Tuesday, 29 July 2014

Through the ages... the difference between real understanding, and examinations or tests

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* Real understanding: to have mastered and be able to use the relevant knowledge and concepts. Four generations ago: to be able to use r...
Wednesday, 23 July 2014

What signs should we look for in monitoring mutation accumulation? Signs of de-differentiation/ loss of adaptations - especially in social and sexual functioning

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* I have been thinking about the expected effect of mutation accumulation - and I think there would be  de-differentiation/ loss of special...

Modern England as Mouse Utopia?

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* http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/the-demise-of-mouse-utopia.html If we look at the Mouse Utopia experiment and try...

Review of Dancing with a Ghost by Robert Ross

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* http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/review-of-dancing-with-ghost-exploring.html *
Tuesday, 22 July 2014

Review of The Son also Rises by Gregory Clark

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* http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/a-brief-and-preliminary-review-of-son.html *
Friday, 18 July 2014

The demise of 'Mouse Utopia' reinterpreted as mutation accumulation by Michael A Woodley

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* The so-called Mouse Utopia experiment was conducted from 1968 by John B Calhoun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun The ide...
Thursday, 17 July 2014

Convergent evidence on child mortality rates in hunter gatherer and historical societies - consistent with mutation accumulation being a mechanism of the decline in intelligence since the industrial revolution

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* I previously estimated that something like 2/3 to 3/4 of offspring failed to survive in historical times - and that this was the princip...
Tuesday, 15 July 2014

The lop-sided genius summarized

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* The typical genius is of: 1. Very high intelligence, and 2. This very high intelligence is channelled into a specific ability, and ...

How intelligent does a genius need to be? Relatively and absolutely

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* The main point is that - in order to make the creative breakthroughs which define genius - a genius needs to be much more relatively int...
Monday, 14 July 2014

The highly intelligent Normans?

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* Like JRR Tolkien I have a kind of prejudice against the Normans for their near complete obliteration of high Anglo Saxon culture, in par...
Thursday, 3 July 2014

Conceptual notes on brain size and intelligence

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* 1. There is a broad correlation between brain size and intelligence - as a brain must be of a certain size to have a certain complexity....
Tuesday, 1 July 2014

The relationship between Intelligence (IQ) and Personality traits: Intelligence is Primary - Personality is Secondary

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* Historically, Intelligence was the first and most powerfully predictive variable of individual differences. Personality came later - an...
Monday, 30 June 2014

What proportion of offspring survived in historical times? - with reference to mutation accumulation

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* The paper referenced here:     Yann Leseque et al. A Resolution of the Mutation Load Paradox in Humans. Genetics 2012; 191: 1321-1330 ...

Population expanision in England with respect to mutation accumulation

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* When the Black Death (c 1380) halved the population of England, the deaths were disproportionately among the poorest (i.e. apparently ...

A comment on the personality trait of Openness (and Personality in general)

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* Personality is supposed to be independent of intelligence - Personality is a separate explanatory variable which can be seen after Intel...
Thursday, 26 June 2014

The genius as a 'medium': channeling external influences

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* (What follows goes outwith science.) Pretty much all the geniuses I have heard of and who have expressed an opinion seem to say (in on...
Tuesday, 24 June 2014

The Lop-sided genius - mutations, channelling K, and group selection

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* The idea of Life History (LH) is that organisms tend to have a default 'r' strategy of fast growth and sexual maturation leading...
Wednesday, 18 June 2014

Learning to Parrot - modern intelligence as a "Chinese Room" thought experiment

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* Suppose that I'm locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing...[but] to me, Chinese writing is just so many meaningl...
Tuesday, 17 June 2014

So, you think you are in favour of eugenics? Do you know the implications?

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* Current information on the rate of mutation and the fraction of sites in the genome that are subject to selection suggests that each hum...
Monday, 16 June 2014

Could the Flynn effect be an invalid artefact? Yes - if IQ tests are no better than any other type of exam at tracking long-term changes in cognitive ability

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* Supposing we just accept that IQ tests are no better at measuring long term change in abilities than any other type of examination? Th...
Friday, 13 June 2014

Possible Dysgenic Trends in Simple Visual Reaction Time Performance in the Scottish Twenty-07 Cohort

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* Michael A. Woodley, Guy Madison, Bruce G. Charlton. Possible Dysgenic Trends in Simple Visual Reaction Time Performance in the Scottish ...
Thursday, 5 June 2014

The inevitability of significant dysgenic change - the impossibility (both practical and moral) of a planned eugenic solution

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* http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/realistically-accepting-consequences-of.html *
Thursday, 29 May 2014

The year I lost eidetic memory was the year I became creative

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* I was always very good at exams - the best in my non-selective school - heavily reliant on a strong eidetic/ literal/ photographic memor...
Wednesday, 28 May 2014

Maybe very high intelligence IS (nearly-) always creative - although high IQ test scores are not

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* I have been thinking lately that it seems possible that very high intelligence is always (or almost always) creative - despite that peop...