Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Skoyles, J. R. (1999). Human evolution expanded brains to increase expertise capacity, not IQ. Psycoloquy, 10(002). Chicago Skoyles is arguing a rather implausible claim: Why do modern humans have larger brains than earlier people such as Homo erectus? As large brains cause problems in childbirth, infancy and locomotion, the advantage they offer must be substantial….
Continue ReadingI don’t know of any scientific studies, but there’s been a bunch of shows where they put teams of women and men on islands and had them try to survive etc. The results were quite predictable, though I want to note that the producers could have biased things by picking particularly incompetent women and competent…
Continue ReadingIn evolutionary biology, there is a hypothesis about sex ratios: Trivers-Williard hypothesis. It has been noted that males have higher dispersion in their fertility than females have, a finding that is also true in humans (one, two, three). If resources are related to fertility — which they are in many species and used to be…
Continue ReadingDisclaimer: I did not read Rushton’s seminal book on the topic. I was only first recently able to obtain a complete electronic copy (i.e. not abridged version). I did in fact only skim this literature. I don’t have time to work on this, but I’d like others to do so, hence I put the labor…
Continue ReadingA reader asked me to comment on the predictions/musings by Marty Nemko at his blog. I had never heard of him before, but he’s some kind of coach, radio host and columnist popular in the Bay Area. The decline in good jobs. My optimistic side predicts that improved education and gene editing to improve intelligence…
Continue Readinghttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/875481.Race http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=5624936a816b96dd3e6a4af6808ee69b I had seen references to this book in a number of places which got me curious. I am somewhat hesitant to read older books since I know much of what they discuss is dated and has been superseded by newer science. Sometimes, however, science (or the science culture) has gone wrong so one…
Continue Readinghttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23621169-the-roma Richard Lynn is so nice to periodically send me books for free. He is working on establishing his publisher, of course, and so needs media coverage. In this case, he sent me a new book on the Roma by Jelena Cvorovic who was also present at the London conference on intelligence in the spring…
Continue Readinghttp://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8765372-is-there-anything-good-about-men http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=B21C5698CE12510CDEDBE940259BDF6F If you read the original essay, there is not much to recommend about the book. It taught me very little, has no data tables, no plots, no figures. Numbers are only mentioned in the text and sources are only given in the back of the book. There were a few interesting works mentioned,…
Continue ReadingSeriously. Read it. Behavior Genetics (Impact Factor: 2.61). 03/2014; DOI: 10.1007/s10519-014-9646-x Source: PubMed ABSTRACT I argue that the g factor meets the fundamental criteria of a scientific construct more fully than any other conception of intelligence. I briefly discuss the evidence regarding the relationship of brain size to intelligence. A review of a large body of…
Continue ReadingThis book is very popsci and can be read in 1 day for any reasonably fast reader. It doesnt contain much new information to anyone who has read a few books on the topic. As can be seen below, it has a lot of nonsense/errors since clearly the author is not used to this area…
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