…have a distinct set of physiological traits that help with the dangers of high altitude: decreased arterial oxygen content (low levels of oxygen in the blood), increased resting ventilation (rapid breathing while resting), lack of hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction (meaning blood vessels don’t constrict when oxygen content of the blood is low), lower incidence of reduced birth weight, and reduced hemoglobin concentration (hemoglobin is a protein in red blood cells that helps transport oxygen from lungs or gills to the body). Put together, this means that Tibetans have evolved to function with far less oxygen in their blood than other people – perfect for high altitudes with low oxygen.
A new study focuses on this final trait, the reduced hemoglobin concentration. Tibetans have 3.6 grams per deciliter less hemoglobin than other populations. When you go up to the insane altitudes that mountain climbers tend to go for, your body ramps up red blood cell production in order to compensate for the low levels of oxygen. This is why athletes train at high altitude — to get more red blood cells into their system, and transfer oxygen around more efficiently. However, a side effect of this increase is the that your blood increases in viscosity. When it gets really bad, your body is pushing around blood the density of motor oil, something it’s not designed to do. By naturally having much lower hemoglobin levels, people from Tibet (and assumedly Nepal, and other regions in the area) maintain proper blood fluidity.
I hasten to add – none of this undermines the overwhelming academic consensus that the forces of evolutionary selection apply to all living organisms except humans.
ET – A biological system is not the same as a cognitive system. The former operates in a linear fashion where X-gene sets up X-observable physiological property….
ET – you should know better than that. Neither are linear, nor are they distinct from one another. Cognition is utterly dependent on the biological systems that support it.
Testosterone and cognition
Testosterone and race
ET;
The only reason the Bell Curve caused a stir was precisely because Hernstein and Murray said that there were marked differences in the IQ scores of racial groups. Absent that claim there never would have been a controversy in the first place. If you are unaware of that ET, you simply could not have read the book.
“rroe – I’ve explained this before. You simply don’t get it. A biological system is not the same as a cognitive system. The former operates in a linear fashion where X-gene sets up X-observable physiological property.
The human species is unique among all biological organisms in that its cognitive system doesn’t operate this linear direct way. ”
Absolute, unadulterated, bullshit. ET continues to demonstrate that one can spend an entire career as an anthropologist without ever actually understanding the biology underneath it all. Loki understands it, and can explain it. Jema54 understands it, but probably can’t explain it. ET neither understands it, nor can explain it. ET, you don’t have a clue about the biology of species, subspecies and races. Give it up.
kate- what you are referring to, in both instances, are biological not cognitive properties! You are merging the two, the brain and the mind, but this should not be done; they are two completely different systems.
The ability to remember is not a conceptual act but a biological act. BRAIN damage disables the capacity of the brain to set up neurological connections which enable memory. This is not the same as the ability to think within logical relations, which is a property of the MIND.
The relation between two physiological properties, testosterone and prostate cancer has zilch to do with the operation of the brain and mind. I certainly agree that the physiology of different populations can be different; that’s obvious to any biologist, medical doctor, to a forensic anthropologist, etc. Therefore, direct physiological expressions of genetic physiology, such as various diseases, can be found dispersed differently among different populations.
But I don’t see any evidence that the brain, which is physiological, differs among different populations. No evidence whatsoever.
Certainly the MIND, or conceptual constructs of the mind, differ. We see this in different beliefs among populations… but these are amenable to change, because the MIND is not determined by the BRAIN but is a conceptual action enabled..but not determined..by the brain.
There is an enormous amount of research being done on this dual reality of the brain and the mind; how each operates; how they interact; why there are two such different realities.
Take, for example, the journal of Brain and Behavioral Sciences – everything from gender differences in cognition, to metacognition and consciousness, to numerical recognition, to language evolution, to…all focused around the examination of the relation between the brain and the mind..and understanding that the relation is not direct or linear but complex.
The MIND has the capacity to imagine. That gives it a freedom that no gene can allow. That is why it is vital to understand this duality of brain and mind.
“You are merging the two, the brain and the mind, but this should not be done; they are two completely different systems.”
Oh, good grief. I have not the strength.
ET;
How would you explain this.
“Brain Size Differences. Studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) find a correlation of brain size with IQ of about 0.40. Larger brains contain more neurons and synapses and process information faster. Race differences in brain size are present at birth. By adulthood, East Asians average 1 cubic inch more cranial capacity than Whites who average 5 cubic inches more than Blacks.”
Clearly, those anatomical differences would be genetic.
This is fun, eh? ~:D
For myself, I go over to the artificial intelligence people who are trying to do things like get a robot to butter a piece of toast.
There’s one school of thought based on Dr. Marvin Minsky’s work, which has been characterized as “hard AI”. They hypothesize that the mind is a software program running on the hardware of the brain. If you know the fine structure of a given brain, let’s say by means of using the Erik Larsen Super Scanner, then you can replicate that brain as a computer simulation (in principle, anyway) and run a human being on a Turing computer. (Look up Turing computer, that’s a whole education on its own.)
It turns out this approach works well for bugs. Simple analog circuits joining sensors and effectors (like motors, steering etc.) can produce a wide range of bug behavior, from avoidance to hunting to cooperation. Bugs are essentially Turing machinery. So are fish, lizards, slime mold, etc.
This correlation between biology and behavior starts to break down when you get to the higher mammals. The correlation remains powerful, but not -perfect-. Something more is going on.
Now my point is that the “hard AI” model can’t be right, because you can break the hardware and the “software” still runs. The human being remains cognizant and whole in themselves even with really astounding brain damage, like having half their brain removed. They are messed up, their behavior often changes dramatically, but its still that person. The continuity of their being is undisturbed.
Now, genetics can only code for brain hardware. But a human being can change the hardware by training it. The “human being-ness” if you like, transcends both the brain -and- the mind. That which choses is not limited by hardware or software.
Examples, Kate mentions the effect testosterone has on cognition, and Loki mentions the Iowa Gambling Task which diagnoses a particular type of brain disorder. Those things have measurable, observable consequences in the behavior of individuals. And those consequences can be mitigated by those individuals by training. Which they can do on themselves.
That’s part of my job as a neuro-rehab physical therapist, helping people realize they can fix themselves. So having watched a lot of average people people overcome things by sheer will, I have a different perspective on human limitations than what one usually finds in academia.
Introducing a different hypothesis now. If you read Roger Penrose you discover that human mathematicians regularly do things which -in principle- cannot be done by a mathematical algorithm. I can’t reproduce his argument here because its really long, but he shows conclusively that a human being cannot be “software” running on hardware, because human beings do things software can’t do.
Therefore in principle a human being can’t be coded for in DNA. The human being is something that happens after the DNA part does what it does. My way of saying it is, you are bigger than your brain, you are bigger than your mind, you are bigger than your culture.
That’s an observable fact, because people sometimes create things that break out of all that has gone before. Some rare people do it over and over again, like Thomas Edison, or Nicolai Tesla, or Isaac Newton. Other people break out of their culture, out of brain damage, out of their own mental processes. This breakout phenomenon shows Human Beings doing things machinery can’t do.
All of the above indicates to me that people are strongly -influenced- by their biology, but they are not -determined- by it. They are not determined by anything. Free will is The Real Thing (TM). You can transcend it all, and people do that regularly. I’ve seen it, and I’ve done it myself a few times.
That’s why Christianity is not wrong about human nature. People are big.
Apply this thought to the Bell Curve methodology. The statistics create an artifact which does not reflect reality. You can’t take the global IQ of the entire population of Kalahari Bushmen, then use that number to make useful predictions about one particular Bushman today. Even less can you predict how that individual will perform tomorrow.
Its bollocks, basically. Trying to measure a mountain with a thermometer. Don’t believe the hype.
Plus, on a more personal note I find it massively disrespectful to people generally. It seems to me an attempt to demean humanity, reduce us to a commodity encompassed by an IQ score. Its f-ing rude as well as merely incorrect.
I recall seeing a reference to a paper not too long ago regarding the preponderance of intellectuals amongst a certain segment of the Jewish population? Anyone else remember this or have a reference?
Bob c, the problem is you can’t assume those anatomical differences are genetic. They might be, but they are more likely to be due to environmental factors. See my comment at 11:13 pm for variation of brain size in individuals due to being couch potatoes.
I’d also question the bit about larger brains processing faster. I’m unaware of anybody demonstrating that conclusively. Sounds like a speculation, not an observation.
The Phantom;
Anatomical differences can certainly be affected by environmental factors in the short run. However, if those environmental differences are persistent over long periods of time, say 5 or 10 thousand years, they can and do result in change on a genetic level. Genes are not immutable.
As far as larger brains processing faster, it makes sense to me, assuming that the larger brain has more neurons and synapses. Think about modern computer processors as compared to old 486 models. The wiring is far more complex today, to the point that they aren’t just faster, but are able to to do calculations that simply overwhelm the old 486.
kate – you still haven’t explained how and why you consider my conclusions wrong. Your examples of physiological links did not deal with the brain or the mind.
skip – how about explaining exactly how I misunderstand ‘it’? All you are doing is stating your opinion. Substantiate it.
bob c – you must be joking if you are unaware of the criticisms of the Bell Curve’s methodology and conclusions. Check out Gould’s critique, Kamin’s quite blistering criticisms of the speculative data base, the statistical errors, the false equation of correlation with causation, etc. Lemann’s critique, the mismeasurement of education as intelligence, and so on.
bob c- there’s no evidence that brain size determines mental agility.
jcl – don’t equate education and culture with intelligence.
The mind-body problem, i.e., the mind-brain interface, is an ancient conundrum. My view is that the material reality, the biological brain, is not the mind. Others think differently.
Can the mind be reduced to the brain? A lot of comments here, including I think, kate, seem to think that it can be. That’s called ‘monism’ or physicalism or reductionism. See Spinoza and also behaviourists. And of course, the Bell Curve, and R. Lynn’s and P. Rushton’s work. This view considers that all mental activities are reducable to physical attributes of the brain. It’s actually a very mechanical view.
Are they two different systems? I think they are; that’s dualism, although I use a triadic function for my analysis of how the two interact. There’s a lot of work in this area because computer and robotic science is working on trying to figure out how a mechanical system which is necessarily linear can do ‘mental’ things which are non-linear. It doesn’t seem to be mechanical; the mental can’t be reduced to physical steps.
There’s a lot of research in this area on ‘intelligence’ and ‘the devt of information’ and how the brain sets up conceptual anticipatory patterns..and so on.
Obviously, I don’t think that the two perspectives, the monist-mechanical and the dualist-function will agree!
ET, I think Penrose has shown powerfully (if not conclusively) that the mind -can’t- be reduced to brain hardware, nor even an algorithmic “software” running on brain hardware.
I wrote a huge comment about it, but the spam filter seems to have eaten it. Kate, help!
ET;
I’ll see your Gould, Kamin and Lemann with Rushton, Lynn and Jensen. Just because you happen to come down on the side of the former group doesn’t make it so. All we have at this point are different beliefs and theories. There is no hard “proof” of either position. Stop pretending there is.
Bob, there -is- some proof. Have you not been reading the comments? The hard evidence is against Rushton and company.
Earlier you commented about changes over 5 to 10 thousand years. We don’t have brain scans back more than 20-30 years ago for most populations. The number of scans the study you mention is based on is -small-.
Furthermore I have seen a study on people with hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain. Fluid pressure basically expands the fluid ventricles of the brain, and in the process -shrinks- the rest of it. Like, a lot. One particular case was a young woman who led a normal life, had friends, a job, finished school and etc. Her brain was a one centimeter thick layer around the outside of an enormous bubble of water which filled probably half the volume of her skull.
1cc difference between Chinese and white people doesn’t amount to diddly, compared to that.
Larger brains processing faster -seems- reasonable. But since we have no idea how brains process in the first place, we have no idea if that’s true or not.
Besides bob, if Rushton et al are right, Conservatism is wrong. You can’t hold somebody accountable for their actions if their hereditary smaller brain makes them stupid, can you?
Conservatism is built on the premise of free will. Rushton etc. proclaim free will to be an illusion.
Good thing he’s wrong, eh?
bob c – that’s the point. A larger brain is not necessarily a more complex brain. Modern computers, i.e., ‘the chip’ are miniscule while the old ones were massive in size.
bob c- the problem with the people you cite in support of your monist, mechanical view of the mind-brain system, is that their work is not scientific. Rushton, Lynn, and Herrnstein propose conclusions that are not based on hard empirical data. Jensen is a monist, his method IS scientific but it was strongly critiqued by Gould as faulty. The two of them argued for decades with each other.
The question is: whether the mind-brain interaction is direct, i.e., mechanical and furthermore, genetic and heritable – versus whether the mind-brain interaction is INDIRECT, non-mechanical and thus, malleable.
It’s been a basic question since mankind began – and we can see such arguments between Plato and Aristotle, for example.
I happen to reject the mechanical direct link between the two. You support that mechanical monist view.
My research work has been in biosemiotics and physico-semiotics, which is the study of how matter is morphologically ‘formed’ as, not uninformed matter but as information. This transformation of matter obviously involves order, logic, and some form of Mind – even within a one-celled organism.
Within the human species, the existence of the mind and its capacity for symbolic mapping and analysis, suggests to me, that the mind cannot function via a direct connection to the brain, but works within an indirect transformative action, which I understand as a function f(x)=y. The ‘f’ is that non-physical transformative action of the mind.
So, we’ll have to continue to disagree. I work within a view that biological (and physico-chemical) systems are Complex Adaptive Systems. This precludes them being mechanical. As a complex system, there must be some ‘interface’, some transformative action that requires input from a ‘deeper’ or more logical level. It’s too much to explain here, but, the point is, I can’t be convinced of a reductionist mechanical view of the brain and mind.
The Phantom;
Your comments about free will are baffling. Nothing I can remember in the Bell Curve suggested that any group was so low in IQ as to be unable to exercise free will. I stand to be corrected, but I believe that according to law there is a low IQ threshold whereby one is deemed not to be able to comprehend the nature of their acts, but it is way lower than the IQ level that the authors spoke of in relation to any particular group. You’re seriously off base on that issue.
There is no “proof” that exists on either side of this issue. Evidence yes, proof no. We are simply no where close to understanding the full working of the brain. What we have at this point is theories.
Hm. Back to the original article. You are saying that the Tibetans adapt to high altitude by producing less haemoglobin, which then makes their blood less viscous.
But no – your blood’s viscosity isn’t a function of it’s concentration of haemoglobin. It’s controlled by it’s concentration of blood cells. The Tibetans are compensating by damping down the body’s compensation mechanism for adding more haemoglobin by adding more red blood cells.
All good – but there’s a reason why you react by adding more red blood cells. You need to scavenge out more oxygen out of the air to supply it to your body, and that’s what the haemoglobin in the red blood cells is for. So now that you’ve kept your body from over-producing red blood cells, how are you solving the original problem of getting enough oxygen out of the air and to your body if you can’t produce more red blood cells?
bob c, Kate rescued my earlier comment @ 11:03 AM from the bit bucket. Have a go at it and see if the free will thing makes any more sense.
As to the Bell Curve: When somebody says “A gun in the home is 47 times more likely to kill a family member than a robber”, any person who owns a gun or knows about guns will immediately say “no way that’s right.”
That’s what people who understand neurology, population genetics and statistics say when they read the Bell Curve. The methods used by the Bell Curve authors do not allow them to make the conclusions they make. Their data does not support what they say, any more than Kellerman’s data supports his 47 times more likely BS.
Now, if you want to understand the argument better, you car read Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind”, a bunch of stuff by Marvin Minsky, take a course in medical statistics and experiment design, neurophysiology, neuro-rehab, neuro-anatomy, abnormal psychology, and then read up on what’s going on with PET scans and SPECT scans of the human brain, and a few other odds and sods like what I’ve been doing the last 15 years.
Also, understand that I am a reasonably well read dilettante in this issue. There’s a WHOLE lot more going on than what I’ve said here. I doubt I know half of it.
Phantom, I’m quite familiar with Penrose’s ideas owning all of his books that touch on neurology. His brain model is fascinating and I hope that it’s right as it would imply that we have a quantum processor in our wetware and this neatly sidesteps the non-computability problems that arise when one tries to model the brain as a computer simulation implying that a Turing machine can be constructed to model the brain. The problem with Penrose’s quantum brain model is that there is no simple test to validate or disprove it and his suggestion that microtubules are the substrate for quantum computation may be viewed in 20 years in the same way that we currently view Descartes assertion that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul.
Once quantum computers exist, then we can talk about downloading a mind into a computer simulation. The brain functions in a manner that is probably stranger than we can imagine as do biologic systems. Protein folding is another intractable problem from a computational standpoint and there are suggestions that quantum effects are involved in proteins neatly folding into their final configuration. The interface between quantum scale operations and macroscopic structures is being worked out now with all of the bizarreness that quantum theory contains. I have no doubt such phenomena are operating in the brain and it gives us potentially huge power in every brain, but most people are using it in an analogous manner to using a formula 1 racecar to deliver pizza.
Phantom, even insects can’t be modelled as Turing machines because their brains compute differently than a deterministic computer. One insect related problem I remember thinking about last summer was how do wasps find their way back to their nests? We’re dealing with highly complex problem solving even in an organism that has an absolutely miniscule brain.
ET, physiologic systems are non-linear. The only time one finds linear behavior is either in overly simplistic models of physiologic systems or pathology. Plotting glomerular filtration rate in untreated diabetic neuropathy vs time gives a very nice downward sloping straight line and the most uniform heart rates one sees are in patients with heart disease. Normally functioning physiologic systems are usually chaotic.
The reason we’re never going to agree on this issue is because we’re dealing with a “blind men and the elephant” type of problem. Each one of us has a particular area of expertise and is either focused on the elephants trunk, it’s leg, or if one is the MSM, in crawling deeply into the elephants rectum and describing what they find there.
Nothing in the science of race and intelligence has any bearing on free will; chaos theory alone produces free will as one cannot predict the outcome of a system even if one knew all of the relevant parameters for the system at an initial time. One can see the shape of the strange attractor that results and that is it.
Oops, my example should be diabetic nephropathy and not “diabetic neuropathy” as I mistakenly wrote probably influenced unduly by the subject of the discussion.
loki – yes, I agree; even physiological systems are non-linear but they don’t have the amount of freedom that a brain-mind process has.
The physiological mediation of transformative rules between input and output is necessarily limited and constrained. After all, you can’t have the system, whether it be the heart or the ear with a wide latitude of possible activity. This can make it, functionally, mechanical and closed rather than open and free-willed. Furthermore, one can link a genetic causality to a physiological organ.
The brain is very different. As you note, we simply don’t have enough research knowledge to understand what is going on in the brain. But we do know that there are two different realities to deal with. One is the organic entity, the brain; the other is the process of the mind. They don’t match up in any one-to-one correspondence, as do genes with, i.e., organs or diseases.
It’s the tremendous freedom of the mind that is of interest and it is an error, I feel, to consider that it operates within the same limits as physiological organs.
The Brain with or without it’s mind is the most important organ in the body, but then, that is in it’s own opinion.
I am not quite the same as me, but we work together pretty well. We know that the all important brain wouldn’t last long with out the lungs or the heart or the asshole for that matter.
There, I think I have made my point.
Goodnight all.