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It is not *quite* possible, although it is statistically possible. It is also statistically possible that you will spontaneously combust before finishing this sentence.

Crap science is crap science, and the biggest give-away is when controversial claims are made without supporting information or data on research methods. Invoking tolerance as an excuse for intellectual laziness in research is absurd, as is feeling victimized by "political correctness" when objections are made on grounds of scientific rationality.

This is worth a read if you take genetics-based racial research seriously. Thomas Sowell can also hardly be called political correct.

http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-c urve/sowell.html

I claimed that many of them do not believe in g,

(If you really don't understand.. there are discussion on most subjects in most research areas. It doesn't make Hoyle correct if you find cosmologists that argue against the Big Bang theory.)

You once again are taking a statement about some researchers who make a specific logical fallacy and translating that into ALL researchers making some unspecified "stupid errors" to make a straightforward logical argument that is TRUE seem like conspiracy.

Gould claimed the intelligence researchers did a central and stupid error for decades.

If that is true, then there should literally be a chapter in most psychology text books discussing that!! (Which, as far as I know, there isn't.)

You claim G showed decades of research to be wrong and irrelevant. It is like claiming that someone showed the world was flat 20 years ago -- and become angry when someone points out that the astronomers didn't change their text books. And that there were lots of criticism of the thesis in the public literature.

I have repeated that simple point four times now.

using logic rather than smear tactics

There are also Mayr, Maynard Smith and other evolutionary biologists claiming that Gould do smears.

Lets not even discuss Science for the People.

All evidence? IQ and falling birthrates

This is true for educational and social achievement, but raw IQ appears remarkably stable. See this Minnesota twin study for an example. I was honestly rather surprised when I started looking at studies like these by just how much of a role genetics plays in IQ.

Mozart and Picasso and Alexander the Great probably wouldn't be able to write a Perl script or analyze a chemical reaction if they were alive today. But I think few people would call any of them unintelligent.

As for wealth vs. intelligence, here's a book for you: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad." A bit repetitive, but it talks at length about how someone can be very smart in some ways but not when it comes to money.

Being able to figure out the decay rate of a new radioactive isotope doesn't make you good at figuring out which underpriced region is going to have the next big real estate boom. But both of those things require smarts.

That said, at least one study (admittedly, performed by someone whose views on the subject are controversial) shows a pretty good correlation between high IQ and financial success. That tracks pretty well with my experience in life: most of the rich people I know are pretty sharp. All of the self-made rich people I know are pretty sharp. If you can provide a pointer to any research showing a reverse correlation, I'd be fascinated to see it.

I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.

There was a lot of criticism of Gould, claiming he did straw man attacks from people like Ernst, George Williams, E O Wilson, Trivers, Maynard Smith, Hamilton.

That is a theory conceived by those with average scores. ;-)

Stephen Jay Gould did the cannonical debunking of them in 'the mismeasure of man'.

To quote an interesting analysis of "The Mismeasure of Man":

"The biologist Bernard Davis (1983; see also Gould, 1984; Davis, 1984) called attention to the fact that reviews in the popular and literary press, such as The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, were almost universally effusive in their approbation, whereas most reviews in scientific journals, such as Science (Samelson, 1982), Nature, and Science '82, tended to be critical on a number of counts. Davis cited Jensen's (1982) review in Contemporary Education Review as "the most extensive scientific analysis," but mentioned, as an exception, a generally laudatory review by Morrison that appeared in Scientific American because that joumal's editorial staff had "long seen the study of the genetics of intelligence as a threat to social justice" (Davis, 1983, p. 45)."

So, it appears the science involved in "The Mismeasure of Man" is suspect at best, and that there is a strong political motivation to the work.

When I was at high school I posted some IQ scores that were well outside the standard range - 160 to 180. That is because the school was a selective school and we had a weekly coaching session on the exam to get into the upper school. My scores went from upper decile to 2 to 3 standard deviations above the mean. All through coaching and practice.

From your writing it is clear you're highly intelligent. If you weren't, you never would have been able to score as well as you did on the tests, regardless of the amount of coaching. The SATs are even harder than some IQ tests, since the math portion involves lots of problem-solving.

Most people who take the tests aren't coached, regardless. I took the SATs once, with no special studying or coaching, and scored 750V/690M. That was top 1/10 of 1% in verbal, and top 1% in math.

Then when we got into the upper school we were told that research shows that the results are innate. I said the results had to be faulty since the entitre class of us had shown the same type of improvement (not necessarily as extreeme). Thats the point where I discovered that English public schools can hire some awfully stupid geography teachers. The science staff backed me up though.

You should read the link I included above carefully. I agree that everyone will show improvement through study, but the peak intelligence that people will reach is largely innate, in my opinion. I've tried very hard to teach certain concepts to certain people, and it was just basically impossible. These were not abnormal people, just "not that bright".

I've also had long discussions with a couple of (as it happens) female friends who state "I'm just not good at math". I felt they've received some kind of mental block related to sexual roles at an early age, and should just start studying it until they "get it". But they both claim that their minds just flat out "can't handle math". Laziness or hardwiring? You decide. (Both claim they would like to know math for various reasons.)

Odd thing was that despite all that testing the school never picked up the fact I have a form of dyslexia.

Obviously you've overcome that handicap. Congratulations.

We all (you should) know that an IQ test only your ability to score well on an IQ test.

See e.g. the part on general intelligence here.

It is a controversial subject because of social discussions (separate from marxists seeing red when discussing innate mental characteristics).

(Your point is valid for another reason. It is not trivially a good thing to remove "unpopular" features like low intelligence from the gene pool since those features probably have other genetic effects that we might be poorer as humans if they are not in our societies. But if it was my child and I could select for higher intelligence, I would.)

Well, The Bell Curve was not the first place I heard the term, as I majored in psychology. I thoroughly believe that genetics influence a tremendous amount of our makeup, especially our susceptibility to various illnesses. However, I found The Bell Curve nearly unreadable. I found it a good example of taking a little data and stretching it over much too great a distance.

Everyone should make up their minds for themselves, to the degree their genetics permit, but bear in mind that the books conclusions are far from received wisdom. Keep a close eye on the book's use of statistics and remember the inherent limitations of intelligence testing with its fixation on one number to characterize each of us. Efforts to do so in the past have failed spectacularly. It his quite a leap to go from the shaky assumption that intelligence can be quantified to thinking we know how to design society around it.

For the interested, I happened across this site which had gone to impressive lengths to collect commentary, pro and con, on The Bell Curve. One of the most critical, and entertaining to read, is the late Gould, also of Harvard.

Oddly enough, the late co-author Herrnstein was my Psych 1 professor. Seemed like a nice guy. :)

I just had to do some Google searches on the 'cyborg' mummy, and I actually found a neat article about it. It's interesting to note that these mummies have been found in Xinjiang for over a hundred years, but mostly disregarded until recently. According to DNA testing, they share common ancestry with modern Europeans, and the famous European 'iceman' Ötzi, found in a glacier on the Austrian-Italian border. Kinda sets the history of the area on its' ear, really. The article is a neat read.

Though western reason and science has brought us to a level of health and comfort not dreamed of in the past, those who hate man's accomplisment and progress continue to try and saw the limb off behind us with blind and ignorant fear.

For interesting reading about Gould and how he was regarded in his field, see The Gould Files

There are some critical reviews of The Mismeasure of Man:

http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/jensen-gould- fossils

http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/psycho logy/IQ/carroll-gould.html

For interesting reading about Gould and how he was regarded in his field, see The Gould Files

There are some critical reviews of The Mismeasure of Man:

http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/jensen-gould- fossils

http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/psycho logy/IQ/carroll-gould.html

What I have found particularly striking is the extensive effort made to suppress this story.

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The company is Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm,with offices throughout the U.S. It provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement. Here's how wiretapping works in the U.S.

Every time you make a call, it passes through the nation's elaborate network of switchers and routers run by the phone companies. Custom computers and software,made by companies like Comverse, are tied into that network to intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls, and at the same time transmit them to investigators.

The manufacturers have continuing access to the computers so they can service them and keep them free of glitches.

This process was authorized by the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA.

Senior government officials have now told Fox News that while CALEA made wiretapping easier, it has led to a system that is seriously vulnerable to compromise,and may have undermined the whole wiretapping system. Indeed, Fox News has learned that Attorney General John Ashcroftand FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned October 18th in a hand-delivered letter from 15 local, state and federal law enforcement officials, who complained that -quote - "law enforcement's current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today than they were at the time CALEA was enacted."

Congress insists the equipment it installs is secure. But the complaint about this system is that the wiretap computer programs made by Comverse have, in effect,a back door through which wiretaps themselves can be intercepted by unauthorized parties. Adding to the suspicions is the fact that in Israel,

Comverse works closely with the Israeli government, and under special programs,gets reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade.

But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse is considered career suicide.

And sources say that while various F.B.I. inquiries into Comverse have been conducted over the years,they've been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks.

A 1999 F.C.C. document indicates several government agencies expressed deep concernsthat too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system.

I'm not sure how much of this story I believe, here are some other (mostly right-wing) sites that covered this:

• http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/12/1 8/224826.shtml
• http://www.mugu.com/pipermail/upstream-list/2001-D ecember/003993.html

So the system is hackable. So what.

Thanks man, that was EXACTLY what I was looking for.

He also has a great peice on the Eugenics movement 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."

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 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.