From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Sep 14 2002 - 20:29:45 MDT
At 11:26 AM 9/14/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>No offence, but I'm always amused the way that many academics who
>lean towards the left (this time I do mean you) have their long
>sentences often in the last phrase or two swerve unexpectedly into
>a denunciation of capitalism, or racism, or some other hot topic.
The comment about racism was not flag-waving, but intended to take into
account restrictions in some places on the sexual availability of partners
with certain phenotypes (and hence, by and large, a greater proportion of
narrowly selected genotypes).
>Dropping that last phrase, the verb and object remaining assert
>that the genes get so thoroughly "mix-mastered" that parent's
>and children's IQs couldn't possibly be correlated. But then,
>surely you know that this isn't so: they're in fact *strongly*
>correlated.
I had in mind the mixing after several generations. I'm not sure how the
mixing process works, but Eysenck, not known for his far-left views, was
where I learned about `regression to the mean' in IQ. As far as I can see,
the correlation of child and parent doesn't work to make ever brainer and
stupider kids in each generation via assortative mating; if that had
happened, you wouldn't just see the Flynn effect, you'd be living in a
culture where the top IQ had risen by a point a generation (or whatever)
for the last 10,000 years at least. But maybe the effect saturates. Tricky
topic.
Damien Broderick
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