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Trace Levels of Lead Shown to Lower IQs
constantnormal writes "This government study explains a lot of things, from the American public's propensity to elect the worst candidates, to the decreasing fraction of students who bother to study the "hard" sciences, to the overwhelming power advertising holds over their apparently simple minds. I think it was all the leaded gasoline burned in this country prior to the 1970s.
Homer Simpson IS the archetypal American -- Thinking and Reasoning is just too doggoned difficult."
Homer Simpson IS the archetypal American -- Thinking and Reasoning is just too doggoned difficult."
that there are trace amounts of lead in areas inhabited by large concentrations of Slashdot posters? ;>
The study says that lead levels are LINKED, slightly, to lower IQs. It says little about causation.
While the researchers do say on a few occasions, correctly, that lead is a toxin which may be affecting children, it appears as if they correctly realize that their study is correlative and cannot be directly linked, therefore, to causation.
All studies that deal with correlation cannot be linked to causation because the experimenters do not have direct control over the independant variable, nor can they tell which variable is independant in some cases. While the researchers did control for a variety of things in this experiment (The study followed 172 children in the Rochester, N.Y., area whose blood lead was assessed at 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months, and who were tested for IQ at both 3 and 5 years of age. The researchers controlled for many other factors that contribute to a child's intellectual functioning, such as birth weight, mother's intelligence, income, education, and amount of stimulation in the home)... it appears that they did not account for lead exposure by location - the first thing I might suggest.
For instance, suppose that equal income housing varies greatly in Rochester, NY, and that certain children are growing up in worse or older neighborhoods than others? These worse neighborhoods might have a higher lead exposure than others, which might cause the subsequent decline more than the lead.
Obviously, the children must be getting lead exposure from somewhere - have they accounted for school district (lead piping or building location of a particular school)?
It's not that I don't believe in the study, I'd just be hesitant to scream causality.
This header is editorialism at it's worst. I'm sure constant doesn't have any axe to grind at all, and that this incindiery post is unintentional in every way, but nothing says "put me on your foes list" like a header that
#1:Insults an entire Continent,
#2:Insults said continents ability to comprehend politics/science, and
#3:Emphatically states that said continents inahbitants are unable to refuse the siren song of Madison avenue.
Ordinarily, I try to avoid vulgarity, trolling, and plain being offtopic, but F@!$ you too Constantnormal
And Michael, I'm not one of these cats that criticises you all the time, but damn. In this case, you might have wanted to think this one over before posting.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
... that's about half the IQ difference between Blacks and Whites (avg. 85 and 100 respectively).
...
I'm sorry, but given your asserted (and not backed up by reference) averages of 85 and 100, you cannot possibly arrive at an average of 100 for the entire population, as is required?
It's interesting how an IQ test can be meaningless and racist
IQ tests are never racist. Only people are.
Urban kids will have higher lead levels and poorer schools - it may have to do more with economy of urban areas and property taxes/school financing than with lead poisonong. Rochester brighter kids live in suburbs, have affluen/more educated - motivated parents etc. Incidentaly, there is less lead in suburbs.
Europe is stil using leaded gasoline as frequently as unleaded - the catalysts did not realy caught on (it was poisoning the exhaust catalysts that was decisive in conversion from leaded to unleaded gas). I would like to see a similar study done in Europe - with different (more homegennnous) ethnic and social composition. *That* would be convincing argument.
If you try hard enough, you will find statistic correlation between colour of car and frequency of trafic accdents.
Lies, outrageous lies - and then there is statistics.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
But let's look at this just a bit further and see if there isn't something to it.
One point -- please don't confuse the United States with Canada and Mexico. Canada seems to do quite well when compared to us on a per capita basis, and Mexico is still growing out of being a third-world nation, and makes for a not really meaningful comparison to the US.
Your #1 gripe should read:
#1:Insults an entire country. Maybe an insult, maybe an observation. Probably an insult in my case, certainly an expression of the strongest disappointment, could well be an observation for others.
#2: One would normally supply examples refuting the statement, rather than just listing it and stating that it's wrong. Let me begin by offering up the opinion that while the military end of the war in Iraq was prosecuted brilliantly, the political end of it has been a miserable failure -- witness the predictable looting and collapse of social structure when the previous totalitarian iron grip was removed. Who loots hospitals, for God's sake? And why didn't we have a plan beyond winning the war? Is there any political action being taken to correct the economic malaise in this country? Shouldn't we be attending to this? Is anyone concerned about the Patriot Act doing what Al Qaeda could not, destroying the freedoms that have allowed the United States to become the strongest nation on Earth? These aren't the cries of the masses, the masses are happy as clams that we're able to kick a minor despot's butt and bomb third-world countries back into the stone age. Was there any value in severely damaging a web of diplomatic relationships it has taken a half-century to put together? As to the questions about America's ability to comprehend science, how well does this most powerful (and one of the most prosperous) nation on the planet score in such things as literacy, mathematical reasoning, etc? Why are high-tech jobs fleeing overseas (no, I haven't lost mine -- yet)? What about the long-term trend of declining SAT scores?
I think that there's PLENTY of empirical evidence that would indicate that the USofA, as a nation, is running a few bricks short of a load. I welcome your counter-examples of political/scientific brilliance on our part.
#3: How can you doubt this? Just look at the correlation between advertising dollars and where consumers spend their money.
Finally, if you look at where most tetraethyl lead and lead-based paint has been consumed over the past hundred years, maybe there is something to this. It's said that one of the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was their extensive plumbing system, using lead pipes. Maybe, just maybe, we are seeing some impact from our role as the world's largest consumer of virtually everything.
Personally, I'd like to be able to blame it on some external influence like lead exposure, as opposed to thinking that maybe our culture promoted stupidity as a virtue. BTW, where are the forms of entertainment (TV, cable, movies) that show a thinking protagonist solving complex problems? All I see is "reality" TV.
I believe that the thing that has allowed America to become the Greatest Nation on Earth is our society's freedom to, and penchant for, critically examining what's wrong in America and fixing it. If you are one of those "America - Love It or Leave It (exactly as it is)" people, then I guess I belong on your list of foes. So be it.
What a world we live in. People call the IQ tests racist because the black and white averages are different? They didn't bother to complain about the IQ test's as compared to some useful metric (that it doesn't predict success in school, or that it doesn't predict average income)?
I mean, the need to be a victim is *wildly* out of control. Yes, it's not impossible that the IQ tests were designed to produce lower scores for blacks. It's also quite possible that the average black score simply happens to be lower, and that the IQ *is* a useful metric of intellectual functioning.
If you want a fucking scale that ranks everyone the same, get a piece of paper and write "4" or something on it. Then get lots *more* pieces of paper and write "4" on them, and hand them out to people. Didn't feel like much, did it? Possibly because the scale was totally freaking useless in measuring anything in the real world. Just like the IQ test can be if you randomly slant it.
Readjusting the IQ test for the sole purpose of giving more PC results is the most inane thing I've heard of. The test may not be perfect -- but arguments should be made based on relationship to another worthy scale of merit, not on pure PC grounds.
May we never see th