A notice caught my eye calling for general practitioners to sit on the BreastScreen Queensland State Accreditation Committee. The BreastScreen program is the national mammogram screening program and is available to all Australian women between the ages of fifty and seventy (or younger in some circumstances) and screens around 1,600,000 women every year. In 2004, [...]

Previously, I laid into James Watson for his comments on intelligence. But there is a greater spectre than Watson out there. Watson, for all his faults, at least can be said to have been bemoaning the state of affairs he was describing and argued against discrimination (although it’s hard to see how the world should [...]

I had thought we had got past needing to write about race and IQ thirty years ago. Apparently not. There has been an surge of commentary recently to the effect that IQ is highly racially determined, and that this is a genetic phenomenon. The most infamous was James D. Watson’s career-ending interview in the Sunday [...]

In the previous installment, we saw that a study published in Science was poorly reported in the mass media. One of the most egregious errors was the attempt to make a small IQ difference look big. In this case, the source of the error was not just mass media reporters but Science itself, or to [...]

From The Independent:
Using the IQ tests taken from the military records of 241,310 Norwegian conscripts, the scientists have found that eldest siblings are, on average, significantly “more intelligent” than second-borns. It may not seem like much, but 2.3 points on the IQ scale – the average difference between first and second siblings – could be [...]

One might expect that I would be in full agreement with Melvin Jules Bukiet’s essay “Wonder Bread” in American Scholar. Bukiet takes on the current crop of Brooklyn-based writers who use fantastical elements in their fiction to achieve a certain style of happy resolution. Among these writers he includes Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole [...]

In keeping with my current fixation on bad logic from professional thinkers, I was delighted to find Robin Hanson of George Mason University on Cato Unbound running some excruciatingly poor arguments about public health spending. He’s another associate professor, like Jonathan Haidt, which makes me wonder if there is a certain pattern developing here. [...]

The Edge, which normally contains exceptionally interesting and well-reasoned argument, has posted a piece of intellectual tripe of such cognitive incompetence that one wonders how author Jonathan Haidt thinks his way out of bed in the morning.

Watching the footy tonight I was privileged to view the latest public advertising campaign from our federal government. The campaign is for the new NetAlert program to protect children from online stalkers and other e-criminals. The main plank of the $189 million NetAlert campaign is an internet content filtering program. Now, protecting children from online [...]

Evolutionary psychology. It is one of the most fascinating fields in science right now. I love it. I also hate it because it lends itself to terrible articles like “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature” by Allan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa in Psychology Today. I know, I know. It’s only Psychology Today, not a [...]