Re: Healthy Brains/was Re: Life Expectancy

Timothy Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Mon, 14 Jun 1999 21:36:56 +1000

I said
>>several researchers believe that IQ simply reflects brain "health"
>>- that IQ 140 means nothing wrong, and less than
>>that is the sum of all things that have not gone wrong.
Daniel Ust asked
> Which researchers believe this? And, much more importantly, why?

OK.

At the 1997 ISSID (international society for the study of individual differences conference in Aarhus, Denmark), Arthur Jensen and others were discussing the genetics of intelligence, and Jeffrey Gray suggested that they are likely to look like a scree-plot (a term from factor analysis which describes the relative importance of latent variables) which is very flat

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i.e., you need many many genes to explain very much of the variance. these genes, then will be for all sorts of "unintelligent" things like insulin control, blood carrying capacity, APO E4, etc etc etc. In this sense, a bright person has more than average numbers of the more efficient allelles at each of these low-level function loci.