Dave Badtke’s Blog

Comparing some 60,000 IQ tests taken by male Norwegian military siblings, Norwegian researcher Petter Kristensen claims, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle (also in the NY Times), that the debate over the intelligence of the oldest in a family is over:

On average, the eldest child’s IQ is a measly 2.3 points higher than the second. But researchers say the difference is enough to give the first child a better chance — about 13 percent higher – of getting into the top college.

The researchers, whose work appeared today in the online issue of Science, analyzed IQ scores of 250,000 men starting mandatory military service in Norway. They found a significant difference in IQ scores in 60,000 pairs of siblings, making it the largest study to confirm that birth order affects intelligence, ending nearly a century of debate, said lead author Petter Kristensen, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oslo.

Even though the researchers looked only at men, Kristensen said previous studies say women are similarly affected by their birth rank in the family.

Maybe. Certainly if you’re the oldest in your family, this is confirmation of what you always knew, but if you’re not, it’s faulty research.

When I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa in 1968, I was a Jean Piaget fan. In one of my classes crowded with elementary students sitting closely together, squeezed into the small classroom with arms and legs wrapped around each other, all listening intently to my lessons, I would perform little Piaget experiments to see whether Piaget’s Switzerland results applied in Palala. One that I remember involved an understanding of volume in which water from a squat vessel is poured into a tall thin vessel. When I asked my students which had more water, the squat or tall vessel, they knew that both contained the same.

“Duh,” these little kids seemed to say. “You just poured the same water from one into the other. Of course they’re the same.”

According to Piaget, at their age they shouldn’t have understood this conservation principle that older children, at least Swiss children at the time, had trouble with. My students were different from Piaget’s, it seemed, and while I continued to be interested in Piaget’s theories, I didn’t give them as much weight: Certainly a child’s understanding of the world changes as he develops, but that change is a complex mix of nature and nurture.

So perhaps younger siblings can have hope if they’re not Norwegian, which reminds me of the marvelous Norwegian movie Elling, in which IQ plays a complex, comical role.

In New York Times on May 31, Sam Brownback, one of the three Republicans to raise his hand against evolution during the first Republican presidential debate, is trying to do the kind of explaining one needs to do after apparently not learning even after all these years in office that he shouldn’t answer a question with a raised hand unless the query has to do with coffee and dessert after dinner, which can be a good idea if too much rubber chicken hasn’t been eaten. But instead, Brownback’s eating crow, trying to explain why he raised his hand.

Ours is a sound-bite political culture, Brownback claims — though one wonders why there are so many willing sound-bite participants — which creates a stark contrast that does a “disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.” He feels that since religion and science strive to understand the truths of their respective worlds, a materialistic world in the case of science and spiritual world in the case of religion, the truths of each can be complementary, but not contradictory.

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

If you’re hoping for some example of how having a common origin or initial condition — God — guarantees that two complementary things cannot be contradictory, you won’t find it because rational, evidence-based cause-and-effect relationships find little purchase in Brownback’s editorial. For example, one could certainly argue that in a marriage the partners complement one another. But does anyone really believe that because both were born of women that they don’t contradict one another? Well, you might say, my analogy is facetious, and you’d be right, but then it seems it’s Brownback’s problem that he neither chooses his terms carefully nor takes the time to carefully define what he’s talking about.

In any event, he gives no example, and in the next paragraph he states that “People of faith should be rational,” which is fine, but then states that reason “cannot answer every question,” which leads him to the disturbing conclusion that “Faith seeks to purify reason” so that we can see more clearly. “Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose.” Diagrammatically, Brownback seems to be suggesting that the relationship between science and religion looks something like this, in which the truth that science finds is “purified” by religion. This could hardly be a more dangerous idea since one person’s purification is another’s propaganda or oppression. That there is a God is doubted by many or that there is a different kind of God from Brownback’s is believed by many more, but in either case a faith-based filter of science is doomed to fail because when scientists seek truth, their mathematics and modeling are not affected by ethical or religious considerations, which is not to say that they themselves are not so affected.

It’s critical to separate the search for scientific truth, which is not bound by ethics, from the scientist who performs the research, who is bound by ethics. As a result, the diagram above should be modified to reflect the filter that ethics and religion apply to the person to “purify” his or her thoughts, but not to the truths the scientist develops. Within the scientific endeavor, the scientist discovers evidence-based truths. And in science something is the truth if and only if it is a carefully defined set of evaluated facts from which inferences can be made that quantitatively explain the past and predict the future. Physics does this in a Newtonian sense, for example, when it explains tides and solar eclipses, in an elementary particle sense when it explains the quantum properties of particles and fields, and in a flow and aerodynamic sense when it explains why birds, bees and Boeing 747s fly. Similarly, molecular biologists perform this kind of evidence- and model-based science when on a micro level they decode various genomes and discover that we and mice share 99% of the same genes. On a macro level, the evolution of our nervous system can be traced back to the much simpler structures found in worms and insects. And yes, monkeys do look and act like us, which you’ll discover if you spend any time with one.

Evolution, then, is a science as well established as the science underlying the various technologies we use every day from a toaster and cell phone to an automobile and airplane. The problem with evolution is, however, that it deals directly with us, with human development, and this has twisted the ideas of some in the religious community, like Brownback, into unsupportable intellectual knots.

He claims that “There is no single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today” without understanding that the constant reevaluation of falsifiable scientific principles is the essential dynamic that drives scientific evolution much as natural selection drives biological evolution. But Brownback wants none of this dynamic if the assumption is that evolutionary theory offers a “vision of man as a kind of historical accident.”

Fortunately for science, unfortunately for Brownback, he has no say in the scientific debate unless he’s willing to participate as a scientist by assuming that his “truths” are falsifiable. Certainly he’s a senator capable of messing with the minds of Kansas children and children in other states, and that will take a terrible toll, but in the grand scheme of scientific evolution, his views will make no difference because those who pursue science will continue to discover truths whether the U.S. wants to participate or not.

Where he does have influence is in the ethical training of scientists, since this indeed is the filter that philosophy and religion apply to science. But that influence is weakened to the point of ineffectiveness if it is based on an unwillingness to understand the scientific process.

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truthe are welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

Sorry, Brownback, but if you want to participate in the scientific debate, you can never make such statements. Science will continue to evolve and answers will be found, and some of the answers will be horribly unethical, which is why it’s so important not to undermine ethical and religious training with principles that encourage people, especially children, to bury their heads in religious sands by claiming that scientific results can be rejected because someone believes them to be “atheistic.”

At times like these when some of our political leaders are behaving as though they can return us to the dark ages when Greek and Roman ideas were rejected, independent of their value, as pagan and corrupt, we need someone like Bob the Bird who can speak sense to nonsense. On this I will have much more to say in upcoming Benicia Herald articles.

Yesterday Mina and Joe arrived from Japan via Chicago and New York.

Oh Joy, Hooray!
Some of the children have arrived to stay
for a couple weeks
which is never long enough
to hear all their stories
and to give them enough hugs.

They’ll be with us for two weeks, which will be fantastic, so we decided to celebrate after picking them up at SFO at Mandalay Restaurant , which is near the corner of 4th & California, a Bermese restaurant that we like as much as Burma Superstar, which is usually more crowded and noisy, to be found just a few blocks away near 3rd and Clement. Just across the street is Mia’s Vietnamese Restaurant, which is also terrific, but we were looking for pumpkin chicken and should have ordered more at Mandalay because it’s so, so good. Just writing about it now makes me hungry.

And then after we ate, we thought about going to Green Apple Books, which is always a treat, but not last night. After mango with sticky rice, Joe and Mina were tired — their New York time was three hours later for them — so we headed home.

As reported by NPR, there are more than 10,000 mothers in the U.S. military who are celebrating this day in Iraq. Not that long ago, Liz Vazquez, about whom I wrote today in The Benicia Herald and who is pictured here when she was in Iraq, was one of them. (See also my earlier blog post.) On this special day, all the best to those who have served, who are serving as I write this, and who are preparing to serve in the U.S. military.

One of the joys of writing for a local newspaper like the Benicia Herald is that I get to sit down with people for an hour or more to listen to their stories.

Well, you might say, you’re not living in New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo or London or Paris or even, for that matter, in San Francisco, where there’s a chance that around the next corner you might meet a celebrity or mover and shaker. And you’d be right that the people I meet aren’t the famous and fabulously rich and influential — they’re people who don’t feel comfortable in the spotlight and usually cringe when I pull out my camera — but they’re interesting and always surprising because like all those people you know so much about from watching too much TV or from guiltily reading tabloids while you wait in the grocery story checkout line, these people have spent their lives getting an education, developing skills, creating careers, supporting their families, having interesting experiences and serving others.

Such is the case with Elizabeth Vazquez who, along with her partner Chuck Bowen, owns Galley Cafe, a fantastic, inviting, comfortable little restaurant with a beautiful water view at Glen Cove Marina. Elizabeth was in the Army in the 70s and then recently served in Iraq. She has worked as a social worker advocate for the homeless and recently earned her paralegal degree at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. And she and Chuck, who live in a houseboat in the marina, make wonderful breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks at Galley Cafe in addition to catering special events. But for more about this you’ll need to read my Sunday Column on May 13 in the Benicia Herald.