Well, I checked. This was written by the Japanese scientist noted above. He says much of the same things the former head of SONY stated, and government heads in S. Korea and Singapore have spoken openly of the "Imagination Deficit" as they call it:
http://human-nature.com/ep/articles/ep04120128.html
Evolutionary Psychology 4: 120-128
Commentary
No, It Ain't Gonna Be Like That
Satoshi Kanazawa, Interdisciplinary Institute of
Management, London School of Economics and
Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A
2AE, United Kingdom.
Abstract: For cultural, social, and institutional reasons, Asians
cannot make original contributions to basic science. I therefore
doubt Miller's prediction for the Asian future of evolutionary
psychology. I believe that its future will continue to be in the
United States and Europe.
Keywords: East Asians; intelligence; Nobel prizes; People's
Republic of China; Japan; India; creationism; "intelligent
design".
Introduction
Miller (2006) paints a very bleak picture for the future of
evolutionary psychology in North America and Europe, and
holds out hope for its prospect in Asia. For a variety of reasons
that I will detail below, I do not believe that his prediction will
come true. The future of evolutionary psychology will not be in
Asia.
1. Asians can't think
And they certainly cannot think outside the box. Miller is
correct to point out that East Asians have slightly higher mean
IQs than Europeans (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002). However,
East Asians have not been able to make creative use of their
intelligence. While they are very good at absorbing existing
knowledge via rote memory (hence their high standardized test
scores in math and science) or adapt or modify existing
technology (hence their engineering achievements), they have
not been able to make original contributions to basic science.
Table 1 presents revealing statistics from the entire history of
Nobel prizes (1901-2005). The first set of five nations in Table
1 have produced the largest number of Nobel Prizewinners
(USA - 155; Germany - 91; UK - 67; France - 38; Switzerland
- 24). They are all Euro-American nations. The second set of
nations are the nine Asian nations which have ever produced
any Nobel laureate (Japan - 12; India - 7; China - 5; Taiwan -
2; South Korea - 1; Bangladesh - 1; Pakistan - 1; Myanmar -
1; Vietnam - 1). The last two nations have produced only
Nobel peace laureates. These numbers are listed in Column
(1).
Table 1: Nobel Prizewinners by Nationality, 1901-2005 [View
Table 1]
Column (2) shows the relative representation of Nobel
prizewinners from each nation out of the total 776 laureates.
Column (3) shows each nation's population as of mid-2005,
and Column (4) shows the relative representation of each
nation's population in the world out of the 6.451 billion. So, for
example, the United States has produced 20% of Nobel
Prizewinners while its share of the world population is less
than 5%. Column (5) shows the relative representation of
Nobel prizewinners standardized for population. Any number
greater than 1.000 signifies overrepresentation; any number
less than 1.000 signifies underrepresentation.
The contrast between the five Euro-American nations and the
nine Asian nations cannot be starker. The first four Euro-
American nations are overrepresented among the Nobel
laureates by a factor of 5 to 10; Switzerland is
overrepresented by a factor of 28! In sharp contrast, all Asian
nations are underrepresented among the Nobel laureates.
Japan, for example, has been a major geopolitical and
economic power for most of the 20th century (Small and
Singer, 1982). Yet it has produced only 12 Nobel laureates,
the same number as Austria, which has one-sixteenth of
Japan's population.
This problem has long been known to East Asian specialists as
the "creativity problem" (Eberts and Eberts, 1995, pp. 123-
127; Taylor, 1983, pp. 92-123; van Wolferen, 1989, pp. 89-
90). Some argue that the ideographic Asian languages curb
abstract thinking and creativity among Asians (Hannas, 2003).
Others point out that Asian cultures, religions, and educational
systems devalue and discourage logical thinking (Eberts and
Eberts, 1995, pp. 120-123; van Wolferen, 1989, pp. 236-244).
Whatever the reason, it is evident from Table 1 that some
combinations of cultural, social, and institutional factors
combine to stifle basic science in Asia.
The message of Table 1 is clear: Science is not democracy; it
is inherently elitist. A nation does not dominate science by
having a large number of people but by having good ideas.
And there appears to be a dearth of good, original, scientific
ideas in Asia in the last century. If Leda Cosmides were born
Japanese, she with her high intelligence would have made an
excellent product engineer for Sony and contributed to making
the robot dog Aibo look and behave even more like a real dog.
Date of article
27 July 2006
Email:
Satoshi Kanazawa
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Page 2 of 5
But it would have never occurred to her that the human brain
might be composed of distinct modules, let alone to modify an
obscure logic test to uncover the existence of one such
module. That requires massive creativity, which Asians lack.
2. Asians can't write
Nor can they speak English. While Miller correctly points out
that East Asians have slightly higher overall IQs, he neglects
to mention the particular pattern of Asian intelligence. East
Asians have much higher visualization IQ than verbal IQ
(Lynn, 2006, pp. 121-148). For East Asians in Asia, in studies
which assess both types of IQ, the mean visualization IQ is
108.6 while the mean verbal IQ is 101.4. Their high
visualization IQs explain East Asians' relative success in
mathematics and mathematics-based sciences such as physics
and chemistry. Of the 27 Nobel prizes awarded to Asians in
Table 1, 10 have been in physics, 5 in chemistry, and 3 in
physiology or medicine; there have only been 5 Nobel
literature prizes awarded to Asians, and 1 in economics
(Amartya K. Sen).
It is true, as Miller points out, that English is universally taught
as a second language in all Asian nations. But that does not
mean that Asian students learn it. In fact, Asians are
notoriously poor at acquiring foreign languages, particularly
English, compared to the relative ease with which Europeans
speak English. Their low verbal intelligence may explain their
difficulty.
Their inability to express themselves in English is likely to
hamper Asians' contribution to evolutionary psychology, as
long as it remains largely a verbal (i.e. non-mathematical)
science, which, for better or worse, it is likely to remain for
some time. East Asians might begin to make significant
contribution to evolutionary psychology once it attains the
level of formalization of the current evolutionary biology. Miller
argues that we cannot worry about the accents of our
successors, which is true. However, accents are one thing;
impenetrably thick accents which prevent mutual intelligibility
is another. That's what many Asians have.
If Geoffrey F. Miller were born Chinese, The Mating Mind
would have been filled with elegant mathematical equations,
and all of his theses would have been mathematically proven.
But it would not have been the literary gem that it is, and
nobody would have read it. Nobody could have understood him
either.
3. The political reality of People's Republic
of China (PRC)
As the most populous nation on earth, People's Republic of
China (PRC) figures prominently into Miller's vision of the Asian
future of evolutionary psychology. While Miller emphasizes
recent economic achievements of PRC, however, he
conveniently neglects the political reality of communist China.
Miller is correct to point out that, due to its higher average
intelligence and the largest population, there are millions of
bright young students in PRC, but for political reasons we are
not likely ever to meet them.
The communist government of PRC has a policy of not letting
their brightest students leave the country for fear of the brain
drain and of forcing them to study home at Chinese
universities. Then it sends the second-rate students to
American universities and the third-rate students to British
universities, both with falsified transcripts and exam results to
make them look first-rate. Here at LSE where I teach, we
receive a large number of these third-rate Chinese students
dressed up as first-rate. (About 5-10% of all undergraduate
and graduate students at LSE are from PRC.) Virtually every
Chinese applicant to LSE boasts "the highest exam scores in
their province." Apparently it has not occurred to the LSE
admissions office that there could not possibly be that many
provinces in China. Naturally, most of these PRC students do
very poorly and fail out of the program, and, when they do,
many confess to having purchased or otherwise fabricated
their exam scores and transcripts before they applied for LSE.
Yes, there are millions of bright Chinese students in PRC, but
we are not likely to meet them anytime soon until or unless
the political reality of PRC changes or otherwise the communist
government ceases its policy of sending second- and third-rate
students to the US and UK.
4. The conformist culture of Asia
Part of the reason why Asians cannot think for themselves and
make original and creative contributions to science is because
they are too conformist. One of the factors that Miller identifies
as a possible obstacle to the Asian future of evolutionary
psychology ("academic conservatism") is actually fatal.
Scientific revolutions happen by challenging the established
paradigms. No conformists have ever brought about a scientific
revolution.
Once again, at LSE, we have an enormous problem of
plagiarism among our Asian students. Despite the fact that
each student, Asian or otherwise, must sign a declaration that
their work is original and they have not plagiarized, many
Asian students simply copy the work of established scholars.
To them it is a venerable act of honoring their masters to
"borrow" from them, by copying their words verbatim. No
matter how much we tell them that it is wrong, Asian students
simply cannot understand why it is wrong to honor their
intellectual masters by faithfully reproducing their work.
Needless to say, this is no recipe for scientific progress.
5. The maverick
It is true that evolutionary psychology is currently flourishing
in Japan, and many Japanese evolutionary psychologists attend
annual meetings of HBES, as Miller points out. But this is due
almost entirely to one man: Toshio Yamagishi at Hokkaido
No, It Ain't Gonna Be Like That by Satoshi Kanazawa 10/16/2006 12:53 PM
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University. Virtually all of the Japanese evolutionary
psychologists that Miller identifies as regular attendees of
HBES are either students or collaborators of Yamagishi's.
Yamagishi is a true maverick. None of what I have said above
about Asians hold for him. He is a true exception to virtually
all generalizations and stereotypes about Asian academics.
Anyone who has ever seen him in action, by attending his
nightly lab meetings (yes, nightly) in the Department of
Behavioral Science at Hokkaido University, as I have had the
privilege to do several years ago, will be struck by the
enormous intellectual energy and creativity that he generates
among his students and colleagues. There is no question that
he and his students are producing truly groundbreaking work.
(I should point out, in the interest of full disclosure, that, while
I have coauthored with Yamagishi and his students, my
intellectual contributions to these papers have been marginal;
it is entirely his and his students' work.)
Unfortunately for the Japanese future of evolutionary
psychology, however, there is only one Toshio Yamagishi, and
one maverick, even a truly exceptional one like him, does not
make the rule. By 2106, like the rest of us, Yamagishi will be
dead (or not; it has never been conclusively demonstrated that
he is a mortal, and there has been some evidence to the
contrary), and when he goes, so does the entire future of
evolutionary psychology in Japan. There will never be another
one like him. I should also point out that, while he now
operates in Japan, Yamagishi was nonetheless trained in an
American university (University of Washington) by American
social psychologists (Richard M. Emerson and Karen S. Cook).
6. Why does American fundamentalism
matter?
Part of Miller's pessimism for the future of evolutionary
psychology in the United States concerns its pervasive
Christian fundamentalism. According to the September 8-11,
2005, Gallup polls, 53% of Americans believe in the literal
truth of the Book of Genesis, and further 31% believe that
God "guided" the process of evolution (Newport, 2006). Only
12% believe that God had no part in evolution. More
frighteningly, 38% of university graduates and 25% of
postgraduates with Master's and Ph.D.s believe in the literal
truth of the Book of Genesis. (These numbers increase to 66%
and 44%, respectively, among graduates and postgraduates
who attend church regularly.) Obviously, these people will
never understand or accept the theory of evolution by natural
and sexual selection.
But so what?
Over 99.99% of Americans (including, I might add, a large
number of physicists) do not understand or accept quantum
mechanics or superstring theory. Yet we never hear quantum
physicists or string theorists complain about the public lack of
understanding of their subject matter. True, Americans are not
up in arms about quantum mechanics or superstring theory the
way they are about evolution, and they don't demand that
"alternative" Ptolemaic cosmology be taught in tandem with
quantum mechanics and superstring theory the way they
demand that creationism be taught. But this is entirely
because they are not aware of what these theories entail. If
the civilians find out that particles do not have definite
locations or velocities and can instead only be described as
probability waves or that the very act of observation
fundamentally changes the nature of what is observed, or if
they learn that the universe contains 12 physical dimensions
instead of the familiar 3 dimensions, then they would be just
as disturbed and upset as they are to learn that we are
descended from monkeys.
Physicists don't have to deal with "certaintyists" or "threedimensionalists"
the way we must deal with creationists
because they keep the civilians ignorant about the true nature
of their theories. Any effort to educate them would only have
deleterious consequences. It seems to me that evolutionary
psychologists can learn lessons from physicists. Keep them
ignorant (the civilians, not the physicists). Let them be taught
creationism and "intelligent design" in schools along with
evolution. The smart few will realize that there is something
wrong with creationism and naturally opt for evolution. They
belong with us. Who cares about the rest?
It seems to me that there is a way to present our research to
the public on mating intelligence, fluctuating asymmetry, or
even cryptic ovulation, without constantly reminding them that
we share common descent with chimpanzees. The less the
civilians know, the better. Once again, science is not
democracy; we cannot enlighten everybody. Science is an
inherently elitist enterprise.
There is, however, one caveat. The problem arises when the
public, through their democratic representatives, control our
research funding. The physicists learned the lesson when the
U.S. Congress discontinued its funding of Superconducting
Super Collider (SSC) in Texas in 1993 (Weinberg, 1994, pp.
277-282). The public in their ignorance did not appreciate the
importance of the SSC for fundamental knowledge about the
origin of the universe, leading to the Theory of Everything. It
is mandatory that we not repeat the mistake of particle
physicists and cosmologists when they lost funding for the
SSC. Fortunately, very little of what evolutionary psychologists
do is as expensive as the SSC, which came with the price tag
of $1 billion.
7. Does anybody remember 1985?
These days I feel like I am the only person who remembers
1985. No wonder I feel old.
Yes, these days, as Miller points out, savvy Economist-reading
business people constantly hear about the miraculous
economic growth in China and India, and how in the near
future these two Asian giants will overtake the US and the
European Union and dominate the world economy. But doesn't
No, It Ain't Gonna Be Like That by Satoshi Kanazawa 10/16/2006 12:53 PM
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anybody remember 1985, when we were equally afraid that
Japan would inevitably dominate the world market, that we
would one day soon all be working for the Japanese, and that
all western companies must learn lessons from and become
more like their Japanese counterparts if they wanted to
survive? We read exhortative or alarmist books and articles
like Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Vogel, 1979),
Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and
How to Reclaim It (Prestowitz, 1989), "Containing Japan"
(Fallows, 1989), and The Coming War with Japan (Friedman
and LeBard, 1991). We also read critical reactions like
Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the "Japanese
Miracle" (Taylor, 1983), Unexpected Japan: Why American
Business Should Return to Its Own Traditional Values -- and
Not Imitate the Japanese (Riccomini and Rosenzweig, 1985),
Japan as (Anything But) Number One (Woronoff, 1991), and
The Myths of Japanese Quality (Eberts and Eberts, 1995).
What happened? Japan went into a recession merely five years
later, in the early 1990s, from which it never fully recovered.
None of the ominous predictions about the Japanese
domination of the world came true. Why then should I believe
any of the alarmist hype about China and India 20 years later?
I have a feeling that the current ominous predictions of their
world domination will somehow never come true.
What to do? What is the future of
evolutionary psychology?
It seems to me that the best thing we can do for the future of
evolutionary psychology is to do what we have all been doing:
produce good science, and train our Ph.D. students well. We
don't have to go to Asia or anywhere else; we can simply
welcome bright students from all over the world (except for
PRC until the current government policy changes). There is no
cause for alarm.
That is not to say, however, that we do not face obstacles or
have enemies; we do. But our enemies are not fundamentalist
Christians; they are instead our university colleagues in
Women's and Cultural Studies Departments. Our true obstacle
is not the Christian fundamentalism in the wheat fields of
Kansas; it is the political correctness in the ivy-covered
buildings on our own campuses. The feminists and social
constructionists, all of whom have Ph.D.s and no problems
with the theory of evolution by natural selection (as long as it
is not applied to the human brain), are in a position to do far
greater damage to our science than the Christian
fundamentalists. Really, what can Christian fundamentalists do
to us? Refuse to pump our gas? Spit in our Big Mac? In
contrast, our politically correct feminist and social
constructionist colleagues control our recruitment, tenure, and
promotion processes, and influence our research funding. If
anything can interfere with the future of evolutionary
psychology in the United States and Europe, it is the cultural
insanity of political correctness. That is the true enemy that
we must fight.
My alternative vision for the future of
evolutionary psychology
Yes, there really will be Tuesday, March 16, 2106. Yes, we
really will be dead (except maybe for Yamagishi). Yes, there
really will be a Justine Chen studying the history of psychology
in her first-year Ph.D. program. But she will not be studying it
at Shanghai University, which will then have no more
relevance to scientific progress than Tokyo University does
today. Justine Chen will instead be studying it at Stanford
University, which for more than two centuries now has opened
its doors to the brightest students from all over the world,
whether they be from Cincinnati or Shanghai.
On September 11, 2001, our Muslim enemies made one crucial
mistake; they chose the wrong symbolic target in New York.
What makes America great is not the Twin Towers; if it were,
then Malaysia, with its magnificent Petronas Towers, will be
the greatest nation on earth. No, what makes America great is
the Statue of Liberty. The Twin Towers, evolutionary
psychology, and everything else in America are mere
consequences of the Statue of Liberty and what she stands
for.
In the days and weeks following 9/11, two thoughts occurred
to me. Our Muslim enemies could destroy the Twin Towers,
but they could not have built them in the first place; there are
no skyscrapers in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. And they needed to
use Boeing-built airplanes to accomplish their destructive
goal; they could not even build their own weapons. As long as
America remains true to the Statue of Liberty, and the
freedom and openness she inspires, then virtually all future
scientific progress will come from her shores.
Justine and her cohortmates will take the history of psychology
seminar, co-taught by Ying-Ling "Elaine" Zhang and Shilpa
Choudhury-Johansson. They may discuss the intellectual
contributions of their own mentors, and their mentors. All of
them received their Ph.D.s at the University of New Mexico,
under the tutelage of an evolutionary psychologist who, when
he was not wasting time by writing pessimistic opinion pieces
about the bleak future of evolutionary psychology, made great
theoretical contributions to the field in the early 21st century,
a Stanford alumnus for whom the building in which Justine's
seminar takes place is named -- the late great Geoffrey F.
Miller.
Received 23 June, 2006; Accepted 27 June, 2006.
References
Eberts, R., and Eberts, C. (1995). The myths of Japanese
quality. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Fallows, J. (1989). Containing Japan. Atlantic Monthly, 5, 40-
54.