Tags
Flymm effect, IQ, nutrion, Richard Lynn, twins, Wechser, WWII
In March 2016, I wrote the following:
I decided to look at an excellent study that Lynn had cited. In this study you had 14 pairs of identical twins (one born undernourished, the co-twin born well nourished as measured by birth weight; twin pairs were raised in the same homes). At an average age of 13, they had their head circumferences measured and were given the WISC IQ test.
The heavier twins had crania that were 0.64 cm bigger than their undernourished co-twin. At age 13, the within sex standard deviation for head circumference appears to be 1.31 cm, so that’s a difference of 0.49 standard deviations.
When it came to verbal IQ, the well-noursihed twins and the undernourished twins had the exact same average IQ. And when I saw the exact same average IQ, I mean the exact same average IQ: 98.29 vs 98.29 (unadjusted for old norms)
However when it came to performance IQ, the well nourished twins scored 7.07 IQ points higher than their undernourished co-twins. That’s a difference of 0.47 standard deviations, virtually identical to the 0.49 standard deviation difference in head circumferences.
So it seems that Richard Lynn was half-right. Brain size gains caused by prenatal nutrition do perfectly parallel IQ gains caused by nutrition, but only when it comes to Performance IQ. Prenatal nutrition seems to have virtually zero impact on Verbal IQ, though given the small sample size (only 14 twin pairs), these conclusions are tentative.
It’s amazing how well this study of identical twins perfectly parallels the difference between North American young adults in the 21st century vs circa WWII.
21st century North American young white adults are to their circa WWII counterparts as well nourished identical twins are to their less nourished co-twin in that their head circumference and Wechsler Performance IQs are both about half an SD larger, while their verbal IQs are about the same.
Because humans are cultural creatures, I believe the brain evolved to prioritize verbal ability during times of malnutrition (which as Lynn noted, includes disease since disease prevents the body from using nutrients), so when sub-optimum nutrition shrinks the brain, mostly spatial IQ suffers, and then when prosperity returns you get a genuine Flynn effect, but it’s 100% concentrated in spatial ability. Spatial ability is a luxury of the well fed.
One might wonder why, with all the increasing education and media, I did not find any verbal Flynn effect on the Wechsler. It’s likely that 21st century education gave us an unfair advantage on verbal tests especially Similarities, but this advantage was negated by the fact that a test created in the 1930s was biased against us (especially in tests of specific knowledge). In other words, two conflicting cultural biases cancelled each other out, thus exposing our true verbal intelligence as unchanged since WWII.
Pumpkin Person 
Don’t forget to take dysgenic fertility into account.
That might be negated to some degree by less inbreeding
Speaking of dysgenic fertility, why has the black-white IQ gap remained constant despite dysgenic fertility being stronger amongst blacks than whites?
Have black gains in nutrition been larger than those in whites, offsetting a decline in genetic intelligence?
There might also be affects from changing chemical and pollution-levels, lead etc.
I guess the only way to quantify the effects of a specific variable on IQ is when all other factors are controlled for like in this twin study.
I wonder if brain size correlates mostly with spatial/performance IQ, even when nourishment is not a factor?
Caffeine: That sounds likely, the worse your environment is the bigger effect any improvement will have. But also the difference might just be too small to be noticeable.
Good thinking. I’ll say it’s the latter.
Regression to the mean was probably strong enough to preclude significant changes. And the phenomenon is probably exaggerated.
I’d just like to thank Ron unzi for summarising my personal conspiracy beliefs in 1 recent article. Anyone with an iq over 130, no autism and a curious intellect will realise that many of the things he mentioned are true.
I wasnt knowledgeable about the McCain stuff…but the stuff regarding epstein and pizza gate being mossad honey traps……
Yep. I have said that FOM DAY ONE.
In many ways I’m like the opposite of a melo or an average Washington post subscriber. I’m too fucking smart hahaha.
Obviously if you believe Ron and me you have to wonder about the general nature of our [redacted by pp, July 19, 2019] rulers. They will probably claim they are just rulers and need such disgusting methods to maintain control ‘for our own good’.
Says Trump’s IQ is 73 and that he took a test at the New York Military Academy. Asked for a source, will report back of and when I get one.
Someone wanna quote some of the image in Google and see if there’s a reliable source?
It’s a hoax
Haha. I should have looked before posting. My bad.
looked at what?
just the 73 figure tells you it’s a hoax.
trump is no joe louis.
Yo Mugabe. I’m reading “Straightening the Bell Curve” by constance Hilliard, check out what she says about Jensen.
“Jensen, who had described himself as a” frustrated symphony conductor,” may have had his own reasons for reverencing Shockley’s every word. The younger psychologist had been forced to abandon a career in music because his own considerable talents in that area nevertheless lacked “soul,” of the emotional intensity needed to succeed in so competitive a profession. He decided on psychology as a second choice, carrying along with him a fridge against those American subcultures perceived as being “more expressive” than white culture from white he sprang.”
And Shockley:
““Shockley’s growing preoccupation with eugenics and selective breeding was not simply an intellectual one. He disowned his eldest son for his involvement with a Costa Rican woman since this relationship, according to Professor Shockley, threatened to contaminate the white family’s gene pool. He also described his children to a reporter “as a significant regression” even though one possessed a PhD from the University of Southern California and another held a degree from Harvard College. Shockley even went so far as to blame this “genetic misfortune” on his first wife, who according to the scientist, “had not as high an academic achievement standing as I had.”
What a clown.
“Chapter 3 details Shockley’s transformation from physicist to modern-day eugenicist, preoccupied with race and the superiority of white genes. Some colleagues believed that the car accident that crushed Dr. Shockley’s pelvis and left him disabled might have triggered mental changes in him as well. Whatever the case, not long after returning home from the hospital, Shockley began directing his anger toward the reckless driver who maimed him into racial formulations. His ideas began to coalesce around the notion that an inverse correlation existed between blacks’ cognition and physical prowess. Later, in donating his sperm at the age of seventy to a sperm bank set up for geniuses, Shockley suggested to an interviewer for Playboy that women who would otherwise pay little attention to his lack of physical appeal would compete for his cognitively superior sperm. But the sperm banks owner apparently concealed from Shockley a painful truth. Women employing its services rejected the sperm of the short, balding Shockley in favor of that from younger, taller, more physically attractive men, whatever their IQ.”
Shockley was a manlet, at 5 foot 6 inches and he weighed 150 pounds. Hahaha. I love that burn on him at the end of that last quote.
Eugenicists are a funny lot. Cattell also had shit views like this as well. I’ll leave quotes from a book on him later.
PP what do you think of these quotes about these IQ-ists (eugenicists)? Hmm what a coincidence that most of these ‘big names’ harbor these kinds of views…
*g*, the general factor largely talked about amongst psychologists and other intelligence researchers, cannot exist because many traits counteract and limit the expression of other traits. Social skills comes at a cost for visual-spatial skills because of how the brain wiring work. Intelligence as a whole is a very difficult matter to solve because some traits are more valuable than others in real-life and thus given more weight on an intelligence test. So it’s difficult to find an answer for all this.
Pumpkin, since the person with average verbal expression abilities can express their logic in the similarities subtest, would someone who has average verbal expression abilities, but missed a similarities question that he conceptualized in his brain because of verbal expression, but later in the day he could express it, is that an underestimate technically?