Err … because IQs are (were) normalised to 100? Or was this a trick question?

That’s “genetic” fitness, ie increased presence of particluar genes in the gene pool at the expense of others. Although there is bound to be a cost (larger brain, more neurons, more energy consumption) it’s the competition amongst genetic variants that will drive the evolution of IQ. Fitness is hardly ever stable.

2) I have a suggested plan of action to move the discussion forward:

a) JQ should write up few sentences about his claim about what “significant new information” has come to light. I think that I understand his position, but clarifications always help.

b) The folks at GNXP could then write a literature summary arguing against this. (I am fairly sure that they will disagree with JQ.)

c) JQ could then restate his opinion and link (from a new CT post) to the GNXP literature summary. A fun discussion at CT would then ensue. I would especially enjoy hearing the views of other CT authors.

The best intellectual discussions feature smart people with different views. Putting CT together with GNXP seems a good way to accomplish this.

What could possibly go wrong?

“There is something maddening about it in that it’s on the one sense complete comprehensible and in the other sense bafflingly incomprehensible and what that makes me think is that we’ve run into some limitation in our own mind a kin to the one that make it very difficult or impossible for us to understand that time came into existence with the big bang. ”

Is this mysterianism ? it sounds like it but I would expect an argument to the effect why the problem cannot be solved ( that is what McGinn does ) so to the extent that P does not offer any arguments like that he is not a mysterian but merely someone who things the problem is v. hard to solve ( as I said that is a different claim a weaker claim ).

“No this is I mean we’re we’re defiantly in agreement that there is a puzzle there and we’re both vulnerable of being accused of being mysterians of saying that this is consciousness will never be solved, it’s beyond the reach of neuro-science which is not what I believe and I think it’s not what you believe in the sense of consciousness meaning the difference between conscious and unconscious processing. ”

There is a difference between saying that the problem is hard to solve ( re qualia ) which is what P is holds and saying that it in principle cannot be solved .The ‘mysteryans ’ hold the second view and it is clearly a different kettle of fish ( much stronger and much harder to defend ).

Pinker’s a mysterian about subjective experience. He says so in The Blank Slate and also in this interview with Robert Wright. As I understand it, he takes a computational view of mind-as-it-could-in-principle-be-observed-by-a-third party, i.e., beliefs, goals, emotions, etc.

You have to be thinking of someone else ( Colin McGinn or R. Penrose ?) because Pinker has an computational view of the mind ( mind is a neural computer that performs operations on strings of symbols ) but of course so has Dennett.

Are your feet sore yet? What exactly are you asking for from the relevant fields? We’ve spent the last two decades dismantling the wall of denial erected by Gould et al. (and are beginning to see the restoration of the reputations of those he unfairly libeled; being right still counts in the end).
It almost sounds like a creationist crowing about the inability to recreate speciation in the lab though, when discarding reams of relevant data all going in the same direction by pointing out the nonexistence of an unidentified breakthrough. And above all, it is oh so early still.

The revolution in genomics is harrowing, if one fears what it might reveal.
The past two decades have seen the confirmation of what Burt et al were marginalized for stating those many years ago, by way of all that “more and better data”, with the Great White Hope of the much used and abused (and still not satisfactorily explained) Flynn effect embodying more and more hope for those who desperately want it all to stop. As for what the Flynn effect means (not what we hope it means) one might want to read his recent Harvard paper to find out his thoughts on the matter.

Someone way up in this long comments thread has already pointed out that 70% heritability for IQ was once enough to end a career, now it is accepted by all but the last few diehards.

Once you accept heritability of IQ coupled with continuing evolution (discarding now discredited notions of stasis) you have to give up the ghost. Recent studies (Cochran and Harpending; Lahn) suggesting not only that evolution has not somehow stopped working on humans but that evolutionary pressures may have increased in recent history, in particular affecting the brain and behavior, the dread specter of significant racial differences in IQ must follow. It’s almost as if the “race as a sociological construct” canard was devised in anticipation of all this, like calling in an airstrike on your own position.

I take it we estimate heritability by the correlation in IQ between identical twins raised apart. But there is no logical connection between this fact and the idea that high-IQ parents have high-IQ children. For example, identical twins always have the same eye color, so I guess the heritability of eye color is 100%. But children don’t always have the same eye color as their parents.

Am I missing something, or is this term incredibly misleading?