Free Republic

COVID-19 has been debilitatingly boring for newborns, disturbing new research has found. Scientists have discovered that the coronavirus pandemic significantly impacted the intelligence of children born during it: Living the entirety of their lives in lockdown has seriously stunted their cognitive development. Researchers analyzed the cognitive performances of 672 children born in Rhode Island, 188 of them born well into the pandemic (after July 2020), 308 born before it (prior to January 2019) and 176 of them born during its beginning stage (between January 2019 and March 2020). They found that children born during the pandemic have pronouncedly lower IQs...

A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021) I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic the instant it was shelved. It was here that I stumbled upon the shocking views Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein expressed in The Bell Curve about race, class, and inequality in America. I didn’t give those views much deep thought at the time, and so my perception of Murray and his ideas...

As a teenager, Trump (center) attended the New York Military Academy. He then entered Fordham University before transferring to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as it was one of the few places that offered real estate studies. https://www.pollhype.com/gallery/15-of-the-brightest-u-s-presidents-ranked-by-iq-score/?utm_medium=57313874&utm_source=mgid&utm_campaign=PHPresidentIQ0331&utm_term=57313874&utm_content=8729628&adclid=b120ea489f0ada4be3c3f8d46ffa97d7&requestid=XDPKWQgG&h=42

Give Charles Murray, longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, credit for courage. Again and again, despite outrageously unfair attacks, he has returned to the public arena and persisted in telling unwelcome truths. In his meticulous prose, with charts and tables so elegant as to betray an aesthetic bent, he makes his points with precision and clarity. Murray's 1994 book "The Bell Curve," co-authored with Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, evoked furious and undeserved denunciation. It will be interesting to see whether there is a similar reaction to his latest and much shorter book, "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in...

A TikTok user who goes by the name of Brianna, or appaloosauce, was offered $2,000 from her father who believes the side effects of getting vaccinated will kill her, Rawstory reported. "It is not a vaccine," he says. "It is a human trial, it is genetic therapy. It's not a vaccine, it doesn't fall under the category of a vaccine. It's not FDA approved." "Why are you trying to buy me off?" Brianna asked her father. "Because I love you, why do you think I want to buy you off?" the father said. "I know you don't [want money], but...

The “Flynn Effect” is the phenomenon identified by intelligence researcher James Flynn. He found that average intelligence quotients, or IQ’s, as measured by standardized tests were steadily increasing through the course of the 20th century. That sounds quite natural because, after all, each generation gets better nurturing. They get better health, improved medical care, more nutritious food and greater schooling. But IQ is supposed to be mainly about nature, not nurture. Nurturing can certainly affect a person’s well-being, but in theory it doesn’t change a person’s IQ much (except of course when the nurturing is so bad that it produces...

Recent studies have shown that I.Q. scores have been declining in Western nations for decades. Evan Horowitz, director of research and communication at FCLT Global, wrote a post for nbcnews.com in which he stated: “A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.” Horowitz added that this plunge in cognitive ability could well lead to “fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our collective future.” Duh.And there are others.These findings have led some to issue dire predictions of a general dumbing down...

This cruelest of years has claimed the life of another consequential scholar whose passing warrants some reflection. James Flynn, who died last week at 86, was an American social scientist born in Washington and educated at the University of Chicago. He spent most of his academic career on the other side of the planet, at the University of Otago in southern New Zealand. Flynn specialized in the study of mental tests and human intelligence, and he distinguished himself by bringing far more light than heat to this fraught debate. Many earlier researchers of group differences in mental performance were convinced...

"Vitamin D deficiency is quite prevalent," Melough said. "The good news is there is a relatively easy solution. It can be difficult to get adequate vitamin D through diet, and not everyone can make up for this gap through sun exposure, so a good solution is to take a supplement." The recommended daily intake of vitamin D is 600 international units (IU). On average, Americans consume less than 200 IU in their diet, and so if people aren't making up that gap through sun exposure or supplementation, Melough says people will probably become deficient. Foods that contain higher levels of...

Shakira wrote her first poem when she was 4 years old, however, Einstein did not learn to speak until he was 4.Even if an IQ test above 130 does not reveal how successful a person will be, this is the case just for only 2.5% of the population. Among them, some are renowned artists who have not succeeded academically, but who’ve totally won on the stage or the catwalk. Here at Bright Side, we love smart people who share their wit with the world, so we want to show you this VIP group of brilliant celebrities, regardless of whether they’ve...

Nishi Uggalle, the latest crowned champion of Channel 4’s Child Genius show, is believed to possess an IQ “higher than Einstein’s”. Impressive as it sounds for a 12-year-old winning a junior Mastermind programme, but does the comparison with the infamous physicist actually mean anything? And how seriously should we consider IQ (intelligence quotient) as a benchmark of a person’s intellectual capacity? The most notable issue is that nobody knows what Albert Einstein’s IQ was because he never took the test. It is presumed he would have an IQ score of over 160.

Academic freedom is under assault by people who want to control research and speech. One of their strategies exploits the gatekeeping functions of journal editors to censor unpopular ideas. The leading open-access journal in the field of intelligence research, the Journal of Intelligence, has a policy listed on its website since 2018 that states, “The journal will not publish articles that may lead to or enhance political controversies and the editors will judge whether that is the case.” In other words, the journal’s editors will reject manuscripts that could be politically controversial—regardless of the quality of the science. On May...

...according to the hospital’s top doctor, Jane Appleby..."Just before the person died they looked at the nurse and they said, 'I think I made a mistake. I thought it was a hoax but it's not," she said,...the hospital is treating other COVID-19 patients in their 20s and 30s who are "severely ill,"...

Hollywood actress Lori Petty — who has starred in Orange Is the New Black, Point Break, and the critically acclaimed Tank Girl — has insulted Americans across the board by claiming that they have low IQ’s. “I believe what we have forgotten is that the average IQ in Amurrrikkka is 99,” Petty tweeted on Friday. She said that a third of Americans, including President Donald Trump, have IQ’s lower than that. “A third, plus the murder-in-charge, I guess, lower than that. So, in the house I happily stay, besides kissing y’all.” It remains unclear what spurred Lori Petty’s acrimonious tweet,...

Social-justice ideology is turning higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars. Left-wing activists, masquerading as professors, are infiltrating traditional academic departments or creating new ones—departments such as “Solidarity and Social Justice”—to advance their cause. They are entering the highest rung of college administration, from which perch they require students to take social-justice courses, such as “Native Sexualities and Queer Discourse” or “Hip-hop Workshop,” and attend social-justice events—such as a Reparations, Repatriation, and Redress Symposium or a Power and Privilege Symposium—in order to graduate. But social-justice education is...

After a public uproar, The New York Times has revised a column by Bret Stephens that cited an academic paper co-authored by an anthropologist who has been branded a white nationalist. An editor’s note, appended to the column headlined “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” says a reference to the 2005 study was removed and that Stephens did not know the author “promoted racist views. “Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically,” the note said. “The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens...

SNIP Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx — how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations? The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3...

It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites. In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.” Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people...

Abstract: Fifteen years ago, Frey and Detterman established that the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence (Frey and Detterman, 2004; Koenig, Frey, and Detterman, 2008). Since that finding, replicated many times and cited extensively in the literature, myths about the SAT, intelligence, and academic achievement continue to spread in popular domains, online, and in some academic administrators. This paper reviews the available evidence about the relationships among the SAT, intelligence, and academic achievement, dispels common myths about the SAT, and...

A professor at Indiana University who defended "racist, sexist, and homophobic" comments that he posted on his social media accounts will keep his job because his views are protected under the Constitution, university officials announced after they were bombarded with demands to fire him. Eric Rasmusen, a professor of business economics and public policy at the university, tweeted this month a quote from an article that said, "geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and Moderately low Conscientiousness." The article, titled, "Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably" was published by The Unz Review, which describes...