Scientist Bruce Lahn Did Honest Work on Genetics, Intelligence, and Race; Racist, Marxist, Thugs Responded by Chasing Him Out of the Field; and the Wall Street Journal Supported Them!

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

I thank the colleague who sent me this article.

This article is a travesty. I can’t emphasize enough how disappointed I am in its author, Antonio Regalado, unless an editor at WSJ or the CST tampered with it. He presents scientific frauds like the late Stephen Jay Gould, and all matter of living political hacks, as if they were the good guys, while insinuating that research that is uncontroversial within the field of intelligence were somehow “Nazism.” I can’t believe that Regalado had no idea that he was turning the truth upside down.
 

Chicago Sun Times
June 18, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition

A University of Chicago professor has reached some uncomfortable conclusions about . . .Intelligence, genetics and race: Bruce Lahn's claims about the evolution of the human brain have sparked a furor

BYLINE: Antonio Regalado, Wall Street Journal

SECTION: CONTROVERSY; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 2357 words

Last September, Bruce Lahn, a professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago, stood before a packed lecture hall and reported the results of a new DNA analysis: He had found signs of recent evolution in the brains of some people, but not of others.

It was a triumphant moment for the young scientist. He was up for tenure and his research was being featured in back-to-back articles in the country's most prestigious science journal. Yet today, Lahn said he is moving away from the research. ''It's getting too controversial,'' he said.

Lahn had touched a raw nerve in science: race and intelligence.

What Lahn told his audience was that genetic changes over the past several thousand years might be linked to brain size and intelligence. He flashed maps that showed the changes had taken hold and spread widely in Europe, Asia and the Americas, but weren't common in sub-Saharan Africa.

Web sites and magazines promoting white ''racialism'' quickly seized on Lahn's suggestive scientific snapshot. One magazine that blames black and Hispanic people for social ills hailed his discovery as ''the moment the antiracists and egalitarians have dreaded.''

Lahn has drawn sharp fire from other leading genetics researchers. They say the genetic differences he found may not signify any recent evolution -- and even if they do, it is too big a leap to suggest any link to intelligence.

''This is not the place you want to report a weak association that might or might not stand up,'' said Francis Collins, director of the genome program at the National Institutes of Health.

Several scientific groups have set out to disprove or challenge Lahn's discoveries. His own university now said it is abandoning a patent application it filed to cover a DNA-based intelligence test that drew on his work.

NEW RESEARCH RAISES TENSIONS

[The research doesn’t “raise tensions,” the anti-scientific thugs do. This is like black racists terrorizing whites, and blaming “racial tensions.”]

As scientific tools for probing genes become increasingly powerful, research into human differences has exploded. Most of the time, scientists are looking for clues about the causes of disease. But some research is raising tensions [bull] as scientists such as Lahn venture into studies of genetic differences in behavior or intelligence.

Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin, criticizes Lahn for implying a conclusion similar to The Bell Curve, a controversial 1994 best seller by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The book argued that the lower average performance by African Americans on IQ tests had a genetic component and wasn't solely the result of social factors. Referring to Lahn and his co-authors, Ossorio said: ''It's exactly what they were getting at. There was a lot of hallway talk. People said he's doing damage to the whole field of genetics.''

[Doing honest scientific research cannot possibly “do damage” to the field in question. The “hallway talkers” are either anti-scientific, Marxist hacks or cowards.]

Lahn, 37, said his research papers, published in Science last September, offered no view on race and intelligence. He thinks it's possible that some populations will have more advantageous intelligence genes than others. And he thinks that ''society will have to grapple with some very difficult facts'' as scientific data accumulate. Yet Lahn, who left China after participating in prodemocracy protests, said intellectual ''police'' in the United States make such questions difficult to pursue.

Scientists think that a small group of anatomically modern humans struck out from Africa probably less than 100,000 years ago. After arriving on the Eurasian land mass, they continued to split up and eventually humans populated nearly every corner of the globe. One use of genetic research is to probe how each group evolved differently after becoming isolated from the others. Recently created genetic maps of people of African, Asian and European ancestry make that research easier.

For instance, researchers have found that most Europeans have a genetic variant that lets them fully digest milk as adults. The variant is much less common in Africa and Asia, where lactose intolerance is widespread. Scientists theorize that it spread quickly among Europeans because drinking milk from domesticated dairy animals conferred a nutritional advantage. Similar evolutionary reasoning may explain why many people in malaria-prone parts of Africa carry [e.g., sickle cell] gene variants linked to malaria resistance.

INTERPRETATIONS BASED ON PREJUDICE

Other research is starting to explain variations in human skin color and hair texture. But scientists tense up when it comes to doing the same sort of research on the brain. [Only the most important field of genetic research!] Sociologist [Read: Marxist hack] Troy Duster, who studies the use of racial categories by geneticists, worries that scientists will interpret data in ways that fit their prejudices. [That’s a lie. He is afraid that “scientists will interpret data” like scientists, rather than racial socialists.] He cites the sorry history of phrenology, a study of skull shapes popular in the 19th century, and other pseudoscientific techniques used to categorize people as inferior. ''Science doesn't transcend the social milieu,'' said Duster, of New York University.

[Troy Duster is a fraud. He is clearly speaking based on the scientific hoax book, The Mismeasure of Man, by communist Stephen Jay Gould.]

Lahn traces his interest in human differences back to his youth in China. Foreigners there used to have a special currency that they could use at stores closed to ordinary Chinese. ''I wondered why people were different, and why Chinese were at the bottom,'' he said.

By the time violence struck Tiananmen Square in 1989, Lahn, the son of two physicists, was an undergraduate at Harvard University. He channeled his curiosity into genetics and built his reputation with a groundbreaking study of the Y chromosome. After taking a post at the University of Chicago in 2000, Lahn won a prestigious fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The fellowship pays most of his research bills and has allowed him to pursue creative projects, often on attention-grabbing subjects. One study looked at how promiscuity among female chimpanzees, gorillas and humans affected the evolution of a gene that makes sperm sticky.

''Bruce is in a hurry to be famous,'' said Martin Kreitman, a Chicago colleague who is friendly with him.

BRAIN SIZE LINKED TO IQ

Henry Harpending, a University of Utah anthropology professor who recently published a theory on why Ashkenazi Jews tend to have high IQs, said Lahn once suggested they co-author an article for Scientific American about the genetics of behavior, in which they could explain why ''Chinese are boring.''

''I think that Bruce doesn't understand political correctness,'' Harpending said. Lahn said he only vaguely recalls the conversation but confirms that he wonders whether during China's imperial times there was ''some selection'' against rebellious individuals.

In recent years, Lahn has become interested in why the human brain is so large and complex. Although humans and chimpanzees share about 96 percent of their DNA, human brains are about four times larger. Even today, researchers can find a correlation, on average, between people's brain size and their IQ. [Sounds like that evil phrenology to me!]

Lahn's group zeroed in on the role of two genes, called ASPM and microcephalin, that are known to have a role in brain size. Humans with defective copies of either gene are born with brains only about one-third the normal size.

Studying DNA from several species, the Chicago team found that, over millions of years, the genes had undergone more rapid change in monkeys, apes and humans than in other animals. Their next step was to determine if evolution had continued in modern humans. Lahn's graduate students began decoding DNA from 1,184 people belonging to 59 groups from around the world, including Bedouins, Pima Indians and French-speaking Basques.

The data showed that evolution had continued in recent millennia. A statistical analysis of DNA patterns suggested that new mutations in each of the two brain-related genes had spread quickly through some human populations. Evidently, these mutations were advantageous among those populations -- just as the genetic variant promoting milk digestion was advantageous to early Europeans. Lahn and his team further observed that the new mutations are found most frequently outside of Africa.

What the data didn't say was how the mutations were advantageous. Perhaps the genes play a role outside of the brain or affect a brain function that has nothing to do with intelligence. [Yeah, right.]

While acknowledging that the evidence doesn't permit a firm conclusion, Lahn favors the idea that the advantage conferred by the mutations was a bigger and smarter brain. He found ways to suggest that in his papers. One mutation, which according to his estimates arose about 40,000 years ago, coincided with the first art found in caves, the paper observed. The other mutation, present mostly in people from the Middle East and Europe, and estimated to be 5,800 years old, coincided with the ''development of cities and written language.''

That suggested brain evolution might have occurred in tandem with important cultural changes. Yet because neither variant is common in sub-Saharan Africa, there was another potential implication: Some groups had been left out.

[In other words, Lahn’s research threatened to explain why sub-Saharan blacks never invented the wheel or written langiage.]

The dean of the University of Chicago's medical school, James L. Madara, said he approached Lahn before the papers were published. They discussed whether the report could be taken out of context.

''Let the chips lie [fall] where they may,'' Madara said he told Lahn. As long as the ideas and data are clear, ''don't worry about the implications,'' the dean said.

CRITICS UNIMPRESSED BY LAHN'S WORK

John Easton, head of media relations at the medical school, said his office was worried the work could be misinterpreted and abused by racist groups. Easton borrowed a copy of The Mismeasure of Man, the famous attack on IQ tests and brain-volume measurements by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Easton helped Lahn with talking points about his research.

[Let’s linger on this John Easton individual. He derived talking points for legitimate scientific research from a work of scientific quackery. To call Gould’s book “famous” is like calling Mein Kampf “the famous political treatise by Adolf Hitler.”]

''We said, 'Don't be shy about telling people what it doesn't mean,' " Easton recalled.

Easton said Lahn ''makes us nervous'' but ''with Bruce we know it's not driven by personal bias.''

[Unlike the anti-scientific garbage peddled by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, the late Gould, et al.]

That is because Asians ''don't score at the top'' in the frequency of the brain-gene mutations, Easton said.

[So, according to Easton, the moment an Asian or white researcher finds something in which his group looks good, his research is invalidated? Thuis, if I as an Ashkenazi Jew, point out that the Ashkenazim average 12-15 points higher in IG than white gentiles, my religious identity invalidates my claim? That’s not science but ad hominem attacks elevated to scientific arbiters. And so, Oddly enough, no one ever plays this same stupid game with blacks or Hispanics. In their cases, the opposite game is played: they are granted blanket authority over “science” about their groups.]

Lahn's paper and talk at his university -- in which he also claimed the gene variants were probably linked to higher IQ -- provoked a strong reaction both on and off campus. Collins, head of the federal genome program, obtained advance copies of the papers and circulated them to top population geneticists. He wasn't persuaded by the statistical evidence for evolution and criticized Lahn's work in media interviews.

The papers won wide attention among researchers, and several responded by setting out to test Lahn's findings. Scientists at the Broad Institute, a top genetics center in Cambridge, Mass., have been reanalyzing some of the data and say they may challenge Lahn's finding that evolution acted on ASPM, one of the genes. Broad's influential chief, Eric Lander, said scientists probing recent evolution run the risk of ''seeing a difference, and saying there is a story to fit it.''

A team at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently tested whether the gene variants actually affect brain size. They studied DNA from 120 people whose brain volumes they had already measured using magnetic-resonance imaging. They didn't find any difference. ''It certainly makes you want to look at other explanations'' of what the variations mean, said Roger P. Woods, a UCLA brain-mapping expert who reported the results in May.

Some of Lahn's co-authors are also uncomfortable with the work. Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Maryland who provided DNA from remote African groups, said she is bothered how one paper drew a link between the genetic changes and the rise of civilization. She thinks it is too early to reach any conclusions about why the changes spread and said it is ''very simplistic'' to imagine that a single gene could have a major effect on complex cultural traits.

Several groups of scientists have sent letters to Science criticizing the papers. Lahn prepared responses, sending one earlier this month, but Tishkoff wasn't willing to add her name to them.

''You have to follow the data wherever it leads, but speculating [in politically incorrect ways] in this field is dangerous,'' said Spencer Wells, head of the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project, a five-year, $40 million effort to collect DNA samples from 100,000 indigenous people. Wells said the project team might try to find evolutionary reasons for physical differences such as why Danes are taller than pygmies. But Wells said National Geographic won't study the brain. ''I think there is very little evidence of IQ differences between races,'' he said.

[Spencer Wells is a bald-faced liar. This is flat-earther stuff. In psychometrics, racial IQ differences are not at all controversial. They’ve been shown by hundreds of studies over the course of a century.]


LAHN STANDS BY HIS WORK

The accuracy of Lahn's work and his views on race came up in his tenure review last fall, said a person familiar with it. After debate, his department voted unanimously in his favor, according to another faculty member. A more senior committee agreed and awarded Lahn the post of full professor, although it wasn't unanimous, this person said.

[Lucky for him, he wasn’t white, or things might have gone differently.]

Lahn stands by his work but said that because of the controversy he is moving into other projects. Earlier this year, Easton of the university's media department forwarded to Lahn a paper by two economists looking at the IQ of infants of different races. Lahn wasn't interested.

[Since you can’t test infant IQ, this sound very dubious.]

''I'm surprised anyone studies this,'' he replied in an e-mail.

[The writer may be conflating Lahn’s looking askance at a dubious research program with looking askance at intelligence testing, as such.]

Lahn said he isn't as eager as he once was to continue studying brain differences. P. Thomas Schoenemann, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, said that at Lahn's request he collected DNA from 25 people whose brain sizes he had studied previously. But the two scientists haven't been in touch recently.

The university's patent office is also having second thoughts. Its director, Alan Thomas, said his office is dropping a patent application filed last year that would cover using Lahn's work as a DNA-based intelligence test. ''We really don't want to end up on the front page . . . for doing eugenics,'' Thomas said.

[The “second thoughts” are purely political, and anti-scientific.]

More recently, Lahn said he was moved when a student asked him whether some knowledge might not be worth having. It is a notion to which he has been warming. Lahn said he once tried testing himself for which version of the brain genes he has. The experiment's outcome was blurry ''but it wasn't looking good,'' he said. He hasn't tried testing himself again.


GRAPHIC:
Color Photo: (See microfilm for photo description).; Color
Photo: Al Podgorski, Sun-Times; University of Chicago genetics professor Bruce Lahn is moving away from his own research into brain size and genetics. He says it's "too controversial."

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

DOCUMENT-TYPE: News

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper