A New Study Shows IQ to be a Myth

Originally posted by IEtherianSoul9
LINK - IQ a Myth, Study Says

Can a moderator PLEASE move this to the 'Science and Technology' section...no clue how it ended up in the Fragile Earth section.

“When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ — or of you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth,” said Dr. Adrian Owen

“If there is something in the brain that is IQ, we should be able to find it by scanning. But it turns out there is no one area in the brain that accounts for people’s so-called IQ. In fact, there are three completely different networks that respond — verbal abilities, reasoning abilities and short-term memory abilities — that are in quite different parts of the brain,” Owen said.

IQ tests do not properly determine an individual's level of intelligence. The reification of intellectual acuity into a scalable number so easily defined by IQ tests is inaccurate; it's much more complex than that.

These recent results are in line with late pundit Stephen Jay Gould's views on biological determinism and intelligence testing. In his book the The Mismeasure of Man he provided a critical review of the reasoning behind the Bell Curve and IQ testing (notably the g factor).

The two fallacies that are present concerning the principles of IQ testing are: reification and hereditarianism. The hereditarianism fallacy claims that intellect can be passed on, through genes, to the progeny of a person. The degree to which it is heritable is clearly been exaggerated by the most avid hereditarians (Gould, 1996). The first fallacy doesn’t take into account environmental effects, which can greatly outweigh any genetic effects passed on from parent to child. It doesn’t allow for opportunities for improvement of intellectual capabilities through proper education. The second fallacy is the misassumption that if hereditary explains a certain percentage of variation among individuals within a group; it must also explain a similar percentage of the difference in average IQ between groups (Gould, 1996).

In conclusion the study determined that three factors - reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability - form one's "cognitive profile" and that unlike a trait like height which can be measured almost precisely, intellect is not a single, scalable, immutable number, so easily defined by IQ tests.

edit on 12/22/2012 by IEtherianSoul9 because: (no reason given)

IQ is ONLY a measure of reasoning capability. Short-term memory doesn't figure into the equation.

Originally posted by L8RT8RZ

Originally posted by crackerjack
Try telling the Chinese that.
They think IQ is EVERYTHING!

Maybe that's why they're ahead of us in everything

You mean they wait until someone else has spent everything into R&D and then copy it ?

reply to post by Symbiot

It is a false assumption that any one person is worth more or contributes more to society than any other.

So, you contributed the same ammount to human society as Nichola Tesla, George Washington, Socrates, Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, etcetera?

Seriously?

This is what you actually believe?

reply to post by NewAgeMan

EQ matters more of course

EQ isn't a real thing.

reply to post by mr10k

IQ tests mean nothing other than how well you can do an IQ test.

And being rich means nothing other than how many numbers are in your bank account...

reply to post by gl300

The above definition of intelligence doesn't negate the validity of multiple intelligences.

Yes, actually, it does.

(second line)

reply to post by defrost

IQ isn't intelligence.

Intelligence Quotient is a measure of intelligence.

Why are we even having this discussion?

IQ tests are not perfect, but they are definitely good indicators of one's general intelligence if they fall within the lower ranges of the spectrum. The tests themselves were first designed to identify kids with learning disabilities, and it breaks down significantly as you get to the above average ranges. For example, Feynmann's IQ was reported to be only 125 while Hawking's IQ is around 160. No serious physicist would suggest that Hawking is brighter than Feynmann, despite IQ testing suggesting exactly that.

reply to post by L8RT8RZ


this and that

Originally posted by defrost
reply to post by IEtherianSoul9

 

IQ isn't intelligence. IQ is a (man-made) construct, an operationalisation (like everything else, even these words). A high IQ isn't an instant-win in life, it can also be (perceived as) a burden. There are much more other factors who have greater impact. Openness to new experiences, emotional regulation, impulse control etc.

That they are critical is undisputed---whether or not they has a greater impact is a matter for scientific investigation. And it depends on what you want to measure as well.

My wild ass guess without data: if one measures 'success' most prominently by income and educational achievement, then IQ would be the largest single component but less than 50%, the sum of other emotional and personality inputs would be larger.

If one measures 'success' by also including measures of personal happiness/contentment, the contribution of IQ would be smaller still.

I would modify these judgments in light of actual data.

So IQ neither is nor was a myth. It's just a (more or usefull) model for certain circumstances. Nothing more and nothing less.

It is also a summary of an empirical phenomenon of the population of homo sapiens.

It could have been different---that performance on various cognitive subtasks is very uncorrelated from one another. This recent research appears to imply (by my reading) that there are really 3 substantially independent principal axes and not one, but the three is still much smaller than the number of types of performance measured.

Why is this so surprising? Nobody doubts the phenomenon in athletics. It's pretty obvious that any male in professional sports will be able to jump higher than me, lift more per body weight than me, run faster than me, throw farther than me, catch better than me, etc, even though these are fairly distinct athletic skills.

Are these subskills all entirely unrelated? No. Athletic recruiters can tell.