by Maximilian Holland

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination (Dennett 1995)

 An inherent feature of the practice of observation in empirical science is its dependence upon how  perception is ordered into description via language and communicated to others. This is true for social, physical, behavioral and other sciences; all are inextricably dependent upon language and pre-existing concepts.  This understanding, relevant to all of modern science, goes back at least to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt in the nineteenth century.

Von Humboldt expressed the idea that there is a close relationship between social groups, languages, and cultures and their representations of reality. This condition has since been reiterated by Wittgenstein and Kuhn in the context of philosophical and scientific methodology. Further, the very choice of what is considered a valuable field of enquiry to engage upon will reflect the culture, representations and values of the society that makes that choice. Is it any surprise that 4th century BCE Indian investigations of economics (as ‘the science of wealth’) were expounded upon in a work that also discussed ‘the science of government’ and statecraft more generally (Trautmann 2012)? For all these reasons, science must continuously disentangle its observations and proposed models from inherited linguistic, perceptual, conceptual and value-based biases. This is necessary as part of the broader bootstrapping that science carries out via methodological criticism, new observations, and counter-evidence. As Dennett puts it: “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination” (Dennett 1995).

The baggage of inherited language and representations, though inherent in all science, has particular implications for the behavioural and social sciences. Observations we make about ourselves and  fellow humans are readily perceived via familiar categories and described by familiar language, concepts and behavioral models (folk-psychological models if you will) that accompany our everyday social interactions. Social and behavioural observations thus make more use of what Geertz 1976, following Kohut, calls ‘experience-near’ concepts, compared to the typically more ‘experience-distant’ concepts that are employed when describing physical phenomena. Since our models and working theories are inevitably heavily encumbered by our linguistic and cultural milieu; they are consequently particularly vulnerable to constraint and bias via the particular culture that generates them.

An example of a discipline that is acutely aware of this fundamental problem is anthropology. This is partly because anthropologists deliberately attempt to explore the linguistic, conceptual, behavioural and social variations between cultural groups, and routinely face the concomitant problem of considering how to ‘translate’ these between languages and cultures. Ethnographic methods of fieldwork, pioneered by anthropologists such Boas and Malinowski are an example of an attempt to mitigate cultural bias in the observer/scientist.

Given that Boas’ cautions were first outlined over 100 years ago, one would expect most behavioural and social sciences to be well aware of these pitfalls, and to at least attempt to account for them. However, although there has been some progress in these areas (ethnographic and participant-observer methods, reflexivity) there is still much work to be done. In psychology for example, significant debate only arose around the need to address these issues in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Katz 1985), and methodologies to compensate are still being debated. Mainstream economics with its inherently limited analysis of various kinds of value has barely begun to address these issues (see e.g. Tony Waters’ piece http://www.ethnography.com/2010/12/).

A concrete example which both illustrates the cultural bias problem, and illustrates how incorporating criticism is integral to bootstrapping in science is described in Schneider’s critical work about the anthropological use of ‘kinship’ concepts.  He demonstrated in the 1960s-1980s that, even in anthropology, cultural bias existed long after Boas’ work. To highlight the bias, Schneider noted a distinction between the traditional anthropological conception of kinship relationships as intrinsically ‘given’ and inalienable (‘from birth’), and an alternative view of kinship relationships as created, constituted and maintained by a process of interaction, or ‘doing’. Schneider boldly included his own earlier work in his critique. He revisited his own analysis of the citamangen / fak relationship in Yap Island society, which he had formerly treated as a ‘father / son’ relationship.  Two alternative conceptions are offered:

The crucial point is this: in the relationship between citamangen and fak the stress in the definition of the relationship is more on doing than on being. That is, it is more what the citamangen does for fak and what fak does for citamangen that makes or constitutes the relationship. This is demonstrated, first, in the ability to terminate absolutely the relationship where there is a failure in the doing, when the fak fails to do what he is supposed to do; and second, in the reversal of terms so that the old, dependent man becomes fak, to the young man, tam. 

The European and the anthropological notion of consanguinity, of blood relationship and descent, rest on precisely the opposite kind of value. It rests more on the state of being, on the sharing of certain inherent and therefore inalienable attributes, on the biogenetic relationship which is represented by one or another variant of the symbol of “blood” (consanguinity), or on “birth,” on qualities rather than on performance. We have tried to impose this definition of a kind of relation on all peoples, insisting that kinship consists in relations of consanguinity and that kinship as consanguinity is a universal condition. (Schneider 1984)

Schneider also included sociobiology in his critique:

Finally, the most recent, explicit, detailed, and developed commitment to the premise that Blood Is Thicker Than Water is made by the socio-biologists. They do this in numerous publications that need not be quoted here since they are so well known. (Schneider 1984)

Anthropologists responded quickly by engaging in debate about Schneider’s critique, and in many cases, adjusted methodology and models, and as a result most observe the distinction between ‘being’/blood vs. ‘doing’/performance is a central orientation of kinship studies today. A decent display of bootstrapping. One might think that the sociobiologists too might have usefully responded to this critique of their cultural bias by showing that they understood such problems that the work of not only Schneider, but Humboldt, Boas, Wittgenstein and many others had demonstrated, and introduce some reflexivity and caution into their analyses and models.

Instead, human sociobiologists responded to such critiques by retrenching and rebranding themselves as ‘Evolutionary Psychologists’, and derogating all perspectives that attempt to account for culture (which they refer to as the ‘Standard Social Science Model’ e.g. Pinker 1999). They continue to boldly promote particular models of ‘human nature’, sometimes arguing for these via experimenting on small groups of US college students, and more importantly by closing their ears to the rest of science and philosophy. Unsurprisingly, the observations made and models advanced often bear striking resemblance to particular behaviours, practices, and folk-theories common in Euro-American cultures.

That Evolutionary Psychologists have not taken Schneider’s critique seriously is seen in how they continue to conceptualize social relationships, kinship and cooperation. Both earlier human sociobiologists and current Evolutionary Psychologists typically claim that biological theories about the evolution of social behaviour can be used to make predictions about how behaviour is mediated in both humans and other animals. For example, a recent experiment conducted on humans by Robin Dunbar and colleagues (Madsen et al. 2007) was, as they understood it, designed “to test the prediction that altruistic behaviour is mediated by Hamilton’s rule” and more specifically “If participants follow Hamilton’s rule, investment (time for which the position was held) should increase with the recipient’s relatedness to the participant. In effect, we tested whether investment flows differentially down channels of relatedness.” From their results, they concluded that “human altruistic behaviour is mediated by Hamilton’s rule… humans behave in such a way as to maximize inclusive fitness: they are more willing to benefit closer relatives than more distantly related individuals.” (Madsen et al. 2007). As well as ignoring the counter-evidence advanced by Schneider, Sahlins and others, the fundamental problem with this position is that the biological theory does not make the prediction that organisms behave in such a way as to maximize inclusive fitness. Their position thus achieves the rare feat of being simultaneously; empirically disproven; logically fallacious; and still frequently employed.

The evolutionary biology theory they refer to (inclusive fitness theory), necessarily takes the form of an ‘ultimate’ explanation; it is a model specifying a covariance criterion that is considered relevant to the evolution of certain social traits. What is misunderstood by claims such as those made by Dunbar and colleagues is that evolutionary explanations and proximate explanations are distinct in biological analysis and should not be conflated (Tinbergen 1963). Inclusive fitness theory is explicitly an evolutionary explanation, and not a proximate one. Confusing these distinct forms of explanation amounts to claiming that behaviour is goal-driven to achieve certain outcomes; it is fallacious and a type of reductionism.  Even a cursory review of findings about the proximate expression of social behaviours in mammals and primates should make it clear that these are not contingent upon genetic relatedness per se, but are instead mediated by context-based and proximity-based cues. Social traits that have taken this proximate form in evolutionarily typical environments are nevertheless compatible with the covariance criterion suggested by inclusive fitness theory.

Furthermore a more careful and less deterministic interpretation of the biological theory (Holland 2012) reveals that there is in fact compatibility between biological and social science disciplines regarding social bonding and kinship.  This comptibility includes the position in attachment psychology (which has recently begun incorporating cultural diversity), and the themes that emerge come from many ethnographic accounts. Why have Evolutionary Psychology accounts not taken on board the kinds of critiques that Schneider (and others) have outlined, and instead stuck to their previous unsupported and incorrect models of behaviour? It seems likely that these incorrect models remain prevalent precisely because they reflect the cultural biases that Schneider outlined.

A constructive treatment of biology that minimizes cultural bias thus actually reinforces the scientific value of the ethnographic accounts that cultural anthropologists have carefully produced over several decades. Constructing an essentialized model of ‘human nature’ from narrow cultural particulars (Euro-American or otherwise) does not constitute science; rather it is closer to cultural colonialism. In any analysis intended to shed light on proposed universals of the human condition, reflexivity and a culture-aware approach are essential.

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References:

Wittgenstein, 1953 Philosophical Investigations

Lackey, 1999 What are the Modern Classics?

Kuhn, 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

von Humboldt, 1836 On the Diversity of Human Language

Dennett, 1995 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

Geertz, 1976 From the Native’s point of view

Trauttman, 2012 Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth

Boas, 1920 The Methods of Ethnology

Malinowski, 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Katz 1985 The sociopolitical nature of counseling

Schneider, 1984 A critique of the study of kinship

Sahlins, 1976 The use and abuse of biology

Kitcher, 1985 Vaulting ambition

Pinker, 1999 The blank slate

Madsen et al., 2007 Kinship and altruism a cross-cultural experimental study

Hamilton, 1964 The genetic evolution of social behaviour

Tinbergen, 1963 On Aims and Methods in Ethology

Holland, 2012 Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship

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Maximilian Holland is an Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a guest blogger at ethnography.com.  This blog is based on his PhD. dissertation and book Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship (2012).

Website: maximillianholland.com

Steve Hsu has been on a tear lately. Giving talks about IQ, here and here, and partnering with BGI to sequence the genomes of “high cognition” individuals in a quest to solve the giant “problem” of IQ. This effort has hit Vice magazine, Slate, and, more recently, NPR. To give you the CliffsNotes version of Hsu’s argument: IQ is a quantitative trait, just like height and can therefore be selected for improvement.

If you don’t know Hsu, he is the vice president for graduate admissions and research at Michigan State University. He has input into the direction of MSU’s research efforts and whom MSU admits to its graduate programs. .

Obviously, Hsu isn’t the first to claim a method of ranking humans according to cognitive endowment, nor will he be the last. The first attempt was Spearman’s 1904 paper in which he noted a positive correlation in schoolchildren across seemingly unrelated subjects. He called this construction “General Intelligence.” Hsu’s attempt is one of the latest and in keeping with intellectual fashion, he has substituted “Genetic Architecture” and a series of quantitative trait loci for Spearman’s construction, but otherwise their respective projects follow the same intellectual current.

I will raise three lines of objection to Hsu’s claim to have found the “genetic architecture” of high IQ. The first objection is that the tests Hsu uses to determine IQ are culture bound. That is, they reward some types of test takers more than others. Second, Hsu’s model assumes that certain types of knowledge require more cognitive ability to master than other forms do. Third, Hsu falls victim to the utilitarian fallacy. I’ll briefly discuss the first two before turning to the third.

First, a well-worn criticism of Hsu’s work on the genetics of “higher cognition” is that the SAT, which he uses as a proxy for the g factor (see Gould for a thorough debunking) is slanted towards rewarding wealthy test takers. This is a well understood phenomena. The more money one’s parents make (or the more academic their jobs are!), the better one’s chances of succeeding on the SAT.

Hsu, for his part, has acknowledged the culture bound nature of his quest, but seems to believe he can get around the unfortunate fact of the SAT with a “culture-neutral” test, though he does not actually have any concrete plans to administer it and his work uses the SAT extensively. Unfortunately for Hsu, people who think in “culturally neutral” categories are about as common as Giants on the plains of La Mancha.

 

Second, in this paper, Hsu attempts to link certain majors (physics and mathematics) to “cognitive thresholds.” In doing so, he assumes a natural order of cognition running from fields requiring advanced mathematics to those do not. There is no need to do too much here work tying this up with Victorian conceptions of the savage and the civilized. Suffice to say there is a long body of work within anthropology (and cross-cultural psychology) which explodes this assumption. What is important is context. Some skills are more important, and hence likely to receive more development in certain contexts as opposed to others. Hsu is simply mistaking an epiphenomena of formal schooling in the early 21st century for an eternal human truth.

For example, in 1904, Spearman concluded that the most powerful correlation for “General Intelligence” was excellence in Classics, followed by Common Sense, Pitch Discrimination and French. Mathematics is on the list and and correlated positively, but the highest correlations were dominated by language. It is unsurprising that among English schoolchildren in the first half of the 20th century, language and music would be highly valued within formal schooling while among American college applicants in the early 21st century, mathematical ability would be highly valued.

In each case, the sample subjects are cultivating historically and socially contingent subjects taught within a powerfully hegemonic institution. What makes Spearman and Hsu irresponsible social scientists is i), their unreflective assumptions of these categories as eternal and unchanging and ii), their use of these categories to rank and sort humans in a manner that closes off their possible futures. In this way, both hew closely to deficit models of school failure.

Third, the utilitarian gambit is a staple of quantitative approaches to human action, and as with any mathematical model, must make some assumption about motivation as a start. Hsu simply assumes everyone who takes the test tries to get the best score. He uses the brute fact of admissions based on the SAT to model a market for IQ, which sorts test takers according to their potential with the underlying assumption that test takers do their best to gain high scores. Thus, a political economy is formed whereby high scoring test takers are slotted into the most competitive majors (Hsu thinks some majors require more cognitive ability than others) at the most competitive universities.

However, we know from a wide and deep body of literature within the Anthropology of Education that not all test takers apply themselves equally or are motivated to do well on tests they know are of little use to them. Hsu knows this as well, but he chooses to ignore it with his work on genetics and IQ. However, in an interview with Psychology Today, Hsu gave the following answer to a question about Richard Feyman’s allegedly low IQ score:

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.

How the world has changed since 1904!

Hsu is more than eager to judge you based on your SAT, ACT, GRE,  IQ, or Wonderlic score, but for his personal hero, an excuse must be made. And the excuse he makes for Feynman exposes the assumptions underlying his theory. Feynman, of course, is gambling that he can afford not to care about some things. But, he isn’t alone. Everyone gambles on what they can and cannot afford to care about.

One of Hsu’s examples of an acceptable SAT substitute is the Wonderlic. The Wonderlic is perhaps most famous for its use in the NFL scouting process. Morris Claiborne, a cornerback from LSU, infamously scored a 6 on the Wonderlic. What does he say about the IQ test?

“That test don’t tell me who I am and what time of guy I am and what kind of ability I have. That test can’t drop me.

“They say it’s an IQ test. I came to the combine for football. I looked at the test, and wasn’t any questions about football. I didn’t see no point in the test. I’m not in school anymore. I didn’t complete it. I only finished 15 or 18 questions.”

Claiborne was selected number 6 in the NFL draft and signed to a contract worth several million dollars. Obviously, Claiborne plays football and does not teach theoretical physics, but his comments are illuminating for a powerful reason.

Claiborne is just like Feynman in that he has the good sense to know what not to care about, and where to focus his attention. In fact, the logical justification Claiborne uses in blowing off the test and the logical justification Hsu uses in explaining away Feynman’s relatively low IQ score are almost identical.

Hsu on Feynman:

I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things.

Claiborne on Claiborne:

I’m not in school anymore. I didn’t complete it.

What Feynman and Claiborne are doing is deeply playing with the boundaries of their respective fields. As Geertz observed in a Balinese cockpit deep play is two things. It is 1) instructive work and 2) metasocial commentary. That is, it is a set of instructions about how to do the thing we are now doing and what the consequences might be (or might not be) for doing it wrong.

Though these two examples are playful in the sense that the stakes are low and nothing much is to be lost or gained by a CB who refuses formal logic or a physicist who takes an eccentric approach to spelling, they both point to the metacognitive nature of intelligence and the difficulty of pinning down something like the “g-factor” without recourse to the messy details of context or taking into account the inevitability of self-reflection. Such as: Why am I writing this post?

Postscript:

I sat on this post for a long time. I thought perhaps it would be better to take another direction. But this morning’s news carried the tale of Jason Richwine and a reminder of why I might write about IQ and not something else. Richwine is the co-author of the Heritage Foundation’s new report on immigration and the author of a Harvard dissertation titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” Here is the abstract:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.

In a few days, I will set Richwine (and Hsu) in the context of the Culture of Poverty debates. Suffice to say, they offer nothing new to debates over IQ, or poverty or immigration. Their innovation lies in the naked, unreflective application of a naïve sociobiology to policy debates over access to democratic institutions – citizenship and public education.

Update:

Richwine is out at the Heritage Foundation. Meanwhile, Richwine’s advisor has been distancing himself at a rapid clip:

“I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don’t really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc,” Borjas told me in an email. “In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I’ve long believed this, I don’t find the IQ academic work all that interesting. Economic outcomes and IQ are only weakly related, and IQ only measures one kind of ability. I’ve been lucky to have met many high-IQ people in academia who are total losers, and many smart, but not super-smart people, who are incredibly successful because of persistence, motivation, etc. So I just think that, on the whole, the focus on IQ is a bit misguided.”

Michael in the last pot here, is pointing to a book review “No Big Deal, but This Researchers’ Theory Explains Everything about How Americans Parent” in Slate.org that describes something that is self-evident to anthropologists, i.e. that whatever is defined as “cognitively advanced” is in fact culturally determined.  This is a point which I tried to make, apparently unsuccessfully, to commenters on this article, which was posted in Ethnography.com in March.  What can I say, I just don’t get it how a culturally determined characteristic like “cognitive ability” which is specific to a time and place is determined by DNA.    I also don’t trust the tools of the psychometricians when they are used indiscriminately across national, temporal, and cultural boundaries. (Note the operative word: “indiscriminate.”)

 

Along these same lines, though on an unrelated subject, there was another pair of articles about DNA I read today, one by the conservative columnist George Will in today’s Washington Post, “Obama is Right on Syria “.  In an outbreak of comity, the conservative Will is complementing the prudence of President Obama for not taking military action in Syria.  In making this argument, Will is in effect pointing out that there is not always an American solution for every foreign policy problem.   He contrasts this with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claim in a 2010 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that “Throughout our history, through hot wars and cold, through economic struggles, and the long march to a more perfect union, Americans have always risen to the challenges we have faced. That is who we are. It is in our DNA. We do believe there are no limits on what is possible or what can be achieved.”  So up pops yet another biological metaphor: DNA determines that Americans always rise to challenges, and makes us believe that all can be achieved.

 

Now for my major stretch in logic.  Science, testing, DNA, and the genetic revolution have become a metaphor which stretches way beyond where, from a scientific perspective, it should be.  Scientists are not at fault, as Rajiv Khan seems to be pointing out to me in his comments.  However, as the book review in Slate points out, cognitive ability is perceived by American culture as being ever manipulable by parents, foreign policy by Secretarys of State, and so forth.  This is why such metaphor is so appealing—there is indeed a culturally grounded belief that “there are no limits on what is possible or what can be achieved” by Americans.  Geneticists and others have of course taken advantage of this cultural bias toward explanation via DNA, and pumped the federal government for ever-larger grants in ways that anthropology can only dream of.

In this installment of the seriocomic series Incidental Anthropology, I bring you three more media stories which incidentally illustrate anthropological points. Given the recent back and forth on this blog over genetics, I highly recommend the first link.

1) Why are Americans so focused on how “cognitively advanced” their children are?

2) Some thoughts on Elsevier’s purchase of Mendeley and what this might mean for Open Access and academic publishing.

3) The complex career and photography of Hiroshi Hamaya with a view towards the relation of snow and spirit.

As Tony pointed out, the back and forth on this blog over population genetics has produced some smoke, some heat and some insights into what a gene might be and how much it can say about the everyday lives of human beings. 

Today the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics. At stake are some the same questions we have been debating at ethnography.com modulated through the US legal system. NPR has a nice overview here.