In a flashback to the IQ by state hoax, the Times has published a list of IQs by country for most, but not all, European countries. The ranking is attributed to Richard Lynn, without references. The IQ range of 107 (Germany) to 89 (Serbia) resembles real IQ by US state data. Razib whispers: Beware of […]

Although the scientific community has been dismissive of the threat of juvenile neurological disease posed by thimerosal (a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines), the theory linking mercury to autism has persisted in the popular mind. The US is in the middle of a vast–if late and unwilling–experiment in reducing thimerosal use, and the results are […]

ScienceNOW Daily News has an article on The Case of Mistaken IQ: Health workers routinely assess autistics using a standard IQ test known as the Wechsler test. But this test requires that children understand oral commands, a trait that many autistic children have trouble with. Cognitive neuroscientist Laurent Mottron of the Hopital Riviere-des-Prairies, Montreal and […]

Researchers have associated a variant of the IGF2R gene with lower IQ in males–by an average of 20 IQ points. From the Dallas Morning News article [registration required]: The researchers studied about 300 children with an average age of 10. The children, all Caucasian, came from six counties in the Cleveland area. As a group, […]

QIMR Scientists Identify Genetic Links to Human Intelligence: The QIMR group, led by Professor Nick Martin, has identified specific locations on Chromosomes 2 and 6 as being highly influential in determining IQ. To do this, they applied multipoint linkage analysis to data from 634 sibling pairs (including non-identical twins) from Australia and the Netherlands who […]

EurekAlert! summarizes a paper by Rushton and Jensen to appear in the June issue of Psychology, Public Policy and Law in ten handy points: The Worldwide Pattern of IQ Scores. Race Differences Most Pronounced on Tests of (g).The Gene-Environment Architecture of IQ.Brain Size Differences.Trans-Racial Adoption Studies.Racial Admixture Studies.IQ Scores of Blacks and Whites Regress toward […]

You probably need to be a philosophy geek to fully appreciate this one, but renowned British philosopher Anthony Flew has gone from atheist to Deist in the space of a year. His theism will be immortalized in a new edition of God and Philosophy. The journal Philosophia Christi has an interview with Flew available on-line […]

I firmly believe that the best things in life are sugar, salt, and fat. Sugar is the gas that makes your body run, salt is an essential mineral without which you’d keel over, and fat…well, fat just tastes good. Salt gets a bad rap, though. We wince in horror when Emeril tosses a handful of […]

I’ve spotted four different IQ stories in the last four days, divided neatly into two categories. In the first category are the medical reports: Low Birth Weight Affects IQ Into Teen Years and [anti-epileptic] drug warning on child’s IQ. (The drugs in question are those taken by pregnant epileptic women to prevent seizures.) Both reports […]

From Hugh Hewitt’s quote of Robert Cartwright, computer scientist and typography expert at Rice University: The typed text in the “Killian memos” is kerned (check out letter combinations like “fo” and “fe”), but the Composer text is clearly not. Kerning is a computationally complex task beyond the capacity of any mechanical typewriter–even one as expensive […]

Harcourt is doing a “research study” on the Miller Analogies Test. (It sounds to me like they’re norming a new computerized version of the test.) If you’ve never taken the MAT, you can take it for free at test centers around the US [PDF]. Posted by jemima at 12:09 PM

Along the lines of godless’s new saying, When IQ is called Nazism, only Nazis will talk about IQ, the AP reports that an Unabashed Racist Wins GOP Primary in Tennessee. “James L. Hart, a believer in the discredited, phony science of eugenics,” will be running against Democrat Rep. John Tanner for his US congressional seat. […]

Creationism strikes me as the most innocent of the popular unscientific beliefs. Unlike, say, the current fact of human biodiversity, evolutionary events a million years old have no significant implications in politics or daily life. Thus creationists get to take a stand for their pet belief that costs them almost nothing in terms of cognitive […]