October 26, 2006

Hot, smart Brown girls gaining ground


Now that Project Runway is over, a new season of Top Chef has started. I don't like it as much as Project Runway since the chefs are typically under much tighter time constraints and thus don't have sufficient time to fully elaborate a creative product. You might think that another downside to Top Chef would be the lack of hot models (like Marilinda from PR) -- but you would be wrong. The host of the show is the first international supermodel to hail from India: Padma Lakshmi. Unlike other models, though, she graduated from college and has written several cookbooks -- all right, so not exactly proving a new theorem in math, but you can tell from her biography and the way she behaves on the show that she's got an IQ of at least 115 or so (+1 SD at least).

To revisit a couple biological and genetic themes, in the comments to my previous post on cross-assortative mating for good looks and intelligence, Jason refers me to a study on fruitflies which shows that sometimes traits which boost the fitness of males would incur fitness costs in a female, and vice versa. Therefore, cross-assortative mating for the most desirable male and female traits might be a complete wash for the children's fitness, or worse. However, human beings are not that sexually dimorphic, probably because paternal investment is high in our species, which requires females to choose good fathers and not simply the largest, sexiest males [1]. Male fruitflies, by contrast, do a mating dance, leave their stuff, and then they're done. The same reasoning explains why male deer have such clunky antlers while does are not so burdened, as well as why peahens are drab compared to peacocks.

For IQ, there is no consistent difference in the means between males and females, though males show greater variance. There are non-trivial differences in the means for personality traits (as I reviewed here), though only two of the Big Five show noticeable differences. Agreeableness shows a 0.57 SD difference in means, such that males are less cooperative and more antagonistic than females; while females score 0.55 SD higher on Neuroticism. As for good looks, Kanazawa recently examined the attractiveness ratings of men vs women using a representative sample and found a difference between male and female means of 0.2 on a 5-point scale (3.6 female vs 3.4 male). He doesn't report the SD for this measure, but let's say it's 1, on the idea that the trait is normally distributed with a mean of 3 and that the 5-point scale is only sensitive to cover +/- 2 SD. (In fact, it looks like there is Lake Woebegone stuff going on, in that there are far many more attractive than unattractive people, but assume this for simplicity.) Then the male-female difference in means would be 0.2 SD, favoring females. So, for most things people care about when choosing a mate -- intelligence, attractiveness, and personality traits -- there is either no dimorphism or real but slight dimorphism, well under 1 SD [2]. This dovetails with the high paternal investment of humans -- because males and females face pretty much the same problems in surviving and reproducing, we don't expect too many traits to be advantageous to one sex but not the other, or if so, the difference should not be extremely pronounced [3].

Therefore, human beings need not worry much about passing one male-typical or female-typical traits that might harm offspring of the opposite sex. While high IQ may not make females more desirable as mates, it certainly doesn't make them less desirable -- all complaints I've ever heard or read about high-IQ or high-status females had to do with their personalities, not the fact that they had larger vocabularies or were better at Tetris than the complaining male. And good looks certainly don't make males less desirable -- in fact, it will ensure that they are not only desirable but begin having sex earlier, not to mention the huge boost in confidence they'll enjoy as a result of being given the up-and-down look by girls throughout adolescence. (See here for a Google image search of "hot bollywood actor" and tell me if you think these guys are at a disadvantage in the dating & mating game.) The differences in Agreeableness, however, are more significant, so you may want to pick a partner to balance you out, as disagreeable females will be perceived as bossy and bitchy (though it would help males assert their authority). I don't see how high Neuroticism would be perceived as undesirable -- this doesn't refer to Woody Allenesque neuroticism, but rather emotional volatility or being on-edge. Since there is no assortative mating for personality traits, apparently being more emotionally labile doesn't harm one's dating prospects.

Which brings us back to the hot, smart Brown girls. As a result of the caste system, which has existed for at least 1000 years (and dates back perhaps to 800 BC, although the Wikipedia entry is not totally clear on this), there is extensive assortative mating for intelligence and status. One crucial effect of assortative mating is that it increases the narrow-sense heritability, making it regression toward the mean less severe. Recall that narrow-sense heritability measures the amount of variance in phenotype that is accounted for by additive genetic factors -- think of additive genetic factors as those that contribute "blindly" or "unconditionally" to the phenotype. For example, if there are 100 loci involved in IQ, and each locus can contribute either 0 or 1 points to the phenotype, additivity means that a "1 allele" at a certain locus will contribute its 1 point no matter what the value of the other allele at that locus is (i.e., dominance plays no role), and also regardless of what the values are at other loci (i.e., epistasis plays no role). If additive factors play a larger role, then less of the phenotype is accounted for by conditional and chancy factors, which may or may not occur. That makes it a safer bet that a child born to IQ 130 parents will have an IQ close to 130. The same is true for assortative mating for good looks -- it will make it a safer bet that the good-looking parents will have a child close to the parents' level. Thus, not only do upper caste South Asians have a high level of attractiveness and intelligence, which is reason enough to choose them as partners, but it's more likely that your children will remain close to the parental value, in comparison to mating with a smart, good-looking person of European or African descent, for example. All this goes to show that one must take care in comparing humans to species that exhibit low paternal investment, whose members have causes for concern that we should not fret over in our own lives.

[1] It's true, though, that human groups vary in the degree of paternal investment.

[2] Of course, even small differences between means, or greater variance assuming equal means, will have marked effects in the tails of the distribution (i.e., more males than females with IQ 160, more female than male bombshells).

[3] Note that this is the opposite of what is acceptable thinking in academia -- there, sex differences, though taboo, are more easily discussed and taken for granted, while discussion of ethnic or racial differences are dynamite. In reality, the most glaring inter-group differences are between populations adapted to different environments, since the males and females of a given environment face roughly the same pressures in human beings. That's why it's not uncommon to compare racial groups for IQ and find a 1 SD difference (or more) between means, while there is no such male-female difference anywhere.

13 comments:

  1. So far, though, alleles found to be associated with points up in IQ are half recessive and half dominant, if I've not misunderstood the reporting.
    Is there some reason to expect this balance will change much, if at all?
    If not, then encouragement of further and further degree of outbreeding, would seem to push towards dysgenesis of high IQ.
    Those who are looking to reverse the progress of civilization may use academic positions, to push the top percentiles to breed with as different a type as possible, in order to cancel out the possibilities of valuable recessives.
    One can be perhaps never too suspicious on a point of this kind, since so much is at stake. Even if the fear were unfounded, there will still be gain in getting the issues; dysgenesis, outbreeding effects (positive and negative) and heritability to come under consideration, relative to human breeding.

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  2. A Google Images search for Ms. Lakshmi will yield interesting results. What sort of results? Here's a hint: make sure the "safe search" option is turned off.

    Peter
    Iron Rails & Iron Weights

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  3. i am offended by the picture.

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  4. Peter -- yeah, I opted for a SFW pic, though there were plenty of steamy-hot-babe ones to choose from. Another reason that fanatic Muslims wouldn't like Salman Rushdie, her husband (who's on his 4th marriage and is 23 years her senior at 59 -- and who said alpha-status didn't pay?).

    jsbolton -- outbreeding would harm IQ either through antagonistic epistatic effects or through simply mating w/ someone who had low IQ due mostly to additive genetic factors. Upper caste South Asians do not fall under either of these groups, as far as we can tell. Certainly their IQ level is higher than the white average, and centuries of assortative mating will make their children less likely to snap back to the mean.

    As for antagonistic epistasis, I don't know of any studies on European-South Asian interracials, but one study of interracials of European and another high-IQ group (Japanese) in Hawaii found that the interracials were above the mean of either of their parental populations, which is far above expectation.

    Euros and South Asians didn't split apart as long ago as, say, sub-Saharan Africans and everyone else, and upper caste South Asians are adapted to the same degree of social complexity, etc., that Euros are, so on the whole we expect their genes to "get along."

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  5. i am offended by the picture.

    Then we're even: http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2006/10/what_shade_do_you_fancy.php

    As a person not of interracial background, you cannot presume to know what it feels like to see your mixed brothers and sisters Half-Otherized by the imperial march of unmixed consciousness, their identities semi-bleached by the corrosive Unmixed Male Gaze. And don't even start me on all the "hot Eurasian babe" pics that gc used to post. ;)

    I took several bullshit lit courses in college before I studied something real, so I know how to talk the talk.

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  6. Link to your aforementioned exotification.

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  7. As a person not of interracial background

    i'm part chinese.

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  8. You mentioned white-Japanese interracials in Hawaii and their high IQ's. What's odd is that on the state-by-state IQ chart that Steve Sailer posted a couple weeks ago, Hawaii was in the bottom category. I thought that Hawaii is full of white-Asian mixtures, apparently that hasn't helped the state's scores. I suppose native Hawaiians might not score well, but they're not numberous enough to affect the state's score.

    Peter
    Iron Rails & Iron Weights

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  9. Peter -- lots of Hawaiians also come from Polynesian backgrounds, and higher than European IQ is typically found in Northeast Asia, not Polynesia.

    Razib -- what, just cuz you're Bengali? Ha, well then as an interracial, you surely know the rule that you don't really count as one unless you meet or exceed the degree of admixture of your interlocutor!

    And since I'm 1/4 and you less, you're just trying to appropriate the mixed identity like some latter-day Richard Burton infiltrating the territory of The Other to plunder its sociocontextual treasures for the existential profit of the identity-less Mother Country.

    (They seriously should hold "critical theory" battles like they do dance-offs, freestyle rhymin', and dissin' contests -- I'd fucking rule.)

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  10. They already do have theory battles.

    There's entire "theoryslamming" communities on livejournal.

    I could never cut it, which is why I'm not getting a Ph.D. In my feild even if you don't buy theory, you have to be able to mouth it. I just can't do it.

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  11. Razib -- what, just cuz you're Bengali? Ha, well then as an interracial, you surely know the rule that you don't really count as one unless you meet or exceed the degree of admixture of your interlocutor!

    1) my maternal grandmother had a great-grandfather who was from china

    2) my paternal grandfather was mostly pashtun/turkic, not ethnically bengali

    3) my paternal grandmother was from a family which converted from hinduism in her toddlerhood

    so i think i have 'mixed' creds

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  12. OK, but you must not wince the next time you hear some white American say that they're mixed Euro-Native American (invariantly Cherokee) because they're 1/32 or 1/64.

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  13. As I have written on my blog, I don't believe that high IQ is, from a Darwinian perspective, beneficial.

    I believe that mankind had evolved towards an optimal level of intelligence such that people above or below the average are less fit mates.

    So the hottest people would tend to be those of average intelligence.

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