sophie

ps418,

when you say intelligence tests, you really mean, how much you know tests. Of course newborn and babies know nothing.

When I speak of intelligence with a modern philosophical twist, I mean how much you can do, and how much you can do with what you know.

Intelligence = how do you do what can be done. This is the modern interpretation. The need for a modern interpretation is evident because of the ontological shift in the definition of knowledge. Perhaps not in the minds of the professional philosophers as yet, but in the heads of the wanna bees folk interpretators.

To further argue the necessity of a seperate category to entail genetic provision and intellectual capabilities we will have to envision the state of the brain of a newborn.

Newborns have capabilities to do things, access to form impressions which I assume is done through change and adopt relations between varions information sources. These provisions of the head must have been provided by genetic readying.

Therefore it may seem your disconnection from the term genetic intelligence may only be due to the connotation of the term intelligence.

God Fearing Atheist

There is no "modern interpretation" of "intelligence". There are, as Jensen puts it, as many definitions as there are psychologists.

Im all for doing away with the term altogether. We should refer to specific intelligences and to g; but not to "intelligence".

See, for example, Sternberg, R.J. & Detterman, D.K. (1986) What is intelligence? Contemporary viewpoints on its nature and definition. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

-GFA

sophie

God Fearing Atheist defends, there is no "modern interpretation" of "intelligence". There are, as Jensen puts it, as many definitions as there are psychologists.

This may be true in some cases. There may be as many ways of describing change as there are types of change but it remains to be seen if there is any ambivalence in the ontology of change. Things only seem to become clearer.


There is no reason to do away with the term altogether since there is every reason to refine the definition of the term or to complete the understanding of the term. I do not believe there are as many philosophical definitions of intelligence as you claim.


Contrarily I think it is necessary for some of us to point out new trends and new knowledge in order to underscore the tiling we find ourselves riding on.

AdamWho

Genetic intelegence in animals manefests itself as instinct.
How does a bird know how to make a nest? Where did this knowledge come from? Is it genetic? If it is genetic how is it hardwired with genes? Is there limits to how much "pre-loaded" knowledge can carried in the genes?

NZAmoeba

yeah, im quite curious to know how instinct occours.

One theory i've just made up myself just now is that the DNA tells the brain what patterns and connections to form during the embryo stage, giving you some kind of knowledge before you get out into the world, such as ideas like breathing... and holding your breath underwater.

there been any studies on this? i'm too lazy to look it up myself

echidna

I'm not sure that holding your breath underwater is actually instinctual, but I could be wrong, it's been known to happen. Nonetheless I've mentioned before that one of the ones I find fascinating in its simplicity, is the way babies somehow "know" (or at least learn exceedingly quickly) to look at the eyes of their parent, or brother or dog or cat for that matter. It would seem that there is an automatic response to move their own eyes towards the eye-like pattern of another creature.

echidna

Don't ask me to find the references, but IIRC 70% would be towards the high end of estimates. I seem to recall 50% being the more commonly accepted figure. Bear in mind that advocates of stronger genetic influence over IQ, must account for the Flynn Effect, that national IQ's steadily increase by 3 percentage points every decade, a fairly large & rapid shift which can only be caused by environmental factors.I don't think anyone's proposing such a rapid improvement in our gene pool.

Additionally, there are fairly clear correlations between lower IQ's and higher birth rates. Once again, if IQ were mainly genetic, then this would contribute a very large downward pressure on average national IQ. But once again this is confounded by the Flynn Effect, which sees national IQ's on the increase.

Interestingly IIRC neither Hernstein or Murray could account for the Flynn Effect in the Bell Curve.

ps418

Yes, we are talking about entirely different things. If I understand you correctly, you are thinking of "genetic intelligence" as cognitive abilities that are not learned, for instance those that are apparent at birth. You can call this intelligence if you wish, but this is not what I mean by "intelligence." And my point still stands. Every ability, even those that are apparent at birth, are subject to both genetic and environmental influences. Genes are always expressed in an environment. In that sense, there is no such thing as "genetic intelligence," in the sense of genes acting independently of environmental influences.

That depends completely on what age group you are considering. An adult broad heritability of 0.7 is not at all at the high end. The 0.5 represents a mean heritability of all studies taken together, most of which are on children. This is important because it is well-established that h2 increases with age. Studies of adult samples very consistently yield heritability estimates around 0.7 or so. From the APA Task Force report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns:

The Flynn Effect does not in any way contradict the high heritability of IQ. The only hypothesis that the Flynn effect would potentially contradict is the hypothesis that IQ is completely genetically determined and not at all subject to environmental influence, which is not a hypothesis that anyone takes seriously. Its precisely analogous to the population increase in height and prevalence of myopia over time, both of which have very high heritability. To return to the APA report:

Patrick

God Fearing Atheist

What Patrick said.

Note that .75 was for MZ twins during preadolesence, and the .80 was for full adults.

You may have seen the h^2 figures for other sorts of siblings during childhood, which are, obviously, much lower.

-GFA

God Fearing Atheist

For more on the heritabily of IQ:

Bouchard T. J.. & McGue M. (1981) Familial studies of intelligence: A review. Science, 212: 1055-1059

Bouchard, T.J, et al (1990) Sources of human psychological difference: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science, 250: 223-228.

Loehlin, J.C., et al (1989) Modeling IQ change: Evidence from the Texas Adoption Project. Child Development, 60 (4): 993-1004.

Plomin R., et al (2001) Why are children in the same family so different? Nonshared environment a decade later. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 46: 225-233.

And the contraversial Burt C. (1966) The genetic determination of differences in intelligence: A study of monozygotic twins reared together and apart. British Journal of Psychology, 57: 137-153.

One of Burt's biographers claimed he fudged some of his numbers, but recently, it seems he has been vindicated.

-GFA