{"id":7941,"date":"2018-04-11T12:23:24","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T16:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7941"},"modified":"2018-04-11T13:22:48","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T17:22:48","slug":"how-many-einsteins-per-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7941","title":{"rendered":"How many Einsteins per Africa?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 2008, Neil Turok, an eminent phycisist, gave a talk about trying to find the next Einstein in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ted.com\/participate\/ted-prize\/prize-winning-wishes\/aims-next-einstein-initiative\">in sub-Saharan Africa.<\/a> I was thinking about this a few days ago after his initiative re-surfaced in a minor news story,and wondered &#8220;what are his odds?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Coincidentally, this morning I stumbled across the key figure needed to upper-bound them while researching something else.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>So, how do you estimate something like that?  Formally, what you&#8217;re looking for is an estimate of the frequency of Einstein-class brains in sub-Saharan Africa (&#8220;SSA&#8221; in the rest of this post). Or at least a statistical upper bound; that way we can make generous assumptions where we have a choice, insulating the calculation against various kinds of special pleading.<\/p>\n<p>It may not be a sufficient condition for an African future Einstein to have Einstein&#8217;s IQ &#8211; he may have had some special creative spark not captured by testing &#8211; but tensor calculus is <em>hard<\/em> and depends on qualities about which there is no dispute that IQ captures well. (That is: both capacity for long chains of abstract logical reasoning, and spatial visualization.)<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, we can upper-bound Turok&#8217;s number with an estimate of the number of people with Einstein-plus IQs in SSA.  There are two problems with this project.<\/p>\n<p>One is that Einstein never took an IQ test. There is, however, a mini-industry among psychometricians of estimating the IQs of historical figures from various proxies.  If you do a little research you&#8217;ll find that the minimum IQ attributed to him is 160 (all figures Stanford-Binet).<\/p>\n<p>I think this is low, myself; I&#8217;ve seen a median estimate of 175.<br \/>\nBut since we&#8217;re looking for an upper bound, we&#8217;ll start with the low figure; this leaves statistical room for the maximum number of African Einsteins.<\/p>\n<p>The other problem is that you need to know at least an IQ average for SSA. What I stumbled over this morning is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0160289609001275\">just such a thing<\/a>.  The paper argues that previous estimates have erred by oversampling elite populations &#8211; and in African conditions that&#8217;s a pretty damn plausible argument. It marshals several lines of evidence for an average IQ of 68.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s almost all we need. I have a handy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iqcomparisonsite.com\/iqtable.aspx\">table of IQ percentages and rarities<\/a>. Needs to be used with a bit of caution for two reasons.  First, it&#8217;s based on a 100 average, so we need to slide our IQ target by 100-68=32 points to re-norm it.  Second, it fails to account for the fact that black Africans probably have a slightly narrower IQ dispersion than the mostly Euro population the chart was based on.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to cheerfully ignore the dispersion issue (and avoid having to dig up cites for that claim) because, if anything, it will cause a slight overestimate of the fatness of the high-IQ tail in African populations.  That is OK because (as with choosing a low estimate for Einstein&#8217;s IQ) it will make our upper-bound estimate err on the high side.<\/p>\n<p>We also need one last piece of information: the population of SSA. <a href=\"http:\/\/worldpopulationreview.com\/continents\/sub-saharan-africa-population\/\">This site<\/a> says 1,050,135,841.<\/p>\n<p>Time to crunch numbers. I didn&#8217;t actually do this calculation before I started writing this post, so I don&#8217;t know what the result will be.  We&#8217;re targeting an IQ lower bound of 160 + 32 = 192  on the chart.  That gives us a 16SD 1\/X of 212343687. Dividing into population, we should expect 4.9 Einsteins per Africa.<\/p>\n<p>Well, that could have gone worse.  Me, if I were looking for Einsteins, I&#8217;d try the obvious population first: Ashkenazic Jews. (Well, duh!) But at least it&#8217;s good to know Turok is not, statistically speaking, fishing in a completely dry hole.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Or is he?  Most of the plausible ways for the inputs to be wrong punch hell out of that number. In particular, a median 175 estimate for Einstein&#8217;s IQ drops it to&#8230;.looking&#8230;less than 0.9%.  Actually probably a lot less since my chart tops out at IQ 202 and the target would be 207. Even at 202 that&#8217;s less than one Einstein in 100 Africas.<\/p>\n<p>OK, that&#8217;s not so good. At that level Turok&#8217;s odds look really bad unless there is some way to drastically elevate SSA&#8217;s IQ mean. The good news is that Africa is the only place left in the world this might still be possible, and it leads to actionable advice for Turok&#8217;s plan.<\/p>\n<p>Adult IQ is hard to increase. You can jack it up slightly and temporarily with drugs like DMSO and Modafinil, but there aren&#8217;t any known interventions (even in childhood) that are reliable and permanent. On the other hand, it is easily lowered by environmental insults in childhood. There&#8217;s a lot of indirect evidence that neurological growth can be stunted by poor early-childhood nutrition.<\/p>\n<p>In most of the world poor childhood nutrition is largely a solved problem; this was not true as recently as the late 1960s and represents one of the great human achievements of the last half-century.  Africa is the dolorous exception.<\/p>\n<p>So this is my advice to Turok: if you want an Einstein in thirty years, start by improving the diet of young children in Africa <em>now.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t guaranteed to work.  To know how effective this would be we&#8217;d have to look at mean adult IQs in a representative sample of SSAs that have had good childhood nutrition&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;OK, as I was typing it occurs to me that that test may have been run already. Lynn &#038; Meisenberg think that previous average-IQ estimates have been high due to oversampling elites, and they cite one of 80 that they criticize. In Africa, &#8220;elite&#8221; is pretty much defined by &#8220;you get to feed yourself and your kids decently&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>So, hm, what happens if we take 80 as an estimate of the average IQ of SSAs not subjected to severe childhood environmental insults? Let&#8217;s call this the &#8220;future SSA&#8221; estimate. One reason to think this estimate is plausible is that the average IQ of SSA-descended American blacks is about 85.<\/p>\n<p>As before, I don&#8217;t know the answer yet; I&#8217;m calculating as I go.  Target IQs on my chart is now either 160 or 175 + (100 &#8211; 80).  That&#8217;s either 180 with a 16SD 1\/X of 3483046 or 195 with a 16SD 1\/X of 1009976678.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that these assumptions predict an upper bound of 301 Einsteins per future Africa and a most likely figure of almost exactly 1 Einstein per future Africa.  That&#8217;s if Turok or others can prevent malnutrition and other insults from keeping Africa as a whole below the performance of their elites.<\/p>\n<p>For comparison, the U.S&#8217;s population of 325,700,000 should include 10320 Einsteins at 160 IQ and 93 at 175.  That makes 175 look much more plausible to me, which unfortunately implies that 1 Einstein per future Africa is probably an upper bound.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, one Einstein can make a continent-sized difference.  I wish Neil Turok the best of luck finding him or (though less likely) her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2008, Neil Turok, an eminent phycisist, gave a talk about trying to find the next Einstein in in sub-Saharan Africa. I was thinking about this a few days ago after his initiative re-surfaced in a minor news story,and wondered &#8220;what are his odds?&#8221; Coincidentally, this morning I stumbled across the key figure needed to&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7941\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How many Einsteins per Africa?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7941"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7945,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7941\/revisions\/7945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}