Time-scales

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophile"
wrote:
> I think that maybe, just maybe, I was a bit too snarly in my
> replies re: IQ. When I have taken such tests, I have ranged from
121
> to 134. This, plus what I hear about cultural bias,

And therein lies the danger. There is a battle going on with the
Marxists like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and Richard
Dawkins pushing to completely eliminate genetic basis because it
runs counter to their peceptions of humanity and how the world shold
work.

Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" addressed the IQ question and it was
a very influential book in its time. Through questionable rhetorical
tactics Gould made his case and found a following. The book has
pretty much now been debunked but it's meme lives on.

The battle to of knowledge versus what people know and hear
continues.

makes me very
> distrustful of such tests. All other things being equal, the
smarter
> person will score higher on an IQ test, but are all other things
> equal? I have my doubts.

Great strides have been made in making culture neutral tests. There
is a lot of validation that goes into insuring this.

>
> By cultural bias I do not charge racism, which would mean
> deliberately fixing the tests so as to make the Eskimos or other
> disliked group seem dumber than they really are. I doubt that
goes
> on much in the making of IQ tests. I mean simply that the people
> making such tests see the world in a particular way, and this
tends
> to make those from a different type of upbringing seem not quite
as
> smart as they really are. As a personal example, I scored higher
on
> IQ tests when I was in college, which is hardly surprising, as I
was
> at the time used to taking tests. Also, the folks making the test
> spent a lot of time in college. So it is hardly surprising that
> OTHER FOLKS in college would do better.

IQ tests are most effective when taken in grade school because they
measure your academic age over your physical age. Testing a 30 year
old and a 50 year old starts to lose its meaning.

Also, as Al Globus pointed out, an IQ of 100 is the population mean.
You will always have the majority of people scoring 100, even
accounting for the Flynn Effect which sees IQs rising over time. The
mean just has to be adjusted back to 100.

>
> Also, I am into transhumanism (a little bit), and tend to look
on
> eugenics for intelligence the way a sports car buff might look at
> racehorse breeding. Yes, if you breed fast-running mares to fast-
> running stallions, and do so for several generations of horses,
then
> you are likely to wind up with a generation of horses which run
> faster than any horse has run before... and any cross-eyed granny
in
> a VW bug can leave horse and rider in her dust (not to mention
> somebody in a Ferrari!).

Your acknowledgement of the breeding aspect puts you in another camp
from that of Gould et al. who believe that IQ is a concept which
can't be measured and has no genetic component.

We are at the start of a new age with the blossoming of genetic
sciences. Rather than eugenics being a dirty word for how it was
practiced in the past and how it was state directed, eugenics in the
future will probably be decided by the parents who will seek
preimplantation screening. A number of embryos are formed via IVF,
and after 8 cell divisions, a cell is removed and screened for a
variety of recognized gene sequences. People will be healthier,
smarter, perhaps more prone to mental illness (seems to go hand in
hand with increased intelligence) and you get the idea. Parents will
be choosing, and already are, to give their children the best
opportunities available, not unlike trying to get them into the best
schools, presenting them with cultural training via music lesssons,
language studies, etc. This will be no different.

TangoMan