C’mon, I laid the satire on really, really thick there. 
No one is saying that it is impossible for someone with an average or below average to have academic success only that it is less likely than someone with a high IQ and the higher the difference in IQ the bigger the difference in likelihood.
Oh, crap. Well done, even though I feel like a dolt.
I got so whooshed so hard that I lost twenty IQ points.
And with those taken away from me, I’ve fallen below 114 and can no longer be a college professor.
Actually the implication of RivkahChaya’s post is that someone who is average / below average can succeed only at non-academic pursuits.
If the only thing anyone in this thread were claiming were a correlation between IQ and academic achievement, nobody would dispute it. But many posts are going much further than that, and when anyone objects the response is “So you don’t believe there’s such a thing as IQ!?”
Well, what I meant was that there is a statistical association between high IQ scores and academic success. I never said it was impossible for someone with a score around 100 to succeed academically, just that statistics suggest such a person won’t pursue academics. It might be a matter of ability, or it just might be a matter of interest. My point was that cause and effect aren’t clear. Does the same factor that makes you good at academics make you good at tests, or are the tests just measuring what you have learned?
I don’t really believe there is such a thing as IQ. I believe the brain, being a body organ, can work better or worse in some people, just like some people have a pancreas, heart, or kidney that doesn’t work optimally, and a few people seem to have parts that work prodigiously. I think it’s hard to measure future ability, though, in any area, which is what IQ tests purport to do. When the idea is to identify people who are behind and need help, they are good tools, but when they are supposed to find high achieving people, well, past performance is a much better indicator than a score on a test.
I think that impression comes from all the “IQ measures only test taking ability” posts at the beginning of this thread.
Future ability? I think it measures present potential.
We can measure people behind and needing help by lack of performance just as well as we can measure high achieving people through excellent performance. And clearly high IQ people performing poorly need as much help as low IQ people, and low IQ people performing exceptionally should get the same enrichment as high IQ people. The utility would be before there is much of a performance record, or when age variation might distort it, in other words in young children.
To the extent that IQ is heritable, has anyone looked into the correlation between IQ and number of offspring? Because, in the grand scheme of things, that’s how “success” is measured.
I don’t know. Really smart Roman Catholic priests didn’t do too well by this measure.
Though in Renaissance and late middle ages Italy they did much better.
They might not be doing too badly in modern Italy, either. You never know!
It is a negative correlation.
If you use education as a proxy for intelligence, there is a pretty consistent negative correlation.
http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/images/completedfertility.png
By whom?
Do you really think some irresponsible gigalo who gets dozens of women pregnant is more successful than a nobel prize-winning scientist who chooses not to have any children (or heck, some guy who knows how to put on a condom)?
Evolution. How is what he is saying wrong? What happens after 10 generations of lower IQ people out breeding higher IQ people.
I doubt it’ll matter though, advances in biotechnology and machine intelligence will compensate for those issues.
Yes it’s wrong. For two reasons:
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Evolution is a process which resulted in Homo sapiens and millions of other species. There is no reason why modern humans need to feel like they “owe” it something, and must consider the goals of evolution to be our own highest goals.
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Evolution doesn’t have a goal. Yes individuals with traits that make them better at surviving and passing on genes are better represented in the next generation. But it takes a sentient being to look at that system and say that the objective is to be represented in the next generation.
For example, we could equally say the objective is to become extinct. You and are represent the unlucky few animals with traits that made them very bad at that.
And what’s your response to the second question? Irresponsible horny guy is the highest achievement possible?
Good question, it depends on what IQ actually is and the degree of heritability. We should note of course that IQ scores have been going up (the Flynn effect), so clearly at least some part of this logic doesn’t follow.
Agree with this. Evolution is very slow compared to the rate of technological advance.
The degree to which humans are evolving is largely moot.
Look up reversion to the mean sometime. Lower IQ people will likely have children with higher IQs, and high IQ people will have children with lower IQs. To whatever extent intelligence is genetic, it sure isn’t dependent on one or even a few genes.
True, but our intelligence grew quite a bit in the last 2 million years when our brain size tripled. And with selective breeding or social pressures rather than natural selection it would’ve grown much faster.
So IQ dropping over time seems like a real risk if people who have an IQ of 120+ have fewer kids than those with an IQ of <90. Granted it’ll take generations
You would be a big fan of Shockley.
What are some of the better definitions of intelligence? Are there generally agreed upon components? Is it all about activity in the prefrontal cortex?
I’m curious about what those characteristics are, good and bad.
Not exactly a new concern. Read “The Marching Morons” by Kornbluth from over 60 years ago, not to mention all the eugenics in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
I actually do favor voluntary eugenics to increase IQ. I really enjoyed this paper on using embryo selection to select for higher IQ children and the sociological effects of doing so.
Intelligence is why we aren’t living in caves. Why we aren’t starving to death, or dying in huge numbers from easily preventable diseases. The more intelligence human civilization has, the better. I don’t support sterilization or involuntary eugenics, but I’d be in favor of incentives for more intelligent people to procreate. If people with an IQ of 130+ (or whatever other traits other than intelligence that are proven to be highly heritable and are associated with various prosocial outcomes like advances in science, technology and social reform) were offered financial incentives to procreate, have at it. I’m fairly utilitarian.
But overall I doubt it matters because machine intelligence advances will vastly surpass biological intellect within 2 generations.