intelligence
razib | September 26, 2009My post below elicited a lot of response. One thing to point out though, which I want to emphasize: a higher proportion of smart people go to college now than in the past. How can this be? First, let's review the change in distributions of intelligence of those with college degrees (or higher) and those without. The first two charts show the proportions of WORDSUM scores for individuals with and without college degrees for two decades. I limited the sample to whites ages 30 and over. So for example in the period between 1974-1984, of those with college degrees and higher 26.8% scored 10 on…
razib | June 23, 2009Social Competition May Be Reason For Bigger Brain:
"Our findings suggest brain size increases the most in areas with larger populations and this almost certainly increased the intensity of social competition," said David Geary, Curator's Professor and Thomas Jefferson Professor of Psychosocial Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. "When humans had to compete for necessities and social status, which allowed better access to these necessities, bigger brains provided an advantage."
The researchers also found some credibility to the climate-change hypothesis, which assumes that global…
gregladen | June 7, 2009Note: First Woman Michele Obama confirms my suspicion
Who is smarter, men or women?
Any college teacher (at least in the social sciences and life sciences) who has ever paid attention to their own stats know that women do better than men in college classes.
OK, women are smarter. But why?
There are all kinds of post hoc explanations given for this like "Girls get better grades because professors are men, nod nod wink wink" and so on. What a load of crap. Women are smarter than men on average, among the smartest people there is no emperical evidence that women are underrepresented, and…
edyong | April 27, 2009For many animals, living with others has obvious benefits. Social animals can hunt in packs, gain safety in numbers or even learn from each other. In some cases, they can even solve problems more quickly as a group than as individuals. That's even true for the humble house sparrow - Andras Liker and Veronika Bokony from the University of Pannonia, Hungary, found that groups of 6 sparrows are much faster at opening a tricky bird feeder than pairs of birds.
After ruling out several possible explanations, the duo put the speedy work of the bigger flock down to their greater odds of including…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2009tags: Eurasian Jackdaw, Corvus monedula, body language, behavior, peer-reviewed paper
Eurasian Jackdaw, Corvus monedula.
This is the smallest species of corvid (crows and ravens).
Image: Wikipedia [larger view].
Those of you who go birding will know what I am talking about when I say that birds are so capable of reading human body language that they know when we are looking at them, which frequently causes them to hide from our gaze. However, this capacity has never before been scientifically studied in birds, until now, that is.
A newly published paper studied handraised, tame…
purepedantry | March 27, 2009Numerous studies have attempted to correlate general intelligence with different anatomical measures. (You might even argue that the phrenologists were working in this vein.) Likewise many studies have attempted to relate intelligence to the function of different brain regions -- using techniques like fMRI or PET scanning. However, relatively few studies have attempted to correlate general intelligence with anatomical features of particular brains regions.
This is important because we know that the brain works not as regions operating in isolation, but as a set of neural systems…
edyong | March 3, 2009In the Goualougo Triangle of the Republic of Congo, a chimpanzee is hungry for termites. Its prey lives within fortress-like nests, but the chimp knows how to infiltrate these. It plucks the stem from a nearby arrowroot plant and clips any leaves away with its teeth, leaving behind a trimmed, flexible stick that it uses to "fish" for termites.
Many chimps throughout Africa have learned to build these fishing-sticks. They insert them into termite nests as bait, and pull out any soldier termites that bite onto it. But the Goualougo chimps do something special. They deliberately fray the ends…
edyong | December 23, 2008Three years ago, Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University, claimed that genetic differences between the sexes led to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end". His widely derided led to his dismissal, but is views are by no means uncommon. In the same year, Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn conducted a review of existing studies on sex differences in intelligence and concluded:
"Different proportions of men and women with high IQs... may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds for which a high IQ is required, such…
esiegel | May 14, 2008Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God.
Next year, the Vatican is organizing a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Whoa. And whoa's wobbly cousin, woah. Did I just step into the 21st century? After my post last week on what Americans…
purepedantry | March 3, 2008Conventional wisdom + bigger microphone = excellent journalism!
High fives all-around for Charlotte Allen who repackages conventional wisdom about sex differences to a degree rarely attained by print journalists.
My favorite part:
Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2008tags: behavior, environmental enrichment, giant Pacific octopus, Octopus dofleini, cephalopod, animal intelligence
Louis, the giant pacific octopus, Octopus dofleini, cuddles his Mr Potato Head.
The 1.8meter-wide (6 foot) animal is so attached to Mr Potato Head that he
becomes aggressive when aquarium staff try to remove it from his tank.
Image: Apex.
Who would have thought that Mr Potato Head would turn out to be such a charmer? Certainly not I, but this morning, I unexpectedly ran across a news story about a giant Pacific octopus, Octopus dofleini, that lives in an aquarium in the UK.…
purepedantry | December 10, 2007If there has been at least one good side-effect of Dr. Watson making a jack-ass of himself, it is that it has given scientists the opportunity to set the record straight about heredity, race, and IQ. (He has since recanted, so everything is all better now. Watson to Blacks: "Sorry Blacks." Blacks to Watson: "Um...apology not accepted.")
Richard Nisbett clarifies the issue superlatively in the NYTimes:
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost…
gregladen | November 6, 2007Obviously, I have to work this both into tonight's talk in Grand Rapids, and blog about it:
Gene governs IQ boost from breastfeeding from PhysOrg.com
The known association between breast feeding and slightly higher IQ in children has been shown to relate to a particular gene in the babies, according to a report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[...]
But for now, I'll just say this...
By way of cautionary notes. It is being said that this is evidence of intelligence being the result of "nature and nurture" interacting. This is because there is a gene that…
purepedantry | October 19, 2007Here is a must-read post on g-factor by Three Toed Sloth:
Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of intelligence, tells us about these matters. By calling g a "statistical myth" before, I made clear my conclusion, but none of my reasoning. This topic being what it is, I hardly expect this will change anyone's mind, but I feel a duty to explain myself.
To summarize what follows below ("shorter sloth", as it were), the case for g…
purepedantry | July 9, 2007The story about two weeks ago that eldest children have a significantly higher IQ was really big news, but I didn't have time to talk about it then. Now, that I have had time to look at the articles about it, I think that some statement about what the word "significant" means is in order.
The NYTimes reported:
The eldest children in families tend to develop higher I.Q.'s than their siblings, researchers are reporting today, in a large study that could settle more than a half-century of scientific debate about the relationship between I.Q. and birth order.
The average difference in I.Q. was…