From: "Phil Rushton" <rushton@u...>
Date: Fri Dec 12, 2003 12:01 pm
Subject: The Smarter the People, the Richer the Nation
Charles Murray is certainly correct that "The best source is Art Jensen's
The g Factor (1998)" for his statement that despite thousands of attempts to
show there is much more at work in human intelligence than the g, or general
factor, it has simply not been demonstrated. Psychometricians who work in
industry, the militray, and in education have done their utmost to find what
they call "incremental validity" for predicting success, even to the point
of loading in personality factors like conscientiousness to see if they can
get better predictions for employers, etc. So far the evidence is not good
that much more than g is operating. (Spatial ability may show increements
for fighter pilots; conscientiousness for check-out counter employees).
Having just come back from three days of talks on intelligence at the
International Society for Intelligence Research at Newport Beach, I can say
that this picture remains true. Moreover general intelligence is being
mapped more and more as being in the forebrain and depends on the speed and
efficiency of processing information. The g factor is even extractable from
reaction time measures that everyone can do in less than one second. There
are hopes that IQ research may be put on a ratio scale of measurement with
chronometric apparatus in which there is an absolute zero. Chronometrics
give very lawful results, correalting highly with standard IQ tests and
brain scans and show steady increases in children all the way up to 24, and
then steady decrements until death, just like do g measured IQ and as does
the size of the brain.
This is true cumulative science. Of all the conferences in social sciences
that I go to it is the ONLY conference that seems to show the cumulative
effects of knowledge and not trendy in-cliques that seem to characterize so
much other work. (Admittedly not way beyond Spearman's 1904 model of general
intelligence nor Karl Pearson's first heritability estimate for IQ of 50% or
Paul Broca's 19th century finding that forebrain is responsible for the
highest forms of abstract reasoning.) But at least it is correalted with
incremental truth and that's a huge relief for some of us who sometimes
think others don't even believe there is such a thing.
Professor J. Philippe Rushton, Ph.D., D.Sc.
Department of Psychology,
University of Western Ontario,
London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada
http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton.html
Tel: 519-661-3685
