In comments on a previous post, I mentioned that I had seen a study of the IQ of immigrants to the Netherlands.

Here is the full reference:

Jan te Nijenhuis and Henk van der Flier: ‘Group differences in mean intelligence for the Dutch and Third World immigrants’, Journal of Biosocial Science, 33 (2001), 469-475.

The authors’ Summary is as follows:

“Evidence from eleven samples indicates that the mean IQ of third world immigrants in the Netherlands is lower than the Dutch mean by approximately one standard deviation for Surinamese and Antillians, and by approximately one and a half standard deviations for Turks and Moroccans. Since IQ tests provide the best prediction of success in school and organizations, it could be that the immigrants’ lower mean IQ is an important factor in their low status on the Dutch labour market. The IQs of second-generation immigrants are rising.”

For more details……

The article is a review of Dutch studies of immigrant IQs. It is stated that ‘only studies of acceptable methodological quality were included in the review’. Unfortunately not much is said about the tests used, which are identified by their (Dutch?) acronyms, such as ‘RAKIT’, ‘GATB’, or ‘DAT’. If any Dutch readers know what these are, please tell!

The four immigrant groups studied are Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese, and Antillians. You all know who Turks and Moroccans are, but Surinamese are from the South American former Dutch colony of Surinam (Dutch Guiana), and Antillians are from the Dutch Antilles islands in the Caribbean. The Surinamese and Antillians are predominantly black, with maybe a touch of white and Amerindian ancestry.

It is not explictly stated whether mixed-race individuals are excluded from the studies. Clearly it would be misleading to describe them simply as ‘Turkish’, etc., if they are Turkish-Dutch. If anyone has access to the original Dutch studies maybe they could check?

The data from the various studies are given in a table. There are a few studies of adults, and more of children. The children’s studies are classified as ‘1st generation’, ‘2nd generation’, or ‘Mixed generations’.

I give the key results below. A = Antillians, S = Surinamese, T = Turkish, M = Moroccan. In some of the studies Surinamese and Antillians are grouped together, and in some Turks and Moroccans are grouped together. I have omitted two studies which cover ‘various’ immigrant groups. [For those who consult the original table, I have assumed that the study by van der Vijver covers Surinamese and Antillians, like the one immediately above it in the list.]

You can all group and average the data however you wish. I have calculated averages for Surinamese and Antillians together, and for Turks and Moroccans together, if only because many of the raw data are grouped in this way. For children, I have averaged 2nd generation and mixed generations combined, as there are so few studies which distinguish 2nd generation as such.

So here are the data. The mean IQ of the samples is stated in standard deviations below the Dutch mean:

Adults
Surinamese and Antillians
S: 1.05, 1.08. A: 1.17. Average: 1.1
Turks and Moroccans
T: 1.43 M: 1.86 Average: 1.5

Children (1st generation)
Surinamese and Antillians
S: 0.93, S & A: 1.09 Average: 1.01
Turks and Moroccans
T: 1.45. M: 1.70. T & M: 1.13. Average: 1.43

Children (2nd generation and mixed generations)
Surinamese and Antillians
S & A: 0.77 (2nd gen.), 0.81 (2nd gen.), 0.22 (mix), 0.67 (mix), S: 0.70 (mix),
A: 0.21 (mix) Average: 0.56
Turks and Moroccans
T: 1.20 (2nd gen.), 1.16 (mix), 1.47 (mix), 0.60 (mix) M: 1.43 (2nd gen.), 0.82 (mix), 1.38 (mix), 0.79 (mix). T & M: 0.89 (mix) Average: 1.08.

It will be seen that Turks and Moroccans perform considerably worse than Surinamese and Antillians. Presumably no-one will argue from this that Turks and Moroccans are innately less intelligent than Surinamese and Antillians. The obvious fact is that Surinam and the Antilles are former Dutch colonies, and their people presumably speak reasonable Dutch, while the Turks and Moroccans wouldn’t know Dutch from douche. Both groups perform better after the first generation, as the authors point out.

It is odd that the studies do not cover people of Indonesian origin. As anyone familiar with the Netherlands will know, there is a large Dutch Indonesian community, especially from the Moluccas. Te Nijenhuis and van der Flier say that data on the IQs of various generations of Moluccans are not available. This is surprising.

The following finding cited in this article speaks for itself and suggests that the generalisation that ‘Jews vote left’ (expanded into something sinister by the likes of Kevin Macdonald) does not necessarily hold true in countries other than the US, even those with roughly the same cultural foundations,

Evidence suggests that most Australian Jews follow their socioeconomic interests and vote conservative. A 1991 survey of the Melbourne Jewish community conducted by John Goldlust found that 24.5 per cent favoured the ALP and 63.5 per cent the Coalition. Equally, a 1995 survey of Jewish leaders in Australia, conducted by Professor Bernard Rechter for the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs, found that 26 per cent would vote ALP and 64 per cent Liberal.

Even without the strong pro-Israel record of the Prime Minister, John Howard, Jewish support for the Coalition is unlikely to waver much. The same applies to the minority of Jews who vote ALP. Many of them are concerned about other issues, such as Aboriginal rights, support for asylum seekers, and defending Medicare. A minority of left-leaning Jews may even support the ALP taking a more critical position vis-a-vis Israel.

Exceptions, as always, prove the rule. The only parliamentary seat significantly affected by a Jewish vote is the inner city area of Melbourne Ports: according to demographics; an estimated 15-20 per cent of voters in Melbourne Ports are Jews.

Many swinging Jewish voters support the sitting Labor MP, Michael Danby, because he is Jewish and passionately pro-Israel. For this reason, they also are unlikely to change their vote simply because some other Labor MPs express contrary views. The appearance of a few perceived hostile backbenchers is likely to confirm, not undermine, their decision to support Danby.

*Note to US readers – in the bizzaro world of Australia, Liberal = conservative

This article addresses (again) the difficulties in using racial quotas in determining higher education admissions in the Byzantine racial mix that is Brazil. A few points….

Racial self-classifications are subjective & personal (some “whites” by phenotype, and even persons of recent and un-mixed European ancestry, are claiming pardo, racially mixed, status)
Many students admitted under quotas are failing (40%-and the interview with an Electrical Engineering student is instructive)
The writer is conflating & mixing & matching American and Brazilian racial terms and paradigms (the former seem to be spreading in Brazil)
The writer did not present the complexity of Brazilian racial classifications-which go beyond a black-white spectrum, to people who have “white” features and dark complexion to those who have a white complexion and black features
The following quote is interesting: “We pay our taxes,” he added, “so why shouldn’t we receive this public service we’re paying for, and which supposedly belongs to everyone?” It reminds me of things I’ve heard from Latino politicians in California and frankly this sort of wrangling makes the case for pragmatic libertarianism (yes, you heard those two words in sequence!) in a racially diverse polity

Andrew Reeves ruminates on the freedoms and restrictions that Muslim women are subject too:

First off, since my own social views are usually closer to grumpy old fart than most, I actually have a great deal of sympathy for what Islam says is the proper role of a woman, and the whole porno chic thing combined with my growing disgust at the commodification of what should be an act of commitment between two people leads me to further sympathize with Muslims who find what goes on here in the House of War to be disgusting. Of course, as I am a man, it is much, much easier for me to say that Islam has the right idea, since even under a sha’ria regime I would not be subject to social control by the male members of my family and subject to beatings and death in the event of an infraction of my honor. So it is, then, that I must in fact take issue with our Islamic friends.

As I say, to get an idea of how a society works, note how they treat (control?) their women.

A strict Muslim who slit his daughter’s throat because he believed she had become too Westernised pleaded with a judge yesterday to sentence him to death. Read the full story from the link-it’s wack. And what’s up with Kurds? Fadime, shot by her father in Sweden, was also Kurdish….

Seems the blogosphere has been chattering away about the new David Brooks piece that discusses the hate relationship between conservatives and academia[1]. A post by Virginia Postrel brings up the supply & demand issue-there are hundreds of English Ph.D.s out there for every job (I hyperbolize, perhaps), so your academic creds are almost a given, and you can be filtered out on other criteria (including politics). I get the impression that this isn’t as extreme in the natural sciences (the imbalance between supply & demand)-though there is the same problem in getting a tenure track position (as opposed to ending up teaching chemistry to community college students). But cultural issues might be at work in the natural sciences too-for instance, the 90% rate of non-religiosity in the NAS seems so high, I wouldn’t be surprised if scientists that aired their religious views were simply considered irrational and dismissed by the Great Men[2]. Anyway, if you want more info on this topic, follow the link that Mrs. Postrel provides and read away…..

On a mildly related note…as a follow-up to godless’ post on academic hierarchy of difficulty-when I graduated from my university, there were about 30 graduates with chemistry & biochemistry degrees, and almost 250 biology grads (out of about 2,000 graduates I think). I think it was safe to say that many of the biology majors were kind of stupid-but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were as many or more intelligent biology graduates in absolute numbers as chemistry graduates. In other words, the biology majors had a lower threshold to graduate-they did not have to take physical chemistry for instance-so they had a full spectrum of intellectual aptitudes and interests, from sociology-dumb to physics-smart, while people in the chemistry department were more self-selected and would switch majors if they couldn’t pass organic or physical chemistry (especially the latter). Once you get really high up in the sciences, I think the difference in mean g between fields (say biology & chemistry) shrinks, possibly because as godless alludes to, many prominent biologists, economists, etc. have strong mathematical backgrounds (E. O. Wilson taught himself population genetics while Francis Crick was by training a physicist, Keynes was very mathematical in orientation and ventured into economics almost as a personal challenge to his comparatively poor results in that field as opposed to math)[3].

fn1. This includes libertarians of course, I knew people who read Reason as their token far Right publication.

fn2. Carl Sagan was denied a spot in the NAS for a different reason-he was a big popularizer the last half of his career, which probably cancelled out the value of his earlier work.

fn3. I once went to a small talk given by Richard Dawkins to about 20-30 students as an undergrad. He is by training an ethologist-a researcher of animal behavior-traditionally a rather soft field, though population genetics and mathematical modelling have come to the fore recently. In any case, he is often dismissed as a "popularizer," and not strictly speaking an original thinker. This is true as far as it goes-but I was surprised to note that he tangentially went off into the details of the physics of sound and threw up a few equations and went on to relate how it affected animal auditory systems. My point? The guy might be a popularizer & an anti-religious crank, but he does strike me as rather intelligent and his drift into popular writing might be a calculation of the impact he might have on the public rather than a reflection on his inability to do original research.

NOVA is doing Archimedes. I’ll be there, God-willing.

The New York Times reports that the Elephants of Borneo are a phylogenetically distinct population from other Asian Elephants (who are themselves separable into two clades). The full paper can be accessed over at The Public Library of Science.

Posted by razib at 10:41 PM

For those interested in behavior genetic modeling, there is now on online Mx scripts library, with practice data!!!!

Here is an excerpt from the the e-mail I received:

The site is on air since sept 1st 2003 and now contains around
70 mx scripts that can be downloaded with an example datafile so the user
can fiddle around with the script before modifying it to run on ones own
data.

There are scripts for continuous/categorical datasets, uni- or
multivariate, linkage analyses, association analyses, longitudinal data,
extended kinships, sex limitation models etc. We are frequently
contributing scripts and others are wellcome to contribute scripts as well.
The library also includes a section containing tips on how to use Mx.

We advise people to register, because then you will receive e-mail alerts
on updates. Feel free to download and use the scripts.

Posted by A. Beaujean at 08:19 AM

New article out from The American Journal of Human Genetics. I have cut & pasted the abstract below in the “extended entry.” The title is: Haplotypes in the Dystrophin DNA Segment Point to a Mosaic Origin of Modern Human Diversity. Yes, a mouthfull, but basically it is suggesting an added layer of complexity to the standard Out-Of-Africa One-Wave model. I have already expressed doubt about the simplistic Great Leap Forward and summarized the position of some researchers that the Out-Of-Africa scenario is perhaps multi-pronged rather than an explosive blitzkrieg. I’m not saying this particular study will be validated (three dozen locii does not a new model make)-but the flat serene simplicity of the Out-Of-Africa model pioneered by Chris Stringer and reinforced by Alan Wilson is going to get some wrinkles. Age does that to you….

Haplotypes in the Dystrophin DNA Segment Point to a Mosaic Origin of Modern Human Diversity

Ewa Zitkiewicz,1,4 Vania Yotova,1 Dominik Gehl,1 Tina Wambach,1 Isabel Arrieta,5 Mark Batzer,6 David E. C. Cole,7 Peter Hechtman,3 Feige Kaplan,3 David Modiano,8 Jean-Paul Moisan,9 Roman Michalski,10 and Damian Labuda1,2

1Centre de Recherche de l’Hôpital Sainte-Justine and 2Département de Pédiatrie, Université de Montréal, and 3Departments of Human Genetics and Pediatrics, McGill University, Montréal; 4Institute of Human Genetics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan, Poland; 5Departamento Biologia Animal y Genetica, Universidad del Pais Vasco, Bilbao, Spain; 6Department of Biological Sciences, Biological Computation and Visualization Center, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; 7Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Toronto; 8Fondazione Pasteur Cenci-Bolognetti, Istituto di Parassitologia, Universita “La Sapienza,” Rome; 9Centre Hospitalier Régional et Universitaire, Nantes, France; and 10Prince Albert Parkland Health Region, Victoria Hospital, Prince Albert, Canada

Received March 31, 2003; accepted for publication July 23, 2003; electronically published September 25, 2003.
Although Africa has played a central role in human evolutionary history, certain studies have suggested that not all contemporary human genetic diversity is of recent African origin. We investigated 35 simple polymorphic sites and one Tn microsatellite in an 8-kb segment of the dystrophin gene. We found 86 haplotypes in 1,343 chromosomes from around the world. Although a classical out-of-Africa topology was observed in trees based on the variant frequencies, the tree of haplotype sequences reveals three lineages accounting for present-day diversity. The proportion of new recombinants and the diversity of the Tn microsatellite were used to estimate the age of haplotype lineages and the time of colonization events. The lineage that underwent the great expansion originated in Africa prior to the Upper Paleolithic (27,00056,000 years ago). A second group, of structurally distinct haplotypes that occupy a central position on the tree, has never left Africa. The third lineage is represented by the haplotype that lies closest to the root, is virtually absent in Africa, and appears older than the recent out-of-Africa expansion. We propose that this lineage could have left Africa before the expansion (as early as 160,000 years ago) and admixed, outside of Africa, with the expanding lineage. Contemporary human diversity, although dominated by the recently expanded African lineage, thus represents a mosaic of different contributions.

Posted by razib at 11:52 PM