Word: iq
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Warning: The following movie may insult your positive IQ so severely that the result could well be permanent brain damage. Watch at your own risk. If you pay money to see this film, I will feel sorry...
Criminologists acted rashly in the 1930s, the authors say, by deciding to ignore low IQ as a significant factor in crime. "For four decades," they write, "large bodies of evidence have consistently shown about a ten-point gap between the average offender and nonoffender in Great Britain and in the U.S." Though the authors make much of this difference, it may mean only that low-IQ criminals tend to get caught more often than their smarter colleagues. But for the authors, the important finding is that low IQ is associated with a particular kind of crime: impulsive acts with...
Leon Kamin, a Princeton psychologist who has long opposed Herrnstein in the IQ debate, thinks the Wilson-Herrnstein material is based on unsound studies. "Fashions change in the social sciences," he says. "Sometimes the environmentalists are in the saddle, so they will look at fatally flawed data and say, 'Look, these suggest an environmental interpretation,' and other times the hereditarians are in the saddle and say, 'Look, these suggest a genetic interpretation.' The data are fundamentally ambiguous, and, in fact, scientists have no basis to come to any conclusions with data of this sort...
Others in the field are more impressed by Wilson and Herrnstein. Dr. Frank Elliott, emeritus professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, though a bit dubious about the conclusions on IQ, says of the authors, "Theirs is the philosophy of this subject which is going to stand. Most of the work done on criminality by sociologists never mentions heredity. For either political or philosophical reasons, they don't like the feeling that your temperament or your personality is in any way influenced by heredity. That's nonsense...
...want to be a doctor, a surgeon," he says, "but I'll probably have to wait until I'm 21 before they'll let me practice." The only child of Thai immigrants, he was reading at age two (before he could talk), at four scored 159 on an IQ test (140 is generally considered genius level), also at four taught his chemical engineer father BASIC computer language (are you keeping up with all this?) and finished high school at eight. His mother, who started reading to him during the pregnancy, devotes herself full time to his education, driving...