RenewableCandy wrote:Anyone here ever done an IQ test? I once did one for the laugh. One of the questions had a load of anagrams and it was a matter of finding which one *wasn't* the name of a type of aeroplane. Some of them were olde WWII planes, the sort RenewableFrere had in his model collection at the time. So I got the right answer.
Many years later I remember reading that "research has found" women from mixed families (i.e. with brothers) were on average brighter than other women. You do wonder sometimes.
IQ goes down if you so much as miss a meal or drink less than 90% the water you need. This probably explains any lack of intelligence "found" anywhere in the 1/3 world. What happens to your mum between conception and birth can be a showstopper too.
I have done many IQ tests as well as a significant battery of other cognitive tests. They were part of my degree.
To address each of your points in turn:
One of the questions had a load of anagrams and it was a matter of finding which one *wasn't* the name of a type of aeroplane. Some of them were olde WWII planes, the sort RenewableFrere had in his model collection at the time. So I got the right answer.
This is merely evidence of a badly designed test. Or, rather it is badly designed if the intention was to measure people who did not share the cultural influences encoded in the test. That is the reason why, over time, there has been a steady move to less and less culturally bound tests. This has led to tests employing abstract, non-linguistic patterns. A common one is the Raven's matrices test.
Many years later I remember reading that "research has found" women from mixed families (i.e. with brothers) were on average brighter than other women. You do wonder sometimes.
This may be due to environmental influences on IQ. IQ tests measure IQ. They do not measure the genetic
basis of IQ. Or, at least they
can be used to investigate that. But only if they are used on mono zygotic twins who were separated at birth.
IQ goes down if you so much as miss a meal or drink less than 90% the water you need. This probably explains any lack of intelligence "found" anywhere in the 1/3 world. What happens to your mum between conception and birth can be a showstopper too.
Again, all true. Again, IQ tests measure IQ, not the basis of IQ. As a matter of documented researched, though, the heritability of IQ has been consistently shown to be over 70%. That is to say, heritability studies with mono zygotic twin studies has shown that 70% of the variance of IQ can be put down to genetic variance in a given population. This, of course, leaves 30% of the variance explainable by environmental factors. The key point here is that the test is carried out on a given population who are all subject to similar environmental conditions. Which leads to my next point.
As for the difference between the average IQ in, say, Western Europe as compared to central Africa, there is indeed a significant difference and it would be intellectually dishonest to deny it. It's approximately a 15 to 20 IQ point difference which is not small. However, the confounding variable of the stark average difference in
environmental conditions for humans in these two continents means that it is impossible to state that the difference in IQ is down to genetic differences between people of African Negroid descent and those of European Caucasian descent.
Nevertheless, there have been some limited studies (and therefore less reliable) that have shown a similar though far less extreme difference between these two racial groups in Western Europe. This difference has been shown to be fairly consistent whichever European country you care to make the comparison in. This finding does, at least, lead to a possible hypothesis that there may exist some limited genetic basis for such a difference.
However, I should stress, there is a significant overlap of measured IQ between these populations such that the average difference is largely a function of the extremes of each distribution.
I have put all of the above on record simply as bald researched knowledge. I make no moral, political or philosophical point by its mention. It simply stands as it is. As unpalatable to many as it may be.
I should also make clear that IQ, as Biffernon has already pointed out, is only one of a myriad of cognitive traits. A very narrow one, in fact. Perhaps a way to describe it might be to say that is is a narrowly defined set of cognitive traits that have proved to be useful in industrially advanced societies and so have been grouped together into a single measure of "IQ". Many other cognitive traits that may be just as useful or, even, more useful in other environments are not measured by an IQ test. But, then, the designers of such tests would not (or should not) claim they are.
