Re: IQ and heredity
- From: "John W Edser" <edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:52:49 -0400 (EDT)
"Alan Meyer" <ameyer2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm not saying we can train a baboon to be intelligent (though it
is entirely conceivable that we can train some baboons to be more
intelligent than others.) I'm saying that virutally all human
beings have inside their skulls a pretty good instrument for
thinking - IF AND ONLY IF it is properly trained - either by
conscious teaching, or by family environment, or in some cases,
by self-developed skills.
JE:-
Hi Allan,
If you regard the multifarious forms of intelligence to be heritable complex
traits then one of the most important parts of such a trait is the
DEVELOPMENT of it. As I keep repeating ad nausium, population genetics
models ignore development which they delete as a "black box". The
developmental biologist and population geneticist (a rare combination) C.H.
Waddington stressed this over 50 years ago. He successfully amended
Haldane's basic population genetics equations to include a developmental
variable for the first time. I posted Waddington's amendment of Haldane to
sbe, twice. Unfortunately Waddington's amendment of Haldane remains ignored.
My view of this is not original. I got it from Arthur Whimbey's
1980 book, _Intelligence Can Be Taught_.
I wrote a review of Whimbey's book on Amazon.com, which I will
quote from here:
---------------
Whimbey, a professor of psychology ran a special school in
California for 10-11 year olds who seemed to be getting nowhere
in the public schools and who had IQ scores around 85. He
concentrated on drilling the students in three principles of
thought:
1. Have a reason for everything you say. (Low IQ people do not.)
2. Think long enough about a problem to solve it. (Low IQ people
often limited their effort to no more than 5 seconds of
thought. Many problems simply require more than that.)
3. Consider all the information available before making a
judgment . (Low IQ people jumped to conclusions based on the
first observations they made.)
What most impressed me about Whimbey's approach was that he was
attempting to develop intelligence in general, i.e., reasoning
ability.
JE:-
Reasoning does need to be taught, i.e. we do not just reason. Indeed, we
often forget that the western reasoning tradition remains based on the hard
work done by the Ancient Greeks. This is why I stress epistemology simply
because in order to reason you must firstly provide an epistemology of it.
In contrast to the Ancient Greek tradition of applied reasoning the Arab
tradition was mostly based on just logic and mathematics which is not at
all the same thing.
This was not just about reading better or doing better
arithmetic. He claimed that, after one school year of intensive
drilling in these basic principles, the average child went from
an IQ of 85 to an IQ of 115, and the change was permanent! The
children were able to do better, because they could think more
effectively, in all subjects.
JE:-
Like any heritable trait, intelligence has to be DEVELOPED, e.g. exercised
from a very early age. Indeed, the more complex the trait the more important
the developmental phase of it. If you delete this critical phase then the
error becomes increasingly gross as the trait develops in a more complex
way.
Regards,
John Edser
Independent Researcher
edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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