Intelligence

[aquarius]

I always emphasise balance. Nature relies on nurture and vice versa.

Is this true?

[Jim Necroslaughter]

I always emphasise balance. Nature relies on nurture and vice versa.

Is this true?

Yes, I think so.

[Dinaric Leather]

Molestation can destroy a child when his/her family is apathetic to it, and the child realizes he is of no worth to them. This could be difficult to overcome in adulthood. A person in this position might have a high IQ, or artistic ability and still be unable to function at an average level.

I think this is bullshit, smart is smart. Childhood trauma might change a persons view of the world or even make them a little neurotic but they will still be just as smart or artistic as they would be if no trauma occured. The only thing that can truly damage a persons intelligence is brain damage, things like child abuse and poverty are just "bumps in the road" so to speak.

[aquarius]

Molestation can destroy a child when his/her family is apathetic to it, and the child realizes he is of no worth to them. This could be difficult to overcome in adulthood. A person in this position might have a high IQ, or artistic ability and still be unable to function at an average level.

I think this is bullshit, smart is smart. Childhood trauma might change a persons view of the world or even make them a little neurotic but they will still be just as smart or artistic as they would be if no trauma occured. The only thing that can truly damage a persons intelligence is brain damage, things like child abuse and poverty are just "bumps in the road" so to speak.

No rule without exceptions can apply to most things.

[BillHopkins]

Obviously a major portion of nurture is non-brain parts of the body. Neural and vascular health, lipids, things that can help the brain function correctly. All the rest is context: what good is any literature to a successful hunter-gatherer society? This is why Flynn Effect maxes out at a 4-6 point IQ boost; thus nurture can be low as about 7% relevant, with heredity taking the lion's share for determing IQ. Overemphasis on nurture is utterly dismal thinking rooted in moronic feelings of guilt about human inequality.

How, then, do you explain the difference between hunter-gatherer homo sapiens and homo sapiens who have civilisation? We are not genetically different from our stone-age ancestors whose technical knowledge maxed out with the use of spears, rocks and sticks, but we have sent members of our tribe to other celestial bodies. If the genes are the same, then necessarily this means the advancement is due to environmental factors.

We are unique as a species. Other animals and even primates simply have cognitive capities that fit with their habitats and which allow them to function successfully in them, but nothing more. This is the standard understanding of evolution of some trait: it evolves to fit the environment which is static. Human beings, on ther other hand, modify their habitats to scaffold their cognitive abilities, lifting them to new heights. Rich developmental environments, technology, calculators, language, written language (to store longer thoughts and to pass down knowledge so that it deosn't need to be discovered again from scratch), peer-review, thinking tools like induction and deduction... are all cultural scaffolding on cognition.

Now I'm not sure about the role of 'nature vs nurture' in individuals living at one time in rich cognitive environments... but i just want to bring up the important point that environment potentially means a great deal with it comes to the mental capacities of human beings.

I Know there are extensive studies been done with identical twins who have been seperated since birth (i.e. genes are the same but environment is variable). I can't remember the specifics but the general concensus was that genetics was more than a 50 per cent factor.

[scourge]

Yes we have changed since the Paleolithic, but not much since the Neolithic.

then necessarily this means the advancement is due to environmental factors

If the passage of time and experimentation are parts of the  whole of environmental then yes. However, there is a difference between a million monkeys eventually typing out Shakespeare and conscious human mastery over the course of time. Yeah, it's that genetics thing.

[BillHopkins]

Yes we have changed since the Paleolithic, but not much since the Neolithic.

then necessarily this means the advancement is due to environmental factors

If the passage of time and experimentation are parts of the  whole of environmental then yes. However, there is a difference between a million monkeys eventually typing out Shakespeare and conscious human mastery over the course of time. Yeah, it's that genetics thing.

But the genetic difference is not captured by the concept of 'IQ', at least not not the essence of the difference. It has to do with the capacity to learn and be influenced by the environment in our cognitive development. I.e. the genetic difference between other primates and humans is bound up in hardware than enables us to take on better software. The hardware is genetic, the software is not. This hardware will be: (1) grammatical language, and (2) the capacity to imitate others. Once you have language and the capacity to imitate other people's behaviour (imitation is a very sophisticated cognitive task as cognitive science has shown), then a whole new world is opened up. You can learn logic, maths, philosophy, reasoning strategies, religion, etc. And you can modify what was handed down to you. This was the start of cultural evolution. Primates have no cultural evolution. Humans do. This is not due not to humans have 'more IQ' than primates. Cultural evolution and higher IQ are both of products of something more fundamental that we do not share with other primates.

The genetic difference between us and other primates isn't fundamentally to do with IQ. It is to do with adaptations that allow humans to be more developmentally flexible, to upload new cognitive software and to be open to the cognitive scaffolding that has been responsible for homo sapiens' massively progressed culture compared with other primates. A million monkeys can only come up with shakespear by hit and miss. Humans can come up with Macbeth because we can imitate others and make slight modifications at every step of the way (shakespear would have been very familiar with Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and enlglish tales, after all)

Of coures, we have bigger brains, but this is not to be put down to something as blunt as 'iq'. It is to be put down to capacities for learning 'new tricks'. This, in turn increases what is measured by 'IQ'. Of course, two people running the same cognitive software can have different IQ measures, put down to a difference between them in processing power of the brain. But two people can also have different software (thinking tools) and the same processing power, and thus in this case their different IQs will *not be due to genetic differences*.

I hope i'm making this clear

[scourge]

Yes. There isn't much disagreement just a need for clarity. I look at it like this. A newborn may perfectly fail any IQ test but that doesn't mean it has no intelligence like an inanimate object. So its intelligence potential comes from somewhere which is heredity. Hardware is a fine analogy. Likewise for software which is that potential's development over the course of time in some given environs.

A lot of the disagreement we may encounter is to what degree nature and nurture each respectively result in intelligence. None of the naturists are saying newborns come fully developed with an end of lifecycle stages finality. Many of the nurturists have a history of promoting Blank Slatism however. However, they haven't explained why a Congo gorilla or perhaps a parrot has yet to solve problems as well as a Congo guerilla or perhaps any random villager. They all have had access to the same resources since prehistory.

[BillHopkins]

I always emphasise balance. Nature relies on nurture and vice versa.

Is this true?

Yes

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/108/1/What_is_innateness.pdf

[BillHopkins]

Yes. There isn't much disagreement just a need for clarity. I look at it like this. A newborn may perfectly fail any IQ test but that doesn't mean it has no intelligence like an inanimate object. So its intelligence potential comes from somewhere which is heredity. Hardware is a fine analogy. Likewise for software which is that potential's development over the course of time in some given environs.

A lot of the disagreement we may encounter is to what degree nature and nurture each respectively result in intelligence. None of the naturists are saying newborns come fully developed with an end of lifecycle stages finality. Many of the nurturists have a history of promoting Blank Slatism however. However, they haven't explained why a Congo gorilla or perhaps a parrot has yet to solve problems as well as a Congo guerilla or perhaps any random villager. They all have had access to the same resources since prehistory.

Ah but similarly 'nativists' can't exactly explain why modern humans can solve problems exponentiallity better than a random homo sapien in a scavaging band, 120,000 years in east africa. Genetics hasn't changed there (or at least not substantially)!

The reality of such a large behavioural variation between two groups (across time) of the same species indicates that the development of individuals in that species is massively plastic. In other words environmental variation means a fucking great deal to the potential of the same cognitive hardware, no?! Humans are niche constructors. They change their environment to change their development, which in turn increases their adaptive fit with their environment. No other species does the first step (changing environment to change individua development) to a level comparatively significant to that of humans. This means something!

Modern humans squeeze 1000 times more juice (at least on a utilitarian plane) from the same orange than humans 10,000 years ago, to put it crudely.