weiss@umnstat.UUCP (Robert Weiss) (06/22/87)
-> From: the unknown flamer ->Perhaps you should stop to consider that the "data" you are basing your ->intelligence postings on is based on Cyril Burt's fraud. - From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) -I am well aware of Burt's fraud. You are making a completely unwarranted -assumption here. More recent studies (cited in _The_Mismeasure_Of_Man_) -have turned up the sorts of correlations I describe. Gould's attempt at -refutation *doesn't* challenge the recent data; it depends on a philosophical -criticism of factor analysis. -> From: the unknown flamer -> I also doubt that anyone ->has a satisfactory definition of "intelligence" yet, let alone a method ->for testing it- - From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) -You should learn to pay more attention to what you read. I specified that -the 'intelligence' I was describing was a statistical composite of the -results of standardized acuity tests. Yes, I skipped over the details. There are too many comments to make on these four interesting paragraphs. Here are some thoughts on this. Re: Factor analysis. Gould's attempt includes criticism of the leap of faith required to connect the statistical analysis with the theoretical model of IQ. Does anybody out there in netland know what the actual model is that Factor Analysis postulates? I'll bet that most do not. If requested, I'll _try_ to post it. There is a study being done at U of Minnesota Dept. of Psychology with twin data from Scandanavia. The authors ,(Auke Tellegen possibly?), I think, conclude that IQ is "heritable". No references for this since my source is my memory of a U of Minn Daily newspaper article. Minnesota is supposed to be a hot-bed of heriditarianism. On the other hand, there are plenty of people that are willing to reinterpret their data from a non-heriditarian point of view. I would like to see some more references for this discussion. For example, an entertaining, readable and good article on the Nature-Nurture controversy is: Kempthorne, Oscar (1978). Logical, Epistemological, and Statistical Aspects of Nature-Nurture Data Interpretation. Biometrics 34, 1-23. Kempthorne makes short shrift of BOTH sides of the controversy currently going on in sci.bio! Quotes: We can then, surely, construct a battery of test. We can apply these tests to a group of individuals, e.q., of age 8, and we can construct from the battery an index of ability, which is standardized to give results which are like a random sample from a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. What name we give to this standardized score is essentially arbitrary. ... It is clear, I [Kempthorne] suggest, that the mental testing discipline overstepped reasonable bounds in labelling results of the tests it developed as intelligence scores. ... a huge array of mental abilities which humanity needs and values and puts under the general rubric of "intelligence" which do not appear in the batteries that the "intelligence-testers" use. The reification of the IQ score that has taken place is unfortunate ... [reification is a word that Gould used, too, I [Weiss] believe] But there is another side of the coin which Jensen and others state. The measurement of various aspects of mental ability is critical for a human society. The anti-hereditarians, I [Kempthorne] suggest, destroy their case by taking illogical steps as well as ignoring "facts" they know well. END-OF-QUOTES Can anybody pass along some useful (literature) references for the study of IQ, what it supposedly means, and how to measure it? I'd especially like theoretical papers since I was thinking about trying to construct a simple world where some measurement 'G' behaves the way psychometricians want IQ to behave, and then figuring out how the simple world could be (or couldn't be) translated to our complex real world. Thanks, Robert Weiss umnstat!weiss@umn-cs.ARPA ihnp4!umn-cs!umnstat!weiss
hes@ecsvax.UUCP (Henry Schaffer) (06/22/87)
In article <338@umnstat.UUCP>, weiss@umnstat.UUCP (Robert Weiss) writes: ... much deleted > > There is a study being done at U of Minnesota Dept. of Psychology > with twin data from Scandanavia. The authors ,(Auke Tellegen possibly?), I > think, conclude that IQ is "heritable". No references for this since my > source is my memory of a U of Minn Daily newspaper article. Minnesota > is supposed to be a hot-bed of heriditarianism. On the other hand, > there are plenty of people that are willing to reinterpret their data > from a non-heriditarian point of view. ... much more deleted Heritability can take on values 0-1 inclusive (or the equivalent in percentages.) A value as low as 0.01 is very hard to measure and distinguish from 0, even in experimental organisms in well controlled environmental conditions. In humans - forget about it! To say a trait is not heritable is to claim that the heritability value is 0. (Make sure you understand what I'm saying the the previous sentence - I`m not talking about "an important hereditary component, or ...".) Therefore a claim that something is not heritable is seldom believable (because it is very hard to prove that something is exactly 0 and not .01 or .001, ...) and being told that something "is heritable" is essentially meaningless without the value, or at least a qualifier of some sort, e.g., "highly", "moderately", or whatever. I generally get both the hereditarians and the non-hereditarians angry at me. As a scientist, this suits me fine. As a scientist and a person I am very unhappy with the twisting of science to serve social and philosophical goals (and especially when those goals are ones which I think are evil.) (This could be the start of a very long discussion on whether one should refuse to work in the area of heritability because the results {could | might} be misused - but this is long enough already.) > > > Can anybody pass along some useful (literature) references for the > study of IQ, what it supposedly means, and how to measure it? I'd > especially like theoretical papers since I was thinking about trying to > construct a simple world where some measurement 'G' behaves the way > psychometricians want IQ to behave, and then figuring out how the simple > world could be (or couldn't be) translated to our complex real world. > > Thanks, > > Robert Weiss > umnstat!weiss@umn-cs.ARPA > ihnp4!umn-cs!umnstat!weiss The literature I know is in genetics, rather than in psychology - but what you are asking for is not elementary. A good intro book is Quantitative Genetics by D. S. Falconer, 2nd ed, but to read it one needs a decent statistics background - especially including topics (usually called "experimental statistics") such as variance components, and the linear model. This just covers the way to measure the heritability of traits - and not the pyschology of IQ, ... --henry schaffer n c state univ