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    #152485 04/03/13 05:05 AM
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    http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-talented-1-in-10000.html

    The talented 1 in 10,000
    by Steve Hsu

    David Lubinski sent me a copy of his latest paper from a longitudinal study of individuals who scored at the 1 in 10k level (normalized by age) on SAT-M or SAT-V before 13. This population is similar to the one whose DNA we are using in our intelligence GWAS.

    How can a brief test administered to a 12 year old be so good at picking out individuals who are likely to be exceptionally successful at age 38? If I hadn't been repeatedly told otherwise by "experts" I might conclude it had some validity ;-)

    ...

    The authors note that about 2% of the US general population earn doctoral degrees (JD, MD, PhD), whereas about 22% of gifted students who test at the top 1% level do so, and 44% percent of this population (in the 1 in 10k population there were many times more PhDs than MDs and JDs).

    ***********************************

    The paper being discussed is

    http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/25/0956797612457784
    Who Rises to the Top?: Early Indicators
    by Harrison J. Kell, David Lubinski, and Camilla P. Benbow
    Psychological Science
    March 2013, 24 (3)

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    Can we *please* stop associating intelligence with the J.D. degree?

    Please?

    I mean it doesn't require anything except having a pulse and a willingness to take on $200,000 in debt.

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    And the one 1 in whatever-he-is-off-the-reservation-probably-well-beyond-1-in-10,000 who I know is at that level is a Ph.D.

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    I regularly participate in a weekly journal club during the school year with a lot of behavior genetics researchers, and also am part of an online group for the Behavior Genetics Association. Most of the active researchers in this field DO NOT expect to find any powerful gene associations with membership in the Study of Exceptional Talent (SET),

    http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html

    which is the study population reported on here.


    "Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities." Israel Gelfand
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    Originally Posted by kmbunday
    I regularly participate in a weekly journal club during the school year with a lot of behavior genetics researchers, and also am part of an online group for the Behavior Genetics Association. Most of the active researchers in this field DO NOT expect to find any powerful gene associations with membership in the Study of Exceptional Talent (SET),

    http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html

    which is the study population reported on here.

    Are you trying to say there's no such thing as natural talent?

    In a recent thread we discussed that brain scans taken by the National Institute of Mental Health show that areas of the brain develop on a different timeline for gifted or average children, similar to the way adhd childrens brains develop on a different schedule than average? Wouldn't brain growth rate be governed by a gene?





    But I'm not in a Behavior Geneticist Club so I'll just stick with making a more pedestrian point. Some kids at school are staying after school for tutoring because they can not keep up with the class. Other kids are sitting in the same classroom listening to the same lessons and waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. There is obviously such a thing as natural talent. If there is such a thing then it follows there must be degrees of natural talent.


    Youth lives by personality, age lives by calculation. -- Aristotle on a calendar
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    I was interpreting kmbunday's point as being the SET population is a functionally tainted pool to draw conclusions from. I'd view it as skewed for quite a few reasons: first it is self-selected, second membership in the population gives extra support (e.g. letters of recommendation) to achieving the very ends they are measuring (e.g. PhDs), third prep services exist for the test being used.

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    Originally Posted by La Texican
    Wouldn't brain growth rate be governed by a gene?


    In addition to Zen Scanner's point, I'd add that for most complex behavioral traits, there is no one gene that's responsible. Instead, many many genes contribute incrementally to the likelihood and/or strength of that trait. This further weakens (and drastically so) one's statistical power to find a correlation between a behavioral trait and any one candidate gene.

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    And I'd add that, on top of all the genetic variability, there's all that epigenetic stuff going on, where the presence of a gene sequence may not matter at all if some environmental factor hasn't triggered it "on."

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    Yea, epigenetics has been blowing my mind lately. I think it was in Science News recently about cross-generational epigenetics and miRNA. And also I was reading about the presence of in utero testosterone and the thickness of the corpus callosum and the relationship with math ability with a negative effect/correlation on the presence of testerone in math gifted boys (and if you line up the math club next to the wrestling team, did we not already instinctually guess that that effect existed?)

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    epigenetics is freaking me OUT.

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    Yes, as other people who have commented since I last commented have correctly pointed out, since even monozygotic twins can be discordant for IQ (sometimes very markedly so), genes are never destiny. Moreover, all wide-scale gene studies of any human behaviorial trait have consistently found multifactorial, polygenic influence ("multifactorial" means that both environment and genes matter, and "polygenic" means that multiple genes matter insofar as any gene matters). I have a FAQ file collecting quotations from recent review articles by some of the leading researchers on human behavior genetics (especially researchers on genetic influence on IQ) that will perhaps make the key issues more clear.

    The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence:

    http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neuroscience_of_intelligence_review.pdf

    "At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]."

    The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182

    http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Johnson%20Current%20Directions%20Psych%20Science%202010%20(G%20and%20E%20in%20IQ).pdf

    looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection.

    "Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic. We will understand them best through investigation of their manifestation in biological and social developmental processes."


    Turkheimer, E. (2011). Genetics and human agency (Commentary on Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011). Psychological Bulletin, 137, 825-828. DOI: 10.1037/a0024306

    http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer_darnimrod%20comm%20(2011).pdf

    "That heritability depends on the population in which it is measured is one of the most frequently repeated caveats in the social sciences, but it is nevertheless often forgotten in the breach. (For example, it is nearly meaningless for Dar-Nimrod and Heine to note that 'heritability [of intelligence is] typically estimated to range from .50 to .85' [p. 805]. The heritability of intelligence isn’t anything, and even placing it in a range is misleading. Making a numerical point estimate of the heritability of intelligence is akin to saying, 'Social psychologists usually estimate the F ratio for the fundamental attribution error to be between 2.0 and 4.0.') The observation that genotypic variation accounts for 90% of the variation in height in the modern world depends on the variability of genotype and environment relevant to height. Among cloned animals with widely varying diets, body size is perfectly environmental with heritability of 0; in genetically variable animals raised in identical environments heritability is 1.0. This is no mere statistical fine point: it means that the entire project of assessing how essentially genetic traits are in terms of measured heritability coefficients is a fool’s errand."


    Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological Science.

    http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositivesGenesIQ.pdf

    "At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be tempered—as it has been in the medical sciences—by a recognition that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects.

    "Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the proliferation of potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not realize that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public may lead to incorrect perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as 'genes for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."

    Last edited by kmbunday; 04/04/13 01:10 PM.

    "Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities." Israel Gelfand
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