From: phil osborn (philosborn@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 22 1999 - 00:42:27 MDT
>From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com>
>Reply-To: extropians@extropy.com
>To: extropians@extropy.com
>Subject: Twin Studies [was Re: HR25Show82099 - BS]
>Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 01:13:09 -0700 (PDT)
>
> > This is frankly total BS
> > and implies a profound ignorance of the whole subject of intelligence.
>
>Really!?! In my freely admitted "ignorance" of the subject, I would
>argue that there is a profound possibility of variance in human
>intelligence based on such things as variabilities in neurotransmitter
>release and uptake by receptors -- for which there are known to be
>genetic "variants". These variants would be diminished or eliminated
>in twins, and so one would expect there to be a correlation in the
>intelligence of such individuals. Are you attacking a specific
>set of twin studies or the entire concept that intelligence can
>have a basis in molecular biology and genetics?
>
Thank you for your response. I am so tired of the way that this particular
discussion is trivialized into "nature" or "nurture," or flip responses like
Natasha's on air last night. The various "extropians" were so eagerly
backing her up with various attempts to emotionally intimidate any opposing
argument that it took Warren James, the host of the program, four tries, as
I recall, to get anyone to even recognize that he had demanded proof or
facts to back up her position. Warren, fortunately, is not so easilly
intimidated. I also note that everyone sort of slid around that demand.
First, it's nature AND nurture, obviously, else cats and mosquitos would
both have human intelligence. What Burt did was to heavily tilt the balance
of evidence to please the British aristocracy. As I recall, he concluded
that about 80% was heredity, when in fact the data indicated more like
50/50.
Just as the same Pentium PC can run DOS3.3, Win98, BeOS or LINUX, to name a
few options, so human intelligence is software running on hardware (to
oversimplify only slightly) with data and I/O channels with specific noise
parameters and bandwidth.
Before she had computers from which to draw analogies, Maria Montessori
essentially figured this out, which is why the Montessori Environment for
Discovery starts with training sensory/perceptual (these are two separate
categories, BTW) capabilities, building the I/O and low level inputs,
constructing the filtering routines and optimizing them.
I personally had a chance to be on the Board of Directors of the first
Montessori school in one major city and also to teach briefly and observe.
The kids we started with were definitely well-endowed genetically, but none
of them gave any indication of genetic genius like Mozart, etc.
After three years, however, the six and seven year olds of our first group
could pick up a newspaper and read it with good comprehension, they could
find virtually any major named spot on a globe or map (any spot given the
references), they could diagram any English sentence. They had excellent
musical relative pitch recognition. They knew quite a bit of Euclidian
geometry and were starting in algebra. These were not their only skills, by
any means.
In fact, the MOntessori method is not aimed at duplicated grades 1 thru 6
before the age of seven, although that is roughly what it accomplished in
terms of the guages used by academia. The much more important tasks are
building epistemology and integrating focus. Nothing is taught by rote or
authority in a true Montessori environment.
The entire environment is an enormous set of prepared scientific
experiments. The child does the experiment and works out in his or her own
mind what the cause and effect relationships are. The equipment is designed
such that it is nearly impossible to get to the end result - which the
director demonstrates at the start - without understanding the principles.
Montessori's goal was to create a revolution by creating powerful
individuals who knew how to actually use more of their brains - and why
(such as Milton Friedman, one of the early U.S. Montessori kids, before
Dewey and Thorndike declared war on Montessori and wiped it out in the U.S.
for almost four decades). People who would be utterly immune to propaganda
and fully confident in their own ability to understand and deal with the
world, who had been brought up to be totally self-motivated (no one tells a
Montessori child "you VILL do this NOW!", as they do in the German
Kindergartens. The Montessori kids choose their own activity or not.)
Unfortunately, it being the early '70's, we had no computers in our school,
although we had already made plans for when they came available.
> > In fact, this is part and parcel of the whole Mensa nonsense propagated
>by
> > Mensa founder Cyril Burt in his massively fraudulent Twin Study, very
>likely
> > the most costly scientific fraud in all history.
>
>Fraud or not fraud, you be the judge. Do you have an explanation or
>argument that variations in genetic traits that effect brain development
>such as (#'s of neurons, rate of neuronal death, reinforcement of
>synaptic strength/weightings, neurotransmitter release & uptake
>rates, propagation rates of neuronal impulses) are *totally*
>negated by environmental effects?
This angle of discussion is irrelevant. Burt's orginal data was found upon
his death. He falsified the results. We know this. We also know that a
386 running LINUX can outperform a 90Mhz Pentium running Win98 in many
important respects. The average child who goes through Montessori, when
matched as closely as possible with other kids of the same background, etc.,
according to the U. of Chicago results, maintains a three year academic
advantage.
Not that spectacular, certainly, compared to the J.S.Mills or the Susedik
daughters, but then Montessori herself emphasized that the first two years
are the most important for developing intelligence. (Susedik believed that
pre-natal was even more important.) Unfortunately, she had her hands full
trying to coordinate 4,000+ schools dealing with 2-7 yr. olds, dealing with
Hitler and Mussolini, both of whom banned or burned her schools. Anne Frank
was a Montessori child, BTW.
She also hoped that someone would carry on her work and extend the
environment into the higher ages. I might point out, in passing, that we
certainly do know what happens on the other end of the spectrum - early
sensory deprivation. There have been enought cases of that historically to
verify that it results in severe intellectual incapacity.
> > stack of documentation from U of Chicago that resulted in Head Start.
> > Or the nearly century-long record of Montessori education.
>
>Do you have *specific* references here?
No. Not for many years. If you are interested it shouldn't hard to find.
I saw the old U. of Chicago documents at Santa Monica Montessori in the late
'70's where the school's head director, Ruth Dresser (who took it over from
Tom Laughlin (Billy Jack), had collected them.
>I would argue that if either Head Start or Montessori educations
>had made a demonstrable difference in the intelligence of children
>that you would see parents flocking to these approaches. If they
>only have marginal effects within a range of intelligences dictated
>primarily by genetic factors, then I would argue that you would have
>what you see today -- that people adhere to these approaches to the
>degree that they have been convinced that they have some benefit.
>Such benefit is "marginal" and that is why the subscription base
>is marginal as well.
There are several factors that unfortunately make this far from a free
market in competing technologies. As I mentioned, in the U.S. the two most
powerful figures in U.S. education, Dewey and Thorndike, the "fathers of
Progressive Education," declared war on Montessori. It was a battle royale,
with Alexander Graham Bell and many prominent intellectuals championing the
Montessori side, and virtually all of academia and its coffers and its
public schools on the other.
Then Burt's study came out. Then the market crashed and the world
depression set in and private money dried up. Montessori's base was in
Italy. Mussolini was happy to have her schools to point to as a source of
Italian pride, but she refused the uniforms on the kids, so he shut her
down. Ditto, Hitler and most of the rest of Europe shortly as a result.
Montessori died in 1952, and, as it was a top-down organization, her death
ended most innovation in her schools. Nevertheless, there are more
Montessori schools - at least in name - now than ever, by far, so parents
have been chosing them. Because of extremely restrictive regulation of "day
care," instigated by the teacher's unions, who have been conspiring to force
the introduction of universal public day care by pricing private day care
out of the general market, however, the Montessori schools are too expensive
for most people.
The educational equipment for one Montessori pre-school classroom costs over
$20,000, compared to a few hundred in a typical day care. Ironically
though, if it were not for the state regs, Montessori schools would be
CHEAPER! than other daycares, as the children do not need constant minute by
minute adult authority to keep them under control, and labor is the biggest
cost. The kids clean and maintain their own environment - which they
consider to be theirs!, BTW, as in "casa de bambini" - the children's house.
Montessori schools worldwide often run at 30 to 1 ratios or more, and
operate in places like Sri Lanka, but California, for example, sets the max
at 12 to 1, and to get a day care director's license you have to have a
college degree, in addition to the year or more of Montessori full-time
training.
There are other major factors I could discuss at some length, such as the
fact that women, the major factor in childcare in this country, take huge
pride and virtually identify themselves with strongly genetic factors, like
their personal appearance, for example. The majority don't WANT to believe
that by making the intellectual effort they can make a major difference in
their child. They want to preserve this magical feminine mystique that
their particular child is somehow utterly precious just because it has their
particular blend of chromosomes.
Recall the UCI egg scandal. You might have thought that the women had been
raped and tortured by their reactions. Yet UCI made no attempt to lure
particular genetically desireable women to steal their eggs, oddly enough.
Just any old healthy egg would do. It was a crime of hubris and opportunity
in which absolutely no one would have been harmed if it had not been found
out.
Women - not all of them, obviously, but way too many - are anti-rational and
consistently resist science and technology. Look at how they waited until
computers became "fashinable" to finally adopt them. As an educational
consultant in the '80's, I could talk for hours about this one. And Amerika
distrusts people who are too smart, as in "Mad Scientists." So it's a hard
sell culturally and then you have active, dedicated thoroughly evil
opposition who happen to control the state-financed compulsory education and
its propaganda apparatus - the schools themselves.
Bottom line. If any other area of human endeavor were pursued as
incompetently as childcare, it would be notable for that fact alone. There
are other political and cultural factors why, but this is too long
already...
>Robert
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