Federico wrote:As you well know, I have contributed to the discussions in the thread
'You Only Use 10pc of Your Brain' Claim mainly elaborating about the heritability and substratum for Intelligence.
Now, I don't intend to reproduce here all my writings but only a few paragraphs:
"
Although the relative importance of each is still matter for debate, it is now well demonstrated that Nature and Nurture both play an important role.
...data obtained mainly using imaging techniques have allowed to formulate the idea that high intelligence stems from faster information processing by the brain, and that underlying such speed is an unusually efficient neural circuitry.
...Are the brains of geniuses such as Einstein structurally different from those of "normal people?
Studies performed in various laboratories have demonstrated that Einstein's brain lacked the parietal operculum region in the inferior frontal gyrus and the lateral sulcus, while -- as if to compensate -- the inferior parietal lobe ( which is responsible for mathematical thought) was wider than normal.
....These data suggest that genius level performances in memory tasks and/or mathematics which is accompanied by enlargement of some brain areas, as if to compensate , is associated with poor social and/or language skills together with a decrease in volume of the corresponding brain areas."
Indeed, I do remember your posts there. I also disagreed with nearly all of them.
Federico wrote:There is something more I wish to add to this post.
First of all (and I'm repeating myself)), it was not my intention to get into a discussion about race-linked intelligence dispute; but I was afraid it would come to that.
As for the
Nature/Nurture respective roles in the transmission of some cognitive capacity, I will be enough daring to cite the opinion of two geniuses,
Paganini and
Goethe.
Paganini used to say that to become a great violin player it takes both Talent and Discipline. And that applied also to himself since if he stopped only one day from practicing he was the only one to notice , but if he stopped two days or more even the others would notice.
Goethe used to say that genius is half talent and half transpiration.
I don't care what Paganini and Goethe used to say, they were artists not scientists, and they based their beliefs on subjective anecdotal experience.
tribalypredisposed wrote:1)"No scientist assumes that larger brain = intelligence." Really? So all of those textbooks and peer reviewed papers and so on that discuss the relative sizes of our ancestors and relatives (we do not know which are which in many cases) brains and speculate about their intelligence and assume it was not equal to ours BECAUSE THEIR BRAINS WERE SMALLER are written by non-scientists? Weird.
Not non-scientists, no, but I imagine you've misunderstood what the studies said. As I mentioned, the encephalisation quotient gives us a very weak correlation with intelligence, so what you're trying to discuss is research that uses the brain-to-body-mass ratio to compare differences in intelligence between extant and extinct species, not relative size. But no scientist thinks that a larger brain = intelligence; it can sometimes be used as a rough indicator, but it's not evidence in itself as there are numerous other factors that affect intelligence. As a direct example of this, if larger brain = intelligence, then the shrew is by far the most intelligent species on the planet.
tribalypredisposed wrote:It is true that there has not been a correlation shown in modern humans between brain size and intelligence. On the other hand, it would seem logically to be purely maladaptive to have a larger brain that serves no useful purpose and consumes huge amounts of calories, enacting an unavoidable fitness cost. If our brains evolved as some sort of paperweight, then they are pretty costly paperweights. Seems fairly unlikely that we would evolve to have brains three times as large as would be expected for a primate our size if there was not some sort of payoff, something like, I dunno, maybe intelligence?
Maybe intelligence, maybe something else. Sexual selection is one explanation, in that having a costly resource is similar to peacock feathers. The other explanation is that our discovery of fire made it possible to feed a higher resource hungry brain, etc etc. We also have to keep in mind that neanderthals had far larger brains than we do, yet they were (according to research) far less intelligent than us. So having a large energy-hungry brain does not necessarily mean that we will be intelligent, nor does it mean that it isn't disadvantageous.
tribalypredisposed wrote:2)"...there is no evidence that they exhibit higher intelligence scores than other groups." "Entine laid out the data. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, well above the human average of 100. " "...the average Ashkenazi Jewish score of 122 on verbal IQ tests" -
http://www.slate.com/id/2177228/
Do you have a link to the actual research? Given that the claims are supported by Charles Murray, who made numerous incorrect claims in the Bell Curve, I'm naturally skeptical. Especially considering that other studies showed a below average-to-average representation of Jewish people in verbal tests.
tribalypredisposed wrote:% Jewish
20-30% Westinghouse Science Prize
30% Faculty at elite colleges
30% Supreme Court Law Clerks
27% Ivy Leaguers
25% ACM Turing Award
27% Nobel Prizes won by Americans
-
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/dialogue.htmAnd of course all the other data I provided in an earlier post...47% of world chess champions for one. Even if the average of Jewish intelligence is not higher than 100, as some sources claim, we do produce more outliers on the far right of the bell curve than other groups. Far more. That is highly unlikely to be purely cultural.
Why is it highly unlikely to be cultural? You have absolutely no evidence to make that claim.
tribalypredisposed wrote:3)I have read your "paper" attacking Evolutionary Psychology. It is in a thread that is closed so I could not comment on the many large errors you made there. In general I would recommend that you seek to understand disciplines before you attack them or dismiss them. As Evo Psych is a new field, none of the "established" scientists within it have degrees in Evo Psych. They all come from other disciplines and claim to be doing Evo Psych. In some cases their work is world class; for example, E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson both do very thorough, logically precise, and careful work. Leblanc is also very good, and there are others. Then there are those who claim Evo Psych as a way to legitimize their pre-existing bias, like Harpending who is not using Evo Psych at all, really. And there are those like Buss who are just incredibly sloppy thinkers and scholars who are literally not up to the mental challenges of Evo Psych.
But please keep in mind that Evolutionary Psychology is really a new discipline with a new tool kit and is not defined by either the scientists currently attempting to use it or by the hypothesis they generate. The stuff about the EEA is sillyness (since we clearly must have adaptations from before this period and are empirically known to have some from after it as well), and the ideas about the "modular mind" are likely to require some refinement at best, and lord knows the obsession with answering the question "why cant I, the researcher, get laid" is very annoying. But the concept that we can usefully apply the Theory of Evolution, knowledge of primates and other group social species, Game Theory, Cultural and Physical Anthropology, and Neuroscience to come up with new hypothesis about human psychology and evolved behavioral predispositions is sound. If we can find evidence to support our hypothesis from all of those fields (well, maybe we do not have to have support from primatology all the time), including that X is found universaly in cultures around the world (and it can have a given range of expression and not be found in all individuals and still qualify), then we have a legitimate Evo Psych hypothesis. This takes a huge amount of work and most are just not up to it, do not have the mastery of the various fields needed or are not willing to work hard enough, and the demands of academia to publish frequently also make it more difficult.
At this point any professor in Psychology or Anthropology or even Philosophy can claim to be doing Evolutionary Psychology. Whether they are really applying the toolkit of Evo Psych or not is an entirely different question, as is their ability to do so with any competence.
You say that I made a number of huge errors in my essay, yet your ensuing critique is basically a summary of what I wrote. My essay was an attack on a particular breed of evo psych, namely the school of thought supported by Buss. The main problems being the EEA and modular mind assumptions, as well as the fact that many of the researchers in that area are woefully uneducated in basic evolutionary biology. This is all what I said.
I also then went on to clarify, in both the introduction and conclusion, that it was not an attack on evolutionary psychology as a field. The fact that there are great researchers in the area, and the fact that there is some amazing research coming out of it, is indisputable. I know the field very well, as well as a number of figures in the field, so I'd never suggest that the entire area is useless. However, this still does not change the fact that you have applied the same broad brush stroke attack against sociology, whilst supporting a more controversial field.
Your comment on universality, whilst understandably only a passing comment, is slightly incomplete. Whilst it's true that finding a universal behavior is evidence for something being evolved, and this isn't affected by some variation, we have to keep in mind that this is incredibly weak evidence by itself since we know that universal behaviors can come about without an evolutionary component. As I discussed in my essay, this is a common misconception in a lot of the poorer evolutionary psychologists who fail to recognise that species-specific environmental constraints also produce universal behaviors; for example, all cultures across the world eat soup from a bowl. This is because we are all subject to gravity, and not because we have a "soup from a bowl" behavior.