Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id AAA13826 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 18 Aug 2001 00:45:19 +0100 Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 16:42:04 -0700 From: Bill Spight <bspight@pacbell.net> Subject: Re: Gene-Meme Co-evolution in Reverse? To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Message-id: <3B7DABCC.14C60A8A@pacbell.net> Organization: Saybrook Graduate School X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Yahoo;YIP052400} (Win95; U) Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Accept-Language: en References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745FFA@inchna.stir.ac.uk> <3B7D5BAF.12845.7C575B@localhost> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Dear Joe,
From
http://www.beyond-the-illusion.com/files/New-Files/200101/why_kids_are_smarter_than_you.txt
<<
"The rising-IQ trend is often called the Flynn Effect after New
Zealand sociologist James Flynn, who first noticed the phenomenon
in the 1980s. Since 1984, Dr. Flynn has published a series of
papers showing that IQs in at least 13 developed countries have
gained five to 25 points in recent decades.
He managed to find what others had missed because he did not look
at average IQ scores, which rank how people compare with each
other at a certain point.
Instead, Dr. Flynn looked at the number of questions people
answered correctly on the intelligence tests over the years and
found everyone from school children to soldiers was scoring
progressively better.Interestingly, Dr. Flynn does not
necessarily believe the Flynn Effect points to a rise in
intelligence.
"If people, children, were really becoming smarter, teachers
would be saying, 'My gosh I can't believe how fast kids learn
today,' and they are not saying that," he said in an interview
this week.
"If people were really getting as smart as the test scores
suggest, we should be blinded by brilliance."He suggests that the
rising-IQ trend tells us more about what society demands of
people's mental abilities than about their actual intelligence
level because the gains have been in very specific skills.
>>
So the data is misreported. IQ scores have not been rising. And thus IQ,
whatever the term may mean, if anything, has not been rising. What has
been increasing is specific knowledge, both declarative and procedural.
So people today would have scored higher on previous IQ tests. The Flynn
Effect illustrates the cultural relativity of IQ tests, reflecting
cultural change over time.
Best,
Bill
Bill
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