Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct

Villains do exist in this world. So do heroes, although they're a lot rarer.

Though I think that this is a really important counterpoint.

I once tried reading a book of some of Gould's essays... the parts I read were mostly just boring and I didn't bother to finish it.

Mr Johnson, sir, there you are! The lab boys have been looking for you. They say they've figured out where the missing personality core got to!

When thinking about the climate and cranial capacity connection the most likley explanations seems to be simply that cold clime, all else being equal, requires, more smarts, but please note that it is also possible that cranial capacities vary due to the problem of temperature regulation of the brain (the relationship between surface and volume matters in this sort of thinking).

Another alternative explanation that has surfaced (paper) is that both bigger eyes and bigger brains developed in order to deal with the low light condition. Commentary on the study, by Peter Frost:

The logjam seems to have broken. On the heels of Lewis et al. (2011), we now have another paper on variation in brain size among human populations, this time by Pearce and Dunbar (2011).

Brains vary in size by latitude, being bigger at higher latitudes and smaller at lower ones. This variation seems to reflect an adaptation to climate. But just how, exactly, does climate relate to brain size? How direct or indirect is the relationship?

Pearce and Dunbar (2011) argue that bigger brains are an adaptation to lower levels of ambient light. Specifically, dimmer light requires larger eyes, which in turn require larger visual cortices in the brain. Using 73 adult crania from populations located at different latitudes, the two authors found that both eyeball size and brain size correlate positively with latitude. The correlation was stronger with eyeball size, an indication that this factor was driving the increase in brain size.

How credible is this explanation? First of all, visual cortex size was not directly measured. The authors inferred that this brain area was responsible for the increase in total cranial capacity. Obviously, they couldn’t have done otherwise. They were measuring skulls, not intact brains.

But there’s another problem—one in the realm of logic. A lot of things correlate with latitude: pigmentation, mating systems, rules of descent, degree of paternal investment, and so on. If one of them correlates more strongly with latitude than the others, does it therefore cause the others? Not at all. It may be closer than the others to this shared cause, but it doesn’t necessarily lie on the same causal chain as the others.

In other words, the level of ambient light does not produce a single cascade of consequences, with eyeball size being the first consequence. There are probably many different cascades.

To date, the best map of human variation in brain size is the one by Beals et al. (1984) (see previous post). If dimness of light is the main determinant, brain size should be highest in northwestern Europe, northern British Columbia, the Alaskan panhandle, and western Greenland. These regions combine high latitudes with generally overcast skies. Yet they are not the regions where humans have the biggest brains. Instead, brain size is at its highest among humans from the northern fringe of Arctic Asia and from northeastern Arctic Canada. These regions are, if anything, less overcast than average. They often have high levels of ambient light because of reflection from snow and ice.

The jury is still out on this question. I suspect, however, that the following three factors probably explain variation in brain size with latitude.

1. Among hunter-gatherers, hunting distance increases with latitude because there are fewer game animals per square kilometer (Hoffecker, 2002, pp. 8-9). Hunters must therefore store larger amounts of spatiotemporal information (landmarks, previous hunting itineraries, mental simulations of possible movements by game animals over space and time). This factor might explain why brains have grown smaller since the advent of agriculture.

2. The seasonal cycle matters more at higher latitudes. As a result, northern hunter-gatherers, and northern agriculturalists even more so, must plan ahead for the next season (or even for the season after the next one).

3. Women gather less food at higher latitudes and almost none in the Arctic. They are thus free to specialize in other tasks, such as garment making, food processing, and shelter building. This “family workshop” creates opportunities for greater technological complexity, which in turn increases selection for greater cognitive performance.

I suspect bigger brains provide not so much greater intelligence as greater ability to store information. As such, they nonetheless pre-adapted northern hunter-gatherers for later advances in cultural evolution.

What I find surprising is that human eyes size increases further from the equator, this is something I think I've never heard of before.

Temperature regulation aspects might rate more highly as an influencing factor than one would think. Large bodies (and probably the head in particular) would be more resistant to hypothermia, whereas small bodies would be more resistant to heat-stroke.

See now, this layman couldn't tell from Wikipedia why Edwards' critique actually contradicts what the intro calls the main point of Lewontin. Edit: I mean the section on Lewontin's argument.

It would seem very odd if a sufficiently knowledgeable geneticist couldn't tell a person's natural skin color from their genes with near 100% reliability. Melanin clearly has a strong genetic component, as do other physical features that correlate with melanin. We want to know if it correlates with any interesting genetic differences.

In cases of this type, it's an error akin to relativism. "Suzy is wrong, therefore I should kill her" does a lot of damage, so people start thinking "Nobody is ever wrong". "Members of outgroup X have negative traits, therefore they're subhuman" does a lot of damage, so people start thinking "Members of outgroup X can't have negative traits". It's best to stay on the object level and prove "This group's average brain volume is 95% of that group's" rather than saying "political correctness", for the same reason proving particular facts is more effective than getting into "What is truth?".

In other cases, like changing the color of garbage bags from black to orange, it's fear of being thought evil and thereby losing status, and attempt to get status by chiding others. This has absolutely nothing to do with the group you're trying to defend, so it leads to white people telling other white people "This is offensive to black people!" while all black people are saying "But we're not offended!" and getting ignored. The phrase "political correctness" used to be useful in those cases.

In yet other cases, shouting "political correctness" is just applying a phrase with negative connotations to people who don't want you to lynch your neighbor.

Would you care to be more specific?

Actually, I'd say it's a good example of how a passionate ideologue who is at the same time very smart and a great writer can produce an extremely biased propagandistic work that nevertheless looks admirably objective and reasonable to a casual reader. Certainly, the book deserves a place among the most skillfully crafted works of ideological propaganda in history. This is especially evident when you compare it with similarly slanted but much cruder and more obviously propagandistic works by Gould's less talented co-ideologues (most notably Not in Our Genes by Lewontin et al.).

I regard humans as incongruent as well, albeit without crying.

Sometimes I'd really rather be a dolphin, y'know? They're quite intelligent, and aren't about to destroy the world by accident. Or maybe a bonobo.

Kinda speciesist, don'tcha think? People in the modern world in large part have learned to be illogical, but it isn't an inherent quality; in fact, some would argue that the current low level of rational capacity is very difficult to maintain. If people were inherently irrational, why can everyone learn mathematics, why can children sometimes disagree with their parents, and why was a prerequisite for degeneration into the current American political system that 7 corporations should own all major media outlets?

That does interest me. Why did people citing Boas think it made sense to talk about "the American environment"? Even the USA had 48 states by the end of February 1912.

From the OP:

the full range of average capacities is seen in Native American groups, as they historically occupied the full range of latitudes, say the study authors.

At the same time, some other anthropologists dispute Sparks & Jantz's conclusion that Boas was incorrect. From the abstract of the paper I'm linking:

In two recent articles, we and another set of researchers independently reanalyzed data from Franz Boas’s classic study of immigrants and their descendants. Whereas we confirm Boas’s overarching conclusion regarding the plasticity of cranial form, Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz argue that Boas was incorrect. Here we attempt to reconcile these apparently incompatible conclusions. We first address methodological differences between our reanalyses and suggest that (1) Sparks and Jantz posed a different set of questions than we did, and (2) their results are largely consistent with our own. We then discuss our differing understandings of Boas’s original argument and of the concept of cranial plasticity. In particular, we argue that Sparks and Jantz attribute to Boas a position he explicitly rejected. When we clarify Boas’s position and place the immigrant study in historical context, Sparks and Jantz’s renalysis supports our conclusion that, on the whole, Boas got it right.

Further reading suggests Gould is not representative of scientists. My confidence has gone back down.