open Democracy News Analysis - James Watson, Anna Kournikova, and me, KA Dilday - Comments

JFox on "Intelligence, inequality and race "

JFox — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:47:17 +0000

Intelligence may be defined as a quality of intellect believed to be unequally distributed in a population and whose definition satisfies the intellectual pretensions of those who claim to be able to measure it. We still know very little about how our brains work; but what is certain is that we can only display our ability through interaction with our environment. If someone is brought up with books, he/she will find easier it to negotiate literary discourse than - say - the average Kalahari Bushman. But I would bet on the latter surviving more successfully if both were set the challenge of negotiating Namibia on foot. Great sports men and women may have extraordinary hand-eye coordination, timing and reaction times. These are brain functions just as much as those that permit a Harvard philosophy scholar to penetrate the darker pages of Hegel. Is James Watson more intelligent than Roger Federer? Depends on the test.

Felix Cohen on "Intelligence, inequality and race "

Felix Cohen — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:01:28 +0000

Good discussion of the social side of IQ testing; and you managed not to mention the Bell Curve once! The thing I find most interesting in IQ testing is the Flynn effect, whereby average IQ scores across a population seem to increase by significant amounts each generation; most IQ tests have to be restandardised occasionally as a result of this. Everyone getting smarter, or just more education focus on answering the questions right...

James Watson, Anna Kournikova, and me, KA Dilday

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:13:19 +0000

I remember when my IQ was first tested - I was 12 years old. A teacher had selected a few of us (of all racial backgrounds) to apply to a camp for gifted students and the camp required an IQ test. I took it and was shocked at how low mine was. Mind you, it was well above the score necessary for admittance to the summer camp, but according to the Stanford-Binet test, I wasn't the genius I thought I was which was defined by that test as an IQ of 140. I can't remember my score, but I was in the next level, which I just looked up and saw is called "very superior intelligence", 120-140. (Honestly, I can't remember my actual score, but I do recall that I was well into very superior intelligence but not just a few points from genius, or I would have just chalked it up to a bad day).

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