CharlesJones

Writing Down the Jones

Posts Tagged ‘intelligence’

April 9
Posted in Words
Tagged

The Power of Intellectual Curiosity

fail-24I think the greatest gift God gave me is a love of learning.

Most of the time I don’t even care what the subject is (though I do have my limits), I just want to know stuff about it. Where did curling come from? What’s a flashmob? What’s the origin of the word “separate”? I just like to learn stuff.

As a result I’ve spent the last year and a half making a living doing something about as far removed from my college education as could be. I became curious about how people made websites look so good, so I found out (and I’ve still got a lot of finding to do). Intellectual curiosity has had other, more profound effects on my life, and my family.

My wife received the same gift as I did, which means that trips to Borders or Half Price Books are like trips to Six Flags for a lot of people, and Google is our family’s closest friend. With these gifts we’ve made quite a few discoveries that have changed the way we live. And plenty that haven’t, but were just as much fun.

In the early 80′s a child received 8 recommended vaccines. Did you know that today that number is 36? I would bet that you didn’t, unless you saw Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey on Larry King recently. Did you know you can clean (almost) anything in your house with distilled white vinegar? We haven’t bought any cleaning products in months. Did you know Charlie O’Connell played a slacker cop on an early episode of Sliders, a few seasons before becoming Colin?

These tidbits are all great and some are helpful, but the real benefit of intellectual curiosity comes not in changing the way we live, but the way we think. Read more

February 5
Posted in Science
Tagged

Misusing Binet

Alfred Binet: Inventor of Intelligence

Alfred Binet: Inventor of Intelligence

Alfred Binet, a self-taught psychologist, created the scale which is now one of the best known measures of intelligence. In 1904 a French child psychology society began looking into determining which students would qualify for special education, and Binet – who had “published more than 200 books, articles, and reviews in what now would be called experimental, developmental, educational, social, and differential psychology” – responded the government’s appointment of the society to develop a measure by creating his scale.

According to a teacher’s resource provided by Indiana University, Binet made it clear that “intellectual development progressed at variable rates, could be impacted by the environment and was therefore not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be used on children with comparable background.” But his test and scale soon made it into the hands of Henry H. Goddard, an American eugenicist.

Goddard was among many at the time who, like Francis Galton, believed that the best way to raise national averages in health and intelligence would be to prevent the “feeble-minded” and others not up to their standards from reproducing. Methods of included contraception, forced sterilization, and abortion. “Eugenicists claimed IQ tests could quantify innate human ability in a single measurement, despite the objections of the tests’ creator, Alfred Binet.[Wiki]”

The test has now come to be used on a single scale for people from all cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds around the world. The test was never meant to compare even children from the same neighborhood from different economic classes, yet it is being used to compare Aborigines to European aristocrats.

It’s clearly time that a new standard for intellectual measure be developed, the only question is whether the reward will be greater to create it, or prevent it.

February 3
Posted in Education
Tagged

Of Mice and Moms: Inheriting Intelligence

The heritability of intelligence is one of the bigger questions in debates about education and IQ. Some, including those attempting to perpetuate the current educational system, swear that heritability is of negligible importance, and environment makes all the difference. Others swear that environment has almost nothing to do with outcomes. It might not be long before we can declare that both sides are right.

– Mothers can pass along their experiences to their children without even trying, researchers reported in a surprising study on Tuesday that showed baby mice could inherit the benefits of “education” that their mothers received before they became pregnant.

They found that young mice raised in an enriched environment — with toys and other stimulation — passed along the learning benefits to pups they had after they grew up.

The stimulated mothers did not simply have better parenting skills, because the researchers showed pups swapped at birth still learned better if their biological mothers – but not their foster parents – had been raised with the extra toys.

Study: Children inherit mom’s experiences…

So it’s nurture, then nature, in this scenario. An average parent who receives a quality education can pass their acquired brain development on to their children. The children benefit from that without any such education themselves. But there’s one catch:

The changes only lasted one generation, indicating the DNA was not permanently changed. Researchers are learning that DNA function can be altered without changing the genetic code itself.

If this is born out in the lives of humans, and I have no doubt that it is – consider our proficiency with complex technology that didn’t exist two generations ago – it means that there is real generational importance to the education we provide today.

Of course, this won’t change the stratification of intellectual ability in the population; even as the lowest achieving groups learn and pass on their growth to the next generation, the highest achieving groups are doing the same. The question of whether it is possible to raise up the least-able, with out hindering the growth of the most-able remains.