Date: Tue, 01 Sep 1998 11:09:33 -0500 From: Alan Spector Reply-To: spector@calumet.purdue.edu To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK , WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK Subject: Pseudo-genetics and bad research methods Note: There has been discussion on both of these lists on the questions of genetics and behavior. I found these two posts on an e-mail list and thought they would be of interest to some readers ---- Alan Spector -------------------------------------------------------- ....-- there has been a refreshing new (non-chomskist) set of research arrticles on the aquisition of language, some of them reported in science in hte past year. pinker is not among them. it is too easy in these days of the human genome project for people not actually in molecular biology/ genetics to geneticize everything. it is particularly popular among psychologists, many of whom now invoke genes for all kinds of psychological traits. one of the few scientists trying to find genes for behavior that has any idea what he is doing is hammer, but his work is clouded by his own adgenda (homosexuality). in any case, little has changed in the last 30 years, and lewontin's objections still hold. all bouchard's studies really show is some insight (for those willing to look) at the way the human (and scientist's) mind works -- we see patterns, we connect what we see to what we already know. this is the reason "fortune telling" and astrology work. bouchard didn't notice all the things that were different among twins, he noticed the things that were the same, and when you look at enough of them, there are going to be some interesting similarities. if he looked at the same number of non twins, he would find the same kinds of "similarities".................... ------------- (other posting) ----------------- The Bouchard group's twin studies, heavily funded by the Pioneer Fund, is their big attempt to repair the damage done to the scientific racist project by Leon Kamin's exposure of Sir Cyril Burt fraudalent twin studies. For years, racists like Jensen and Eysenck relied on Burt's fabricated data to support their assertion that intelligence was largely inherited and that whites were more intelligent than blacks. If you get past the amusing anecdotes about twins reared apart who like to drink the same beer, it becomes clear that Bouchard is mostly interested in proving that intelligence is primarily due to genetic factors and not environment. (The Bouchard groups estimates the heritability of intelligence at 70 percent.) Secondarily, they also want to show that personality traits such as aggressiveness and impulsiveness are also mostly inherited. Discover magazine (September 1987)reported: "The Minnesota researchers ... stress, however, that if the environment does influence intellectual talents, the effect is subtle. Time after time in the Minnesota study, twins with very different schooling opportunities came out only a few points apart in intelligence." Leon Kamin, at one point, was talking about writing a book about the Minnesota twin studies research. It might be worthwhile trying to contact him about this. Bouchard has studied only about 50 pairs of identical twins reared apart, and his methods have already been criticized: *"Other twin researchers say the significance of these coincidences has been greatly exaggerated. Richard J. Rose of Indiana univerity, who is collaborating on a study of 16,000 pairs of twins in Finland, points out that 'if you bring together strangers who were born on the same day in the same country and ask them to find similarities between them, you may find a lot of seemingly astounding coincidences. "Rose's collaborator, Jaakko Kaprio of the University of Helsinki, notes that that Minnesota twin studies may also be biased by their selection method. Whereas he and Rose gather data by combing birth registries and sending questionnaires to those identified as twins, the Minnesota group relies heavily on media coverage to recruit new twins. The twins then come to Minnesota for a week of study -- and, often, further publicity. Twins who are 'interested in publicity and willing to support it,' Karprio says, may be atypical. This self-selection effect, he adds, may explain why the Bouchard group's estimates of heritability tend to be higher than those of other studies." (Scientific American, June 1993) * "In his investigation of other twin studies, Kamin has shown that identical twins supposedly raised apart are often raised by members of their family or by unrelated families in the same neighborhood; some twins had extensive contact with each other while growing up. Kamin suspects the same may be true of some Minnesota twins. He notes, for example, that some news accounts suggested Oskar and Jack (the Nazi and the Jew) and the two British women wearing seven rigns were reunited for the first time when they arrived in Minnesota to be studied by Bouchard. Actually, both pairs of twins had met previously. Kamin has repeatedly asked the Minnesota group for detailed case histories of its twins to determine whether it has underestimated contact and similarities in upbringing. 'They've never responded.' he says. "Kamin proposes that the Minnesota twins have particularly strong motives to downplay previous contacts and to exaggerate their similarities. They might want to please researchers, to attract more attention from the media or even to make money. In fact, some twins acquired agents and were paid for appearances on television. Jack and Oskar recently sold their life story to a film producer in Lost Angeles (who says Robert Duvall is interested in the roles)." (ibid) * "Raymond Fancher's excellent book The Intelligence Men details much of this history, including studies of identical twins reared apart. These began in the early 1930's when Ed and Fred discovered one another in Chicago. Ed and Fred had been separated at the age of six months. They became the first of 19 such pairs examined by three Chicago scientists, Horatio Newman, Frank Freeman, and Karl Holzinger. Newman, Freeman, and Holzinger recognized serious problems when they tried to determine how much genetics influenced intelligence. Among the difficulties were that adoption agencies tried to place twins in similar homes, so environments often were not so different. Also, some of the twin had more contact with one another before they were tested than others. Those who had communicated more tended to overemphasize the coincidences in their lives to make their story more interesting. For those and other reasons Newman, Freeman and Holzinger concluded in 1937 that the most they could say was that both genetics and environment contributed to intelligence." (The New Republic, 12/21/87) Bouchard likes to pretend that his research is not politically motivated and that his conclusions have no political effects. Others don't quite see it that way (including, of course, the Pioneer Fund). When Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore, delivered a 1983 speech in favor of his eugenics program, in which middle class parents are giving tax incentives to have more children, while low-income parents are discouraged, he cited the work "by Professor Thomas Bouchard of the University of Minnesota." Roger Pearson, the neo-Nazi who edits Mankind Quarterly with Pioneer Fund largesse, praises the Minnesota twin studies project in his book, Race, Intelligence, and Bias in Academe. I've noticed some uncanny coincidences between Pearson and Bouchard. They are both willing to accept money from a white supremecist outfit, they both believe that intelligence and other personality traits are mostly determined by heredity, and they both claim to have been harassed by anti-racists. Could they be identical racists reared apart! ... ---------------