Intelligence / IQ research

You know who else was into the study of twins? Dr M. Anyway, when a study is done where one twin is put in a stable loving home, in a good upscale area, with no material want and healthy social interaction compared to another twin who's put in the home of an extremely poor single mother with no hope, surrounded by violence, the drug trade, perhaps physical abuse in the home and underfunded schools then we'll see if they both have the same IQ.

The nature/nurture debate isn't as black and white as many people think anyhow. With the right nurture everyone's IQ could be brought up to an acceptable mean where decisions on production and other social functions could be entrusted to all. These current advocates of inherited intelligence place all social stratification on the lap of genetics. It's absurd. You're absurd if you believe that ; your point here is to say some people are too stupid to be trusted with running society is it not? Who are these people? Poor white people? Not Asians of course because we all know Asians are born smart no matter the material conditions (ya right). Black people? Maybe we simply need a perpetual sub human under race that we can all point at and blame for societies ills? I point my finger at the rich white men at Princeton who come up with all manner of theory to rationalize the world capitalism creates.

this is the important bit about his resurch

if he's telling news papers but hasn't yet or cant get it publish in a scientific journal then its bullshit

anyway out of that article this

directly contradicts the calims about genes, unless you think children's genes are causing them to switch schools often.

Ok sorry. I get defensive because usually "race realists" bring these topics up. I was on a political site a few years back and had to "debate" this ad nauseum. And the "debate" continues to this day in universities across the globe but the implications are major for racist ideology. Here in the states we have white nationalists touting works such as the Bell Curve as proof that "mud people" are inferior and must be left to their own device in separate nation states or exterminated. On the other side of the coin capitalists use the info to excuse a hierarchical society which, in their view, is almost a hereditary meritocracy. As in, poverty/crime etc don't exist because of racism or the system itself but because of the genetic inferiority of certain races. It's all nasty stuff I don't want to delve into at the moment. I'm just posting this to apologize to you for assuming you were some sort of fascist.

autogestion, just be careful when considering studies about IQ. IQ is not an absolute, but a relative measure -- how much a subject diverges from the mean of his/her age group (see wikipedia article).

It doesn't imply academical achievment and measures very constrained set of skills. Thus, skills that you would need for a self-organizing society (e.g., social competence) is completely exempt from IQ (and would be hard or impossible to measure anyways).

As has been pointed out above, it couldn't. Average IQ is by its own definition 100, and can not be brought up or down.

I presume that this is a reference to Dr Josef Mengele. Is this an attempt to bring in Godwin's law as early as possible?

Devrim

Every child is equally gifted. If only they all had equal choices and opportunities. The only children with skills of questionable merit are those who grow up to be military dictators, though perhaps in an ideal world they could be successfully channeled into extreme sports so that they could conquer mountains and rivers instead of other people.

Highlander, that is plainly not true, as observing a child with Down syndrom would suggest. The more equal a society the more pronounced do genetical differences ("gifts") become.

Children with Down's Syndrome also have unique abilities, it is only a matter of identification and encouragment. A friend of mine who works with severely handicapped children assures me that many are gifted artists, I remember his description of one young man with Down's Syndrome who was discovered to have a natural gift for aikido.

I think this is probably semantics. I don't think Highlander is implying that all children have the same gifts, but they are all "equally gifted" albeit in different ways.

Going back to the original topic, firstly the poster implying that there is something bad about twin studies I think is completely overreacting. There is nothing inherently wrong with them.

Secondly, other posters are entirely correct to point out massive flaws in this article. Like the contradiction with respect to genetics and moving schools and also the fact that this is not a peer-reviewed study.

Thirdly, without seeing the methodology it is impossible to know if this study is worthwhile at all. As while twins share a lot of DNA (or all of it in the case of identical twins) they also share very similar upbringings. So "nature" and "nurture" are very similar. So you can't use twin studies to make these definitive statements (back in the day psychologists used to use identical twins who were adopted separately to differentiate, however nowadays twins don't get split up when adopted).

Finally, either way it doesn't have any relevance for the self-management of a communist society, as "IQ", "intelligence" or educational qualifications don't say anything about someone's ability to be able to have their say in running society, or running a workplace or a local area or what have you.

I.e. plenty of people with high IQs are racist idiots, or rapists or psychopaths, plenty of people with Ph.D.'s have no common sense, etc.

There's quite a few books on IQ/intelligence in the science and psychology reading guides.

I have yet to hear a an operational definition of IQ that isnt dripping with problematic assumptions. I'm still not even sure what 'innate general intelligence' is (and my background is psychology and biology!) and any attempted definition I've come across is left wanting. The plasticity/flexibility of or mental abilities is so large as to render any innate component purely secondary. Years ago, when I was an starting my undergrad, psychologist Ken Richardson from the Open University was debating philosopher Michael Ruse about intelligence on In Our Time. Around the same time he wrote this paper where he drew the conclusion that IQ test score 'is a measure of social class
background, and not one of the ability for complex cognition as such. '

He notes that when the original intelligence tests were developed, scientists couldn't agree on what they were measuring:

[my emphasis]

By the late 90s the scenario was no less clear:

[my emphasis]

So it's clear that no one quite agrees on what intelligence is, and IQ is merely what IQ tests measure, self referential.
How is it that IQ testing is used? And to what purpose? We know that IQ testing has been used to reinforce all sorts of popular prejudices at various times. Chomsky was on to something when he talked about whether it was possible to justify much 'IQ' research at all, using the example of comparative IQ research into racial differences (apologies for long quote but I like the passage and its general thrust):

As a teacher I find it really depressing to hear students talk about their supposed-innate 'intelligence' with words to the effect 'i'm just not good at academic stuff' or 'i'm not that smart' - liked it's some fixed quantity you're born with and there's a ceiling. Of course schools reinforce this with structural constraints like setting, which make mobility all but impossible
Bart Simpson: 'let me get this straight. We're behind the rest of the class but we're going to catch up with them by going slower than they are? Cuckoo!'

There's a great wee book from a couple of years ago called 'The Genius In All Of Us' by David Shenk, which, despite the cheesy title, is actually quite a good takedown of IQ studies and more generally the notion of being 'born gifted' in any sphere of activity. His point is that 'experts' and 'gifted' people, when actually examined as case studies, turn out to be the unique combination of a complex set of factors (family, time, money etc) that enabled them to do the one thing that is necessary for exceptional proficiency in any field - deliberate challenging practice.

Gould's Mismeasure of Man is good, and the recent critiques of it don't seem to have much sway.
Rose, Lewontin & Kamin's Not In Our Genes is the best criticism I've read of twin-studies as actually deployed - as Steven says, there's nothing 'inherently' wrong with them, but in practice they've been anything but methodologically sound and are fraught with problems.

I just picked up James Flynn's Are We Getting Smarter? and have yet to read it - he's the guy who spotted the fact that IQ scores were rising decade upon decade, the Flynn Effect. This can be interpreted to mean that IQ cant be measuring any sort of 'innate' intelligence, but rather that we are merely 'more modern' - that is we're simply better at doing things like IQ tests.
He summarises the book in this podcast.
Flynn doesn't attribute the rise in IQ to any innate improvement or genetic factors, but rather social and historical change.

Now, bits of what Flynn has said there can be taken issue with, but the main thing is that variance and change in IQ is not attributable to genetics, even if you do take IQ to be useful, which I don't

[edited by author to fix spelling and formatting]

Some people, due to genetics, have a predisposition to intelligence(not that we can reasonably define it). Believing in equality isn't about ignoring genetic reality. Equality is recognizing that while some people are smarter or stronger than others doesn't mean they deserve special treatment. It's sad seeing leftists ignore reality just to fit their own poorly thought out view\points.

Tablo, I think it's been clarified more than once that "intelligence" is pretty much impossible to measure, therefore we don't really gain anything by worrying about what impact genes have on this undefinable slippery fish. On top of this, the definitions of intelligence that do exist are all incredibly subjective and tend to favour white rich men.

So why bother giving any credibility to this bourgeois construct? People certainly seem to have different strengths and abilities (I have no idea whether that's nature or nurture) and no-one's claiming otherwise, but categorizing people as smart/stupid is neither useful or accurate. I don't see how that equates to ignoring reality?

Care to develop this with reference to the literature? Cos that's a fairly bold assertion.

As stated above, with reference to the field, the variation in scores on IQ tests is much more attributable to social and historical factors than inherited ones, and that is to where our focus should be put, for communists like us, or 'leftists', as you put it that should be class struggle.

[all emphases mine]

If you can't define 'intelligence' then what makes you think you can turn it into a number that you can rank people on?

I have no problem with working with 'hard-to-define' concepts (we do it all the time) - I do have a problem with thinking they can be measured with questionnaires, assigned quantitative values and put to social use.

So it turns out Robert Plomin, the researcher in question in the OP, has had talks with Michael Gove and his research has found its way into Gove's advisor's seemingly mad 250 page 'thesis'.

O FFS not genes again! Apart from the economics of certain people's need to receive 'research' grants and pay for mortgages and foreign holidays, don’t they ever get tired of churning out the same old pop science machine metaphors for humans and other complex forms of life? We aren’t genetic machines. But how could we be since that’s an oxymoron? Yes we are 'genetic' but is there any machine that starts from small beginnings, grows and then forms new structures within itself before reproducing itself?

Molecular biology hasn't made good on any of its promises and biotech companies of all kinds have not made anything significant except consistently huge losses because there's no evidence that genes do anything beyond coding for the sequence of amino acids in polypeptide chains: they just make fucking proteins! They don't even carry the instructions for the development of embryos. The genes associated with development (homeobox genes) have turned out to be almost identical in flies, reptiles, mice and people. So how much insight could they possibly provide into what makes us what we are?

There are more genes in certain grains of rice than there are in people. Genes can’t even tell you how birds build nests or why your nose is a different shape from your elbow. How could they possibly be connected with whether or not you have culturally inherited the privilege of easily passing loaded and elitist examinations?