Malcolm Gladwell has published an excellent article on IQ and race in the New Yorker. It’s almost enough to get me to forgive the New Yorker for the Darkness in El Dorado debacle. Here’s a taste of what Gladwell has to say:
When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early [...]

Big Don made a point that I needed to respond to at length, so I’ve broken out of the comments section. This is what he said:
Chris, I was merely refuting the point that sub-Saharan Pygmies and Bushmen must have had IQs greater than 54-60 for them to have survived. Not so. Rats and cockroaches, however [...]

An interesting post at physorg.com on recent work by University of Utah scientists Henry Harpending and Gregory M. Cochran, who have previously argued that the high IQs of Ashkenazi Jews can be attributed to genetic selection. Their more recent work suggests that 7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, recent evolution.
The quotes Cochran [...]

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 [...]

COSMOS magazine has announced its list of the ten best young scientists from Australia. It’s a wonderful idea. As editor Wilson da Silva says, “Australia produces some of the finest scientists in the world, and many of them show exceptional talent early in their careers.” It would be nice if these young scientists received a [...]

A couple of remarkable flying machines. At White Sands, the solar powered Zephyr has just set a new world record for unmanned continuous powered flight. And in Germany, they’ve demonstrated a 200 kph winged jetpack, the Gryphon, which can carry a pilot, oxygen, and 20kg of gear.
Now, if we could just combine these and get [...]

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. [...]