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February 8, 2008
The Fenimore Cooper of sociobiology
Oddly enough, I've received two unrelated emails attaching articles shooting down hypotheses of the notorious Satoshi Kanazawa: a paper by Kevin Denny in the Journal of Theoretical Biology:
Recently Kanazawa (2005) proposed a generalization of the Trivers–Willard hypothesis which states that parents who possess any heritable trait that increases male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success will have more male offspring. . . . This note shows that analysing the same data somewhat differently leads to very different conclusions.
and one by Vittorio Girotto and Katya Tentori in Mind & Society:
According to Kanazawa (Psychol Rev 111:512–523, 2004), general intelligence, which he considers as a synonym of abstract thinking, evolved specifically to allow our ancestors to deal with evolutionary novel problems while conferring no advantage in solving evolutionary familiar ones. We present a study whereby the results contradict Kanazawa’s hypothesis by demonstrating that performance on an evolutionary novel problem (an abstract reasoning task) predicts performance on an evolutionary familiar problem (a social reasoning task).
These, on top of other debunkings of this work by Volscho, Freese, and others, makes me think that Kanazawa is actually serving a useful role in the fields of biology and sociology by evoking such interesting rebuttals.
P.S. I probably should stop bringing this stuff up--it's just that I got those two emails one right after the other. As David Weakliem and I discuss in our paper, Kanazawa's work is not particularly interesting in itself except as an example of genuine statistical challenges that arise in the estimation of very small effects. Basically, the multiple comparisons problem in action, but with a twist in that Kanazawa has been successful enough at getting his ideas out there that he's attracted debunkers. Presumably, there's lots of stuff like this out there in the scientific literature that nobody even notices. In studying these problems, I'd like to think that I'm contributing to the search for better methods of estimating small effects, not simply making fun of the errors of non-statisticians.
It's also interesting to me that biologists and economists seem to fall for this stuff, while sociologists and psychologists see the flaws right away. Presumably because sociologists and psychologists have lots of experience studying small effects in the context of individual variation.
Posted by Andrew at February 8, 2008 5:31 PM
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Comments
Posted by: Cosma at February 9, 2008 9:22 AM.
Cosma,
Denny's article is in Journal of Theoretical Biology 250 (2008) 752–753.
Girotto and Tentori's is in Mind & Society (in press).
The articles were emailed to me and I'm not sure if it's ok to post them.
Posted by: Andrew ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 9, 2008 8:52 PM.
It's a bit flippant to state: "...biologists and economists seem to fall for this stuff." I see that Kanazawa's work is published in biology journals, but economists are for the most part very well trained in stats/econometrics.
Posted by: Jack at February 13, 2008 12:33 PM.
Jack,
I was flippant only because I don't exactly know how to be "snarky" . . . Seriously, though, I agree that economists are serious about statistics. But here I'm actually talking about the substance of Kanazawa's claims. Some economists (and some biologists, too) are suckers for this sort of "schoolyard evolutionary biology"--the idea that boys are different from girls in some area because of what life was life when we were swinging in the trees, running away from saber-toothed tigers, etc. I think that a lot of economists and biologists will suspend their natural skepticism and just accept such results. It's my impression that, in contrast, sociologists and psychologists, perhaps due to their experience with studying individual variation, are more aware of the potential problems in this sort of research.
Posted by: Andrew at February 13, 2008 6:22 PM.
Posted by: Simon G. at March 19, 2008 4:25 PM.