Who says that all living humans are members of the sub-species homo sapien sapien? Err... the culture of latin speaking Europeans and their descendants in the New World? You want me to endorse European colonial arrogance and its system of taxonomy? I will accept that the term 'human' can be applied to all contemporary, bipedal lifeforms with quadruped ancestors sharing close genetic relations with primate groups. But not that we all share the same mental 'sentience'. Homo sapien : Latin "wise man", "knowing man". How many bipeds can that be applied to? Hence, it's a matter of subjective opinion, and, therefore, political. Good enough? (PS: Why not get Enmos to prove it?)
Why not just come out an say what you believe instead of going through all these middlement arguments.
That's an option. I took another one. In one short sentence. Oh, yes... I wanted an answer to that question.
Here are some more questions that you might also want to find answers to in regards to the OP just before you get into the genetics and intelligence debate. What effect might a variable, such as nutrition, have on intelligence? What effect might prolonged exposure to pollution have on intelligence? What effect might equal access to education have on birth rates? What effect might access to childhood vaccinations have on death rates? What effect might conflicts have on populations? What effect might migration have on populations? What effect might the rising cost of wheat have on populations? What effect might a flu pandemic have on populations? Now then a few more questions: How are you going to prove that today's poplulation is smarter or dummer than a previous generation's population? If you can prove one way or the other what would it actually mean? When you have decided what it actually means; what then do you propose to do about it? What might your aims be? Do you want more smarties than dummies? Or more dummies than smarties? Or do you want to maintain the status quo? whilst you are at it you might also ask: What are smart people for? What are dumb people for? Where is the line that determines whether you are dumb or smart? Oh and one final question for you. How are you measuring smartness again? IQ did you say?
Sniffy, I never said, nor was it ever my argument that environmental factors do not influence intelligence. I only said that the main influence is genetics which is consistent with science. Can you show that it is not? Yes, IQ is what we use to indicate cognitive ability. Is it perfect? Does it tell you all about the different nuances in an individual's intelligence? No. Is it useful in predicting a person's ability to understand information, ability to train for jobs, and perform complex tasks? Immensely so. Why are people with high IQs so much better at these things than people with low IQs? Because they have higher general intelligence. I remember talking about this with TimeTraveler a while ago. He was like "there is no such thing as general intelligence." How good one is at math has nothing to do with how good he is at, say, music or linguistics. In fact, this could not be further from the truth. All different facets of intelligence are, in fact, related. How good you are at math does have something to do with how good you are at linguistics. How good you are at music does have something to do with how good your memory is. If you're a prodigy at math, it doesn't mean you're going to be a prodigy at linguistics, but it does strongly suggest that you're going to be much better at linguistics than the average person. If you're a prodigy at music, it doesn't mean you're going to have a prodigal memory, but it does predict that you will have a better memory than most people. This is what science knows. This overlap in different cognitive abilities forms the basis of g. If you don't agree that there is such a thing as g, or that some people are generally smarter than others, then your opinion is in stark contrast to scientific fact. There is such a thing as general intelligence. IQ predicts this correlation of cognitive abilities and that's why it is useful. That's why people with high IQs are more educated, have better health, have smarter spouses, have better jobs, earn more money, are more productive at their jobs, have lower incidences of incarceration, (the list goes on) than people with lower IQs. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Explain this: During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference. If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large. Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q. Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin than other blood groups. A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/opinion/09nisbett.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q2u612426625w110/ It's entirely possible that my wife is stupid, but I doubt it. It's possible that there are lots of IQs of 100 (population mean) who work at NASA, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. I doubt it. All of my friends are pretty smart compared to the population mean. Coincidence? I doubt it. Everybody in my family is pretty smart. Coincidence?
Sam, I'm not making this a thing about race, although race does play a role. I will say this, however. There are whites who are intelligent and whites who are stupid. There are blacks who are intelligent and blacks who are stupid. That's about as far as I will go with that in this discussion. Sam, how do your justify not being a hereditarian (am I wrong in assuming this about you?), in light of what homozygotic twin studies say?
1. Do twins share womb environments? 2. Are there substantial environmental differences between the twins? Pretty smart compared to whom? What does an average IQ mean? Is the average IQ in NASA the same as the average IQ in the White House? What is the relative construct?
Sweeping generalisations? You got it! My point is; so what? What is the point of this thread? To boast about how clever you and your family are and how you never have to mix with the stoopid people? Do you know how stupid that sounds? And no you haven't given any proof that genetics is the main influence on intelligence. If it were so wouldn't the smart people be way out numbering the dummies by now and you seem to imply that they are not?
What's wrong with making generalizations as long as you acknowledge that that's precisely what they are? You people are so boring with your attacks. To you and your ilk, it all comes back to me, me, me, and especially my evil conservative agenda. Why do you feel the need to focus on me and my disease? Why don't you just be an intellectual and focus on what's being argued? I wasn't tooting my horn numbnuts, I was making a point: have you never noticed how similar people cluster? Athletic people find athletic friends, intelligent people find intelligent friends, outcasts make outcast friends, and so on. "lol francois your so full of yourselflol" Shut up. You can't absolutely prove anything. But there is overwhelming evidence that genetics is the prime influence on intelligence. The second sentence here is a total non-sequitur (also doesn't even make grammatical sense). I'll give you a chance to redeem yourself and see if you can figure out why it makes no sense before I explain it.
Twins who have been reared separately have remarkably similar IQs; the correlation is almost the same as it is for twins who have been reared together. The difference in the correlation coefficients, which is presumably due to environmental influence, is very small. Remarkably, the older one gets, the less it seems is the influence of the environment. Heredity increases as one ages. Not what you'd expect if you were an environmentalist, as opposed to a hereditarian. Do you know of any evidence which suggests that genetics is not a prime influence on intelligence, Sam?
Francois I didn't ask for absolute proof only some proof. I have no idea what your politics are but thanks for letting me know about your evil conservative agenda. Also, thanks awfully for mentioning my people I didn't know you knew them. Anyway. Now we are down to similar people clustering. Well yes some people who exhibit similar traits and finances gather together to socialise, SO WHAT? This is not something new as you implied in your OP. In fact it has happened for many a century but I'm not sure how much this has to do with intelligence or genetics and how much other factors are at work, such as economic systems.... So aside from a thread that has been posted to state the obvious. I can only assume that you are trying to make some other interesting point about social stratification and culling. And in future please don't bring my numb nuts into the equation or you'll find yourself with yours forcefully removed.
Why should I have to? This stuff is known by science. Would you similarly ask me for proof if I said that the Earth revolves around the sun? Look it up! This is not a controversial point. We've known this for decades! Whoa. So you agree with me? If you want to know my point, you need only read the last sentence in my first original post. Are you flirting with me?
Sam, will you quit editing my posts to make me look like a quack? I'm not doing anything out of line.
Not even the correlation between IQ scores and intelligence is "known" by science to be interpretable in the manner you suggest, letalone your somewhat fanciful sociological projections. I notice in your projections you do not even allow for recessive genetics, inbreeding, environmental lead exposure, diet, and so forth. Just for one example, suppose you were faced with the following choice: you have a serious engineering problem to solve, and the people available to solve it are 1) the fifth generation of assortive mating among the offspring of the Kennedy and Bush families, all with fancy college degrees from elite Eastern institutions, who have been drawn to each other by their mutual intelligence as demonstrated by their above average IQ test scores (and of course their mutual proximity as teenagers at the same playgrounds for the rich), and 2) the fifth generation of assortive matings among the offspring of two families founded by a nomad Australian aborigine who shacked up with Greenland aborigine prostitute for a few years and left her with five kids and the Canadian welfare system, and a Kenyan small farmer who married a gullible Baptist missionary's daughter from the hills of West Virginia and produced seven children. Of that second pair of families, founded by four people with well below average IQ scores, scientifically demonstrable to be genetically dumber than the Bushes and Kennedys, in this fifth generation now only a minority have gone to college at all, let alone expensive elite institutions of higher learning. Which do you entrust with your problem ?
