Arguably the greatest horror movie of all time. Certainly in the top five. One reason is the heroine (Alice) just looks like the girl next door. I could really relate to the film for that reason; she reminded me of the young adults on my street that I was always tagging along with. I saw the film in the 4th grade. It was on TV at around 1 am and I waited for my parents to go to sleep and snuck downstairs to watch.

Sadly, one of the fans of the film became obsessed with the actress who played Alice and started stalking her just as Jason stalked her at the start of the sequel. She was so wierded out by the experience that she didn’t act in another movie for 29 years by which point I doubt anyone would have wanted her because she was no longer young and relevant. Can you imagine, being the heroine of the most influential horror film of the last half-century and then throwing your whole career away and all because some demented fan?

Imagine the career she might have had if that stalker hadn’t ruined it. And it probably wasn’t just her career that it ruined but her relationship with men. Hopefully he went to jail for a long time.

But at least her youth and beauty will forever be preserved in perhaps the greatest horror movie of all time.

And yet she always thanks us fans for getting her through the trauma by showering her with love and support.

Way back in the 1980s, Rushton had a hunch that evolution is progress and some populations are more advanced than others, with newer forms of life being more developed than than those that emerged early.

One characteristic of Mongoloid populations is a spatial ability is more developed than verbal ability. We even see this in incipient Mongoloid groups like Native Americans despite them having a totally different culture from Northeast Asians and being separated from them for 30,000 years. Richard Lynn argued that the spatial demands of surviving ice age Northern Siberia were so extreme that the left hemisphere of the Mongoloid brain (the seat of language) was invaded and forced to take on more spatial processing. And yet full Mongoloids, like tonight’s Jeopardy! champ, often have so much overall intelligence than even verbal IQ is sky high.

Because cold adapted populations tend to score higher than tropical populations on IQ tests, it can be inferred that human intellect reached its pinnacle after we left the tropics. But correlation does not equal causation. Some folks think that because civilization began outside the tropics, that explains why the tropics fell behind and that somehow before civilization, cold adapted peoples were no smarter than warm adapted people. After all, IQ was useless in the stone age right?

WRONG!

Arthur Jensen notes that “On non-verbal reasoning tests given in the first grade, before schooling could have much impact,” Native American “children exceeded the mean score of blacks by the equivalent of 14 IQ points.” Jensen claimed they also score higher on achievement tests from first to twelfth grade, and this DESPITE Native Americans ranking as far below Blacks in socio-economic status as Blacks rank below Whites.

Did you hear that? DID YOU HEAR THAT AMERICA? As Oprah would say.

When I read that today I thought Jensen must be mistaken. Hate to say it but the majority of Native Americans I’ve met were homeless, drunk, barely coherent and missing teeth. I can’t imagine a more environmentally deprived community in a First World country and yet these people outscore black Americans by 14 points on performance IQ (at least in early childhood).

I decided to look for more recent research since Jensen’s book was from 1981. I found a 1996 paper in which 28 American Indian school-aged children ranging in age from 6 years
to 17 years (from a random sample of 30 selected from students participating in a community program through the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis, Minnesota) were given the WISC-III. Their verbal, performance and full-scale IQs were 90.5, 102.3, and 97.4 (U.S. norms) respectively.

To put that in perspective, in the WISC-III standardization, the corresponding scores were 103.6, 102.9, and 103.5 for Whites and 90.8, 88.5, and 88.6 for Blacks.

It should be noted that the American Indians were tested in 1994 and the WISC-III standardization occurred in 1989 so at most we could reduce the American Indians to 90, 100.3 and 95.9. Also, the Native Americans were a bit atypical in that they were from an urban as opposed to reservation environment, but this should make the comparison more fair.

If we assume that on a scale where Americans have an SD of 15, White Americans have an SD of 14.5, then on a scale where the White American mean and SD is set at 100 and 15 respectively, Native Americans scored 86, 97 and 92 and Black Americans scored 87, 85 and 85.

It should also be noted that Black Americans average about 25% white genetically so their scores might be reduced to 83, 80 and 80 if unmixed.

The 17 point gap in Performance IQ between Native Americans and unmixed Blacks can not at all be explained by environment so it must be genetic but it can’t at all be explained by selection pressures related to civilization, since most Native Americans didn’t have any. Maybe it’s genetic drift, but most likely it’s selection pressures related to cold winters and that explains why the Performance IQ gap is quadruple the verbal one. Cold winters require require visuo-spatial motor abilities to sew, hunt, make tools, make shelter, build fire, make clothes etc. This also explains why men tend to outperform women especially on spatial tasks (men did the hunting, women did the child rearing).

Over 589 people have now taken the TAVIS and these have a mean and standard deviation of 9.84 and 2.63 respectively.

When the sample increased to 604, I decided to rank the items by order of difficulty (hat-tip to Kiwi-Anon who suggested this could be easily done in Excel):

At least 48 TAVIS takers reported taking the Wechsler intelligence scales in the U.S. or Canada within the last 10 years (excluding people who reported scores outside the valid score range). This subgroup had a mean TAVIS score of 10.48 (SD = 2.44) and a mean self-reported Wechsler score of 129.92 (SD = 17.61). When I arranged the 48 TAVIS scores from lowest to highest and placed them beside the 48 Wechsler scores ranked lowest to highest, I got the following equivalencies.

TAVIS 7 = Wechsler IQ 100

TAVIS 8 = Wechsler IQ 105

TAVIS 9 = Wechsler IQ 121

TAVIS 10 = Wechsler IQ 125

TAVIS 11 = Wechsler IQ 141

TAVIS 12 = Wechsler IQ 146

TAVIS 13 = Wechsler IQ 151

TAVIS 14 = Wechsler IQ 154

TAVIS 18 = Wechsler IQ 159

Correlation between TAVIS and self-reported Wechsler IQ: +0.04

The correlation with the Wechsler was disappointingly low, but keep in mind that the Mega Test also had an incredibly low correlation with the self-reported Wechsler so this doesn’t necessarily invalidate the test.