Intelligence

by David Sims THERE ARE ABOUT 98,000 bachelor’s degrees in engineering given annually in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. As an article in the journal Black Enterprise, 3,500 (3.57%) of them are given to Blacks, who comprise 12.5% of the US population.…

by David Sims THE SMUG “Debunking Denialism” Web site, which likes to style itself as scientific and rational, says that “racists” employ fallacies in their arguments: Thinking that the average says anything about the spread [is a fallacy]. This fallacy can often by found…

INTELLIGENCE COULD BE measured with a swab of saliva, or drop of blood, after scientists showed for the first time that a person’s IQ can be predicted just by studying his or her DNA. In the largest ever study looking at the genetic basis for intelligence, researchers at the University of Edinburgh and…

I’VE MENTIONED BEFORE that from an evolutionary perspective it is not the most intelligent who survive, but the least deluded. Intelligence and a deficit of delusion are not entirely exclusive concepts, as without an advanced capability to learn we might still be wallowing in our own filth …

Bowing to Israeli-Saudi desires, the Trump administration is abusing the U.S. intelligence process to whip up a war fever against Iran, much like George W. Bush did on Iraq. Left nearly (but not quite) unsaid in this otherwise excellent piece is the motivation behind US warmongering: Washington’s…

by David Sims LET ME INDULGE in a bit of math to show how a normal distribution can arise from biological inheritance. Suppose that there are ten locations on the human DNA that pertain to intelligence. I don’t know how many such locations actually exist, but for the purpose of illustration, let’s…

IT’S NOT JUST YOU. People really are getting dumber, according to a new study. Research published online in the journal Intelligence on Thursday claims the IQ of people in Western nations has fallen by an average of 14.1 points over the past century. Scientists in Europe used visual response…

Intelligence, strength, and race by David Sims FOR HUMANS, greater strength and greater intelligence (and greater dexterity) stay gold throughout a very wide range of environments. It would be difficult to contrive an environment in which weaker men are more likely to survive than stronger men,…

A new study in the journal Intelligence indicates that viewers can, on average, sort the intelligent from the unintelligent merely by seeing individuals’ faces. Since both intelligence and character are largely heritable, it is not at all surprising that we can sense such traits by noting,…

PREDICTING 9% of educational achievement directly from DNA — and DNA alone — is quite good; a great achievement, in fact, almost quintupling the previous figure. Remember, it is established science that educational achievement is 60% heritable — but predicting it directly from…