Thread by @MatsVinnaren

amren.com/news/2018/08/w…

"deaf children get low scores on verbal intelligence tests. However, they get normal scores on non-verbal tests and by the time they are adults they have overcome most of the verbal deficit."

"children with catastrophic motor disabilities, who lead lives that are severely restricted by any definition, apparently have higher tested intelligence levels than blacks who are not physically handicapped."

"Perhaps the greatest direct assault on the environmentalist view comes from biology and physiology. As early as the 1960s, it was discovered that many mental illnesses are best treated with drugs. This instantly invalidated convoluted psychoanalytic theories about the..."

"...central role of childhood experiences and other social variables — and cast doubt on environmental explanations for IQ differences."

"Inspection time” studies, which are Mr. Brand’s specialty, are an even more direct refutation of environmental claims. The classic..."

"...experimental method involves use of a tachistoscope, which casts simple images on a screen for very brief periods that can be precisely timed. A common test would be to show two lines of different lengths and have the subject say which is longer. Images can be displayed..."

"...so briefly that no one can make them out, but a firm pattern has been found, in which more intelligent people are better able to make out the images displayed for the shortest periods of time. Very high correlations of 0.65 and 0.7 have been found between intelligence and..."

"...“inspection speed.”

Mr. Brand proposes that the tachistoscope measures a basic physiological correlate of intelligence: the speed at which a person acquires and decodes information. It is difficult to imagine a social or environmental explanation for differences in..."

"...inspection time or for the strong correlation with intelligence. These results cannot be dismissed as some artificial measure of “what IQ tests test.” Unfortunately, Mr. Brand does not report data for different racial groups, but if inspection speed were strongly..."

"... with intelligence in one race but not in another, it would suggest racial differences in physiology far beyond the expectations of hereditarians."

"The IQs of adopted children have a reported 0.13 correlation with IQs of adoptive mothers but a correlation twice as great..."

"... with biological mothers. By mid-adolescence, the correlation with the adoptive mother has dropped close to zero while the correlation with the biological mother has increased slightly."

"Likewise, fraternal twins have more similar IQs when they are children — when their..."

"...environments are established by their parents — than when they grow older and make their own choices. Identical twins, however, maintain their marked similarity of IQs throughout life, presumably because their identical genes push them to seek very similar environments..."

"...even as adults."

"even small children establish their own environments to some degree. A bright, sunny child elicits different reactions from parents and strangers than does an ill-tempered one."

"even some of the effects on personality and intelligence that count as environmental are, to some degree, influenced by genes."

"As children grow older the parental environment increasingly becomes a reaction to the child’s genotype rather than an independent, external force."

"Why is there so much resistance to genetic explanations for human difference, despite increasingly irrefutable evidence for it?"

"One reason is a quasi-Marxist longing for human equality, what appears to be a genuine revulsion for the brute fact of unbridgeable gaps."

"Another seems to be a fear that genetic explanations would lead inevitably to forcible, eugenic measures."

"Massive transfers of wealth and decades of government intrusion have already failed to equalize achievement or even begin to narrow the black/white IQ gap"

"Mr. Brand argues that much of the opposition to genetics comes from people who make a living in the uplift trade and who would be exposed as useless if the truth were known."

"He [Brand] thinks it a disgrace that psychology has neglected and downplayed the reality and heritability of intelligence, and even accuses much of the profession of outright malpractice."

"In The g Factor Mr. Brand proposes only one policy change that should logically follow acceptance of the reality of g: “streaming” or grouping of students by ability"

"He argues that squeamishness over inherent differences in ability fuels the current fashion for shoving everyone into the same classes, but this makes everyone suffer."

"Dim students hold the good ones back and good ones outstrip and humiliate the dim ones."

"Mr. Brand writes that there are perhaps a few talented teachers who can pitch the same lesson simultaneously to children of different abilities, but most cannot. Nor, he argues, is there any basis in the fear that bright children may not be “mature” enough to skip grades."

"Gifted children are happiest with friends of the same mental age, not chronological age."