Rebecca Sear
@RebeccaSear
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Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University London. President of the European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association
Joined April 2011
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New blog on the problem of the continued proliferation of eugenic ideology in academia, including "national IQ" data.
(Part of) the solution is to prioritise research integrity, rather than the acquiring of grants, papers & profit (which current academic structures incentivise)
💥New: The persistence of eugenics in mainstream journals highlights major gaps in research integrity
@RebeccaSear
#ResearchEthics
#SocialScience
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Do 'national IQ' datasets present accurate and unbiased data on average IQs in nation-states worldwide?
A thread 👇
(Spoiler alert: NO)
1/n
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Adolescent rebellion is WEIRD, not a cross-cultural universal: rebellion less likely when social groups are multi-generational & where children have relatively high autonomy
@Emily_Emmott
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Interesting-open offices decrease face-to-face interaction significantly, ~70%. "rather than prompting face-to-face collaboration, open architecture triggers a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates & interact over email & IM"
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How very disappointing to see this published in a respected evolutionary behavioural science journal in 2023. The argument that gender disparities in the workplace can be explained by women’s “choices”, determined by their evolved psychology, is incredibly simplistic & damaging
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Are there 'race' differences in intelligence? Evidence supposedly comes from 'national IQ' datasets, but when you look at the data...there's a problem:
‘National IQ’ datasets do not provide accurate, unbiased or comparable measures of cognitive ability
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Dear Editor
Is it really necessary to send my paper out to FOUR reviewers?
This not only increases the burden on reviewers but also makes your job harder, since it is mathematically impossible to get four academics to agree on anything, ever.
Sincerely
All authors everywhere
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I once desk-rejected a paper which used national IQ data. The authors promptly accused me of political-correctness, while defending the idea that entire nation states could have IQs of 70 or below, because such IQs still allow people "to have children & do physical labour" 🤷♀️
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Science is political, because it is done by humans with all their attendant biases. Insisting science is apolitical, and that acknowledging the biases inherent in the status quo *introduces* politics into science, is not helpful, and will only hamper scientific progress 🤷♀️
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Was recently reminded of Quillette's "women are ruining science because evolution didn't make ladybrains work that way" article, and I don't see why I should suffer alone. Please don't take these people seriously
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So, while we’re tackling scientific racism and scientific sexism, we also need to be doing something about scientific classism… 🤦♀️
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Study reveals number of hours it takes to make a friend: roughly 50 hours of time together for casual friends, 90 hours to go from that stage to simple "friend" status & more than 200 hours before you can consider someone your close friend
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The illusion of neutrality: "Scientists refraining from engaging with socio-political issues in a not-neutral world is not neutrality. It is a political position that avoids responsibility to society"
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Please please please can we stop referring to the male breadwinner-female homemaker nuclear family as the 'traditional' human family. Because (1) it's wrong & (2) it reinforces problematic political narratives & (3) it's wrong
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Hey Quillette, interested in my new piece? “Are men really fit for science? Men’s evolved psychology prioritises status competition & dominating women, meaning they’ll never achieve the clear-headed evaluation of evidence that women’s evolved preferences for equity make possible”
new in quillette: why is academic freedom dying? that's right, it's women's evolved psychology
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A few months ago, Evolutionary Psychological Science published a paper which is effectively a defence of Lynn's 'national IQ' dataset. Does it present a clearly argued, rigorous & convincing case for continuing to use the data?
(You know the answer already don't you)
NO
🧵
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Stop blaming population growth for climate change. The real culprit is wealth inequality “focusing on human numbers obscures the true driver of our ecological woes..the waste, inequality & focus on endless growth & profit accumulation of modern capitalism”
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Why eugenics is a bad idea: traits considered "desirable" change rapidly over time. Ardent 20th century eugenicist Marie Stopes disinherited her son for marrying a woman with the "undesirable" trait of myopia. 21st century eugenicists seem fine with the future being short-sighted
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Honestly baffled that any academic could hold the belief that science was entirely apolitical until “critical social justice” came along. Really do not think we are training scientists well
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Dear Journal Editors
Before you can explain a phenomenon, you first need to understand that phenomenon. That means endlessly rejecting papers because they’re ‘descriptive’ hurts us. Deeply.
Sincerely yours,
Science & Social Science
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New paper out: The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences', part of a special issue on social support & maternal-child health 1/n
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So, for anyone who doesn't know what the demographic transition is, a 🧵
The demographic transition is the shift from high mortality, high fertility to low mortality, low fertility which has occurred, or is occurring, in countries worldwide over the last couple of centuries 1/n
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A very brave, very sad article. I’m so very sorry to read this, by an amazing colleague, doing amazing work, at LSHTM: I'm one of the thousands of extra cancer deaths we'll see this year
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Your regular reminder that eugenics never went away, and remains a highly influential ideology👇
‘Eugenics on steroids’: the toxic and contested legacy of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute
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My new professional home 😊 Delighted to be taking up the post of Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. Check out the amazing people I’ll now be working with (along with several new hires not yet on the website!)
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Potentially my most unpopular opinion: academics should make ALL their work freely available, including books and book chapters. What's the point of going to all that effort to write, if hardly anyone can afford to read your work..?
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Dear Reviewer
#2
Asking researchers to add theory and a hypothesis AFTER they’ve done the analysis is HARKing (hypothesising after results are known). Might I suggest the next time you review a paper you don’t recommend research misconduct…?
Sincerely yours,
Science
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Here I've focused on the wholly inadequate samples which go into these 'national IQ' estimates, but many, many other criticisms can, and have been, made. It is very, very depressing that these data are still appearing in peer-reviewed journals 😢 /end
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Why Evolutionary Psychology (Probably) Isn’t Possible: “evolutionary psychologists have not shown that there are specific psychological programs that are written in our bio-historical document”
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Dear Journals Who Hide Data & Methods at the End of the Paper
Please put them back where they belong, before the results section, so readers can evaluate methods before reading results.
Thank you,
Scientific Rigour
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Congo’s ‘national IQ’ is estimated from one sample of 88 schoolchildren in their 6th year of schooling
Somalia’s ‘national IQ’ is estimated from one sample of child refugees in a Kenyan refugee camp
These aren't cherry-picked examples. This IS the dataset
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The journal Evolutionary Psychological Science sending a pretty clear message here about its stance on pseudoscientific racism 👐
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Unintentionally hilarious piece. Starts by claiming ideology is suddenly poisoning biology. Ends by defending race/IQ research & the “ladybrains can’t science” guy, as if sex/race hierarchies aren’t ideologies that have poisoned biology from the start 🤦♀️
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Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature: "For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection, suggesting the toll access business model will become unsustainable"
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Nope
The 'national IQ' of Ethiopia - a population of 112 million - is now based on 6 samples, with a total sample size of 707, all are samples of children, and all of which are highly unrepresentative of the country 7/n
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New paper out today on 'Demography, and the rise, apparent fall and resurgence in eugenics', which provides a reminder of how influential eugenic ideology was in the development of demography as a discipline 1/6
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Eugenics never went away
Greenland women seek compensation over involuntary birth control - “At least 4,500 women, some teenagers, were fitted with coils to limit birth rates among the indigenous population”
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Your regular reminder that the ‘evidence’ for inherent differences between human groups includes a ‘national IQ’ dataset which has been repeatedly debunked. Yet hereditarians are desperately clinging on to it, presumably because no real data supports their beliefs
Critiques of Lynn's National IQ data
NY Review of Books:
Wicherts critiques:
Recent critiques:
@RebeccaSear
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Very good article on how the right is making eugenics respectable again 👇 At the risk of repeating myself, academics have facilitated this and REALLY need to stop
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Twitter hivemind: I've created an embryonic spreadsheet of resources for those interested in working with secondary data. It's very much work in progress, so if you have any suggestions of data sources/repositories to add, that would be much appreciated 🙏
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"The figure for Ethiopia is derived from a sample of 250, 15-year-old immigrants to Israel. The figure for Nigeria is from a sample of 86 adult men & one of 375, 6–13-year olds. The figure for Sierra Leone from a sample of 22, 23-year-old skilled workers & one of 60 adults" 5/n
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In 2007 I co-authored a critique of a paper which used an earlier, 2002, version of this dataset, which involved examining the dataset in detail. Our conclusion: “The primary data are grossly inadequate...the sampling is sketchy at best and ludicrously insufficient at worst” 3/n
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Darn women, ruining science again with their insistence on academic integrity instead of careerism 😡
"female researchers appear to contribute more to the public good of open science, while men focus on private reputation” ...
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My first blog (be kind!) - on the WEIRD people problem, in the context of whether father absence in childhood is associated with earlier menarche
Girls Who Grow Up Without Their Father Start Their Periods Earlier, Or Do They?
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If these ‘national IQ’ data float across your feed, please note they are pseudoscience. The dataset was developed by a guy given a sword by his psychologist mates for his “long-term services to eugenics”, which is political ideology, not science
Average IQ:
1. 🇯🇵 Japan: 106.48
2. 🇹🇼 Taiwan: 106.47
3. 🇸🇬 Singapore: 105.9
4. 🇭🇰Hong Kong: 105.34
5. 🇨🇳 China: 104.1
6. 🇰🇷 South Korea: 102.3
7. 🇧🇾 Belarus: 101.6
8. 🇫🇮 Finland: 101.2
9. 🇱🇮 Liechtenstein: 101.1
10. 🇩🇪 Germany: 100.7
.
16. 🇨🇦 Canada: 99.5
17. 🇦🇺 Australia: 99.2…
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Some race scientists are now trying to deal with the criticism that ‘national IQ’ datasets imply large swathes of the world are intellectually impaired by acknowledging they don’t actually measure cognitive ability, which obviously invalidates the whole point of the datasets
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Want some more examples? The 'national IQ' of Angola is calculated from a sample of 19 (nineteen) individuals, about whom literally the only thing we know is that they don't have malaria
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Things I learned today- only humans experience heart attacks: "naturally occurring coronary heart attacks due to atherosclerosis are virtually non-existent in other mammals, incl chimps in captivity which share human-like risk factors" via
@medical_xpress
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Let me spare you the pain of reading the blog which describes how race science has ‘won’👇 It’s about a paper written by an uncredentialed untroubled-by-ethics ‘researcher’ published in a pseudo-journal set up to promote racist ideology, so is not going to trouble real scientists
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Sierra Leone? This population of 7.8m is estimated from 2 samples from the same study in 1966, ages 10-40, one rural & one urban sample of the same ethnic group. Sample size? 119 participants (any demographer reading this has now had to stop & lie down in a darkened room) 10/n
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Oh look, the guy profiled in the New York Times for being a racist pseudoscientist whose work is cited by terrorists has just published (again) in a Springer journal which has many big names in evolutionary psychology on its board. Plus ça change
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It matters who does science: "Scientists should embrace their humanity rather than pretending that they are a bunch of automatons who instantly reach perfectly objective conclusions"
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@stats_feed
Please note these 'national IQ' data are pseudoscience. Multiple critiques have shown the dataset is methodologically unsound and systematically biased. Here's the latest critique
And a statement from a behavioural science society
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Science is a meritcoracy?
Racial inequalities in journals highlighted in giant study: "Discrimination against members of under-represented groups leads to lower citation rates, fewer editorial-board positions and longer manuscript-review periods."
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A recent paper, published in a peer-reviewed journal, which used such a dataset prompted me to examine the most recent version of the Lynn & Vanhanen 'national IQ' dataset, which purports to estimate average IQ for a large proportion of countries worldwide 2/n
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Sorry to put a dampener on your Monday, but I regret to inform you that a new paper using "national IQ" data has been published in a journal apparently endorsed by two Nobel Laureates 😢
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May go a bit quiet for the next few days, Twitter; more important things to do 😉
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Just think how much more productive academics could be if we didn’t have to endlessly apply for grants we have almost no chance of getting, & waste so much time reviewing & sitting on grant panels. Surely it would be more efficient to allocate research funds randomly
Survivor-tip-of-the-iceberg-biased-perception from outside would be: "wow she is just flying through it". Grants are a lottery. U need to buy (write) as many tickets as you can if you wanna stay in the rat-race that is modern science.
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An Excess of Positive Results: Comparing the Standard Psychology Literature With Registered Reports - "we found 96% positive results in standard reports but only 44% positive results in Registered Reports"
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Cold Winters Theory is ludicrous
National IQ data is ludicrous
Differential-K Theory is ludicrous
This must be quite intentional, right? Race scientists are not trying to convince academics but to promote race science in the real world, where simple messages are effective
An important thing to remember about the Cold Winter Theory of why Europeans evolved greater intelligence than Africans is that nearly every substantive thing it predicts is wrong and nothing in evolutionary biology supports it.
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Things I’ve learned on Twitter recently: that philosophy has as big a race science problem as evolutionary psychology 😢 Time for a reminder that ludicrous “National IQ” data is the kind of “evidence” relied on to claim race differences in intelligence
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New paper out (which may comfort anyone else with papers which have been in progress for yrs - I estimate this one took >a decade...'slow science' is good, right?)
'An age-dependent ovulatory strategy explains evolution of dizygotic twinning in humans'
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Eritrea’s ‘national IQ’ is estimated entirely from small samples of children living in orphanages
Namibia’s ‘national IQ’ is estimated from one sample of 103 children from an ethnic group which the dataset's authors acknowledge makes up only 7% of the population of that country
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There's been much (needed) talk of scientific racism lately, but discussion of scientific sexism is also overdue. The manosphere draws heavily on evolutionary research, to prove 'women are worse than men'. Yet I don't see many evo researchers countering these harmful narratives
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Wow. Harvard awarded a PhD on the basis of research which used Lynn & Vanhanen’s flawed ‘national IQ’ dataset. The author of that PhD has just been given a senior US government post. Giving bad science a free pass because it’s on a politically sensitive topic has consequences
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Count the cost of disability caused by COVID-19: "Focusing only on cases and deaths hides the pandemic’s lasting health burden on people, societies and economies"
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A closer inspection of the 2019 dataset shows the primary data sources are wholly inadequate for calculating nationally representative scores. Most are small, convenience samples, often collected from children & often from samples deliberately chosen NOT to be representative
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3 are samples of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel - not remotely representative;
2 samples are from the same survey conducted in food-insecure districts. Unrepresentative;
The last is from the Young Lives survey (promising, yes?) but uh-oh... 8/n
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New preprint 'Do human life history strategies exist?'; trying to tame the confusion in the evolutionary human sciences on this topic, so that important ideas from life history research can help strengthen theoretical frameworks in health & social sciences
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Just left LSHTM’s Keppel Street building for the last time (as an employee). A little sad to be leaving so many wonderful colleagues behind, but have learned a lot in the last 12 years. Thank you to
@PSG_LSHTM
for all your collegiality and cake! 🙏❤️
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I'll throw in one more example, since it's so egregious: the 'national IQ' of Botswana - a population of 2.3m - is estimated from a sample of 140 17-20 year olds from the Batswana ethnic group, sampled from schools in the North West Province of *South Africa* 15/n
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After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids, but women wanted more
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Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers: “in line with the current scientific understanding that race is a social construct & a welcome departure from past research that has often conflated genetic variation & racial categories”
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The first 'national IQ' dataset was put together in 2002; latest update 2019. The datasets use primary data sources to claim...average 'IQ' in sub-Saharan Africa is 70, on the verge of intellectual disability. As Ebbesen has pointed out, this is absurd
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“Unfortunately in the Ethiopian version, administration of the test ran into difficulties relating to explanation of tasks & time constraints & only about a quarter of the sample—all urban children—have test scores available in the dataset.” Unrepresentative 9/n
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More evidence here on the damage that allowing race science to proliferate unchecked does in the real world 👇 AI developers love race scientists (who, let’s not forget, also promote misogynist & classist narratives)
Speaking of Shane Legg, here's this gem he co-authored in 2007 on "Universal Intelligence" where he wonders, as one does,
"Are men on average more intelligent than women? Are white people smarter than black people?" 🤔 Questions white men like to "ask"
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Anyone who wants to reply to this thread with some version of "facts not feelings" should read those three tweets again 👆 and find someone else to troll
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Statistical power of a study is no higher when researchers are asked to do formal power analysis before collecting data:
Recommendations in pre-registrations & internal review board proposals promote formal power analyses but do not increase sample size
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If Elon Musk had taken our MSc in Demography and Health, he would not be making such embarrassing mistakes on Twitter 😳 Applications now open 👉
UN projections are utter nonsense. Just multiply last year’s births by life expectancy. Given downward trend in birth rate, that is best case unless reversed.
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We looked particularly at the samples used to estimate the 'national IQs' of 3 countries which had exceptionally low estimates: Ethiopia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. What we found wasn't good 4/n
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The journal Psychological Reports has just retracted three of Philippe Rushton's papers "following a review that found that the research was unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda". Science can be self-correcting after all 👏👏👏
Journal retracts more articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”
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I'm a higher rate taxpayer & I do not want to pay less tax
I want an NHS
I want social care
I want the safety net of welfare benefits
I want good quality education in schools
I want police on the streets
I want public services....
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Nigeria? 10 samples here, total sample size of 12,331 - this is better, right?
No. All but one are samples of children
The one adult sample has a sample size of 47 (35 men, 7 living abroad) but no other info on sampling strategy. Wildly unrepresentative 11/n
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"I'm not calling to end the study of genetic ancestry or socio-cultural categories such as self-identified race. The goal is to stop conflating the two, which leads scientists to attribute differences in health to innate biology rather than inequality"
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Some happy news, for a change: Ugandan gorillas in Bwindi park have 'baby boom'
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Evolution of monogamy in response to partner scarcity: mate guarding not paternal care responsble for human monogamy
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This is an important point 👇 those claiming race science can be countered solely with scientific critique & better science fail to understand that race scientists don't play by the rules of science, because they're not interested in science. They're producing political tracts
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Statistical illiteracy isn't a niche problem. During a pandemic, it can be fatal: "Society would gain significant advantages if children were taught the fundamental ideas of probability theory and statistics"
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There is now a newer version of these 'national IQ' estimates by Becker, available online, largely based on Lynn and Vanhanen's updated 2012 dataset. Surely this updated version will have fixed many of the sampling problems of earlier versions, right? 6/n
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Evolution of the dad: most male mammals have little or nothing to do with their kids. Why is our own species different?
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The myth of academic indoctrination: “If politicians can paint academics as indoctrinators around Black history, they can do the same with climate, evolution & public health. The political tactics used in Florida are same as those driving science denial”
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Evolutionary research in the human sciences can be rigorous science which helps strengthen our understanding of human health and behaviour. Tweeting this in case any of my followers have recently read any papers which might have convinced them otherwise...
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"Ape populations were crashing in the face of competition with monkey species which were able to eat unripe fruit. What seems to have saved one line of apes was a genetic adaptation that let them to process alcohol, meaning they could eat overripe fruits"
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The reason Zoom calls drain your energy: "Being on a video call requires more focus than a face-to-face chat. Video chats mean we need to work harder to process non-verbal cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of the voice, and body language"
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Clearing out my office and I’m slightly horrified to discover I am old enough to have once used overhead projectors for giving talks 😬
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Flight attendant: Is there a doctor onboard?
Dad: that should've been you
Me: Not now Dad
Dad: Not asking for a human behavioural ecologist are they?
Me: Dad, there's a medical emergency happening right now
Dad: Go see if an ultimate explanation will help
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“The best barometer of rising inequality in America is no longer income. It is life itself. In the 80s, people in the poorest communities were 9% more likely to die each year, but the gap grew to 49% in the past decade and widened to 61% when covid struck”
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Kitten training going reasonably well 🙂 Kev is now about 75% prepared to sit next to, rather than on, my laptop
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One sample is of children attending an outpatient clinic at one hospital; final sample is from a single school grade, from one state, in 1981. Unrepresentative
Extrapolating 'national IQ' estimates from such unrepresentative samples will result in inaccurate, biased data 14/n
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Fear of humans as apex predators has landscape‐scale impacts from mountain lions to mice: “We conducted a playback experiment demonstrating that the sound of humans speaking generates a landscape of fear with pervasive effects across wildlife communities”
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