Interesting interview of Steve Hsu. I’ll reproduce the part about Feynman:

3. Is it true Feynman’s IQ score was only 125?

Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. It seems quite possible to me that Feynman’s cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things.

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Amy Harmon has a very long piece in The New York Times, Navigating Love and Autism. It’s about a couple who both have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Like cancer I suspect that this term brackets a lot of different issues into one catchall label, not to mention the acknowledgment that it’s a spectrum. When I spent time with the Bay Area Less Wrong community I would observe the range in tendencies and neurological diversity of people who clearly would be classified as “high functioning autistic” (to be clear, these were individuals strongly selected for high general intelligence, with a minimum threshold of around two standard deviations above the norm). The lack of comprehension of religiosity and bias toward libertarianism were two salient characteristics of this sect (though people who have met me don’t classify me as having Asperger syndrome, I have these two cognitive biases myself)

 

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Hominin increase in cranial capacity, courtesy of Luke Jostins

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A few years ago a statistical geneticist at Cambridge’s Sanger Institute, Luke Jostins, posted the chart above using data from fossils on cranial capacity of hominins (the human lineage). As you can see there was a gradual increase in cranial capacity until ~250,000 years before the present, and then a more rapid increase. I should also note that from what I know about the empirical data, mean human cranial capacity peaked around the Last Glacial Maximum. Our brains have been shrinking, even relative to our body sizes (we’re not as large as we were during the Ice Age). But that’s neither here nor there. In the comments Jostins observes:

The data above includes all known Homo skulls, but none of the results change if you exclude the 24 Neandertals. In fact, you see the same results if you exclude Sapiens but keep Neandertals; the trends are pan-Homo, and aren’t confined to a specific lineage….

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I badger readers here to actually use all the analytic tools which researchers put out into public circulation, rather than just offering cheap opinions. Obviously it’s way more fun and informative to have discussions with someone who can check their own hunches by doing a few “runs” overnight. Secondly, if you have minimal technical skills all it requires is an investment of time. If you can’t be bothered to invest the time if you have a modicum of nerd-quotient then it says something about how passionate you are about these issues in my opinion (granted, life gets in the way, but as someone who routinely felt lucky to sleep 3 hours on many nights over the past 3 months, please spare me).

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And, if applicable, Hanukkah, and/or Kawanzaa, Yule!

In response to comments and queries below I’ve been poking around for more experimental material on quantitative genetics, and in particular the breeder’s equation. That’s how I stumbled upon this very interesting and informative obituary of D. S. Falconer in Genetics. It reviews not only the biographical details of Falconer’s life, but much of his science. It’s free to all now, so I highly recommend it! (as well as Introduction to Quantitative Genetics, which is quite pricey right now, but just keep watching, I recall getting a relatively cheap copy of the 1996 edition) Curiously, quantitative genetics is rather unknown to the general public in comparison to the biophysical sexiness of molecular genetics, but in most ways it’s the much better complement to the “folk genetics” which often crops up in our day to day life (e.g., “why is so-and-so’s son so short when so-and-so is so tall”). DNA illuminates the discontinuities of Mendelian inheritance, often in the gloomy realm of disease, but quantitative genetics sheds light on the continuities and variations we see across the generations.

In the comments below a reader asks about the empirical difference in heights between siblings. I went looking…and I have to say that the data isn’t that easy to find, people are more interested in the deeper inferences on can make from the resemblances than the descriptive first-order data itself. But here’s one source I found:

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Average difference	Identical twins	Identical twins raised apart	Full siblings
Height, inches	0.67	0.71	1.8
Weight, pounds	4.2	9.9	10.4
IQ	5.9	8.2	9.8

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These data indicate that IQ and height variation among sibling cohorts is on the order of ~2/3rd to 3/4th of the variation that one can find within the general population (my estimate of standard deviation of 2.5 inches for height below is about right, if a slight underestimate according to the latest data). But I also found a paper with more detailed statistics.

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John Farrell points me to this interesting post, Whose Christmas Is It Anyway?, which reports on revisionist scholarship which expresses skepticism that the Roman Christian celebration of Christmas on December 25th is a co-option of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the celebration of the birth of Sol. The context is that in the 3rd century various forms of astral religion, often of eastern provenance, became rather prominent across the Roman Empire. These cults received ad hoc imperial patronage due to the devotion of particular emperors, such as Aurelian. Though the cult of Sol never attained a religious monopoly analogous to Christianity, the rise of the latter in the 4th century is best understood with the prominence of the former in the 3rd century kept in mind. So, for example, the peculiarity of early depictions of Jesus Christ to the modern eye may simply be a function of the cultural milieu in terms of the expectations of what a god would look like. The transfer of rituals from the solar religion of the 3rd and 4th century down to Christian late antiquity is noted for the Roman aristocracy, mostly because the clerical elite of the period inveighed against these persistence pagan forms of reverence of the divine.

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Kobe Bryant is an exceptional professional basketball player. His father was a “journeyman”. Similarly, Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr. both surpassed their fathers as baseball players. Both of Archie Manning’s sons are superior quarterbacks in relation to their father. This is not entirely surprising. Though there is a correlation between parent and offspring in their traits, that correlation is imperfect.

Note though that I put journeyman in quotes above because any success at the professional level in major league athletics indicates an extremely high level of talent and focus. Kobe Bryant’s father was among the top 500 best basketball players of his age. His son is among the top 10. This is a large realized difference in professional athletics, but across the whole distribution of people playing basketball at any given time it is not so great of a difference.

What is more curious is how this related to the reality of regression toward the mean. This is a very general statistical concept, but for our purposes we’re curious about its application in quantitative genetics. People often misunderstand the idea from what I can tell, and treat it as if there is an orthogenetic-like tendency of generations to regress back toward some idealized value.

Going back to the basketball example: Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player in the history of the professional game, has two sons who are modest talents at best. The probability that either will make it to a professional league seems low, a reality acknowledged by one of them. In fact, from what I recall both received special attention and consideration because they were Michael Jordan’s sons. It is still noteworthy of course that both had the talent to make it onto a roster of a Division I NCAA team. This is not typical for any young man walking off the street. But the range in realized talent here is notable. Similarly, Joe Montana’s son has been bouncing around college football teams to find a roster spot. Again, it suggests a very high level of talent to be able to plausibly join a roster of a Division I football team. But for every Kobe Bryant there are many, many, Nate Montanas. There have been enough generations of professional athletes in the United States to illustrate regression toward the mean.

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John Horgan has a long review of Robert Trivers’ long overdue book, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. I really don’t care how well Trivers analyzed the topic, this is such a rich and important issue that I can’t help but think he must have hit some important mines of insight. I haven’t read The Folly of Fools, but I can recommend Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers. It’s not just a compilation of papers, there are biographical chapters which flesh out the context behind a particular idea at a given time. Trivers also shows up prominently in Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate and Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species.