Posted 5:07 PM by Paul

Intelligence, Consciousness, etc revisited
It occured to me today that in my "model" of cognition, I left out one of the absolutely crucial issues, which is interference (in the technical sense). This is a bit of a tease, but those out there who remember their frosh/soph physics courses will recall the periodic wave physics, with its constructive and destructive physics. An asynchronous system of nodes (a graph, that is), could conceivably have an analogous functionality, especially if those nodes have a periodic activation cycle (hint, think "refractory period"). I don't have time to elaborate on this right now, since I have to fly up to the Bay Area for a wedding (maybe I will run into "Godless" while I am up there, but I wouldn't know it.).

I am also going to blog on genomics, proteomics, and the future of biology when I get back, although if "Godless" is who I think he is, I am going to get myself in deep you-know-what with this line of argument, but you don't improve yourself by backing away from a challenge, right?

Posted 9:12 AM by Paul

My "Bulldog" has responded, and raised some points that are worth addressing, as well as some for a later date. First things first;
I said ;

While it is true that monkeys probably don't have the brains for DE's (many humans don't either!), we are talking, to some degree about apples and oranges.

To which "Godless" responds;

No, we are talking about apples and apples. Intraspecies variation is what eventually leads to speciation. As you admit, there is a demonstrable gap between humans already - some have the brains for DE and some do not.

I think I did not make myself clear; I was using the Volokhian interpretation of that aphorism, which notes that apples and oranges are both fruits, and thus somewhat similar, while "apples and intercontinental ballistic missiles" or some other such completely unrelated items is more apt. Sorry for the (very) oblique reference. Nevertheless, the key word in GC's response is eventually, as you will recall, he was suggesting that my description of human intelligence potential was flawed because "monkeys can't learn DE's" (to paraphrase).

Note that they used the most intelligent non-human creatures: chimps and dolphins. It would have strained the suspension of disbelief to use ants or bacteria. To beat a dead horse: there are genetic limitations on intelligence.

I think you are obfuscating the issue here. Bacteria don't even have more than one cell, it would strain everyone's credulity, and I obviously never even suggested it, to think that bacteria could at some point be "intelligent". Of course, if you work with them on a daily basis, you know they can be spiteful!! Ants are an interesting choice. Doug Hofstadter has a fascinating section in Godel Escher Bach using an Ant colony as a (fictitious) model for emergent consciousness. If you haven't read it, I heartily suggest it. I think GC is building a straw man here, however, beating at an unmade conjecture that human intelligence is literally unbounded, a suggestion that I never made (although a technologist might argue that our chief issues are memory capacity and look up power, which might be solved by "cyborgization").

In this particular exchange, I realize that I left something out of my original post;

This actually goes back to my very original point (who remembers that?), which was that the "races" have not been physically or reproductively separate long enough for the kind of deep, population genetic differences that GC was originally speculating on.

This was supposed to be followed by some of the obvious, physiological differences in immunity, skin coloring, and superficial physical traits, and by the suggestion that we have conflicting data here. On one hand, there are physical traits that differ. If we total up the physical traits that we can identify, and the ones that differ, we can get a rough idea of what may differ "under the hood", as GC says. However, we can not a priori suggest that all differences we see statistically in phenotype are genetic (haven't we been over this ground before?), nor can we establish the extent of the genetic differences based on the phenotypic differences (one small gene difference could have a large effect, something GC himself noted in an early post). On the other hand, the reality is that the notion of large scale genetic differences between races at "deeper levels" is difficult to reconcile with anthropological data suggesting that the time scale of human reproductive isolation is relatively short, on an evolutionary scale.

GC's comments bring me to something I wanted to comment on, the promises (true and false) of genomics and proteomics, which I will attempt to discuss in my next post.

Posted 12:14 AM by Paul

Since my "Bulldog" has made some interesting points (by the way, I am more than honored to be Darwin to his Huxley, although I am pretty certain I don't deserve it), so I will try to respond to them in kind.

I think that Paul is making the issue more complicated than it needs to be. Yes, there are stages in intellectual development (e.g. adolescence) when some processes come online and some processes come offline. But that's simply another level of detail, another notch in on the zoom lens of how genetics goes about dictating brain structure. After all, such processes are genetically controlled in the first place! The fact is that genetics provides bounds on what is possible.

This is true, as far as it goes. I was probably unwise to say that his statement about a "range of intelligence values" was wrong, but more correctly that it leads to an underestimation of human potential, IMO. The reason I brought up all of this was so I could introduce the notion of signal transduction into this topic (intelligence, "g", genetics and environment, for those keeping score at home). At the level of single-celled organisms, the ones I know best, signal transduction from the sensory proteins on the cell surface is crucial to the bacterium's survival. Bacteria take in signals about their surroundings all the time; they detect chemical gradients, pH, Oxygen, CO2, Nitrogen (in various forms), and in many cases light, and they respond by way of gene expression. Not only is all of this true in larger animals, such as people, but the systems are bound to be more complex, more finely tuned, and "pleiotropic" (that means one stimulus has many effects). So when "Godless" says

If we take Orwin's argument to its implicit conclusion, there is no upper bound on human intelligence. This is simply untrue, as we can see from the following thought experiment.

I say, yes, but the upper bound may be a lot different from what we think it is, based on the rather crude epidemiological studies that we can currently do.

Suppose we have a newborn monkey in a cage, which we can raise as we please. Is there any way to teach a monkey to understand Newton's second law? Is there any sequence of fortuitous environmental inputs that will have the monkey solving differential equations? Of course not. No matter how much you pamper the monkey, there are certain concepts that are simply beyond the monkey's ability to comprehend. This is because the monkey's genetics do not code for a brain capable of understanding such concepts.

This reminds me of David Brin's Uplift series, in which human beings, using technology and genetic engineering, "uplift" chimps and dolphins to sentience (i.e., human-like intelligence). It is an intriguing series, that I heartily recommend. The best book in the series is, IMHO, Startide Rising. In any event, I think this argument is a tad too pat, and maybe needs to be explored. While it is true that monkeys probably don't have the brains for DE's (many humans don't either!), we are talking, to some degree about apples and oranges. After all, my (not quite) hypothesis is purportedly that human intelligence is unbounded, but actually, I would be quite satisfied with the notion that all humans could be potentially "stimulated" to very high intelligence, for all practical purposes equivalent. This is not "radical egalitarianism", but simply entertaining the notion, which I think we cannot reject a priori, that the genetic bounds of intelligence are outside, at the high end, the environmental bounds. For example, one might propose the hypothesis that there exist a relatively few different genetic brain types. The normal brain, with a very wide range (but not infinite) of "g" values, the mentally retarded, who might have some specific defect (possible reparable by genetic means, even), genius, a brain with a virtually unique structure, in some way we don't yet understand, that allows for revolutionary insight, and insanity, which is again almost certainly some chemical or physical problem with the brain.

Lets examine an "allelic" model of the brain more closely. Suppose some relatively small number of genes (say, a few hundred), describe the structure of the brain. It seems quite likely to me that of the four brain types listed above, a small number of differences separates the clinically insane from the "normal" from the genius from the retarded. If the brain is like most other complex biological systems (and it probably is, from a molecular standpoint), most of the genes involved are "housekeeping" genes, which simply proscribe a basic structure, that is relatively invariant. Probably, deleterious mutations in some of these genes are what cause certain forms of insanity (schizophrenia, for example, is strongly hereditary). There is likely to be some combination of allelic variations that correspond to severe mental retardation, in various forms, and others that correspond to minor forms such as dyslexia. The bulk of the allelic variation, however, may (or may not) have an effect on "g", and this is where the meat of the question is. I submit, therefore, that genius and retardation be dropped from consideration, for this purpose.

So, where does this leave us? Well, I think, at this point, we have two competing hypotheses. One would be that the allelic variations (which we have no quantitative idea of) play a large role in determining intelligence, and the other is that they do not. The best answer we have (based on heritability studies), is that the influence is about 50/50. Ok, so I still ask the question, to what extent can we use modifications of the environment (and this could include medical treatments), to enhance intelligence? I submit that as we learn more about these phenomena, we will come to the realization that there are specific points in development where certain environmental cues are crucial (they may well be unexpected in nature). I wouldn't be surprised if, when optimized, the intelligence of a population is much more narrowly distributed than currently is the case (note, at this point we have abandoned the distinction between "g" and multiple intelligences; this is not, gentle reader, because I have conceded the argument, but rather because as a shorthand it is more convenient), because environmental disparities between human populations are probably much larger than genetic ones, based on evolutionary rates compared with the history of humanity. This actually goes back to my very original point (who remembers that?), which was that the "races" have not been physically or reproductively separate long enough for the kind of deep, population genetic differences that GC was originally speculating on.
I have not really discussed very much the notion of signal transduction and environmental factors in development in this post, unfortunately, but I am of the opinion that this is actually where the future of "enhancing humanity" lies. It strikes me that genetic enhancement of cognitive ability will be very difficult, since it will likely require the development of a coherent biological theory of consciousness. Even then, we won't be able to enhance humans beyond the limits of our "maximal intelligence gene set", and will be further limited by as yet unknown environmental and developmental factors. Maximizing gain by optimizing the environmental cues for developing children, however, seems to me more promising because we can do non-invasive, quantitative study of these factors, with minimal ethical hurdles (no experiment in this regard would involve hurting a child in any way, but simply providing them different stimuli, such as toys, and different diets, etc, and monitoring their development).

In the end, however, it seems to me that GC and I are differing largely on the structure of the bounded set of intelligence(s), and whether the distribution can be perturbed significantly by conditional changes.
P.S. Don't get into a mathematical argument with this guy, he will run circles (chaotic ones) around you. I am interested in Chaos theory myself (that is to say, I read Gleick's book of the same title), but I wouldn't have come up with that one!

Posted 7:00 PM by Paul

Genes v. Environment
Verdict: Genes must stay 500 feet from Environment at all times (Oblique, obligatory Simpsons reference)

I am working on a lengthy post that I think takes off tangentially from the subject of Evolution and attacks a big problem in society today wrt biological sciences, biotechnology, and "genetic engineering". The impact of "environment" (by which I mean the immediate surroundings of a given organism or population, not the environment that we may (or may not) want to save, is sometimes underestimated, sometimes overestimated, but almost never given the credit it deserves, IMO. I will start later tonight, following up on my late night ramblings of last night, and hopefully go somewhere useful with this.

Posted 11:48 PM by Paul

Tying threads together
I don't know if this will make much sense to anyone besides me, but it occurs to me that there is a common theme between my "battles" over Evolution, and my "battles" over Intelligence (I put those in quotes to remind myself that everyone involved has been, for the most part, very civil about both of these rather touchy subjects). Both differences of opinion are derived, to some extent, to the very vexing question of "Genes vs. Environment". This is probably more obvious w/ Intelligence, so I will start there. It is known, of course, that the structure of the brain must be encoded in the genes (of course, only strict materialists such as myself and "Godless" would make this assertion), but it is also known that environmental conditions are very important (even the most ardent hereditist assesses the heritability of Intelligence at ~50%, so the role of environment is crucial). We don't know how this almost certainly very complex interrelation works. "Godless", in one of his early posts, put forward the often cited view that genes provide for a range of intelligence, and environment decides where you fall on that range. This is a very straightforward model, and I think therefore mistaken. It strikes me that the process is iterative, rather then single steps (genes go first, then environment). For example, it could be that some set of genes turns on just after birth to start cortical development, and then at some key point a decision must be made based on environmental factors. If the environment is rich, a switch is turned one way (say, toward abstract thought), but if it is poor, the switch goes another way (say, toward simple survival strategies). This is all hypothetical, of course, but I can envision a branching tree (a decision tree, if you will), with a resultant g value depending on the environment at various points, and genetic makeup at various points. Of course, this only accounts for one facet of intelligence (ha! you thought I had gone to the dark side, didn't you?), but this model can get infinitely more complex if the specific genes for specific brain regions or neurons or ganglia interact with specific environmental factors at specific times, and the combinations of these things give rise to the final brain structure and function.

That may not be very clear, but all I mean to say, without getting too bogged down in specific models of intelligence or consciousness (again!), is that the interaction of genes and environment, in many cases, is bound to be much more complex, driven by feedback loops, and iterative processes, then the common conception.

So, how does this apply to Evolution? Because of the power of genetics to tell us about diseases, about physical characteristics, and about the living world around us, many people are tempted to think of Evolution by Natural Selection as a genetic model, when it is really a mixture of genes and environment. In all of the discussions I have gotten involved in, the question is always "How can genes do this or that?" or "How do gene mutations add information?" (this is the most recent, quasi-sophisticated question). Although there are good answers to these questions (I and many others have already given them, as recently as this afternoon!), they miss an important point about evolution, that has been made popularly by...you guessed it! Stephen Jay Gould! In his book Full House, Gould makes the argument (its not his argument, I stress) that Life does not progress in a line from simple to complex, but rather spreads and adapts to fill niches by mechanisms that are neither linearly derived from their antecedents nor necessarily efficient in terms of resource utilization. Life adapts to its circumstances, and competes based on a set of rules that can change at any moment, making adaptation to the old environment useless. So environment clearly plays a role in the evolution of any organism, including humans. Not only that, but it is a classic fallacy of logic to assume that because an organism now uses, for example, its second finger for pointing, that that is what it was evolved for (what would the middle finger have evolved for, then? Ha Ha) Based on the long time scale of evolution (geologic time), it is not unreasonable to predict that we could see evolution of limbs for certain tasks which they were not originally "designed". The canonical Gouldian example is the Panda's thumb, which is actually an elongated wristbone, the Panda having 5 additional digits. The Panda's thumb is not a thumb, in a skeletal sense, but it serves that purpose, not because it is the ideal bone to develop for stripping Bamboo, but because that is what a capricious Evolution tried, and it worked. (note, this, in less detail, was described in the Newsweek piece eulogizing Gould). I think the notion of Evolution=Progress needs to be fought, however, and Evolution by Natural Selection needs to be recognized as a description of the interactions of genes and environment over very long timescales, through the intermediary of living beings (including us).

P.S. For those who don't read a lot of pop. bio books, that last sentence was a semi-oblique reference to Dawkin's seminal book "The Selfish Gene", which (justifiably) guides the work of many biologists today.

Posted 1:13 PM by Paul

Science, Religion, and Evolution
I am probably going to regret this, but I think that the topic of Evolution is worth my time. Before going into the heavy lifting of the science, however, I encourage my readers to think a bit about their position on Evolution, and where it comes from. If it comes from the Bible, it is not going to be getting much sympathy from me. If it comes from study in the biological sciences, fine. Many people have tried to define the role of science and religion in our lives, and I tend toward the "separate realms" notion, that Religion has nothing to say about the validity of a given scientific result, and Science has nothing to say about religious notions. They intersect, mainly, where people perceive that Science is attempting to disprove religion. As I have said here before, I am an atheist, that is I explicitly deny the existence of God. If that offends you, then this is probably not the right blog for you. If you want to argue with me about that, I am ok with that, but I will not be explaining myself over and over, so I may just refer you to past comments/writings. With all that said, here goes nothing!

A note on terminology/PR I have noticed an interesting phenomenon among opponents of Evolution (think about that; how many opponents of Gravity do you know?); they call scientists who argue with them "evolutionists". Presumably (careful with those! -ed) this is to draw a contrast with "Creationist", or perhaps a parallel with "Marxist" (see No Watermelons for additional info on hidden Marxists!), "leftist", etc. I always think this is funny. Am I a "gravitationist" if I observe that every time I throw something in the air, it comes back down? Am I a "particle physicist" if I observe the energies of freed subatomic particles after smashing atoms together in a cyclotron? (Just kidding about that last one; I would be a particle physicist if I did that)

Let me set out my "humble" opinion on this issue at the outset; Evolution happens. The evidence is overwhelming. The fossil record shows that life has existed on this planet for ~3.5-4 billion years, and in that time has evolved from single celled organisms alone (probably with RNA as their genetic material), to the incredibly diverse biota of the current earth. Natural selection has been observed in all sorts of species, including but certainly not limited to bacteria and insects. Unnatural selection (that is, breeding of domesticated organisms) has resulted in the pets that we routinely give our children. Genetics has shown us unequivocally that there are genes present in human beings that are also present in bacteria, and that genes responsible for very different activities are related to one another by sequence. The pieces of evidence for all of this are myriad and deeply convincing, provided a basic understanding of molecular biology (no small thing, I know!). I have been involved in several long conversations on this issue at No Watermelons and Transterrestrial Musings, and the problem can be succinctly described thusly; Either people come into the argument convinced that Evolution must be wrong because it "denies the existence of God" (it doesn't), or they get bogged down in semantics (what defines a species, for example), and lose sight of the major issue at hand.

Here is the point that I would really like to get across to any reader. Life is Beautiful, Wonderful, Fascinating, and Rich. There are so many absolutely astounding things going on in virtually every creature that lives on this planet, a person can spend an entire lifetime studying one small facet of the life of a tiny microbe, and still be surprised at what they find. Amazingly, however, when you look at all of this wonderful life, you find that there are many things that we all do the same way. For example, virtually every organism on the planet uses Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as an energy storage molecule, retrieving stored energy by breaking a phosphate bond (ATP to ADP). This is a great energy storage reaction, because the bond has a peculiarly high level of energy, but it is hardly the only possible way. Likewise, virtually every organism uses the "proton motive force" as a mechanism for deriving the energy stored in this molecule. Basically, microbes (and higher organisms, in their mitochondria) set up a gradient of protons across a membrane, so there are more protons on the outside than inside, and then, as the protons flow in, they are coupled to a chain of oxidation-reduction reactions. The net result of all of this is the formation of ATP molecules, using a mechanism called "the TCA cycle", or the "Krebs cycle". I don't want people to get bogged down in the biology of these things, just to recognize that almost every organism uses these systems, in one form or another. Another example is photosynthesis. A substantial number of very different organisms capture sunlight and produce energy, releasing molecular oxygen as a result. But there are only two ways to do photosynthesis (Photosystem I and II).

When you get into more detail in any given system, you find evidence of evolution. For example, the lens of our eyes is made of a protein called crystallin, which creates a transparent, flexible matrix that focuses light on the retina. A remarkable development, no? Interestingly, it seems to be related by sequence to proteins in bacteria called "chaperonins" (Here is the abstract for a review). Chaperonins, also called "heat shock proteins", are small proteins that bind to other proteins to prevent them from destruction by the cell while they get shipped from the nucleus (in eukaryotes) or from where they form to where they belong (in the cell membrane, for example). So these small proteins with a totally unrelated job (shipping unfolded proteins around the cell) were co-opted by evolution to make a transparent, flexible lens for focusing light on the retina. This is a deeply interesting result, because it is truly unpredictable. It suggests that the human body, far from being a flawless design, is cobbled together from the materials at hand.

I haven't touched upon the myriad examples of bacterial evolution, but I will simply describe an experiment that every microbiology student does. Microbiologists use petri dishes to grow bacteria, and in that dish we use a gelatin like substance called agar. You melt it, pour it in the plate, and let it harden at room temperature. You can add virtually any soluble substrate or inhibitor, and it diffuses freely, resulting in a uniform growth medium. Suppose we wanted to "evolve" (in the lab), a strain that is resistant to penicillin. If we place our plate at an angle, we can pour a plate with an uneven depth, i.e. on one side it is thick, and on the other side it is thin (image a wedge of cheese). Suppose we put an antibiotic in that agar. We then put the plate flat (after it has solidified), and we pour more liquid agar on it, until the surface is even (image two wedges in opposite orientations, forming a rectangle). We know have a gradient of antibiotic on the plate. If we spread our bacteria on this plate, they will grow up to a certain point on the plate, where the concentration is too high. If we pick cells from that edge, and do it again, the edge will be farther along (closer to the high concentration end) each time. After a few iterations of this, the bacteria will grow everywhere on the plate, being resistant to the antibiotic treatment. If you do this enough times in enough ways, on different traits, you can make the new bacteria very different from the original culture. If you then hand them to someone who has no idea what happened, and you do it right, they won't be able to tell that they were related. Presto! You have just made evolution happen. Of course, nature often takes much longer to do this than we do, but the principle is exactly the same.

Let the deluge begin!

Posted 7:58 AM by Paul

I was going to write a screed about George Will's recent inane column/right wing book review in Newsweek about Title IX, but upon starting I realized 1) He's a known idiot, and 2) everyone who reads my website knows he is an idiot. He is, however, a somewhat influential guy, so I will just take one quote from the article and point out how ridiculous it is.

The industry prefers the word “gender” to “sex” because “sex” suggests immutable differences, while “gender” suggests differences that are “socially constructed” and can be erased by sufficiently determined social engineers.

Actually, this makes no sense whatsoever; The "industry" (I thought he liked industries, but apparently this is a perjorative in this case) uses "gender" instead of "sex" to distinguish this from discussion of sexuality. They are in fact completely wrong, linguistically, to use "gender", which is a grammatical term, but that is beside the point. There is no evidence whatsoever of "social engineers" attempting to erase differences between men and women. What seems to offend Mr. Will is the notion that girls might like sports, rather than staying in their rooms making pretend tea for their dolls. The notion that a girl might like to do both (my 2 year old kicks a ball around with me for a while, then serves me imaginary juice and cookies) seems to boggle certain right-winger's minds.

Ok, so I lied about the just one quote thing. Re-reading this column made me want to "Fisk" it again, so here is some more;

Colleges have killed more than 400 men’s athletic teams in order to produce precise proportionality between men’s and women’s enrollments and men’s and women’s rates of participation in athletics. And Title IX has given rise to a huge “gender equity” industry of lawyers, sensitivity-trainers and consciousness-raisers

I am not sure that the internet contains enough data processing space to handle all of the logical fallacies in this pair of sentences, but I will give it a shot. First of all, is there evidence that Title IX was the reason in every case for the "killing" of a men's athletic team? Let's compare Mr. Will's interpretation of Title IX with the actual wording of the law (from the NCAA Gender Equity website)

"No person in the United States shall on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Title IX of the
Educational Amendments of 1972 to the 1964 Civil Rights Act


An athletics program can be considered gender equitable when the participants in both the men's and women's sports programs would accept as fair and equitable the overall program of the other gender. No individual should be discriminated against on the basis of gender, institutionally or nationally, in intercollegiate athletics.

NCAA Gender-Equity Task Force

Boy, that is a very rigid law, forcing those poor, desperate college administrators to "kill" men's programs in order to force unwilling girls to play sports when they would rather be home taking care of their husbands! In the most recent assessment I could find on the NCAA website (a PDFn review over the last nine years), participation by women in athletics had increased by about 45%, while participation by men remained essentially flat (fluctuating around a mean, with a slight increase or decrease depending on where you started measuring. There has been a slight decline in men's participation over the last 3 years, but there was an increase before that, etc. It is my humble opinion that college administrators have used Title IX as an excuse to cut unprofitable men's athletic programs, blaming it on the dreaded political correctness, rather than spending precious football dollars (Football is a big moneymaker at many large colleges) on women's athletics. As far as the "huge 'gender equity' industry", it seems that the many changes in our society over the past 30 years have not made it onto Mr. Will's radar, and only the brutal forcing by evil big government liberals of these unconscionable rules for gender equity in college athletics have caused those rapacious lawyers and greedy "sensitivity-trainers" to exploit us in this manner. Is it possible, just maybe, that Title IX reflects a change in society that allows women to pursue different careers and goals than what Mr. Will would like, such as fulfilling work or athletic achievement, rather than being a cause of this change? Is it possible, just maybe, that women and men can get along in a world where women are allowed to compete with men on an equal footing? I think it might be.

The U.S. soccer players who won the 1999 Women’s World Cup were called “daughters of Title IX,” and when the WNBA began playing in 1997, arenas displayed THANKS TITLE IX! banners. This propaganda pleased people who believe all progress comes from government. But throughout the 1970s, the years of the most rapid growth of participation of girls in high-school sports, which presaged the growth of women’s college sports, Title IX was, Gavora says, unenforced and unenforceable because no athletics regulations had been written.
The first Title IX implementing regulations for athletics were written in 1979, and through most of the 1980s athletics were exempted from Title IX coverage. By which time, the women of the 1999 soccer triumph and of the WNBA were already excelling in their sports. By 1979, one in four high-school girls was participating. Since then, the Title IX “revolution” has made the number one in three. Clearly, autonomous cultural change, not Congress, produced the increase in female participation, which carried over into college athletics, where the real Title IX revolution has been perverse.

This paragraph is a ridiculous non-sequitur. In point of fact, many of the women on the 1999 World Cup team were very recent college grads, or even upper level college students (one of the reserves, Lorrie Fair, was in my sister's high school class, and I believe graduated college in 1999). So these women had the chance to compete in a broad, large scale women's athletic program precisely because Title IX forced colleges to expand women's athletics. Of course, the girls who turned into soccer World Cup champs and WNBA stars were excellent athletes, and likely would have excelled no matter what. But without the cauldron of competition to emerge from, it seems to me unlikely that the World Cup team in particular could have won. Of course, it is the (disingenuous) hallmark of opinion journalism to pass of any successes as the result of autonomous causes, out of our control, while simultaneously blaming any failures on the objects of the column. We have seen this before, in many contexts. For example, Bill Clinton had nothing to do with the economic boom of the 1990's, but he sure was to blame for every conceivable problem!

As for the second half of this quote, the mathematical dissembling here is also rather striking. For one thing, he is talking about high school athletics, not college (where Title IX is most important), but secondly, he tries to downplay a rather significant improvement, by deceptively using fractional descriptions. Although only a 3rd grader would actually be deceived by this trick, I will run it down anyway. Female participation increased from 1/4 to 1/3 over about 20 years. In other words, the percentage increased from 25 to 33 percent, an increase of 8/25 ~33 percent. This is a pretty big increase. Since there are a lot of girls in high school, this really means that there are millions more teenage girls pursuing sports as an extracurricular activity, yet Mr. Will would like us to believe that no impact has been made. Considering that this is a derivative effect (i.e. Title IX is not really directed at High School athletics), it is actually pretty impressive. As I mentioned above, the effect on women's participation in college athletics has been even more profound.

Sadly, this article also goes on to allow a blatant lie by a U. of Chicago wrestling coach (no conflict of interest there!)

Leo Kocher, University of Chicago wrestling coach, explains the Alice in Wonderland logic:

“Say there’s a school that has equal numbers of boys and girls and it decides to offer 200 athletic opportunities. If they have 100 girls who want to play sports and they have 1,000 boys who want to play sports, the law says you must give 100 opportunities to those 100 girls and you must give 100 opportunities to those 1,000 boys. In the end, 100 percent of the girls are fully accommodated but only 10 percent of the boys are taken care of.”

Here is the relevant information from the NCAA website on Title IX compliance;(NCAA Gender Equity Index FAQ)

Q. How does an institution comply with Title IX?

An institution must meet all of the following requirements in order to be in compliance with Title IX:

1. For participation requirements, institutions officials must meet one of the following three tests. An institution may:

a. Provide participation opportunities for women and men that are substantially proportionate to their respective rates of enrollment of full-time undergraduate students;

b. Demonstrate a history and continuing practice of program expansion for the underrepresented sex;

c. Fully and effectively accommodate the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex; and,

2. Female and male student-athletes must receive athletics scholarship dollars proportional to their participation; and,

3. Equal treatment of female and male student-athletes in the eleven provisions as mentioned above.

Now, leaving aside the obvious conflict that a wrestling coach might have with a law that might give administrators an excuse to cut his money-losing athletic program, and the further possibility that the occasional wrestling coach might not be the strongest logician or legal strategist at the institution, his example is demonstrably false. As long as all female students who want to be athletes are satisfied, there is no problem having more spots for boys, based on the official guidelines.

This column is really a book review, for someone named Jessica Gavora, who has written a book called "Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX". She is a "senior policy adviser at the Justice Department", so we know she couldn't possibly have a political axe to grind!

STOP THE PRESSES! It turns out she's Jonah Goldberg's WIFE!! (found in an obscure reference from the English language version of Pravda). She is also part of the Independent Women's Forum, a noted conservative women's anti-feminist group. I think now we might have a slightly better perspective on her than "senior policy adviser at the Justice Department."

I won't bother quoting the rest of the column (here's the link), but suffice to say that it doesn't get better. I don't usually bother reading Will's column's but the where the hell does he get off thinking that women are somehow being forced to play sports against their will, ignoring all of the known benefits of team sport participation (for men and women), and in 2002 trying to promulgate the idea that we shouldn't give young girls and women an opportunity to pursue dreams of athletic excellence because some idiot wrestling coach is getting played for a fool by college administrators who know a way to save a buck when they see it. I wish people would stop taking this tool seriously.