Quote: (07-11-2018 11:41 AM)Dr Mantis Toboggan Wrote:
Quote: (07-10-2018 03:58 PM)Cam Newton Wrote:
Quote: (07-10-2018 03:12 PM)semibaron Wrote:
IQ is really the least of the problems. If you raise your half Colombian kids in your home country in a functioning environment, they will become just as smart as you.
Unfortunately the environment plays almost no role in intelligence unless they are malnurished.
So your idea would only work if your Colombian wife was smart. Since Colombia has an average IQ of about 85 (1 standard deviation below the mean), then only about 15% of Colombians will have an IQ over 100. Essentially it just limits your pool of wife candidates. That being said if you go shopping at a university then their won’t be much of an issue.
So how does it work with kids, is the starting point for expectation simply the midpoint of the two parents? Meaning let's say a guy with 120 IQ and a woman with 90 IQ have a child, would the child be expected to have an IQ of 105? Is a boy more likely to trend towards the father's intelligence and a girl towards the mother's? Honestly curious about how this works.
OK, so the simple version is, yes, take the average IQ of the parents and the kids' IQ's will be bundled in that area (according to the 70% correlation of IQ in adults to their parents IQ). By "bundled in that area" I mean the IQs will almost always be within 15 points, and often with 10 points. More precise probabilities can be calculated, if that interests you.
However this is a simplification. There are other phenomena which we know that contribute to IQ. One is regression towards the mean (or average). This is when one, or both, of your parents have a significantly different IQ then their immediate family, the offspring's IQ will be "pushed" towards the average IQ of the close family members. For example if you're an outlier in your family with an IQ of 150 and your siblings have IQs in the 120s (this big of a gap is rare), then your kids' IQs will most likely regress towards the 120s (but not necessarily all the way there, just in that direction). Conversely, if your parent(s) has a learning disability and has a much lower IQ than their siblings, then your IQ will move closer to your aunts/uncles IQs.
Another small contributor may be hybrid vigor. Which is what happens when one side of the family has low genetic diversity, then suddenly has children with someone who is genetically diverse to them. This typically happens in cousin marriages (in the Islamic world primarily), and in small towns. In these small towns, even though your two grandparents may not be cousins, they may be as genetically related as two cousins would be (sharing 1/8 of their genes) due to the family breeding within the small town of 400 people for hundreds of years. As soon as that "less genetically diverse" family member breeds with someone from another town, the kids genetic quality may shoot up. Some interesting studies have shown that the height of 1st generation European immigrants (to say America) is correlated with the distance between the cities of their grandparents. However, this effect would be more impactful the more inbreeding in one side of the family. There haven't been very many studies studying the effect of IQ on hybrid vigor, although Bob Trivers (pioneer in evolutionary biology) explains it the way I have above.
A large contributor may be the Flynn effect. This is the observation that IQ has been increasing by about 10 points every 30 years for the past 100 years, or so. The reason for this is unclear. One contributor may be the decrease in environmental toxins such as lead. Another contributor may be increasing complexity of society - thus improving the cognitive environment of the children. However, we haven't been able to confirm that the "cognitive environment" plays any role in IQ. We've tried large educational projects helping out the lower class which completely failed to increase IQ. Also, adoption studies show how little the effect of the "cognitive environment" really is on adult IQ. Some people think the Flynn effect may be slowing down, or is stopped, but we don't really know right now. Also, just because we haven't found the effect of the "cognitive environment" on IQ, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Then there are negative ways to impact IQ, like malnutrition, heavy metal toxicity, etc.
Quote:Buja Wrote:
IQ tests are just a single measure of cognitive ability that can be measured on paper and have nothing to do with real world results. There are so many other abilities that trump IQ.
There are plenty of people of who fail in the classroom but succeed in real life. (Thomas Edison-kicked out of 3rd grade because he was not "intelligent" enough. Albert Einstein hated classroom education and left high school)
vehemently disagree with this and with Charles Murray-the author of The Bell Curve.
First of all, unless every single person in Colombia was given a standard IQ test, these numbers are irrelevant.
Bachelor of Arts Degree/Ph.D holders like Charles Murray throw around terms like bell curves, standard deviations, etc. to make their non-scientific pseudo-intellectual dissertations sound more "scientific" and sell more books.
A normal distribution (commonly called "a bell curve") is only accurate for a specific type of data with specific results such as the roll of dice, a coin toss, the occurrence of blue eyes in a given population, etc.
Psychologists and other pseudo-scientific academic disciplines can find "bell curves" where none actually exist.
I will briefly respond as to not derail this thread too much, although I think this topic is very important for people considering having a family.
IQ absolutely has a major impact in real life. Hundreds of studies, with millions of people (collectively) show this. IQ is a larger impact on life "success" than anything else we can measure; including the big 5 traits, and other not as successful ways of measuring people.
You gave two examples, if you want to know the actual effect of IQ you must look at large studies. However even those examples can be explained. First of all, IQ may be only 30% heritable in childhood, but 70% heritable in adulthood. So just like someone can be a "late bloomer" when it comes to height, someone can be a "late bloomer" when it comes to IQ (up until say 21 years old or so). Another reason, specially for Einstein is that people who are WAY smarter than everyone in their classes, even their teachers, will likely hate high school. They often won't enjoy school until it actually challenges them - which is up to the parents and teachers.
As far as ability to be good at your job - IQ and the big 5 trait conscientiousness (hard-work, industriousness, etc) play large roles. For jobs that require constant learning IQ is the king. For jobs that are more routine (and yes, a good chunk of engineering jobs are routine) then conscientiousness plays a larger role than IQ.
As to your last points, the only controversial statement in the bell curve is that the differences in IQ are, most likely, in part genetically caused. The fact that IQ differs between races, or countries, and is normally distributed (bell curve) is not controversial AT ALL. We've had millions of people do IQ tests (via studies, military, etc) and hundreds of millions of people complete tests that are strongly correlated to IQ, like the wonderlic test, and standardized tests, like the SAT, that many large countries use. IQ is distributed on a bell curve, that's a fact.