Recently I posted an episode of the sitcom The Facts of Life that dealt with IQ, but sadly the video no longer works.

The POWER of this blog is such that almost every time I post a youtube, media owners seem to suddenly realize the enormous value of their old content and remove it from youtube.

Fortunately I found the only other episode of The Facts of Life that seemed to deal with intelligence (watch it quickly before they take it off youtube ).

In this episode, all the girls at the fictional Eastland New York private school are in love with a new boy who delivers the boarding house food, but what they don’t know is he has a tragic secret.

He’s retarded.

When this leads to an awkward confrontation, the school den mother Mrs Garrett makes it all better as usual with some words of wisdom.

One of the reasons the girls on campus don’t notice the boy is retarded is that he looks normal because he has familial retardation, meaning his retardation is just part of the normal spectrum of human intelligence, unlike organic retardation which is caused by a mutation of large effect, which impairs physical appearance and brain functions beyond intelligence.

Commenter “Mug of Pee” will happily concede that organic retardation is independently genetic because it has physical symptoms, but he downplays the independent effect of genes in biologically normal IQ differences.  It would be especially interesting to find cases where familial retardates have identical twins raised from birth in very different countries, because it’s hard to imagine such an immutable disability was not hard wired into the brain.

Another amusing thing about this episode of The Facts of Life is that we’re now in season 4, so the hilarious character “Jo” is by now a regular; the writers felt the show was missing a girl from a working class background.

“Jo” played by Nancy McKeon is like a young female John Travolta in both her appearance, attitude, and tough guy Brooklyn accent.