That’s a journal I would never trust — after all, they were responsible for publishing Richard Lynn’s hacky paper on the IQ of nations. Now here’s another example of a terrible racist paper from it. It’s an evolutionary psychology paper by Kanazawa, a terrible combination that ought not to ever pass peer review.
On the basis of his theory of the evolution of intelligence (Kanazawa, 2004), Kanazawa (2008) proposed that, during their evolutionary travels away from the relatively stable and hence predictable environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA; i.e., the African savanna of the late Pleistocene), the ancestors of Eurasians encountered evolutionarily novel environments that selected for higher intelligence. Therefore, Kanazawa (2008) predicted higher average IQ scores in countries located farther away from the EEA. Kanazawa (2008) tested this hypothesis against data gathered by Lynn and Vanhanen (2006), who estimated so-called “national IQ-scores,” i.e., the average IQ of the inhabitants of nations in terms of western norms. Kanazawa (2008) found a significant negative correlation between countries’ national IQs and their distance from three geographic locations in and around sub-Saharan Africa.
This is from a paper analyzing the problems of peer review, using Kanazawa’s paper as a case study. That evo-psych paper flew through peer review, with reviewers missing a number of deep problems.
We point to a number of indisputable issues that should have precluded publication of the paper as constituted at the time of review. First, Kanazawa’s (2008) computations of geographic distance used Pythagoras’ theorem and so the paper assumed that the earth is flat (Gelade, 2008). Second, these computations imply that ancestors of indigenous populations of, say, South America traveled direct routes across the Atlantic rather than via Eurasia and the Bering Strait. This assumption contradicts the received view on evolutionary population genetics and the main theme of the book (Oppenheimer, 2004) that was cited by Kanazawa (2008) in support of the Out-of-Africa theory. Third, the study is based on the assumption that the IQ of current-day Australians, North Americans, and South Americans is representative of that of the genetically unrelated indigenous populations that inhabited these continents 10,000 years ago (Wicherts et al., 2010b). In related work by others who share Kanazawa’s (2008) views on the nature of race differences in IQ, the latter issue was dealt with by excluding countries with predominantly non-indigenous populations (Templer and Arikawa, 2006). Thus, although Wicherts et al. (2010b) raised additional issues that may the topic of debate (see below), these three problems are beyond dispute.
I am amused that Kanazawa’s methodology assumed that the Earth is flat and that all peoples ignored geographical obstacles, like mountains and oceans, to make a beeline to their modern location. I am horrified that anyone would use Lynn’s deeply racist and wrong paper to make any estimates of a population’s intelligence. I reject the whole notion of IQ as a useful measure of intelligence in the first place.
The authors propose some changes towards a more open peer review process, which sound good to me. My simpler solution is to simply throw out the whole goddamn journal of Intelligence, along with anyone who publishes in it.
Speaking of flat earth follies, I see that YouTube is in a tizzy because someone is doing something called “The Final Experiment” — a group of people are flying to Antarctica to witness the fact that there is a period where the sun never sets, which ought to be impossible if Antarctica is actually a ring of land surrounding the whole planet. It’s ridiculous. No, flat earthers will find a new excuse and will not be persuaded by a “final” experiment — it’s not as if they reached their beliefs by experiment and reason in the first place, or as if all the other evidence that the earth is roughly spherical were insufficient.
Can you imagine someone proposing a “final experiment” to “prove” that life on earth evolved? I can’t. I know the idiots who are creationists far too well to think that.
The journal’s name is perfect as is. The mark of someone on the internet who is a complete idiot is that they use a pseudonym that refers to intelligence.
One can easily imagine many simple experiments and calculations that the average person can carry out. The flat-earthers always have complex sounding rubuttals that ultimately amount to nothing more than “nuh-uh”.
Maybe the flat earthers will finally get that photo of A’tuin.
Sheesh!
At the very minimum Kanazawa could have used migration distances from Waze, the way that the indigenous people did.
…you have to click the option for “avoid major highways”. You might guess that you should also click “avoid tolls”, since there was (originally) no humans there to collect the tolls, but that neglects the Troll booths.
I think anyone trying to prove, once and for all, that Earth is round to somehow ‘own’ the flat-earthers should just watch this instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
Dan Olson not only does an effective job at both proving the notion of a flat earth wrong but also explaining why it doesn’t matter and flat-earthers will continue to believe the flat earth claim.
Flat Earthism is just another conspiracy theory. It’s worth disproving conspiracy theories to prevent their spread, but getting believers to drop such ideas probably won’t work with a large percentage of them. Getting them to realise the logistics problems with the idea, like all giant conspiracy theories, is very hard.
You don’t need to go to Antarctica to show that the flat-earth model is nonsense. You just have to think about what it would mean for the sun’s motion. According to them, “east” and “west” are directions around a flat circle. So if you watch the sun in the sky at noon, it would move towards the west — and then reach a point where it gets further away and starts moving west to east, until it changed direction again. The sun would never rise or set, just keep circling the supposed north pole at the hub of the disk. The only way to have night would be for the sun to have some sort of giant lampshade that blocks light when the sun is moving west to east.
The only way for the sun to “set” and “rise” over the side of the flat earth is if it happened in the south — it would rise in one part of the south, and set in another part of the south.
Terry Pratchett put far more thought into his flat Discworld — he didn’t even bother with traditional earth directions, and just used Hub(ward), Rim(ward), and Turn(wise). I’m not sure he got everything right, but he did better than Flat Earthers in imagining his fictional Flat Earth.
Indeed, I thought Flat-Earthers already subscribed to total epistemic nihilism regarding any observed astronomical event. The apparent movements and changes of the sun, moon, and stars, which in reality show expected changes as one changes latitude on the round-ish (oblate spheroid) Earth moving around the sun, are all just changes in a giant super-duper high-definition video screen covering the flat earth. All windows (such as in airplanes) are also actually video screens.
The sky is a lie. Windows are lies. Everything observed is a completely undetectable deception.
Total epistemic nihilism.
There is a huge problem in even considering the idea that IQ scores measure something innate like “intelligence”.
We know that IQ measurements are affected by a large number of variables. These include notably, socio-economic status, early childhood nutrition and socialization from birth to age 2, and environmental factors such as toxins in the environment.
Up until recently, gasoline was fortified with tetraethyl lead. Lead paint also used to be common. This resulted in several generations being exposed to lead in the environment and lead is known to have neurotoxic effects.
The other common variable is what language and culture the IQ test was in versus the language of the people taking the test.
If your English isn’t your first language or it isn’t all that great for a lot of Third World reasons, you aren’t going to score all that high on IQ tests.
What we actually see is that IQ is very malleable and flexible and can change rapidly through time and space, even for the same groups.
One common observation is that the US IQ keeps going up over time, the Flynn effect, so that occasionally they renormalize the tests.
The classic case of IQ explaining anything is the data from the 20th century that the Irish were dumb. The Irish consistently scored low on IQ tests and most British intellectuals didn’t have a problem calling them dumb.
Then recently, Irish IQs started rising and are now equal to those of the British.
So much for that idea.
The Irish don’t have low IQs any more.
Pretending that IQ is some absolute measurement fixed in time and space is just wrong.
It can change a lot and rapidly for groups.
The idea that the Mediterranean region is more “evolutionarily challenging” than sub-Saharan Africa seems quite a stretch too, even considering the Pleistocene fauna that existed during early migrations.
I saw a reel recently…don’t know how old it is…of a man in Europe asking people on the street what nation has the lowest IQ. It was noticeable the number of people who said the US…which was wrong. It was also noticeable the number of people who said a nation can’t have an IQ…clever answer but also wrong. So was the UK, Nigeria, and several other nations. In fact, never heard a right answer.
“The Final Experiment”, AKA TFE, has been almost a year in the making. A central tenant of many flat earthers, flerfs, is that the sun is not visible 24 hours a day in Antarctica in the austral summer. They claim that all videos showing it to be true are fake. Further, may flerfs have long claimed the no one can go to Antarctica because the Antarctic Treaty prohibits it (it doesn’t), and that NASA guards the “ice wall” around the perimeter of the disk to block anyone who tries to go there. They really are bat-shit crazy. Well except for the out and out grifters who make a living off of the gullible.
There’s far too much to go into here. If you are interested, my gotos are Dave McKeegan and Conspiracy Toonz. There are others who are supposed to be good. I don’t recommend Sciman Dan.
If the weather held, the party will be landing at Union Glacier about now.
wasn’t kanazawa the guy who did that paper that was full of booty porn?
INTELLIGENCE’s long-time editor, Richard Haier who was responsible for a great deal of race/IQ nonsense recently stepped down. Apparently the race/IQ clowns are very angry that his replacements don’t seem amenable to their bullshit. So, there is hope. https://web.archive.org/web/20241213203714/https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/mass-resignations-at-the-journal
“the average IQ of the inhabitants of nations in terms of western norms”
There’s your problem right there.
“Western norms” just elected Trump … again.
Interestingly the person behind “the final experiment” is a wealthy young Earth creationist pastor who apparently was a money man before he became a man of God.
I looked him up because that made me suspicious. He seems to have given a sermon explaining why he is doing this. He explains that he feels that young earth creationists like him have been the somehow shut out of the world of science by a conspiracy. And then he goes on to listen to me religious arguments used to support the idea of a flat Earth and explains why he thinks the Bible doesn’t actually say that. I still don’t fully understand what he was trying to say, but I feel like he thinks he’s including flat earthers in a way that he feels he has been excluded when it comes to the age of the Earth or evolution or other such things.
I still have a nasty suspicion that he’s going to try to set up a spontaneous debate when they’re at sea and have limited connection to the outside world. But it won’t be long now until I find out if that happens.
@14
Richard Haier wasn’t that long term having served since 2016. His predecessor, Douglas K. Detterman, had been editor since the journal was founded in 1977. I’m also not sure how highly respected the journal is. I wonder who the proposed new editors are.
I have read a couple of Kanazawa’s papers. They are prima facie evidence that peer review is deeply flawed.
As for the Flat Earth Final Experiment, this is clearly a scam. Nobody needs to go to Antarctica. The “experiment” can be performed anywhere in the Arctic circle during summer, which means if you live in Europe or North America, you can drive there.
Even that is unnecessary. All you need is a phone call to a friend who lives more than 1670 km to the east or west and ask them what time it is there.
chrislawson: hadn’t thought about how you can drive there in North America. Not a lot of roads up there, but there’s a couple (to Prudhoe Bay and to Inuvik).
chrislawson:
I think you misunderstood what it is Flat Earthers are denying. Look at the picture in the OP and remember that according to them, the Earth is a disk where Antarctica is stretched around the entire outer rim. The south pole doesn’t exist for the sun to go around in the austral summer!
But as I wrote above, all they need to do is claim that the austral summer solstice is fake because the entire sky is a snare and delusion.
The same aliens that can fake the appearance of the sky can easily hack phone systems.
ok kanazawa was the black women are ugly because science guy, not the tits & ass evopsych paper guy. i swear i read about that one on pharyngula. help me out – who was it? did a big giant paper with dozens of photos from his porn collection in it. wild man.
@ ^ Great American Satan : Does this help?
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/05/20/an-entertaining-debunking-of-evolutionary-psychology/
@8 Raven
If your English isn’t your first language or it isn’t all that great for a lot of Third World reasons, you aren’t going to score all that high on IQ tests.
Strangely enough testing psychologists have even thought of this and have translated and renormed tests.
Your point about culture is much more valid. I.Q tests appear to measure certain kinds of mental ability and various cultures may or may not stress these. As long as you’re sticking with a Western European, North American, etc., environment it looks like most of the population is being raised to emphasize these abilities. Other cultures are going to emphasize other types of abilities and skills.
And of course there are some tests that are totally nonverbal. The Ravens Matrices and Kohs Blocks are completely non-verbal. Ravens Matrices do suffer from the problem that you need to be familiar with the printed stimuli. If you’re from a non-literate culture and not looking at a printed page I suspect you’re immediately at a disadvantage. I never thought of it before but it’s possible then if you are from some non-literate cultures, then you might have an advantage with Kohs Blocks.
In fact unless the test is culturally appropriate you can get some really weird results even in a European culture. There is the old story about the child who was asked to look at two pictures: One was a man chopping wood, the other was a man sitting in an armchair reading a book. The question was which man is working. The child pointed out the man sitting in the arm chair. It was the correct answer. Their father was a university professor. Much of his work involved reading, he chopped wood for relaxation.
I can remember arguing with some math/electronics people at a teaching institute that using a boat in water to measure something or other in a screening test might not be culturally appropriate since the bloody country was 90% desert.
Come to think there is fairly good evidence that up until recently males had better spatial skills than females in European cultures. The last I read, this difference is disappearing because of cultural changes. There’s more girls playing sports, doing more mathematics and so on.
I.Q. tests can be a very useful tool for any number of things, but like any other tool they can be badly misused and to be honest has taken probably most of a century to to work out some of the weird problems and quirks that needed to be ironed out to make them less prone to unintentional misuse. If you want to be a racist bigot, and you don’t know much about IQ tests or you really want to attack a group even if you know how IQ tests work, then you misuse them.
stevor – i’ve watched that whole video, but it’s so long i don’t remember if the specific paper showed up in it. very fun video. the thing I’m thinking of was gumbified / comic sans in my memory, but i dunno. maybe it was all a dream…
Owlmirror@20–
I agree that Flat Earthers are not going to be persuaded by evidence or they already would be. I was noting that the “experiment” is to see if there is a 24 hour period where the sun never sets in Antarctica. They can run the same experiment in the Arctic Circle and the result will be exactly as contradictory to Flat Earth theory. I suspect the reason for running this test in Antarctica has nothing to do with testing of solar hypotheses and everything to do with inflating funding targets to the rubes — the guy in charge is ex-finance, after all.
To take things further, this Flat Earth experiment is a variation of Eratosthenes’ method of calculating the size of the Earth. And Eratosthenes managed to get remarkably close to the correct answer by measuring the shadow of a stick. Quite a bit cheaper than going to Antarctica.
@25 except that since the north pole (and Santa’s workshop) are at the center of the Universe, the sun just needs to be near above it to give you a 24 hour day. Much harder when Antarctica is the rim of the plate and you have to get sun all the way around. Of course, that argument implies some sense of geometry and plausibility which is completely absent in Flat Earthers.
@9 So the Irish IQ is rising rapidly – this is evidence for rapid evolution and a young Earth. Must be going up since they became Christians in 1100 or so.
/s
No, they’re not symmetric on flat earth. With the “UN flag” azimuthal equidistant polar projection most flat earthers tacitly take as a map, it’s still possible to claim the spotlight sun hovers over the center for northern summer (hand waving away all the inconvient details, of course). But it’s just flatly geometrically impossible to do the same for the circle at the edge which the south pole is projected onto. The sun would have to be both in view all day for an observer at a single point somewhere out on the antarctic “rim”, and yet still be making a day/night circuit further in.
That’s evidently impossible enough that it’s even obvious to flat earthers, and all the major
influencersgrifters have clearly stated at one point or another that specifically a 24 hour antarctic sun would be a catastrophe for their “theory”. It’s why they all insist it’s illegal to go to Antarctica, and it’s one of the few things they can all be pinned down on. There’s a compilation video out there somewhere.In theory, this really is a good thing to nail them with, difficulty and expense aside.
It still won’t work, of course. The few that agreed to go on this trip are surmised to be guys who are already looking for an excuse to drop flat earth and move on to a more lucrative right wing political grift or whatever. The rest turned it down flat, and are already working on their excuses (two or more suns, fake sun courtesy of NASA, actually they were in Greenland, etc.)
@29–
I get that the observations will not be symmetrical between the Arctic and Antarctic circles in Flat Earth theory, but epistemologically they are symmetrical. If the Earth is a flat plane, then any 24-hour daylight should occur all the world (excluding deep valleys). That is, it would be just as falsifying at the North Pole as in Antarctica since nowhere outside the polar circles has 24-hour daylight.
There’s a well-known case of a bunch of Flat Earthers who bought a laser gyrometer to prove the Earth wasn’t rotating. Again, this experiment was unnecessary because the hypothesis had already been tested by Foucault’s pendulum in 1851. And when they got the result indicating a rotating Earth, as anyone with any wit would expect, they did not abandon their beliefs. Instead tried to rationalise why the gyrometer would give the illusion of motion. So even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they themselves had formulated beforehand as a definitive test, they clung to their error.
But… umm…
@robro #11:
So, what’s your idea of the right answer?
Sure. But you’re bringing too much rationality and science awareness to the party. A flat earther would just claim the sun doesn’t illuminate the whole thing all. They say the sun is some kind of thing (they won’t specify what) that’s only a couple thousand miles away, and illuminates more like a spotlight, not in all directions. Maybe the spot even changes shape to kinda-sorta match the expected shape of the terminator line on the surface.
Does that explanation actually work in any coherent way, like explaining sunsets, moon phases, etc.? No. Will they realize that their magic morphing spotlight shape (if computed with sufficient fidelity) is suspiciously identical to the projection of a hemisphere onto the flat surface? No.
But is that explanation sufficient to paper over all those deficiencies if they wave their hands hard enough? Yes. Flat earthers are, by definition, incapable of doing the kind of analysis that would reveal its faults.
So that’s where Antarctica comes in. Even a magic spotlight sun can’t be in two places at once. And even flat earthers know it.
So will that actually show them they’re wrong and get rid of flat earth? No. Like I said, the ones who persist are just going to add a few more wild epicycles of conspiracy theory and special pleading. But it does at least force them to add those epicycles.
Jack lecou already addressed most of what I wanted to say, but I do want to add that
No, it’s really nothing so complex. All of geometry is a closed and silent book to most Flat Earthers.
I think the “classical” Flat Earth response to Eratosthenes was to deny that the sun’s rays are even vaguely parallel at different latitudes, because the sun is “actually” very close or some such nonsense which ignores other geometrical measurement of the sun’s distance.