From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Mon Jun 14 1999 - 18:48:29 MDT
From: Timothy Bates <tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au>
Date: Monday, June 14, 1999 4:56 AM
>>>several researchers believe that IQ simply reflects brain "health"
>>>- that IQ 140 means nothing wrong, and less than
>>>that is the sum of all things that have not gone wrong.
>Daniel Ust asked
>> Which researchers believe this? And, much more importantly, why?
>
>OK.
>
>At the 1997 ISSID (international society for the study of individual
>differences conference in Aarhus, Denmark), Arthur Jensen and others were
>discussing the genetics of intelligence, and Jeffrey Gray suggested that
>they are likely to look like a scree-plot (a term from factor analysis
which
>describes the relative importance of latent variables) which is very flat
>
>*
> *
> *
> *
> *
> *
> *
> *
>i.e., you need many many genes to explain very much of the variance. these
>genes, then will be for all sorts of "unintelligent" things like insulin
>control, blood carrying capacity, APO E4, etc etc etc. In this sense, a
>bright person has more than average numbers of the more efficient allelles
>at each of these low-level function loci.
That reduces to one person not several.:) But even so, thanks for the
explanation.
I'd originally thought, picking up the discussion with your email as my
computer was down until yesterday, that by "brain 'health'" you meant
something possibly but not exclusively nongenetic. We need a model of what
optimal health is for the brain and to see how this ties in with
intelligence. My gut feeling is an unhealthy brain would lead to less
intelligence, BUT what of epileptics (unhealthy brains, no?) such as
Dostoyevsky? Are they counterexamples? Or could it be, if your (Gray's?)
hunch is correct that Dostoyevsky, etc. would have been even smarter had
they not had epilepsy? Or perhaps epilepsy might be different in this
respect -- i.e., it might not have much to do with intelligence whereas
other aspects of brain health might.
My interest right now would be in finding ways to overcome any genetic
limits on intelligence in the short run -- viz., before we get all this
groovy tech the future will provide.:)
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
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