Half Sigma

MSN Chess, a winner

I experimented with several online chess sites today, and my choice for best site (for the casual player) is MSN.

Unlike most of the other free sites which use Java applets, MSN uses ActiveX controls. In other words, it permanently installs the program onto your hard drive. So although it seems like you’re playing inside a web browser, it’s really a client/server application. The benefit is that it starts up a lot faster because you don’t have to re-download the Java applet every time you play.

The standard rated game at MSN is 10 minutes per side. I find this more civilized than the more common 5 minute blitz (you have twice as long to think), but you can still finish a game in 20 minutes at most.

MSN automatically pairs you up with someone close to your rating, unlike all the other sites where you have to find someone willing to play a game with you. The MSN system means you get started playing right away. The downside is that you don’t have the sense of community that some of the other chess sites offer, because you can’t see who’s playing and you can’t observe other players’ games.

Muhammad, the teddy bear

So a school teacher was sentenced to prison for allowing the kids in her class to name a teddy bear "Muhammad." Who the hell knew you could go to jail for something so stupid? "Muhammed" is probably the most common male name in Sudan. It's like naming a teddy bear Mike in the United States.

That's her reward for trying to help people in a country where the government doesn't want anyone to be helped. Countries like Sudan are good for nothing except providing targets to test our latest smart bombs.

Algebraic chess notation sucks

When I first learned how to read chess books as a kid in the 1970s, descriptive notation is what was used. But now, everything is written in the much uglier and harder to follow algebraic notation.

The beauty of “1. P-K4 P-K4” has been replaced by the ugliness of “1. e4 e5” The former clearly tells us that both white and black are moving their king pawn to the fourth rank. The latter tells us absolutely nothing unless you memorize the location of “e4” and “e5” on the chessboard. The really confusing part about algebraic is that if you’re looking at the board from black’s perspective, everything is upside-down.

“Pawn to king four” has a poetic sound to it that “ee four” will never come close to.

The US Chess Federation forced algebraic on us in the 1970s, which happens to coincide with the time that certain powers also tried to get us to adopt the metric system. The average American had the common sense to realize there was no good reason to switch from miles to kilometers. But the typical chess player, geekier than the average American and thus lacking in common sense, was easily brainwashed into thinking that algebraic was more scientific, and that if Europeans were doing it then it had to be good for Americans.

All the arguments given for algebraic seem bogus.

1. Europeans were using it. Who care? Why didn’t Europeans adopt our system instead?

2. Less ambiguous. Algebraic is only unambiguous in the long form (as in “Ng1-f3”). Once you convert that to short form (“Nf3”) as commonly used in books, it’s just as ambiguous. There could be two knights able to move to f3.

3. Easier to learn. Huh? Algebraic makes you memorize the coordinates of the board from both a white perspective and an upside-down black perspective. How exactly is that easy? In contrast, you already have to know which pieces start on which files in order to play the game, so descriptive notation requires no additional memorization at all.

4. Takes up less space in books. Only true if you use short form algebraic, and you don’t save that much space. Is this, by itself, really a good enough reason for the switch?

It’s sad that classic chess books have been rewritten in ugly algebraic notation, and the old versions are on longer in print.

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS

From reading the comments, it seems that criticizing algebraic notation is the most horrible thing I've ever written.

SECOND RESPONSE

If you pulled a random group of 100 people off the street, how many people would know the difference between algebraic and descriptive notation? One? Five?

Yet it seems like a substantial percentage of readers of this blog are actually familiar with this debate.

Fritz chess software sucks

I recently installed the Fritz 8 chess program on my notebook computer, and I realize that this program sucks.

I’m not talking about its playing ability. Allegedly, this same chess engine tied Gary Kasparov in a four-game match in 2003.

The interface is maddening. A seemingly simple task like starting a new game where the computer is white and I’m black is something I can’t figure out how to do.

The interface only displays algebraic notation. What if you want to see “P-K4” instead of “e2-e4”? Surely that can’t be too difficult of a programming task?

My biggest complaint is that Fritz doesn’t provide a level of difficulty suitable for entry-level players. There is a “handicap” mode (with a zillion confusing settings) where even the weakest setting still beats me.

There’s a “friend” mode where you can set a handicap (in hundredth’s of a pawn), but this mode doesn’t feel like you’re playing a weaker player, it feels like you’re playing Gary Kasparov who makes an obviously bad move a short way into the game, and then he kicks your ass anyway.

I guess there’s no need to upgrade to version 11 which claims to play an even stronger game.

Optimism and evolutionary biology

Yesterday I wrote about the optimism-realism-pessimism continuum and about how the average person has an optimism-bias.

So what’s the evolutionary purpose of the optimism bias? In most matters, pessimism seems more conducive to survival. The overly-optimistic hunter may decide to take on a sabertooth tiger by himself, while the more pessimistic hunter would wait for help from his fellow hunters. The optimistic farmer may be overly optimistic about the harvest and not plant enough food to feed himself for the winter. The pessimistic farmer would take precautions against droughts and other unforeseen circumstances.

This advertisement for optimism training for children (which sounds pretty creepy) highlights the main evolutionary benefit of optimism:

A boy asks a girl to the school dance, and she says no. Will he decide that he is a social failure and begin to withdraw, or simply ask another girl and hope for a better result? If he is programmed for optimism, the boy will probably go to the dance with a date.

The optimistic man is more likely to get with women and thus is more likely to pass his genes along to the next generation. This also creates a bioevolutionary feedback loop, because women who have children with optimistic men will be more likely have optimistic boy-children who will have greater sexual success and pass on more genes. Thus women evolved to favor men who are optimists. Optimism is possibly related to “self-confidence,” a quality that women always say they favor in a man.

The only problem with the bioevolutionary optimism theory is that we should expect men to be more optimistic than women, but the General Social Survey doesn’t seem to show a tendency for one sex to be more optimistic than the other. Perhaps optimism leads to higher social status for women which allows them to obtain higher status mates?

UPDATE

GSS respondents were asked how many days during the previous seven they felt sad. 42.5% of men said they didn’t feel sad during any of the previous seven days, compared to 30.9% of women. Perhaps this is related to women being less optimistic? Or maybe it's just not manly to admit to girly emotions like sadness?

Optimism-realism-pessimism

Optimism and pessimism are two ends of a scale, but realism should be in the middle of that scale.

I propose the following objective definitions:

Optimism: systematic tendency to expect the best possible outcomes.
Realism: systematic tendency expect the most likely outcomes.
Pessimism: systematic tendency to expect worst possible outcomes.

The realist appears to behave in the most rational matter and would make the most rational decisions.

The average person is an optimist. The fact that people have an optimism-bias in decision making is well documented (see for example the Wikipedia article). The other day I blogged about high school seniors' self-assessments of their intelligence. Only 6.9% of high school seniors assessed their intelligence as being below average, but 61.7% said they were above average. Such a skew is very typical when people are asked to assess themselves.

Because people judge whether someone's an optimist or a pessimist based on a relative scale rather than an objective scale, this means that someone with below average optimism, who is in fact a realist, will be said to be a pessimist.

So if realists are called pessimists, what are true pessimists called? They are probably classified as clinically depressed.

Andrew Sullivan on race and IQ

A reader pointed out to me that Andrew Sullivan posted again about race and IQ. His point is very similar to the point I made yesterday. We need to talk about race and IQ because it explains why there are unequal educational outcomes. And unequal educational outcomes is a topic liberals won't stop whining about.

Frauenmangel

Frauenmangel: it's German for the Woman Shortage. (Hat tip: fifi.)

Football player Sean Taylor shot

An anonymous commenter mentioned that Sean Taylor was shot.

Some news reports mention a possible burglary, but using my powerful profiling skills, I predict that this was not a random burglary, and that the shooter is a black person, with a history of violent and criminal behavior, who previously knew Sean Taylor.

Convicted of a crime he didn't commit

I feel sorry for the guy in this article who was convicted for a rape/murder he didn't commit.

The police profiler said the perp was probably a young white guy, a loner, who knew the victim, so the police focused in on some mentally troubled 16-year-old who knew the victim and showed too much interest in the case, even though there was no physical evidence or eyewitness evidence connecting him to the crime, and the semen and hair found on the victim did not match him. (The police figured she must have had consensual sex with someone else before the rape. They didn't even bother to try to find the guy she had sex with.)

Sixteen years later, it was discovered that a 30-year-old black guy whom she didn't know raped and murdered her. (The racial basis of the case is mysteriously excluded from the NY Times article.)

Another example of how being a "loner" can get you put in prison for crimes you didn't commit. I'm reminded of Richard Jewell, who was accused of being the Olympics bomber because he fit some psychological profile that involved being a loser.

I'm also reminded the DC sniper, whom the police profilers said was a lone white guy, so the police were busy looking for a lone white guy instead of the two black guys who were actually committing the crimes.

In reading background material, I also discovered that white people are more likely to be convicted, by juries, of crimes they didn't commit, because juries in white neighborhoods are a lot more trusting of police and prosecutors, and will usually convict anyone put in front of them. Juries in black neighborhoods routinely let the guilty, as as well as the rare innocent defendant, walk.

Why we need to talk about human biodiversity

Some people have said, "even if there are racial differences in IQ, why do we need to talk about them? Why can't we just pretend they don't exist?" This article, mentioned by an anonymous commenter, is an example of why it's necessary to talk about racial differences in average intelligence.

The article is about a survey that implies that the Alexandria public school system is racist because "privileged white minority receives an education that sets them on a path for college while black and Latino students are marginalized or ignored."

Because of racial IQ differences, the average black or Latino student is simply not smart enough to be college material, so as far as I know, the Alexandria school system is doing a good job of ensuring that its students capable of more advanced education receive more advanced education. The authors of the study would obviously be happier if no one received advanced education, then it would be "fair." These people disgust me.

Classic Time Magazine: The White Minority

In 1976, Time Magazine had an article entitled The White Minority, about an elementary school in DC with 400 black kids and only 50 white kids. It doesn’t seem like it was a very pleasant place for the white kids.

Sony Reader vs. Amazon Kindle

NY Times technology columnist David Pogue likes the new Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

I think that it’s incredibly ugly compared to the beautiful Sony Reader which costs only $300 compared to the more expensive $400 Kindle. And according to what I’ve read on internet forums, the Sony is the better reader. Thinner, an ounce lighter, easier to flip pages, longer battery life, theoretically they both contain the same screen technology but people say the Sony text is easier to read.

What does the Kindle have going for it? Wireless connectivity. Essentially there’s a cell phone built into it, so no matter where you are you can use the Kindle to shop the Amazon Kindle store and spend money on more e-books.

A big advantage to the Kindle is that it will automatically download the entire New York Times or Wall Street Journal in the middle of the night. That’s really useful. But you have to pay $9.99/month for the Journal and $13.99/month for the New York Times. I think it’s a good deal because they are less expensive than the paper versions and an e-book reader takes up a lot less space in your briefcase than a newspaper.

I previously wrote about how e-books have rip-off pricing. Amazon has improved this somewhat. From glancing around the Kindle store, the most expensive e-books seem to be $9.99, which is a nice discount from the price of new hardcover books which tend to have a discount price between $15 and $20. But there doesn’t seem to me much of a price discount for paperback books. Thus you only get the price savings if you read the latest books that aren’t out yet in paperback. Furthermore, you must remember that you are really renting the book rather than buying a permanent copy, which is something that this guy is furious about. When you buy a book for the Kindle, you will never be able to read it on another device such as the Sony Reader.

I believe that the correct price for an e-book is about 25% of the price of a print-book. Such a price would adequately take into account the savings to the publisher (no printing, storage, or shipping) and the fact that you can’t resell, lend, or give away your copy after you read it.

The Amazon Kindle store seems to have a better selection of books than the Sony Connect store. For people too lazy to download copyright-free books from free online e-book libraries, Amazon has a much better selection and better prices on such books. For example, Amazon has large collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels (one of the most popular authors on free e-book sites), most priced below $2.00, but the Sony Connect store has only A Princess of Mars and Sony wants $7.20 for it.

Epigenetics and human biodiversity realism

People have been throwing around the word "epigenetics" in the comments. As in "you fool, you can't say that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence, because you're ignoring epigenetics."

I have to admit this is a word I've never heard until this month. What does it mean? As someone pointed out in the comments, it has something to do with neo-Lamarckism. While I'm 100% in favor of scientists figuring out to what extent, if any, "epigenetics" affects how we turn out, I don't see how it's very relevant to disproving human biodiversity. Are black people in the United States going to look just like white people after a few generations because they now live in a white environment? Well so far it hasn't happened, and it seems very unlikely. Evolution obviously happens at the genetic level.

Furthermore, if someone is born with lower intelligence, what does it matter if he inherited the lower intelligence via genetic transmission or via epigenetic transmission? He's still innately of low intelligence. No amount of remedial education is going to change him into the next Einstein.

This is a debating tactic that the left-wing human biodiversity realism deniers stole from the Creationists, who take every single thing about evolution that's not 100% certain and say "Ah ha! This proves that evolution was wrong and that God created us."

Left-wing human biodiversity realism deniers seem to be saying that because we don't know every single thing there is to possibly know about genetics, this proves that the races are exactly equal in intelligence. This is ridiculous. This type of argument was used by the Catholic Church against Galileo. And in fact, Galileo was wrong about a whole lot of crap. He thought the planetary orbits were perfect circles, and he was completely wrong about comets. But Galileo is not remembered for what he got wrong, he's remembered for being correct in his main argument, which is that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun.

That races differ in average intelligence and other important cognitive traits is, based on the overwhelming evidence, the default assumption which needs to be disproved.

No one thinks they are stupid, even when they are

Yesterday I mentioned the commenter at another blog who said “people like to believe they are smarter than they have any justification for.”

The truth of this statement can be proven by looking at the data from Monitoring the Future: A Continuing Study of American Youth (12th-Grade Survey), 2006. High school seniors were asked the following question:

How intelligent do you think you are compared with others your age?

And here are the answers:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		Distribution
V174	1: FAR BLOW:(1)	1.1 150
	2: BELOW AV:(2)	1.5 216
	3: SL BELOW:(3)	4.3 597
	4: AVERAGE:(4)	31.4 4,389
	5: SL ABOVE:(5)	24.9 3,476
	6: ABOVE AV:(6)	28.6 3,993
	7: FAR ABOV:(7)	8.3 1,158
	COL TOTAL	100.0 13,979

Quite humorously, we see that only 6.9% of respondents assessed their intelligence as being below average, but 61.7% said they were above average.

Arnold Kling on race and IQ

Arnold Kling seems to be in the human biodiversity realism camp. (Hat tip to the reader "Mark" who pointed it out to me.)

His best contribution to the debate is pointing out that our educational policy is messed up because people deny human biodiversity realism. You can't create a class for intellectually slow children because that class always winds up being mostly black, and the principal is accused of being racist. Human biodiversity realism will most certainly lead to better public education.

Wow, everyone is talking about this issue now. But when will Glenn Reynolds chime in?

* * *

I found the first paragraph of this guy's comment extremely interesting and well written:

Our society is hypocritical about intelligence. We have no problem at all allowing people to get an advantage because of physical attributes, like beauty, athleticism, strength, height, and musical talents, but God forbid if we let anyone get an advantage because of intelligence. If intelligence correlated directly with the size of your cranium, then there would be no argument about who is smarter, since it would be obvious, just like who is taller and who is better looking. But intelligence is something that can pop up in people no matter what they look like. Thus, people like to believe they are smarter than they have any justification for. They are jealous of people who have this invisible gift, and ask why they can't have it, or indeed, how do you measure it when it is not obvious the way beauty is.

The final William Saletan article

Today he's using the HapMap Project to demonstrate that genes differ in frequency by population group. That's an idea he surely borrowed from this blog, because he probably read the New York Times article.

Too bad he's writing about the breastfeeding gene. I demonstrated that the study is bogus.

Brad DeLong deletes more comments

Proof of the deletion is this comment responding to my comment, but where is my comment?

Did I make any personal attacks? Use bad language? Call Brad a moron? Nope. I just explained why the Flynn effect doesn't mean that intelligence is increasing.

It should also be noted that this is only the second time I've left a comment on Brad's blog this year. It's not as if he knows me as some problem commenter who's always annoying him.

Question: should I delete all dissenting comments the way that liberal bloggers do?

* * *

I found the offensive comment in the Google cache. Here it is:

The "Flynn Effect" does not disprove racial differences in intelligence. It only demonstrates that culture-free "IQ-tests" are actually measuring some cultural influence besides IQ. Yes, those IQ tests are only approximations of people's real intelligence, and are an imperfect measuring device.

Scores on the SAT (and other academic tests such as reading and math tests given to school children) have been steady or declining over two generations (except for when they renormed the test). If people were actually getting smarter, SAT scores would have risen. The SAT is really a better intelligence test (for people born and raised in the U.S.) than most self-named IQ tests.

Going back to the Flynn Effect of rising scores on certain "IQ tests," I see very little desire on the political left to truly discover WHY scores have risen, they just want to use this as an argument that the whole concept of trying to measure how smart someone is is completely bogus.

Words like "smart" and "stupid" were in all languages long before the first IQ test was created.

No one is allowed to disagree with Brad DeLong. In fact, the comment doesn't really disagree with him, it just points out that his argument is very weak.

Decline in reading caused by Hispanics and dysgenic breeding

The current number one most emailed NY Times article is about declining reading test scores and declining time spent reading. This is said to be "alarming."

I agree, but people are alarmed for the wrong reasons. Between the lines, public education (perhaps No Child Left Behind?) and the internet are being blamed. But I think this is evidence of a decline in America's genetic intelligence. Intelligence is correlated with reading for fun (because smarter people enjoy reading more), and with scores on reading tests (because reading tests have a high g-loading).

For example, the number of 17-year olds who read almost every day, for fun, declined from 31% in 1984 to 22% in 2004. The number of 17-year olds who say they never or hardly ever read for fun increased from 9% to 19%.

Demographically, the percent of the population composed of ethnic groups with lower IQs has been increasing. Comparing U.S. census data from 1980 to 2000, and looking at ages 12 to 14 (because that age range will comprise the 17-year-olds in 1984 and 2004), the percentage of blacks increased from 15.1% to 15.7%, and the percentage of Hispanics increased from 8.2% to 15.1%.

Furthermore, within racial groups there is dysgenic breeding. Based on the General Social Survey, I previously calculated that we are losing about 10% of a standard deviation in intelligence with each generation. How does this break down in percentages? Well, if we assume that the standard deviation is 15, and that the median IQ was 100 a generation ago and only 98.5 today (because of dysgenic breeding), the percent of people with IQ of 80 or below would increase from 9.1% to 10.9%.

It's possible that there is some decline in reading caused by competition from other entertainment, such as DVDs, video games, and the internet, but it's hard to say to what extent. The people who did this study intentionally decided not to consider race, thus the study is pretty useless.

This post is a lot like a post I wrote a few months ago: Reading scores are declining. But I hope I've given you some more detailed data to think about.

You should also think about the fact that No Child Left Behind has only increased reading test scores in elementary school. This is because tests given to younger children test a narrower range of cognitive abilities, and thus it's easier to raise performance through coaching, or in other words "teaching to the test."

The female desirability advantage, by race

The following chart, produced from the 2000 Census data, shows the percent of U.S. born citizens, age 30 to 40, who are married, broken down by sex and race. Mixed race respondents are not included.

Why people ages 30 to 40? Some people think that’s an age category where people ought to be married.

Why only people born in the U.S.? Most Asian immigrants come here married, so the Asian figures look a lot different when foreign born Asians are included. Foreign born Asians of both sexes are more likely to be married than whites.

	Percent married
Race	Male	Female	Female desirability advantage
Non-Hispanic white	64.9	69.6	4.7
Black	48.1	38.3	-9.8
Asian	51.6	65.9	14.3
American Indian	56.7	54.6	-2.1
Mexican	58.6	61.8	3.2
Puerto Rican	51.9	51.8	-0.1

I believe that the chart above tells us the female desirability advantage for each race. The fact that more white women are married than white men demonstrates that white women are more desired as spouses (due to the Woman Shortage).

There is no woman shortage for the black man. Among blacks, there is a Man Shortage.

But for Asian men, the Woman Shortage is the most severe.

Is it wrong for white men to date Asian women?

No, I’m not saying that interracial dating is wrong because it’s interracial.

I’m saying that Asian men face a big problem in the dating market that’s going to get a lot worse in the next generation. The U.S. Census shows that Asian men born in the U.S. are less likely to be married than white men and face a bigger shortage of Asian women than white men face with respect to white women. It’s because too many Asian women are marrying white.

White men have plenty of white women to choose from, but Asian men face only a small supply of Asian women and Asian men don’t have an option of dating other races because, as discussed previously, women of other races don’t want to date them.

Therefore, one might argue that white men have a duty to Asian men to not poach their women. (A corollary argument is that white women have a duty to give Asian men a chance, but I doubt that's going to happen, because they are not even willing to give beta white men a chance.)

* * *

June, a young Asian woman who works in engineering and who lists sci-fi and "manga" as some of her hobbies, says the following about Asian men:

There is a definite trend in society for Asian girls to prefer to date white guys rather than Asian guys and my friend finds this insulting. Of the reasons I wouldn't want to date Asian guys are: they're chauvinistic, uncaring, lazy, not independent, weak willed, selfish, etc...

Ouch. That's mean. Do lots of Asian women have such a high amount of prejudice against men of their own race?

Liberal creationism

Slate has an article by William Saletan, Liberal Creationism, in which the author makes the case for racial differences in intelligence. He makes many arguments that have previously been made here, all of which are based on sources such as Arthur Jensen or J. Philippe Rushton. In fact, the post includes a link to the Jensen/Rushton paper (which is, perhaps, the best free human biodiversity resource on the web).

The most creative part of the article is where he explains to liberals that racial differences in intelligence is their equivalent of creationism:

If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn't just another fact; it's a threat to their whole value system. ...

. . .

Evolution forced Christians to bend or break. They could insist on the Bible's literal truth and deny the facts, as Bryan did. Or they could seek a subtler account of creation and human dignity. Today, the dilemma is yours. You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn't break your faith.

I think the article is incredibly groundbreaking, because Slate is a semi-mainstream website, and this is the first time I've seen such a forceful argument made at a semi-mainstream website.

Perhaps the dam of political correctness is finally breaking? This article is making its way around the blogosphere.

It has nothing to do with property ownership

Henry Louis Gates Jr. has a bullshit op-ed in today’s NY Times in which he alleges that the problem of the black underclass is that they don’t own any property:

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.

Mr. Gates has the cause and effect completely reversed. People who “study, save, work, strive and vote” are more likely to own property because of the tax advantages of doing so, and because it’s the culturally correct thing to do for most married middle class people.

I’ve lived in rental communities my whole [adult] life, and they were all nice places, without any of the problems of ghetto housing projects. When you put a bunch of people with middle class values together in a community, it’s a nice place to live. When you put a bunch of people together with underclass values, you wind up with a really bad place to live.

Ironically, back in the heyday of public housing, it was thought that housing projects would fix the problem of poverty. Now, the very same fix is supposedly the cause of the poverty.

The reason why it’s important to acknowledge human biodiversity is because without it, people latch onto bogus environmental reasons for different outcomes in different population groups. And then they want to waste billions of dollars in tax money to fix the alleged problem. And then a generation later they want to waste billions of more dollars to undo the fix.

Another "DNA Age" article

Amy Harmon has another "DNA Age" article in the NY Times. She writes about how she had her own genome sequenced.

I think it's the first time the NY Times has instructed people about SNPs, with instructions on how to pronounce them too. Another positive is that she reminds readers once again that genes have been discovered that are associated with intelligence (although I'm beginning to have serious doubts about the usefulness of those findings).

Unfortunately, she writes about the IQ-breastfeeding link that I proved to be bogus.

Bad news for Asian men

There’s an article in Slate about an interracial dating study.

The politically incorrect and bad news for Asians of both sexes is that Asians are rated the least physically attractive race, and that’s especially true for Asian men. From the study:

For male partners (column (1)), our main finding is that Asians generally receive lower ratings than men of other races.20 In fact, when we run the regressions separately for each race, we find that even Asian women find white, black, and Hispanic men to be more attractive than Asian men.

The authors’ final analysis is that women have a stronger preference for dating within their own race than men, but men still have a preference for dating within their own race. The exception is Asian women who, on average, have no preference against dating white men. The reason you see so many white male/Asian female couples is not because white men prefer Asian women (in fact they prefer black and Hispanic women over Asian women), but because Asian women like white men as much as they like men of their own race. On the other hand, women of other races view Asian men as the least desirable race, so Asian men have fewer opportunities to date interracially themselves.

My own thoughts are that averages can be deceiving. The finding that the Asian women, on average, have no preference with respect to white or Asian men may reflect a different distribution. I suspect 80% of Asian women have a mild preference for Asian men while 20% of Asian women have a strong preference for white men. This is based on observation, and from reading online Asian forums where Asian men complain about all the Asian women who only want to date white men.

It should also be noted that this study was based on speed dating events hosted for Columbia University graduate students, an extremely atypical segment of the population. Their attitudes towards interracial dating are probably different than those of regular people.

Findings from the General Social Survey show that as intelligence (as measured by Wordsum score) increases, so do politically correct responses to racial questions. It’s not clear to me how this might skew the results. For example, within the Asian community, it’s considered politically incorrect for women to express a preference for dating white men, so maybe Asian women with bachelor’s degrees from state schools have a stronger preference for white men than Asian women who are graduate students at Columbia?

DTNBP1 gene and racial IQ differences

Based on the study linking various SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) of the DTNBP1 gene, I created the following chart summarizing data from the DTNBP1 study and the HapMap Project. (Sorry about the horizontal scrollbar.):

SNP	Common allele	Uncommon allele	IQ benefit	Asian freq	White freq	Nigerian freq	Asian IQ	Nigerian IQ
rs2619539	G	C	3.5	85.39%	69.49%	51.67%	0.5565	-0.6237
rs3213207	A	G	-2.86	1.12%	20%	5%	0.539968	0.429
rs1011313	G	A	-0.21	46.07%	13.33%	0%	-0.068754	0.027993
rs2619528	G	A	-6.41	15.12%	34.48%	63.33%	1.240976	-1.849285
rs760761	C	T	-8.02	14.44%	32.20%	63.33%	1.424352	-2.496626
rs2619522	T	G	-7.51	15.56%	33%	62.71%	1.309744	-2.231221
rs2619538	A	T	6.52	3.41%	81.36%	88.14%	-5.08234	0.442056
							-0.079554	-6.301783

The chart above shows the IQ benefit of carrying at least one uncommon allele, and the percent of population having at least one uncommon allele. The righthand columns calculate the IQ difference with respect to the white population.

The net result shows -6.3 IQ points for the Nigerian population group compared to the whites, and -0.1 IQ points for Asians compared to white. Asians are supposed to have higher IQs than whites, so I suspect that other intelligence genes such as the CHRM2 gene, will be found to boost Asian IQ.

The really strange SNP is rs2619538, because that shows -5.1 IQ for Asians compared to whites. Most of the other SNPs show a higher IQ for Asians and a lower IQ for Nigerians. I wonder what else that SNP does?

DTNBP1 explains 1/3 of the black-white IQ gap.

Looking at the allele frequencies, all but one of the SNPs have the white population group in the middle compared to the Asian and Nigerian population groups, tending to confirm J. Philippe Rushton's r/K selection theory.

Human biodiversity deniers say "races have 99.9% same genes blah blah blah more variance withing races than between races blah blah blah," but as we see, it only takes a few SNPs out of billions to to explain 1/3 of the black-white IQ gap.

I will be studying some of the other IQ genes in the future to get a better picture. I suspect that half of the Asian-white-black IQ gaps will be explained by currently known IQ genes.

UPDATE 1/30/2010

More than two years after I wrote this, this post suddenly appeared on the front page of reddit.

I was just playing around with the HapMap project when I wrote this post. Although I do believe that the ability to accurately predict a person's IQ based on their genotype will be possible in the not-too-distant future, there aren't yet enough genes identified in the literature for an armchair geneticist to determine the average racial IQs differences between whites, Asians and Nigerians.

HOWEVER, what the existing research and the HapMap project demonstrate is that (1) various SNPs have been identified which are associated with brain function and intelligence; and (2) the frequency of occurrence of these SNPs differ dramatically between races. I am sure that there will soon be more compelling DNA-based proof that the average black isn't as intelligent as the average white. The non-DNA-based proof is compelling.

You should read my post Response to comments on race and intelligence in which I probably responded to the comment you wanted to write.

UPDATE 2/1/2010

I already admitted I was just over-exuberantly playing around with the HapMap project and I’m now aware that the method was flawed. At the blog Gene Expression, you can read a more detailed explanation of why this specific analysis doesn’t prove much.

But once again, the bigger point of it all is that (1) there are SNPs associated with brain function; and (2) these genes have a very different distribution in different racial gene pools. This demonstrates that there’s a sound basis for the theory that IQ differences and other behavioral differences between races has a genetic explanation.

Breastfeeding does NOT cause higher IQ

There is a 2007 article in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), “Moderation of breastfeeding effects on the IQ by genetic variation in fatty acid metabolism,” by Avshalom Caspi et al., claiming to have discovered a genetic variation in the way that breastfeeding effects IQ. However, this is in complete contradiction with a 2006 article published in BMJ (British Medical Journal), “Effect of breast feeding on intelligence in children: prospective study, sibling pairs analysis, and meta-analysis,” by Geoff Der, G. David Batty, and Ian J. Deary, claiming that breastfeeding has no effect on IQ after other confounding factors are accounted for.

The results are completely contradictory. What’s going on here?

Hispanic neighbors make us happy

The 2006 General Social Survey asks the following question:

Next, we are going to ask questions about people that you are acquainted with through your neighborhood. g. How many are Black or African-American?

Breastfeeding and IQ

I have recently read some blog posts about some recent study alleging that breastfeeding increases IQ, but only if the baby has a certain gene.

HOWEVER, a year ago, it was reported that the breastfeeding-IQ link is bogus:

The researchers analysed data from more than 5,000 children and 3,000 mothers in the US.

They found that mothers who breastfed tended to be more intelligent, and when this fact was taken into account, most of the relationship between breastfeeding and the child's intelligence disappeared.

The rest was accounted for by other aspects of the family background.

Sibling comparison

The researchers also looked at families where one child was breastfed and another was not.

This confirmed the earlier results - the breastfed child was no more intelligent than his or her sibling.

Putting the results together with other studies that measured the mother's IQ confirmed this pattern.

Mr Der said: "This research shows that intelligence is determined by factors other than breastfeeding.

So which report do we believe?

* * *

For the curious, according to the HapMap analysis, Asian populations have the G (allegedly low IQ) gene much less frequently than the European or Nigerian populations. 81% of Asians have two C alleles, compared to 55% of Nigerians and 48% of Europeans. Assuming that this allele really is connected with IQ (which I am not sure I believe), this is yet more evidence that genes affecting cognitive abilities are not equally distributed among the races.

UPDATE

I obtained e-copies of both these research papers, if you want a copy, email me.

UPDATE 2

JUNK SCIENCE debunked. Read it: Breastfeeding does NOT cause higher IQ.

Maureen Dowd complaining about something

Maureen Dowd’s is complaining about something, but I can’t figure out quite what. Makes me kind of wish that the NY Times never made her column free.

We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.

Stop the presses! Scientists discover that men prefer women who are good looking!

It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.

I think the above quote has something to do with what she’s really complaining about, but it seems to be mutually beneficial, because a past NY Times article revealed that women dump men who don’t have an expensive enough apartment. It’s best for everyone if they never start dating in the first place.

Note that “ambition” is just a euphemism for money. Ambitionless rich men seem to have no problems in the dating market. If anything, not having to sit in a soulless cubicle for 40 hours a week adds to their desirability--it makes them seem more free spirited.

Or, to take a quote from yet another NY Times article:

“I love traveling, going to the opera and good restaurants,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be Per Se, but good food is important in my life. It’s sometimes hard to maintain the lifestyle I’m used to when I’m in a relationship with a guy who makes less than me, since I don’t want to be paying for the guy I’m with all the time.”

Once again, men just seem to be showing good common sense to avoid women like the one from the quote above.