I’m interviewed in episode 2 of this podcast. ABOUT THE DECODING GENIUS PODCAST What exactly is a Genius? Are they born that way or can you become a genius? The world is now so interconnected that a single genius, whether a young Aussie creating mind-controlled machines or a ten year old building a high tech …
David Lubinski sent me this comprehensive review of 100 years of research on intellectual precocity. Someone has already posted an un-gated copy online at the link below. Many of the stunning SMPY graphs summarizing their longitudinal (30+ year) study of a population of gifted individuals (including one group measured at the 1 in 10,000 ability …
James Miller interviews Greg Cochran on a variety of topics. Some comments on the early part of the interview (you might need to listen to it to make sense of what I write below): 1. The prediction I’ve made about the consequences of additive genetic variance in intelligence is not that we’ll be able to …
The year 2015 may go down in history for a lot of things. Just this December saw a number of firsts: A movie about armed conflict among celestial bodies breaks all records, a rocket delivers a payload of satellites and returns back to Earth vertically, not to mention the politics of the election cycle. But …
The September issue of Scientific American is about human evolution. It includes articles by Frans de Waal, Gary Stix, John Hawks, and others. And this one by Ian Tattersall, paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History. His research is on hominins and lemurs. If I Had a Hammer A radical new take on human …
The article excerpted below, in the science magazine Nautilus, is an introduction to certain ideas from my paper On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits. Super-Intelligent Humans Are Coming (Nautilus, special issue: Genius) Genetic engineering will one day create the smartest humans who have ever lived. Lev Landau, a Nobelist and one of …
Ever since I published my previous article on the average IQ of students by college major, I’ve received several requests to analyze the correlation between IQ and religiosity. Below, I’ve written up an analysis of the existing published literature on the topic. I hope this serves as a springboard for future conversation on the topic …
This paper is based on talks I’ve given in the last few years. See here and here for video. Although there isn’t much that hasn’t already appeared in the talks or on this blog (other than some Compressed Sensing results for the nonlinear case) it’s nice to have it in one place. The references are …
I came across this nice discussion at LessWrong which is similar to my old post Success vs Ability. The illustration below shows why even a strong predictor of outcome is seldom able to pick out the very top performer: e.g., taller people are on average better at basketball, but the best player in the world is …
A natural place to look for alleles of large effect are the otherwise conserved (from mouse through chimp) variants that are different in humans. See The Genetics of Humanness and The Essential Difference. My guess (without checking the paper to see if they report it) is that test-retest correlation for chimps is well below the …
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Slides for a brief introduction to my panel at the University of Chicago Conference on Genetics and Behavior later this week. See also One hundred thousand brains. Some relevant comments, from an essay by David Deutsch: It is uncontroversial that the human brain has capabilities that are, in some respects, far superior to those of …
There has long been a debate in the autism community as to whether autism is a properly speaking a “disorder” or whether being “on the spectrum” is merely another way of existing in the world with its own drawbacks and benefits. In truth the disagreement probably depends on whether we are talking about severe ASD …
The NYTimes magazine describes efforts to resurrect extinct species such as mammoths. Let’s suppose this is possible. Perhaps it will even be possible with Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Erectus and other pre-modern human types. Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine thousands of Neanderthals on some privately held land in Siberia, perhaps the secret project of a reclusive …
This is video of a talk given to cognitive scientists about a year ago (slides). The original video had poor sound quality, but I think I’ve improved it using Google’s video editing tool. I found that the earlier version was OK if you used headphones, but I think they are not necessary for this one. …
This figure is from the Supplement (p.62) of a recent Nature paper describing a high quality genome sequence obtained from the toe of a female Neanderthal who lived in the Altai mountains in Siberia. Interestingly, copy number variation at 16p11.2 is one of the structural variants identified in a recent deCODE study as related to …
I am curious about what serious chess players think of Elo scores across generations — is there a Flynn Effect? Current world champ Magnus Carlsen has the highest score of all time. It seems possible that due to computer training today’s players are much better than those of the past — we’ll never know how …