That’s been “debunked” though right?
I'm confident that plastic will go the way trees did: Unbothered for a long time until bacteria figured dead wood is just another food and put a stop to trees being fossilized as coal.
Stop plastics, it's a good idea to do so for many reasons, but there's no need to drag gender roles and those stupid good old times into it. I much prefer spending time with my kid instead of slaving away 9-5 six days a week.
[0] https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g2856528... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalonymus_ben_Kalonymus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cercle_Hermaphroditos
BPA for instance, is a xenoestrogen. I'm not sure what metric to watch for it, but it's probably not IQ.
> Males with a short AGD (lower than the median around 52 mm (2 in)) have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as those with a longer AGD.
> Swan et al. report that the levels of phthalates associated with significant AGD reductions are found in approximately one-quarter of Americans tested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for phthalate body burdens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance (warning on the header photos).
Maybe high school graduation rate (an inverse proxy to indicate bullying)?
> A 2021 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US found blood levels in children aged one to five years fell from 15.2 to 0.83 micrograms per decilitre between the late 1970s and 2016 as leaded fuels were banned.
I seem to recall reading an article that observed that every time we do a study of the effect of lead exposure on IQ, it gets larger.
IQs aren't changing much, but lead exposure is going down, and so we keep imputing the same IQ gaps to ever-smaller quantities of lead.
Isn't IQ a comparative representation of one's standing within their contemporary age group?
My understanding is that within a given group the median should be 100. So you won't see it change between groups. This is highly relevant when you're talking about different groups being exposed to different concentrations of lead.
As an extreme example to make the point, if people born in 1970 were all exposed to high concentrations of lead and were all morons as a result, their median IQ is still 100.
Then people born in 2000 are exposed to far less lead and are super smart, but their median IQ would still be 100.
Points above or below 100 are merely a specification of how many fractions of a standard deviation above or below that median within the given age group a person's performance is measured to be.
That said, even within a group, 2.5 - 3 points seems largely insignificant as an individual's score might vary more than this depending on which day of the week they took the test. It seems a big stretch to draw any scientific conclusion from such a small variance.
To impute the effect of lead, you look at a bunch of people, measure the amount of lead in their blood, measure their IQs, and see how much of a difference there is between people with a lot of lead and people with less or none.
Modern poor people who live in crummy areas where there's still a little bit of lead are about as stupid, relative to the leadless elite, as poor people from decades past who lived in crummy areas which, at the time, had a lot more lead than they do now.
It seems like a safe assumption that the effect of lead on people with negligible lead levels has stayed constant over the decades at indistinguishable-from-zero.
But for lead to explain the gap between the lead-haves and the lead-have-nots, its effect must have increased dramatically over that same period. That gap hasn't changed. But lead levels have plummeted.
It's not easily explained by things like immigration since it is also present (though less pronounced) even within families. The hypothesis I find most compelling is that IQ levels have "naturally" been declining for decades, but improvements in nutrition, education, etc were helping to offset, and even rise beyond, these declines. But as nutrition, education, etc reach the point of diminishing returns, the declines dominate.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
Though that goes against Europe hitting the decline earlier than the US which leads in sugars and unhealthy foods.
I suspect they don't do the research for real, they do some kind of simulation, and write it was in mice. They do know the metal changes the protein, but they incorrectly claim that the version without it works, but in reality the one with it does. They could'n make such an error if they actually did the research for real.
You find compelling the idea that organisms naturally get dumber with each successive generation? What possible mechanism would cause IQ levels to "naturally" decline? Have they been naturally declining since the dawn of civilization? Since LUCA? Shouldn't the expectation be that without other causes, IQ levels would remain roughly constant throughout generations?
But there's also the most objective and straightforward reason as well - evolution. As far as evolution is concerned IQ isn't good or bad, it's just another highly heritable trait. When it correlates against fertility (as it currently does), IQs will decrease over time. When it correlates with fertility (as it likely did when life was more difficult), they will increase over time.
What do you base this on?
There are confounders between houses with lead and other demographics and contribute to the gap and aren't completely controlled — aspects of social class and low mobility that are hard to explicitly capture, it's all old housing.
So as the lead level drops and the gap remains steady (increasingly dominated by the confounding factors), more and more IQ gap gets attributed to the small lead-level gap between those living in old housing with abated lead pipes + paint and new pipes + new paint.
Current regulation requires water supply at the tap to measure <10 µg/L, changing to <5 µg/L next decade.
2-3 µg/L is significant.
this is a massive scandal that has not been fully understood in public AFAIK. Extensive documentation of the false premise of leaded gasoline has been published, e.g.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...
When we think of the nastiness of industry, it's often industrial 19th century Britain and so on, but some of these villages (often quite remote) back then were full on industrial sites with massive smelting operations and the entire population including children engaged in mining and smithing and then exporting.
Incredibly effective one, too.
Just that unfortunate thing of poisoning the top soil forever.
A lot of those old apple orchards have had other things done with them since. Which is kind of scary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_hydrogen_arsenate
"US EPA banned use of lead arsenate on food crops in 1988."
It was common from 4000 BC to 2000 BC. Ötzi the iceman lived near a copper-arsenic forge site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenical_bronze#Arsenical_bro...
And the first industrial revolution was already over.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42513706 ("Ancient copper industry in King Solomon's mines did not pollute environment")
- "...We took hundreds of soil samples from both sites for chemical analyses, creating high-resolution maps of heavy metal presence in the region. We found that pollution levels at the Timna copper mining sites are extremely low and confined to the locations of the ancient smelting furnaces. [...] The new study contradicts a series of papers published since the 1990s about pollution caused allegedly by the ancient copper industry."
I believe this came up when reading something about how the trend of traditional historicity has always been to identify the Big Major Cause of the fall of the Roman empire, but that each explanation ultimately falls short. The followup point made by this, of course, is two-fold: that "falls" are often very complex and multi-faceted; and that the Roman empire never really "fell" in the Gibbons sense - it just slowly evolved, and eventually shifted east, finally becoming self-consciously retro-classically Hellenized, and just morphed to something new and lasted another thousand years -- but never actually fell during that time.
Anyone else have any thoughts or insight on the "lead pipes eventually line themselves with something non-lead-like" angle?
What I rarely see talked about with regard to Flint's water supply is that Detroit was willing to give them water for free, which is documented, and the only explanation that makes sense as to why they weren't taken up on the offer is the state governor's cabinet connections to fracking and a pipeline intended to bring lakewater inland to facilitate fracking. They wanted the taxpayers of Flint to help foot the bill. See: http://banmichiganfracking.org/the-flint-water-connection-to...
And to throw in another quote from a scholarly source, "Water from the river Anio, which fed two of Rome's principal aqueducts, the Aqua Anio Vetus and Aqua Anio Novus, was particularly hard and conveyed high levels of dissolved calcium carbonate. Indeed, Frontinus complains in his treatise on the aqueducts of Rome, that "the accumulation of deposit, which sometimes hardens into a crust, contracts the channel of the water" (CXXII.1)." [1]
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128153390/toxicology-...
[1] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/lead...
Thanks for the replies! Great stuff from all of you.
You obviously would prefer non-lead pipes, but running the water for a period before using flushes out any lead if the pipes are in the house. Like you say in your comment, it's when water sits in a container like a wine vat where leeching has time to accumulate.
I can hardly imagine living in a house with lead pipes. I mean even if water if provably safe today, what if tomorrow PH shifts to acidity.
Everything in this article may be accurate, but that likely means we're all far worse off now.
I'm not a fan of this phrasing. None of the findings had anything to do with measuring IQ levels in ancient Europe. They were about measuring historical levels of lead, which they then just plugged into modern models to presume some levels of cognitive effects.
A study that was actually able to measure cognitive disparities and correlate them with measured levels of lead would have been extremely interesting, but this is not that. Everything other than the measurements of historical lead levels seems to be fluff.
This would kind of be like saying "massive asteroid strike 100m years ago lead to cataclysmic tsunami, study finds" but then not showing any evidence of a tsunami, just evidence that it struck an ocean and the inference that that would have caused a tsunami. It might be a reasonable inference, it's just not as interesting as the title would make it seem.
Edit: I should qualify, I'm not trying to say that "they did the math"-style papers don't have value, just that the phrasing in how they are presented matters to me. If the phrasing was more like "Use of lead in Roman Empire would have lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds" I would have no issue with it.
Some of it was also fucking bananas which didn't survive enlightenment.
It considered it's self the successor in the same way that russia considers itself to be the 3rd Rome.
Some of the social sciences are terrible at this. A former partner was a researcher in one of what I now consider to be less respectable fields and she would come up with a feely conclusion and fit the data to it and publish it. Wanted me to co-author one with her and do the statistical analysis. Told her I don't want to be on Retraction Watch.
This is why I do mathematics. Most of it is impossible to argue against once there's a solid proof :)
(also everyone is really nice in the field!)
For (presumed) IQ benefits, I'd focus more on the hygiene, and the relatively disease-free drinking water which all those lead pipes & lead-lined aqueducts provided. (Plus the sewers.) There were lots of nasty diseases you could catch by drinking the water in ancient cities. And at scale, "lead lowered IQ" isn't much different to "unable to think well while ill", to "higher mortality makes education a poorer investment".
you mean after the slaughters?
And conquest is of course always bad. But that wasn't the point you were making.
You were talking as if there was constant large scale starvation in Rome, and there for the most part wasn't. You point that only rich Roman elites didn't regularly starve isn't really true. And its certainty not true in comparison to other places in the ancient world.
You just looking for an argument? Its important people know writing and roads weren’t invented by the romans. They are given way too much credit by Americans with imperial ambitions.
Not "presume", "deduce" or "conclude".
May have lowered IQs based on extrapolation and modern studies
Might be a better way to put it
> We use "would have" as the past tense form of will have:
>> I phoned at six o'clock. I knew he would have got home by then.
Note the difference between this and:
> I phoned at six o'clock. I knew he was home by then.
Which implies first-hand knowledge of his location. The first only signals a logical conclusion.
https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-gram...
2. Disease Resistance: Genetic adaptations to diseases like malaria (e.g., sickle cell trait) have become more common in certain regions.
3. Skin Pigmentation: Variations in skin color have continued to adapt to UV exposure in different regions, influenced by migration and interbreeding.
4. Height and Physique: Improved nutrition and health care have led to an increase in average height and changes in body composition in many populations.
5. Wisdom Teeth: A gradual decrease in jaw size has made wisdom teeth less functional, and they are increasingly absent in some populations.
6. Brain Function: While the brain's size and structure remain unchanged, shifts in cognitive demands and education have influenced how we use our brains.
-- https://let-me-ChatGPT-that-for-you/search?q=how+has+human+b...
Then I realized this is better than common daily occurrences like, "it's perfectly reasonable to assume human biology does not change in 2000 years".
At least this is amusing!
Yes, lead exposure would have likely had similar detrimental effects on human cognition and IQ 2000 years ago as it does today. Lead is a neurotoxin that interferes with the development and function of the brain, particularly in children. Its harmful effects on intelligence, behavior, and overall health are well-documented in modern studies, and these effects would have been the same in the past, even if they were not understood at the time.
> Yes, lead exposure would have likely had similar detrimental effects on human cognition and IQ 2000 years ago as it does today. ...these effects would have been the same in the past...
I challenge you to consider that details matter, and one of those details is that the recent past through today has seen significantly more exposure to airborne lead than existed 2,000 years ago.
More philosophically, the condition of life is inherently susceptible to damage, so you practically have to draw the line at what level of damage you want to try and mitigate given the realities of the time. Do you want to be wrapped up, only breathing, eating, and drinking perfectly calibrated mixes of chemicals?
So if my generation had lead levels 3-4 X higher than Roman kids, does this explain the “Exams are getting easier” meme - that exams are staying the same, but kids really are getting smarter …
( also the hey exams were waaay harder in the Edwardian Era meme?)
-----
Note this isn't mainly about lead pipes:
"most significant... may have been through background air pollution from mining and smelting of silver and lead ores "
The smelting of silver and lead is detectable via ice cores, I remember seeing a graph showing the height of Roman silver production was only matched in the 18th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy#/media/File:Worl...
There is no evidence whatsoever that lead was widely known to be toxic, until a group of conspirationists took over the academia. In fact such a belief couldn't have been widespread. The historical quotes appear to be fabricated.
In fact it's essential. Roman sewers and sanitation quickly flushed it down the drain, by 235 it was in chaos, long distance trade was no longer possible and a thousand years long dark age ensued. The original depletion happened deep in prehistory, the most major event happening around 26kya. Also by ice cores, substantiated by geological changes and mammoth skeletons.
Anyway, I'm really tired of those "Stupid claim, study finds".
I mean, if your goal is to get from point A to point B, having a fast car just means you go there faster.
I'm thinking of IQ in a similar way, as in - high IQ = faster car. But at the end of the day, it's still the same, isn't it? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
But still, I don't believe IQ alone can improve your reasoning capability, could it? Like with proper education, and knowledge, a person with average IQ would more likely be able to see the correct patterns, and connections between ideas, than a high IQ person without the required education would.
It's like - having the proper education, trumps the meaning of having a high IQ. But, it's true, given the similar environment, I'd assume, the high IQ person would do better.
Education is no substitute for IQ any more than IQ could be substituted for education. A high IQ individual has the potential to better utilize an education, all else being equal. Whether education or reasoning ability is more critical is very situational. In a tour guide, you definitely would prefer someone knowledgeable, in a detective you really want someone clever. At least for the moment the preferred workload distribution is generally for computers to help us with information retrieval and low level analysis which education trains us for while a human performs high level reasoning tasks which are represented by IQ.
There are two different form of understandability that comes to my mind,
1. Things that you don't understand because you don't have the necessary background knowledge, 2. And the things you'd fundamentally never understand because of the limitations of your own mind, which is, limited by the IQ.
I' assuming you're trying to mean the second version here.
If we all suddenly went from 100% to 97% brain efficiency we wouldn't even notice. For example a bad night of sleep is surely worth 10 times as much.
I wonder what will happen to current empires from micro- and nano-plastics, PFAS, airpolution, as well as harmful yet popular habits like doomscrolling and games addictions.
You might find this meta-analysis interesting: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... Part of that conclusion (note that water fluoridation in the US is recommended to a level of 0.7 mg/L):
> This systematic review and meta-analysis found inverse associations and a dose-response association between fluoride measurements in urine and drinking water and children’s IQ across the large multicountry epidemiological literature. There were limited data and uncertainty in the dose-response association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ when fluoride exposure was estimated by drinking water alone at concentrations less than 1.5 mg/L.
Cochrane Review https://cochrane.org/news/water-fluoridation-less-effective-...
LOTUS Study https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/lotus/#results CATFISH Study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36469652/
When under oath CDC could not provide any evidence that fluoride is safe for the brain https://fluoridealert.org/content/cdc-oral-health-director-w...
CDC agreed with the 2006 National Research Council findings that fluorides “interfere with the function of the brain and body by direct and indirect means.” CDC KNEW fluoride affected the brain back in 2006, yet did nothing with this information! https://youtu.be/0A34FK2lTDs
This article correlates 100% with bad causal statements. Garum, anyone?
