FYI ROBERT McCRAE: BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF BIG-5

----- Original Message -----
From: "George Hammond" <xxxx@xxxxxxx>
To: <IDANET@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 4:43 PM
Subject: FYI ROBERT McCRAE: BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF BIG-5


FYI ROBERT McCRAE:  BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF BIG-5

Posted to:

IDANET <IDANET@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>

Dr. Robert R. McCrae
Nat. Inst. Health

Dr. Paul Costa
Nat. Inst. Health

Prof. Richard Gorsuch
Fuller Theological Seminary


Dear Dr. McCrae,
We have spoken on a previous occasion.  I was visiting
Paul MacLean at the NIH animal shelter in 1989 when he
suggested I call you and we spoke for half an hour on the
telephone about the Big-5.  I found you to be a very amiable
and conscionable scientist and very easy to talk to.  That
was 20 years ago!

Now I am indebted to Dr. Paul Barrett, Hans Eysenck's
former laboratory chief at the IOP University of London for
once again putting us in contact.  Paul Barrett is the
moderator of the IDANET (Individual Differences and
Assessment Network) and this open letter has been posted
publicly there.  There are 200 professionals in Psychometry
on this list and in the event that I do not hear from you I
feel it necessary that this vital information be made
public.

In your 2002  book on the Big-5 you wrote of the
biological basis of the Big-5:

"At present, we do not know what the underlying biology is,
nor have we made much demonstrable progress since 1967, when
Eysenck published his landmark volume.  If and when the ...
neuropsychic structures that underlie personality traits are
identified, it will lead to a revolution in Personality."
(Robert McCrae in the 5-factor Model of Personality
Across Cultures, 2002)


Bob, this letter is to inform you that the "unknown
neuropsychic structure" that you refer to above HAS BEEN
FOUND and that the "revolution in Personality" that you
predicted HAS ALREADY BEGUN.

I am a physicist by training (M.S. 1967) but I've spent
the 20 years since I talked to you studying Psychometry in
Personality.  Naturally, Factor Analysis presents absolutely
no mathematical stumbling block to a physicist.
What I discovered is that the so-called biological basis
of the Structural Model of Personality is nothing other than
the orthogonal cleavage of the brain and in fact the
orthogonal cleavage of the entire human body.  I published
this in 1994 in New Ideas in Psychology:

Hammond G.E (1994) The Cartesian Theory, in New Ideas In
Psychology, Vol 12(2) 153-167 , Elsevier Scientific
Publishers
Online copy of peer/published paper is posted at:
http://webspace.webring.com/people/eg/george_hammond/cart.html

It turns out that the Medial, Central and Transverse
cleavages of the brain constitute a "CUBIC" anatomical
geometry of the brain. This is "cube" is isomorphic to the
4-cell stage in embryology.  The reason the brain is
structurally cubic is the same reason we have 4-feet.  This
cubic brain geometry causes a cubic psychometric structure
which was first detected by Heymans in 1900 but of
course never proven.  Thurstone even suspected it when he
invented his famous Box Problem in Factor Analysis .  It
should come as no surprise then that what I discovered is
that the entire body of second order factor correlations in
Psychometry is actually CUBICALLY INTERCORRELATED.  The
reason for this is elementary geometry.  A cube has 13 axes
of symmetry as any geometry book will you.  These 13
symmetry axes become the SIMPLE STRUCTURE positions during
the rotation process in Factor Analysis.  This is why
Raymond B. Cattell using the highest possible resolution was
able to extract and measure the full complement of 13 second
order factors (Cattell 1975).  I discovered that they are
cubically intercorrelated!  Naturally if you use lower
resolution (extract fewer factors) you will come up with
Saucier's 9-factor Model, Krug and John's 7-factor Model,
your 5-factor Model, Merenda's 4-Factor AVA Model and at the
lowest resolution Eysenck's Big-3 Model.  They are all
simply higher/lower resolutions of the full 13 axis cubic
Structural Model of Personality.  This geometrical result is
illustrated at:
http://webspace.webring.com/people/eg/george_hammond/5X7C0193.jpg
and
http://webspace.webring.com/people/eg/george_hammond/ILLU4.jpg

To be noted of course is that only the first three axes
(the normals to the cube) are actually orthogonal.  Thus
Eyesenck was right when he said there are no orthogonal
factors beyond E,N,P.  However, Cattell was right that there
are 10 more oblique second order Factors.  C and O in the
Big-5 then are not actually orthogonal.  They are orthogonal
to each other, but they are not orthogonal to E and N.  As
Paul Barrett has pointed out, a survey of the latest data
continues to confirm this.

However, I am not here to start a micro-factorial
controversy.  I am here to inform you that the biological
basis of the Big-5 and of the Structural Model of
Personality itself has been discovered!

Hans Eyesenck himself was well aware of this discovery by
the way.  I was an invited speaker to the 26th international
Congress of psychology in Montréal in 1996.  I sat next to
Hans Eysenck on the dais for two hours before I got up and
gave a 30 minute presentation of this discovery.  Hans
Eyesenck spoke for half an hour following me mainly about
the situation in Boznia and Herzegovina.
Later on I managed to buttonhole Hans in the mezzanine for
a few private words.  What I discovered is that my
presentation had apparently gone right in one ear and right
out the other, at least it appeared that's what he wanted me
to think.  What he told me, and this is an exact quote, was
that he "didn't see the relevance of it", which of course
left me wondering what exactly he meant by "it" since the
relevance of the biological origin of the Structural Model
is well-known to everyone.  Hans Eysenck was 80 years old at
the time, in fact he died the following year, and was also
the author of his own biological theory of the Structural
Model (1967).  I could see that it was useless to try and
prevail with a senior scientist well into his doteage who
apparently simply found it convenient to "play dumb" rather
than being forced into some kind of inconvienent action.
Incidentally, at the same conference, at the end of my
speech Robert Stelmack (U. Ottawa) stood up in the audience
and said to me that he "thought the treatment of me by the
psychometric community was absolutely egregious".  Well I
misunderstood what he said and failed to realize that he was
being sympathetic and thought that he was attacking me, to
which I responded, "how would you know, you've never taken a
course in physics in your life".  I then noticed that Hans
Eyesenck who was by that time on his feet, standing there
virtually splitting his sides with laughter at my amateurish
faux pas.  At any rate, as you can see, my first ill-fated
appearance before a Psychometry audience was less than a
stunning success.  About the only thing I came away with was
a picture of me taken with Hans Eysenck by Peter F. Merenda
chairman of the Psychology department at URI.
That was 13 years ago and here I am again pounding
furiously on the door of the Psychometry department trying
to get someone's attention. Of course now Eyesenck and
Cattell, both of whom I was in communication with, are gone,
and now I am addressing the next generation of
Psychometrists, which includes you.  It also includes Prof.
Richard Gorsuch whom I have recently been in contact with
through IDANET.  Gorsuch as you know, is an authority in
Factor Analysis in Psychometry as well as being a
collaborator with Ray Cattell for many years.  In a recent
e-mail from him he asked me to send him a copy of my paper
on the discovery of the structural model.  That was a month
ago and I'm still waiting to hear from him.  I'm not
particularly optimistic since it took him a full seven
months to answer my first e-mail inquiry.  I am hopeful that
you, being a younger man, might be more alert to an
important scientific development, especially since it is
ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL TO THE BIG FIVE MODEL!

In closing this letter I am hopeful, based on our earlier
conversation, that you will recognize the importance of this
discovery of the biological basis of the Structural Model to
the future success of the Big-5 and am hoping that you will
see your way clear to talk to me either by private e-mail or
here on IDANET.  Naturally, what I am looking for is some
authority who will recognize the importance of this work and
assist me in getting it published in a higher impact
academic journal so that the Psychometry community at large
can have a look at it.
After the passing of Eyesenck and Cattell we must now rely
on a new generation of factorists inluding you, Paul Costa,
Richard Gorsuch, Lew Goldberg, Willem Hoffstee, Paul Barrett
and dozens of others who should be notified of this
discovery by a leading journal.

Please contact me at  xxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx  or here
on Dr. Paul Barrett's IDANET list <IDANET@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>.

Excuse the length of this letter, I am using voice
recognition technology and it is so much fun it is easy to
get carried away.  Thanks and

My best regards,
George Hammond, M.S. Physics... Psychometry
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alien8er (29.10.2009 20:40)