That summarizes The Bell Curve’s predictions. While you’ve been lied to endlessly about how Herrnstein and Murray were bad people for writing The Bell Curve, the reality is that they weren’t cynical enough.
Now that we have some British politicians talking about IQ it seems the right time to rush out a summary I was slowly preparing about the lives and achievements of different intelligence bands. Please accept this as a general overview, subject to revision, to which more illustrative details and precise boundaries will be added at a later date.
Racial differences in psychopathic behavior persist even when IQ is held constant, and the same racial differences are found in essentially every kind of measurable behavior that reflects psychopathic personality. The most plausible explanation for these differences is that just as there are racial differences in average IQ, there are racial differences in what could be called “average personality,” with blacks showing greater psychopathic tendencies. The argument that white “racism” is responsible for black social pathology is increasingly unconvincing.
Harvard Study of Adult Development
Frankland suspected that memories actually got filed away into long-term storage, but that the hippocampus lost track of where they’d been stacked during the rapid growth phase that takes place in the first few years of life.
For people who have studied mental ability, what’s truly frustrating is the déjà vu they feel each time a media firestorm like this one erupts. Attempts by experts in the field to defend the embattled messenger inevitably fall on deaf ears. When the firestorm is over, the media’s mindset always resets to a state of comfortable ignorance, ready to be shocked all over again when the next messenger comes along.
Since most of the variation in IQ is heritable, scientists have long searched for genetic differences that might account for it. The reason we haven’t found them, Hsu theorizes, is because there aren’t any single genes or even a handful of genes with a big effect on IQ. Instead, the thinking goes, there are as many as 10,000 different locations in the genome where a mutation can affect IQ. According to Hsu’s rough model, all humans carry a few hundred of those 10,000 possible mutations, and each mutation has a tiny negative cost to IQ, on the order of half an IQ point.
During its hundred-year existence, it has been found that our IQ affects our life in a number of important ways. It is a significant determinant of how well we do at school and in further education, our income, occupation, health, life expectancy, and of our choice of friends and partners.
I see five feasible approaches: selection, spell-checking the genome, QTLs for intelligence, cloning, and hybrid vigor.
By de-emphasizing the role of nature in determining intelligence, Nisbett tries to reduce IQ to little more than an achievement measure. Achievement can be raised by better textbooks, better teachers, better home environments. No need to worry too much about biology, Nisbett is telling his readers. There is no need to face up to deep-seated individual and group differences in abilities, and to what implications they might have for a democratic society.
Introduction
The five-factor model of personality (FFM) is a set of five broad trait dimensions or domains, often referred to as the “Big Five”: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism (sometimes named by its polar opposite, Emotional Stability), and Openness to Experience (sometimes named Intellect).
Dog IQ: How Smart is your Dog?
Here's a listing of dog IQs by breed. Dogs have undergone artificial selection, so those selected for intelligence (Border Collie) tend to be very smart, while those selected only for appearance tend not to be so smart. It depends on what was being selected for. A bloodhound typically has a low dog IQ (doesn't respond well to commands) but has undergone intense selection for smelling ability, so a bloodhound compensates for lack of command response with a keen sense of smell.
or decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting.
In summary, the worldview that Palo Alto’s early 20th-century IQ testers and eugenicists developed explains part of the basis for the American economy’s most productive sector in the 21st century.
In every generation there will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine, Crazy Horse, or Malcolm X come along. So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”
Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?
As coauthor Flynn famously pointed out, raw scores on IQ tests all over the world have been rising for generations (what Herrnstein and Murray approvingly named the “Flynn Effect”). For example, US Army psychometricians were shocked at WWI draftees’ dimness but were happier with WWII’s more on-the-ball conscripts. Was this due to more schooling, better nutrition, less hookworm and cretinism, more mental stimulation from radio, movies, and automobiles, more scientific conceptual models in common circulation, something else, or all of the above? As the Ameliorists admit, there’s no consensus on the Flynn Effect’s causes.