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Grégoire Canlorbe

Psych

A conversation with Gerhard Meisenberg, for Psych

A conversation with Gerhard Meisenberg, for Psych

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Juin 20, 2019

Gerhard Meisenberg is a retired professor of biochemistry who lives in the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. Originally from Germany, he studied at the universities of Bochum and Munich where he obtained his Ph.D. in biology. He then did biochemistry research in the United States for three years, before joining the faculty at Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica. He worked in Dominica from 1984 until the end of 2018. He became known as the senior author of a major textbook of medical biochemistry that has so far been printed in four editions. In addition, he embarked on research in educational research and psychometrics. His special interest is in secular trends of intelligence (Flynn effects), which he studied in Dominica.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You are best known for your textbook Principles of Medical Biochemistry as well as your evolutionary psychology treatise In God’s Image: The Natural History of Intelligence and Ethics. How do you move from the former to the latter?

  Gerhard Meisenberg: Biochemistry and the study of human behavior both are part of biology, although at slightly different levels. Psychology is one step down in the “hierarchy of sciences”: more complex, and less precise. What attracted me to human behavior are the big questions about why humans are the way they are, how they got that way, and what it means for our ongoing evolution. As Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” I realized that the “big picture” of human history cannot be understood without an understanding of the ongoing evolution of the value systems that determine what aims people pursue and the intelligence that determines how good they are at attaining these aims. Neither of these are etched in stone. They keep evolving, both culturally and biologically.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A short while ago you co-wrote an article on sex differences in intelligence with Professor Richard Lynn. Could you remind us of the outlines of your perspective on this subject conducive to arousing hysteria?

  Gerhard Meisenberg: There was actually a big debate about sex differences in the journal Mankind Quarterly, where contributors exposed the different views in the field. Briefly, there are those who hold that in modern Western societies there are no sex differences in intelligence that are big enough to have any real-world importance. James Flynn defended this position. The second view is represented by Richard Lynn, who claims that boys and girls start out pretty equal, but from the age of about 15 males gain an advantage over females because their mental as well as physical growth continues to an older age. Lynn estimates that adult men score 3 to 5 IQ points higher than women, which is a very small difference. He thinks that together with a higher male standard deviation, this is sufficient to explain male dominance in many intellectual fields. Then there are those, including myself, who emphasize that males and females have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, males have an up to one standard deviation (15 IQ points) advantage in mechanical reasoning, but females come out on top in tests of emotional intelligence and of verbal and episodic memory. There isn’t a huge amount of disagreement among scientists who study these sex differences. It’s a matter of emphasis.

  Another thing to consider is that sex differences in some non-cognitive traits are much bigger than those in measured intelligence. Some aspects of vocational preferences have sex differences of at least one standard deviation, although this depends much on the way the differences are measured and analyzed. Perhaps the reason why women have lower mechanical comprehension is not that they are innately deficient in this kind of reasoning, but that they have zero interest in the workings of gears and pulleys. Therefore they never bother to develop the ability to understand these things.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: dysgenic fertility, Flynn effect, Gerhard Meisenberg, Grégoire Canlorbe, Islam, Kevin B. MacDonald, Psych, race differences in intelligence, Richard Lynn, sex differences in intelligence, Woodley effect

A conversation with Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Yr., for Psych

A conversation with Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Yr., for Psych

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mai 9, 2019

1454590368-7168-0  Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, Yr. (Younger), is a British ecologist and evolutionary psychologist, whose research on secular trends in different aspects of human intelligence has earned him considerable notability.

  Woodley of Menie received his Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 2007 and received his Ph.D. from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2011, where he researched the molecular genetic and community ecology of Arabidopsis thaliana, a model organism used in plant science. Since then, the focus of his research has shifted to the evolution of human intelligence and personality, and the relation of these phenomena to life history strategy.

  Woodley of Menie holds a lifetime fellowship with the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, and sits on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence. He has authored over 100 papers covering a very wide range of subjects, including human intelligence and life history strategy (especially their genetic and evolutionary bases), personality psychology, comparative phylogenetic methods and primatology, cognitive epidemiology, secular trend analysis, macroeconomics, microbiology, plant science, theoretical ecology, and even cryptozoology.

  He has published four books, most recently a popular science work (co-authored with Dr. Edward Dutton) on secular trends in intelligence and their macro-social effects (At Our Wits End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK). In 2015, the Association for Psychological Science awarded Woodley of Menie the Rising Star designation for his work on secular trends in intelligence. Part of this body of research inspired the coining of the term “Woodley effect,” which refers to any trend indicating a population-level decline in general cognitive ability. His work has been covered in diverse media, including the BBC, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and RAI (Italian television).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You have been involved in elaborating a “biological meta-theory” for the social sciences—from the perspective of “life history evolution.” Could you start by telling us more about it?

  Michael A. Woodley of Menie: First I should explain life history theory. This is a very powerful model in evolutionary ecology for explaining the covariance of anatomical, physiological, and behavioral traits within and across species. Its core idea is that environments pose particular sets of fitness challenges to organisms, which favor the evolution of coordinated suites of adaptations; these coherent adaptive packages can be understood as strategies through which organisms overcome obstacles to fitness (i.e. reproductive success). Species that tend towards very high rates of reproduction (i.e. high yields of offspring) typically have short life expectancies and their offspring tend to be precocial—meaning that they take relatively little time to mature into their adult forms. Their behaviors are also adapted to environments with generally high and unpredictable levels of extrinsic morbidity and mortality—sources of morbidity and mortality are “extrinsic” if adaptive features of organisms have little influence on them, and they are “unpredictable” if they exhibit high spatial and temporal variability that organisms cannot anticipate. The package of adaptations—behavioral, reproductive, and so on—that typically emerges in these environmental circumstances is usually called “r strategy” (where r denotes a species’ reproductive potential). Rabbits exemplify this ecological strategy—they are ready to reproduce within six weeks after birth, and the mother spends only a few minutes per day with her offspring investing resources in their growth. Rabbits also have relatively short lifespans, and in the wild have very high odds of succumbing to predation. The opposite strategy is usually called “K strategy” (where K denotes the carrying capacity of an environment). When a species is optimized for existence at the carrying capacity of its environment, its members exhibit high longevity, prolonged gestation, and extended postnatal development. The high-density populations in which K strategists live experience relatively little, or at least predictable, extrinsic morbidity and mortality. K strategists are typically long lived, in part because they invest heavily in somatic development and maintenance. With respect to behavior, K strategists are usually highly pro-social, investing in the fitness of their genetic kin via communitarian effort. Elephants exemplify this strategy, since they have relatively low rates of fertility, but invest substantially in their (small numbers of) offspring via extended gestation and multiple years of postnatal parental investment. Moreover, they are markedly herd oriented, with individual elephants exhibiting highly protective behaviors toward their entire herd when threatened by predators.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: China, Edward Dutton, Life History Theory, Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Psych, Woodley effect

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