BOMBSHELL: Lead to blame for ADHD, urban crime and low IQ

I remember reading several years ago an article about the eerie correlation between the use of leaded gasoline and national crime rates (outside the U.S., too), with about a 20-year lag time, and thinking this was a real bombshell in social science research. 

But this discovery was dismissed even by the "lib'rul" mainstream media and never got a fair hearing. Why? Probably because this theory doesn't fit the traditional Right-Left / Nature v. Nurture debate about the causes of crime. This isn't about genes or upbringing, it's pure brain chemistry. It also deprives a lot of folks like the Rudy Giuliani's of the world a pet issue on which they made their careers. This is not to mention America's well-funded and lobbied prison-industrial complex that tells us that more prisons and tougher sentencing are to thank for lower crime rates.

Now MJ is back with more research that's been done in the meantime and it looks pretty legit. As journalist Kevin Drum points out, "econometrics consistently fails to explain most of the variation in crime rates."  Levels of lead -- specifically Pb(CH2CH3)4 -- however, do pass the econometrics test.

So if this is true -- and it looks like it still is borne out by the data -- then what are some of the implications?

1. Here we have a huge case of economic spillover or "negative externalities," as economists like to call it, for when an economic decision costs society more than its private or "market" cost does. Innocent children end up paying for it; and then later, their innocent crime victims. 

2. We have a lurking danger in our urban areas among populations least equipped to clean it up. The cost of a real, nationwide cleanup of houses with lead paint, lead pipes, and urban topsoil would be $20 billion per year for 20 years!  However, MJ argues that the benefits in lower crime rates could be $200 billion per year, or a 20-to-1 return on investment.

3. Trying to clean this stuff up in the wrong way can make it worse, spreading lead dust that is currently "locked" into lead-based paint or up to 6 inches of urban topsoil.

4. This theory explains, at least partially, why murder rates in cities are always higher than in smaller towns... but also why the crime rates in big cities everywhere have been going down, down since the 1990s.

UPDATE (01.07.2013): A buddy tipped me off that one American engineer/chemist, Thomas Midgley, Jr., was responsible for both leaded gasoline and many CFCs that cause the greenhouse effect. Thanks, dick!

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

By Kevin Drum

January-February 2013 | Mother Jones

URL: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

Study: Smart people are liberals, atheists

Well, I'm obviously a night owl (check the local time of this post), and I'm certainly liberal, but am I a statiscial outlier: a dumb liberal? I'll leave that to you, my esteemed readers, to decide. Regardless, science don't lie, so if you're a religious conservative, chances are, you're not quite as sharp. Sorry to break it to you this way. Here's some consolation though: you've still got Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, and Glenn Beck to feel superior to... I hope.


Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds
February 24, 2010 | ScienceDaily

More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."

"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."

"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles."

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

[Now I admit I would have identified myself as "very conservative" in my stupider adolescence, but you might say that my genes got the better of me, and my innate intelligence forced me to become a bleeding-heart, Marxist/socialist liberal in adulthood. - J]

Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans' tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see "the hands of God" at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid," says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. "So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists."

Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary history. Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were. In sharp contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate. So being sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women. And the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes no difference for women's value on sexual exclusivity. Kanazawa's analysis of Add Health data supports these sex-specific predictions as well.

One intriguing but theoretically predicted finding of the study is that more intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends.