What proportion of offspring survived in historical times? - with reference to mutation accumulation

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The paper referenced here:
  
Yann Leseque et al. A Resolution of the Mutation Load Paradox in Humans. Genetics 2012; 191: 1321-1330.

http://www.genetics.org/content/191/4/1321.full

could provide a way into the literature on accumulated mutation damage in other species.

There seem to be a number of variables to consider - how many new mutations per generation, what proportion of offspring survive, how fast the population is growing and probably others.

Although this literature says 88% mortality or 12% surviving,  this is only approximate - and there would have been considerable variation at different points in history.

It also seems a bit high for human reproductive capability - since hunter gatherer women seem seldom to have more than six children (due to late menarche, the children spaced-out by the contraceptive effect of lactation, prolonged lactation and then low fertility from age c 40) - which would not be enough.

So I guess the real number would be more like an average 1/4 or 1/3 of human offspring surviving for most of the time and in most places.

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What about about delayed reproduction in modern populations?

Delayed reproduction leads to more chance of mutations (eg from sperm) and problems with poorer quality control on release of older eggs (eg trisomy twenty one is probably the tip of an iceberg of similar problems).

But late reproduction also reduces the number of generations and the possibility of mutation accumulation from that cause - so that modern people only have two generations (e.g. average thirty plus years) - i.e. two new lots of mutations in sixty-something years - where in historical times there would have been three generations per 60-70 years - three lots of new mutations.

So slowing reproduction (by increasing the average age of reproduction) may perhaps reduce mutation accumulation temporarily; given that the effect of aging on mutations may be less per decade than the effect of an extra generation of new mutations.

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This was originally a comment at a new blog called Brain Size

http://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/could-genetic-iq-really-have-declined-so-much-so-quickly/

Which is shaping-up to be a valuable contribution to intelligence research.

The author, Herr Professor Doktor Pumpkinperson, has the attributes of honesty, persistence (this especially), intelligence and a refreshing disinclination to take offense at the criticism of others!

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Population expanision in England with respect to mutation accumulation

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When the Black Death (c 1380) halved the population of England, the deaths were disproportionately among the poorest (i.e. apparently 'eugenic').

Then the population took about 200 years (until around 1600) to recover (from 2-4 million) all the time under strong 'eugenic' selection (probably, nearly all of the surviving children came from the elite skilled craftsmen type working class and the 'intellectual' middle classes).

That is a 200 year doubling time. Then it took another 200 years for the population of England to double to 8 million (around 1800); then about 50 years to double again; and about 50 years to double again to 32 million after 1900; and then about 100 years for the most recent doubling.

So, 4 million was probably the usual maximum population for agrarian England, and there have been five doublings of population in about 600 years since the Black Death

(rounded numbers)

1350 - 4 million
1400 - 2 million
1600 - 4 million
1800 - 8 million
1850 - 16 million
1900 - 32 million
2014 - around 64 million

The rate of increase was slow and child mortality was very high until about 1800 or later - then three of the doublings have happened in 200 years since child mortality began to reduce, and fertility began to reduce, and selection was more and more strongly dysgenic.

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A comment on the personality trait of Openness (and Personality in general)

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Personality is supposed to be independent of intelligence - Personality is a separate explanatory variable which can be seen after Intelligence is controlled-for.

Intelligence is primary as an explanation of behaviour - primary both historically, and because intelligence (very obviously) affects personality - but personality does not affect intelligence.

In other words, as a matter of routine - when measuring personality, one should also test for intelligence - and before looking at the effect of personality on behaviour, one ought to remove the effect of intelligence (by stratified analysis, preferably - i.e. creating narrow strata of IQ and only looking a personality effects within these strata - or else by some kind of regression).

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However, much personality research is done on an already-intelligence-stratified sample - such as Psychology Students at Mudsville State University - in these situations the researcher can usually get-away-with missing out IQ testing and just evaluating Personality.

However, this does not apply to the pseudo-trait of Openness - which is often so sensitive to IQ differences that it varies even within strata such as the same class of the same college.

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If Intelligence is controlled-for, then the effect of Openness disappears - because Openness is merely 'the personality type of intelligent people in Western-type societies' (but rather badly conceptualized).

While the other personality traits (C, E, A and N), which derive essentially from HJ Eysenck, are robust to IQ differences (especially in college populations which provide most of the subjects): Openness is not.

Openness merely a (weak) correlate of IQ (in Western Societies)... plus noise and cross-contamination from other personality traits (e.g. a little bit of Psychoticism/ Schizotypy).

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Take home message: all research on so-called Openness is either ignorant, incompetent - or (usually) both. 

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This began as a comment on  the Isegoria blog

http://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/how-does-iq-relate-to-personality/

The genius as a 'medium': channeling external influences

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(What follows goes outwith science.)

Pretty much all the geniuses I have heard of and who have expressed an opinion seem to say (in one way or another) that the key factor in their genius comes from outwith their conscious motivation - and feels as if it appeared 'ready-made' in their awareness.

In other words, geniuses will often decline credit for the essence of their achievement (and it is other people who often insist upon ascribing agency to the genius).

This means that - to a varying extent - genius seems to be experienced as a mediumistic phenomenon, that being a genius feels like being a channel for insights and understandings and inventions.

From these point, there may be a division among geniuses: crafted versus automatic. In other words, some 'receive' the inspirations, and work-out for themselves how to communicate it by craft; while other geniuses also receive inspiration about communication - for example, deliberately crafted writing from within the writer; versus a more 'automatic' kind of writing which the writer (to some extent) mentally stands-back and observes the emergence of communications.

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The difference in these types crafted and automatic types of genius is seen when the product of a genius cannot satisfactorily be accounted-for by the observable personality and ability of that person.

Tolkien and JK Rowling could be taken as examples of the two types. Tolkien received his inspiration as 'given' him - as if discovered by him in fragments of ancient texts; and the achievement of Lord of the Rings can easily be understood in terms of Tolkien's own disposition, his abilities, what he wanted to do. When I see Tolkien in an interview is it obvious how a man like him would write LotR.

By contrast, JK Rowling's Harry Potter series (which is, in my evaluation, is also a work of genius - albeit lesser than LotR). But it is hard - I would say impossible - to understand Harry Potter as plausibly having been crafted by JK Rowling. When I see Rowling in an interview, there is a gross mis-match between the person and the work. I believe that the actual communication of Harry Potter was as a kind of 'automatic writing' - experienced more like taking dictation than crafting prose.

In support of this specific interpretation is that Tolkien felt a strong loyalty to LotR, and a gratitude for having the inspiration; while Rowling appears to be hostile to Harry Potter and has a detached, critical and revisionist attitude towards it - consistent with her not having had much to do with its production, but having mostly observed it emerging.

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Where does personal choice and motivation come in?

The genius must accept the external inspiration; and the automatic type of genius must also accept the 'dictation' of the actual mode of communication.

Any attempt to interfere or reshape the external inspiration - or to select or distort the automatic writing - will result in a drying-up of the source of inspiration and loss of automatic writing ability.

However, inspiration can be refused, and distortion of communication can be attempted - with the above consequences. Genius doesn't happen anymore.

Presumably, this accounts for the frequent situation when someone produces a single work of (inspired) genius - but everything else they produce (which is entirely the product of the creator, and lacks external inspiration) is at a qualitatively lower level.

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Most of these ideas are derived from A Geography of Consciousnesses by William Arkle (1974) 151-156.

The Lop-sided genius - mutations, channelling K, and group selection

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The idea of Life History (LH) is that organisms tend to have a default 'r' strategy of fast growth and sexual maturation leading to large numbers of offspring requiring minimal parental investment; but that natural selection can act on groups of organisms to enhance a 'K' strategy of LH which is characterized by slower growth and sexual maturity, smaller numbers of offspring, and a greater investment of parental resources per offspring.

So, among mammals, mice are r selected while humans are K selected - crudely r strategy is for quantity of offspring, while K is for higher quality of offspring. .

But a further aspect of LH theory is that within species there are a range of potential Life Histories - and the young organism may be able to respond to environmental conditions to channel development resources in various ways. For example if conditions are harsh and an early death seems likely, then resources are channeled in a relative r direction; while less stressful conditions may trigger a K strategy.

Michael A Woodley has suggested that the slow LH strategy of K is also a strategy for behavioural specialization - so that a more K-selected population of humans is also more likely to generate behavioural specialists - including cognitive specialists:  people with high and also highly- specialized types of intelligence.

In other words, K-selected populations are more likely to produce geniuses - because geniuses have a Lop-sided kind of cognitive activity; geniuses prioritize their special ability and do not put so much effort into the kind of social interactions and reproductive strategies (mating, courting, marriage, child rearing) which dominate the majority of people.

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So geniuses have something wrong with them, from the perspective of individual reproductive success.

This might suggest that genius is simply a pathology, a rare disease, probably a particular set of genetic mutations - which happens to be useful by chance, in some particular times and places...

Alternatively, it may suggest that genius is group-selected - on the basis that it was geniuses which provided the breakthroughs which led to the industrial revolution and the consequent expansion of those European national populations which produced the geniuses (England, France, Greater Germany, Italy etc).

On this scheme, a genius does not - on average - benefit his own reproductive success; but a population which produces enough geniuses will benefits its own population level reproductive success.

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SO, what are the ingredients of genius? The answer is twofold: high intelligence plus a high level of personality trait Psychoticism.

But what is Psychoticism, from the perspective of Life History? It can perhaps be seen as a rare result of Lop-sided K -  personality type which combines impairment in social domains (such as Agreeableness/ Empathizing, Conscientiousness, Social Conformity) with an autonomous/ selfish obsession with some other thing.

(Note: High Psychoticism is only rarely found in K-selected populations - there is probably an inverse correlation between the two variables - but it is that rare and strange combination of high K and moderately-high P which is required for creative genius.)

So the personality of a genius is defined, here, by default - by a strategic slow LH but not of the type which would tend to lead to social and sexual success, but instead where long term interest, enjoyment and effort are channelled into... something else.

Something else could be any of the possible domains of genius: mathematics, science, literature, invention, art and sculpture, economics, music... So when there are a lot of geniuses in a population, they are of various and multiple types.

(Although not all types, nor all types at equal frequency - since some populations start with an innately higher level of some talents, and lower levels of others - populations differ).

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So, why Europe? Why was it Europe, and nowhere else, that made the industrial revolution?

First, there had to be something - or some things - in Europe which selected-for what it is that geniuses provide: selected-for the products of genius... especially things like inventions. 

To focus on inventions - geniuses do not need to be encouraged: genius does what genius does, and unless actively prevented genius will produce... But that is only half of what is needed: the society must notice what is produced, and value it, and exploit it.

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So, if a society has geniuses, then the geniuses will be producing inventions. But only some societies will use these inventions.

IF a society does use inventions, and as a result the society expands (if the population grows from which the geniuses have arisen) then this would indirectly tend to sustain the production of geniuses.

How might this happen? Perhaps by allowing/ encouraging mutations to occur specifically in relation to some of the genes which sustain social intelligence, sexual selection and that kind of thing - and thereby channelling K into specific functional channels - to create a variety of Lop-sided geniuses who are independent of social pressures and motivated to focus on their special ability; rather than a population all-rounders who conform to societal norms.

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Learning to Parrot - modern intelligence as a "Chinese Room" thought experiment

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Suppose that I'm locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing...[but] to me, Chinese writing is just so many meaningless squiggles. Now suppose further that after this first batch of Chinese writing I am given a second batch of Chinese script together with a set of rules for correlating the second batch with the first batch. The rules are in English, and I understand these rules as well as any other native speaker of English. They enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols, and all that 'formal' means here is that I can identify the symbols entirely by their shapes. Now suppose also that I am given a third batch of Chinese symbols together with some instructions, again in English, that enable me to correlate elements of this third batch with the first two batches, and these rules instruct me how to give back certain Chinese symbols...from the point of view of somebody outside the room in which I am locked -- my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers. Nobody just looking at my answers can tell that I don't speak a word of Chinese.'

John Searle, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1980

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The nature of modern technology and educational evaluations is such that people typically understand much, much less than they appear - superficially - to understand.

A modern person is in a position much like that described in Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment outlined above.

Whether in school, college, work, the Mass Media or in almost any kind of discourse - a modern person is able to interact on subjects far beyond his comprehension by algorithmically implementing a predetermined set of rules - recognizing inputs from a chart (whether external or internalized), then matching and selecting 'appropriate' predetermined responses, then ordering and setting them out as a kind of mosaic of 'points'.

This activity is, more or less, automatic - and involves no necessary comprehension of the symbolic inputs or outputs - the whole thing is a matter of cycles of recognition, matching and arranging; back and forth between people or groups.

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So, a project is assigned on a certain subject. This subject is looked up on the internet. Passages of text, illustrations, graphs are copied, modified, pasted and arranged stylishly in line with explicit guidelines. The work is returned and marked according to a template referencing the guidelines. Several of these projects are accumulated and an educational qualification is awarded. The student becomes a manager, and the same procedure is followed. A task is assigned, information is gathered and arranged and presented - and evaluated, and perhaps implemented - perhaps as bullet points; and if so these implementations will follow the same process: each bullet point leading to an analogous process of recognition, matching and arranging. Even the question "But does it work?" is 'answered' by the same process of gathering and selecting pre-approved forms of data (sales numbers, surveys focus groups...), matching data to the outputs being evaluated, and arranging this into patterns.

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In modern 'abstract' discourse, there is never any point at which any actual person evaluates the exchanges to determine whether real understanding is present or absent - because the formal evaluation procedures (whether in school college, work, politics, government or punditry) are themselves typically conducted on exactly the same basis as that which is being evaluated.

A person who really knows the field, may know that there is zero understanding - but from the perspective of formal evaluation procedures, this individual evaluation is merely opinion, rumour, hearsay and anecdote.

What really matters in modern bureaucratic organizations is the formal procedures - recognition, matching and mosaic-building; and these do not require understanding on the part of any of the participants.

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So what is really going on behind the mechanical pretence of understanding?

Social interactions; the usual human stuff of gossip, or status competitions, or money-making, or attempted exploitation, or altruistic assistance... or whatever.

So the relevant thought experiment might be somewhat different from the impersonal and contact-less Chinese Room thought experiment - perhaps a better thought experiment might be interacting Parrots.

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Imagine a group of parrots which have been taught a set number of English language phrases, and taught when to use these phrases in response to particular other phrases or the presence of key words; and taught rules about how to combine these phrases. These are then evaluated for their linguistic ability by other parrots who are checking whether the stimulus phrases match the proper response phrases according to the rules; and whether the phrases are being uttered in the proper combinations, according to the rules.

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So, for these parrots, learning the English language, understanding the English language, is defined as following the proper rules in recognizing, emitting and combining phrases of English.

An intelligent parrot is defined as one that knows a lot of these rules and always follows them.

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Throughout, none of the parrots have a clue what these phrases mean (if anything), nor are they in the slightest degree interested; so far as they themselves are concerned, what is really going on is showing-off or deferring, flirting or repulsing, threatening or submitting, and trying to get more food.

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And this is a picture of modern 'intellectual' life - in science, medicine, the arts, politics, government, the mass media... the public arena in general.

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So, you think you are in favour of eugenics? Do you know the implications?

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Current information on the rate of mutation and the fraction of sites in the genome that are subject to selection suggests that each human has received, on average, at least two new harmful mutations from its parents. These mutations were subsequently removed by natural selection through reduced survival or fertility. It has been argued that the mutation load, the proportional reduction in population mean fitness relative to the fitness of an idealized mutation-free individual, allows a theoretical prediction of the proportion of individuals in the population that fail to reproduce as a consequence of these harmful mutations. Application of this theory to humans implies that at least 88% of individuals should fail to reproduce and that each female would need to have more than 16 offspring to maintain population size. This prediction is clearly at odds with the low reproductive excess of human populations. Here, we derive expressions for the fraction of individuals that fail to reproduce as a consequence of recurrent deleterious mutation (ϕ) for a model in which selection occurs via differences in relative fitness, such as would occur through competition between individuals. We show that ϕis much smaller than the value predicted by comparing fitness to that of a mutation-free genotype. Under the relative fitness model, we show that ϕ depends jointly on U and the selective effects of new deleterious mutations and that a species could tolerate 10’s or even 100’s of new deleterious mutations per genome each generation.

Yann Lesecque, 

Peter D. Keightley, 

Adam Eyre-Walker.  

A Resolution of the Mutation Load Paradox in Humans. Genetics 2012; 191: 1321-1330.

http://www.genetics.org/content/191/4/1321.full 

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I am not suggesting that the above paper is the last word - far from it. Its conclusions require modification in light of some important features the authors have neglected. 

However, the basic point is that - according to a well established genetic calculation, it would be expected that 88 % of humans would fail to reproduce. The authors regard this as a long-standing unsolved paradox, and try to suggest an answer. But it may not be a paradox - it may simply be what happened in human populations most of the time and in most places through history (in equilibrium, on average) up to about 1800.  

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Even if this number is too big, even if it is much too big, the point is that in order to prevent the accumulation of damaging mutations generation upon generation, in order to prevent the population being overwhelmed and destroyed by genetic damage; a lot of humans would need to fail to reproduce...

Which, given that - in pre-contraception and -abortion eras - a lot of humans are born (i.e. fertility is high), then there must be *very" high child mortality rates.

To put this in terms of eugenics, a large majority of people would not be allowed to reproduce at all, or else a large majority of children would have to die (or be killed) merely to stop dysgenics from mutation accumulation - this would have to happen just for things to stay the same.

To actually improve the functional-adaptedness of the population - in other word to practice eu-genics (by differentially breeding from the better- adapted) would have to come on top of this.  

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To put it simplistically - to perform actual eu-genics as a matter of state policy would require something like the following: 

1. Slaughter c. 88% of children or sterilize c. 88% of adults, to stay the same - and then... 

2. Of the remaining c. 12%, breed only from the best adapted minority - to improve the population.  

Knowing this, are you still in favour of eugenics? 

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Could the Flynn effect be an invalid artefact? Yes - if IQ tests are no better than any other type of exam at tracking long-term changes in cognitive ability

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Supposing we just accept that IQ tests are no better at measuring long term change in abilities than any other type of examination?

Then it would not be surprising that the 'Flynn effect' - of rising raw IQ test scores over the twentieth century - seems to have no real-world validity; and is contradicted by slowing simple reaction times over the same timescale.

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But why should we suppose, why should we assume (without proof) in the first place that the raw scores of IQ tests are any better at tracking longitudinal changes of general intelligence than are the raw scores of examinations of (for instance) Latin vocabulary, arithmetic, or historical knowledge?

Everybody knows that academic exams in Latin, Maths, History or any other substantive field will depend on a multitude of factors - what is taught, how big is the curriculum, how it is taught, how the teaching relates to the exam, how much practice of exams and of what type, the conditions of the exam (including possibilities for cheating), how the exam is marked (including possibilities of cheating), and the proportion of nature of the population or sample to whom the exam is administered.

In a cross-sectional use - this type of exam is good at predicting relative future performance on the basis of rank order in the results (not on the basis of absolute percentage scores) when applied to same age groups having been taught a common curriculum etc. - and in this respect academic exams resemble IQ tests (IQ test being, of course, marked and interpreted as age-specific, rank order exams).

All of which means the raw score of academic exams - the percentage correct - means nothing (or not necessarily anything) when looked at longitudinally. Different percentage scores among different groups at different times is what we expect from academic exams.

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Cross-sectionally, performance in different academic exams correlate with each other; and with 'g' as calculated from IQ tests, or with sub-tests of IQ tests.

But just because differential performance in an IQ test (a specific test, in a specific group, at a specific time) is a valid predictor; does not mean that IQ testing over time is a valid measure of change in general intelligence.

The two things are utterly different.

Cross sectional use of IQ testing measures relative difference now to predict relative differences in future; but longitudinal use of IQ data uses relative difference at various time-points to try and measure objective change over time: incommensurable.

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So, what advantage do IQ tests have over academic exams? Well, mainly the advantage is that good IQ tests are less dependent on prior educational experience (also (which is not exactly the same thing) their components are 'g-loaded').

Historically, IQ tests were mainly used to pick out intelligent children from poor and deprived backgrounds - whose social and educational experience had led to them under-performing on, say, Latin, arithmetic and History exams - because they had never been taught these subjects - or because their teaching was insufficient or inadequate in some way.

It was found that a high rank-order score in IQ testing was usefully-predictive of high rank-order performance in future educational exams (assuming that the requisite educational inputs were sufficient: high IQ does not lead to high scores in Latin vocabulary unless the child has actually studied Latin.)

But IQ tests were done cross-sectionally - to put test-takers in rank order -  they were not developed to measure longitudinal change within or between age cohorts. Indeed, since IQ tests are rank-order tests, they have no reference point to anchor them against: 100 is the average IQ (for England, as the reference population) but that number of 100 is not anchored or referenced to anything else - it is merely an average '100'  not mean anything at all as a measure of intelligence; just as an average score of 50% in A Latin Vocabulary Exam is is not an absolute measure of Latin ability - the test score number 50 does not mean anything at all in terms of an absolute measure of Latin ability.

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What applies to the academic exam or IQ test as a whole, also applies to each of the individual items of the test. The ability to answer any specific individual test item correctly, or wrongly, depends on those things I mentioned before: "what is taught, how big is the curriculum, how it is taught, how the teaching relates to the exam, how much practice of exams and of what type, the conditions of the exam" etc. etc...

My point is that we have been to ready to assume that IQ testing (in particular raw average scores and specific item scores) is immune to the limitations, variations and problems of all other types of academic exams - problems which render them more-or-less meaningless when raw average scores or specific item scores are used, decontextualized, in the attempt to track long term changes in cognitive ability.

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It is entirely conjectural to suppose, to assume, that IQ tests can function in a way that other cognitive ability tests (such as academic exams) cannot. And once this is understood, it can be seen that - far from being a mystery, there is nothing to explain about the Flynn effect.

If longitudinal raw average or test item IQ scores have zero expected predictive validity as a measure of intelligence change; then there is no mystery to solve regarding why they might change, at such and such a rate, or stop changing, or anything else!

The Flynn effect might show IQ raw scores or specific item responses going up, down, or round in circles - and it would not necessarily mean anything at all!

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Possible Dysgenic Trends in Simple Visual Reaction Time Performance in the Scottish Twenty-07 Cohort

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Michael A. Woodley, Guy Madison, Bruce G. Charlton. Possible Dysgenic Trends in Simple Visual Reaction Time Performance in the Scottish Twenty-07 Cohort: A Reanalysis of Deary & Der (2005). Mankind Quarterly. In press.

In a 2005 publication, Deary and Der presented data on both longitudinal and cross-sectional aging effects for a variety of reaction time measures among a large sample of the Scottish population. These data are reanalyzed in order to look for secular trends in mean simple reaction time performance. By extrapolating longitudinal aging effects from within each cohort across the entire age span via curve fitting, it is possible to predict the reaction time performance at the start age of the next oldest cohort. The difference between the observed performance and the predicted one tells us whether older cohorts are slower than younger ones when age matched, or vice versa. Our analyses indicate a significant decline of 36 ms over a 40-year period amongst the female cohort. No trends of any sort were detected amongst the male cohort, possibly due to the well-known male neuro-maturation lag, which will be especially pronounced in the younger cohorts. These findings are tentatively supportive of the existence of secular declines in simple reaction time performance, perhaps consistent with a dysgenic effect. On the basis of validity generalization involving the female reaction time decline, the g equivalent decline was estimated at -7.2 IQ points, or -1.8 points per decade.


http://tinyurl.com/m3jf5e4

 

 

This is the full paper publication of some results previously reported here:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/further-evidence-of-significant-slowing.html

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The inevitability of significant dysgenic change - the impossibility (both practical and moral) of a planned eugenic solution

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http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/realistically-accepting-consequences-of.html
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The year I lost eidetic memory was the year I became creative

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I was always very good at exams - the best in my non-selective school - heavily reliant on a strong eidetic/ literal/ photographic memory; and this continued for my first year at medical college where I gained a Distinction.

In my second year - aged 19-20 - at some point the eidetic memory went. I realized it at the time, and indeed, for a while, my exam results suffered a bit - I dropped out of the top ten.

I went from the eidetic memory typical of childhood to the 'semantic' - meaning-based, memory of adulthood. Once I had changed my learning strategy, my exam results improved again - and I graduated near the top of the class.

But I have only just noticed that this eidetic/ semantic shift was exactly the time when I began seriously to do 'creative writing' (although I never attained any competence at it) - for example I worked fairly hard at writing a play which I submitted to a competition.

It strikes me that this is probably a reason why children are seldom (if ever) really creative - and why eidetic memory savants are not creative.

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Maybe very high intelligence IS (nearly-) always creative - although high IQ test scores are not

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I have been thinking lately that it seems possible that very high intelligence is always (or almost always) creative - despite that people with very high IQ scores are not always creative.

It is a matter of definitions.

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Very high intelligence is clearly not the same thing as scoring very high on IQ tests - thus it is possible that all those people who really are creative are actually intelligent (if general intelligence - or 'g' - could be validly measured).

(For example, very few - some but very few - women are genuinely creative - and this is a much smaller proportion than the women who score very highly on IQ testing - at least modern IQ testing.)

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And we need also to look-at the definition of creative.

People of recognized high creativity are only a - probably small - proportion of genuinely creative people; because some very creative people are working in areas where the general public has little or no interest, and the subjects may not be useful or profitable in a particular society. Therefore their genuine creativity is not recognized.

This applies to people like the high-IQ prodigy William Sidis - http://www.sidis.net/ - who is popularly supposed to have 'burned-out' and wasted his life - but who was actually very creative in fields that were not given recognition.

Another example would be Grady M Towers, who had an ultra-high IQ but worked as a night watchman. http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/essential-reading-for-iq-scholars-grady.html his creativity was in the form of some superb essays written for high-IQ societies.

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Given that it is possible for high levels of creativity (such as that of Sidis) to be unknown or invisible for many years - it is reasonable to suppose that some very highly intelligent people are highly creative in domains that are never known to other people - for example in private, unpublished, destroyed journals.

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Furthermore, creativity requires luck, as well as ability - so that some very creative people are simply unlucky, and never make the achievements of which they are capable.

Putting all this together - the deficiencies of IQ tests in measuring general intelligence plus the limited ability for us to recognize genuine creativity -  it is certainly possible that highly intelligent people are always creative - indeed are driven to be creative.

And conversely, that many (or almost all) of the supposed examples of unintelligent people being creative, or creative people being unintelligent, are due to misclassification. As when a creative achievement is actually (knowingly or unconsciously) stolen from the work of a truly creative person; or when a low score on an IQ test has simply failed to measure real intelligence.

In other words maybe very high intelligence just is the creative personality - could we but measure intelligence and creativity validly.

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A challenge to those who disagree that sRT speed and/or general intelligence has declined a lot over the past 150 years

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Replicate Galton's sRT 183 ms group.

During 1884-93 Francis Galton found about 2,500 men with a median simple Reaction Time (sRT) of 183 milliseconds (ms).

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/objective-and-direct-evidence-of.html

The challenge is to find any population of 2500 modern people with a median reaction time of 183ms

This will, in itself, be difficult - I think.

But if this succeeds and we have 2,500 people median sRT of 183ms - then what is the average IQ of this sRT 183ms modern population?

Or if IQ data is not available - what is this sRT 183ms 2,500 population's characteristics in terms of reasonable IQ proxies such as examination results, educational attainment, or even occupational class?

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(According to Silverman, other authors contemporary with Galton reported average sRTs between 151ms and 200ms - so instead of 183ms average, perhaps 200ms would be an acceptable replicate? And maybe n = 900, or even n = 200 would suffice? So - even 200 modern men with a media sRT of 200ms would be of considerable interest.)

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Is there really such a thing as 'low hanging fruit'?

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It was only after I started getting interested in intelligence research about seven years ago that I heard the phrase 'low hanging fruit' being used as an explanation.

The first time was, indeed, a suggestion that the field of intelligence research itself was full of low hanging fruit - easy pickings - because most people were too afraid to work in the field.

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Since then I have been hearing the phrase more often, especially as a way of explaining why scientists in the past seem to be so much better than scientists nowadays.

The implication is that the breakthroughs of the past were more frequent because the problems were easier to solve and the answers were more obvious, whereas nowadays it is supposedly harder to make breakthroughs than in the past because the problems are much harder...

Or, to put it another way, the 'low hanging fruit' notion assumes that it is easier to make significant breakthroughs when the field is new, virgin territory, unexploited - supposedly breakthroughs are simply waiting there to be 'plucked' by the first person who stumbles upon them.

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The 'low hanging fruit' argument is built on many assumptions - most of which are false.

1. That creativity is relatively common.

2. That creative ability is constant across time, place and circumstances.

3. That history is progressive (assuming that modern people and circumstances are overall 'better' than those of the past).  

4. That an analogy of creativity as picking fruit makes sense.

I disagree with all of these. 

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To decide whether people of the past were (as people) better, worse or the same at making creative breakthroughs it is necessary to understand creative breakthroughs.

This means that we must study creativity - via history and biography and acquaintance with creative people - and understanding creativity requires some minimal level of creativity otherwise it could not be recognized.

But my judgement is that 1. creativity is rare - and even mundane levels of creativity are uncommon.

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2013_09_01_archive.html

Furthermore, 2. there are many eras, places and circumstances when creativity is apparently absent. And 3. there is really nothing to suggest that creativity is progressive, and the amount of it accumulates through time within any culture - rather creativity seems to come in blips - in creative eras whether shorter or longer, and then may disappear. 

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But my major disagreement regards the nature of the creative process itself, and the cognitive difficulty of making a significant breakthrough.

Most people are not creative, and few people have struggled to solve a problem for more than a few minutes (and that includes nearly all so-called 'scientists' - who simply get their problems from other people and try to solve them by following recipes).

Experience and knowledge of creative insight and invention makes it clear that breakthroughs are very very hard to achieve.

The simplest breakthroughs (i.e. simple in retrospect) are, in fact, by far the hardest to make - as should be obvious from the fact that despite the simplicity of the solution, nobody had actually made the breakthrough!

And, the more (potentially) important the breakthrough is, the bigger the difference between the difficulty of solving the problem and the ease of understanding and using the solution.

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The best and most important technological breakthroughs have often been astonishingly simple - once achieved. Things like the spade, bow and arrow, wheel, arch. We know of  cultures that failed to discover these for centuries - yet as soon as they were discovered they spread 'like wildfire'.

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The pattern of creativity is that it is very hard to discover things; yet sometimes very easy to understand, use and exploit them after they have been discovered.

Therefore it is clear that creative discovery is nothing like picking fruit!

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Indeed, experience suggests that creative people who have themselves experienced creative science will never dismiss past breakthroughs as 'low hanging fruit'.

To regard the simple, major work of the past as akin to plucking low hanging fruit is, indeed, evidence of either an uncreative mind (such as the vast majority of people have) or a potentially creative person who has not yet actually achieved anything creative.

It is okay to speculate about whether or not major breakthroughs of the past were analogous to 'easy pickings' - a matter of scooping-up goodies that were just waiting to be gathered by the first person to stumble-upon them - but anyone informed and competent will swiftly conclude that the 'low hanging fruit' explanation is arrogant, blind, complacent, foolish nonsense.

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Mutation accumulation as the major cause of declining intelligence - WD Hamilton

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I have come across a useful round-up the idea of mutation accumulation as the most likely significant mechanism for rapid decline in human intelligence over the past eight or so generations:

http://wasdarwinwrong.com/korthof97.htm

This author came across the idea in WD Hamilton's second volume of Narrow Roads of Gene Land - just as I did:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/what-are-genetic-causes-of-dysgenic.html

and he fills in the background and more recent history of this idea.

My only major quibble with this article is that the first and most-important and earliest cause of mutation accumulation was the decline in childhood (i.e. pre-sexually-mature) mortality rates starting from the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

This means that mutation accumulation very probably began in Britain from 1750-1800 and was becoming measurably apparent by 1850. Apart from public health and hygiene (e.g. water supply) improvements, medical breakthroughs would only have begun to have an effect on natural selection from the early 20th century.


So mutation accumulation as a cause of dysgenesis is not an abstract and theoretical speculation about the future - something possible unless we do x, y, and z...

No! Whatever may happen from now onwards - mutation accumulation is something that has already happened, beginning several generations ago - and the product of dysgenic change is us, i.e. the modern population in developed nations: we are it.

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What do simple reaction time measurements mean to intelligence research?

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Simple reaction time measures a very simple situation - how quickly somebody can respond by pressing a button (or equivalent) to a sudden-onset stimulus such as a light flashing or a sharp noise.

This correlates with general intelligence - very robustly, but not with a very high correlation.

In other words, the sRT-g positive correlation is found in all populations - but there is a lot of scatter around the correlation line; so there are apparently many individuals with slow sRT and high IQ and vice versa.

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(I would suppose that when there is a dissociation between sRT and g, that in principle this should be explicable; for example I would suppose that a person with rapid sRT but low measured IQ would have some factor, such as poor vision, concentration or motor control, which affected their performance in IQ testing - but not {or hardly at all} performance in reaction time testing.)

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The advantage of measuring the sRT (compared with other ways of measuring intelligence) is that it is highly objective (e.g. culture- and education-independent); and also that it reduces to a low level of influence things like perceptual differences (good eyesight and hearing), concentration (this does not need to be sustained for sRT), and 'motor' differences - such as muscle strength and fine motor control.

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(Many people grossly misunderstand reaction times as being analogous to reactive power sports actions such as boxing prowess, or batting in baseball; but the sports most related to fast sRT are finesse, minimal-movement, quick-reaction but not strength-dependent sports such as Ping-Pong/ Table Tennis, or perhaps foil fencing - in other words, the kind of competitive sports at which East Asians tend to excel.)

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The simple reaction time therefore measures the speed of a nerve path through the central nervous system while minimizing the effect of perception and musculature - and this presumably provides an imprecise but valid measure of the processing speed of the CNS.

And this is a measure of the efficiency of processing.

So, I assume that sRT is a measure of CNS efficiency - and this is why sRT correlates with g; because g is perhaps most profoundly a measure of efficiency: and increased CNS efficiency is the reason that increased g improves (to a greater or lesser extent) average performance on all cognitive tests and tasks.

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It is a truism of complex systems research (and for very good reasons) that the main method to increase efficiency is via an increased in complexity - more specifically efficiency in a process usually entails functional specialization and coordination of specialized functions.

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(The best known example is in a factory - such as Adam Smith's pin factory described in Wealth of Nations - by breaking down pin manufacture into multiple specialized functions - division of labour - and careful coordination of these functions, the efficiency of the factory can be greatly increased when measured in terms of daily productive output of pins per employee. )

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By this argument - sRT measures speed of processing, which is a measure of efficiency, which is a measure of complex functional specialization of organization.

So, the sRT correlation with g is telling us that - at root:

A more intelligent brain is a brain with a greater functional complexity.

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(Complexity of the brain is partly a matter of size as a way of accommodating more neural connectedness; but probably also of the density of connectedness. In computer technology, the density of connectedness of circuits is a constraint on processing speed - and probably something similar applies to brains.)

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If a more intelligent brain is more complex (hence more efficient and faster-processing) then this, in turn, explains a number of otherwise puzzling things about general intelligence - for example that higher intelligence in a human group or population is achieved at some cost - such as reduced athleticism and reduced fertility in that population.

Some cost, because building a more complex brain is costly - it requires extra resources (or transfer of resources from other functions) and extra time to make something that is extra complex - and there are more things which can go wrong either in making it, or after it has been made.

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The basic, biological, selectional Human Condition

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http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/what-is-human-condition-through-most-of.html
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The apparently *sudden* disappearance of English geniuses from the 1960s

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http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/how-could-english-genius-apparently.html
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"All" modern geniuses will probably be oddballs

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Due to the 150-200 year decline in general intelligence, there are not many potential geniuses born nowadays (not many in total, and only as in a tiny percentage of births) - furthermore, six to eight generations of accumulated deleterious genetic mutations (due to extremely low infant and child mortality rates) mean that almost-all modern geniuses will be oddballs: difficult personalities, significantly crazy, stubborn, aggressive, disobedient; socially maladaptive due to lacking in careerism, networking-abilities and constantly 'saying - or doing - the wrong thing'.

This seems to be the case from the geniuses and near-geniuses I have known - hardly any of them are/ were good at building their careers or nurturing their success - quite the reverse: either they are utterly obscure and apparently happy to stay that way, or else they are always 'trailing their coats', picking fights and making powerful and influential enemies.

This is another factor in the apparent disappearance of genius - intolerance of eccentricity, and the dominant tendency to write-off as insignificant and incompetent (or even dangerous) those who do not tick all the right boxes - many such people drop out from education early, or fail to get good jobs/ promotions/ publication/ prizes - and consequently have near zero influence.

In such an environment, actual achievement means nothing. Literally nothing.

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The evolution of genius. The necessity is for the production of enough geniuses, and a society which values products of genius

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I had a valuable conversation with Michael A Woodley yesterday, in which he gave me a new and very significant insight into the nature of genius in its social context.

Michael had noticed and recognized the crucial importance of a comment by HJ Eysenck, in his 1995 book Genius - that noted that many geniuses were short lived.

(There are a particularly large number of mathematicians in this short-lived category; but there have been many short-lived examples among geniuses of all types.)

Furthermore, Michael already knew that many geniuses have either zero children - or few/ zero children who survive.

(Shakespeare had zero direct descendants, so far as known. Same for Beethoven and Schubert. Same for Pascal and Turing. Same for Newton and Maxwell.)

Therefore, there is a high probability of reproductive extinction for geniuses - and this implies that geniuses do not need to live beyond early adulthood and do not need to reproduce.

I believe that this insight of Woodley's is the missing key; when added to the insights of Eysenck, he has essentially solved the problem of genius, as I understand it.

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One thing that must be emphasized is that each individual genius potentially has a disproportionately massive impact on their society as a whole.

For instance, it is plausible that the unknown Byzantine inventor of Greek Fire quite possibly ensured the survival of Constantinople for several hundred years beyond what would otherwise have happened.

This is totally different from the way that genetics works!

So a single genius may affect - may massively-enhance - the likelihood of survival and growth of a whole human society - even when their genetic impact on that society is near-zero or actually zero.

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Which means that the problem in explaining the emergence of a society where there is a high concentration and number of geniuses (e.g. Western Europe from the late Middle Ages and until recently) reduces to the simple problem of first producing geniuses and secondly of society being such as to appreciate and use the products of genius.

In other words, geniuses do not need to live long or have children, they simply need to survive long enough to make their contribution. And having made their contribution they do not personally need to be rewarded for it - because it is likely that they will not live very long anyway.

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Why should geniuses so often be short lived (and sterile)?

Plausibly, because that the genius has a brain of exceptionally high complexity (in relevant ways), which means (from the predictions of general complex systems theory) that in the first place this kind of super-brain is harder to grow and therefore more likely to have developmental faults; and in the second place that an exceptionally complex brain is harder to maintain and therefore more likely to malfunction fatally (in many possible ways).

(The minority of long lived and fertile geniuses would include those few who have had the good fortune to develop an extra highly complex brain without any significant or potentially fatal faults; and therefore whose brain is more robust and easier to maintain over the long-term.)

So, what is needed to produce a society with a high concentration of geniuses is:

1. Enough potential geniuses are born

2. Enough of these potential geniuses survive to early adulthood (at least)

These two factors are enough to ensure that geniuses will produce - because the innate tendency to practice genius is a property of geniuses: it takes very little in the way of encouragement, and indeed geniuses will 'do their thing' even in the face of considerable dis-couragement.

The final step is that:

3. Society must value and use the products of genius.

Not all societies do this - or, more often, they only use certain restricted products of genius - such as decorative arts, improvements in statecraft or military technologies.

But, to reiterate, the society need not value or reward the genius himself, indeed the genius can safely be neglected, defrauded of his credit, or even killed (after making his discovery) since he will probably be dead soon anyway.

So long as the genius has the minimal psychological appreciation/ positive valuation - perhaps from just one or two or a few persons - then he will do his thing anyway.

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So what kind of society produces geniuses?

Probably all societies produce sporadic geniuses, but only a few produce a high enough concentration of geniuses to make a difference to the society as a whole.

Although even one single genius who produces a particular invention may make a vast difference.

But the genetic pre-requisites of genius are already known: a society with a sufficiently high average general intelligence ('g') and also an average personality of a moderately high level of Psychoticism

('Psychoticism' embodies both creativity and the personality traits necessary for a genius to produce a distinctive contribution - see http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/eysencks-personality-trait-of.html )

This will ensure a sufficient production of geniuses - then these must survive to adulthood in sufficient number.

I think this implies that the society must have a sufficiently large proportion of 'middle class' people - in other words those whose economic role involves a high level of technical or cognitive skills - and where possession of technical or cognitive skills gives a high probability of a higher than replacement-level of survival for your children.

In other words, what is needed is a sufficiently large and successful middle class.

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But what kind of society tends to value the products of genius?

My guess is that it needs to be a society where the middle class of skill-workers has a substantial role in serving itself - because where the skill workers serve the upper classes, then only the types of genius which serve upper class interests will be used - mostly innovations in statecraft and war, and to a lesser extent in upper class luxury goods such as the arts and crafts and architecture, cooking and clothes and the like.

But when a middle class person can sell their skills to other middle class persons, then conditions are ripe for the recognition and use of a wide range of products of genius - including those which increase the functionality of society in many ways - innovations in economics, industrial organization, agriculture, transport, power machinery, communication and so on.

But a society of mandarins, a society in which the skilled middle class survive by serving the ruling class, a society in which the middle class of predominantly officials and bureaucrats, is NOT, on the whole, a society which will be likely to recognize or use the innovations of genius.

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All that is somewhat speculative.

But Woodley's insight has simplified, and thereby solved, the basic problem of how genius is produced - by clarifying that genius as such is not, cannot coherently be, regarded as a direct product of natural selection: genius does not happen because it brings reproductive success - quite the reverse.

Genius is a product of heredity - but is itself (on average) a genetic dead-end.

And, having had enough geniuses born and survive to adulthood - the crucial factor is that society as a whole recognizes and uses the innovations which individual (and often short-lived) geniuses produce.

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Cognitive Neurointelligence - an agenda for case-based clinical research into intelligence

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Following from:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-need-for-case-studies-in.html

If it is agreed that intelligence research has (thus far, and in general) been deformed and devalued by its origins in population-level and statistically-orientated research methods (especially warped by aiming at group--level social scientific uses in education research, demographics and epidemiology)

-then there is a clear need for individual-level research methods;

without which we can never understand the qualitative nature of 'general intelligence' but will remain stuck in the present (and for the past century plus) situation of merely an abstract and statistical and correlational non-definition of general intelligence, which utterly fails to describe or explain 'what intelligence actually is'.

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This problem seems very obvious to me, coming into intelligence research (as I do) from a background in medicine, psychiatry and evolutionary biology.

It is clear that mainstream intelligence research is and always has been (to put it crudely, but accurately) non-biological.

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One remedy would be to develop new strands of intelligence research which focus on individuals; in other words case study methodologies.

Specifically, intensive 'clinical' study of individuals who are selected for their unusual attributes: in other words an adaptation of the approach pioneered in Cognitive Neuropsychology (in which individuals with unusual forms of localized brain damage were studied intensively).

This was later extended to psychiatry as Cognitive Neuropsychiatry - for example, the 'looking for exceptions to a theoretically-grounded prediction' (or 'black swan') approach I used in Walston F, Blennerhassett RC, Charlton BG. (2000). ‘Theory of mind’, persecutory delusions and the somatic marker mechanism. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 5: 161-174.

(Authors who have written in this tradition include Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio and (in a useful textbook) Tim Shallice. - see my references in the previous blog post.)

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Focus of case studies

While traditional, population-based intelligence research has focused on as-large-as-possible, norm-based, representative samples - and on studying population differences, average effects and correlations...

in contrast, case study based research focuses on the unusual.

For example, while Terman's 1920s longitudinal, follow-up cohort research on high IQ children, or Deary's recent analysis of a more-representative cohort from the same era, focus upon normal, averages, correlations etc. - case based research would focus upon the exceptions to these correlations.

Possible suitable and potentially-fruitful subjects for a Cognitive Neurointelligence approach would be:

Those people who had high IQ as children but who did NOT have successful careers as adults. In other words, Grady M Towers 'Outsiders' - 

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/essential-reading-for-iq-scholars-grady.html

The misfits, the people who sometimes congregates in high (and ultra-high) IQ societies; whose personalities stand in the path of successful careers (e.g. Grady Towers was a night watchman).

And/ or very high IQ people who suffer illness, localized brain damage, who are psychopathic, neurotic, psychotic - who have poor concentration, a small working-memory...

Or people who have very fast simple reaction times, probably indicating fast processing and highly efficient brains - but who have low IQ test scores.

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In such studies population norms ('averages') are used in a qualitative fashion which does not depend upon great precision and is not sensitive to the exact representativeness of population sampling  - measures simply to indicate whether the person has about-average performance - or significantly above or significantly below average performance.

So, test measures are used in a yes/no fashion - and a profiles can be built up for each individual in terms of three categories:

1. About average
2. Certainly above average
3. Certainly below average

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Why? because is it (for instance) much easier to understand the nature of intelligence when intelligence is pretty much the only advantage a person has - when they have high intelligence but - say - poor concentration - what can they do and what can they not do?

When somebody has high intelligence but a psychopathic personality - how do they function socially, educationally, vocationally, under formal testing - what can they do at normal levels, what better than average, what worse than average?

What kind of a person shows very fast reaction times but performs badly on IQ tests - are there any subtests (with modifications) tests on which they perform very well - if so, what characteristics do these subtests have?

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The great thing about this kind of research is that it can be done (in fact, needs to be done) by many people of many types (including, of course, self-study, detailed autobiography, and self-experimentation)  - it can be amateur science - and thereby escape from the wholesale careerism, bureaucratization and in-general corruption of mainstream modern 'science'.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/doing-real-science-after-corruption-of.html

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The need for individual case studies in intelligence research

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Intelligence research grew as the study of comparatively-tested groups - and indeed the IQ measure is comparative, since it describes relative performance on these tests compared with a reference group.

But this is a very strange and unusual way for a biological subject to originate - since most biology developed on the basis of individual studies - with groups merely being used to check that individual observations were not unique, and to increase the precision of quantitative estimates by the use of averaging.

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So IQ research has suffered this distortion - and the IQ measure has seldom been very useful for understanding individuals - except when there is a dissociation between general intelligence and other abilities.

(In contrast, IQ is very useful for predicting group level performance.)

Furthermore, this distortion has gone to the very heart of intelligence research, and has - I judge - exerted a paralysing effect on it; since the conceptual understanding of what-intelligence-actually-is remains pathetically weak.

The simple reason for the feebleness of understanding of the central concept of intelligence research (by its leading researchers!) - is that IQ, and indeed general intelligence/ g itself - is a group-level comparative measure

- but what is needed to understand intelligence a description of what happens at the individual, personal level - without reference to other people.

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In sum, intelligence research needs individual case studies - it needs very rich and detailed descriptive studies of the cognitive functioning of specific people in order to be able to develop an understanding of what-intelligence-is.

Or, to put matters another way, until intelligence researchers can do conceptualize and conduct proper (scientifically valid) individual case studies, then they won't really know what they are talking about.


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(More to follow on this theme...)

References:

A critique of biological psychiatry. Psychological Medicine, 1990;20:3-6

Endocrine physiology and the value of case studies. Journal of Endocrinology, 1991;130:1-2

The scope and nature of epidemiology. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 1996; 49: 623-626. 

Charlton BG, Walston F. Individual case studies in clinical research. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 1998; 4: 147-155.

Understanding dreaming sleep, the awake state and deep sleep from an Einsteinian perspective - different relative speeds of time

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The three consciousness states of Dreaming Sleep, Awake and Deep Sleep can be understood by analogy with Einstein's theory of General Relativity - in terms of time always running at the same speed as experienced from within a state, but being perceived to run at relative different speeds when observing one state from a different state.

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Time runs at the same rate for every state from within that state. One hour always feels like one hour, whether a person is dreaming, awake or deeply asleep.

But, for instance, if awake is taken as the reference point; then one hour of being awake seems to be able to encompass many hours, even days, of dreaming. On the other hand, many hours in deep sleep feel like an absence, or just a few moments - from the perspective of being awake.

So Deep Sleep passes almost like no time at all (as when somebody wakes-up and says: "how long have I been asleep?", and he can't believe that the answer is three hours because while deeply asleep it felt like a few moments); while dreaming can encompass what is experienced as a very long, complex, vivid, perhaps exhausting dream - and on wakening the dreamer find that they have only been asleep 45 minutes.

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Perhaps there is a helpful analogy in considering falling into deep sleep as an acceleration, and falling into deep sleep as a deceleration - a slowing.

Thus, from the perspective of an observer located on Earth,  an astronaut on a spaceship which accelerates away from earth to high relative speed, for example in a round trip to Jupiter, will be found to have 'aged more slowly'; when he returns to Earth. For the observer on Earth time has slowed down for the astronaut - for the astronaut, time on Earth has speeded-up.

Thus, dreaming sleep is like an acceleration to high speed: within the dream the time is unaltered, but from the awake perspective the dream can cram more into each unit of time than is possible for the awake mind.

And presumably the opposite is true of deep sleep; where (from the awake perspective) very little seems to be happening per unit of time.

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So our lives are spent oscillating between different times. Being awake is in the middle of two states, and when we are awake we see events speeded-up or slowed-down, or time running slower or and faster: in dreaming events are speeded-up or time appears to run slower to allow more to happen per unit time; and in deep sleep events are slowed-down or time seems to run quicker so that not much happens per unit time.

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This provides a way of understanding why our memories of the times when we are asleep are so limited: when we are dreaming, too much is happening, too fast for memory to 'take it all in': like a videotape sped up to 1000 times normal speed, and reduced to a mere blur of shapes and colours.

But when we are deeply asleep, not enough is happening for the memory systems to make sense of it - it is like a sound recording played back a thousand times too slowly: a single word becoming just a deep, incomprehensible, modulating rumble.

However, it would be reasonable to assume that although the waking mind, and waking memory systems cannot make much explicit sense of what happens in dreams and deep sleep - the experiences of dreaming and deep sleeping do change things (presumably by their own memory systems): although how this happens is only indirectly knowable to the awake state - being mostly unconscious, inaccessible, implicit.

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Some implications of men cognitively-maturing more slowly than women - men reaching maximum intelligence at an older chronological age than women

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It is general regarded as a solid fact that women reach full maturity earlier than men, and this almost certainly applies to brains - and therefore almost certainly applies to intelligence - yet this fact is very generally neglected.

(Except by Richard Lynn - whose argument is apparently being ignored - although surely it is far more biologically plausible than the alternative tacit assumption that a 16 year old man and women are at exactly the same stage of development.)

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Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that on average women reach their maximum intelligence at 16 and men at 18  - the actual numbers are not really known, because it seems that the matter has not been thoroughly looked-into.

The average 16 year old woman is at her maximum intelligence, while the average sixteen year old man is at about 16/18ths of his maximum intelligence  - that is to say the average 16 year old man is at somewhat less than 90 percent of his full intelligence (assuming that development is linear).

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To get a more precise estimate of the maturation of men and women - probably the best measurement would be serial simple reaction times (sRTs) - sRT could be measured every few months in a longitudinal study of individual children right through into their twenties - and the (average) age at which the sRT reaches its shortest (i.e. the average age when reaction times are fastest) would be the age of full cognitive maturation for intelligence.

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The implications of this matter are considerable.

1. When comparing boys and girls or young men and young women - they should not be age-matched, but maturation matched - so that an 8 year old girl who is at about 50 percent maturity, should be matched with a 9 year old boy - who is at an equivalent level of maturity - and so on.

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2. What does the age difference in maximum intelligence mean - in biological terms?

It seems plausible that intelligence is a consequence of brain complexity - in the sense that as a general principle (from systems theory, and confirmed by biology) increased complexity of organization allows (and it necessary for) increased efficiency - and general intelligence is substantially about greater brain efficiency.

But increased complexity of brain organization implies:

i) A longer period of brain development

ii) A greater potential for things to go wrong during brain development.
 
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So, on these grounds we would expect the 'more-intelligent' sex (i.e. men) to have on the one hand a longer 'normal' (which is not necessarily the same as 'average') period of brain development with later maturation (which is indeed observed);

and, on the other hand, also a higher rate of things going wrong and leading to sub-optimal intelligence (which is also observed - in that there are more men than women who suffer from mental handicap/ subnormal intelligence).

Also, it would be assumed that - in considering genetically-separated populations, the 'normal' period of brain development would have a broad correlation with average intelligence in that population (assuming other relevant influencing factors were sufficiently controlled) - so that the most intelligent populations had a significantly longer development than the least.

This also seems to be the case - and the shortest normal development period - which is, I think, seen in pygmies who mature at about age 12, seems to be associated with low average intelligence, and so on.

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In passing, it may be suggested that the reducing average age of sexual maturation that has been seen in Western populations may also be happening at the same time as reducing average intelligence in the same populations - and this statistical association may (to some significant extent - although not necessarily entirely) be causal.

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One interesting conclusion of this line of research is that when young boys and girls of the same age test at the same level of intelligence -

e.g. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289603000539

this is actually strong evidence that adult men are more intelligent than adult women!

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Another implication of this line of reasoning is that we should be less interested by differences (or not) between averages when comparing men and women or different populations, and more interested by differences at extreme or peak levels.

In other words, we should think of intelligence more like we think of athletic ability - when we are interested in the best, rather than the average.

For example, the interesting men-women comparison is between (say) Olympic standard runners and weight lifters, or professional tennis or soccer players - rather than between the population average ability - which is mostly unknown and also very difficult to measure (due to the in-practice impossibility of getting truly random population samples).

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