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Arthur Jensen, boxing, chronometrics, Duke of Leinster, dynamic g, fighting, Joe Louis, Leon Kamin, Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, Reaction time
Recently self-proclaimed BGI study participant and outspoken HBD critic “Duke of Leinster” claimed on this blog that World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Joe Louis, was considered mentally slow by his friends. The Duke felt this was another example of intelligence evaluation being wrong, since the Duke felt Louis had a big head and because the Duke felt that a mentally slow person could never be the greatest boxer. I looked at the wikipedia page on Louis and couldn’t find much about his intelligence, other than the fact that he had a speech impediment and spoke very little before about age six.
However this is the third World Heavyweight Boxing champion I’ve heard of being mentally slow. The first was Muhammad Ali who according to the book A Question of Intelligence by Daniel Seligman scored an IQ equivalent of 78 on his armed services exam. The second was Mike Tyson whose school file classified him as borderline “mentally retarded” which typically means an IQ in the 70-79 range.
What are the odds that three of the world’s heavy weight boxing champions had allegedly such low IQ’s? That can’t be a coincidence. It implies a NEGATIVE correlation between IQ and boxing skill, meaning low IQ people are actually better boxers than high IQ people. But that makes no sense. Intelligence can be defined as the mental ability to adapt whatever situation you’re in to your advantage and few situations require as much real time quick thinking and mental adaptability as physical combat. Obviously we shouldn’t expect a high correlation between IQ and boxing ability because it’s primary a physical ability, not a mental one, and it’s a skill developed through much practice, but we also shouldn’t expect a NEGATIVE correlation between IQ and boxing ability.
So how do we make sense of all these allegedly low IQ boxing champions? For starters an IQ of 78 is actually kind of high when you consider that these boxers were recruited from the poorest, most culturally deprived communities in America. Although scholar Arthur Jensen became famous for claiming that IQ is highly genetic, even he admits that there’s an almost invisible segment of America that lives in environments so bad, that environment actually does matter a lot for this small population. Jensen studied culturally deprived children in the rural South and found that while they started with a respectable IQ of 85, their IQ’s slowly regressed to 70 by adolescence. Something in the environment was dragging their IQ’s down. The obvious suspect was poor schooling, but since even non-verbal IQ showed this massive decline, it may have been a decline in real intelligence, not academic skills only. In a previous post I discussed a groundbreaking theory that reaction time training improves the dynamic component of intelligence, so perhaps the culturally deprived see their IQ’s drop because they lack video games, television, and fast driving parents who take them on chronometrically stimuating road trips on freeways.
So boxers are recruited from cultures so deprived they average IQ 70, but since heavyweight boxing requires a lot of muscle and a violent personality (you must assault people for a living), and since both weight/height ratio and violence are related to low IQ, those who are recruited to box are even lower than 70; perhaps IQ 60, on average. So when you consider that boxers are recruited from the most culturally deprived, muscular, and violent segment of society, IQ is actually a huge advantage in boxing, because IQ 78 is probably much higher than the average for culturally deprived muscular violent people.
However even though IQ 78 is relatively high, it seems low for Muhammad Ali. Scholar Charles Murray felt the score was believable, but many others beg to differ, for example, scholar Tony Buzan ranks Ali as the 32nd greatest Genius of all time! I wouldn’t go that far, but Ali’s IQ of 78 was likely spuriously lowered by the fact that he was dyslexic (and opposed to joining the army) and Tyson’s IQ was likely spuriously lowered by the fact that he couldn’t read.
I also think that once these men started boxing, their IQ’s may have increased because complex reaction time has been hypothesized to improve the dynamic component of intelligence, though I don’t know if this is true or not.
Jensen reportedly claimed that Ali had an average reaction time, however scholar Leon Kamin claimed Jensen was wrong, and that Ali’s reaction speed actually approached the physiological limit of the human species!
Brain Size 
“For starters and IQ of 78 is actually kind of high when you consider that these boxers were recruited from the poorest, most culturally deprived communities in America.”
Is this correct? I’m reminded of a Penn study run by a pediatrician named Hallam Hurt that focuses of poverty and gestational cocaine exposure:
http://articles.philly.com/2013-07-22/news/40709969_1_hallam-hurt-so-called-crack-babies-funded-study
“The researchers consistently found no significant differences between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls. At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group.”
Most (if not all) of the people in this study, whether they were crack babies or part of the impoverished control group, are black, so the depression in IQ scores isn’t as significant as that quote makes it sound. According to this study, abject poverty and gestational cocaine exposure don’t seem to be substantially depressing the IQs of blacks.
You’re talking about a prenatal effect on IQ that is largely fixed for life and I’m talking about a cumulative cultural effect on IQ that slowly drags IQ down every year from childhood to adolescence.
The control group with the average IQ of 81.9 were blacks at or below the poverty line in Philadelphia. They weren’t prenatally exposed to cocaine and the study participants who were had an average IQ of 79. The cumulative cultural effect of growing up poor and black in Philadelphia doesn’t seem to be depressing black IQ much, according to this study.
How old were they? Jensen found that culturally deprived kids in the rural south started with IQ’s of 85, but regressed to IQ 70 by 16 or so. Maybe the kids in the study you cite will decline with age too. Also, what test did they take and what year were they tested? A lot of studies use old IQ tests which give inflated scores because of the Flynn effect. For example, a study in 2004 that finds an average IQ of 79 on the WISC-R is really reporting an IQ below 70 because the WISC-R was published circa 1974 and scores have been improving by 2 or 3 points a decade. They need to use the most up to date tests like the WISC-IV.
Larry Holmes was also one of the most dominating heavyweights.
Billy Crystal made fun of how stupid he was. “I like eggs…”
and as can be seen the Ashkenazi Cosell has a smaller head than Ali.
While both the Klitschko brothers have PhDs, they are Ukrainians after all.
Boxing became whiter with the fall of the Soviet Union and the consequent large number of impoverished eastern Europeans.
Tyson is an interesting case.
I’m sure he wouldn’t score very high on an IQ test, but I’ve always found him to be surprisingly smart in interviews. As pro athletes go I’ve found him interesting and impressive.
Tyson’s documentary got great reviews. Since most of the film was just him talking, that may suggest he had some smart things to say.
If the average IQ across broad swathes of the world is around 80 it upends the question of why are IQs low in some areas to why are there some areas with average IQs substantially above 80 (..As Rushton noted at ISIR about a decade ago.) In modern environments high IQs are associated with lots of advantages in life (Gottfredson). But in environments where humans are living more closely to the ancestral conditions of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness perhaps those advantages largely or even entirely disappear. i.e. there is no or insufficient selection pressure to raise IQs much beyond the world average. I know of one attempt to see if “high” IQ among hunter-horticulturists was associated with more favorable life history variables such as reproductive success — no such advantages were found though admittedly the sample size was quite small. Still, perhaps there are a different set of selection pressures in modern environments giving rise to rising IQs relative to more ancestral conditions. (Perhaps a kind of weaker equivalent to Cochran’s thinking about the Ashkenazi, and also leaving aside issues of nutrition, disease-burden, exogamy patterns and all the other Flynn Effect hypotheses etcetera.) If so then the paradox of fast reaction times associated with boxing with IQs in the typical world average range might start to make some sense as selection pressures over the habitats associated with more ancestral type conditions might have operated to keep the reaction times “tuned up” as much as possible but IQ above the world average might not have been selected for so much. (In the absence of killing off much of the population, selection pressures for one trait often comes at the expense of selection pressure on other traits. So an issue here is to get at just how related ~are~ the traits of reactions times and IQs.) Questions: Do reaction times vary with IQs in hunter-horticulturalists (or some proxy groups) the way they do with populations living in more technological environments? Can we do some sort of replication along the lines of the Gottfredson paper on the benefits of higher IQ but with hunter-horticulturalists and with a large sample size? (How does all this relate somehow, if at all, to Victorian reaction times?) (And then there is Jensen’s comment on observing the functionality of low-IQ children at play in a schoolyard and how that relates to choosing appropriate reference groups… but I’ve written and speculated on the basis of my understanding too much already.)
Yes. Perhaps.
There are two problems with IQ (at least):
1. The IQ test appropriate to Danes is inappropriate for Pygmies. But at the same time one can imagine that there is a test which would distinguish the clever Pygmies from the not so clever Pygmies.
2. It isn’t clear that the trait which IQ tests measure is an accident or substantial in the language of Aristotle. That is, it may be that it is no more than one’s fitness for formal education, something which is only recentIy a universal environment.
And it isn’t clear if the projection of the individual’s test scores onto his population’s principal component vector converges. That is, it isn’t clear whether intelligence can be measured in an unambiguous way.
Hereditism could be respectable. But it isn’t, because hereditists are in fact quite stupid.
I’m with Chris Langan on a Manhattan Project for birth control and eugenics. But the criteria of the hereditists aren’t good enough.
Questions: Do reaction times vary with IQs in hunter-horticulturalists (or some proxy groups) the way they do with populations living in more technological environments?
It hasn’t been well researched, but I think the default assumption should be that IQ has the same correlation with reaction time in all human societies.
Can we do some sort of replication along the lines of the Gottfredson paper on the benefits of higher IQ but with hunter-horticulturalists and with a large sample size?
I think IQ is advantegous in all cultures (since it’s the ability to adapt), but much more so in technological cultures.
(How does all this relate somehow, if at all, to Victorian reaction times?)
In the Victorian era IQ (or IQ impairing mutations) was often the difference between life or death because there was limited safety nets & health care. Such natural selection kept simple reaction time & genetic IQ sharp.
(And then there is Jensen’s comment on observing the functionality of low-IQ children at play in a schoolyard and how that relates to choosing appropriate reference groups…
Yes, low IQ people from low IQ families & communities tend to be biologically normal & thus higher functioning than equally low IQ people from high IQ communities because the latter often have an organic impairment that depresses all of intelligence (and much more) and not simply general intelligence.
but I’ve written and speculated on the basis of my understanding too much already.)
You can never write & speculate too much. The more the better!
yeah an IQ of 70-80 seems about right for a typical professional boxer
grey enlightenment, you might be correct about the IQ’s of boxers. Ali is interesting because on the one hand he seems quite verbally quick, but on the other hand, his boastfulness seems very childlike, suggesting a low mental age.
I would like to read more about the debate over his reaction time.
A large head might be an advantage in boxing for reasons other than intelligence. A large head is probably correlated with a thick neck. A thicker neck gives a boxer the ability to better absorb blows to the head without being concussed or knocked out.
You can see this most clearly in the undersized heavyweight boxers like Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson. The one part of their body which is clearly overdeveloped for their size is the neck.
Pincher, I thought you were going to say that a big head was advantageous for head butting which I’ve wondered may have selected for head size in human evolution independently of intelligence, although Jensen has noted that a large head is a liability in virtually every way except intelligence, partly because it increases the odds of being fatally wounded since its a large target.
Another factor independent of one’s current intelligence is cognitive reserve. Boxers endure a lot of blows to the head so a small brained boxer might go senile by 28 from all the brain damage while a big brained boxer could continue to slug it out into his 40s
Cognitive reserve may even prevent one from getting knocked out because there’s enough extra brain mass to never slip out of awakeness, even when being punched; but I’m not sure if it works that way
Not head butting.
Neck size.
Every time someone hits you, your head jiggles against your cranium. This is not a pleasant experience, which is why few men box regularly.
If the punch is hard enough to snap your head back, your brain will hit your skull even harder – hard enough to occasionally knock you out. This is not advantageous in a sport that absolutely requires you to stay awake longer than your opponent. This is why boxers constantly work on their neck muscles.
Hence…
And this…
While it’s not impossible for a pinhead to have a large upper back and neck, just as it’s not impossible for him to have a high IQ, I’m sure there’s a strong correlation between head size and the size of the neck.
“Jensen has noted that a large head is a liability in virtually every way except intelligence, partly because it increases the odds of being fatally wounded since its a large target.”
I’m not sure about that. Is there any creature in the animal world that has evolved a smaller head to better endure combat?
Apart from battles, however, Jensen’s still wrong. People with big heads generally take better photos and do better in the movies because a larger head enhances facial features and makes the big-headed person more photo- and telegenic. Small-headed people look strange on screen and on the stage.
Think of Jay Leno, FDR, Oprah, Kelsey Grammar, JFK and a host of other celebrities and charismatic politicians with large domes.
I’m not sure about that. Is there any creature in the animal world that has evolved a smaller head to better endure combat?
It’s very difficult to evolve a smaller head without also evolving a lower intelligence & since intelligence is the ability to adapt & all organisms evolve to adapt, the physical benefits of decreased crania are not worth the cognitive costs. But when mutations that increase intelligence without increasing head size finally appear, they are extremely useful and have probably been hyper-selected in the last 10,000 years of human evolution.
Apart from battles, however, Jensen’s still wrong. People with big heads generally take better photos and do better in the movies because a larger head enhances facial features and makes the big-headed person more photo- and telegenic. Small-headed people look strange on screen and on the stage.
Think of Jay Leno, FDR, Oprah, Kelsey Grammar, JFK and a host of other celebrities and charismatic politicians with large domes.
It is true that a lot of TV talk show hosts have big heads, but I don’t think that’s at all related to big heads being telegenic. Rather it’s probably because (1) tall people are more telegenic & respected & tall people have bigger heads on average, and (2) talk show hosting is moderately g loaded because you generally need to be funny, witty, articulate, knowledgeable, savvy, coherent & succinct extemporaneously.
It’s very difficult to evolve a smaller head without also evolving a lower intelligence & since intelligence is the ability to adapt & all organisms evolve to adapt, the physical benefits of decreased crania are not worth the cognitive costs. But when mutations that increase intelligence without increasing head size finally appear, they are extremely useful and have probably been hyper-selected in the last 10,000 years of human evolution.
Forget about humans for the moment. Jensen says that large heads are a liability in every way except for increased intelligence and that having a large head increases your odds of being fatally wounded. You’ve now established that as your sine qua non for all life.
But there are numerous animal species which have evolved to fight pitched battles against each other and to take down often dangerous prey. They’ve evolved large horns, claws, fangs, tusks, etc., to help them win those encounters.
Is there any evidence that having a large head was detrimental to that evolution, as Jensen’s comment suggests? I see none. The lions with the biggest heads probably often have the biggest fangs and biggest claws. The buffalo with the biggest heads probably have the biggest horns. The bears with the biggest heads probably have the capability to put on the most bulk. There were bigger species of lions, buffalo, and bears in the past, but I’ve never heard of any evidence that they evolved to be smaller in order to avoid head fatalities when taking on rivals and taking down prey.
So if it’s NOT true for other animals species in which intelligence has not been as strongly selected for as it has been in humans, even though these creatures are far more likely to fight in order to live, why should we believe Jensen’s comment that the increased size of a man’s head increases his chance of being fatally injured in battle?
Jensen was a very silly man.
(After beating Brazil losing to Italy was unexpected and “heartbreaking”.)
The Zizou headbutt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF4iWIE77Ts
And I’m sure it had something to do with RACE, or the perception of race, even though Zidane is likely no less Caucasian (no more African) than Materazzi.
“It is true that a lot of TV talk show hosts have big heads, but I don’t think that’s at all related to big heads being telegenic. Rather it’s probably because (1) tall people are more telegenic & respected & tall people have bigger heads on average, and (2) talk show hosting is moderately g loaded because you generally need to be funny, witty, articulate, knowledgeable, savvy, coherent & succinct extemporaneously.”
I was talking much more broadly than about talk show hosts. But of the talk show hosts I mentioned, Leno is only 5’11” and Oprah Winfrey 5’7″, neither of which is tall.
Also, I don’t think FDR’s height helped his charisma, given that he was sitting down for all of his public appearances. In fact, most TV and movie stars’ height is probably unrelated to their glamour, but not unrelated to their head size.
Take a look at this photo of Herbert Hoover and FDR together.
Hoover’s IQ was almost certainly no lower than FDR’s and perhaps substantially higher. He was an engineer and successful businessman. But he looks to be the less attractive man in the photo, and I think that judgment would hold up even if you were to ask people to judge them who knew nothing about either man or the circumstances of that photo.
Yes IIRC Hoover had a big head and FDR not so big. (And another thing, Hoover lived a long time. IIRC he died after all the presidents who followed him until Nixon.)
I remember telling my Aunt’s husband, who is one of those “psychological traits are like height” people (he was a biology major), that Ali had such a low IQ. He laughed. He couldn’t believe it.
But then one boxing reporter said Ali was all show. If you got to know him he was extremely boring.
I think this demonstrates both that subjective judgement of intelligence level doesn’t correspond with IQ and that IQ tests do “really” underestimate the intelligence of some people.
No. I recalled incorrectly.
FDR had quite a large head. Though it had the shape of those with small heads.
And Hoover died before Truman and Eisenhower.
See how stupid I am Pinky.
I know what it was. Hoover is the third or fourth longest lived president. He died at 90. Only Reagan and Ford have bested him.
But I agree with Pinky, there should be more politicians like Hoover. He was unfairly maligned I think. FDR’s policies failed too. It took WW II to get the country working again.
So if it’s NOT true for other animals species in which intelligence has not been as strongly selected for as it has been in humans, even though these creatures are far more likely to fight in order to live, why should we believe Jensen’s comment that the increased size of a man’s head increases his chance of being fatally injured in battle?
For starters, intelligence has been selected for in every animal to some degree, so every animal would have to sacrifice intelligence in order to evolve smaller heads & so head size could be a liability in non-human combat, it’s just that stupidity is an even bigger liability so small heads don’t evolve.
But Jensen was talking specifically about human evolution & humans fight very differently from beasts because we’re bipedal & use tools. While animals actually use their heads as weapons some times (ramming their horns into other animals) & thus head size may perhaps be occasionally advantageous in its own right, primitive incipient humans presumably through rocks and swung clubs at one another, so a bigger head made a bigger target that was easier for enemies to hit.
Pincher, one can always cherry pick examples of big headed telegenic/photogenic people but someone did an analysis of celeb hat sizes, and found them to be no bigger than normal on average. I haven’t analyzed the data myself, but such databases exist:
http://www.baronhats.com/index.php/celebrity-hat-sizes
Here’s an interesting quote an anonymous person wrote on the internet.
The average man’s hat size is 7 3/8 according to hats.com. There is a pretty big database of celebrity hat sizes from Baron’s Hats. (http://www.baronhats.com/hatsize…) After removing women, non-actors, and non-humans (Charles McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd), I find that average hat size is 7 3/8 with standard deviation of .19
You seem to appreciate my argument, so the following points are just to follow up and reinforce some lines of reasoning.
You write:
“For starters, intelligence has been selected for in every animal to some degree, so every animal would have to sacrifice intelligence in order to evolve smaller heads & so head size could be a liability in non-human combat, it’s just that stupidity is an even bigger liability so small heads don’t evolve.”
Yes, those creatures would have to evolve smaller heads, but then some creatures do evolve smaller heads, including some lines of hominids.
So if Jensen’s speculation is correct – that larger head size increases the odds for a fatal encounter – we would expect the direction of adaptation for skull size in some aggressive animals to occasionally decrease rather than just increase or stay the same. It would depend on the tradeoff.
We also know that the evolutionary pathways for several animals show that some species have adapted larger skulls to accommodate larger horns – not for intelligence, but for battle. This, too, seems to contradict Jensen’s claim.
I’ve never heard anyone say, “As this species became more aggressive during its evolutionary history, its head got smaller to protect it in fights.”
That’s not to say it hasn’t happened, but I’ve never heard of it. I imagine the cheetah’s head got smaller as its body became more streamlined, for example, but obviously that was to make the big cat faster in the chase, not to protect it in fights.
And there’s this:
The Evolution of Horn-Like Organs
It would appear, then, that scientists believe it’s possible for an animal to evolve a larger and heavier skull for reasons other than increased intelligence and for a purpose which seems to contradict Jensen’s claim that larger heads are a liability in every way except for increased intelligence.
*****
“But Jensen was talking specifically about human evolution & humans fight very differently from beasts because we’re bipedal & use tools.”
True, but even some hominids, including the Flores hobbit and all ancestral lines of modern men, have seen their heads get smaller.
Similarly, I can see the large craniums of the Neanderthals being an advantage in a fight – an above-the-neck corollary to their below-the-neck physical robustness. If you’re in a mammoth hunt and get slightly hit or bumped by one of the large animals and tossed twenty feet before landing on your head, you almost certainly want to have the neck and cranium of a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon than you want to be built like modern man.
I love Jensen’s work. I’m not hating on Jensen. But not every speculation the man utters should be taken as gospel truth.
Pincher, Jensen’s bigger point was that intelligence must have been a massive advantage in human evolutionary history in order for brain size to triple despite all the physical & metabolic liabilities of big heads, including hazardous birth, musculoskeletal burden, & combat danger. He might also have added slower running caused by wider hips for giving birth to big brained babies. I suppose you could make counterarguments to his combat point, but overall Jensen’s argument seems sound. Had there been no selection for intelligence over the last several million years, do you really think hominid crania would have tripled, doubled or even significantly increased at all? I think that absent selection for intelligence, it’s likely that that our crania would have not only never grown in the last 4 million years, but rather would have shrunk substantially.
“Pincher, Jensen’s bigger point was that intelligence must have been a massive advantage in human evolutionary history in order for brain size to triple despite all the physical & metabolic liabilities of big heads, including hazardous birth, musculoskeletal burden, & combat danger. He might also have added slower running caused by wider hips for giving birth to big brained babies. I suppose you could make counterarguments to his combat point, but overall Jensen’s argument seems sound. Had there been no selection for intelligence over the last several million years, do you really think hominid crania would have tripled, doubled or even significantly increased at all? I think that absent selection for intelligence, it’s likely that that our crania would have not only never grown in the last 4 million years, but rather would have shrunk substantially.”
No one disputes that. But your post here is not about broad evolutionary trends for hominid intelligence, but about the correlation between fighting ability and head size/IQ. Your examples of fighters (Ali, Joe Louis,) were both contemporary.
Obviously over the long term, most lines of hominids were selected for greater intelligence.
But it does not follow from that accurate generalization that Jensen must be right when he speculates that smaller heads had the counter-benefit of being harder to hit and that the selection for intelligence in hominids had to be that much greater to overcome that advantage.
But it does not follow from that accurate generalization that Jensen must be right when he speculates that smaller heads had the counter-benefit of being harder to hit and that the selection for intelligence in hominids had to be that much greater to overcome that advantage.
But isn’t it just common sense that a smaller target is harder hit than a larger one, regardless of whether you’re throwing a rock, a club or a fist?
Now there may be other combat advantages to a big head that negate this liability that Jensen neglected to acknowledge. I suggested head butting, you suggested that big heads can absorb more punches, partly because they’re perhaps supported by bigger necks generally.
Just to be clear, I don’t dispute that the primary reason Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons had larger skulls than previous hominids was because of their greater intelligence than previous hominids.
I dispute Jensen’s claim, however, that a smaller skull is beneficial in combat because it presents less of a target than a larger head. The opposite case is more likely to be true. A man with a small head isn’t that much of a smaller target, but the man with the larger head can absorb more punishment and keep coming after his small-headed opponents in battle.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were selected for slightly larger skulls than even their high intelligence suggests because a larger, more durable skull was part of the robust physical package they needed to thrive in the environments they hunted in.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were selected for slightly larger skulls than even their high intelligence suggests because a larger, more durable skull was part of the robust physical package they needed to thrive in the environments they hunted in.
If you’re right about that, it may help solve one of the biggest mysteries in human evolution which is why brain size shrunk substantially in the last 10,000 or 20,000 years. My answer is that agriculture caused malnutrition which our brains have only recently recovered from (see the Flynn effect).
However agriculture doesn’t seem to explain it perfectly because brains allegedly shrunk in parts of the world without agriculture too. So perhaps a decrease in violence caused our heads (and thus brains) to shrink via evolution.
Others say we domesticated ourselves; domesticated animals have smaller brains, but that could be because aggressive life requires intelligence since you must outwit opponents.
“If you’re right about that, it may help solve one of the biggest mysteries in human evolution which is why brain size shrunk substantially in the last 10,000 or 20,000 years.”
I’m obviously not saying that is the answer. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a little something to do with the extraordinarily large size of the skulls in that part of the world during that time.
I remember telling my Aunt’s husband, who is one of those “psychological traits are like height” people (he was a biology major), that Ali had such a low IQ. He laughed. He couldn’t believe it.
LOL. I used to also be one of those “psychological traits are like height” people, but in recent weeks I’ve become a “psychological traits are like fat-free body weight” person. So I’m making a little progress. 🙂
I’m not sure why my two images aren’t loading.
Come to think of it, I don’t think anyone’s ever posted an image in the comment section of this blog ever. The duke was thinking of posting his “perfect GRE score” report but said he couldn’t figure out how so maybe figuring it out requires an IQ above 160 🙂 I know it can be done on Cochran’s blog, but then Cochran’s blog can’t do things my blog can do like post superscripts.
BTW, the reason why Ali can’t be said to be the GOAT is that he was too defensive. He was never KOed, but he did little KOing.
And the two Liston fights appeared (to me) to be fixed.
And after seeing the Frazier Foreman fight I wouldn’t be surprised if the Rumble in the Jungle were also fixed.
Joe Rogan is the longtime color commentator for the UFC, the premiere mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion in the world. He mentions quite frequently his belief that a large head helps a fighter absorb more punishment than men with smaller heads can endure.
I remember Rogan mentioning it during the Leben/Sakara fight in 2008. Leben was an American fighter with a monstrous head – a wrestler who became a brawler in MMA with almost no standup technique. He often just waded through his opponent’s punches to connect with his own and score the knockout.
Here are a couple of examples of Leben’s big cranium: here and here.
Alessio Sakara, on the other hand, was a skillful and technical Italian boxer who had made the successful transition to MMA. But he had a small head for his weight class, and Rogan remarked that he thought men with small heads were susceptible to the knockout.
Here are a couple of examples of Sakara’s small head: Here (on left) and here (on right).
Sure enough, when the two fighters met in 2008, Sakara controlled the bout in the first two minutes with his technique, but eventually he succumbed to Leben’s ability to absorb his punches and make Sakara suffer more in the tradeoff.
CORRECTION:
“Here are a couple of examples of Sakara’s small head: Here (on left) and here (on right).”
Sakara is on the right hand side of both photos.
Leben’s cranium is indeed huge judging from those photos. I wish there was some software that could calculate someone’s cranial capacity from a photograph.
If what you’re arguing is true, I’m surprised fighting champions aren’t smarter on average, since not only do high IQ people have the mental advantage, but physical advantages (head size, height).
On the other hand, high IQ people tend to be less muscular if the stereotypical nerd stereotype is any indication.
A few IQ people are very good fighters (i.e. Steve Hsu, Cochran)
“Leben’s cranium is indeed huge judging from those photos.”
He’s dumb as a rock, too. He even fights dumb.
“If what you’re arguing is true, I’m surprised fighting champions aren’t smarter on average, since not only do high IQ people have the mental advantage, but physical advantages (head size, height).”
It’s just such a small and specialized category of people that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were atypical from many of the correlations you enjoy so much.
Having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the fighters at the top of the rankings were more intelligent than the fighters in the middle and the bottom. That seems especially true in MMA, where many college grads have vied for the belts, but perhaps it’s less true in boxing, the Klitschko brothers notwithstanding.
But if there is any area of life where the size of the cranium is less correlated with intelligence than in most other areas of life, it would have to be combat sports.
I think whatever physical & mental advantage high IQ people might have in fighting is largely or entirely negated by the fact that low IQ people are more interested in fighting, more motivated & ruthless in their fighting & have more experience & practice being violent.
“I think whatever physical & mental advantage high IQ people might have in fighting is largely or entirely negated by the fact that low IQ people are more interested in fighting, more motivated & ruthless in their fighting & have more experience & practice being violent.”
Yes, I agree. It’s why taking these modest correlations too seriously and applying them too frequently can often lead to trouble.
Height and IQ are correlated. So does that mean the NBA and WMBA are filled with extraordinarily intelligent men and women? Obviously not.
I look at skull size and combat sports in a similar way. For extreme samples, I suspect much of the usefulness of these correlations breaks down.
Height and IQ are correlated. So does that mean the NBA and WMBA are filled with extraordinarily intelligent men and women? Obviously not.
I look at skull size and combat sports in a similar way. For extreme samples, I suspect much of the usefulness of these correlations breaks down.
I don’t think you’re seeing correlations break down, I think you’re seeing positive correlations being overwhelmed by negative correlations.
Fighting selects for height, skull size, coordination & quick thinking; all correlated positively with IQ.
But it also selects for violence, culturally deprived background, limited opportunity, lowbrow interests, reckless behavior & weight/height ratio which are all negatively correlated with IQ.
Because fighters are so low on so many negative correlates of IQ, they might be low IQ on average despite having a few high IQ traits like height & skull size.
“I don’t think you’re seeing correlations break down, I think you’re seeing positive correlations being overwhelmed by negative correlations.”
It’s the same thing.
In your post, you’re looking for a positive correlation between IQ/skull size and fighting ability among boxers. You’re so convinced a positive correlation must exist that you claim it makes “no sense” to believe that great boxers would have low IQs, and you seek to explain away any evidence to the contrary
But I think your confidence is misplaced. Boxers are such a small group of outliers who have need of very special skills – including both tolerance of extreme pain and the ability to inflict extreme pain in a specialized athletic competition – that all kinds of odd correlations might surface when looking at the field.
For example, the correlation between IQ and head size might be negative among boxers. I don’t know that this is the case, but it very well could be. Boxers with smaller heads might have to rely more on evasion and scoring (i.e., strategy), while large-headed boxers might be able to afford to take a more direct approach by accepting some punishment in order to inflict a decisive punishment.
If such were true, then the dumb boxers with small heads would be quickly weeded out of the field, while the dumb large-headed boxers could still manage to hang on and be successful. The competition as a whole might be reduced to Sugar Ray Leonard versus Marvin Hagler – the wily, elusive, small-headed, savvy Leonard versus the big-headed, tough brawler Hagler.
I don’t know if this is the case, but it certainly sounds more plausible than just assuming that the low IQ of boxers is somehow uniformly mistaken.
This is where statistics literacy comes in. Pumkin thinks of himself as literate, but there are studies with a height IQ correlation of 0.
Use the Fisher transform to determine the + or – for the sample correlation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_transformation
That .2 figure might be +/- a figure > .2.
Pumpkin
…it is sometimes useful to remember that the variance of r is well approximated by 1/N as long as |ρ| is not too large and N is not too small.
Pincher, I didn’t entirely try to explain away the low IQ’s of great boxers…my larger point was that champion boxers could have very low IQ’s despite fighting ability being positively correlated with IQ IF the average IQ of people who pursue this profession is even lower still. But as you imply, alternative interpretations are also tenable.
I came across your comments on West Hunter with the pygmies, and I wanted to bring to your attention that there is other cranial capacity data on the pygmies, being a remarkably high average of 1,440 from graves in the french congo: http://books.google.com/books?id=iZCbPG0zD48C&printsec=frontcover&dq=negro+in+the+new+world&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KWQHVMqYGcvGggTF5YLADg&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=graves&f=false
The very small one comes from Beals 1984, who themselves found it questionable.
Adadwa, the 1085 cm3 that Cochran claims for pygmies might be too low, but 1440 sounds ridiculously high. The average modern Westerner has a 1378 cranium. Do pygmies appear to have larger crania than Westerners to you?
Here’s a photo of a Westerner standing with pygmies and his cranium is bigger than all of theirs:
http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/pygmy.htm
I agree it’s probably too high, but I thought the reference was worth noting nonetheless. I also can’t say what it’s really sourced to, as the book merely footnotes it, nothing more. And to be fair, some of those pygmies are women and the elderly, and that white guy is David Mendosa, who has a medical background.
Indeed!
It’s not as if such figures are “known”. It’s not as if such figures sit on a shelf from which one may pull them for whatever argument he would make.
Pygmies?
Seriously?
Who would fund research into the remains of Pygmies?
Let’s see. Where are they buried? Would the corpse skull need to be cleaned? Or were live Pygmies put through an MRI? An MRI in the Central African Republic? Really?
Cochran IS smart for a hick. He’s a good writer. Really! But the hick shows through.
For one thing…
Cochran has made very clear his belief that tests developed in the “developed” world are applicable to peoples living (as all men lived 8000 years ago) before agriculture.
They AREN’T.
They’re like tests in Arabic developed for imams given to American evangelicals.
But Cochran himself doesn’t know he so believes/”knows”.
What he believes/”knows” is an “unknown known”.
http://www.youtube.com/watchv=4SQpczc8mGg
“They don’t know it but they do it.” — Marx
Sorry,
I did NOT mean to bring up the the non sequitur of the second Iraq war.
I just wanted to explain how people like Cochran have assumptions that even they are not aware of.
Dookie,
“Cochran has made very clear his belief that tests developed in the “developed” world are applicable to peoples living (as all men lived 8000 years ago) before agriculture.
They AREN’T.”
Of course they are.
Can an Australian aborigine not in theory learn to fly a plane, work out a theorem, speak grammatical English, write a musical ditty, engineer a bridge?
The answer is a hundred times yes. They’re men, not dogs. They aren’t from the planet Pluto with their own separate foundational rules for math and language. They don’t communicate by mind meld. So their relative ability compared to how other people can learn to do all these things matters a great deal, especially since the desire for modern things is nearly universal.
You sound like an East German I knew who once tried to tell me that Chinese could not understand Beethoven’s music because he was not part of their culture – despite the fact that many Chinese learn to play and enjoy classical music much more than he, the German, did.
They are only applicable to Pygmies et al if they have been raised in the developed world and even then only if they have been raised in middle class homes.
I’m sure one could devise tests which distinguished the clever Pygmies from the dull ones.
You should read this: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/17/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/
And the very idea of a “culture fair” intelligence test is very NOT intelligent.
Hear! Hear!
One would expect a smaller capacity, because the Pygmies are short. And, as is his wont, Cochran’s skepticism and dubiety end whenever it supports his racism.
My own prejudice:
There are genuine racial differences in mean cranial capacity. But they are smaller than reported. And the significance of the differences for intelligence is…not much.
“Cochran IS smart for a hick. He’s a good writer. Really! But the hick shows through.”
I don’t know if I’d call him a hick, but he’s long struck me as kind of a malcontent, and he’s well aware of it and proud of it. And to that end, I find him quite overrated as a thinker in these circles, and that post really struck me with how arrogant, poorly researched and crude it was. His reference to the brain size figure with no caveat that it was noted in the Beals data that it was questionable (and it’s difficult ascertain much else about it), the reference to Lynn who himself thought the sole test on them didn’t even permit a score, and unsourced anecdotes from neighboring bantu peoples who are known to sometimes eat them.
Personally, I would take actual footage of something like them putting together an intricate bridge over the stuff Cochran throws out (even if the video was partially staged): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYvaA0Lz70A
I just want to emphasize no, I do not think pygmies have a brain size as large as that, or they have particularly high IQ’s, but just to let you know there is other brain size data on pygmies out there, and it’s ironically the opposite of the Beals figure. It would be helpful to know, however, the nature of the Beals citations, such as the age of the subjects, sample size and sex ratio. But his paper isn’t very helpful in those regards, as they all seemingly came from an old database known as “CRANDAT.”
boxing is not fighting. the real fighting simulation would be closer rather to an MMA match. And best mma fighters are rather from developed countries
http://www.ranker.com/list/countries-with-the-best-mma-fighters/ratedmma?utm_expid=16418821-48.w4XvOttHQz-Kl88l1iLzhA.0&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.de%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q%3D%26esrc%3Ds%26frm%3D1%26source%3Dweb%26cd%3D2%26cad%3Drja%26uact%3D8%26ved%3D0CCoQFjAB%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.ranker.com%252Flist%252Fcountries-with-the-best-mma-fighters%252Fratedmma%26ei%3D4S0YVJ6MDeG7ygPV5YHIAw%26usg%3DAFQjCNGC8f6iavEO3qfBLXUvVLa8etwc_A%26bvm%3Dbv.75097201%2Cd.bGQ
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Interesting article however, I couldnt finish it. Not to say what I did read wasnt decent but when Im reading an article which is calling several historically famous public figures “borderline mentally retarded” whithin an article which is written in a way that’s “borderline college level writing” it just irks me. Not that I have anything agaisnt you for it, im just getting the instinctual reflex sort of like a boxer being called out for being retarded and telling the “smart blogger whos never fought a day in his life” to come and show him how easy fighting is a retard could do it.” except im just going to stop reading and watch some House of Cards.
Your point in this article is flawed at best. It is perfectly reasonable and more realistic with proven data that boxers are great fighters because of the very fact that they have a low IQ, and why? People with high IQs over think everything. Their minds race, often creating anxiety, triggering an overload of adrenaline, which completely clouds your judgement. People with low IQs do not.
Pincher Martinsaid:September 4, 2014 at 3:06 am
“Can an Australian aborigine not in theory learn to fly a plane, work out a theorem, speak grammatical English, write a musical ditty, engineer a bridge?”
The fact is that none of them can manage do any of these things. In fact the only ‘Aborgines’ you will ever see working in the professions are middle class ‘White’ ones with at least 3/4 European heritage.