The introduction of IQ tests has always seemed to be one of the best examples of the great political and social harm that can be done by the mind-boggling arrogance of scientists who think that they can sum up human abilities in a single number.

From a Letter to Nature (3/12/09 issue) by David Colquoun, Department of Pharmacology, University College London

Also, I don’t quite see your problems with “race” and “IQ”. Different folks’ ancestors lived in different parts of the world with different tribal setups, resulting in different selection pressures. And the idea of general intelligence, which IQ is supposed to measure, is fairly well supported. Really, it’d be a miracle if ancestral origin had 0 correlation with intellectual capacity.

The important thing right now is to 1) not talk about race and IQ and 2) if the subject comes up, tell them we’re not sure if they’re related, but that their actions as individuals will affect their future a hell of a lot more than whether people with their racial characteristics tend to do slightly better or slightly worse on average.

I don’t think Niklaus was attempting to set a “value”, but rather merely referring to the average.

32°F was originally defined as that temperature at which pure Water at Standard Pressure would freeze. There are more accurate means of determining that temperature point now, so that if the universal constants that govern molecular interactions changed, we would see the freezing point change on the modern Fahrenheit scale. That is, if we could survive in the new environment.

Depends on your definition of “should” doesn’t it? Should water freeze at 32 degrees? Or would that just be comparing a particular molecule of H2O to others which have frozen in the past?

My concern is that these two constructs, as used in most scientific research, are hopelessly vague.

On the streets people use all kinds of heuristics to make use of “race,” none of it meaningfully scientific. In my recent post on the East St. Louis race riot, for example, I freely referred to “race,” “whites” and “blacks.” I didn’t mean to suggest anything scientific–I do not believe that it is any more meaningful to group people by skin color than by hair color or eye color. In the context of social strife, however, many people take skin color as indicative of an underlying reality. The appearance becomes reality through ignorance.

“Focusing on race and IQ is a bad idea simply because both are artificial concepts”

Can you come up with an example of a non-artificial concept? Every idea is an artifice of the mind, based on preconceptions, environment, and learning. Any concept is the product of artifice with a range of disputable definitions, like “life” or “dirt”.

[IQ] “is simply a ration of how intelligent you are to how intelligent you should be at you particular age.”

“Should”? It is a measure of how well one does on a test compared to others in the same age group. There is no preset “should” value.

Ask any Asian about race. It is not about skin color, but about the height of the bridge of the nose and the set of the eyes. An Asian newly in America has trouble telling blacks from whites, but no problem distinguishing a Han from a Manchu from a Mongol from a Hui from a Zhuang from …