shit, and that, in fact, the issue she is discussing demonstrates academia working as intended: critics noting methodological flaws in an academic's research that lead to inaccurate conclusions.

When I first read the abstract of this article, I was a little surprised, because Gottfredson seemed to be defending someone whose research had been discredited on methodological grounds, rather than ad hominem attacks of being "racist" (for a few of many examples, see Weizmann et al. 1990, 1991; Lynn 1989a, 1989b; Silverman, 1990; Zuckerman 1988, 1990; Cain & Vanderwolf 1990, Anderson 1991). So I kept reading a full copy of the paper, and this is my response to it.

The criticism in question is Lieberman (2001), an article which states the following early on: "[Samuel George] Morton collected human skulls, measured their cranial vaults, and concluded that “Caucasoids” had the largest brains and “Negroids” the smallest, with “Mongoloids” in between (Morton 1849). A century and a half later this hierarchy would be altered by J. Philippe Rushton and colleagues, placing the “Mongoloids” in the alpha position, “Caucasoids” next, and “Negroids” last. Rushton went on to correlate brain size with IQ scores, claim a Mongoloid 1 Caucasoid 1 Negroid correlation, and use variation in IQ scores to “explain” everything from civilization to barbarism (1997a). Although this view has been invalidated by a century of anthropological research and theorizing stimulated by Franz Boas (Gossett 1965, Cravens 1978), Rushton (1996) dismisses this work as no more than political correctness."

The point being made here is that race science does not conform to scientific objectivity or to the actual conclusions that are best supported by evidence, but instead to a political/social agenda of justifying oppressing a given group of people. Lieberman illustrates this in a later section of his paper, entitled "Changing Hierarchical Worldviews". He subsequently notes that in the 1970s, researchers like Richard Lynn started publishing studies arguing that, contrary to mainstream thinking at the time, Japanese people were smarter than Caucasians, and that "The publication of these theories of East Asian superiority was preceded by Japan's becoming a “world-class economic power”" (p. 72).

Here is how Gottfredson summarized what you just read (as well as a bunch of other parts of Lieberman's paper I did not discuss above):
"Lieberman opens with a question that itself damns Rushton. A century of anthropological work has invalidated Rushton’s claims, so how can he claim to find in it a ‘‘racial hierarchy’’ for intelligence and brain size? The question is thus not whether Rushton is wrong, but why and how he persists in being so wrong. The article’s first section (‘‘Changing Hierarchical Worldviews’’) justifies the premise, and the second (‘‘Abusing Anthropological Research’’) explains the ‘‘paradox’’ of how Rushton and other ‘‘scientific racists’’ could claim to be doing science when they draw evidence from the very fields that disavow racism and the concept of race (p. 74). To justify his premise, Lieberman describes 19th century research on cranial size and its social context which, he says, was the need by Caucasians to justify their domination and exploitation of other races. He discredits that research and Rushton’s own primarily by appealing to authority in 20th century anthropology: Franz Boas’s theorizing (no link between culture and genes), official statements on race from the UN and the American Anthropological Association (no biological races, no meaningful innate racial differences), Gould’s critiques of research on intelligence, brain size, and heritability (none is valid), and anthropology’s ‘‘disavowal’’ of ‘‘hierarchical’’ and ‘‘racist’’ thinking. Lieberman also draws from stock concerns, long-since resolved, about possible methodological flaws in twin research, brain research, behavior genetics, and mental testing. He says nothing about the explosion of research in the 1990s using the Y chromosome and mtDNA to trace the evolution of human lineages as they migrated across the globe. He says nothing about Rushton’s many other 3-way results on ‘‘reproductive behavior, sex hormones, twinning rate, speed of physical maturation, personality, family stability, lawabidingness, and social organization’’ (p. 74), except to summarily dismiss them as a faulty ‘‘blizzard of data’’ (p. 78)."

So her first main point seems to be that Lieberman is relying on logical fallacies to criticize Rushton, the first of these apparently being appeal to authority by citing the extensive work of Boas, the AAA, and Gould. Well, what Lieberman cited to support this claim on the first page of his paper were two sources: a 1965 book (Gossett 1965) and a 1978 book (Cravens 1978). So he's not just invoking Boas's name as a talisman of some sort to dismiss inconvenient arguments, but instead is citing evidence to support them. It is notable that, in contrast, Gottfredson does not cite any sources to support her claim about how the concerns Lieberman raises are "long-since resolved". I would also like to note that while Lieberman may not have addressed every trait Rushton studied, other researchers have; for instance, Weizmann et al. (1990) concluded that "The predictions that Rushton derives from the r/K model are arbitrary, and these predictions are supported by selective citation and misrepresentation of the research literature and by the use of unreliable sources. Changes in human life-history traits are so rapid that there is no need to posit genetic selection to explain intergroup variation." And with regard to Rushton's results on race differences in reproductive traits, Lynn (1989a) noted the following four problems in a paper Rushton co-authored on the subject in 1987: "First, they did not explain why natural selection would have favored different reproductive strategies for different races. 
Second, their data on race differences are of questionable validity because their literature review was selective and their original analyses were based on self-reports. 
Third, they provided no evidence that these race differences had significant effects on reproduction or that sexual restraint is a K characteristic. 
Finally, they did not adequately rule out environmental explanations for their data."

Back to Gottfredson (p. 4): "Zeroing in on Rushton’s IQ, race, and brain size analyses, Lieberman details his own list of 6 major ‘‘errors.’’ Briefly, Rushton ‘‘uses ‘race’ despite decades of findings that invalidate it,’’ his conclusions about racial differences in cranial capacity are ‘‘contradicted by evolutionary anthropology,’’ he did not account for environmental factors that surely influence cranial capacity and intelligence, his measurements tell us nothing because they are confounded or the differences they reveal are trivial in size, he cannot claim to ‘‘explain’’ a vast array of human behaviors because some of his measures and concepts may be faulty, and his ‘‘principle of aggregation’’ (e.g., grouping diverse populations into ‘‘races,’’ averaging results from different studies) is invalid. ‘"

She then dismisses the first two of these errors as mere appeals to authority. That being said, there is compelling evidence against the biological or genetic existence of race (Templeton, 2013; Long & Kittles, 2009). Moreover, though it may have been phrased as an appeal to authority, the assertion that Rushton's conclusions of race differences in cranial capacity is inconsistent with anthropological evidence is not an appeal to authority, nor is it any other logical fallacy. As Lieberman goes on to note, Rushton took his cranial capacity measurements from a 1984 study without mentioning that this study showed no significant relationship between race and cranial capacity, but did find that "climate variables were strongly correlated with cranial variation" (Lieberman 2001, p. 76). Other research supports this claim, and also suggests that cranial size varies with the development status of a country, not with race (Cernovsky 1993). Gottfredson is, therefore, being disingenuous in not mentioning the sources on which Lieberman's argument is based.

The next two claims Gottfredson makes are that Lieberman's 3rd and 4th points "disallow drawing conclusions until an infinite regress of alternatives has been considered" (p. 4). Those points are, respectively, that 3) "[Rushton] did not account for environmental factors that surely influence cranial capacity and intelligence" and 4) "his measurements tell us nothing because they are confounded or the differences they reveal are trivial in size" (Gottfredson, p. 4). In fact, though, these are both valid criticisms of Rushton's work in this area. Environmental factors like climate and development status have been discussed above, but there are other confounders as well that call his findings into doubt. As Lieberman noted, the following factors had been previously identified as affecting brain size, and therefore needing to be controlled for if you want to determine whether there's a real difference between groups: "sex, body size, age at death, early-life nutrition, early-life environment, source of sample, occupational group, cause of death, lapse of time after death, temperature after death, anatomical level of severance, presence or absence of cerebral spinal fluid, presence or absence of meninges, and presence or absence of blood vessels" (p. 77). Also, Rushton's claims about race differences in brain size are contradicted by some of the studies he cites (Cernovsky 1995).

So what about Lieberman's last two points? To recap, they were that "[Rushton] cannot claim to ‘‘explain’’ a vast array of human behaviors because some of his measures and concepts may be faulty, and his ‘‘principle of aggregation’’ (e.g., grouping diverse populations into ‘‘races,’’ averaging results from different studies) is invalid" (Gottfredson, p. 4). Gottfredson claims that "the last two [of Lieberman's arguments] demand uniformly perfect data and measurement before concluding anything from a body of evidence" (pp. 4-5). Again, not so: All that Lieberman pointed out was that Rushton did not consider yet another confounding factor: nutrition. This is explained in Lieberman's fifth point, which was that "Rushton does not relate environment, nutrition, cranial size, and IQ" (p. 78). Gottfredson, weirdly, ignores this point while going after his sixth point, namely that "Rushton claims to “explain” a vast array of human behavior" (p. 79). 

What's wrong with him doing this? I'll give you a hint: it's not that his data and measurements aren't perfect. The problems include that he's glossing over differences that contradict his theory by lumping different groups together into racial categories by only using averages. Rushton's doing so also ignores the larger differences in brain size across gender than across "race", and the genders of his skulls were unknown (Cernovsky 1993). Lieberman also notes that "Rushton ranks “races” on a number of variables including cultural achievements, personality traits, marital stability, law-abidingness, mental health, and administrative capacity. These variables are usually not defined, and each represents reified aggregations of diverse behaviors that vary in their causation" (p. 79).

Naturally, Gottfredson couldn't resist ending her paper with this gem: "...it is Gould’s work on cranial capacity, not Rushton’s, that we now learn was fudged and falsified (Lewis et al., 2011)—just as Rushton said it was." Lewis et al., of course, is a 2011 study of Morton's skulls which concluded that "Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould." Of course, she omits criticism of Lewis et al. from sources like Weisberg & Paul (2016) who wrote that "We take no issue with Lewis et al.’s remeasurements, but argue that these measurements are not and cannot be evidence for their conclusion". Other researchers have argued that Lewis et al.'s defense of Morton is inadequate, and that "Gould was right to reject Morton's analysis as inappropriate and misleading, but wrong to believe that a more appropriate analysis was available" (Kaplan et al. 2015).

Addendum: Rushton's research on international variations in crime, which Gottfredson briefly mentions in her paper, is criticized by Neapolitan (1998) for not controlling for non-race factors.
Sources
The paper this post is about (Gottfredson 2013) is here: http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2012RaceandRushton.pdf
Anderson 1991: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/race-r-k-theory-rushton-anderson-canadian-psychology-1-1991.pdf
Cain & Vanderwolf 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019188699090185T
Cernovsky 1993: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-rushton-cernovsky-j-of-black-psychology-1993.pdf
Cernovsky 1995: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002193479502500602?journalCode=jbsa
Cravens 1978: The triumph of evolution: American scientists and the heredity-environment controversy 1900–1941.
Gossett 1965: Race: The history of an idea in America.
Kaplan et al. 2015: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848615000035
Lewis et al. 2011: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071
Long & Kittles 2009: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3378/027.081.0621
Lynn 1989a: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0092656689900299
Lynn 1989b: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0092656689900317
Neapolitan 1998: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1998.tb01243.x/full
Silverman 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016230959090002N
Templeton 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
Weisberg & Paul 2016: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002444
Weizmann et al. 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/cap/31/1/1/
Weizmann et al. 1991: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1991-20580-001
Zuckerman 1988: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988901365
Zuckerman 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1991-12414-001


http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00957984930193004
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.109.3.733-736?journalCode=pmsb
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02088001