Almost every student who attends a decent high school will be exposed to Special Relativity. Their science/physics teacher may not really understand it very well, may do a terrible job trying to explain it. But the kid will have to read a textbook discussion and (in the internet age) can easily find more with a …
Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, in conversation with Jordan Peterson. I wrote about McGilchrist in 2012: Intuition and the two brains. Albert Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have …
Years ago I predicted that: 1. Cognitive ability would turn out to be influenced by many thousands of genetic variants, each of small effect. 2. With large enough sample size we would detect these variants and eventually construct genomic predictors. The Nature Genetics paper (below) from the SSGAC collaboration takes a significant step in that …
I’ve just started watching this so I can’t give you an evaluation of the whole conversation. Looks promising — they jump right in on topics like sex differences, political correctness, internet flame wars, the Trump candidacy, social media, … (I’m skipping the Super Bowl, by the way. I stopped watching the NFL and NBA years …
These researchers, from Stanford, Northwestern, and the University of Florida, analyze a large population of twins and siblings (~24k twins and ~300k children in total, born 1994-2002 in Florida). They find no evidence of SES (Socio-Economic Status) moderation of genetic influence on test scores (i.e., cognitive ability). The figure above shows the usual pattern of lower pairwise …
What is the dominant causal mechanism for the results shown above? Is it that better family environments experienced by affluent children make them more likely to invent later in life? Is it that higher income fathers tend to pass on better genes (e.g., for cognitive ability) to their children? Obviously the explanation has important implications …
Slate Star Codex has a new post entitled Against Individual IQ Worries. I write a lot about the importance of IQ research, and I try to debunk pseudoscientific claims that IQ “isn’t real” or “doesn’t matter” or “just shows how well you do on a test”. IQ is one of the best-studied ideas in psychology, one …
From the web site of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR): a summary of the recent debate involving Charles Murray, Sam Harris, Richard Nisbett, Eric Turkheimer, Paige Harden, Razib Khan, Bo and Ben Winegard, Brian Boutwell, Todd Shackelford, Richard Haier, and a cast of thousands! ISIR is the main scientific society for researchers of …
The Nature Genetics paper below made a big splash in today’s NYTimes: In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence. The picture above is of a UK Biobank storage facility for blood (DNA) samples. The results are not especially surprising to people who have been following the subject, but this is the largest …
Almost everything we hear from the media these days is simply motivated reasoning — i.e., partisan nonsense. Wikipedia: …When people form and cling to false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence, the phenomenon is labeled “motivated reasoning”. In other words, “rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information …
Male brains exhibit larger variance across all morphological measures. (Don’t tell Larry Summers! ;-) Note, as far as I can tell the authors don’t normalize the SD by mean value for each gender to obtain the typical percentage fluctuation (a dimensionless quantity). The male brain is about 10% larger and each of the subregions is …
Perverse Incentives and Replication in Science Here’s a depressing but all too common pattern in scientific research: 1. Study reports results which reinforce the dominant, politically correct, narrative. 2. Study is widely cited in other academic work, lionized in the popular press, and used to advance real world agendas. 3. Study fails to replicate, but …
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 …
CNVs (structural genomic variants) associated with increased autism and schizo risk are found to depress cognitive function in carriers who do not present for either condition. There are also effects on physical brain structure. This is the future of neuroscience: read out the genome and look for the direct effect on phenotype. Assuming the results …
This is consistent with my experience as a parent and educator: my guess is that number sense is a cognitive module, at least somewhat distinct from general intelligence, and somewhat hardwired. Number sense in infancy predicts mathematical abilities in childhood (PNAS) Abstract: Human infants in the first year of life possess an intuitive sense of …