Dr. Lei, I really respect you, but this argument flies in the face of modern science. Nearly every declarative statement in this paragraph is factually incorrect. IQ is extremely influential in all kinds of areas and has all of the implications that you claim it does not. The correlations are precisely measurable, and IQ has greater predictive ability of many things (e.g. job performance) than ANY OTHER VARIABLE we can isolate (including, e.g., job experience, interviewing ability, and education).

“In some sense, what we’re talking about here is totally pointless.”

I agree with this. As Half Sigma posted below, it turns out that the study is dubious at best.

But if, as a counterfactual thought experiment, we assume its results are true, then I do not see why you are so fast to dismiss the possibility of mandatory breastfeeding. I do not think it is necessarily the right result, but I also do not see why it is necessarily the wrong result.

True, we think of invasions of the body as particularly offensive to our rights. Certainly, there is a presumption against them. But we still go there from time to time when the stakes are high! We MANDATE immunization for children to attend public schools. We MANDATE the extraction of certain forensic evidence in certain criminal proceedings when it is safe. When you get pulled over for drunk driving, we MANDATE either a breathalyzer or urine sample. Why do we mandate these things? Because the benefits of doing so far outweighs the costs.

Okay, let’s take your example about blood transfusions. You’re right, we don’t demand them even if a parent could easily and safely give one and it would save the child’s life. But we SHOULD! It’s outrageous that a dependent child would die because of his mother’s stupid decision when it’s so easy to see what the correct decision is! Imagine the things you would think of a mother whose screaming child died slowly on a hospital table because she didn’t want to give a transfusion. There is no reason to tolerate that kind of abject immorality when it is so easy to fix.

Parenting comes with certain obligations. If you insist on feeding your child a vegan diet and he dies of malnutrition, you could well be tried for second degree murder. In fact, this past summer, the NYTimes ran an article about exactly that. If you leave your child in a crib all day, every day, throwing food in and scooping out poop from time to time, you will be tried for all kinds of abusive treatment if you are ever caught. That means the law quite rightly applies a POSITIVE OBLIGATION to take care of your child.

As to your last point, high IQ is a good thing. You are empirically wrong when you say that “it generally doesn’t spell financial success.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Income . And no, high IQ is definitely a good thing. It predicts good school performance (”The correlation between IQ scores and grades is about .50 . . . [or] 25% of the variance. . . . . Correlations between IQ scores and total years of education are about .55, implying that differences in psychometric intelligence account for about 30% of the outcome variance.”), job performance (”the validity of cognitive ability for entry-level jobs is 0.54, larger than any other measure including job try-out (0.44), experience (0.18), interview (0.14), age (−0.01), education (0.10), and biographical inventory (0.37). This implies that, across a wide range of occupations, intelligence test performance accounts for some 29% of the variance in job performance.”), income, and non-criminality.

How can you seriously argue this last point? Do you really think you’d be no worse off if you were made half a standard deviation stupider? Sure, one of the doors opened by high intelligence is the ability to get a lucrative but “stressful career which leaves no time for family,” but it also opens the door to a lucrative career that earns more money for the SAME number of hours. And your implication that a legitimate way to prevent a child from making a career choice that you don’t like is to make him too stupid for anyone to offer him the choice… well, I think it’s downright pathological.

Best of luck to you too, and of course none of this is personal. I do think it would benefit us all to recognize (1) that rights are really social calculations of costs and benefits and are that they are open to revision when new data comes to light, and (2) that intelligence is a very real phenomenon with incredibly important social implications that will not go away if we pretend that they do not exist.

http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/11/breastfeeding-d.html

This is about optional extras, not about redefining deprivation or malnourishment! Extra possible benefits for your child, regardless of whether or not you can supply them. You’re proposing that it’s OK to invade the bodily integrity of others, against their will, to accomplish this?

Maybe compulsory breastfeeding is no big deal to you - no more than wearing high heels every day, as you see it. Hey, can’t we all just live with that? But it is a step in the wrong direction to argue for it against someone’s will.

If your child needed a blood transfusion, you could probably hope to supply that. The line is crossed when court orders are proposed to order anyone to donate blood, by law, to anyone. What if US athletes could do better with a shot of my blood?
Hey, I don’t think so, guys. I’m a volunteer here.

It only adds insult to point out that you’ll never be the subject of any such court order, but you’d quite like to debate how desirable it would be to apply it to others.

Do you see where we’re going with this?
Put it like this; how would you feel about me proposing invasive & prolonged genetic testing for you, before you’re allowed to father any children? What if permission were denied? Do you see now how objectionable it sounds to others? I would never propose such a thing, because that would be wrong for society. I hope you can see why I think so.

I admire you, Pender for being so frank about your situation and future hopes & plans.

But you do realise that parenthood is not like buying a car?

Good parents love & accept a child as is, on delivery. If you father a child, there are no guarantees what kind of parent you’ll be. All the successful movers in the world can’t compensate for a parent who would love them more if they could just upgrade them a little, tweak a gene here, speed up their performance …

All this says to the child, loud & clear, is that you prefer your dream of a different child - who is not actually them. It says that they are unacceptable to at least one other adult in the world. You’re a bright guy. Why on earth shouldn’t your child be fine as he or she is?

Naturally you may want the best for your child or children. That hardly means that you only want the best child? Would you reject them? Are you unprepared for your child being less than average, less than well, less than perfect? They’ll likely be the best thing that ever happened to you, and you’ll probably be a great father, but not if you pre-judge them. I guess that’s worth equal consideration, and right now, while you can sleep nights! Not when you’re dog-tired & annoyed by the reality of a baby, seriously.

Besides, a high IQ, don’t forget, is not only socially abnormal, but it generally doesn’t spell financial success. If it does, it might well be at the high cost of a stressful career which leaves no time for family. Which is what you would not want, right?

Best of luck in the future. I mean that.

Also, there is no way FADS2 is the only gene influencing intelligence so to focus on that and breastfeeding would be missing the forest for the trees. The effects of FADS2 and breastmilk composition aren’t yes/no dichotomies, they’re continuous variables.

In some sense, what we’re talking about here is totally pointless. It is universally agreed that breastmilk IS the better alternative and every country emphasizes its important. What you seem to want to do is to FORCE women to breastfeed and that just isn’t going to happen. Just like you can’t force women to stop smoking and drinking during pregnancy even though everyone knows you damn well shouldn’t be doing it.

True, not everyone has this FADS2 thingy that responds well to breast milk. But 90% do. That’s a damn good success rate. I don’t know what the issue with breast milk composition is, but I assume that is already taken into account by the 7 IQ points figure — i.e. if only half of mothers’ breast milk has the effect, then to get to 7 IQ points, it must have a 14-point effect the lucky half of the time.

Imagine a dose of lead poisoning that causes a 7-point average IQ reduction in 90% of all exposures to children. Would you be as willing to write that off as the breast milk effect because the other 10% of exposures have no effect?

IQ is not subjective. The difference that 7 points is likely to make is precisely measurable in terms of things like education, longevity, happiness, divorce rate, religiosity, and even certain political views. Certainly, nothing is guaranteed in the individual case — but that’s also true of things like fetal alcohol syndrome, and yet we’re still comfortable making women lay off the booze while they’re pregnant.

My intent was not to make you feel guilty, and of course you shouldn’t. If you could not breast-feed, it’s not your fault and that’s really the end of the issue, morally.

As for your comments about internment camps, I’m not quite sure what to say. Obviously I advocated nothing of the kind, and I’m a little bit annoyed that you would resort to such a cheap and inflammatory mischaracterization.

Dr. Lei,

I wasn’t aware that these results were any more subject to measurement error or confounding variables than any other study. I assumed it was a controlled long-term study of a large and well-chosen sample. If not, obviously the reliability of its results are diminished accordingly.

But if you mean that 7 IQ points is a sufficiently small difference to overall IQ that we can discount it, then I disagree. It’s half of a standard deviation. As the article says, that’s enough to put an otherwise average person into the top third of IQ. And as I said, it’s 25% of the difference between normal and retarded. It’s a big, big deal.

In any case, I join you in hoping for the arrival of equivalent alternatives. Perhaps whatever the special sauce is can be added to formula for the same effect. Failing that, breast milk banks sound like a great idea. I have particular interest in these alternatives, since I’m a gay guy who may someday want children, and the prospect of hiring or convincing a woman to breast feed the children is a daunting one. (Krissy, perhaps you can take comfort in that: whatever physical difficulties your family encountered in bearing or nursing children, they’re nothing compared to mine!

On the other hand, you’re right that we do draw the line in the name of public health although alternatives are often available. When it comes to breastfeeding, formula does do the job and at some point, perhaps breast milk banks may fill the need if it’s only fatty acids we’re after. As I pointed out in my post, however, there are many wonderful reasons to support breastfeeding.