Evolution of Intelligence in Jews

Well, here's what the Wiki article on the subject has to say:

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Better nutrition has been proposed as a factor. However, there is evidence from Scandinavian countries that IQ scores rose even more, 20 points per generation, following the austerity of occupation during World War II.

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I don't dispute the idea that heritable, genetic changes could result in drastic mental deficiencies or ability. And IQ tests are very reliable in regards to detecting retardation or genius.In the middle, though? With the extent that IQ results are confounded by hundreds of other factors, I don't see that there's any evidence for what they call g - innate, physical intelligence. I've never seen one of these measured differences that was greater, or even close to, the average variation within either group. It's not clear to me what the significance of comparing averages would be in a situation like this, so it isn't clear to me that there's anything here to explain. Particularly holding, as I do, that there's no such thing as g.

True, true and true But he is still taught in every first year undergraduate level pyschology course in the country. Not because his ideas were right but because so much of modern psychology had it's historical groundings in Freud. Ideas such as the subconscious, which are taken for granted now, originated with Freud.

I'm not clear what you mean here - What is g? What does "innate, physical intelligence" mean? Why should the middle be any different? Are you claiming that genius is qualitively different from normal intelligence, rather merely quantively different? If this is so, why does it not show up in heritiditability studies? If you wish to compare groups you need to compare averages, or some other statistical property derived from the whole group. The differences measured are statistically distinguishable from chance and thus are in need of explanation. The point about the variation between the groups being smaller than the variation within the group is a big red herring; the same is true for strength in men and women but it would be absurd to argue that accordingly the difference is irrelevant or not worthy of comment; similarly accident statistics by age group, or lifespan by country.

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But he is still taught in every first year undergraduate level pyschology course in the country. Not because his ideas were right but because so much of modern psychology had it's historical groundings in Freud. Ideas such as the subconscious, which are taken for granted now, originated with Freud.

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Oh sure, he's a very important part of the history of psychology.People should definitely learn about him, and Jung, and all of the other pioneers of the field.

It's what you're talking about:

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The general intelligence factor (abbreviated g) is a widely accepted but controversial construct used in the field of psychology (see also psychometrics) to quantify what is common to the scores of all intelligence tests. The phrase "g theory" refers to hypotheses and results regarding g's biological nature, stability/malleability, relevance to real-world tasks, and other inquiries.

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g factor (psychometrics) - WikipediaI don't think it exists. I think that there are gross factors that would affect the top and bottom of the scale. That is, after all, the only validation IQ tests claim - that they always successfully detect retardation and genius. They make no verifiable claim about their accuracy within the middle, so I'm not inclined to supply one for them. I've already given an analogy where the middle is different, and why differences between people in the middle would be much, much less significant than differences between people in the middle and people in the top or bottom. Well, are you claiming that, from imbecile to genius, intelligence is a continuous scale?Do you have any proof of that besides the fact that IQ tests arwe constructed to report on such a continuous scale? What is the merit of comparing groups?

I don't think high intelligence involves have novel and unique ways of thinking, I think it just involves being better at what everyone else can do. Retardation is different, in that it often involved identifiable inabilities to think in certain ways.That's my position. Now, do you think high intelligence involves novel and unique ways of thinking?I'd not come across the term g; and it doesn't actually match what I've been talking about - but broadly, yes, I agree with the concept. Why do you not? How is it that you explain the high correlation between ability in different areas? IQ correlates well with academic performance, job performance and income. That, for me, is sufficent evidence that IQ measures a meaningful quantity across it's normal range. I have no idea what kind of answer you expect to this question.

I agree. I don't know. To be honest, I don't know how much confidence I place in the ability of an IQ test to measure genius. I say that as someone who is a genius (as I suspect you probably are too; most people on this board surely are) as measured by IQ tests. Being a "genius" as determined by these tests doesn't seem to mean much. I don't have a college degree. I was in the bottom half, GPA-wise, of my high school graduating class. As a federal employee I'm at the lowest pay grade."Genius" doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be. I'm not any smarter than anybody else; the best I can say is that I'm stupid a little less of the time. Let's say that I'm 10 IQ points higher than another person. What possible conclusions could be supported by that? None that I can see. Think of the IQ test as for your mind like running the mile, doing the shuttle run, and the number of chin-ups you can do is for your body. We would expect to see a range of scores in an average population. And at the very bottom scores, we would expect to see a lot of people with physical handicaps or impared mobility. We would expect to see a high correlation between ability in these three tests. Over generations, we would expect to see a degree of heritability, too. Fit parents have fit children.But to assert that the mile run, shuttle run, and chin-up bar measure some kind of genetic, immutable physical limitation for each individual would be ridiculous. Everybody knows that a normal person can exercise. Simply performing these tests over and over again would make you much better at each one. (We see the same pattern with IQ tests.) To try to assert the existence of g from IQ tests, or any kind of assessment of mental skill, would be as ridiculous as trying to diagnose the presence of heart disease merely from a person's scores on those three physical tests. For me, the fact that you can get a better IQ score simply by taking the tests repeatedly is sufficient evidence that it does not.

But we'd also expect to see a range of different results given the same diet and exercise regime. It's very obvious that people have different builds, different muscle structures and that some people will just be stronger, or just be faster and that these differences are down to genetics. I could train all I liked, hell I could have trained all my life, and I'd still never run a 100m as fast as Dwain Chambers, or lift as much as Geoff Capes, or any number of other physical feats.I consider the same to be true of intelligence, and IQ. But that's not where g comes from (according to the Wikipedia article you cited); it comes from an observed correlation in performance across a range of tests. How so? To use the same example you cited. I could get better at doing chin ups simply by doing chin ups, or get a better mile time, simply by doing chin ups or running miles - that doesn't mean that my mile time or the number of chin ups I can do don't provide meaningful measures of my fitness and athletic ability.

Usually what people mean when they say "it's obvious" is "I don't know how to prove it, but it must be true."At the Olympics, we see that, for almost every sport, the range of results within the athletes of one given country - who would presumably tend to share the same diet and regime factors - are typically very close. And often the winning factor isn't any genetic basis, but simply a matter of being lucky, being "in the zone", and not having been injured in training. Right, but this is getting back to what I was saying before. I mean you'll never run as fast as a purebred stallion, for instance, no matter how much you train. The test - running the mile or whatever - is valid for detecting severe handicaps or exemplary talent. Gross differences, in other words.But that doesn't have anything to do with the validity of the scale in the middle, the validity of the test when it "detects" miniscule differences in score. And the conclusion of innate intelligence from that correlation is unsupported, as I've said. Obviously, improving your mental skills in one area is going to carry over to other, related areas. People who learn to appreciate classical music are better mathematicians, for instance. Because "fitness" is a concept, not a property of your body. It's an artifact of the testing procedure, a summary of results, not an actual quality that your body possesses. And as a summary it has counterintuitive properties. Imagine Geoff Capes. As a weightlifer his chin-up ability is probably very good indeed. But as a weightlifter he's bulky. The shuttle run is going to be very difficult for him due to his high center of gravity and mass. And we might expect his ability to run a mile to be hampered, too, by all that additional mass. So whereas the average person, with a percentile score of 50 on all three tests might have a "fitness" score of 50 (where we simply average their scores on the three tests), ol'Geoff runs scores of 99, 10, and 10 for a fitness score of 60.Would that be right? Does it really make sense to assert that a champion weightlifter is only slightly more fit than average? Or isn't that simply an artifact of our model, implying that we've failed to accurately assess fitness in every case? That, indeed, "fitness" as we've decided to measure it is ultimately a pretty useless concept?IQ tests test one thing - your ability to take an IQ test. Concluding from that ability some kind of nebulous "general intelligence" is specious in the extreme, especially considering how easy it is to get better at taking IQ tests. So easy, in fact, that the slight differences among scores in the middle of the test range can be explained largely as differences in how well subjects were prepared to take such a test, by their education, background, and environment.The inventor of the test never intended it as an assay for the general intelligence of the populace, or even as a test for adults. Binet intended the test as an assessment of how well educational goals had been met in children, nothing more.

It's a nigh on impossible claim to prove. We can't do sufficently controlled tests with people to prove it.Still; it is obvious. And you'd need some pretty impressive evidence to disprove something that is so obvious in the world around us and observed in other animals in those situations where we can breed them. That's selection bias at it's grossest. Athletes chosen to compete for their country have been selected for ability at every level. I think it would help if you didn't conflate IQ, g and the question of innate intelligence.Heritability in IQ scores has been tested and shows a high degree of heritability. I'd call that innate ability, although you seem to be implying that innate ability is something different from heritable ability? IQ tests do test one thing, but the results obtained correlate well with other things. In particular, they correlate well with those things we would generally describe as being indicative of intelligence.IQ's never going to be a perfect test, intelligence is not a unitary property - although there may be an underlying property (i.e. g) which drives some parts of it - but that doesn't mean it can't give us useful information or provide us with a useful insight into the properties of intelligence. What the inventor intended is utterly irrelevant to what it can be usefully used for.

Then what's the point of the Virginia SOLs (not shit outta luck, but standards of learning)?I mean, why hire a whole new agency to develop an almost totally useless test, at taxpaper expense, when there's this cool little test called the IQ test

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All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

Heritability isn't synonymous with genetics. Many things are inherited culturally as well as genetically or epigenetically.You mentioned the correlation between IQ and high incomes, academic performance, etc. What you didn't mention, or appear to consider, is that corellation cuts both ways. A more likely explanation is simply that people with high incomes and challenging jobs have greater access to education than low incomes, and people in challenging academic fields experience the sort of "brain exercise" that increases performance on IQ tests.Look, one of the most popular video games for the Nintendo DS is "Brain Age", a game that promises that you can "train your brain in minutes a day." They don't use the term IQ to describe what they measure, but it's basically a focused puzzle game. You develop the skills, though puzzles, that allow you to (among other things) score higher on IQ tests. How would this game even be possible if IQ tests assessed a static, innate intelligence factor? You seem to have misunderstood. I'm the one arguing that they aren't the same thing, remember? But that's exactly the position of g proponents. I understand that perhaps you are not advancing that position. Just as long as you understand what I'm opposing. Go back to my first post in this thread, and look at what the five sections of the Stanford-Binet test purport to assess.Are you going to argue with a straight face that the Stanford-Binet test assesses anything but your education? Really? A test that measures Knowledge, comes right out and says it, has nothing to do with education?

Well, I'm tempted to suggest that the testing industry, and their powerful education lobby, might have had some influence in the matter, but I'm a cynic like that.

Biological inheritance can be separated from parental influence, and the figure given is for that. Except that IQ is predictive of these things before they occur. Crash, I've specifically stated I consider the notion of a static, innate intelligence factor such as you describe to be naive and wrong. Then why do you keep treating them as the same subject? Hell, you're the one who dragged g into it in the first place! Not according to the Wikipedia article you cited. But, since neither of us are proposing exactly what it states there, let's drop the matter? It tests knowledge as one part of the test. And, yes, knowledge testing will have a strong level of education bias - but people passing through the same education most certainly don't retain the same level of knowledge. What's more most knowledge based testing on IQ tests concentrates on things such as Vocabulary that aren't specifically taught in most schools (certainly not past a basic level, or specific jargon).As I said, and continue to say, environmental factors are significant in IQ testing. But so are genetic/epigenetic factors.But let us return to first principles. We know that organisms vary genetically, we know that a sufficiently large portion of a organisms behaviour, and physical attributes are determined by genetics that evolution is able to work on those variations to produce massive change in both behaviour and physiology. We know that the behaviour and physiology of all animals today was shaped by evolution working with the material of genetics.Why then, exactly, should we consider Human Intelligence to be a unique special case that somehow avoids the forces that control all over aspects of biological behaviour?

Did I miss it, or did anybody in this thread actually define what "intelligence" is? If so, please point me to it. And if not... can somebody do that ASAP?Not a canned definition, but the meaning as you (all) are using it here. That would help me understand better and possibly even join in the conversation!Thanks!