We all take notice when someone starts a sentence with the word ‘we’. This implies that the speaker thinks they are speaking for everybody. Where does this come from?
One of the key takeaways of neuromythography is that the ventral striatum is the locus of the world’s evil. I say this mostly seriously, but with a slight wink lest fools start contacting neurosurgeons for ventral striatum removal.
Terminology note: the nucleus accumbens (Nacc or NAc) is the principal nucleus of the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum definition typically also encompasses the ventral putamen and olfactory tubercle (OT).
Neuromythographic interpretation of panels A and B:
s32 (Dharma): s32 tracks value across domains. This includes deontological value. Dharma is the Hindu/Buddhist concept of personal values.
The study also found that right rostral VLPFC activation was inversely-related to projecting your own opinion as a group consensus, i.e. the act of controlling the ventral striatum-s32 activation above. The mapping of panel C is:
Right a47r(Magellan): tracking of paths explored, rejecting paths already deemed unsuccessful, and finding new promising paths
Right p47r(Strachey): Strachey invented the programming language concept of polymorphism, which involves using the same programming verb to mean different things in different contexts.
When this right VLPFC area is damaged, people are unable to imagine that other people could have different opinions from themselves.
This is just the latest in a long line of evidence tying the ventral striatum to political madness. No one ever achieves nirvana without controlling it.
In my travels I have met people of great intelligence. Many congregate in academia, but not as many as academics are wont to think. Sadly, I am often reminded after such encounters of a passage in Olaf Stapledon’s book Odd John. Odd John is “a story between jest and earnest” about a mutant boy of superior intelligence, how he made his way in the world, and how he went in search of his own kind and self-determined his own end. In one episode of his searches for fellow comrades, John stumbled upon a handicapped boy stewing a wicked brew of resentment…
Within the first five minutes of my visit he spotted me as different from the others. He got me telepathically. I got him too, but he shut his mind up immediately. Now you’d think that finding a kindred spirit for the first time ever would be an occasion for thanksgiving. But he didn’t take it that way at all. He evidently felt at once there wasn’t room for him and me together on the same planet.
Presently I began to ask myself what sort of a devil this baby Satan really was. Was he one of ‘us,’ or something quite different? But there was very little doubt in my mind, actually. Of course he was one of us, and probably a much mightier one than either J. J. or myself. But everything had gone wrong with him, from conception onwards. His body had failed him, and was tormenting him, and his mind was as crippled as his body, and his parents were quite unable to give him a fair chance. So the only self-expression possible to him was hate. And he had specialized in hate pretty thoroughly. But the oddest thing about it all was this. The further I got away from the experience, the more clearly it was borne in on me that his ecstasy of hate was really quite self-detached. He wasn’t hating for himself. He hated himself as much as me. He hated everything, including hate. And he hated it all with a sort of sacred fervour. And why? Because, as I begin to discover, there’s a sort of minute, blazing star of worship right down in the pit of his hell. He sees everything from the side of eternity just as clearly as I do, perhaps more clearly; but–how shall I put it?–he conceives his part in the picture to be the devil’s part, and he’s playing it with a combination of passion and detachment like a great artist, and for the glory of God, if you understand what I mean. And he’s right. It’s the only thing he can do, and he does it with style. I take off my hat to him, in spite of everything. But it’s pretty ghastly, really. Think of the life he’s living; just like an infant’s, and with his powers!
The Shadow of Oxytocin
The stereotypical pencil-necked ‘nerd’, who grew up in soft, comfortable environs, enviously living in the shadow of more socially-successful people, often fits this description. No self-authored person ever exhibits this attitude.
In the Middle Ages, clerics recognized a depression-related phenomenon called scrupulosity, suffered by Martin Luther and perhaps best exemplified by Jesuit founder St. Ignatius of Loyola:
After I have trodden upon a cross formed by two straws … there comes to me from without a thought that I have sinned … this is probably a scruple and temptation suggested by the enemy.
St. Ignatius of Loyola
It is not a coincidence that both the founder of Protestantism and the founder of the Jesuits suffered from scrupulosity and founded movements that became “left-wing”. This will be explored in a future article.
Such people in these times, thanks to the ample arsenal of rhetoric developed over the past hundred years, restyle their resentment as a perverse kind of altruism. This type of preacher situates themselves as selfless allies fighting oppressive systemic structures on behalf of fetishized oppressed communities. Alternating between self-loathing, envy, and inviting others to cathartically join in denunciations, the crybully goads retaliation and then plays the victim. Such people project their darkness as justice, embracing the role of the Hebrew satan (the accuser), whom the God of the Old Testament sent to test the worthiness of the supposedly faithful.
This is part of the shadow of oxytocin, the Spirit of Community.
The Shadow of Vasopressin
At another end is a smaller group tends to embrace some combination of an eschatological streetcorner preacher persona urging the repenting of sin before the end times, a late-19th century brand of evolutionary psychology, or various anti-establishment conspiracy theories. These people are known for their emotional unavailability and distaste for displays of vulnerability. These tend to flame out of academia and become lonely cranks, crying out in the desert, frustrated by their impotence in the world. Sometimes, they snap and go out in a blaze of glory, tragically often taking innocent others with them.
This is part of the shadow of vasopressin, the Spirit of Dominion.
These are both dark holes to avoid falling into. Basic healthy disciplines–exercise, diet, sleep hygiene, constructive creative activity, engaging with constructive people, and becoming galvanized to the acidic vapors of unhealthy people–go a long way towards keeping their own spirit clear of these tarpits.
Dr. Daniel Amen is a controversial psychiatrist who runs a successful chain of brain health and treatment centers. During the course of his work, his labs have accumulated perhaps the world’s largest collection of brain single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scans. In 2017, Amen and team published an analysis of this data set that explored the difference between men and women.
Amen study of more than 46,034 brain scans: women are red, men are blue.
These SPECT images reflect regional blood flow in the brain, which serves as a proxy for overall brain activity. The study’s overall finding was that women have more active brains.
Here are some specific observations:
Women have more activity in the cingulate cortex and precuneus (the red areas in the above). This large group of zones includes brain areas associated with joy, sadness, concentration, shame, guilt, criticism, autobiographical stories, 3rd-party perspectives, character acting, self-history, self-reflection, and deciding that it is time to change strategies. This is a larger manifest of brain areas than I am willing to elaborate upon in this post.
Men have more activity in the anterior temporal lobes. The anterior temporal lobe zone includes areas
TGd (Pheme/Aesop) associated with knowledge of famous people/allegories
PeEC (OBJECT RECOGNITION/RECENCY/FREQUENCY) an area involved in object familiarity
TGv (Kandinsky/Alex Grey) associated with local and global properties, respectively, and represented by painters whose art exemplifies these concepts
TE2a (Pliny/al Kindi) Pliny wrote the first encyclopedia, al-Kindi was the polymath founder of Arab philosophy
TE1a (Tenjin/Aja) Tenjin, the Japanese god of scholarship, and Aja, the Yoruba goddess of zoology, botany, potions, and healing herbs.
Men have significantly more activity in Crus I and Crus II. These are the main parts of the cognitive cerebellum, and have functional connectivity with the main cortical associative networks. Crus II is assigned Chronos, the Greek deity of cyclic time, and left and right Crus I are assigned Postvorta and Antevorta, after the Roman goddesses of history and the future, respectively. This reflects the hypothesized roles of Crus I and Crus II in projecting thoughts and actions into the past and future, for error correction purposes, before validating a thought back to the cortex via the thalamus.
This maps rather easily to the psychology adage “women empathize, men systematize”. I have given the cingulate and precuneus a brief description here, and will elaborate in a future post.
As far as the question of innate behavioral sexual dimorphisms vs. socially-constructed gender roles, this one study cannot address this. I am interpreting the image based on its neuromythographic archetypes–archetypes that have been honed across thousands of neuroscience studies, and not fitted to this particular study.
You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.
This post is part of a series. Advance to Part II.
Introduction
The terms ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ originated in the National Assembly of France during the French Revolution in 1789, when supporters of the king migrated to the right side of the legislative chamber, and supporters of the revolution seated themselves to the left side. When we study history, we can find that this dichotomy long predates the French Revolution: in ancient Greece (Sparta vs. Athens), in Rome (Optimates vs. Populares), in ancient Judaism (Sadducees vs. Pharisees), in Vedic India (the caste system, i.e. Sudra vs. the higher castes), and even in the social classes of the Qin Dynasty in China (landlord/merchant vs. craftsman/peasant). Philosophers have created their own descriptions: Marx’s famous bourgeoisie/proletariat dialectic, Nietzsche’s master morality and slave morality, and Crenshaw’s intersectionality all recapitulate the same polarized dichotomy.
There exists an entrenched academic view that politics is primarily a story about collective group power–the oppressor classes vs. the oppressed classes. This originated in the historical dialectic method of Karl Marx–“a ruthless criticism of everything existing”. Today, thousands of scholars are employed to critically read texts, recontextualize them in terms of a class power dialectic critical interpretation, and extract hidden class power subtexts from in between the author’s original words.
But this Durkheimian theory of social facts has never withstood the confounding evidence omnipresent in our discourse. For example, consider the prevalence of wealthy heirs amongst the most radical leftists globally, starting with Marx’s own benefactor Friedrich Engels. Or the wealthy patrons that supported Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s odyssey across Europe as he progressively wore out his hosts’ welcome. Consider the unironic use of the term ‘populism’, when the working poor inexplicably align behind a brazenly elite strongman who promises to restore righteousness. Marx contemptuously portrayed the ‘lumpenproletariat’ as fools unaware of what their opinions ought to be, anesthetized by the ‘opiate’ of religion designed by the elite classes. Something more sophisticated is going on than social theorists can explain.
History is littered with epochs in which humans are swept up into the madness of revolutionary and reactionary camps, and make uncivil war upon each other. Jesus Christ sidestepped and redirected an attempt to make him choose a side with his retort, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.’, yet comically strained attempts are still made today to retrospectively recruit Him into the fracas. J. Michael Straczynski’s underrated TV series Babylon 5 mythologized this conflict by imagining human history under the secret influence of two conflicting alien races, the Vorlons (who asked the question, “who are you?”) and the Shadows (who asked the question, “what do you want?”). He poked fun at it in one episode involving a race called the Drazi, who divided up into two warring ‘purple’ and ‘green’ factions every five years:
A failed attempt at mediation between the Drazi purple and green factions. From: Babylon 5
But where does this human impulse to divide up into honor and justice factions come from?
NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and collaborators have investigated moral values and political ideologies, and proposed a model where the left-wing is oriented around broad social connections, the right-wing is oriented around tight social connections, and libertarians are instead oriented around individualism. This feels like a fuzzy glimpse at truth, but the investigative tools available to the psychologist pretty much stop at these abstract nouns.
I propose that the real truth is this: these group perceptions only exist as emergent phenomena due to the common architecture of vertebrate brain, and the life experiences that leave their imprints upon that brain ‘wetware’. There exist no imaginary mass social constructs or historical forces, revealed by reason or the ritual torture and sacrifice of data. Political phenomena are emergent phenomena, not ersatz gods whose worship needs to be indoctrinated. If you can master this truth, you actually can choose your own reality, just as ceramic-jar-housed Diogenes earned the peerage of Alexander the Great. Wary of the dark creatures that await us, let us take a deep, dispassionate dive into the politiques and their critiques.
The Two Spirits
Oxytocin, and its lesser-known sibling vasopressin, are popularly associated with social bonding. They are far more subtle and sophisticated than that.
If there is an overarching claim that I am presenting, it is this:
Oxytocin is the energy of species progress and the Spirit of Community. Vasopressin is the energy of self-actualization, and submission to and rising up towards the Spirit of Dominion.
Let’s elaborate upon this.
Spirit of Community
Oxytocin
Species preservation
Promote parasympathetic nervous system
Left hemisphere
Feminine
Communion
Humanity
Affection
Verbal
Bottom up and detailed
Spirit of Dominion
Vasopressin
Species evolution
Control sympathetic nervous system
Right hemisphere
Masculine
Dominion
Family
Growth
Visual
Top-down and laterally-connected
Summary of the properties of the two spirits
Parasympathetic/Sympathetic
Oxytocin promotes the parasympathetic nervous system, while vasopressin controls the sympathetic nervous system. These autonomic nervous systems, that tend to oppose each other, have long carried the epithets of ‘feed and breed’ and ‘fight or flight’, respectively. Note that promote and control are not symmetrical operations.
Left Brain/Right Brain
Similarly, the left hemisphere promotes the parasympathetic nervous system, while the right hemisphere controls the sympathetic nervous system. This is similar to oxytocin and vasopressin, respectively, and each hemisphere tends to be more influenced by each energy.
Feminine/Masculine
Oxytocin plays a more prominent behavioral role in females, while vasopressin plays a more prominent behavioral role in males. However, oxytocin plays a critical supporting role in men in sexual attraction and parenting, while vasopressin plays a critical role in bonding and parenting in women. Everything here is shades and balance.
The left hemisphere is more critical to female behavior, while the right hemisphere is more critical to male behavior. Damage to the left hemisphere in females and right hemisphere in males is impairing, while the opposite is less noticeable. As this study of the relative performance on a psychological instrument called the Iowa Gambling Test concluded:
Men with right‐side lesions and women with left‐side lesions displayed moderate to severe impairments in social conduct, emotion, and decision making. Women with right‐side lesions and men with left‐side lesions showed mild or no impairments in all three domains.
Communion/Dominion
Oxytocin motivates reaching out into the world for sexual partners, while vasopressin motivates parental care and defense of the home territory and children. This is partly why we associate sexual liberalization and ‘family values’ with left- and right-wing; the other part, as we shall see later, involves the left and right amygdala.
Affection/Growth
Oxytocin and vasopressin modulate how we view child education. In a fascinating study, high oxytocin parents showered their children with validating affection, while high vasopressin parents showed their children new objects to learn about. Mothers tended to display the oxytocin parenting style, while fathers tended to display the vasopressin parenting style, but within-sex variations showed that the hormones, not sex per se, promoted the parenting behaviors. We see disagreements about these educational priorities play out in divisive school board meetings.
Oxytocin and Vasopressin Side-by-Side
Oxytocin promotes desire for communion with our ingroup, but importantly it also increases our resentment of outgroups, particularly those outgroup members who we believe are harming ingroup members. Oxytocin motivates us to reach out to people, and to wish to be a part of something greater than ourselves. Oxytocin makes us want to have families. Oxytocin output is increased when we are under chronic social stress. This is one of the sources of political polarization for both right and left. It is the foundation of patriotism, of internationalism, of ingroups and outgroups, and the Lacanian big Other.
Vasopressin promotes remembering individual people we meet and how we relate to them. It inspires territoriality, pair bonding, loyalty, self-defense, relative social dominance, and risky mission commitments (think of the ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, or the military espirit de corps). Vasopressin makes us want to protect our families. Vasopressin output is increased when we are under acute social stress. Vasopressin closes us off from strangers, but promotes the entanglement of self and close others as in family and friendship. Vasopressin mediates social hierarchies and the Lacanian little other.
Vasopressin is a masculine energy.
Shadow: Vasopressin is the gang hormone.
Men Are From Vasopressin, Women Are From Oxytocin
This ingroup vs. personal bond mediated by oxytocin and vasopressin, respectively, shows up in the perennial miscommunications between women and men. To a woman, the romantic ‘relationship’ is a distinct group entity that encompasses herself and her partner, the seed of a potential new little society of her own, that a woman is loyal to (vasopressin) and is concerned with nurturing (oxytocin), that is indestructible unless broken by emotional betrayal of the relationship (a female-specific oxytocin-mediated temporoparietal junction response). But for men, the romantic ‘relation’ is an individual bond (vasopressin), the primary source of spiritual healing and soul connection that a man reciprocates out of honor, that is indestructible unless broken by acts of sexual betrayal (a male-specific vasopressin-mediated hypothalamic response).
This will be covered in more detail in future articles.
Crowding is the Cause of Urban Left and Rural Right
Solitude increases vasopressin expression, especially in males. Overcrowding increases stress and oxytocin production, which helps organisms tolerate and even enjoy being part of a crowd. This is why urban areas are more left-wing, while suburbs and rural areas are more right-wing.
The balance of oxytocin and vasopressin also relate to young adults’ typical progression from expanding their social circles in their 20s (oxytocin) to withdrawing themselves into nuclear families (vasopressin) in their 30s and beyond. This is also part of why people tend to become “more conservative” as they age–high oxytocin is replaced by increasing vasopressin. Recognition of this shifting tendency as a phenomenon is why some more radically progressive leftists target the nuclear family for dismantlement.
Guanyin vs. Sancus
In neuromythography, oxytocin is assigned to Guanyin, the Chinese Buddhist goddess of affective empathy. Guanyin’s name means “Observing the Sounds of the World,” indicating her compassionate ability to listen for pleas of help so she can come to the aid of the needy. This represents oxytocin’s role in empathy and as the Spirit of Community.
Vasopressin is assigned to Sancus, the Roman god of trust, truths, sanctity, and oaths. This represents vasopressin’s role in self-actualization and rising up towards the Spirit of Dominion.
It should be obvious by now that neither of these complementary spirits is the correct one.
OTR, V1a and V1b Receptors
Neurotransmitters are only half of the story. Each neurotransmitter is received into a cell via receptors expressed on the cell surface. The type of receptor changes how the cell processes the neurotransmitter “message”, and the differences between these receptor types ultimately shows up in behavior.
There exist three cell receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin: the oxytocin receptor OTR, and two vasopressin receptors v1a and v1b. It is important to know that the two neurotransmitters oxytocin and vasopressin bind with all three of these receptors, so there are a total of six different potential effects.
Oxytocin receptors (OTR) are increased in alpha males and females, both as a result of parenthood and increasing social rank.
Vasopressin v1a receptors are increased in male rodents with each successive victory over an intruder. v1a receptors are increased in pair-bonded females, reducing their interest in finding new mates.
Vasopressin v1b receptors are increased in male rodents with each successive submission to an intruder. v1b receptors are increased in nursing females, and are necessary for normal maternal childrearing behaviors.
The Bruce effect is a phenomenon that occurs in rodents in which a pregnant female will spontaneously abort her pregnancy when exposed to the scent of a novel male. This effect is mediated through her v1b receptors, suggesting an instinctive response to the presence of a change in the local male hierarchy, or to a threat that lessens the likelihood of successful young-raising. This shines a new light upon male territorial defense against male intruders. The Bruce effect has been proposed, but is not universally accepted, in other mammals including humans.
v1a and v1b thus form an oppositional pair, with OTR standing on its own. Importantly, these receptors have fundamentally different behavioral properties in males and females.
Tara, Morrigan, and Mordred
OTR
The OTR is assigned to Tara, a complex Hindu/Buddhist goddess. The Buddhist version is known as the “mother of liberation”. The Hindu Tara has a taste for demon blood, but is maternal and breathes life into the world. She responds to the energies of Guanyin and Sancus.
v1a
The v1a receptor is assigned to Morrigan, the Celtic “phantom queen”. The Morrígan is mainly associated with war and fate, especially with foretelling doom, death or victory in battle. She incites warriors to battle and can help bring about victory over their enemies. The Morrígan encourages warriors to do brave deeds, strikes fear into their enemies. She responds to the energies of Guanyin and Sancus.
v1b
The v1B receptor is assigned to Mordred, the disrespected and rebellious son of King Arthur in the Arthurian legend. This represents submission, seething rebellion, and defense of the downtrodden. He responds to the energies of Guanyin and Sancus.
It should be apparent that v1a is the ‘oppression’ and v1b is the ‘oppressed’ motif. Or v1a is the ‘righteous’ and v1b is the ‘weak degenerate’. The interpretation may depend upon the current v1a/v1b balance of the interpreter. OTR is the group identification amplifier, that bonds us into ingroups, and calls forth Ares in the extreme.
A Simple Receiver Biopolitical Model
The international socialist is the amplification of v1b (Mordred) and OTR (Tara).
The nationalist is the amplification of v1a (Morrigan) and OTR (Tara).
The libertarian is the amplification of v1a (Morrigan) and v1b (Mordred).
The national socialist is the amplification of v1a, v1b, and OTR together.
This is of course a vast oversimplification, as it ignores the difference brain areas involved, and can be criticized as veering into a bad kind of biological essentialism. The key takeaway here is that these forces are to be balanced, not unbalanced.
This post is part of a series. Advance to Part II.
Jacques Lacan developed his own brand of Freudian psychoanalysis. His formulation of mind proposed three domains: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, which lends itself to a lot of linguistic analysis in the Symbolic domain.
He created an algebraic notation for his psychological constructs, known as Lacanian algebra. One of Lacan’s more amusing eccentric quips was that the role of the phallic function (i.e. the male sex organ) in the Imaginary domain is analogous to the square root of -1 in the imaginary plane of mathematics.
Lacan developed a pair of constructs he called the little other and the Big Other, that neuromythography claims have biological correlates in the social domains governed by vasopressin and oxytocin, respectively.
“Dad,” he asked me. “Do you believe people’s intelligence is determined by nature or nurture?”
The politically-charged war over the heritability of intelligence by both “anti-hereditarians” and “hereditarian” social scientists — who each reject each others’ strawman labels for the other — is acrimonious and confusing. It is filled with seething polemics barely concealed by academic decorum. Reaching common ground is frustrated by a plethora of thought experiments, pedantic arguments over word definitions, soft prejudices, motivated reasoning, and rhetorical mathiness. As University of Virginia psychologist Eric Turkheimer succinctly describes the dispute:
“The hereditarians want to be seen as scientific so they aren’t seen as racists; the anti-hereditarians want to be scientific so they aren’t seen as frightened by socially difficult scientific findings.”
In this essay, I seek to abolish the nature OR nurture question of intelligence altogether. I will try to show both nature AND nurture are part of a complex interconnected system that determines what people commonly mean by intelligence. I will contrast this with both the Taji position and also the position of social psychologists like Eric Turkheimer. I will take a scorched earth approach to IQ as a purported measure of a measurable construct called intelligence. Along the way, I will challenge the methods of field experts that purport to possess insight into the nature vs. nurture question about intelligence, methods that I call Queteletan.
The Dangers of Politicized Science
Turkheimer is a social psychologist and one of the willing proxy instruments of Vox editor Ezra Klein’s orbital bombardment of the reputation of author and podcaster Sam Harris. In a recent blog post, Turkheimer laments the lack of progress on the nature vs. nurture issue over the course of his career:
“…everyone is stubborn. One thing I actually have in common with Charles Murray is that (as he notes about himself in the podcast) I haven’t changed my mind about much on this topic over a thirty-year career.”
What one should draw from this is that the underlying substrate of intelligence is unlikely to be found by social scientists, who too often devolve into opposing factions engaging in what anti-philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein indicted as “language-games”. Opposed to mainstream social scientists are activists in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Many of these practitioners muse about the nature of humanity in an allegorical format that pays homage to natural and sexual selection principles, as if the use of the narrative style of appealing to evolutionary mechanisms by itself raises their meditations’ empirical stature to the level of scientific experiment.
The Dangers of Queteletan Biometrics
Intelligence is inevitably the result of a highly-interconnected mosaic of nature and nurture. This seems to be agreed by all sides. I am concerned that Taji’s article handed some undeserved ammunition to those who call themselves “race realists”, who cherry-pick data as justifications for what they believe are innate “average” differences between members of the socially-constructed concepts of ethnicity. This is received by many people as unhelpful to social progress, and perniciously conflates biological ancestry with socially-constructed ethnic groups. This error, consciously or not, gives unearned credence to oppressor narratives as part of the “natural order” ordaining their power over oppressed groups.
Initially, Taji sets up his piece with the story of the worst mass-killing in Australian history, concluding “the most notable and concrete fact of Bryant’s psychological condition was his extremely low IQ of 66 — well within the range for mental disability”. This is no different than any of the other polemics that scapegoat the entire class of people when one member commits a crime: Muslims, immigrants, blacks, whites, gays, men, and right-wing zealots. The reader is now vulnerable to believing that this class of “low IQ” people are the problem behind this outrage. Scott Adams might muse that this is “good persuasion” but as intelligent adults we should have the presence of mind to be immune to obvious rhetorical manipulations like this. Besides, we know some of the most frightening serial killers have been highly intelligent: Rodney Alcala, Ted Bundy, Kristen Gilbert, Andrew Cunanan, and Ted Kaczinsky were all measurably brilliant people. Intelligence is not an antidote to madness; indeed, they often seem to go hand-in-hand.
Taji goes on to describe the methods of IQ tests. Defining intelligence is exceedingly hard. IQ was originally an attempt to empirically measure intelligence independent from education, but studies have shown that education improves IQ. Humans from primitive tribes usually perform poorly on Western-designed IQ tests, but this is because such tests are almost invariably biased by hidden educational requirements they have not been exposed to. There is no reason to believe that humans from primitive tribes are cognitively handicapped, as their IQ test scores would otherwise indicate. This is a defect in the IQ testing of psychometrics, not evidence for the trope of Darwinian selection for intelligence in “civilized” ancestry lines.
On the other hand, the impact of education may mainly be realized in a specific area of the brain that is a hub for semantics (left anterior temporal lobe), which may explain the stereotype of the pedantic scholar who clings to sophistry that has no support in the real world. Perhaps this is a neural correlate of the IYI (Idiot Yet Intellectual) epithet wielded by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Indeed, damage to this brain area has been observed to unlock latent creative genius. We are able to locate other cognitive competencies to particular areas of the brain, such as musical knowledge, poker skill, mathematics, and humor creativity. Education, or more accurately our pedagogical methods, may have counterproductive downsides — as widely-observed by teachers and sagely observed by Pink Floyd. These neuroscience studies are largely unexplored in the cloistered realms of intelligence and education research.
Quantitative genetics searches for genes that might be selected for IQ (or acadamia’s favorite hubristic IQ proxy, “educational attainment”) have come up null. That is not to say that many genes ultimately contribute to performance on IQ tests and life achievement, because they certainly do. We simply do not have an understanding of the higher-order interactions between nature and nurture. IQ psychometric testing is seductive because it provides the illusion of empirical objectivity, but underneath things are far too muddled to be using it to divide people into Brave New World castes. Surely this was the cautionary message that Aldous Huxley intended to convey in his most famous book.
IQ is a score on a test, an attempt to summarize the “quality” of a mind in one neat number, and it is only as good as the test design. Psychology has long recognized the “confound” issues with IQ psychometric as a valid measure of nature vs. nurture. Psychologist Charles Spearman imagined a new number, called the g factor (general intelligence factor), to represent the “true, innate” intelligence that lurks obscured inside the nominal IQ test measurement. People who do well on one type of mental task, such as vocabulary, tend to do well on other tests, such as memorizing digits, within a certain variance. By combining a number of separate cognitive tests together, and using a statistical technique called factor analysis to try to extract meaningful correlations, we can get a number that has been demonstrated to be more predictive in the real world than IQ.
Spearman’s student, Raymond Catell, rejected the unified g in favor of two variables, fluid intelligence (Gf) and crystalized intelligence (Gc) (later expanded with quantitative reasoning (Gq) and visual-spatial reasoning (Gv)). Later still, John B. Carroll created a hierarchical structure with a master g factor at the top, eight subcategories, and myriad tertiary categories.
All of this psychometric numerology provides a certain illusive feeling of rigor and symmetry, as with the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, but the derived g factor does not escape the fundamental problem of intelligence: we cannot tie it to any observable except performance on behavioral tests designed by researchers; tests that introduce various uncertainties. As Matthew Panizzon and Eero Vuoksimaa of UCSD put it:
“Although we provide evidence in favor of g being a valid latent construct, it is still the case that we do not know if g is a causal individual differences construct with respect to specific cognitive abilities. If one interprets the higher-order common pathway model from a top-down perspective, it would seem to imply that g is indeed a causal individual differences construct. However, this model is not directional, and it can also be explained by models that do not include a g factor, such as the mutualism model (van der Maas et al 2006). In the mutualism model, g is an emergent property of the positive manifold among specific cognitive abilities rather than a construct that causes the relationships among cognitive abilities. “
In other words, g seems to be a good heuristic indicator of intelligence. However, it is not a real attribute that is causally-related to any discernible characteristic differences between individuals. Reifying IQ or g factor into something real is a logical fallacy. We are left no closer to resolving the nature OR nurture question, but I hope this makes the reader smarter about our ignorance of intelligence.
The Dangers of Jeff Foxworthy Medicine
Taji identifies Conduct Disorder (CD) and Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) as being associated with low IQ. I do not buy Taji’s putative causal relationship between a reified IQ and mental disorders. Low IQ is not the “intrinsic” property that causes mental disorders; both personality disorders and low IQ are common symptoms of brain abnormalities. These may be due to poor nutrition, an unenriching environment, chronic stress — all factors very much impacted by socioeconomic stratification. At the same time, there are also strong genetic heritability for particular types of conditions. But the correlation between low IQ and CD/APD is not causation.
It is helpful to remember that these personality disorders are defined by a list of behavioral symptoms agreed to by a consensus of psychiatry committees. While psychiatrists have long attempted to classify the many patients the field has treated over its history, the categories shift over time as the field and committee members change. At the risk of drawing ire from the psychiatry community, the modern pantheon of personality disorders are rather analogous to comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s diagnostic method, “You May Be a Redneck If”. They are not diseases in the physiological sense, but another set of abstract concepts that have been reified into medical conditions (in many cases, to the financial benefit of the pharmaceutical industry). In summary, linking a highly summarized empirical measure (IQ) to consensus-defined behavioral diseases (personality disorders) weakly supports Taji’s case for setting policy around the IQ disadvantaged.
With that caveat established, neurological studies have identified personality disorder associations with particular brain phenotypes, early childhood experience, and in some cases, genes. For example, murderous psychosis seems to often result from damage to a part of the brain called the gyrus rectus, or its inputs. Early childhood trauma has been shown to have physical effects in the brain and the epigenetic expression of genes. Here the inseparability of nature and nurture is clear.
Mental disorders have increasingly been found to have medical causes. The gut bacteria flora, which are heavily controlled by diet and environmental stress, have recently been found to have myriad effects upon the body and brain. Diet is very much impacted by socioeconomic stratification. Exercise has major benefits for the brain, including stimulating neurogenesis, and there is a discrepancy in sports availability along income and gender lines. Long-term stress has many mental health effects, and teachers who teach in underprivileged communities universally attest that children are ill-prepared to learn in school when they are stressed at home. Both IQ and mental health are linked to body health, and ultimately healthy environments, which are clearly related to socioeconomic status.
Psychiatry grapples with some very difficult problems involving the human mind. The grand conjectures of Freud and Jung have been superseded by committee consensus conventions. However, we must remember that diagnostic personality disorders, as with IQ and g factor, are based upon conventions and subjective clinical assessments, not physiology. Psychiatry cannot successfully tease apart nature and nurture.
The Dangers of Gene Myths
In genetics, the MAOA gene, which is passed down on the mother’s X chromosome, has variants (R2 and R3 alleles) that show up disproportionately in violent male criminals. It’s the closest story we have to a “bad seed”. The wounds of childhood trauma can now be observed physiologically in the brain, and some people may be genetically vulnerable to this.
However, MAOA R2/R3 does not explain most violent criminals, and the vast majority of people carrying MAOA R2/R3 are fully-functioning people. But this inconclusive discovery was sensationalized in the media, and “the warrior gene” unjustly became a race realism story in precisely the manner that frustrates Turkheimer. In reality, MAOA does not provide a convenient story to justify racial stereotypes:
“MAOA-3R — the “original warrior gene” — was the first gene linked with antisocial characteristics. But Maori were not the only ethnic group with a high frequency of this variant. It turned out that while 3R was found in 56% of Maori males, it occurred in 58% of African American males and 34% of European males [2]. Misinterpreted by the media, the 3R variant quickly became a lead character in a pop science narrative intended to explain why certain racial groups appear to have increased tendencies toward violence. When a disproportionately high number of males of an ethnic group carries a less common gene linked with aggressive behaviors, the discussion about that gene immediately takes on racial overtones [3, 14]. (Interestingly, the press ignored studies indicating that the 3R variant occurred in 61% of Taiwanese males [15] and 56% of Chinese males [16]).”
The key takeaway here is the neophyte level of knowledge that we have about genes does not warrant any sort of Darwinist social policy framework based around optimizing the human genetic code — we would not know what genetic alleles to select for even if we wanted to. We know of no genetic differences between the popular conception of “races” that explain any racial behavioral stereotypes. Media writers should take care to neither foment race realism, nor portray an unscientific blank-slate position that genes contribute nothing to intelligence as a scientific view.
The Dangers of Statistical Inferencing
Let us identify what is contemptuously called “scientific racism”. The Pioneer Fund is an organization that was headed by J. Phillippe Rushton until his death in 2012, and now appears to be headed by Richard Lynn. Its charter dedicates the fund to “race betterment”. It funds heritability research, and has been accused of being sympathetic to “white supremacy”. I am going to briefly review just one paper by Richard Lynn.
In evolutionary biology, r/K selection theory proposes that organisms tend to adopt reproductive strategies that either emphasize having many offspring with low parental involvement in rearing (r) or fewer offspring with high parental involvement in rearing (K). Lynn describes Rushton’s application of r/K selection as follows:
“…Rushton has proposed that Mongoloids have evolved the strongest K strategy, Negroids are stronger r strategists, while Caucasoids fall intermediate but are closer to Mongoloids. Rushton uses this general theory to explain a large number of differences between the three races including brain size, intelligence, sexuality and numbers of children.”
This speculation is unsubstantiated, offensive, and plainly presumes dubious racial generalizations in the thinking of Rushton and Lynn. However, it illustrates a broader problem with evolutionary biology, which is that its rhetorical style can be adapted to lend scientific-sounding credibility to just about any specious political argument. Lynn further reports:
“The relation between skin color and intelligence was examined in a representative sample of 430 adult African Americans. A statistically significant positive correlation of 0.17 was obtained between light skin color and intelligence. It is proposed that the result supports the hypothesis that the level of intelligence in African Americans is significantly determined by the proportion of Caucasian genes.”
This conclusion, that because skin color is genetically determined, then the same genes somehow affect intelligence, is absurd. There are no “Caucasian genes” rigidly defining whiteness boundaries — there are merely genetic variants that appear more frequently in different populations. There is no scientific reason to believe that skin color genes are even indirectly related to intelligence as a result of “admixture” of socially-constructed white and black groups. Occam’s Razor demands that we first consider racial bias to explain any correlations between IQ and skin color. But through the magic of what is known derisively as p-hacking, Lynn finds them to be correlated in a statistically significant way.
This is another example where quantitative methods, especially those that purport to compute the probability that the author’s conclusions are wrong, should be eyed suspiciously. Methods that seem to provide validation of “politically correct” social sciences narratives create outrage when co-opted to support abhorrent narratives. Some of that outrage ought to be channeled towards questioning the methods themselves.
When we torture the data until it confesses, we should be wary of the stories it is telling us.
The Dangers of Politicized Science
Both Galileo and Darwin were persecuted by the religious establishments of their times because their ideas were thought to threaten extant social beliefs. There is a current teaching among activist progressives that long-suffering oppressed classes can take power if only the oppressor classes did not actively maintain their systemic power dominion. These progressives seem to eye genetic studies of ancestry suspiciously, pointing to historical prejudiced race science and eugenics programs as cautionary slippery slopes leading to the oppressors maintaining unjust power. Although I am not devoting much space in this article to Eric Turkheimer, whose objections to the Pioneer Fund circle are well-founded, I wish to dissent on a specific theme of his:
“Now have a look at the Rushton and Jensen paper making the case for the partial genetic determination of racial differences, or listen to Murray and Harris, or read any of the replies to our piece in Vox. Where are the percentages? Where is the equivalent of the ACE model? Where are the structural equation models with parameters quantifying the “partly genetic and partly environmental” hypothesis the hereditarians keep repeating? For all the hereditarians’ idle intuitions about differences being part genetic and part environmental, where is the empirical or quantitative theory that describes how this apportioning is supposed to work? There is no such thing as a “group heritability coefficient,” no way to put any meat on the speculative bones about partial genetic determination. In the absence of an actual empirical theory, the discussion is all about your intuitions against my intuitions.”
Let us now talk about a gene highly conserved across mammals, FOXP2. This gene created a big stir in 2001. Mutations in FOXP2 can cause human language disorders. Replacing the mouse FOXP2 gene with the human equivalent dramatically changed their cognitive and vocal behavior, in an experiment reminiscent of Daniel Keyes’ short story Flowers for Algernon. FOXP2 is heavily expressed in the left inferior frontal gyrus, a brain area central to language articulation. On the other hand, few connections between particular FOXP2 alleles and high verbal intelligence have been found. What we can say is FOXP2 is that it appears to contribute to verbal intelligence. Many other genes have intriguing connections to intelligence. We do not understand all of this, but have tantalizing glimpses of insight.
Returning to the social sciences, Turkheimer is correct that there is no model linking the social construct of race to particular gene variants that are better or worse. However, it is not unreasonable to suppose that as science untangles the genetic milieu, we may find gene variations involved in cognition that are distributed differently amongst populations with different ancestries. No one can presently meet the Turkheimer Legitimacy Criterion — a mathematical theory that models genes-to-g — because biology appears to be computationally irreducible, and g or any “group heritability coefficient” are highly reified concepts disconnected from this underlying biology. But surely the extreme Turkheimer Legitimacy Criterion does not delegitimize free inquiry into ancestry and intelligence, due to the fear that someone may derive false myths from its results!
This was the central point that Sam Harris felt needed to be made in the case of Charles Murray, whose Bell Curve work drew partly from the aforementioned Richard Lynn’s research. Harris made this principled stand at great personal reputational cost. He tried to justify his defense of the spirit of free inquiry into truth in an appeal to Ezra Klein for two hours on his podcast. This appeal was in vain, as Klein could not be moved from his rhetorical talking points about the historical injustices of bad racial theories past, and postmodernist counseling of Sam Harris to reflect upon his inherent unconscious biases that stem from his white privilege.
Wokeness is a peculiar kind of sonambulance.
The Dangers of Ignoring Divergent Brain Morphology
Genetic studies indicate that the Australian Aboriginal people have been isolated from the rest of humanity for the past 50,000 years. Both anecdotally and in studies, indigenous Australians on average have superior eyesight to Australians of European origin. There are indications that Australian Aborigines on average have a larger occipital lobe of the brain, which is the primary location where visual perception is processed. There is an evolutionary hypothesis that the harsh Australian outback environment with flat, wide open spaces selected for increased visual acuity to find food and water. If indeed we were to find genetic factors behind these adaptations, what would this mean for the popular political science conflict theory doctrine that posits the only differences between “socially-constructed” human ethnic groups is organized political power? We have to be ready for this conversation, which I believe was the central point of both Taji’s article and why Sam Harris waded into the debate on principle.
Dangerous Conclusions
If you made it through this article, you may have found that I evaded your labels. Do I believe in IQ or don’t I? Perhaps you wanted me to come out as a race realist, or as a evolutionary biologist-philosopher who believes that genes mean nothing and group political power is everything? We have to make sense of all of these views, and be able to discuss them no matter where the science leads, even at the risk of calling into question our religious and political beliefs. With all due respect to Ezra Klein and Eric Turkheimer, it is possible to examine issues sincerely and dispassionately as critical thinking individuals without being tainted by the Original Sin of group identity neologisms. We also must take care not to speculatively misuse genetics to explain outcomes where socioeconomic issues loom first and foremost, which is the central issue I have with Taji’s article. We should hear out and earnestly critique the eugenics-era holdovers of the Pioneer Fund, who comb through statistical data as if they were chicken entrails, hoping we might purify the human genome of contaminants — an erroneous framing of the genome long-disproven by the Human Genome Project of the 1990s.
USC electrical engineering professor Bart Kosko wrote a book called Fuzzy Thinking in which he described Western thought as being obsessed with P OR NOT P, whereas Eastern thought is more interested in harmonizing P AND NOT P. It has turned out that nature OR nurture is not even a valid question with respect to shaping individual intelligence; we must instead learn to look dispassionately at nature AND nurture together as a living system.
My son peered at me quizzically. “So do you believe in nature or nurture?”
The most exciting part of neuromythography is when the model explains brand new neuroscience studies. Every experimental validation adds to our confidence in the value of the neuromythographic method.
The researchers used a long-term psychology cohort known as the Dunedin Study, a population in New Zealand who were first assessed at three years old and re-assessed every few years through age 45. 672 of these participants underwent fMRI scanning, and these brain scans were compared to questionnaire data about their behavior between ages 7 and 26. Based on these responses, the population was separated into ‘persistent antisocial behavior’, ‘adolescent-limited anti-social behavior’ (i.e. they ‘grew out of it’), and ‘normal’ groups. The goal of the study was to identify brain areas associated with persistent anti-social behavior, compared to adolescent-limited and normal groups.
Here are the imaging results for the two antisocial groups of interest. The top is for the persistent antisocial group, while the bottom is for the adolescent-limited antisocial group.
A) shows cortical parcels with significantly lower cortical thickness in the persistent antisocial group. B) shows lower cortical thickness in the adolescent-limited antisocial group compared to the normal behavior group.
Both the adolescent-limited and persistent antisocial groups had a distinct, small group of brain areas identified by the study.
The researchers concluded:
First, we found that smaller surface area and thinner cortex in brain regions associated with executive function, motivation, and affect regulation previously implicated in studies of antisocial behaviour were, as hypothesised, specific to the life-course-persistent group. Second, the observed pattern of smaller surface area specific to the life-course-persistent group was much broader than previously reported in cross-sectional studies of antisocial behaviour. Third, both antisocial behaviour trajectory groups had features of reduced cortical thickness compared with the low group without antisocial behaviour, but in different areas of the brain.
The researchers then speculate about genetics, environment, and genetic-environment interactions, and relate these findings to prior findings. That is all we can get out of this if we are using a neuropsychology framework. Now, let us apply the neuromythographic method.
Enter the Neuromythograph
The Unruly Child
The adolescent-limited antisocial behavior group contrast revealed two brain areas, both in the right hemisphere: TE1m and TE2a. The archetypes for these are Bentham and al-Kindi, respectively.
Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher who first articulated utilitarianism and consequentialist ethics. Right TE1m is represented as Bentham because of its role in contemplating the consequences of actions upon other people. TE1m – Bentham has a left hemisphere complement in TE1m – Protagoras, the Greek sophist founder who represents linguistic understanding of agents performing actions upon things. The complementarity between left hemisphere Protagoras, that models agent-object interaction models, and right hemisphere Bentham, that models consequentialist ethics models, is intuitive.
al-Kindi
al-Kindi is known as ‘the father of Arab philosophy’. He was a polymath, whose wrote hundreds of treatises on a myriad of topics across physical and spiritual domains. Right TE2a is assigned to al-Kindi, representing holistic knowledge knitted together into wisdom. Right TE2a – al-Kindi has a left hemisphere complement in TE2a – Pliny the Elder, the Roman philosopher who constructed the first encyclopedia. The complementarity between left hemisphere Pliny, that is the library of knowledge about the physical world, and al-Kindi, who stiches together knowledge into wisdom, is intuitive.
The Antisocial Adult
The persistent antisocial group had a larger set of grey matter thickness deficits identified. In both hemispheres, areas TGd and AAIC were flagged. The neuromythographic archetypes are as follows.
Pheme
Pheme was the Greek spirit of spirit of fame and good repute in a positive sense and infamy and scandal in the bad. Left TGd is assigned to Pheme, because of its multi-faceted role in assigning attributes to types of people, including processing of proper nouns and pop culture.
Aesop
Aesop was a Greek storytelling who wrote some of the most famous tales, most of which have a moral lesson. Right TGd is assigned to Aesop, because of its role in understanding stereotypes, archetypes, poetry, and storytelling.
The complementarity between left hemisphere Pheme, the goddess of fame and reputation, and right hemisphere Aesop, a store of archetypal stories, is intuitive.
Fortuna
Fortuna was the Roman goddess of luck and misfortune. Left AAIC is assigned to Fortuna because of its role in the general emotional sentiment of whether we are currently in a lucky streak or not. The grey matter deficit here is interesting because of how the perception of whether one is lucky might play a role in overall life outlook and the prospects of getting away with a crime.
In the left hemisphere only, areas TPOJ1 and PEF in antisocial adults had less cortical thickness.
Pistis
Pistis was the Greek goddess of trust and good faith. Right AAIC is assigned to Pistis because of its role in assessing trustworthiness, both of oneself and others. The complementarity between left hemisphere Fortuna, that judges luckiness, and right hemisphere Pistis, that judges trustworthiness, is intuitive.
TOPIC-ACTOR-SCHEMA
[INCOMPLETE] Left TPOJ has a general role in understanding the TOPIC-ACTOR-SCHEMA context of a sentence. Left TPOJ1 is activated when someone invokes ‘sacred values’. The reduction in grey matter in left TPOJ in the persistent antisocial group is consistent with reduced experience of sacred values.
Codd
The appearance of a grey matter deficit in left PEF – Codd in the persistent antisocial group is obviously not usefully explained by the neuromythographic interpretation. Either this is an experimental artifact, or PEF awaits a better archetypal interpretation that can explain this experimental result.
Neuromythography Adds Missing Insight to Neuroscience and Psychology
When we consider the neuromythographic interpretation of the grey matter deficits of the adolescent-limited antisocial group, we can start to get a picture of the problem and what the remedies might be. A troublesome teenager may not consider the consequences of their actions in the utilitarian sense mediated by left TE2a – Bentham, and has not yet synthesized experience and knowledge into wisdom. Right TE2a – al-Kindi is a center of wisdom across spiritual and physical realms. It is interesting to speculate that a lack of spiritual guidance might be at fault, in part.
As with the case of the teenage miscreant, the persistent antisocial behavior group’s cortical thickness deficits provide an intuitive picture. Reduced thickness in left TGd – Pheme and right TGd – Aesop may result in a deficit in caring about reputation and self-image of one’s moral character. Deficits in AAIC – Fortuna and AAIC – Pistis may result in under- or over-estimation of one’s ability to succeed, and an impaired judgement of what constitutes trustworthy behavior. A reduction in TPOJ1 may result in impairment of judgment with respect to appropriate behaviors in social situations, and result in a loosened grasp of personal sacred values.
Importantly, the neuromythographic interpretation indicates that the label ‘antisocial’ isn’t a valid construct to apply across the two groups. The adolescent group grey matter profile is very different from the persistent group. Broad psychology categories, ‘validated’ by circuitous psychometrics, fail when put to the test in neuroscience bolstered by neuromythography.
We have just scratched the surface of the additional value that can be extracted from a neuroscience study by applying neuromythographic archetypes to the raw findings. The neighbors, entrances, and exits of these brain areas inform how the networked ensemble of brain areas work together. The neurotransmitter and receptor profiles and their archetypes add additional light into the subtle nature of these brain areas.
Thousands of people have written millions of words about crime, evil, despair, nature vs. nurture, psychology, sociology, religion, and so on. In the above-referenced study, correlations between antisocial behavior and grey matter reductions in certain brain areas were found, but neuroscience and psychology lack a cohesive framework for interpreting them. Neuromythography provides the missing cohesive interpretive framework.
We hope that this interpretation of a recent neuroscience study piques your interest in neuromythography, and cordially invite you to explore more with us.
