IQ DIFFERENCES AND THE BRAIN

I suppose I rattle on rather a lot about IQ but the Left are so determined to ignore it that I feel a need to give countervailing attention to it. And as a much-published psychometrician myself I am in a good position to do so.

What no Leftist seems to want to believe is that IQ has a physical basis -- that smart people are born with better brains and there is not much you can do about it. Leftists hate that story because to them all the ills of society are due to things like "poverty" and it is only the deeds of a few evil people at the top who keep poor people in poverty. That a lot of poverty is due to the foolish decisions of the poor people concerned just cannot be allowed.

Anyway, there are quite a lot of brain differences that correlate with IQ but most of them require complicated instrumentation to detect. There is one, however, that can be examined very easily by anyone -- head size. People with bigger heads TEND (there are exceptions) to be smarter. The more grey matter you have, the smarter you are. Not really surprising but still anathema to the Left.

There is a research paper here which estimates that in the general population brain size (not quite the same as head size but closely related) correlates .50 with general intelligence. A correlation of .50 is quite huge in almost any study of human beings. Medical researchers would kill for a correlation like that. And the research was carried out by Phil Vernon -- one of the grand old men of psychometrics. And it was reported in one of the most widely cited journals in psychology. So even Leftists would find that hard to piss on. But the fact that Vernon studies such subjects at all makes him a "Fascist", of course.

Incidentally, autistic people, who very often have great mental abilities combined with poor social skills, also tend to have big heads and autism is an absolute plague in Silicon Valley, where you have to be REALLY smart to get anywhere. Anybody who has tried coding in "C" will know that. So it seems that, as with so many other things, you can overdo brain size too. When big-brained people in Silicon Valley mate they tend to have kids with even bigger brains and the result is a disaster. What seems to happen, as far as I can see, is that an extra large cerebral cortex firing into the rest of the brain overloads important centres in the rest of the brain. So the withdrawal that is typical of autistics is in fact an attempt to reduce stimulation that is already too great.

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