Free Republic

How smart do we want our presidents to be, and what does their academic performance tell us about their chances for success? This month Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s college transcript was leaked, and the Republican presidential contender’s academic performance at Texas A&M turned out to be less than stellar. Perry’s critics seized on the document to suggest that he didn’t have the aptitude to serve as leader of the free world. Is there a correlation between success in the White House and a president’s perceived intelligence, or at least between academic performance and Oval Office success?

Genetic differences between people account for up to half of the variation in intelligence, according to a study of more than 3,000 individuals. Intelligence is known to run in families, but no single genes have yet been identified that can be reliably linked to mental ability. Instead, researchers think, many hundreds or thousands of genes could be involved, each with a small influence on a person's overall intelligence. "It has been getting clearer and clearer that any genetic contribution to traits on which people differ – like height and weight – comes about from large numbers of gene differences, each...

Results from an online IQ test taken by over 100,000 people have been reported as indicating the users of Internet Explorer have low IQ and have provoked some IE users to threaten legal action. But the study's findings are valuable ammunition for web developers. A Canadian company that designs, validates and publishes psychometric tests for recruitment, career guidance and staff development, released its report Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage and found itself at the centre of a storm. The survey findings were reported by Jared Newman on PC World with the headline "Internet Explorer Users Are Kinda Stupid" and...

Autum Ashante, a highly academically accomplished 13-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., planned to start her freshman year at the University of Connecticut this fall. Now, her father says, the school has rescinded her acceptance, the Daily News reports. Batin Ashante said that his daughter was "devastated" after university officials called him yesterday to deliver the bad news. "They said they now feel she's not academically ready," he said. "That's BS!" When the story was first reported in mid-June, UConn spokesman Richard Veilleaux confirmed that Autum had been accepted to the school but said university officials were still waiting for the...

It's racially discriminatory to prohibit racial discrimination. That's the bottom line of a decision issued Friday, just before the Fourth of July weekend, by the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The case was brought by an organization called By Any Means Necessary to overturn a state constitutional amendment passed by a 58 percent majority of Michigan voters in November 2006. This was not BAMN's first challenge to the proposition. It staged a mini-riot in the secretary of state's office to try to block submission of the signatures that put the proposition on the ballot. The ballot...

This is a terrific test. And it shows results in a number of ways. It sure indicates that the majority of Americans don't know what's going on. No wonder our politicians take such advantage. Interesting and simple test. It’s astonishing that so many people got less than half right. These results say that 80% of the (voting) public doesn’t have a clue – and that’s pretty scary.

Intelligence tests are as much a measure of motivation as they are of mental ability, says research from the US.Researchers from Pennsylvania found that a high IQ score required both high intelligence and high motivation but a low IQ score could be the result of a lack of either factor. Incentives were also found to increase IQ scores by a noticeable margin. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Firstly, it analysed previous studies of how material incentives affected the performance of more than 2,000 people in intelligence tests. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania,...

Australian ethicist working at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics claims that humanity has a “moral obligation” to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the most intelligent embryos for the good of society, with the obvious implication that the less intelligent “surplus” embryos should simply be destroyed. Professor Julian Savulescu of Melbourne made the statement while commenting on an economic modeling research paper by Oxford University ethicists Andres Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, who claim that a rise in humanity’s IQ would result in a reduction in poverty, welfare dependency, crowding of jails, school dropout rates, out-of-wedlock births, and...

It's not just how free the market is. Some economists are looking at another factor that determines how much a country's economy flourishes: how smart its people are. For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies. In the last 50 years or so, economists have started taking an interest in the value of human capital. That means all of the qualities of the people who make up...

-and see if you're any better than the average idiot! This is a terrific test, albeit a couple months dated... very enlightening. But not in a good way... the pitiful results betray the fact that a solid majority of Americans have absolutely no idea what's going on in this country. 80% of the voting public doesn't have a clue- and got less than half right! This goes some ways towards explaining how a shady post-turtle like Barack Obama found his way into the Oval Office- and how the public can continue to be so easily manipulated by the thoroughly-discredited MSM hacks that...

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Beautiful people don't just get all the breaks, scientists say they're likely smarter than most people, too. A study in England conducted by researchers at the London School of Economics found that attractive men and women generally have higher IQs. "Physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence," said LSE lead researcher Satoshi Kanazawa, in the latest issue of the journal, Intelligence. The study indicated attractive men have IQs that are 13.6 points above the average, while beautiful women are 11.4 points higher than average.

America's children rate embarrassingly low again on the latest round of scholastic tests from the OECD. The Program for International Student Assessment, which is released every three years, tests 15-year-old students in reading, math and science. Basically, America earned a "C." We tied the OECD average rating of 496. Teenagers in East Asia and Europe scored significantly higher. There's one caveat to these scores. Some countries test a irregularly narrow sample of kids. Like China -- which we're not counting in our ranking because its sample of 5,100 Shanghai teenagers scored ridiculously high.

Don't know what day it is? Look at a calender. Don't call 911It appears residents in Broward County have their definitions for "nonsense" and "emergency" mixed up. According to the Broward Sheriff's Office call center, nearly half the 911 calls they receive are for things not quite a life or death situation - unless you consider a fast food order an emergency. To paraphrase the immortal words of Flavor Flav, 911 callers are a joke in this town. "My toilet's overflowing, what do I do? That's my personal favorite," BSO Sheriff Al Lamberti said. While it's a stretch, a busted...

Here's How The Various Racial Groups Stack Up In Terms Of Income Joe Weisenthal Sep. 16, 2010, 1:05 PM From the Census bureau:Image: Census

Obama says he ignored Beck rally He seemed intent on casting himself as above the political fray, saying he had more important work to do than to engage in the back and forth of the political “silly season.” For example, Obama said he did not watch any of Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally Saturday on the National Mall. “It’s not surprising that somebody like a Mr. Beck is able to stir up a certain portion of the country. That's been true throughout our history,” he said. But “I’m making decisions that are not necessarily good for...

In psychology’s latest assault on American conservatives, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has determined that “very liberal” people possess nearly a 12 point IQ advantage over those who identify as “very conservative.” Not only is the hard left more intelligent than the hard right, but they are smarter than everyone else, as well – mainstream conservative, middle-of-the-road, and even mainstream liberal. In a blog posting at the Psychology Today website, Kanazawa baldly asserted that, “...apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on...

Global differences in intelligence is a sensitive topic, long fraught with controversy and still tinged by the disgraceful taint of pseudosciences such as craniometry that strove to prove the white “race” as the most clever of them all. But recent data, perplexingly, has indeed shown cognitive ability to be higher in some countries than in others. What’s more, IQ scores have risen as nations develop—a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect.” Many causes have been proposed for both the intelligence gap and the Flynn effect, including education, income, and even nonagricultural labor. Now, a new study from researchers at the...

Many of the wonderful-sounding ideas that have been tried as government policies have failed disastrously. Because so few people bother to study history, often the same ideas and policies have been tried again, either in another country or in the same country at a later time — and with the same disastrous results. One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control, and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things...

People in developing countries have lower IQs because their bodies divert energy from brainpower to fighting disease, researchers claimed today. In hot nations blighted by deadly infections, the priority is survival and populations have evolved to develop stronger immune systems rather than intelligence, according to the controversial theory. Some critics warned the study could become an excuse for racism if it was used to suggest that people in the Third World are not as intelligent as those in cooler, richer climes. Others pointed out that the ancient Persians, Greeks and Romans lived in hot climates and still boasted extraordinary civilisations....