11 ms·

'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

267 points by unfasten 13y ago

ctdonath 13y ago
tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."
- StavrosK 13y ago
  "Poverty: Not even once."
  - salgernon 13y ago
    Since many people might not get the reference, this is a reference to the 90s "crack, not even once" canned media message. Related: Nancy regan's "just say no to drugs" from the 80s. In America, these simplistic sound bites seem to be our attempt at universal healthcare.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- bittired 13y ago
  Damn lies and statistics, though. Being poor does not cause lower IQ, nor does lower IQ cause you to be poor. However, you'll find a lot of lower IQ people at poverty level. You can't guarantee that any college candidate that is poor is not going to excel, so poverty, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, should have absolutely nothing to do with acceptance into any organization, assuming that everything else is equal, which it isn't. Unfortunately clothing, shared experience and knowledge, language, etc. significantly influence testing and decisions.
  - rtpg 13y ago
    Pretty sure growing up in poverty can negatively influence access to mentally stimulating things. Not saying that the number on the bank account directly influences IQ, but tackling poverty would probably have ripples in the school system too.
    - bittired 13y ago
      This is going in a bad direction for sure now, but here is this thing: Some people, regardless of race, have lower intellectual capacity. That is what IQ tests try to measure, but fail to do completely because a lot is still based on education and experience that is difficult to factor out of the tests. A greater number of those people that have less intellectual capacity are not going to be as financially successful. Unless you just make them. And that "making" them is as temporary as the funds that keep going to them. That is NOT to say that we should not feed the poor and hungry. We should! And, we should try to educate them more, because they need more help. However, that is charity. People deserve love, food, and shelter. But, we are not able to "bring up" people to a level that cannot be sustained because they don't have the intellectual capacity. That is why welfare fails and is taken advantage of. Unless you have some sort of medicine or medical treatment that can make people with less intellectual capacity have greater intellectual capacity to even everyone out, then it should be considered charity to help the poor- not some sort of way to make everyone smarter.
      - rtpg 13y ago
        I get your point, I just don't think that "intellectual capacity" is really the limiting factor here. Education is a place where we really can make the pie bigger for everyone I think. And economics isn't zero-sum, we can at least try to make sure people can have 3 meals a day. Also, I'm not completely convinced of the amount of importance of intellect by birth. But that's more of an opinion I hold, I have no evidence to back it up.
      - Daishiman 13y ago
        Except that intellectual capacity is evidently not the main factor in determining the poverty level of people; it's certainly among one of the variables, but the fact that poor people are better off in some systems and countries rather than others and social mobility also varies substantially, it means that there's a ton of things that can work as government policy to improve the situation.
      - mkessy 13y ago
        What are you even talking about right now? The facts are: poverty makes it difficult for children to get access to stimulating environments, diversity of experience, non-stressful living conditions, and good academics. All these factors combined result in lower intelligence as a whole. That is very well cited in the papers, of which plenty have been linked and I suggest you look at them. So it follows that programs that attempt to provide and foster conditions that allow for an intelligent child to grow are beneficial. This can take many forms, educating poor mothers, better funding for schools, education about nutrition and stimulation, money for basic living necessities, etc. I just find it strange that for all your posts you haven't cited a single article that supports your claims. It seems to be your own logical surmising.
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    > Being poor does not cause lower IQ Down the page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 - we have lancewiggs saying that the results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty. What basis do you have for your claim?
    - bittired 13y ago
      Here is the logic: 1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world. 2. Take all of their money away. 3. Give it to the other 50%. Lets say we were able to do those three. Now do you think being poor causes lower IQ? DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION!
      - jre 13y ago
        I think if you take the babies of the smartest X% people in the world and raise them in poverty then yes, their average IQ will be lower than if they were raised in a middle class household. Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.
        bittired 13y ago
        You are confusing intelligence with intellectual capacity (IQ). IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind. Intelligence is building upon that. Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.
        jiggy2011 13y ago
        "An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess intelligence." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
  - arkades 13y ago
    Attending college increases pre-college IQ scores a mean of just under 20 points (I don't recall the precise number from the study now, I remember it was between 15 and 20). That's not "smarter people get into college" - that's before-and-after on the same subjects. Growing up wealthy entails a lot more advantages than four years of courses, at that.
    - rlanday 13y ago
      I would like to see that study if you can find it. IQ is generally believed to become more genetic (that is, environmental effects start to wear off) as people get older.
      - arkades 13y ago
        Sorry, I hit up Google Scholar trying to find it but had no luck. It's not my field of expertise, so I don't know the proper jargon to throw in to get the right search results.
  - Symmetry 13y ago
    No, there's actually a good amount of evidence that poverty does in fact cause low IQs. For instance the divergence between the IQs of East Germans and West Germans during the partition, and the way they converged again after the Cold War. It is true that people with low IQs will tend to become poorer (though conscientiousness is often a bigger factor), but reversion to the mean should limit the impact of that in the children of poor people. EDIT: Here's a rather in depth article on the topic: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-wealth/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-... There's tons of evidence that at a population level wealth is the main driver of IQ differences, though genetics does play a large role at the individual level.
    - qznc 13y ago
      Be careful about causality and correlation. Poverty probably does not "cause" low-IQ, but poverty is a good indicator for low-IQ due to correlation.
      - Symmetry 13y ago
        Correlation between A and B does not imply causation from A to B, but it does imply causation there is some causation somewhere, from A to B or B to A or something more complicated. In those cases we have to step down a level and look at the particular mechanisms. We can see some very good mechanisms for how a low IQ might cause poverty in most cases, but the specific reason I mentioned the East/West Germany situation is that it precludes any of the normal ways that people can sort themselves into poverty - it wasn't as if there was any huge migration in Germany that made all the smarter people end up on the west side of the divide. Can you provide a causal mechanism other than poverty->low IQ that could explain that? Or how about all the immigrants from rural Ireland that had significantly lower IQs than the residents of the cities they immigrated into, but whose children and descendants had substantially the same IQs as other residents of those cities? There's really a mountain of evidence that the causality here runs both ways.
        qznc 13y ago
        Personally, I believe (!) in a causal chain like this: Poor people dream smaller (hopelessness,knowledge) -> less ambition (in school, career, wealth) -> less motivation (e.g. in IQ tests) -> envy -> aggression against wealthy people Also what does "poverty" mean here? "Lack of basic resources", then practically nobody is poor in Germany due to our welfare system. Statistics use "less than 60% of average income" or something like that. Then we will never eliminate poverty, anyways. To "solve" poverty I believe the big question is how to inspire people that it is possible to improve their situation? How to provide hope to poor people? In Germany I think it is intellectually realistic that anybody can improve, but people do not believe it. Essentially, (in the wealthy western world) poverty is not a technical problem, but rather an emotional one. I do not care about IQ much. I do not know my own IQ. Since I am currently pursuing a PhD I am probably above average, but who really cares? Studies show that IQ predicts academic success, so it means something for high-education jobs. For creative tasks it's useless. Effectively, the IQ of a child only provides a hint about future career choices, but not about success or wealth.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    So the kids in the study were selected because their parents were poor, and the average IQ of the kids in the study was around 80. That certainly signals a correlation, and since these are kids and don't have agency over their economic situation, it suggests a direction of causation too.
    - bittired 13y ago
      Logically money should have no direct affect on intellectual capacity (e.g. see my other argument about taking the money away and giving it to someone else). In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.
      - rayiner 13y ago
        It depends on how you ascribe causation to hereditary factors. Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ? I don't think so, because a 4 year old has no agency over his economic circumstances.
        bittired 13y ago
        I actually don't believe at a micro-level that causation comes into play at all. I was responding to the statement that at a macro-level there is probability of causation, and it is more rational that poverty is caused by stupidity than poverty causes stupidity. The latter is nonsense.
        btilly 13y ago
        Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ? No. But it does make sense to say that a 4 year old is both poor and has a low IQ because his parents do. And this applies whether you believe that his low IQ is due to heredity or a poor environment caused by his parents.
      - JshWright 13y ago
        How could it not have an impact on intellectual capacity? Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development. This things are all much easier to access when you have more money.
  - monkeyspaw 13y ago
    There are also issues with using IQ as a proxy for... anything. Especially when we're talking about topics with strong racial components.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine." It's a good thing to back up with a scientific study and facts, but I'd hardly call it surprising (the article did) except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like. Another interesting part of the bias might be that I've never heard the term "crack baby" (or similar) outside the context of US ghettos, while cocaine is used globally in many countries.
  - throwit1979 13y ago
    except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like. I think this is a very important observation. Sometimes poverty doesn't look anything like this. I'd like to note that although I grew up in "technical" poverty, e.g. in a small rural community with a median income of $11,121, very few saw much violence or any of the markers of poverty lifestyle this article talks about. Although my anecdote is not scientific, I do think this has much more to do with observed culture than with an arbitrary signifier like poverty. Urban poverty and rural poverty are entirely different things, for instance. As is transient and temporary versus chronic poverty.
    - thisisrobv 13y ago
      Great point. I would love to see some study done around this. It's the combination of poverty and crime that leads to such disaster in most cases. It's not even a lack of community, in my experience both have very strong social ties to one another. Either way, it's a shame we still can't figure this out in America.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    Crack Cocaine and Cocaine are not quite the same thing. Cocaine is known and used in the US as well. Crack was a US ghetto phenomenon, it is not used as some code-word for blacks. The results are surprising in the sense that what was said, and generally believed even by professionals in the field, at the height of the issue was that it would be impossible for these children to develop at all. Poverty has a known affect on development, it was believed that these crack babies wouldn't even have the chance to hit that level. The surprise comes from that the previous belief couldn't be more wrong. The actual effect was basically non-existent.
- jessriedel 13y ago
  I think the restriction to babies born full term is extremely important. "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine, conditional on being carried to full term."
- clavalle 13y ago
  *When not taking into account prematurely born children, which among crack users is 17–27% compared to between 3-4% for the population at large.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    How do we know it is caused by crack use and not by other factors that usually correlate with heavy crack use?
    - clavalle 13y ago
      Because in areas with high poverty but low-cocaine use rates the pre-term birth rate rises (from 3.9% to 4.9%) but not as much as among crack-cocaine users (17%-29%).
- Sealy 13y ago
  > tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine." This is an interesting and almost 'common sense' observation about demographics. It is more difficult to thrive in a poor environment then it is to do badly out of a rich environment. That's why we are obsessed about 'rags to riches' stories right?
- newnewnew 13y ago
  Somewhere Charles Murray is reading this article and screaming "IQ! IQ!"
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    I've got to read that book, if only because of how frequently it is coming up in discussion recently.
    - newnewnew 13y ago
      It's a great read despite its "evil" reputation. You'll be impressed by how meticulous Murray is. His style is 80% evidence and 20% conjecture, and he is always careful to separate the two. "Coming Apart" is also essential reading to understand modern society.
      - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
        Source of a lot of the evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund
Almaviva 13y ago
This is getting into questions you can't ask, and IQ is a severely flawed metric, but I wonder what the IQs are of the parents, and if the children's scores are higher or lower, and if we can rule out heredity.
- lancewiggs 13y ago
  The results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty as well.
  - jjindev 13y ago
    Related: Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-that-cripple-iq-in-sub-saharan-africa/ http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-...
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      That's a fun comment thread. Poe's Law illustrated beautifully.
- tokenadult 13y ago
  Genetically sensitive designs for study of human behavior are the province of behavior geneticists (many of whom are first trained as psychologists, but at least two I know have undergraduate degrees in mathematics). One of the surprising findings of human behavior genetics is that ALL human behavioral characteristics are heritable. (It is an abuse of language to say "heritable" in this context, but the abuse is conventional and standard in the field.) So we can agree with the professional literature that your tendency to vote for one political party rather than another is heritable. Your attribution of causes for human differences (e.g., human differences in IQ) is also heritable. Your opinion about regulation of the Internet is heritable. Everything about human behavior is heritable. Eric Turkheimer has recently been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, and he has the very kind habit of posting most of his peer-reviewed journal articles on his faculty website. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm Lars Penke is another, younger researcher who posts most of his publications on his personal website. http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html I have the pleasure of meeting many other researchers in human genetics just about weekly during the school year at the University of Minnesota "journal club" Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology. From those sources and other sources, I have learned about current review articles on human behavior genetics that help dispel misconceptions that are even commonplace among medically or scientifically trained persons who aren't keeping up with current research. An interesting review article, Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... admits the disappointment of behavior genetics researchers. "But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it's easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science. "Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place." Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... is another interesting review article that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)." The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence: http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neuroscience_of_intelligence_review.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur... "At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]." The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182 http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Johnson%20Current%20Directions%20Psych%20Science%202010%20(G%20and%20E%20in%20IQ).pdf http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/... looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection. "Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic. We will understand them best through investigation of their manifestation in biological and social developmental processes." Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological Science. http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositivesGenesIQ.pdf http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositiv... "At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be temperedءs it has been in the medical sciencesآy a recognition that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects. "Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the proliferation of potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not realize that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public may lead to incorrect perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as 'genes for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."
jdmitch 13y ago
Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results. Doesn't this mean that their selection sample effectively excluded any babies that had a noticeable physical reaction (other than having cocaine in their system) to the effect of their mothers' cocaine use?
- a3n 13y ago
  You can't study everything at once.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Yeah, I don't really get that part either. Prematurity is something that is itself heavily studied; prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to study.
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    > prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to study It is a logical thing to study, and most likely is being studied, by someone else. After all, this study wasn't looking at premature babies. That doesn't prematurity with crack isn't a problem, only a different problem.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      My issue is less with what the experiment studied and more with how it was summarized (particularly by the headline).
  - sophacles 13y ago
    Except... How do you know which effects come from crack + premature without subtracting out just premature and just crack?
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Designing experiments in this area is not my expertise, but my inclination would be "study premature babies with and without crack" You could also simply study premature babies in general, and then study why crack seems to cause more premature babies. I imagine somebody who is actually in this field would not have much trouble designing experiments to study premature "crack babies". Premature babies are something they chose not to study, not something that cannot be studied.
calibraxis 13y ago
Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act) There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure) It's alcohol, a legal drug. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome)
- smoyer 13y ago
  My wife was a early-childhood development specialist at our local Easter Seals and the kids with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome were very sad. It's totally preventable, and the lack of understanding of consequences is devastating.
  - bittired 13y ago
    Agreed. Don't drink too much when pregnant. But, a short glass of wine once a week or so isn't excessive.
    - JshWright 13y ago
      A glass of wine a _day_ wouldn't be excessive.
      - colomon 13y ago
        In 1970, a glass of wine a day was what the doctor suggested my mother should drink during her pregnancy.
      - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
        A glass of wine a day, normal home glass rather than a pub glass, may be more than the UK recommended allowance for a female.
  - klawed 13y ago
VLM 13y ago
Bad story design... trying to talk about the typical result, then late in the article drop the bombshell "The team considers Jaimee and her mother, Karen, among their best success stories.". If they "have to" go anecdotal, they could have at least picked the median subject. Like doing a report on the health effects of smoking, and intentionally selecting the healthiest 99 year old smoker in the world rather than the most likely outcome. The most interesting part of the whole situation can be summed up by one of the lines describing the babies, "nearly all were African Americans." Even since the first days, It never was about medical issues or science, just a sorta-stealthy way to bash black folks. You'll note there was carefully no outage at the time, or long term medical study, at white coke snorting suburban women, although the blood levels of coke the babies experienced probably were about the same in the end. By analogy it would be like creating a social meme and scientific study of the negative pregnancy impact of malt liquor consumption (by urban black women), carefully ignoring the consumption of fruity margaritas (by suburban white women). Because you can't bash black people unless you can "other" them first. I guess the two startup lessons are if you're trying to make median situation analysis, policy, and decisions, and you must use an anecdote, don't chose an extreme outlier, use a median... unless you've got an axe to grind and you're trying to mislead people, in which case unusual sample selection can be a powerful tool to mislead people. Startup lesson two is one popular way to scam people is to play word definition games as a strategy for divide and conqueror, so look out for that gameplay technique, and/or use word redefinition as a weapon of your own.
- marquis 13y ago
  I found the success story important to heavier weigh the fact that cocaine exposure doesn't stunt brain development to a greater degree than general poverty. The author made plenty of other points about the tested groups not behaving other than expected given poverty as a common factor among them.
- btilly 13y ago
  Bad story design... I disagree. If you're trying to tell a compelling story, you want to reinforce the story that you're trying to tell in every way that you can. That makes it more compelling, and sells more page views. The danger being, of course, that making reasoned decisions based on compelling story lines is dangerous. But this article isn't in that business - it wants to sell page views.
kingkawn 13y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-crack-babies-epidemic-that-was-not.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-cra... Great video from the nytimes on this story from may
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I got the part about not seeing a relationship between crack usage and mental functioning. It's a very interesting result. What I don't understand is "Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty." Is there any data referenced in the article to actually support that claim? It's the central thesis here, and I don't see any supporting argument. I see some text around seeing people arrested, dead bodies, and so on, but there are lots of poor rural kids who never see that. This is much more a function of urban poverty. Maybe I missed it.
- mischanix 13y ago
  >It was amid that climate that Hurt organized a study of 224 near-term or full-term babies born at Einstein between 1989 and 1992 - half with mothers who used cocaine during pregnancy and half who were not exposed to the drug in utero. >All the babies came from low-income families, and nearly all were African Americans.
- undoware 13y ago
  It wasn't in the article -- the past few years have been disruptive in the social sciences because of multiple replicated studies that show stress, including poverty stress (which is a well-quantified phenomenon) have a profound impact on working memory ("how much RAM your brain has"). Google it. I first read about it in the Economist, but really, it's where the conversation starts these days. Brain damage is one of the main mechanisms by which poverty passes itself down to subsequent generations.
denysonique 13y ago
Whats the TLDR of the article?
Alex3917 13y ago
"They found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time." That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%. C.f. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf N.b. that some of these statistics are pretty wonky, e.g. they count getting beat up for your siblings as assault, or getting flashed as being a victim of sexual assault.
- ims 13y ago
  The average is misleading here. Where do you think those 1 in 20 kids mostly live?
- napoleond 13y ago
  1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have No I wouldn't, because: a) I doubt the age distribution for "kids who see people get shot in a year" is constant. The linked article doesn't include age distributions, but they surveyed children up to age 17, and I would expect many more 15 year-olds to see people get shot than 7 year-olds. b) I doubt the system is stochastic. It's probably more likely for the 1 in 20 from year 1 to see another few of the 7 shots in those 7 years (due to geographic and socio-economic factors) than it is for the other 19. In other words, even for a country where gun violence is rampant, a study population where 35% of children below 7 have seen someone get shot is far from average.
  - Alex3917 13y ago
    Good points. In terms of lifetime prevalence, that study says that, "Similarly, 3.5 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds had witnessed a shooting during their lifetimes, whereas more than one in five 14- to 17-year-olds (22.2 percent) had witnessed a shooting." So the population in question is definitely no where near average, my was just that strictly in terms of the amount of violence witnessed, the differences probably aren't as great as one would otherwise assume.
guard-of-terra 13y ago
I guess it's time for a War on Poverty. Make poverty illegal @ Jail anybody caught poor.
- nullc 13y ago
  I thought we started that program in the 80s?
Brock_Lee 13y ago
FYI, the information starts at paragraph 18.
jrochkind1 13y ago
This isn't in fact news, it has long been known that there is no scentific/medical 'crack baby' phenomenon, as documented in the wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure What's perhaps more important to talk about is the demonstrated harm of poverty and violence on children.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
"Crack baby" ALWAYS was simply a synonym for "poor and black". It turns out that racism harms its victims. Who knew?
- rlanday 13y ago
  Do you think racism harms crack users more than their crack use?
deleted 13y ago
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raldi 13y ago
I've read that it's notoriously difficult to measure the impact of crack on prenatal development because so many crack-smoking pregnant women also smoke cigarettes, and the latter is so harmful already that it's hard to isolate the effects of the former.
- clavalle 13y ago
  That doesn't make a lot of sense since there are plenty of pregnant tobacco smokers that don't smoke crack.
  - raldi 13y ago
    I'm not following; could you elaborate?
    - josephlord 13y ago
      The control group should be smokers not non-smokers and if all the cocaine using group are also smokers the difference should be the effect of the cocaine.
brownbat 13y ago
The lede is buried a bit: "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.
KMag 13y ago
My old room mate did cocaine studies with pregnant mice. He'd inject pregnant mice with cocaine and then raise the mouse pups and place electrodes in on of the "pleasure centers" of their brains. He would then measure the curve of how hard the mice were willing to spin a wheel for a given amount of current into their brains. The model was that mice willing to beat their bodies more for the same amount of stimulation were more susceptible to a wide range of addictions. He found that pups exposed to cocaine in utero did in fact as adults spin the wheel harder for a given amount of stimulation, indicating higher susceptibility to a wide range of addictions. My old room mate would have really liked to perform the same study with nicotine, since many many more human mothers dose their fetuses with nicotine as compared to cocaine. For what the wild speculations of an experienced researcher are worth, he suspected that mouse pups exposed to nicotine would also be more susceptible to addiction (supposing he was actually measuring susceptibility to addiction). However, politicians and lobbyists have made it much easier to get federal grant money for cocaine studies vs. nicotine studies, despite nicotine having a much larger impact on society. On a side note: in 1999, 4.7% of US 8th graders were willing to admit to having used cocaine, so the test group appears to be below US averages for cocaine use, despite their mothers using cocaine. I imagine that being predicated upon having mothers caring enough to place their children in these studies, and mothers responsible enough to stay in contact with researchers, and the subjects knowing they were being studied, skewed the drug usage portion of the study. Nationally, (for those outside of medical trials) I can't imagine the cocaine use rate for those whose mothers used cocaine to be below the rate for those whose mothers did not use cocaine.
callmeed 13y ago
So, vitamins are actually bad for you and there's really no such thing as a 'crack baby'. It's a bad week for things I learned growing up in the 80s/90s ...
chrischen 13y ago
What's more likely, that seeing dead people and being poor lowers your IQ, or that having a low IQ means you'll end up poor? They preselected a bunch of poor people, which means the low IQ could be explained by the fact that their existing IQ put them in this place in society along with the predisposition to cheap drug addiction.
- yusefnapora 13y ago
  It seems like what's most likely is that you didn't read the article correctly. They were measuring the IQ of the children, not the parents. These children didn't 'end up' poor; they started life that way. Their IQ was then 10 to 20 points below average by the time they were four, regardless of the parents' cocaine usage. Or are you suggesting that four year olds with low IQ are responsible for their place in society and the poverty of their parents?
  - chrischen 13y ago
    IQ most likely has a genetic factor to it. Otherwise, evolution would be independent of IQ and our society would not have shown an increase in IQ over time (which studies have shown to be true). So no, I did not misread the article.
undoware 13y ago
TL;DR "White folks attack wrong devil, again. Lots of black folks dead or suffering, again." It isn't science that's racist. What's racist is the thousands of brilliant minds that took THIS LONG to look in the right direction. Each one of them minutely racist on its own -- it was just one tiny blind spot. One tiny speck on the lens. On every lens. That's all it takes to destroy a community. That and some SWAT boots.
twohey 13y ago
Of the 110, two are dead - one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting - three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate. It seems rather depressing to me that the college graduation rate by 23 is under 10%. Talk about different worlds
_m_a_u_r_i_c_e_ 13y ago
The study outcome is poverty has the bigger impact. Yet there is a lot of discussion about anything else like Alcohol etc. But think about the uncomfortable issue: What to do against poverty? Isn't it a hint that our concern should be "a human right to access minimum wealth" and how to enable it?
lotsofcows 13y ago
"Jaimee Drakewood hurried in from the rain" What? This is supposed to be a scientific report? A lay science report? A newspaper? Why does the very first sentence read like a badly written paperback?
goggles99 13y ago
"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture. And yet somehow immigrants (Nigerian, Vietnamese, Romanian, Armenian) living in poverty somehow find a way to work hard enough to become successful. They make their own outcome. Why is it only the impoverished Americans that cannot succeed. I think we have to look here at what it takes to succeed. 1. Dedicated parent(s). Two of them (a mom and a dad) can do far more than one so probability of success rises if both stick around. These inner city kids almost NEVER have a dad in the picture. This leaves mom to work or she is a complete welfare loser and probably on drugs too. 2. Standards/Morals. One bad choice can ruin a person's life. We all have turning points in life where we choose to take a hit off a pope, or pass on it. Have unprotected sex, or abstain. Assault someone, commit a robbery, ETC. These choices have a ripple effect on the rest of our lives. 3. Hard work. Why work if you can live off of the dole? Why work for white people and help their society since they are so racist? (this is a common attitude). Immigrants come to America with almost nothing. They see opportunity though. They work hard and succeed. They stick together. Dad does not leave, mom does not smoke crack or sleep around. They have values, morals and a strong work ethic. This is what separates immigrants living in poverty and your more typical inner city situation in Philadelphia.

267 points by unfasten 13y ago

tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."

StavrosK 13y ago
"Poverty: Not even once."
- salgernon 13y ago
  Since many people might not get the reference, this is a reference to the 90s "crack, not even once" canned media message. Related: Nancy regan's "just say no to drugs" from the 80s. In America, these simplistic sound bites seem to be our attempt at universal healthcare.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bittired 13y ago
Damn lies and statistics, though. Being poor does not cause lower IQ, nor does lower IQ cause you to be poor. However, you'll find a lot of lower IQ people at poverty level. You can't guarantee that any college candidate that is poor is not going to excel, so poverty, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, should have absolutely nothing to do with acceptance into any organization, assuming that everything else is equal, which it isn't. Unfortunately clothing, shared experience and knowledge, language, etc. significantly influence testing and decisions.
- rtpg 13y ago
  Pretty sure growing up in poverty can negatively influence access to mentally stimulating things. Not saying that the number on the bank account directly influences IQ, but tackling poverty would probably have ripples in the school system too.
  - bittired 13y ago
    This is going in a bad direction for sure now, but here is this thing: Some people, regardless of race, have lower intellectual capacity. That is what IQ tests try to measure, but fail to do completely because a lot is still based on education and experience that is difficult to factor out of the tests. A greater number of those people that have less intellectual capacity are not going to be as financially successful. Unless you just make them. And that "making" them is as temporary as the funds that keep going to them. That is NOT to say that we should not feed the poor and hungry. We should! And, we should try to educate them more, because they need more help. However, that is charity. People deserve love, food, and shelter. But, we are not able to "bring up" people to a level that cannot be sustained because they don't have the intellectual capacity. That is why welfare fails and is taken advantage of. Unless you have some sort of medicine or medical treatment that can make people with less intellectual capacity have greater intellectual capacity to even everyone out, then it should be considered charity to help the poor- not some sort of way to make everyone smarter.
    - rtpg 13y ago
      I get your point, I just don't think that "intellectual capacity" is really the limiting factor here. Education is a place where we really can make the pie bigger for everyone I think. And economics isn't zero-sum, we can at least try to make sure people can have 3 meals a day. Also, I'm not completely convinced of the amount of importance of intellect by birth. But that's more of an opinion I hold, I have no evidence to back it up.
    - Daishiman 13y ago
      Except that intellectual capacity is evidently not the main factor in determining the poverty level of people; it's certainly among one of the variables, but the fact that poor people are better off in some systems and countries rather than others and social mobility also varies substantially, it means that there's a ton of things that can work as government policy to improve the situation.
    - mkessy 13y ago
      What are you even talking about right now? The facts are: poverty makes it difficult for children to get access to stimulating environments, diversity of experience, non-stressful living conditions, and good academics. All these factors combined result in lower intelligence as a whole. That is very well cited in the papers, of which plenty have been linked and I suggest you look at them. So it follows that programs that attempt to provide and foster conditions that allow for an intelligent child to grow are beneficial. This can take many forms, educating poor mothers, better funding for schools, education about nutrition and stimulation, money for basic living necessities, etc. I just find it strange that for all your posts you haven't cited a single article that supports your claims. It seems to be your own logical surmising.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  > Being poor does not cause lower IQ Down the page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 - we have lancewiggs saying that the results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty. What basis do you have for your claim?
  - bittired 13y ago
    Here is the logic: 1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world. 2. Take all of their money away. 3. Give it to the other 50%. Lets say we were able to do those three. Now do you think being poor causes lower IQ? DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION!
    - jre 13y ago
      I think if you take the babies of the smartest X% people in the world and raise them in poverty then yes, their average IQ will be lower than if they were raised in a middle class household. Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.
      - bittired 13y ago
        You are confusing intelligence with intellectual capacity (IQ). IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind. Intelligence is building upon that. Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.
        jiggy2011 13y ago
        "An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess intelligence." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
- arkades 13y ago
  Attending college increases pre-college IQ scores a mean of just under 20 points (I don't recall the precise number from the study now, I remember it was between 15 and 20). That's not "smarter people get into college" - that's before-and-after on the same subjects. Growing up wealthy entails a lot more advantages than four years of courses, at that.
  - rlanday 13y ago
    I would like to see that study if you can find it. IQ is generally believed to become more genetic (that is, environmental effects start to wear off) as people get older.
    - arkades 13y ago
      Sorry, I hit up Google Scholar trying to find it but had no luck. It's not my field of expertise, so I don't know the proper jargon to throw in to get the right search results.
- Symmetry 13y ago
  No, there's actually a good amount of evidence that poverty does in fact cause low IQs. For instance the divergence between the IQs of East Germans and West Germans during the partition, and the way they converged again after the Cold War. It is true that people with low IQs will tend to become poorer (though conscientiousness is often a bigger factor), but reversion to the mean should limit the impact of that in the children of poor people. EDIT: Here's a rather in depth article on the topic: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-wealth/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-... There's tons of evidence that at a population level wealth is the main driver of IQ differences, though genetics does play a large role at the individual level.
  - qznc 13y ago
    Be careful about causality and correlation. Poverty probably does not "cause" low-IQ, but poverty is a good indicator for low-IQ due to correlation.
    - Symmetry 13y ago
      Correlation between A and B does not imply causation from A to B, but it does imply causation there is some causation somewhere, from A to B or B to A or something more complicated. In those cases we have to step down a level and look at the particular mechanisms. We can see some very good mechanisms for how a low IQ might cause poverty in most cases, but the specific reason I mentioned the East/West Germany situation is that it precludes any of the normal ways that people can sort themselves into poverty - it wasn't as if there was any huge migration in Germany that made all the smarter people end up on the west side of the divide. Can you provide a causal mechanism other than poverty->low IQ that could explain that? Or how about all the immigrants from rural Ireland that had significantly lower IQs than the residents of the cities they immigrated into, but whose children and descendants had substantially the same IQs as other residents of those cities? There's really a mountain of evidence that the causality here runs both ways.
      - qznc 13y ago
        Personally, I believe (!) in a causal chain like this: Poor people dream smaller (hopelessness,knowledge) -> less ambition (in school, career, wealth) -> less motivation (e.g. in IQ tests) -> envy -> aggression against wealthy people Also what does "poverty" mean here? "Lack of basic resources", then practically nobody is poor in Germany due to our welfare system. Statistics use "less than 60% of average income" or something like that. Then we will never eliminate poverty, anyways. To "solve" poverty I believe the big question is how to inspire people that it is possible to improve their situation? How to provide hope to poor people? In Germany I think it is intellectually realistic that anybody can improve, but people do not believe it. Essentially, (in the wealthy western world) poverty is not a technical problem, but rather an emotional one. I do not care about IQ much. I do not know my own IQ. Since I am currently pursuing a PhD I am probably above average, but who really cares? Studies show that IQ predicts academic success, so it means something for high-education jobs. For creative tasks it's useless. Effectively, the IQ of a child only provides a hint about future career choices, but not about success or wealth.
- rayiner 13y ago
  So the kids in the study were selected because their parents were poor, and the average IQ of the kids in the study was around 80. That certainly signals a correlation, and since these are kids and don't have agency over their economic situation, it suggests a direction of causation too.
  - bittired 13y ago
    Logically money should have no direct affect on intellectual capacity (e.g. see my other argument about taking the money away and giving it to someone else). In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      It depends on how you ascribe causation to hereditary factors. Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ? I don't think so, because a 4 year old has no agency over his economic circumstances.
      - bittired 13y ago
        I actually don't believe at a micro-level that causation comes into play at all. I was responding to the statement that at a macro-level there is probability of causation, and it is more rational that poverty is caused by stupidity than poverty causes stupidity. The latter is nonsense.
      - btilly 13y ago
        Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ? No. But it does make sense to say that a 4 year old is both poor and has a low IQ because his parents do. And this applies whether you believe that his low IQ is due to heredity or a poor environment caused by his parents.
    - JshWright 13y ago
      How could it not have an impact on intellectual capacity? Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development. This things are all much easier to access when you have more money.
- monkeyspaw 13y ago
  There are also issues with using IQ as a proxy for... anything. Especially when we're talking about topics with strong racial components.
tripzilch 13y ago
> tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine." It's a good thing to back up with a scientific study and facts, but I'd hardly call it surprising (the article did) except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like. Another interesting part of the bias might be that I've never heard the term "crack baby" (or similar) outside the context of US ghettos, while cocaine is used globally in many countries.
- throwit1979 13y ago
  except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like. I think this is a very important observation. Sometimes poverty doesn't look anything like this. I'd like to note that although I grew up in "technical" poverty, e.g. in a small rural community with a median income of $11,121, very few saw much violence or any of the markers of poverty lifestyle this article talks about. Although my anecdote is not scientific, I do think this has much more to do with observed culture than with an arbitrary signifier like poverty. Urban poverty and rural poverty are entirely different things, for instance. As is transient and temporary versus chronic poverty.
  - thisisrobv 13y ago
    Great point. I would love to see some study done around this. It's the combination of poverty and crime that leads to such disaster in most cases. It's not even a lack of community, in my experience both have very strong social ties to one another. Either way, it's a shame we still can't figure this out in America.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Crack Cocaine and Cocaine are not quite the same thing. Cocaine is known and used in the US as well. Crack was a US ghetto phenomenon, it is not used as some code-word for blacks. The results are surprising in the sense that what was said, and generally believed even by professionals in the field, at the height of the issue was that it would be impossible for these children to develop at all. Poverty has a known affect on development, it was believed that these crack babies wouldn't even have the chance to hit that level. The surprise comes from that the previous belief couldn't be more wrong. The actual effect was basically non-existent.
jessriedel 13y ago
I think the restriction to babies born full term is extremely important. "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine, conditional on being carried to full term."
clavalle 13y ago
*When not taking into account prematurely born children, which among crack users is 17–27% compared to between 3-4% for the population at large.
- smsm42 13y ago
  How do we know it is caused by crack use and not by other factors that usually correlate with heavy crack use?
  - clavalle 13y ago
    Because in areas with high poverty but low-cocaine use rates the pre-term birth rate rises (from 3.9% to 4.9%) but not as much as among crack-cocaine users (17%-29%).
Sealy 13y ago
> tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine." This is an interesting and almost 'common sense' observation about demographics. It is more difficult to thrive in a poor environment then it is to do badly out of a rich environment. That's why we are obsessed about 'rags to riches' stories right?
newnewnew 13y ago
Somewhere Charles Murray is reading this article and screaming "IQ! IQ!"
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I've got to read that book, if only because of how frequently it is coming up in discussion recently.
  - newnewnew 13y ago
    It's a great read despite its "evil" reputation. You'll be impressed by how meticulous Murray is. His style is 80% evidence and 20% conjecture, and he is always careful to separate the two. "Coming Apart" is also essential reading to understand modern society.
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      Source of a lot of the evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund

Almaviva 13y ago

This is getting into questions you can't ask, and IQ is a severely flawed metric, but I wonder what the IQs are of the parents, and if the children's scores are higher or lower, and if we can rule out heredity.

lancewiggs 13y ago
The results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty as well.
- jjindev 13y ago
  Related: Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-that-cripple-iq-in-sub-saharan-africa/ http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-...
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    That's a fun comment thread. Poe's Law illustrated beautifully.
tokenadult 13y ago
Genetically sensitive designs for study of human behavior are the province of behavior geneticists (many of whom are first trained as psychologists, but at least two I know have undergraduate degrees in mathematics). One of the surprising findings of human behavior genetics is that ALL human behavioral characteristics are heritable. (It is an abuse of language to say "heritable" in this context, but the abuse is conventional and standard in the field.) So we can agree with the professional literature that your tendency to vote for one political party rather than another is heritable. Your attribution of causes for human differences (e.g., human differences in IQ) is also heritable. Your opinion about regulation of the Internet is heritable. Everything about human behavior is heritable. Eric Turkheimer has recently been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, and he has the very kind habit of posting most of his peer-reviewed journal articles on his faculty website. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm Lars Penke is another, younger researcher who posts most of his publications on his personal website. http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html I have the pleasure of meeting many other researchers in human genetics just about weekly during the school year at the University of Minnesota "journal club" Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology. From those sources and other sources, I have learned about current review articles on human behavior genetics that help dispel misconceptions that are even commonplace among medically or scientifically trained persons who aren't keeping up with current research. An interesting review article, Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... admits the disappointment of behavior genetics researchers. "But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it's easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science. "Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place." Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... is another interesting review article that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)." The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence: http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neuroscience_of_intelligence_review.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur... "At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]." The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182 http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Johnson%20Current%20Directions%20Psych%20Science%202010%20(G%20and%20E%20in%20IQ).pdf http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/... looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection. "Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic. We will understand them best through investigation of their manifestation in biological and social developmental processes." Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological Science. http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositivesGenesIQ.pdf http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositiv... "At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be temperedءs it has been in the medical sciencesآy a recognition that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects. "Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the proliferation of potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not realize that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public may lead to incorrect perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as 'genes for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."

jdmitch 13y ago

Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results. Doesn't this mean that their selection sample effectively excluded any babies that had a noticeable physical reaction (other than having cocaine in their system) to the effect of their mothers' cocaine use?

a3n 13y ago
You can't study everything at once.
jlgreco 13y ago
Yeah, I don't really get that part either. Prematurity is something that is itself heavily studied; prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to study.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  > prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to study It is a logical thing to study, and most likely is being studied, by someone else. After all, this study wasn't looking at premature babies. That doesn't prematurity with crack isn't a problem, only a different problem.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    My issue is less with what the experiment studied and more with how it was summarized (particularly by the headline).
- sophacles 13y ago
  Except... How do you know which effects come from crack + premature without subtracting out just premature and just crack?
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Designing experiments in this area is not my expertise, but my inclination would be "study premature babies with and without crack" You could also simply study premature babies in general, and then study why crack seems to cause more premature babies. I imagine somebody who is actually in this field would not have much trouble designing experiments to study premature "crack babies". Premature babies are something they chose not to study, not something that cannot be studied.

calibraxis 13y ago

Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act) There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure) It's alcohol, a legal drug. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome)

smoyer 13y ago
My wife was a early-childhood development specialist at our local Easter Seals and the kids with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome were very sad. It's totally preventable, and the lack of understanding of consequences is devastating.
- bittired 13y ago
  Agreed. Don't drink too much when pregnant. But, a short glass of wine once a week or so isn't excessive.
  - JshWright 13y ago
    A glass of wine a _day_ wouldn't be excessive.
    - colomon 13y ago
      In 1970, a glass of wine a day was what the doctor suggested my mother should drink during her pregnancy.
    - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
      A glass of wine a day, normal home glass rather than a pub glass, may be more than the UK recommended allowance for a female.
- klawed 13y ago

VLM 13y ago

Bad story design... trying to talk about the typical result, then late in the article drop the bombshell "The team considers Jaimee and her mother, Karen, among their best success stories.". If they "have to" go anecdotal, they could have at least picked the median subject. Like doing a report on the health effects of smoking, and intentionally selecting the healthiest 99 year old smoker in the world rather than the most likely outcome. The most interesting part of the whole situation can be summed up by one of the lines describing the babies, "nearly all were African Americans." Even since the first days, It never was about medical issues or science, just a sorta-stealthy way to bash black folks. You'll note there was carefully no outage at the time, or long term medical study, at white coke snorting suburban women, although the blood levels of coke the babies experienced probably were about the same in the end. By analogy it would be like creating a social meme and scientific study of the negative pregnancy impact of malt liquor consumption (by urban black women), carefully ignoring the consumption of fruity margaritas (by suburban white women). Because you can't bash black people unless you can "other" them first. I guess the two startup lessons are if you're trying to make median situation analysis, policy, and decisions, and you must use an anecdote, don't chose an extreme outlier, use a median... unless you've got an axe to grind and you're trying to mislead people, in which case unusual sample selection can be a powerful tool to mislead people. Startup lesson two is one popular way to scam people is to play word definition games as a strategy for divide and conqueror, so look out for that gameplay technique, and/or use word redefinition as a weapon of your own.

marquis 13y ago
I found the success story important to heavier weigh the fact that cocaine exposure doesn't stunt brain development to a greater degree than general poverty. The author made plenty of other points about the tested groups not behaving other than expected given poverty as a common factor among them.
btilly 13y ago
Bad story design... I disagree. If you're trying to tell a compelling story, you want to reinforce the story that you're trying to tell in every way that you can. That makes it more compelling, and sells more page views. The danger being, of course, that making reasoned decisions based on compelling story lines is dangerous. But this article isn't in that business - it wants to sell page views.

kingkawn 13y ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-crack-babies-epidemic-that-was-not.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-cra... Great video from the nytimes on this story from may

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I got the part about not seeing a relationship between crack usage and mental functioning. It's a very interesting result. What I don't understand is "Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty." Is there any data referenced in the article to actually support that claim? It's the central thesis here, and I don't see any supporting argument. I see some text around seeing people arrested, dead bodies, and so on, but there are lots of poor rural kids who never see that. This is much more a function of urban poverty. Maybe I missed it.

mischanix 13y ago
>It was amid that climate that Hurt organized a study of 224 near-term or full-term babies born at Einstein between 1989 and 1992 - half with mothers who used cocaine during pregnancy and half who were not exposed to the drug in utero. >All the babies came from low-income families, and nearly all were African Americans.
undoware 13y ago
It wasn't in the article -- the past few years have been disruptive in the social sciences because of multiple replicated studies that show stress, including poverty stress (which is a well-quantified phenomenon) have a profound impact on working memory ("how much RAM your brain has"). Google it. I first read about it in the Economist, but really, it's where the conversation starts these days. Brain damage is one of the main mechanisms by which poverty passes itself down to subsequent generations.

denysonique 13y ago

Whats the TLDR of the article?

Alex3917 13y ago

"They found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time." That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%. C.f. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf N.b. that some of these statistics are pretty wonky, e.g. they count getting beat up for your siblings as assault, or getting flashed as being a victim of sexual assault.

ims 13y ago
The average is misleading here. Where do you think those 1 in 20 kids mostly live?
napoleond 13y ago
1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have No I wouldn't, because: a) I doubt the age distribution for "kids who see people get shot in a year" is constant. The linked article doesn't include age distributions, but they surveyed children up to age 17, and I would expect many more 15 year-olds to see people get shot than 7 year-olds. b) I doubt the system is stochastic. It's probably more likely for the 1 in 20 from year 1 to see another few of the 7 shots in those 7 years (due to geographic and socio-economic factors) than it is for the other 19. In other words, even for a country where gun violence is rampant, a study population where 35% of children below 7 have seen someone get shot is far from average.
- Alex3917 13y ago
  Good points. In terms of lifetime prevalence, that study says that, "Similarly, 3.5 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds had witnessed a shooting during their lifetimes, whereas more than one in five 14- to 17-year-olds (22.2 percent) had witnessed a shooting." So the population in question is definitely no where near average, my was just that strictly in terms of the amount of violence witnessed, the differences probably aren't as great as one would otherwise assume.

guard-of-terra 13y ago

I guess it's time for a War on Poverty. Make poverty illegal @ Jail anybody caught poor.

nullc 13y ago
I thought we started that program in the 80s?

Brock_Lee 13y ago

FYI, the information starts at paragraph 18.

jrochkind1 13y ago

This isn't in fact news, it has long been known that there is no scentific/medical 'crack baby' phenomenon, as documented in the wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure What's perhaps more important to talk about is the demonstrated harm of poverty and violence on children.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

"Crack baby" ALWAYS was simply a synonym for "poor and black". It turns out that racism harms its victims. Who knew?

rlanday 13y ago
Do you think racism harms crack users more than their crack use?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

raldi 13y ago

I've read that it's notoriously difficult to measure the impact of crack on prenatal development because so many crack-smoking pregnant women also smoke cigarettes, and the latter is so harmful already that it's hard to isolate the effects of the former.

clavalle 13y ago
That doesn't make a lot of sense since there are plenty of pregnant tobacco smokers that don't smoke crack.
- raldi 13y ago
  I'm not following; could you elaborate?
  - josephlord 13y ago
    The control group should be smokers not non-smokers and if all the cocaine using group are also smokers the difference should be the effect of the cocaine.

brownbat 13y ago

The lede is buried a bit: "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

KMag 13y ago

My old room mate did cocaine studies with pregnant mice. He'd inject pregnant mice with cocaine and then raise the mouse pups and place electrodes in on of the "pleasure centers" of their brains. He would then measure the curve of how hard the mice were willing to spin a wheel for a given amount of current into their brains. The model was that mice willing to beat their bodies more for the same amount of stimulation were more susceptible to a wide range of addictions. He found that pups exposed to cocaine in utero did in fact as adults spin the wheel harder for a given amount of stimulation, indicating higher susceptibility to a wide range of addictions. My old room mate would have really liked to perform the same study with nicotine, since many many more human mothers dose their fetuses with nicotine as compared to cocaine. For what the wild speculations of an experienced researcher are worth, he suspected that mouse pups exposed to nicotine would also be more susceptible to addiction (supposing he was actually measuring susceptibility to addiction). However, politicians and lobbyists have made it much easier to get federal grant money for cocaine studies vs. nicotine studies, despite nicotine having a much larger impact on society. On a side note: in 1999, 4.7% of US 8th graders were willing to admit to having used cocaine, so the test group appears to be below US averages for cocaine use, despite their mothers using cocaine. I imagine that being predicated upon having mothers caring enough to place their children in these studies, and mothers responsible enough to stay in contact with researchers, and the subjects knowing they were being studied, skewed the drug usage portion of the study. Nationally, (for those outside of medical trials) I can't imagine the cocaine use rate for those whose mothers used cocaine to be below the rate for those whose mothers did not use cocaine.

callmeed 13y ago

So, vitamins are actually bad for you and there's really no such thing as a 'crack baby'. It's a bad week for things I learned growing up in the 80s/90s ...

chrischen 13y ago

What's more likely, that seeing dead people and being poor lowers your IQ, or that having a low IQ means you'll end up poor? They preselected a bunch of poor people, which means the low IQ could be explained by the fact that their existing IQ put them in this place in society along with the predisposition to cheap drug addiction.

yusefnapora 13y ago
It seems like what's most likely is that you didn't read the article correctly. They were measuring the IQ of the children, not the parents. These children didn't 'end up' poor; they started life that way. Their IQ was then 10 to 20 points below average by the time they were four, regardless of the parents' cocaine usage. Or are you suggesting that four year olds with low IQ are responsible for their place in society and the poverty of their parents?
- chrischen 13y ago
  IQ most likely has a genetic factor to it. Otherwise, evolution would be independent of IQ and our society would not have shown an increase in IQ over time (which studies have shown to be true). So no, I did not misread the article.

undoware 13y ago

TL;DR "White folks attack wrong devil, again. Lots of black folks dead or suffering, again." It isn't science that's racist. What's racist is the thousands of brilliant minds that took THIS LONG to look in the right direction. Each one of them minutely racist on its own -- it was just one tiny blind spot. One tiny speck on the lens. On every lens. That's all it takes to destroy a community. That and some SWAT boots.

twohey 13y ago

Of the 110, two are dead - one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting - three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate. It seems rather depressing to me that the college graduation rate by 23 is under 10%. Talk about different worlds

_m_a_u_r_i_c_e_ 13y ago

The study outcome is poverty has the bigger impact. Yet there is a lot of discussion about anything else like Alcohol etc. But think about the uncomfortable issue: What to do against poverty? Isn't it a hint that our concern should be "a human right to access minimum wealth" and how to enable it?

lotsofcows 13y ago

"Jaimee Drakewood hurried in from the rain" What? This is supposed to be a scientific report? A lay science report? A newspaper? Why does the very first sentence read like a badly written paperback?

goggles99 13y ago

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture. And yet somehow immigrants (Nigerian, Vietnamese, Romanian, Armenian) living in poverty somehow find a way to work hard enough to become successful. They make their own outcome. Why is it only the impoverished Americans that cannot succeed. I think we have to look here at what it takes to succeed. 1. Dedicated parent(s). Two of them (a mom and a dad) can do far more than one so probability of success rises if both stick around. These inner city kids almost NEVER have a dad in the picture. This leaves mom to work or she is a complete welfare loser and probably on drugs too. 2. Standards/Morals. One bad choice can ruin a person's life. We all have turning points in life where we choose to take a hit off a pope, or pass on it. Have unprotected sex, or abstain. Assault someone, commit a robbery, ETC. These choices have a ripple effect on the rest of our lives. 3. Hard work. Why work if you can live off of the dole? Why work for white people and help their society since they are so racist? (this is a common attitude). Immigrants come to America with almost nothing. They see opportunity though. They work hard and succeed. They stick together. Dad does not leave, mom does not smoke crack or sleep around. They have values, morals and a strong work ethic. This is what separates immigrants living in poverty and your more typical inner city situation in Philadelphia.