"A computer is about the software and usage you get out of it - who cares how it looks!"
Enough people care to make the likes of Sony and Lenovo spend significant amounts of money designing the appearance of their laptops, so the fact that I don't happen to care what my gear looks either is irrelevant, because unlike most geeks, I realise I'm not typical.
However, while I may not give much attention to appearance, as somebody who actually has to cart a laptop around regularly instead of using it as a desktop replacement, I appreciate both build quality and light weight, and I've often found that ugly portables are both heavy and poorly designed and made, with display hinges and power input sockets being common points of failure that warranties don't usually cover (they try and claim it's been broken by misuse even when this clearly isn't the case).
NB: I'm not recommending Apple here, but saying that light weight and build quality are important for me and many others when selecting a portable, and it's rare to find both in machines whose manufacturers didn't put much thought into their external design.
Today's episode of Pedant time is brought to you by the Department Of Irritating Areholes.
"Water is colorless"
Pure water is actually a very light shade of turquoise blue, although you need a lot of it to see its colour. It only appears colourless in (relatively) small quantities.
"Snails are footless"
Snails and other gastropods technically have one foot.
"Or better yet, what is the cheapest cost that could be achieved by implementing an alternate technology that would allow you to operate with near the same efficiency."
The cheapest would be one of the free-as-in-beer BSDs.
"To put all these semantic arguments to rest about FOSS means you can't associate a $ amount to it: an approximate value can be associated when you evaluate the cost of competing technologies."
The value of FOSS and the value of Linux are not the same thing, because Linux is a part of FOSS, not the entirety of it.
"If linux were suddenly to 'go away', how much would it cost to license, install, configure, and support the entire business world with millions of copies of Server 2008?
Answer - a heckuva lot more than 25B."
You're falling into the trap of assuming that the only possible replacement for Linux is Windows, when a much more likely replacement would be one of the BSDs, which Linux admins can use with minimal retraining, will run most Linux software with in the worst cases a recompile, and are both free as in beer and open source.
So the actual cost of Linux going away would actually be the time spent downloading a BSD distro, installing it, learning the differences between it and Linux (which are no greater from an administrator's POV than moving from one Linux distro to another), and recompiling the few important applications that don't directly run on it and haven't already got a BSD-specific version.
"Well, I know this, but I've seen some "musicians" using Macs loaded with well over five thousand dollars worth of software, when they could have bought hardware solutions".
This isn't something peculiar to Mac users though. I know several people with Windows PCs that have the highest end versions of Reason, Ableton Live, and Pro Tools installed, each of which they use for different jobs. This sort of setup also runs into several thousands of dollars once they've added plug-ins, soft synths, etc. to get precisely what they want for their particular music styles.
"I had the digital SBLive!, so I used the SP/DIF to my external equipment, which had ZERO noise"
There's no such thing as zero noise. The Ensonique chip sets used on SB Live! cards have a best-case S/N ratio of 90dB, which is not quite up CD S/N ratios, and well below what's expected of serious sound hardware. I'm not slamming the SB Live! here, because it's an old card that didn't cost a lot when it was launched, but the fact of the matter is that it comes nowhere near "stomping" a Mac Mini (130dB S/N ratio, 96KHz 24-bit sampling and playback, optical rather than copper SP/DIF built in), let alone a MacBook Pro.
NB: SP/DIF wasn't originally designed with multi-tracking in mind, so it's not really practical to carry more than 4 uncompressed high quality audio channels over it. This makes it unsuitable for use with all but the most basic DAW software.
"There's seriously pure HARDWARE out there that destroys a full-powered MBP with $5,000 worth of software."
Turning any Mac into a DAW / MIDI studio doesn't require $5000 worth of software -- Logic Studio for example is an extremely professional package with comprehensive multi-channel sound and MIDI facilities, and it costs $499. Those with simpler needs can use GarageBand, which can record up to 8 audio channels at a time, and comes free with consumer-level Macs.
"Hell, my CELERON 450 with 224 megs of PC-133 and COOLEDIT (Way to fuck it up, Adobe,) and a SBLive! could stomp a macbook pro in audio recording."
This is a massive exaggeration, because the SBLive comes with two hardware audio inputs that have rather poorer electronics than a MBP's onboard stereo inputs, and only really comes into its own when using outboard multi-channel signal processors connected to it by SP/DIF. It's therefore in pretty much the same situation as the MBP, which serious amateurs and pros also use with outboard multi-channel audio hardware.
NB: none of the DAWs I mentioned in my prior post are software applications, cards, or outboard systems for general purpose computers such as PCs and Macs -- they're dedicated stand-alone devices that look very much like mixing consoles, and are designed for the sole purpose of recording, mixing, and processing sound.
"The Macbook Pro has an 800 port, which makes the discussion about that vs USB legitimate again."
What the MBP has is irrelevant to a discussion about the MacBook, which has different hardware, a different price, and a different target market.
"And even if it's only a 400 port, at least it was leaving you an upgrade path if you ever need that."
Indeed they do, but when one considers the small amount of performance gain that FW 400 provides over USB 2 and the narrow range of applications where that performance gain will be realised, it's IMO unlikely that many of those in the market segments that the MacBook and MacBook Air are targeting would opt for a more expensive FireWire-enabled peripheral instead of an identical but cheaper USB one from the same manufacturer when offered the choice.
NB: I'm not saying that FireWire itself is an obsolete technology, because I use it myself for various things, but the fact of the matter is that the value of FW 400 was significantly diminished after USB 2 appeared, so it's not really surprising to find that Apple have been slowly but steady phasing it out. This really sucks for those who have video cameras etc. with Firewire ports and no longer have the option of buying the cheaper MacBook instead of the MacBook Pro, but I think that Apple will gain more customers with better graphics capabilities, lighter weight, and a multi-touch pad than they'll lose by not supporting FW 400 anymore.
I eagerly await their input _if_ they make some attempt to address my points instead of smugly telling me I have holes in my knowledge.
"In the mean time, there's nothing circular about pointing to Flynn's work to address your concerns and the holes in your knowledge."
It is entirely circular when nothing in those two papers addresses my concerns or those of the psychologists whose work I've cited, so it boils down to them being used to justify your position. As an example, the fact that Flynn considers the possibility of artefacts and then discounts it does not mean that I and others think he's addressed that possibility in a satisfactory way. Furthermore, your continual assertion that I have holes in my knowledge rings hollow when it comes from one whose attempts to avoid answering points are becoming a predictable and obvious feature of every post.
"If you want to background on the claim it's perfectly reasonable to start with the claim itself."
I didn't ask for, and do not require such background. What I am asking for, and require is some attempt by you to demonstrate this obvious ignorance of mine that you repeatedly harp on about by answering the points that I and those I've cited have raised with some valid counterpoints. As I said in my last post, this should be extremely easy for you to do if I am, as you claim, lacking in knowledge.
"The exception to this is hybrids. However, Europe has avoided them, as they can get equivalent or better performance from Diesels."
They also get equivalent or better performance from gasoline engines because there's a large market for small, light cars. Japanese hybrids sell reasonably well in Europe, but the fact that they're in a "luxury vehicle" price range means that they're too expensive for the sort of cost-conscious people for whom the high European fuel prices are a significant factor in their vehicle purchasing decisions. Those customers can get similar fuel consumption figures from a small conventional car that sells for about a third of the price of a hybrid, and has the advantage of being easier to find parking spaces for in towns and cities.
I know a couple of people with hybrids, but they're both business owners who spend about 75% of their lives travelling by car, a good deal of which is in towns and cities, often with employees as passengers. The extra comfort offered by a larger vehicle is obviously something people who spend a lot of time in it will look for, so they'd be buying a bigger and more expensive model anyway, and the fact that hybrids consume less fuel than most equivalently sized alternatives, especially in town and city driving, is not only important from running cost viewpoint, but also because they waste less time sitting in queues at filling stations.
"Musicians like them for live recording because they're pretty small, have firewire, and a kernel with decent realtime performance."
Musicians who want to record live can get some pretty sophisticated dedicated DAWs for significantly less than the cost of a MacBook plus decent DAW software. They're available from a variety of manufacturers (e.g. Boss / Roland, Edirol, Fostex, Korg, Tscam, Yamaha, Zoom) in many different sizes, configurations, and prices, ranging from cheap little 4 track items that easily fit into the palm of a hand and cost less than $150 right up to 32 track, 24-bit systems with XLR inputs for each channel, phantom powering, pull-up displays, and integral CD mastering hardware and software for around $1200.
Or the old mainframe chain and bar printers that had safety covers to stop the paper arcing out of the top, especially when they were passing sections with blank lines at 75 inches per second.
"As my professional psychologist collegues responded to your comment: "Where to start?"
It might have have been nice if they'd actually started by _answering my points_.
"There's a lot wrong with what you said."
If that's the case, you should have no trouble showing it by answering my points.
"If you're interested in getting it right check out [two papers by Flynn]"
And I suggest you check out the definition of a circular reasoning, because that's what citing Flynn's work to support your claims about the Flynn effect is, i.e. you're saying the Flynn effect is a real effect because the Flynn effect is a real effect.
Here are some contrary papers from psychologists who argue that the Flynn effect is an artefact:
1. Rodgers, J. L. (1999). A critique of the Flynn effect: Massive IQ gains, methodological artifacts, or both? Intelligence, 26, 337â"356.
2. Rowe, D. C., & Rodgers, J. L. (2002). Expanding variance and the case of historical changes in IQ means: A critique of Dickens and Flynn (2001). Psychological Review, 109, 759-763.
3. Sundet, J. M., Barlaug, D. G., & Torjussen, T. M. (2004). The end of the Flynn effect? A study of secular trends in mean intelligence test scores of Norwegian conscripts during half a century. Intelligence, 32, 349-362.
4. Jelte M. Wicherts a, *, Conor V. Dolan a , David J. Hessen a , Paul Oosterveld a,G. Caroline M. van Baal b , Dorret I. Boomsmab , Mark M. Span: Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence, 32, 509-537.
I hope your professional psychologist colleagues will take this opportunity to respond to these and many other papers by psychologists that criticise Flynne's work with something rather better than smug assertions about me being wrong and circular reasoning masquerading as an argument.
""freemen" were basically land owners, land owners were basically nobility and the upper class"
You may be thinking of yeomen rather than freemen, or the old Saxon definition of "freeman" as used in the Domesday Book. This was not however the meaning of the term when John signed the Magna Carta.
A freeman in John's time was anyone who wasn't a villein or a serf, and serfs could become freemen by either buying their freedom (despite the prevailing modern view of serfs as all being poor and downtrodden, some became quite wealthy, and although they weren't allowed to own land, they could and did own anything else, and many rented plots of land from their lords for private use), or running away to a town or city and managing to remain there for a year and a day. So the vast majority of freemen in England when the Magna Carta was signed were tenant farmers, tradesmen, and merchants, not land owners, and certainly not nobility or anything that could remotely be described as "upper class".
"This could well be subject to legal challenge in the UK under a combination of the Computer Misuse Act and the Unfair Contract Terms Act".
It might be challenged, but that doesn't mean that the challenge will succeed in a court.
"The first piece of legislation means that you're not allowed to run code, modify data or attempt to access a computer that doesn't belong to you without the owner's permission"
And they'll claim that (a) it's a phone, not a computer in the sense that is covered by the Act; and (b) you gave your permission by agreeing to the terms of service that's in the cell-phone network contract you had to sign to get the phone.
"the second places restrictions on the type of clauses that companies can place in contracts with consumers"
Which they'll get around by claiming that the software you downloaded was a service, not a product, so it's subject to the contract laws that govern services, which allow clauses about the ability of the provider to terminate them at any time as long as they inform you beforehand.
"If Google deleted an application that I'd previously paid for, they'd be skating on some very thin leagal ice."
People in the UK often overestimate the level of protection that their consumer and contract laws provide. Some rather obvious evidence for this is the fact that the UKCPA (Consumer Protection Agency) membership contract (which can be viewed on their website at http://www.consumerprotectionagency.co.uk/index.php?module=site_content&action=view&p_id=400) contains all the usual clauses about service termination, not being liable for damages caused by software they supply, etc., which would not be the case if they were illegal contracts under UK law.
"I repeat: this was exactly the same test. That includes the testing environment, testing administrators, etc."
You cannot claim that the same testing environments and administrators were in place in (for example) the 1960s and the 2000s, or that people from different time periods would react to them in the same way even if they were. So it wasn't actually the same test in any respect other than in terms of the questions on it, and it would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise. It would also be ludicrous to suggest that wide-scale testing procedures such as national ones have exactly the same conditions and testers throughout, and although it's _assumed_ that these differences will average out at a statistical level, there's not actually any real evidence to support that assumption.
"Legitimate psychologists aren't stupid."
I didn't suggest they were, hence the fact that I cited research by legitimate psychologists who don't agree that IQ tests are a valid measure of anything because they can be influenced by too many factors that cannot be normalised for.
"They have studied the Flynn effect extensively; they've considered any explanation you could come up with and many others with some of the best statistical methods seen in any of the sciences."
And some of those statistical methods such as item response theory applied to Revised Peabody Picture Vocabulary tests and Peabody Individual Achievement tests indicate that the Flynn Effect is an artefact of classical test theory being applied to data that's affected by a large number of unknown variables.
"Throughout all of that the Flynn effect has been pretty definitively laid at the feet of the person himself."
See above.
"You could propose opinions and favorite explanations all you want, but there's no need: the matter has been formally and extensively studied, so such guesses are immediately obsolete."
1) These are not my guesses or favourite explanations, they're the published opinions of scientists who work in the field, and are doing active research. You are certainly free to disagree with their conclusions, but they're no more guesses than the ideas you support.
2) A scientific matter does not become settled and irrefutable just because it's been extensively studied, especially when some of those studies indicate that it's an artefact of the testing procedure and the statistical methodology being used.
So unless you can show some reasons why item response theory is a less valid statistical method than classical test theory or that the various Peabody tests are less valid than Binet-style IQ tests, your claim that any objections are "obsolete" is premature.
"Time and again, you post a large response that is facetious and rude. "
My last response was indeed facetious and rude because the smug and insulting claptrap in the post I was replying to warranted it. If you're going accuse people of being wrong, not making sense, and having arguments with no legs, then you'd better ensure that you do so in a post that exhibits none of those flaws if you want to avoid looking like a hypocritical prick, and therefore being treated as such.
"Apparently you think debates are won by berating and belittling the opponent."
Debates are won by proving your points, not repeatedly shouting that others are wrong without providing anything that could remotely be described as an attempt to show why. Perhaps you should heed the ancient advice about treating others in the way you'd like to be treated yourself.
"I'm not going to take the bait again and respond to the tiny little bit of content that is buried in your unmerited condescension"
I suggest you read your own post again before claiming that the condescension was unmerited, or that my post had little content, because that may give you some idea of why I found it extremely insulting, and completely lacking in anything except the same bunch of assertions that you've repeatedly refused to even attempt to back up. If you'd had enough intellectual integrity to at least attempt to counter some of my prior points with some evidence (which I've asked for several times), you would have received the same treatment in return.
"I suppose in that sense, you win"
What did I win? It certainly wasn't a debate, because you've not debated any of my points -- all you've done is claim that they're wrong, but without being either polite or intellectually honest enough to make even a token attempt at showing why so I have a chance of either conceding them or countering with another point.
"Actually, the Flynn effect, in which IQ scores have been increasing over the years, is observed with identical tests."
I think that what you mean is they've used both tests from past years and more recent (but non-normalised for current populations at that time) tests to try and reduce the probability of differences in the papers being a major factor. However, there's more to a test than the questions on the paper -- the testing environment for example plays a major role in IQ scores (I include factors such as time of day, how recently people have eaten, what they ate and drank when they did so, how stressful the testing procedure and the place where the test was taken are, and a number of other factors).
Gould for in his book "The Mismeasure Of Man" cites numerous research papers by psychologists and cognitive scientists which indicate that a person's IQ can vary by as much as 15 points from one test to another, and his own research into the differences that tester training, attitude and instructions have on scores revealed that 99 school psychologists who were asked to mark the same person's tests produced scores ranging from 63 to 117. Tyler's research into the effects of emotional tension, anxiety, and unfamiliarity with the testing procedure concluded that these factors can produce a variance of up to 40 points.
It is therefore IMO extremely difficult to conclude that the apparent yearly rises in IQ are not due to factors in the tests themselves (i.e. a combination of questions, procedures, testing environment, testers, and various other factors that have been shown to produce a large variance in scores). The fact that the Flynn Effect appears to have stopped in the 1990s in many developed countries could IMO also indicate that the the above effects have been steadily reduced as both testers and testees become more familiar with the tests themselves and the correct procedures for taking, applying, and marking them.
The above is IMO a far better explanation for the Flynn effect than the alternative of assuming that half the population of developed countries born in the 1930s was mentally retarded.
"It absolutely represents a change in the people being tested, though there isn't agreement on what this change/means/."
I don't think that some of the ridiculous levels of change that have been noted in some countries over very short periods of time (e.g. jumps 21 points in 30 years) can be entirely attributed to the people being tested.
"The part where you do not get to define what is or is not a genius."
Whereas you do get to define them because you are more special than me, but you won't tell mere mortals such as myself what that definition is because we'd probably not be capable of grasping it.
"The idea that famous historic figures define genius is ridiculous."
But pretending to have a special definition of "genius" which only you know about isn't ridiculous at all.
"I never said anything about IQ level genius, I said there are millions of geniuses in the world."
This assertion would (a) require a definition of genius that you actually reveal to the world which doesn't reference IQ or any generally acknowledged historical geniuses, but satisfactorily accounts for both; and (2) proof that there really are millions of them rather than just you saying that there are. Without those, this is nothing more than another case of you claiming your argument is better because you're the one making it.
"It would appear that you are making the strawman. Your argument needs legs to stand on, your legs were faulty. "
This statement (a) doesn't show my argument is a straw man (being wrong or faulty isn't a straw man), whereas your attempt to change things around by pretending your argument was mine clearly was one, despite the fact that it failed to get me beating at it because it was so poorly constructed; and (b) where are your argument's legs that refute mine? If they have no foundation, then you should be able to refute them easily with some facts that have more legs than "it's true because I say so".
"You attempted to prove your points with questions, those questions relied on faulty assumptions about what intelligence is and how it would have to impacted by an environment."
Whereas your assumptions about what intelligence is and how it would have to be impacted by the environment aren't faulty, because you say they're not. This argument has so many legs that it's a veritable millipede, so I'm suitably awed by your magnificent evidence-laden response.
"Based on those faulty questions you rested your case that intelligence is not based upon environment"
I didn't rest any case, so this is another straw man.
"Why on earth would I bother attacking your conclusion when it has no foundation?
There were no conclusions, only a series of points, which in typical fashion, you've completely failed to answer, so this is a very transparent attempt at an excuse for your obvious inability to come up with a coherent counter-argument. Oh, and by the way, answering points with a question is, according to you, a sign of an argument with no legs.
"You aren't making any sense."
If I don't make any sense, then how did you manage to answer me? Oops, an answer that's a question (albeit a rhetorical one), so I'll lop the legs off that one to save you the trouble of having to do so yourself. I may have the misfortune of not having your ability to prove things by merely saying them, but I try and make up for it by being a very kind human being.
"But of course you can't be because you are wrong."
I'm wrong because you say so. You've gone beyond a mere millipede in the number of legs your arguments have to stand on, and are now firmly in Chinese Red Army leg-count territory. Congratulations!
"There is plenty of evidence that a person learns more slowly when they are 60 than when they are two (or 16)"
I know, hence this statement by me in the passage you quoted, and are claiming to answer in a many-legged and irrefutably factually supported way: "so the fact that they learned new things more quickly when they were two is a non-point". Note the use of the word "fact" here, which indicates a something which the writer accepts as being pretty much proven.
"Learning more slowly by pretty much any definition is less intelligent."
A lower ability to solve the problems presented by one's environment is also a sign of less intelligence by pretty much any definition, w
"Evolution has a goal? I thought it just happened."
I said that badly, as you rightly point out. What I should have written is that genetic sequences, like the life forms that they carry the code for, have a goal, which is to survive, and the ability to change is one of the ways they achieve this goal.
"But of course, I teach English, and you may be a biologist, so what do I know?"
A stupid statement is a stupid statement, irrespective of who makes it, and you have my gratitude for spotting this one.
"You're taking what I said and running too far with it. I said to some degree"
You said _IQ_ was influenced by environment to some degree, which I fully agree with. My reply was however about _intelligence_, not IQ. And while intelligence is definitely affected by environmental factors that influence brain development over time (e.g. nutrition, heavy metals, etc.), IMO it isn't affected by others such as education (I use the term broadly here, i.e. I'm referring to anything from which people learn rather than just formal education).
"I think the figures are that heredity accounts for 75% of the variance in intelligence, environment 25%. My source is Introductory Psychology from MIT OCW; the lecturer, Wolfe, also stated that intelligence can on the individual level be increased by environmental changes (i.e. make the kid play chess or solve rubik's cube; teach them some thinking skills)"
Teaching people thinking skills changes their _IQ_, not their intelligence, which we haven't even managed to define, let alone come up with a way of measuring. Here a link to an interesting article by a couple of other psychologists which describes some the problems with applying IQ test results to things which Binet (their inventor) specifically stated they shouldn't be used for:
"I remember the bottom line being that changes are not dramatic (you change your IQ score by single digit figures), and only last as long as the environmental change is kept in place."
See the article above, because changes that are as large or larger than these occur when measuring the same person on consecutive days, and there are a variety of other factors which can also influence test scores that have nothing whatsoever to do with the intelligence of the people being tested.
"At no time did I (nor Wolfe) claim that we can turn everybody into Archimedes or Da Vinci"
IMO intelligence is only a part (and possibly a small part) of what makes a Da Vinci or Newton. The fact that true geniuses seem to also be accomplished artists and / or musicians in addition to what else they're known for seems to indicate that their minds are a rather special blend of the artistic and analytic, whereas most people are oriented towards one or the the other. This is why I find the idea of "genius level IQ" such a ludicrous idea, because we have no idea what IQ scores any of the historic geniuses would have achieved (Einstein never took an IQ test despite being alive when they existed) -- for all we know, they might have had fairly mediocre IQs.
"Also, if you want to pick nits, pretend I said "intelligence is influenced by environment" instead of IQ, because that's what I really meant."
And that was what I was arguing isn't influenced by environment (apart from long-term environmental factors that affect brain development which I've already mentioned in this post).
"As I recall from The Skeptics' Guide, intelligence tests are calibrated every so often to keep the bell curve centered at 100 with a variance of 15, exactly to compensate for increasing intelligence"
They're constantly calibrated to account for _increasing IQ scores_, which is not the same thing as increasing intelligence (they're also calibrated for other factors such as cultural changes rendering some types of questions obsolete: stuff nobody gets right or that everyone gets right is thrown out).
"When you say _average_ life expectancy, I think what you mean life expectancy not conditioned on reaching the age of twelve; life expectancy is the expected value of a stochastic variable, so in some sense it's already an average."
The point I'm trying to make is that the average life span in a society with a high child mortality rate bears less of a relationship to how long an _adult_ in that society can expect to live than it does in one with low child mortality, because high child mortality "pulls" th
"You might want to check terms like "monophyletic", "polyphyletic" and "paraphyletic""
I am aware of their meaning.
"You seem to be arguing that "great apes" is a polyphyletic grouping"
I am saying this is a possibility, because there's a large hole in the African fossil record prior to 7 mya (and it's notably poor and fragmentary until rather later), whereas there is significant fossil evidence in Eurasia both prior to this period, during it, and after. So as I said before, this leads us to two possibilities:
1) Eurasian great apes migrated to Africa after they became great apes, in which case they are monophylectic. This is not however a theory with many followers in the palaeontological community.
2) Both lines evolved separately from a common African ancestor that was not itself a great ape, which would mean they're polyphylectic.
"I think you're alone with that view, and practically everybody else considers great apes to be monophyletic"
Most palaeontologists favour the common African ancestor theory, so I'm far from being alone here. This is because ape-like animals were so common at one time in both Africa and Eurasia that the number of different species outnumbered those of monkeys, and early Eurasian great ape fossils have features which are present in orang-utans, but not African great apes (e.g. up-turned jaws, and arm / hip configurations suited to a brachiating arboreal life).
NB: there were a lot more species of great apes in other periods (the ape-like animals mentioned above had more in common with lesser apes than great apes) in both Eurasia and Africa than exist today.
"Also, modern view in biology is, that scientific classifications should be monophyletic whenever possible."
I know this is the case, but our preferences for classifying things in a certain way doesn't actually prove anything about the thing being classified, hence the fact that classifications change as new evidence is discovered (even categories as broad as classes get revised when new living creatures or fossils are discovered).
"But monophyletic classification of "great apes" does make sense, and therefore "great apes" is considered to be monophyletic by probably all biologists."
But not palaeontologists, most of whom continue to believe Darwin's African origin for the common ancestor of all great apes (extinct and living). If this is correct (and I'm not claiming it is), then both the antiquity of Eurasian great apes, whose fossil evidence goes back twice as far into the past as anything yet discovered in Africa, and the fact that Eurasia also had many species of lesser apes in the past points at a common ancestor which migrated to Eurasia before the lines leading to great and lesser apes diverged, i.e. prior to 18 mya, and possibly before 20 mya. Such animals were obviously not great apes, or even apes in the modern sense of the word, although they would have had a number of (lesser) ape-like characteristics.
Note that current genetic and molecular evidence is as ambiguous as the fossil record, because it indicates that different species of the African great ape clade are not only more similar to each-other than any of them is to orang-utans, but that they're also (slightly) more closely related to living lesser apes such as the lar gibbon then they are to orang-utans. Even more confusing is the fact that each species of African great ape has a distinct set of genetic similarities with, and differences from orang-utans, so it's very difficult indeed to make any definitive statements about the evolutionary relationship between living African great apes as a group and the sole surviving Eurasian great ape.
"There is pretty wide margin between genius and Einstein though. There are millions of genius level individuals in the world."
What part of " I'm referring to true geniuses such as Newton and Einstein, not those who fall into an arbitrary statistical IQ region" did you fail to understand? I was very specific about this, because nobody knows what the IQ of historic geniuses was, so the claim that certain IQ test scores are "genius level" is unscientific balderdash.
"Here you make a few assumptions."
It seems that it's you who is making the assumptions:
"The first is that newton and his circumstances would be typical of what produces genius. "
I would hardly assume such a thing when the crux of my argument is that there is no typical environment that produces geniuses because it's something people are born with, not that they acquire.
"The second is that either wealth or academia encourage the development of intelligence."
See above.
"If intelligence were merely the sum of acquired knowledge you may be right, but it is not."
I see a straw man emerging here, because _my entire line of argument_ was that intelligence (and genius, which is more than simply intelligence) is something people are born with, and it was you who claimed otherwise. I suggest you stick to your original arguments instead of assuming mine in the vain hope that I won't notice.
"A love of learning, independence that usually leads to poor academic performance, and an inquisitive mind are the characteristics that are more often seen."
The writings of geniuses indicate that their poor performance _in formal education_ is mostly due to a combination of laziness and boredom, not independence. Da Vinci and Pascal for example were educated at home by family members who recognised their talents early on, and became child prodigies, whereas Einstein and Newton, who both attended schools, were late bloomers.
You've also missed one important characteristic of geniuses that in my opinion provides a valuable insight into their nature, i.e. their love of, and often notable ability in at least one art. Da Vinci was extremely gifted in several; Newton played a number of instruments, and wrote a treatise on music; and Einstein was an excellent violinist who claimed that his greatest insights came when playing (he also said he'd have been a musician if he hadn't become a physicist).
"It is through social relations that an individual is more likely to adopt these traits than formal education."
There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that the traits which combine to produce these extremely rare individuals are adopted at all, so this claim is pure speculation.
"Of course I am not pulling my opinions on intelligence out of my arse."
See below.
"Current research supports me showing that often white matter rather than gray matter plays the bigger role in intelligence."
Current research actually indicates that this is only true for women, whereas grey matter is the more important component in men (women have 10 times as much white matter devoted to intelligence as men, while men have 6.5 times times more grey matter devoted to it than women).
"It's not about having the biggest brain, its about having the most efficient brain"
I didn't claim there was any relationship between brain size and intelligence, so this is a non-point.
"the brain's efficiency comes from the chains of neurons you build and revise through input throughout your life."
Please cite some recent experimental evidence that proves brain _efficiency_ is in any way related to revisable connections between neurons. I'm willing to bet you won't find any, because brain efficiency isn't a constant, but a variable that depends on a variety of factors (fatigue, diet, exercise, drugs, etc., etc.). I therefore suggest that you refrain from pretending that what you are saying is an uncontested scientific fact instead of merely your opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
"A computer is about the software and usage you get out of it - who cares how it looks!"
Enough people care to make the likes of Sony and Lenovo spend significant amounts of money designing the appearance of their laptops, so the fact that I don't happen to care what my gear looks either is irrelevant, because unlike most geeks, I realise I'm not typical.
However, while I may not give much attention to appearance, as somebody who actually has to cart a laptop around regularly instead of using it as a desktop replacement, I appreciate both build quality and light weight, and I've often found that ugly portables are both heavy and poorly designed and made, with display hinges and power input sockets being common points of failure that warranties don't usually cover (they try and claim it's been broken by misuse even when this clearly isn't the case).
NB: I'm not recommending Apple here, but saying that light weight and build quality are important for me and many others when selecting a portable, and it's rare to find both in machines whose manufacturers didn't put much thought into their external design.
"Call me when"
OK, you're a when. Happy now?
Today's episode of Pedant time is brought to you by the Department Of Irritating Areholes.
"Water is colorless"
Pure water is actually a very light shade of turquoise blue, although you need a lot of it to see its colour. It only appears colourless in (relatively) small quantities.
"Snails are footless"
Snails and other gastropods technically have one foot.
"Or better yet, what is the cheapest cost that could be achieved by implementing an alternate technology that would allow you to operate with near the same efficiency."
The cheapest would be one of the free-as-in-beer BSDs.
"To put all these semantic arguments to rest about FOSS means you can't associate a $ amount to it: an approximate value can be associated when you evaluate the cost of competing technologies."
The value of FOSS and the value of Linux are not the same thing, because Linux is a part of FOSS, not the entirety of it.
"If linux were suddenly to 'go away', how much would it cost to license, install, configure, and support the entire business world with millions of copies of Server 2008?
Answer - a heckuva lot more than 25B."
You're falling into the trap of assuming that the only possible replacement for Linux is Windows, when a much more likely replacement would be one of the BSDs, which Linux admins can use with minimal retraining, will run most Linux software with in the worst cases a recompile, and are both free as in beer and open source.
So the actual cost of Linux going away would actually be the time spent downloading a BSD distro, installing it, learning the differences between it and Linux (which are no greater from an administrator's POV than moving from one Linux distro to another), and recompiling the few important applications that don't directly run on it and haven't already got a BSD-specific version.
"Well, I know this, but I've seen some "musicians" using Macs loaded with well over five thousand dollars worth of software, when they could have bought hardware solutions".
This isn't something peculiar to Mac users though. I know several people with Windows PCs that have the highest end versions of Reason, Ableton Live, and Pro Tools installed, each of which they use for different jobs. This sort of setup also runs into several thousands of dollars once they've added plug-ins, soft synths, etc. to get precisely what they want for their particular music styles.
"I had the digital SBLive!, so I used the SP/DIF to my external equipment, which had ZERO noise"
There's no such thing as zero noise. The Ensonique chip sets used on SB Live! cards have a best-case S/N ratio of 90dB, which is not quite up CD S/N ratios, and well below what's expected of serious sound hardware. I'm not slamming the SB Live! here, because it's an old card that didn't cost a lot when it was launched, but the fact of the matter is that it comes nowhere near "stomping" a Mac Mini (130dB S/N ratio, 96KHz 24-bit sampling and playback, optical rather than copper SP/DIF built in), let alone a MacBook Pro.
NB: SP/DIF wasn't originally designed with multi-tracking in mind, so it's not really practical to carry more than 4 uncompressed high quality audio channels over it. This makes it unsuitable for use with all but the most basic DAW software.
"There's seriously pure HARDWARE out there that destroys a full-powered MBP with $5,000 worth of software."
Turning any Mac into a DAW / MIDI studio doesn't require $5000 worth of software -- Logic Studio for example is an extremely professional package with comprehensive multi-channel sound and MIDI facilities, and it costs $499. Those with simpler needs can use GarageBand, which can record up to 8 audio channels at a time, and comes free with consumer-level Macs.
"Hell, my CELERON 450 with 224 megs of PC-133 and COOLEDIT (Way to fuck it up, Adobe,) and a SBLive! could stomp a macbook pro in audio recording."
This is a massive exaggeration, because the SBLive comes with two hardware audio inputs that have rather poorer electronics than a MBP's onboard stereo inputs, and only really comes into its own when using outboard multi-channel signal processors connected to it by SP/DIF. It's therefore in pretty much the same situation as the MBP, which serious amateurs and pros also use with outboard multi-channel audio hardware.
NB: none of the DAWs I mentioned in my prior post are software applications, cards, or outboard systems for general purpose computers such as PCs and Macs -- they're dedicated stand-alone devices that look very much like mixing consoles, and are designed for the sole purpose of recording, mixing, and processing sound.
"The Macbook Pro has an 800 port, which makes the discussion about that vs USB legitimate again."
What the MBP has is irrelevant to a discussion about the MacBook, which has different hardware, a different price, and a different target market.
"And even if it's only a 400 port, at least it was leaving you an upgrade path if you ever need that."
Indeed they do, but when one considers the small amount of performance gain that FW 400 provides over USB 2 and the narrow range of applications where that performance gain will be realised, it's IMO unlikely that many of those in the market segments that the MacBook and MacBook Air are targeting would opt for a more expensive FireWire-enabled peripheral instead of an identical but cheaper USB one from the same manufacturer when offered the choice.
NB: I'm not saying that FireWire itself is an obsolete technology, because I use it myself for various things, but the fact of the matter is that the value of FW 400 was significantly diminished after USB 2 appeared, so it's not really surprising to find that Apple have been slowly but steady phasing it out. This really sucks for those who have video cameras etc. with Firewire ports and no longer have the option of buying the cheaper MacBook instead of the MacBook Pro, but I think that Apple will gain more customers with better graphics capabilities, lighter weight, and a multi-touch pad than they'll lose by not supporting FW 400 anymore.
"They've been invited."
I eagerly await their input _if_ they make some attempt to address my points instead of smugly telling me I have holes in my knowledge.
"In the mean time, there's nothing circular about pointing to Flynn's work to address your concerns and the holes in your knowledge."
It is entirely circular when nothing in those two papers addresses my concerns or those of the psychologists whose work I've cited, so it boils down to them being used to justify your position. As an example, the fact that Flynn considers the possibility of artefacts and then discounts it does not mean that I and others think he's addressed that possibility in a satisfactory way. Furthermore, your continual assertion that I have holes in my knowledge rings hollow when it comes from one whose attempts to avoid answering points are becoming a predictable and obvious feature of every post.
"If you want to background on the claim it's perfectly reasonable to start with the claim itself."
I didn't ask for, and do not require such background. What I am asking for, and require is some attempt by you to demonstrate this obvious ignorance of mine that you repeatedly harp on about by answering the points that I and those I've cited have raised with some valid counterpoints. As I said in my last post, this should be extremely easy for you to do if I am, as you claim, lacking in knowledge.
"The exception to this is hybrids. However, Europe has avoided them, as they can get equivalent or better performance from Diesels."
They also get equivalent or better performance from gasoline engines because there's a large market for small, light cars. Japanese hybrids sell reasonably well in Europe, but the fact that they're in a "luxury vehicle" price range means that they're too expensive for the sort of cost-conscious people for whom the high European fuel prices are a significant factor in their vehicle purchasing decisions. Those customers can get similar fuel consumption figures from a small conventional car that sells for about a third of the price of a hybrid, and has the advantage of being easier to find parking spaces for in towns and cities.
I know a couple of people with hybrids, but they're both business owners who spend about 75% of their lives travelling by car, a good deal of which is in towns and cities, often with employees as passengers. The extra comfort offered by a larger vehicle is obviously something people who spend a lot of time in it will look for, so they'd be buying a bigger and more expensive model anyway, and the fact that hybrids consume less fuel than most equivalently sized alternatives, especially in town and city driving, is not only important from running cost viewpoint, but also because they waste less time sitting in queues at filling stations.
What is the relevance of FW 800 in a discussion about MacBooks, which only ever came with (and have now lost) a FW 400 port?
"Musicians like them for live recording because they're pretty small, have firewire, and a kernel with decent realtime performance."
Musicians who want to record live can get some pretty sophisticated dedicated DAWs for significantly less than the cost of a MacBook plus decent DAW software. They're available from a variety of manufacturers (e.g. Boss / Roland, Edirol, Fostex, Korg, Tscam, Yamaha, Zoom) in many different sizes, configurations, and prices, ranging from cheap little 4 track items that easily fit into the palm of a hand and cost less than $150 right up to 32 track, 24-bit systems with XLR inputs for each channel, phantom powering, pull-up displays, and integral CD mastering hardware and software for around $1200.
Or the old mainframe chain and bar printers that had safety covers to stop the paper arcing out of the top, especially when they were passing sections with blank lines at 75 inches per second.
"As my professional psychologist collegues responded to your comment: "Where to start?"
It might have have been nice if they'd actually started by _answering my points_.
"There's a lot wrong with what you said."
If that's the case, you should have no trouble showing it by answering my points.
"If you're interested in getting it right check out [two papers by Flynn]"
And I suggest you check out the definition of a circular reasoning, because that's what citing Flynn's work to support your claims about the Flynn effect is, i.e. you're saying the Flynn effect is a real effect because the Flynn effect is a real effect.
Here are some contrary papers from psychologists who argue that the Flynn effect is an artefact:
1. Rodgers, J. L. (1999). A critique of the Flynn effect: Massive IQ gains, methodological artifacts, or both? Intelligence, 26, 337â"356.
2. Rowe, D. C., & Rodgers, J. L. (2002). Expanding variance and the case of historical changes in IQ means: A critique of Dickens and Flynn (2001). Psychological Review, 109, 759-763.
3. Sundet, J. M., Barlaug, D. G., & Torjussen, T. M. (2004). The end of the Flynn effect? A study of secular trends in mean intelligence test scores of Norwegian conscripts during half a century. Intelligence, 32, 349-362.
4. Jelte M. Wicherts a, *, Conor V. Dolan a , David J. Hessen a , Paul Oosterveld a ,G. Caroline M. van Baal b , Dorret I. Boomsmab , Mark M. Span: Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence, 32, 509-537.
I hope your professional psychologist colleagues will take this opportunity to respond to these and many other papers by psychologists that criticise Flynne's work with something rather better than smug assertions about me being wrong and circular reasoning masquerading as an argument.
""freemen" were basically land owners, land owners were basically nobility and the upper class"
You may be thinking of yeomen rather than freemen, or the old Saxon definition of "freeman" as used in the Domesday Book. This was not however the meaning of the term when John signed the Magna Carta.
A freeman in John's time was anyone who wasn't a villein or a serf, and serfs could become freemen by either buying their freedom (despite the prevailing modern view of serfs as all being poor and downtrodden, some became quite wealthy, and although they weren't allowed to own land, they could and did own anything else, and many rented plots of land from their lords for private use), or running away to a town or city and managing to remain there for a year and a day. So the vast majority of freemen in England when the Magna Carta was signed were tenant farmers, tradesmen, and merchants, not land owners, and certainly not nobility or anything that could remotely be described as "upper class".
I would like to thank you for such an excellent and informative post.
"This could well be subject to legal challenge in the UK under a combination of the Computer Misuse Act and the Unfair Contract Terms Act".
It might be challenged, but that doesn't mean that the challenge will succeed in a court.
"The first piece of legislation means that you're not allowed to run code, modify data or attempt to access a computer that doesn't belong to you without the owner's permission"
And they'll claim that (a) it's a phone, not a computer in the sense that is covered by the Act; and (b) you gave your permission by agreeing to the terms of service that's in the cell-phone network contract you had to sign to get the phone.
"the second places restrictions on the type of clauses that companies can place in contracts with consumers"
Which they'll get around by claiming that the software you downloaded was a service, not a product, so it's subject to the contract laws that govern services, which allow clauses about the ability of the provider to terminate them at any time as long as they inform you beforehand.
"If Google deleted an application that I'd previously paid for, they'd be skating on some very thin leagal ice."
People in the UK often overestimate the level of protection that their consumer and contract laws provide. Some rather obvious evidence for this is the fact that the UKCPA (Consumer Protection Agency) membership contract (which can be viewed on their website at http://www.consumerprotectionagency.co.uk/index.php?module=site_content&action=view&p_id=400) contains all the usual clauses about service termination, not being liable for damages caused by software they supply, etc., which would not be the case if they were illegal contracts under UK law.
"I repeat: this was exactly the same test. That includes the testing environment, testing administrators, etc."
You cannot claim that the same testing environments and administrators were in place in (for example) the 1960s and the 2000s, or that people from different time periods would react to them in the same way even if they were. So it wasn't actually the same test in any respect other than in terms of the questions on it, and it would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise. It would also be ludicrous to suggest that wide-scale testing procedures such as national ones have exactly the same conditions and testers throughout, and although it's _assumed_ that these differences will average out at a statistical level, there's not actually any real evidence to support that assumption.
"Legitimate psychologists aren't stupid."
I didn't suggest they were, hence the fact that I cited research by legitimate psychologists who don't agree that IQ tests are a valid measure of anything because they can be influenced by too many factors that cannot be normalised for.
"They have studied the Flynn effect extensively; they've considered any explanation you could come up with and many others with some of the best statistical methods seen in any of the sciences."
And some of those statistical methods such as item response theory applied to Revised Peabody Picture Vocabulary tests and Peabody Individual Achievement tests indicate that the Flynn Effect is an artefact of classical test theory being applied to data that's affected by a large number of unknown variables.
"Throughout all of that the Flynn effect has been pretty definitively laid at the feet of the person himself."
See above.
"You could propose opinions and favorite explanations all you want, but there's no need: the matter has been formally and extensively studied, so such guesses are immediately obsolete."
1) These are not my guesses or favourite explanations, they're the published opinions of scientists who work in the field, and are doing active research. You are certainly free to disagree with their conclusions, but they're no more guesses than the ideas you support.
2) A scientific matter does not become settled and irrefutable just because it's been extensively studied, especially when some of those studies indicate that it's an artefact of the testing procedure and the statistical methodology being used.
So unless you can show some reasons why item response theory is a less valid statistical method than classical test theory or that the various Peabody tests are less valid than Binet-style IQ tests, your claim that any objections are "obsolete" is premature.
"You sir are an arrogant asshole"
Guilty as charged.
"Time and again, you post a large response that is facetious and rude. "
My last response was indeed facetious and rude because the smug and insulting claptrap in the post I was replying to warranted it. If you're going accuse people of being wrong, not making sense, and having arguments with no legs, then you'd better ensure that you do so in a post that exhibits none of those flaws if you want to avoid looking like a hypocritical prick, and therefore being treated as such.
"Apparently you think debates are won by berating and belittling the opponent."
Debates are won by proving your points, not repeatedly shouting that others are wrong without providing anything that could remotely be described as an attempt to show why. Perhaps you should heed the ancient advice about treating others in the way you'd like to be treated yourself.
"I'm not going to take the bait again and respond to the tiny little bit of content that is buried in your unmerited condescension"
I suggest you read your own post again before claiming that the condescension was unmerited, or that my post had little content, because that may give you some idea of why I found it extremely insulting, and completely lacking in anything except the same bunch of assertions that you've repeatedly refused to even attempt to back up. If you'd had enough intellectual integrity to at least attempt to counter some of my prior points with some evidence (which I've asked for several times), you would have received the same treatment in return.
"I suppose in that sense, you win"
What did I win? It certainly wasn't a debate, because you've not debated any of my points -- all you've done is claim that they're wrong, but without being either polite or intellectually honest enough to make even a token attempt at showing why so I have a chance of either conceding them or countering with another point.
"Actually, the Flynn effect, in which IQ scores have been increasing over the years, is observed with identical tests."
I think that what you mean is they've used both tests from past years and more recent (but non-normalised for current populations at that time) tests to try and reduce the probability of differences in the papers being a major factor. However, there's more to a test than the questions on the paper -- the testing environment for example plays a major role in IQ scores (I include factors such as time of day, how recently people have eaten, what they ate and drank when they did so, how stressful the testing procedure and the place where the test was taken are, and a number of other factors).
Gould for in his book "The Mismeasure Of Man" cites numerous research papers by psychologists and cognitive scientists which indicate that a person's IQ can vary by as much as 15 points from one test to another, and his own research into the differences that tester training, attitude and instructions have on scores revealed that 99 school psychologists who were asked to mark the same person's tests produced scores ranging from 63 to 117. Tyler's research into the effects of emotional tension, anxiety, and unfamiliarity with the testing procedure concluded that these factors can produce a variance of up to 40 points.
It is therefore IMO extremely difficult to conclude that the apparent yearly rises in IQ are not due to factors in the tests themselves (i.e. a combination of questions, procedures, testing environment, testers, and various other factors that have been shown to produce a large variance in scores). The fact that the Flynn Effect appears to have stopped in the 1990s in many developed countries could IMO also indicate that the the above effects have been steadily reduced as both testers and testees become more familiar with the tests themselves and the correct procedures for taking, applying, and marking them.
The above is IMO a far better explanation for the Flynn effect than the alternative of assuming that half the population of developed countries born in the 1930s was mentally retarded.
"It absolutely represents a change in the people being tested, though there isn't agreement on what this change /means/."
I don't think that some of the ridiculous levels of change that have been noted in some countries over very short periods of time (e.g. jumps 21 points in 30 years) can be entirely attributed to the people being tested.
"The part where you do not get to define what is or is not a genius."
Whereas you do get to define them because you are more special than me, but you won't tell mere mortals such as myself what that definition is because we'd probably not be capable of grasping it.
"The idea that famous historic figures define genius is ridiculous."
But pretending to have a special definition of "genius" which only you know about isn't ridiculous at all.
"I never said anything about IQ level genius, I said there are millions of geniuses in the world."
This assertion would (a) require a definition of genius that you actually reveal to the world which doesn't reference IQ or any generally acknowledged historical geniuses, but satisfactorily accounts for both; and (2) proof that there really are millions of them rather than just you saying that there are. Without those, this is nothing more than another case of you claiming your argument is better because you're the one making it.
"It would appear that you are making the strawman. Your argument needs legs to stand on, your legs were faulty. "
This statement (a) doesn't show my argument is a straw man (being wrong or faulty isn't a straw man), whereas your attempt to change things around by pretending your argument was mine clearly was one, despite the fact that it failed to get me beating at it because it was so poorly constructed; and (b) where are your argument's legs that refute mine? If they have no foundation, then you should be able to refute them easily with some facts that have more legs than "it's true because I say so".
"You attempted to prove your points with questions, those questions relied on faulty assumptions about what intelligence is and how it would have to impacted by an environment."
Whereas your assumptions about what intelligence is and how it would have to be impacted by the environment aren't faulty, because you say they're not. This argument has so many legs that it's a veritable millipede, so I'm suitably awed by your magnificent evidence-laden response.
"Based on those faulty questions you rested your case that intelligence is not based upon environment"
I didn't rest any case, so this is another straw man.
"Why on earth would I bother attacking your conclusion when it has no foundation?
There were no conclusions, only a series of points, which in typical fashion, you've completely failed to answer, so this is a very transparent attempt at an excuse for your obvious inability to come up with a coherent counter-argument. Oh, and by the way, answering points with a question is, according to you, a sign of an argument with no legs.
"You aren't making any sense."
If I don't make any sense, then how did you manage to answer me? Oops, an answer that's a question (albeit a rhetorical one), so I'll lop the legs off that one to save you the trouble of having to do so yourself. I may have the misfortune of not having your ability to prove things by merely saying them, but I try and make up for it by being a very kind human being.
"But of course you can't be because you are wrong."
I'm wrong because you say so. You've gone beyond a mere millipede in the number of legs your arguments have to stand on, and are now firmly in Chinese Red Army leg-count territory.
Congratulations!
"There is plenty of evidence that a person learns more slowly when they are 60 than when they are two (or 16)"
I know, hence this statement by me in the passage you quoted, and are claiming to answer in a many-legged and irrefutably factually supported way: "so the fact that they learned new things more quickly when they were two is a non-point". Note the use of the word "fact" here, which indicates a something which the writer accepts as being pretty much proven.
"Learning more slowly by pretty much any definition is less intelligent."
A lower ability to solve the problems presented by one's environment is also a sign of less intelligence by pretty much any definition, w
"Evolution has a goal? I thought it just happened."
I said that badly, as you rightly point out. What I should have written is that genetic sequences, like the life forms that they carry the code for, have a goal, which is to survive, and the ability to change is one of the ways they achieve this goal.
"But of course, I teach English, and you may be a biologist, so what do I know?"
A stupid statement is a stupid statement, irrespective of who makes it, and you have my gratitude for spotting this one.
"You're taking what I said and running too far with it. I said to some degree"
You said _IQ_ was influenced by environment to some degree, which I fully agree with. My reply was however about _intelligence_, not IQ. And while intelligence is definitely affected by environmental factors that influence brain development over time (e.g. nutrition, heavy metals, etc.), IMO it isn't affected by others such as education (I use the term broadly here, i.e. I'm referring to anything from which people learn rather than just formal education).
"I think the figures are that heredity accounts for 75% of the variance in intelligence, environment 25%. My source is Introductory Psychology from MIT OCW; the lecturer, Wolfe, also stated that intelligence can on the individual level be increased by environmental changes (i.e. make the kid play chess or solve rubik's cube; teach them some thinking skills)"
Teaching people thinking skills changes their _IQ_, not their intelligence, which we haven't even managed to define, let alone come up with a way of measuring. Here a link to an interesting article by a couple of other psychologists which describes some the problems with applying IQ test results to things which Binet (their inventor) specifically stated they shouldn't be used for:
http://www.audiblox2000.com/dyslexia_dyslexic/dyslexia014.htm
"I remember the bottom line being that changes are not dramatic (you change your IQ score by single digit figures), and only last as long as the environmental change is kept in place."
See the article above, because changes that are as large or larger than these occur when measuring the same person on consecutive days, and there are a variety of other factors which can also influence test scores that have nothing whatsoever to do with the intelligence of the people being tested.
"At no time did I (nor Wolfe) claim that we can turn everybody into Archimedes or Da Vinci"
IMO intelligence is only a part (and possibly a small part) of what makes a Da Vinci or Newton. The fact that true geniuses seem to also be accomplished artists and / or musicians in addition to what else they're known for seems to indicate that their minds are a rather special blend of the artistic and analytic, whereas most people are oriented towards one or the the other. This is why I find the idea of "genius level IQ" such a ludicrous idea, because we have no idea what IQ scores any of the historic geniuses would have achieved (Einstein never took an IQ test despite being alive when they existed) -- for all we know, they might have had fairly mediocre IQs.
"Also, if you want to pick nits, pretend I said "intelligence is influenced by environment" instead of IQ, because that's what I really meant."
And that was what I was arguing isn't influenced by environment (apart from long-term environmental factors that affect brain development which I've already mentioned in this post).
"As I recall from The Skeptics' Guide, intelligence tests are calibrated every so often to keep the bell curve centered at 100 with a variance of 15, exactly to compensate for increasing intelligence"
They're constantly calibrated to account for _increasing IQ scores_, which is not the same thing as increasing intelligence (they're also calibrated for other factors such as cultural changes rendering some types of questions obsolete: stuff nobody gets right or that everyone gets right is thrown out).
"When you say _average_ life expectancy, I think what you mean life expectancy not conditioned on reaching the age of twelve; life expectancy is the expected value of a stochastic variable, so in some sense it's already an average."
The point I'm trying to make is that the average life span in a society with a high child mortality rate bears less of a relationship to how long an _adult_ in that society can expect to live than it does in one with low child mortality, because high child mortality "pulls" th
"You might want to check terms like "monophyletic", "polyphyletic" and "paraphyletic""
I am aware of their meaning.
"You seem to be arguing that "great apes" is a polyphyletic grouping"
I am saying this is a possibility, because there's a large hole in the African fossil record prior to 7 mya (and it's notably poor and fragmentary until rather later), whereas there is significant fossil evidence in Eurasia both prior to this period, during it, and after. So as I said before, this leads us to two possibilities:
1) Eurasian great apes migrated to Africa after they became great apes, in which case they are monophylectic. This is not however a theory with many followers in the palaeontological community.
2) Both lines evolved separately from a common African ancestor that was not itself a great ape, which would mean they're polyphylectic.
"I think you're alone with that view, and practically everybody else considers great apes to be monophyletic"
Most palaeontologists favour the common African ancestor theory, so I'm far from being alone here. This is because ape-like animals were so common at one time in both Africa and Eurasia that the number of different species outnumbered those of monkeys, and early Eurasian great ape fossils have features which are present in orang-utans, but not African great apes (e.g. up-turned jaws, and arm / hip configurations suited to a brachiating arboreal life).
NB: there were a lot more species of great apes in other periods (the ape-like animals mentioned above had more in common with lesser apes than great apes) in both Eurasia and Africa than exist today.
"Also, modern view in biology is, that scientific classifications should be monophyletic whenever possible."
I know this is the case, but our preferences for classifying things in a certain way doesn't actually prove anything about the thing being classified, hence the fact that classifications change as new evidence is discovered (even categories as broad as classes get revised when new living creatures or fossils are discovered).
"But monophyletic classification of "great apes" does make sense, and therefore "great apes" is considered to be monophyletic by probably all biologists."
But not palaeontologists, most of whom continue to believe Darwin's African origin for the common ancestor of all great apes (extinct and living). If this is correct (and I'm not claiming it is), then both the antiquity of Eurasian great apes, whose fossil evidence goes back twice as far into the past as anything yet discovered in Africa, and the fact that Eurasia also had many species of lesser apes in the past points at a common ancestor which migrated to Eurasia before the lines leading to great and lesser apes diverged, i.e. prior to 18 mya, and possibly before 20 mya. Such animals were obviously not great apes, or even apes in the modern sense of the word, although they would have had a number of (lesser) ape-like characteristics.
Note that current genetic and molecular evidence is as ambiguous as the fossil record, because it indicates that different species of the African great ape clade are not only more similar to each-other than any of them is to orang-utans, but that they're also (slightly) more closely related to living lesser apes such as the lar gibbon then they are to orang-utans. Even more confusing is the fact that each species of African great ape has a distinct set of genetic similarities with, and differences from orang-utans, so it's very difficult indeed to make any definitive statements about the evolutionary relationship between living African great apes as a group and the sole surviving Eurasian great ape.
"There is pretty wide margin between genius and Einstein though. There are millions of genius level individuals in the world."
What part of " I'm referring to true geniuses such as Newton and Einstein, not those who fall into an arbitrary statistical IQ region" did you fail to understand? I was very specific about this, because nobody knows what the IQ of historic geniuses was, so the claim that certain IQ test scores are "genius level" is unscientific balderdash.
"Here you make a few assumptions."
It seems that it's you who is making the assumptions:
"The first is that newton and his circumstances would be typical of what produces genius. "
I would hardly assume such a thing when the crux of my argument is that there is no typical environment that produces geniuses because it's something people are born with, not that they acquire.
"The second is that either wealth or academia encourage the development of intelligence."
See above.
"If intelligence were merely the sum of acquired knowledge you may be right, but it is not."
I see a straw man emerging here, because _my entire line of argument_ was that intelligence (and genius, which is more than simply intelligence) is something people are born with, and it was you who claimed otherwise. I suggest you stick to your original arguments instead of assuming mine in the vain hope that I won't notice.
"A love of learning, independence that usually leads to poor academic performance, and an inquisitive mind are the characteristics that are more often seen."
The writings of geniuses indicate that their poor performance _in formal education_ is mostly due to a combination of laziness and boredom, not independence. Da Vinci and Pascal for example were educated at home by family members who recognised their talents early on, and became child prodigies, whereas Einstein and Newton, who both attended schools, were late bloomers.
You've also missed one important characteristic of geniuses that in my opinion provides a valuable insight into their nature, i.e. their love of, and often notable ability in at least one art. Da Vinci was extremely gifted in several; Newton played a number of instruments, and wrote a treatise on music; and Einstein was an excellent violinist who claimed that his greatest insights came when playing (he also said he'd have been a musician if he hadn't become a physicist).
"It is through social relations that an individual is more likely to adopt these traits than formal education."
There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that the traits which combine to produce these extremely rare individuals are adopted at all, so this claim is pure speculation.
"Of course I am not pulling my opinions on intelligence out of my arse."
See below.
"Current research supports me showing that often white matter rather than gray matter plays the bigger role in intelligence."
Current research actually indicates that this is only true for women, whereas grey matter is the more important component in men (women have 10 times as much white matter devoted to intelligence as men, while men have 6.5 times times more grey matter devoted to it than women).
"It's not about having the biggest brain, its about having the most efficient brain"
I didn't claim there was any relationship between brain size and intelligence, so this is a non-point.
"the brain's efficiency comes from the chains of neurons you build and revise through input throughout your life."
Please cite some recent experimental evidence that proves brain _efficiency_ is in any way related to revisable connections between neurons. I'm willing to bet you won't find any, because brain efficiency isn't a constant, but a variable that depends on a variety of factors (fatigue, diet, exercise, drugs, etc., etc.). I therefore suggest that you refrain from pretending that what you are saying is an uncontested scientific fact instead of merely your opinion.
"The longer and more complex a chain the