Large differences at a few genes?

By equalizing the environment, socialist regimes made genetic influences more noticeable (Wikicommons).

 

 

Current thinking is that cognitive ability differs from one person to the next through small differences at very many genes.  This view is stated in a recent review of the genetics of intelligence:

 

It became clear that the problem was power: the largest effect sizes of associations between individual single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and intelligence were extremely small, accounting for less than 0.05% of the variance of intelligence. The average effect size of the tens of thousands of SNPs needed to explain the 50% heritability of intelligence is of course much lower. If the average effect size is 0.005%, 10,000 such SNP associations would be needed to explain the 50% heritability of intelligence. (Plomin and von Stumm 2018)

 

This view is not shared by IQ researcher Volkmar Weiss, who argues that a few genes have variants that differ more substantially in their effects. Fortuitous combinations of such variants may explain the births of exceptionally intelligent individuals to above-average parents:

 

The possibility of rapid social ascent and descent suggests that the differences in thinking power, the IQ, are based on a simple genetic polymorphism, which prevents the solidification of society. A broad middle class, which marries upwards or downwards or among itself, connects the social extremes. The data supports it: The children of this middle class have a 25% chance of becoming part of the intellectual elite, 25% chance of belonging to the mentally healthy working class and a 50% chance of maintaining the social status of their parents. (Weiss 2020, p. 14)

 

Consequently, "in each generation the greatest number of highly gifted people do not come from marriages between highly gifted people, but from marriages of the middle class" (Weiss 2020, p. 13).

 

Weiss acknowledges that very many genes have some influence on cognitive ability, but in most cases the influence is secondary or tertiary. He argues that selection for intelligence, particularly in recent times, has operated mostly on a subset of genes with substantial effects. He cites a study by Davis et al. (2015) on the DUF1220 gene, which varies in the number of copies of a protein-coding sequence called CON2. Populations of European descent have 26 to 33 copies, and each additional copy is associated with a 3.3 point increase in IQ. Are there other genes with substantial effects on cognition? Perhaps.

 

 

IQ research in the DDR

 

Weiss grew up in East Germany and did his initial research on IQ there. He witnessed how the genetics of IQ, initially a taboo subject, became more and more acceptable in the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe. The authorities had made a systematic effort to erase class differences and equalize the social environment, only to find that differences in intellectual ability remained.  Indeed, by equalizing the environment, they had made the influence of genes more noticeable:

 

Contrary to the expectations of the Marxists, equal opportunities under favourable environmental conditions always lead to an increased genotype-phenotype correlation and thus to an increase in 'heredity'. ... This means that the better equal opportunities are guaranteed in an efficient educational system, the greater the variability of people based on genetic differences." (Mohr 1975, p. 48 [transl. by Weiss])

 

In the 1960s, and even more so in the 1970s, East Germany gave up its policy of preferentially admitting the children of workers or peasants to university … and thus preferentially hiring them for intellectually demanding jobs (Weiss 2020, pp. 44-45). The educational system now became oriented toward performance, with special classes for the highly gifted. Pragmatism was the keynote: the authorities wished to identify talented individuals and help them succeed. Academic research followed the same trend. In 1972, Weiss defended a doctoral dissertation in East Berlin on the inheritance of mathematical and technical abilities (Weiss 2020, p. 47).

 

On the eve of its dissolution, the Eastern bloc was learning lessons that the Western bloc had not yet learned … or had learned too long ago.

 

 

References

 

Davis, J. M., Searles, V. B., Anderson, N., Keeney, J., Raznahan, A., Horwood, J., Fergusson, D. M., Kennedy, M. A., Gledd, J. and J. M. Sikela. (2015). DUF1220 copy number is linearly associated with increased cognitive function as measured by total IQ and mathematical aptitude scores. Human Genetics 134: 67-75.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00439-014-1489-2

 

Mohr, H. (1975). Der prinzipielle Konflikt zwischen Biologie und Marxismus. In G. Szczesny (ed.). Marxismus, ernstgenommen: ein Universalsystem auf dem Prüfstand des Wissens. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt pp. 30-50

 

Plomin, R., S. von Stumm. (2018). The new genetics of intelligence. Nature Reviews Genetics 19: 148-159. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2017.104

 

Weiss, V. (2020). The Population Cycle that Drives Human History. Leipzig, Germany

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341100317

 

  

Birth of a word

Memorial service for Walther Rathenau (Wikicommons - German Federal Archives). His assassination introduced a new word into French and, shortly after, into English.

 

 

A reader has written me about my last post:

It is extremely unlikely that "racism" is an attempt at translating something like Völkismus. Between Hitler's preference for Rasse (race) over Völk and the fact that the Nazis drew on authors like Chamberlain (whose antisemitism would also tend towards privileging Rasse over Völk) and Gobineau (who wrote in French), there is no support to be found for a derivation that would make "racism" appear to be related to the less virulent of the two strains of German nationalism (the romantic-idealistic one which relished being able to point at linguistic differentiation - like Völk vs. populus/people/peuple - and speculating about vague semantic correlates thereof). 

The simple fact of the matter is that "racism" is not any kind of translation but just a combination of a widely used term with a lexologically highly productive suffix. Critical use of "racism" basically starts in the 1920s with Théophile Simar. And Hirschfeld, whose book Racism secured wider currency for the term, clearly wanted to espouse an anthropological concept just as much as Boas et. al. did, although he didn't offer any detailed discussion beyond his roundabout rejection of traditional ideas. BTW, Hirschfeld lectured in the U.S. in 1931. While he wrote his German manuscript in 1933/1934, he may well have employed the term "racism" years earlier.

The best authority on this subject is probably Pierre-André Taguieff, who seems to have read everything about racism, racialism, or colorism. He found that continuous use of the word “racism” began in the 1920s, initially in French and shortly after in English. There is little doubt about the historical context:

In a book published late in 1922, Relations between Germany and France, the Germanist historian Henri Lichtenberger introduced the adjective racist in order to characterize the "extremist," "activist," and "fanatical" elements in the circles of the German national and nationalist right as they had just recently been manifested by the assassination in Berlin, on June 24, 1922, of Walther Rathenau:

The right indignantly condemned Rathenau's murder and denied any connection with the murderers. A campaign was even planned to expel from the Nationalist party the agitators of the extreme right known as "Germanists" or "racists," a group (deutschvölkische) whose foremost leaders are Wulle, Henning and von Graefe, and whose secret inspirer is supposed to be Ludendorff.

[...] The context of the term's appearance is significant: the description of the behavior of the "German nationals" and more precisely the "activist," "extreme right" fraction. The adjective racist is clearly presented as a French equivalent of the German word völkische, and always placed in quotation marks. [...] The term, having only just appeared, is already charged with criminalizing connotations.

In 1925, in his reference book L'Allemagne contemporaine, Edmond Vermeil expressly reintroduced the adjective racist to translate the "untranslatable" German term völkische and suggested the identification, which became trivial in the 1930s of (German) racism with nationalist anti-Semitism or with the anti-Jewish tendencies of the nationalist movement in Germany in the 1920s:

 

It is in this way that the National German Party has little by little split into two camps. The "racist" (völkische) extreme right has separated from the party. Racism claims to reinforce nationalism, to struggle on the inside against all that is not German and on the outside for all those who bear the name German. [...] (Taguieff, 2001, pp. 88-89)

 

The term “racist” thus began as an awkward translation of the German völkische to describe ultranationalist parties. Initially, the noun "racism" did not exist, just as there was no corresponding noun in German. It first appeared in 1925, and in 1927 the French historian Marie de Roux used it to contrast his country’s nationalism, based on universal human rights, with radical German nationalism, which recognized no existence for human rights beyond that of the Volk that created them. "Racism [...] is the most acute form of this subjective nationalism," he wrote. The racist rejects universal principles. He does not seek to give the best of his culture to "the treasure of world culture." Instead, the racist says: "The particular way of thinking in my country, the way of feeling that belongs to it, is the absolute truth, the universal truth, and I will not rest or pause before I have ordered the world by law, that of my birth place" (Taguieff, 2001, p. 91-94).

This was the original meaning of "racism," and it may seem far removed from the current meaning. Or maybe not. No matter how we use the word, the Nazi connotation is always there, sometimes lingering in the background, sometimes in plain view.

Conclusion

The noun "racism" was derived in French from an awkward translation of the German adjective völkische. Unlike the original source word, however, it has always had negative and even criminal connotations. It encapsulated everything that was going wrong with German nationalism in a single word and, as such, aggravated a worsening political climate that ultimately led to the Second World War.

When that war ended, the word "racism" wasn't decommissioned. It found a new use in a postwar context of decolonization, civil rights, and Cold War rivalry. Gradually, it took on a life of its own, convincing many people—even today—that the struggle against the Nazis never ended. They're still out there! 

It would be funny if the consequences weren't so tragic. Our obsession with long-dead Nazis is blinding us to current realities. In Europe, there have been many cases of Jews being assaulted and murdered because they are Jews. These crimes are greeted with indignation about how Europe is returning to its bad ways, and yet in almost every case the assailant turns out to be of immigrant origin, usually North African or sub-Saharan African. At that point, nothing more is said. One can almost hear the mental confusion.

Reference 

Frost, P. (2013). More thoughts. The evolution of a word, Evo and Proud, May 18

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/05/more-thoughts-evolution-of-word.html 

Taguieff, P-A. (2001). The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles, University of Minnesota Press.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=AcOG6Y9XG40C&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

East Germans are getting a lot smarter ... Really?

Unemployment rates in the West and East of Germany (source)
Did East German conscripts become smarter because East Germans were becoming smarter? Or were smarter individuals increasingly seeing the army as an alternative to unemployment?

In a recent study of conscripts entering the German army, Roivainen (2012) has found that the mean IQ of East German conscripts jumped eight percentage points between 1990 and 2006. That’s a huge increase! And a fast one! Far too fast to be due to genetic evolution. Sixteen years isn’t even one generation. The only possible cause seems to be a better environment, such as through improvements to the standard of living, education, and nutrition.

Specifically, the study found:

[…] strong IQ gains of 0.5 IQ point per annum for East German conscripts in the 1990s, after the reunification of the country. An analysis of IQ, GDP, and educational gains in 16 German federal states between 1990 and 1998 shows that IQ gains had a .89 correlation with GDP gains and a .78 correlation with educational gains. The short time frame excludes significant effects of biological or genetic factors on IQ gains. These observations suggest a causal direction from GDP and education to IQ. (Roivainen, 2012)

Until last year, Germany had conscription for all male citizens, so this finding couldn’t result from biased sampling of the East German population. The samples were the population.

Wait a minute …

Or were they? Germans could dodge the draft on several grounds: conscientious objection; service in international aid organizations; illness; drug abuse; delinquency; criminality, etc. In total, over half of all German men evaded military service:

The post-Cold War downsizing of the Bundeswehr led to a considerable decrease in demand for young conscripts. Of all men reaching draftable age, less than one half actually served. In 2005 about 15% served in the military, while 31% performed civilian service or some other form of alternative service. More than 36% were screened out for medical reasons. This percentage was lower in the past (15% in 2003), but to avoid drafting more men than needed, medical standards had been raised. The remainder includes those who were exempt for various reasons, but is mostly made up of men who were not drafted because the military had already reached its recruitment goals. This had led to discussions about "draft equality" ("Wehrgerechtigkeit"), which is the principle that the draft should have applied equally and non-discriminatorily to all men. (Wikipedia, Conscription in Germany)

So the possibility of sampling bias is back on the table. Is there reason to believe that this sampling of the East German population changed between 1990 and 2006?

There were in fact two changes:


Increased sampling of the highly educated

The end of the Cold War brought a steady process of deindustrialization to the former East Germany. Full employment gave way to chronic double digit unemployment. As a result, highly educated Ossies increasingly saw military service as a possible career.

This change has been commented upon in a recent New York Times article:

In a recent study, two experts said that while only 16 percent of the German population of 82 million lives in the former East Germany, easterners make up 30 percent of military personnel. At the same time, said Michael Wolffsohn, a professor at the German Institute for International Security Affairs, and Maximilian Beenisch, a social scientist, easterners with higher educational qualifications were drawn to the military because of a lack of alternative opportunities in eastern Germany, where unemployment is higher than in the west. (New York Times, 2011)

The same point is made by Roivainen himself:

In a Bundeswehr survey from 1993, attitudes toward the army were more positive among East German youth and those planning a career in practical vocations than among West German youth and those wishing to study further. (Roivainen, 2012)

Decreased sampling of troubled youth

With reunification, a more liberal social environment in East Germany brought about an apparent rise in IQ scores. Fewer low IQ individuals were present in the sort of institutional settings where IQ tests were routinely administered.

Many of these individuals were juvenile delinquents. In Germany, delinquency leads to exclusion from military service: “Delinquents sentenced to more than a year or charged with a felony against peace, democracy, the state or state security were not drafted for military service” (Wikipedia, Conscription in Germany).

As I noted in an earlier post, truancy was less common in the old East Germany than in the old West Germany because punishment was harsher. This factor had the effect of depressing IQ scores in East Germany, since potentially truant individuals were more likely to be tested for IQ in East German classrooms than in West German ones.

The same reasoning applies to juvenile delinquency. With reunification, East German youth entered a less controlled social environment. Relatively low-skilled factory work also disappeared. The result was a sharp rise in youth violence and delinquency:

Most of the increase in German youth violence has been encountered in what was communist East Germany before the reunification. Youth violence in the east is 70 percent higher than in the west, a factor linked to the exposure of eastern youth to greater poverty and unemployment than their West German peers. (Siegel & Welsh, 2009, p. 577)

From 1990 delinquency began increasing in the region of East Germany and has reached critical proportions. There are three general types of delinquency: traditional delinquency, new kinds of delinquency from outside the region, and delinquency associated with the unification of Germany. Traditional delinquency has increased in nearly all significant categories of crime: theft, fraud, robbery, murder (homicides generally) and rape. The new category of crimes consists of drug trafficking and abuse, car theft, and environmental crimes. Violence against foreigners in the former East Germany is also significant. Crimes committed in association with unification include profiteering, fraud, and financial manipulations (Buchholz, 1993)

Conclusion

There is little doubt that the mean IQ of East German conscripts rose dramatically between 1990 and 2006. This increase, however, most likely reflected the changing composition of the pool of candidates for military service. Because of rising unemployment, high IQ individuals were much more likely to consider military service in 2006 than they were in 1900. Meanwhile, because of a more liberal social environment, low IQ individuals were much more prone to delinquency and being excluded from conscription.

But why do these gains in IQ correlate so highly, on a state-by-state basis, with gains in GDP and also, to a lesser extent, with gains in education? These high correlations are actually not so surprising given the tight relationship between the positive changes to East German society (rise in GDP due to expansion of the market economy) and the more negative ones (rise in unemployment due to deindustrialization and rise in juvenile delinquency due to social liberalization). These changes were two sides of the same coin.

By way of example, there existed in the 19th century a significant correlation between the salaries of Protestant ministers in Boston and the price of rum in Havana. Is this proof that something underhanded was going on? Hardly. The two trends were part of a larger worldwide cycle of economic upturns and downturns.

As Roivainen himself points out, the correlations with GDP and education are simply an artefact of the east-west divide within Germany:

However, within western Germany, the correlation between IQ gain and GDP gain was .03 and between IQ gain and educational gain −0.12. Thus, the strong correlations based on calculations involving all states mainly reflect the east–west divide and its gradual narrowing (Roivainen, 2012)

References

Buchholz, E. (1993). Social changes, crime and police in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), from Social Change, Crime and Police: International Conference, June 1-4, 1992, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 115-121, (eds., Jozsef Vigh and Geza Katon). https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=144804

Cowell, A. (2011). The draft ends in Germany, but questions of identity endure, New York Times, June 30, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/world/europe/01germany.html?pagewanted=all

Leipzig, a demographic analysis. Germany, Saxony and Leipzig http://demographicleipzig.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/germanysaxonyleipzig/

Roivainen, E. (2012). Economic, educational, and IQ gains in eastern Germany 1990–2006, Intelligence, 40, 571–575. https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/roivainen.pdf

Siegel, L.J. & B. Welsh. (2009). Juvenile Delinquency: Theory, Practice, and Law, Cengage Learning.

Wikipedia, Conscription in Germany, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Germany