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Science

Intelligence is Inherited 79

Posted by michael from the insanity-is-too dept.
codeButcher writes: "Now you can blame it on your parents! NewScientist.com reports on a study done on twins, that determines that IQ [and lack thereof then too, I suppose] is inherited. Quote: The finding suggests that environment - their own personal experiences, what they learned in life, who they knew - played a negligible role in shaping it."
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Intelligence is Inherited

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  • The end of the article makes a critical point about "IQ": it is what you need to do well in school not what you need to do well in life.
    IQ, or intelligence, is only one factor contributing to how a person contributes to society and how "succesful" a person will be in life.
    • THANK YOU! for illustrating this point and esp. pointing out its reference int he article. I'd Mod you up if I could.

      -shpoffo


    • You can measure someones IQ, thats still not going to measure their intelligence.

      When you must understand is, people are very specialized. A person good at math may not know how to read. A person whos a writer may not know how to do math.

      A computer technician may not have social skills

      You see, each persons brain is very specialized, and everyone is a genius in certain things. No one is a genius in everything.

      The people who become the genius's of the world are simply the people who happen to find their gift and focus 100 percent on it.

      School does not promote this, school forces everyone to be the same, and tries to force the human brain which is very specialized to be well rounded, the exact opposite of what its designed to do.

      Take a chess player like bobby fischer, put him in a classroom teaching everything besides chess and he'd be just an average guy, put him in a room with other chess players and hes the best player on the planet.

      Take einstien, put him in a school, and hes just an average guy, may even fail, but then introduce him to science and he changes the world with his theory.

      Take bill gates, put him in school, watch as he drops out and then starts the most successful company in american history.

      Intelligence has nothing to do with academics, the only way academics could truely measure intelligence is if it allowed a person to truely focus on ONE thing, because in order to be a genius, you have to be focused on one thing and one thing only, Bill gates focus's 100 percent on business, its his life, Bobby fischer 100 percent on chess, Einstien 100 percent on science.

      THIS does not mean these people are more intelligent than us, they are just more focused than us.

      Being well rounded almost guarentees you'll never be a "genius" because its impossibile to be a jack of all trades.

  • Intelligence vs. IQ (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20, 2001 @11:21AM (#2589308)
    The title of this article is misleading. Intelligence and IQ are two very, very different things. Having a high IQ may be a factor in making someone intelligent, but it's only that -- a factor. There are plenty of people with high IQs that aren't particularly bright, and I've met people with average IQs that are more intelligent than I can safely imagine.

    In practice, IQs measure only one skill: how well you do on IQ tests.

    (Incidentally, this isn't sour grapes -- I don't know what my IQ is exactly, but I'm told it's within a fraction of the top 1 percentile. And I don't consider myself particularly intelligent either.)

    • >Intelligence and IQ are two very, very different things.

      That was my thought on seeing the Headline as well. Intellegence has a weal link to IQ, not a strong one.
    • That all depends on how you define intelligence.

      I remember that someone defined 7 different types of intelligence, where the mathematical/logical one tested in mensa-test etc. was only one of them. The others were linguistic, social, mucical and some others i cannot remember at pressent.


      If you define intelligence as equal to the mathematically/logically then the IQ is a good measure.


      Yours Yazeran


      Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.



      • Some which we dont really understand, some which we havent even discovered yet.

        And IQ isnt exactly math or logic either, if you want logical intelligence, talk to a world champion chess player, not someone who did well on a silly IQ test.

        If you want math intelligence, talk to someone whos career is math, who created new types of math and does nothing but math.

        To test people who havent even really FOCUSED on developing the intelligence needed to do well on an IQ test (most people try to be well rounded) they arent going to do good.

        But i believe anyone can learn to develop skills to allow them to do good on tests, some easier than others, but its a skill and you cant really measure someones intelligence by a skill or natural talent unless you know they put all their effort into it.
      • If you define intelligence as equal to the mathematically/logically then the IQ is a good measure.

        IQ != Intelligence. Since there are different kinds of intelligence, and there does not appear to be any one test that can measure all types of intelligence, no one study will ever be considered the final word on the matter.


    • You can do well on the IQ test, do well in school, and not be very intelligent.

      In fact, most people who you see doing well in school are just average people whos best trait happens to be a gene which allows them to listen to rules, and follow instructions, and pass tests.

      This allows them to do well in school, its a trait.
      This trait isnt intelligence and its been proven for many many years, that theres no such thing as general intelligence, theres skills, everyone has a set of skills, and everyone is a genius at something, either they havent found out what it is because they never got the chance, or they know what it is, but they want to be well rounded (school teaches you to be well rounded) and so they never focus on it.

  • Good book on the subject (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bofh31337 ( 521771 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {73313hfob}> on Tuesday November 20, 2001 @11:31AM (#2589371) Journal
    In 1869 Francis Galton wrote a book called "Hereditary Genius" on this very subject. It's the first quantitative analysis of the human mental ability. He studied scientists, poets, politicians and many more people, classifying then into nature vs. nurture. In the end he concludes genius is hereditary in humans. Many people consider this book as the creator of the nature vs. nurture argument. He puts forth a great deal of stats in the book, something I find many case studies to be missing.
    • I had never heard of our Mr. Francis Galton here, so I went searching for some more text on him online (isn't the web a wonderful place?). Anyways, I found [mugu.com] a nice summary of his life and times with quite a few rather large excerpts from books that he had written. I'm still reading. What a cool guy.
      • He also has a great peice on the Eugenics movement [mugu.com] and it's dealing with breeding to improve the human condition. This section also touchs on animal breeding. "The power of man over animal life, in producing whatever varieties of form he pleases, is enormously great. It would seem as though the physical structure of future generations was almost as plastic as clay, under the control of the breeder's will. It is my desire to show, more pointedly than, so far as I am aware, has been attempted before, that mental qualities are equally under control."
  • Of course it is. Don't you remember when you were in school and there were those really stupid kids in your class, did you ever meet the parents? They were always stupid, or related, or both. There was a group of brothers going to the same school I did that were called the "Spud Brothers" who's parents where in the "family" way.

    Of course, my parents moved from Chicago to Northern Michigan while I was still quite young, so my experience might be different from yours.


    • School has nothing to do with intelligence, how many times must i tell you.

      And stupid kids in class may end up being scientists like einstien or rich like bill gates.

      Last but not least, its a bad idea to test someones intelligence when they arent even fully developed, a child or a kids mind you can never truely figure out because its always changing, in phases.

      Also the parents who "seem" stupid, may be smart as hell in specific areas.

      Theres alot of people who are truely ignorant but totally a genius at the same time.

      Someone like Adolph hitler, total military genius, but barely sane and if you met him in school you'd consider him to be stupid.
      • That guy's specialty was psychology. Sit down and listen to some of thsoe Neurenberg Rally speeches where he sounds like he's about to bust an artery. Hitler was a huge fan of media technology and how it could influence people emotionally. You could call this a symptom of genius. Militarily he was an idiot and that's why he lost the war despite having captivated millions of Europeans with his stage presence and powerful, seductive imagery. In fact, his only military strategy was to lie about everything and try and get it over as fast as possible. That's hardly a genius strategy.
        And as for genius being handed down from generation to generation, it's true I'm sure and I'm also sure it's genetic. But in addition, I'm also sure that genius can be an extremely painful condition that borders on or leads directly to insanity. Many people of superior mental capacity --ie quick witted-- self-medicate their condition with massive doeses of drugs and alcohol because of the pain it causes in their personal lives. Other people such as family members, friends, co-workers or in-laws easily recognize genius when they're standing face to face with it and their inevitable jealousy leads to antagonism against those who "have it easy" in mental terms.
        A good example of how this jealousy gets played out is-- if you're so smart, where's your money? Imagine this line of questioning coming from the middle management see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil sack of shit to someone who spent years dedicating themselves to the pursuit of knowledge in art, math, science or philosophy and consequently wasn't living their life solely for the goal of making money but is indeed genuinely intelligent. Happens every day. Boy, the ten-thousandth time you get that shit you're looking for something to numb the whole experience of living. If you're both skilled and disciplined as well as mentally quick you find a path of least destruction to continue, but this isn't always easy to find. Often, it is simpler to simply destroy ones body and avoid the cruel joke of having been placed in this world populated primarily by idiots like HanzoSan --just kidding dude. I'm sure you're a swell fella if you're so interested in this thread.
        But Hitler weren't no idjiot and if you met him in school you'd probably have been either impressed or at least frightened by him. The guy had stage presence from hell.

        Danke Schoen, auf Wiedersehen --Wayne Newton
  • ...think twice before shouting out "stupid parents" in the future, eh?

    --
    No I didn't say it would work. I said it was a good idea. Ideas never work by themselves.
  • This sort of finding bothers me. It bothers me in the same way as did a news article a couple of weeks ago reporting that a women was offering something on the order $10k for primo sperm from a Stanford student with certain physical characteristics.

    Given the knowledge of this genetic connection, we should in principle be able to start a breeding program to increase the average IQ of the human species.

    But is this necesssarily a good thing? I'm not convinced that a high IQ is the primary trait needed for human survival. (It's not a bad thing in of itself... some of my best friends have a high IQ. grin.)

    We've come pretty far as a species responding to a number of adverse environments trusting in good old Natural Selection. If we start intentionally selecting out a certain set of genes as especially desirable, what's to stop us from creating a hyper specialized race of savants that do great in math and music, but don't have the ability to bind people together to a common goal?

    I guess what I'm saying is that I've seen what effect overbreeding has had on the canine species - especially when humans have gotten involved. What will happen to our species if we follow that path?
    • I'm just curious, but why should this bother you? Would it be better if she went around sleeping with guys that fit her perfect description? Isn't that what physical attraction is all about? Find the right mate with the right characteristics so the children will be genetically sound?
      • If it's just an occasional occurence, then there's nothing wrong at all - her advertisement is just a more efficient way of fulfilling her desires.

        But if the idea catches on and we start choosing wholesale on a single characteristic (IQ) then I worry we're going down a perilous road.

        I know that you can easily refute the argument by noting that we've been breeding selectively for height for generations - and that's probably why we're so much taller now than we were 2 or 3 thousand years ago. But it seems to me that height is a less explosive characteristic than IQ. (At least in terms of the number of possible ramifications.)
      • exactly!

        evolution can be observed in your everyday life.

        meneer de koekepeer
      • Yah, she should find a mate with a suitable MHC, so that the children would have better immune systems.

        I figure good immune systems are rather important for long term survival :).

        So maybe you should find a mate who smells good to you :). However females who use birth control pills should be aware that the "smell good" tends to change to people with similar MHCs.

        Cheerio,
        Link.
    • I can one up you. I saw an ad, in my campus paper, by an infertile couple offering $25K for an egg donor with certain very specific physical and intellectual qualities.

      Well if you worry about selecting for IQ, what about selecting for socioeconomic success? That's what most people do (or would if they could). Everything else being equal career and financial success are of considerable importance when humans chose mates. I don't know how big a genetic correlation there is, but the process is certainly self-perpetuating more often than not. After all successful parents can give their kids numerous advantages in addition to the genes they passed on, and only rarely do people marry far outside the socioeconomic class in which they were born.

      In short we already have a breeding program for human success (at least to the extent that money and power = success). We might make such a thing more rigidly defined by identifying "desirable" genes, but that doesn't seem overly likely. A critic might mention that smart people breed less, but honestly does it matter? The class structure seems no less stable just because there are fewer people on the top than the bottom. Besides all the people at the bottom have the dream of working their way up (though in reality only a few ever manage it.)

      PS I'm not saying that the current state of affairs is a good thing, but this does seem to be the way of the world.
    • Given the knowledge of this genetic connection, we should in principle be able to start a breeding program to increase the average IQ of the human species.

      It's already happened. When I was a teenager in the 80s, I got a letter from some group that wanted to have a say in who I had kids with. I'm pretty sure I have the letter around somewhere, although it's been years since I even thought about it. The probable reason I got it was because there was an article in the paper with my name (and my name was in a few other places) because I was admitted to Duke's Talent Identification Program, a program that Duke runs for kids with high intelligence during the summer. I do well on SATs and ACTs (using combined scores, I scored perfect on both), something that I credit my Dad with (hooking me on books early, including Latin and Russian, and teaching me the fundimentals of algebra when we learned addition at school, and the fundimentals of calculus when I was in third grade). He's a heck of a smart guy (along with my Mom, who is also very well read), and it's due to them that my siblings and I turned out the way we did. My sister is a career student, and had a 6.0 HS GPA in the IB Program. Interestingly, other than my Mom, we all actively play either guitar or clarinet.

      BUT... this all has to do with intelligence that can easily be tested. If you look at how many times I've been screwed over by people, I'm dumb as a rock. I also can't draw worth a darn, and I am a sucker for a sob story (well, I'm getting better).

      --
      Evan

    • > If we start intentionally selecting out a certain set of genes as especially desirable, what's to stop us from creating a hyper specialized race of savants that do great in math and music, but don't have the ability to bind people together to a common goal?

      Buggered if I know, but based on the track records of people who have the ability to "bind people together to a common goal", I'm a hell of a lot more worried about them than I am of mathematicians and musicians.

  • You know the theory that all the dumb ppl having way more kids drags down the average IQ? It looks like it now has weight. That is bad.

    I'm getting a mental picture of all the less-than-intellectual induhviduals from high school... Then thinking that that'll be most of the ppl in the future. Scary.

    Of course, intelligence does seem to be increasing, so the dumb-stud theory must be counterbalanced by something.

    But just to be sure, all us smart ppl better start reproducing like bunnies ;-)
    • You can't "drag down" the average IQ.

      The IQ test defines 100 to be the average, so no matter what happens, the average IQ will always be, 100!

      I don't think intelligence is increasing. What is increasing is our stored knowledge and experience in teaching. Is the capacity to LEARN going up or down? Down I would think, but not enough to notice for a long, long time.
    • Well there is factors counterballancing this. If in doubt, check out the Darwin Awards [darwinawards.com] :-)

      Seriously, as the poster above mentioned, IQ=100 is defined as the average inteligence.


      Yours Yazeran


      Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

  • Please tell this to teenagers... (Score:3, Funny)

    by mfarah ( 231411 ) <`miguel' `at' `farah.cl'> on Tuesday November 20, 2001 @12:51PM (#2589853) Homepage
    ... they won't believe you at all. At that age, all parents are stupid - I know mine were. Of course, they started to get more intelligent when I hit the 20-year old mark. I can only conclude that intelligence is increased by continous contact with intelligent young people.
    • Such a stereotype! I'm 16, and I can say my parrents are fairly intelligent, from experience more so than actually being geek-ishly smart people. Of course they are also irrational and quick to anger...

      On the subject of the story...While my parrents aren't all too smart (I don't think either of them ever passed an Algebra course.), a genius ;) (Hey, I'm not boasting, that's what the IQ test said.), getting straight A's in all the advanced classes. (Hell, I could sleep through most of Pre-Calc and still get an A.) And it's kind of ironic, as my parrents always tell me that I obviously don't get it from them.
    • Despite that people use the word "stupid" to describe a broad range of characteristics, teenagers, rather than thinking their parents have a lack of raw intelligence, think, or know, their parents have a possible lack of understanding of their lives. This is not a judgement on parents' intelligence.

  • IQ Bunkum (Score:1, Interesting)

    by daigu ( 111684 )

    Couple of points:

    1. There is no good quantifiable measurement for intelligence.
    2. Physical structure of the brain may not indicate ability, e.g., even with identical brain structures is it possible for the twins to have defniitely levels of ability?
    3. Sample size of the study leaves considerable margin for error. Perhaps these 20 twins were an anomoly.
    I know next to nothing about brain functioning, and it does not seem based that this study, as reported here, provides any real evidence -- although, it may be provide some interesting points of departure for further research.

    • Re:IQ Bunkum (Score:4, Insightful)

      by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Tuesday November 20, 2001 @03:55PM (#2591602)
      There is no good quantifiable measurement for intelligence.

      You mean there is no generally accepted definition of intelligence.

      Once you reach a conclusion as to what skills represent intelligence, it is quite clear that a test evaluating those skills is a very short step.
      • ...but only so long as those skills are objectively testable. For instance, a certain type of artist needs to know how to paint, how to communicate ideas through pictures, and use pictures to inspire certain emotions or thoughts in others. Ok, there's your skill list, and a pretty short one at that. But how do you test it without so much observer bias getting in as to make scores or rankings of ability unusable?

        • Re:IQ Bunkum (Score:3, Interesting)

          by pubudu ( 67714 )
          For instance, a certain type of artist needs to know how to paint, how to communicate ideas through pictures, and use pictures to inspire certain emotions or thoughts in others. Ok, there's your skill list, and a pretty short one at that. But how do you test it without so much observer bias getting in as to make scores or rankings of ability unusable?

          Why would you think that an ability to communicate is somehow indepedent from observer bias, such that we cannot measure artistic ability -- which you link to communicative ability -- because there is too much observer bias? Isn't observer bias the heart of communication? And thus wouldn't any attempt to measure such ability independent of such 'bias' be an attempt to measure nothing? And thus not at all surprising when we fail?

          Or do you suggest that I can speak perfectly good German even if no so-called German-speaker can understand me? Or that what I speak can be classified as good German or bad German without regard to how Germans are speaking?

  • iq != intelligence (Score:1, Insightful)

    by sajiimori ( 535333 )
    many of the traits that contribute to iq do seem to be heritable, but iq only seems to test things that we've evolved to solve problems that are specific to our ancestors' environment (visualizing 3d spaces, for instance), and very basic logic (that even the earliest computers had no problem with, but people often have a very difficult time with). neither of which is a good measurement of "generic intelligence", as if there is such a thing.

    put simply, i just know too many people who test >150iq but don't know their ass from their elbow. :)
  • So the obvious question is that if genius is hereditary, can we breed for it intentionally?
  • ".. stupid are breeding.. "

    Hmm what song is that from, I think it was weaser??? I wonder how much truth there is in that. Are we breeding dumber Americans? Sure seems that way when I get on the road and people can't figure out how to use their turn signals properly or how to drive....

  • So, first of all,let me say that, in general, the New Scientist is, IMHO, much closer to pseudoscience than science. It's maybe a good thing to read while you're eating lunch, but it's not a very serious publication. I think perhaps the title "New Pseudo-Scientific Mystic" might be perhaps more accurate. So I'm not too surprised to see this come out of there. Ok, enough trolling.

    I think these studies are in general highly misinterpreted, which has been done so here. For example, in the article they refer to MRI studies in the similarities of identical twins' brains. Ok, great. Why would you expect anything different? These dudes look the same, they're built the same, of course their brains have similar structure. But given that our models of cognition are shite at this point in time, to extrapolate from a structural similarity to a functional similarity is preposterous.

    Furthermore, this whole IQ testing thing is pretty much bunk to begin with. Quoting from the article:

    These tests hone in on what's known as "g", the common element measured by IQ tests. People who do well on one of these tests tend to do well on them all, says Thompson.
    Now, as we who have taken a statistics class know, when you do 17 tests which have a very high degree of correlation, you don't do all 17 damn tests, because they're all measuring the same thing. So you just do one. Second, to assume that you're actually measuring something real is also pretty ridiculous. If the only evidence that something exists is that you've designed 17 tests (which are all highly correlated), then you need to take Stats 101.

    There is a very good exposition of all of these issues in Steven J. Gould's Mismeasure of Man. I would advise anyone who wants to understand some of the scientific issues in this field, as opposed to the crap, should look at that book.

    • first of all,let me say that, in general, the New Scientist is, IMHO, much closer to pseudoscience than science. . . it's not a very serious publication.

      Nor is it intended to be. New Scientist is a compendium of abstracts from serious scientific journals that have been edited to read by non-scientists. In this case the study was published in Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn758). (See the last line of the article).

      Now as to the article as a whole, I think the study was little pointless if at all it was attempting to prove is that intelligence has a significant genetic component. If it didn't then humans would have the same level of intelligence as our ape ancestors.
      • Nor is it intended to be. New Scientist is a compendium of abstracts from serious scientific journals that have been edited to read by non-scientists.

        I would disagree with this statement, at least to some degree. It is true that NS publishes abstracts of papers out there. But it does quite a bit more. You say that it edits it to be read by non-scientists, but the problem is that in such a review journal, the editors have to explain the implications of a scientific position. And very frequently, NS goes way overboard in their interpretation, IMHO. For example, one experiment measures the mass of some particle or another and finds it disagrees with previous measurements by 10%. NS then has a three-page article, complete with quotations from all kinds of people, about how this portends the death of quantum mechanics, etc., etc., et bloody cetera. Frankly, the letter section may in fact be the most entertaining, since it is always either someone bitching about something or another that the EU did, or someone ragging NS for their irresponsible comments.

        In this case the study was published in Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn758).

        This is exactly my point. Contrast the conclusions made in the Nature paper to those made in the NS article, and this is exactly my point.

        Now as to the article as a whole, I think the study was little pointless if at all it was attempting to prove is that intelligence has a significant genetic component. If it didn't then humans would have the same level of intelligence as our ape ancestors.

        This is an interesting argument. I think you're right, this of course shows that there is a significant physical difference between the brains of humans and, say, chimps. But, here's a good question: does this imply that there is a significant variation of brain function within homo sapiens? This seems to me to be the crucial question.



      • I really dont see how humans have changed much mentally. Physically yes we have changed, gotten taller, less hairy, really though we dont know we came from apes so lets not assume that evolutionary darwin theories are absolute truths.

        Second, Humans still act savage, they kill, they rape, they manipulate, they are greedy, theres alot of very apeish animal like traits that humans have. Alot of humans in fact the majority of them are still ignorant just like they were 5 thousand years ago, 10 thousand years ago, 20 thousand years ago.

        The diffrence is, while most humans havent evolved at all, I say a few humans have evolved beyond that point and because theres a few humans who are evolved, they keep the rest of the ignorant ones in check.

        We have technology, but please dont tell me the average human is developing technology, the average human does very slavish type work in an office.

        The day when people no longer kill at all, meaning all people, the day when we no longer have wars, when terrorists dont exsists, when theres no racism, when theres no sexism, and when everyone generally evolves to the next level and not just 15%, this is when you can say humans have mentally evolved beyond what they were in the past.

        Right now though, we are only maybe 1-2% beyond what we were during roman times, while we dont go around enslaving people anymore, theres still millions of people who want to do this still (the KKK and these other morons)

        People have evolved technically, and science has evolved, but in terms of socially, and in terms of people being more intelligent, nothing has chanced much, and if it has only by a few percent.

    • There is a very good exposition of all of these issues in Steven J. Gould's Mismeasure of Man

      Oh yes. Stephen J Gould is well known as being completely unbiased in his expositions. I mean there's no way Gould would let his political ideas have any influence on what he reports as fact in his articles. I've read a dozen books by Gould and I still have no ideas where along the political spectrum his opinions lie.
      • I've read a dozen books by Gould and I still have no ideas where along the political spectrum his opinions lie.

        This would suggest, then, that his alleged political biases don't come through so strongly, eh?

        Go back and read my post, anyway. I didn't say that SJG was the complete and total expert in the field and anything he says is gospel. I just said that if you want to understand the issues, this is certainly one place to go. He is a good writer and a reasonably good scientist.

        And even getting more into it, it's not at all clear to me how this is tied in with politics. I mean, something is good scientific work, or it's not, and the politics are irrelevant. As a matter of fact, I think this is something which is symptomatic of the average American's bad misapprehension with how science works. Very frequently, scientific issues become political issues, and people question scientists' statements by their political ramifications. I oculd write a long list of these. Believe me, with very few exceptions, scientists are not political creatures at all. If a scientist says something, it may be right, and it may be wrong, but he's not saying it because of some ulterior motive.

        It's a shame that Americans are so cynical today that they question the motives of the only truth-tellers out there.


        • I mean, something is good scientific work, or it's not, and the politics are irrelevant.

          Not so, for example in a field like paleontology there is such an incomplete fossil record that there is plenty of room for debate. For example there's the question of how recent the most common ancestor of all humans alive today lived. Some give more recent dates than others depending on how the evidence is interpreted. But even before reading what Gould has to say on the matter you can guarantee he'll settle for the more recent end of the spectrum (barring the views of cretinists) because that's more convenient for his political views. Maybe there will come a day when we'll have a pretty accurate handle on when this human lived - but that's quite a way off and anything published now on that subject is likely to be a collection of facts with gaps between filled in by speculation and opinion.


          For a more concrete example check out Wonderful Life where he makes his strongest case that there is no direction to evolution (a thoroughly bizarre claim IMHO). Armed with this opinion he makes a great many suggestions about how various pieces of fossil evidence should be interpreted. It turns out that the great majority of these claims were actually demonstrated likely to be false in a relatively small time (do a web search on the names of the various fossils that he talks about in the book). A little thought will reveal the real reason why he argues against a direction to evolution.


          However I'd hate to put people off Gould. Much as he pisses me off no end he's very worth reading and The Mismeasure of Man is an excellent book. Same goes for Wonderful Life.

          • I mean, something is good scientific work, or it's not, and the politics are irrelevant.

            Not so, for example in a field like paleontology there is such an incomplete fossil record that there is plenty of room for debate. For example there's the question of how recent the most common ancestor of all humans alive today lived. Some give more recent dates than others depending on how the evidence is interpreted.

            This is certainly true, that there is a large amount of debate in paleontology. Even some of the fundamental mechanisms of evolution are not well understood. But when scientists do this debating, they are certainly not doing it with a view towards political ramifications. Ok, so the origin of humanity gets pushed around a few hundred thousand years. So what? If someone calls me up tomorrow and tells me the muon weighs twice as much as we thought it did, I 'm not going to freak.

            Now, on the other hand, there are people with a political axe to grind, and they sometimes like to interpret scientific notions in their own way. But this is a different story.

    • Re:This is perhaps about 5% away from being crap. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Furthermore, this whole IQ testing thing is pretty much bunk to begin with. "

      Though many tests for IQ are biased or test things that are unrelated to "intelligence" (which I agree has a slippery definition), there are definitely mental abilities that can be objectively tested. The ability to hear a set of numbers and recite them back in reverse order, for example. Or the speed with which a person distinguishes between signals and gives the appropriate response. Different people do have different mental skills. The mind is a physiological thing, based solely on the brain--all matter and energy, nothing else there. Every other part of our bodies is governed by genetic makeup, and therefore heredity to some degree, so why not your brain, the source of your mind? People don't want to accept that there is a genetic source to intelligence (I suppose for well founded political reasons--it does supply racists with ammunition) and therefore try to claim that we cannot accurately define intelligence. I think this is bunk. Problem solving, attention span, creativity, all have a biological component because they are accomplished by the workings of a biological organ. And the structure and function of that organ depends, just like the rest of our bodies, in part on heredity.

  • Conclusion is faulty (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Beowulfto ( 169354 )
    This conclusion appears to be flawed.

    The twins shared environments, means researchers can separate genetic and environmental factors.

    This means that the subjects were in the same environments and makes genetics the dependent variable. This doesn't make any indication of environmental influence on intelligence. As I understand the article, they are stating that in this experiment, environment is not significant since both of the twins had the same basic environment.

    "It's extraordinary how similar they are," he says. The finding suggests that environment - their own personal experiences, what they learned in life, who they knew - played a negligible role in shaping it.

  • Human arrogance prevents us from accepting this (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is politically incorrect to suggest that not all humans are born with with a clean slate and have the same potential. It's OK to say that people can inherit trivial things like hair or eye color, skin tone, and so on. But no one is willing to accept the fact that a brain is just another organ in the body - it can be affected by birth defects, it can be damaged by chemical abuse, and it can be affected by genetics.

    The reasons people don't want to accept this are obvious, but they were similar to the reasons that kept the Ptolemic Solar System alive for centuries. Both sets of reasons are intellectually bankrupt.
    • You stated that the brain can be affected by birth defects, and that it can be damaged by chemical abuse. Let's see. Birth defects can be caused by tabacco smoke, alcohol consumption, and God knows what else: Polluted air and water? And chemical abuse implies that the brain can be affected also by substances not normally in our bodies. Contrary to the intent of your message, these all sound like environmental factors to me.
    • Yes you are right.

      I also do not think that it is a coincidence that Niels Bohr and his son Åge Bohr both
      got the Nobel price in physics (the former in 1922, the later in 1975) (check www.nobel.se)


      Yours Yazeran


      Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

  • I'd never have guessed. I thought it was just a coincidence that most humans seemed to be more intelligent that members of other species. It's amazing what these scientists discover.

  • This isn't news, and it isn't the whole story (Score:4, Informative)

    by 4n0nym0u53 C0w4rd ( 463592 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @02:12AM (#2594535) Homepage
    IAACP (I am a cognitive psychologist), so I know the field pretty well.

    The nature nurture debate has raged for centuries in respect to intelligence. Ever since Darwin's cousin Francis Galton proposed his theories of hereditary intelligence.

    At first glance, it seems neat that these guys did a study on twins. You might think, "wow, what a great approach." You'd be right, then you'd hopefully realize that other people had these ideas in the past, and they did the right studies and came to the right conclusions.

    When Thomas Bouchard [umn.edu] was in charge of the Minnesota Twin Studies, he and his colleagues compared twins raised together and apart.

    Bouchard and colleagues tested 56 pairs of monozygotic (identical) twins who had been raised apart and compared them to hundreds of identical twins who had been reared together. The twins were tested on dozens of capacities. This approach allowed them to examine spatial ability, verbal ability, mathematical ability, personality, etc. Rather than the antiquated "g" or general intelligence factor.

    So, here's a study with many more subjects, much better comparisons, and more detailed data. Here's the cool part: if you correlate the scores of twins on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) (the standard IQ test in the US) and Ravens Progressive Matrices (An allegedly culturally unbiased test of reasoning skills), you see a 65% (WAIS) or 50% (Raven's) agreement among scores of twins raised together, and among twins raised apart, the WAIS scores are about 35% in agreement with nearly the same 50% agreement on Raven's scores.

    What does this mean? Well, it means that even in the best cases, IQ scores are about 50% hereditary. In addition, the big drop off between WAIS scores indicates that environment has an important role in intelligence. Given that most of the twins were raised in similar middle class families (who adopt kids), the estimates of the role of environment are probably inflated.

    That being said, the study mentioned in the story focuses primarily on brain structures. This pisses me off. One of the lamest things about current cognitive neuroscience is the common misunderstanding of the difference between structure and process. Given the little we know about how the brain works (yeah, we're getting good info about the molecular level, and we know in general what larger regions like Broca's area are responsible for, but we have woefully little info about how these structures actually work), idiot PR people take brain findings and blow them out of proportion.

    The fact is, if you want to talk about intelligence, you have to talk about behavioral measurements. Looking at structures can, at best, tell you if something is wrong. So, yeah big deal, major structures are heritable, given the fact that environment has been shown in better studies to play a key role in intelligence, we shouldn't rely too much on these findings.

    Bottom line: Yes of course nature plays an important role in intelligence. You'd have to be an idiot not to realize that. This study is not groundbreaking. Moreover, the headline of the article is sensationalistic and only a half-truth. Environment does play a role in intelligence. My god, meet a person who ate lead paint as a kid and you'll realize that.

    • _____"That being said, the study mentioned in the story focuses primarily on brain structures. This pisses me off. One of the lamest things about current cognitive neuroscience is the common misunderstanding of the difference between structure and process. Given the little we know about how the brain works (yeah, we're getting good info about the molecular level, and we know in general what larger regions like Broca's area are responsible for, but we have woefully little info about how these structures actually work), idiot PR people take brain findings and blow them out of proportion. The fact is, if you want to talk about intelligence, you have to talk about behavioral measurements. Looking at structures can, at best, tell you if something is wrong. So, yeah big deal, major structures are heritable, given the fact that environment has been shown in better studies to play a key role in intelligence, we shouldn't rely too much on these findings." _____ I agree that intelligence must be measured by behavioral measurements, but that does not mean that structure is irrelevant. Granted, we do not yet know much about brain structure, and even less about how those structures comprise intelligence. However, I am surprised that a cognitive psychologist would discount study of structure as pissing him/her off. Studying behavior will only give us a sort of "black box" model of intelligence--what comes out of the black box (i.e., behavior). If we want to understand behavior more fully, and the causes of the behavior, we MUST try to look inside the black box, the structure of the brain, to figure out what is going on in there. We have input (environment, previous mental states) and we have output (behavior). Inbetween is the structure and biology of the brain. To discount study in this area is to ignore a difficult but promising avenue of research, and the only avenue of research that can answer some fundamental questions that behavior studies cannot answer--like how decisions are made, how memories are formed, etc. Behavior tells us nothing about these, and never will, because it does not attempt to inquire into the mechanism that controls or brings about the behavior. Behavoir study only looks at the results of intelligence, not the source of intelligence.
      • I agree that the study of brain structure is important (and promising). What pisses me off is when people confuse structure and process. Here's an example:

        There's a hormone secreted in the brain called CRH[1], and there's a protein in the brain called CRH Binding Protein. Just like it sounds, CRHBP binds to CRH that's released. One theory says that CRHBP binds to CRH and prevents it from reaching receptors that would respond to it by releasing stress hormones. So, the more CRHBP you have, the less CRH will make it through to the receptors. You'd think then, that an organism with an excess of CRHBP would release less stress hormone (less CRH makes it through), well it turns out that this doesn't happen. What does happen is that animals with excess CRHBP release proportionally more CRH to make it through, thus releasing the appropriate amount of stress hormone, and behaving no different than normal animals.

        What does this say? Well, we have a brain difference which, although interesting (and important) has no real bearing on behavior. It is perfectly acceptable to explore the CRH/CRHBP relationship, and in fact it is a scientifically interesting question. Yet, it would be dishonest to look at CRHBP levels and say anything about how the organism will behave.

        It's equally dishonest to say that other differences in brain structure are meaningful beyond the fact that they are differences in structure. Until you show some effect of these differences, don't jump to conclusions. My complaint about the article was that they made claims about intelligence based on structural similarities. Bad PR person. Bad.

        ---
        [1] Corticotropin Releasing Hormone


  • Right now, theres no easy way to measure true intelligence.

    The "G" is Academic intelligence, which i dont even know if i can call that intelligence because its more of a trait.

    Diffrent people have diffrent traits, some people love structure and rules that school forces on people, Some people hate structure and rules being forced on them (I am one of those people)

    But whats this have to do with intelligence? Not much.

    I'd measure intelligence by the speed at which someone learns something, by how fast they figure something out WITHOUT a teacher, and how well they can teach themselves, because in the real world, theres no one ot hold your hand, to force you to learn, and this is where the people who may have gotten all As in school end up being complete failures in life.

    Intelligence is on many levels, I think thats what this proves, and genes decides which areas you are intelligent in and which you are weak in. This isnt very surprising to me because I already KNEW this.

    Take a doctor, theres no way i could go to medical school for all those years, and do the kind of work a doctor does, but then again, theres no way the doctor could do the kinda technical work that I do.
    And theres no way either of us could do the kinda work that an athelete does on the soccer field,

    Well perhaps anyone can do anything, but depending on your genes decides how fast you learn what, I support my genes allow me to learn highly complicated technical information with ease, and allow me to operate a computer with ease. Some other people can handle math which i just cant mess with, like calculus, with ease and minimal effort,
    Just like someone like micheal jordan can play basketball and make it look easy, because genetically people are very specialized, theres no such thing as general intelligence.
  • Excerpts to prove it:
    ---
    The twins _shared_environments_ (my emphasis), means researchers can separate genetic and environmental factors. (Huh?)

    The researchers found that certain regions of the brain were highly heritable. These included language areas, known as Broca's and Wernicke's areas, and the frontal region, which, among other things, plays a huge role in cognition.

    "It's extraordinary how similar they are," he says. The finding suggests that environment - their own personal experiences, what they learned in life, who they knew - played a negligible role in _shaping_ it (emphasis mine).
    ---

    Doh. Same environment + same wetware what do you expect? So what if wetware isn't shaped that much by the environment.

    To prove inheritance shouldn't they use different environment + same/similar wetware?

    Conclusion: stupid researchers|journalist.

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