A Bit of Fun

FuturePundit (see blogroll – a great daily read) has an article up today discussing an study sure to catch Steve Sailer’s attention, as well as HBD pundits Half Sigma.  FuturePundit’s article is well worth reading, so I’ve pasted it below.  Take special note, though, of the article’s title . . .

Intelligence Tracked To Brain Regions

Snark Alert.  Yes, interested readers, in breaking news, scientists have tracked intelligence to the brain.

Spearman’s g-factor comes from a distributed set of brain regions.

PASADENA, Calif.—A collaborative team of neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of Iowa, the University of Southern California (USC), and the Autonomous University of Madrid have mapped the brain structures that affect general intelligence.

The study, to be published the week of February 22 in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds new insight to a highly controversial question: What is intelligence, and how can we measure it?

The research team included Jan Gläscher, first author on the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, and Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology. The Caltech scientists teamed up with researchers at the University of Iowa and USC to examine a uniquely large data set of 241 brain-lesion patients who all had taken IQ tests. The researchers mapped the location of each patient’s lesion in their brains, and correlated that with each patient’s IQ score to produce a map of the brain regions that influence intelligence.

Of course, if IQ differences can be traced down to physical differences in brain regions then IQ is a product of physical qualities of brains.

Connections between the brain regions matter too.

“One of the main findings that really struck us was that there was a distributed system here. Several brain regions, and the connections between them, were what was most important to general intelligence,” explains Gläscher.

Once the genetic causes of intelligence differences become known and DNA testing becomes ultra-cheap the dating and mating game will change quite drastically. Equally intelligent people won’t have equal odds at making smart babies because some will have some IQ-boosting genes on only one out of a chromosome pair and others will have the boosting genes on both chromosomes. The latter will make the most attractive mates for those who want smart babies. Also, in vitro fertlization with genetic testing to select embryos will become the rage for those most ambitious about their children.

If When Sailer and Sigma comment on the study I’ll link to it.

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