intelligence - Taryn . on Diigo

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The art of competitiveness | The San Diego Union-Tribune

In his book, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future,” Daniel Pink makes the case that we have entered the Conceptual Age and that certain right-brain skills are essential to economic success

Tags: economy, technology, industry, education, design, culture, art, brain, emotion, intelligence, creativity, book_review on 2008-10-31 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Seed: How We Evolve

Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.

Tags: human, genome, evolution, map, HapMap, model, intelligence, culture, complexity, climate_crisis on 2008-10-12 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (7) -About

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"The fate of our civilization, and maybe our species," says Ehrlich, "may be determined by the next five generations. So I don't really give a shit what's happening to our genetic evolution." The global climate is changing too violently for DNA to respond by fiddling around with heat regulation and hair thickness; forests everywhere are being clear-cut too quickly for their inhabitants to adjust, and so food chains are coming undone; the collapse of global fisheries has been identified as an imminent calamity; and a nuclear disaster would constitute a catastrophe many orders of magnitude larger than what nature could readily absorb. If any of these nightmare scenarios comes to pass, Ehrlich fears, evolution will be unable to help us. It may be operating faster than we thought, but it's not that fast. Problems like smog and acid rain seem almost quaint, and even to be longed for.
"Intelligence builds on top of intelligence," says Lahn. "[Culture] creates a stringent selection regime for enhanced intelligence. This is a positive feedback loop, I would think." Increasing intelligence increases the complexity of culture, which pressures intelligence levels to rise, which creates a more complex culture, and so on. Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind.
Is intelligence still being selected for? Parsimony and uniformitarianism would compel one to answer yes; things in the present are, by and large, as they were in the past. But the way evolution works, whereby mutations arise in one person and slowly spread throughout a population, makes such a question difficult to frame, for if intelligence is still under selection, that could mean that some populations at this very moment are slightly smarter than others — that, perhaps, even certain ethnicities are slightly smarter than others. In the West, speculation on the subject almost automatically tars the speculator as a eugenicist or a racialist.
HapMap is a leaner and in some ways more powerful version of the Human Genome Project, as it compiles only those regions of the human genome — less than 1 percent — that have the potential to differ from person to person. In comparing different populations' genetic information, it's possible to tease out patterns of gene inheritance, how certain genes correlate with certain diseases, and even the likely geographic origin of some mutations.
Fisher, a Brit, argued that, in fact, a large population was required, because only a large population can produce large numbers of mutations. Because most mutations are neutral, he reasoned, it takes a large number of mutations to produce one beneficial allele. American biologists were most influenced by Wright, but Fisher's work is where Hawks and Harpending find their support.
The signature that natural selection inscribes on the genome is legible even when the import of the message is unclear.

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Football for Smarties - Preening Receivers, Hard Hitters and Those Rare Shut-Down Corners

Tags: athletics, intelligence, how-to, NFL on 2008-09-26 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (8) -About

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While there may be characteristics inherent to the position, the wide receiver has also been shaped by external forces. A brief history: The passing game arrived in the 1940s, shortly after the introduction of a smaller, more easily thrown ball and with the advent of free-substitution rules (which made way for offense-only whippets who would’ve been ground up beneath Jim Taylor’s cleats had they also been obliged to play defense). In the late 1970s, blocking rules were liberalized, and the N.F.L. introduced illegal-contact rules to protect receivers downfield. All of this had the effect of cracking the game wide open. Wide receivers soared to prominence in the 1980s, just in time for the rise of ESPN, the highlight package and the lucrative shoe endorsement. The wide receiver, held up as everything that’s wrong with the me-first world of sports, may actually be the purest product of the marketing juggernaut that is the N.F.L. as well as the culture that launched it skyward.
let’s focus on a collision between a running back and a linebacker, and analyze it according to Newton’s Second Law of Motion. This basic law of physics tells us that the force of a hit is equal to a player’s mass times the acceleration he feels as a result of the hit.
Wonderlic intelligence test, the theory being that quarterbacks who are better at algebra will make better decisions. Unfortunately, the theory is wrong.
Corners are almost always smaller than the receivers they cover, so if the 6-foot Bailey is defending the 6-foot-4 Randy Moss, he has to bump the receiver at the line of scrimmage (not easy to do against the fastest guy on the offense), make sure the receiver doesn’t knock him over and then run — at full speed, on shorter legs — to cover him downfield.

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Gene Expression: Weird lands of the tails

Tags: genetics, population, genome-environment_interaction, intelligence, athletics, slavery, statistics on 2008-08-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"...Think of Google as a life preserver..." - W. Daniel Hills

Tags: Google, information, data, intelligence, evolution on 2008-08-12 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Frontal Cortex : The Hidden Cost of Smart Drugs

Tags: brain, memory, drugs, smart_drugs, neuro, learning, intelligence, creativity, aging on 2008-05-22 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

Tags: memory, aging, neuro, learning, intelligence, creativity, brain on 2008-05-22 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Are we too clever for our own good?

Tags: intelligence, evolution, testing on 2008-05-20 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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THE SHAKESPEARED BRAIN | More Intelligent Life

Tags: brain, intelligence, language, literature, neuro on 2007-12-12 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Books: None of the Above: Books: The New Yorker

What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race.
by Malcolm Gladwell

Tags: evolution, intelligence, iq, malcolm_gladwell, testing on 2007-12-12 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
“As far as I can determine, no clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became more lenient over time,” Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. “Yet no one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental retardation.”

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A response to "Liberal Creationism." - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine

Tags: genetics, intelligence, iq, nurture on 2007-12-12 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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All Brains Are the Same Color - New York Times

the so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors.

Tags: biology, class, development, education, genetics, intelligence, racism, society on 2007-12-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Eggheads - How bird brains are shaking up science

Tags: bird, development, intelligence, language, learning, neuro, neurogenesis on 2007-09-27 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.boston.com

They drop them near busy intersections, then retrieve the smashed nuts when the traffic light turns red.
the brainpower of birds suggests that intelligence is actually a byproduct of complex social interactions. Living in a group requires an animal to juggle lots of information about its peers. So it's not a coincidence that the smartest creatures are also the most social.
Alex wowed many scientists when he began spontaneously using the word "none" to represent a rudimentary conception of zero. He also enjoyed inventing new words for things: he referred to almonds as "cork nuts," since the texture of the nut resembles that of a wine cork. An apple was a "banerry," a combination of two of his favorite other fruits, bananas and cherries.
"The goal of a singing starling is to find a mate," Gentner says. "They make their songs more and more complex in order to impress the females. The ability to learn these grammatical patterns grew out of that. It's like a cognitive version of the peacock's tail."
For the most part, the clustered anatomy of the bird brain is organized very differently from the layered anatomy of the primate brain. For scientists, that's part of what makes the bird brain so fascinating. It's a different anatomical solution to the same evolutionary problem of how to live as a social species.
This suggests that some rarefied aspects of human intelligence, such as tool use and the ability to imagine what other minds are thinking, have actually evolved independently in birds.

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The Surprises of Neuroscience

Tags: brain, emotion, intelligence, mind, neuro on 2007-09-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain

Tags: brain, cognition, emotion, intelligence, learning, memory, mind, neuro, sleep on 2007-08-26 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged intelligence → View Popular

The art of competitiveness | The San Diego Union-Tribune

Seed: How We Evolve

Football for Smarties - Preening Receivers, Hard Hitters and Those Rare Shut-Down Corners

Gene Expression: Weird lands of the tails

"...Think of Google as a life preserver..." - W. Daniel Hills

The Frontal Cortex : The Hidden Cost of Smart Drugs

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

Are we too clever for our own good?

THE SHAKESPEARED BRAIN | More Intelligent Life

Books: None of the Above: Books: The New Yorker

A response to "Liberal Creationism." - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine

All Brains Are the Same Color - New York Times

Eggheads - How bird brains are shaking up science

The Surprises of Neuroscience

10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain

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