Theme: Class

INTELLIGENCE, FLYNN, CLASS, ETHNICITY, REGRESSION

I don’t make mistakes. It’s my job. I have to compensate for you folks. 😉

Neural Plasticity refers to change – usually through generalization, and adaptation of a region to compensate for loss of another region – not to raw ability. If you sacrifice neurons in some area to gain them in another you gained at a cost.

Intelligence scales ALL abilities up and down with limited differences in the ‘objects and abstractions’ that we specialize in – largely male or female, and the degree of agency we train for (daydreaming vs calculating). And “g” changes by only on point or so every three to six years if you work very hard at it constantly. The reason being that many many factors developmental, molecular, biological, and physical affect the outcome.

The Flynn effect (an average) was caused by two factors: a) the culling of the bottom extremes (natal care), and b) general adoption of scientific knowledge. For example, eye response tests (another intelligence test) have DECLINED over the same period.

We did not make people smarter biologically, we removed impediments to their demonstrated intelligence by removing ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, and falsehood.

So, it is not ‘magical’ but statistical. In general, scientific knowledge improves learning and reasoning rapidly (just as supernatural nonsense makes you dumber). We can’t test unscientific learning (pattern matching) when the structure of unscientific information is not coherent or commensurable. Scientific knowledge (general rules) are coherent and commensurable – which is how we know they are ‘true’.

It takes only 6-7 generations to domesticate an animal. Major transformations of a genome GOOD AND BAD can occur in just four to eight generations. Group selection (class rates of reproduction) can work in just two or three generations, and certainly in four.

British IQ was in the 112-115 range by the industrial revolution (From Lynn). Since the industrial revolution reproductive asymmetry has reversed over a thousand years of systemic eugenics.

The same is occurring in china. Within one generation or so the Chinese advantage of 105 (even among rurals) will reduce to 100 thru asymmetric reproduction.

Islam has been asymmetrically reproductive for far longer than anywhere other than Africa and india. In india they compensated with castes so that they have a two tiered society (the two extremes of “Jews and Gypsies”). The islamic world has been affected deeply by african, slave, inbreeding, and destruction of the old upper classes, and the limited rates of reproduction of the upper. This is one of the reasons for Lebanese success in the region – it had sufficient population that was either christian or jewish both of whom produced the opposite behavior.