Posted on 04/18/2015 2:50:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Social scientists have found that by the time children enter kindergarten, there is already a large academic achievement gap between students from wealthy and poor families. We still don't know exactly why that's the case. There's a sense that it at least partly has to do with the fact that affluent mothers and fathers have more intensive parenting sytles—they're more likely to read to their kids, for instance—and have enough money to make sure their toddlers grow up well-nourished, generally cared for, and intellectually stimulated. At the same time, poor children often grow up in chaotic, food-insecure, stressful homes that aren't conducive to a developing mind.
A new study in the journal Nature Neuroscience adds an interesting biological twist to this issue. Using MRI scans of more than 1,000 subjects between the ages of 3 and 20, it finds that children with poor parents tend to have somewhat smaller brains, on some dimensions, than those grow up affluent. Specifically, low-income participants had less surface area on their cerebral cortexes—the gray matter responsible for skills such as language, problem solving, and other higher-order functions we generally just think of as human intelligence. Poorer indviduals in the study also fared worse on a battery of cognitive tests, and a statistical analysis suggested the disparities were related to brain dimensions.
How big a difference are we talking about? According to the researchers, children whose parents earned less than $25,000 per year had 6 percent less surface area on their cortex than those whose parents earned at least $150,000.......
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Agree with all you say.
The conclusion libs draw from this study is that poverty is associated with low-IQ. Therefore if we give poor people large amounts of money, they won’t be poor anymore and their children will become smart.
The number of logical leaps in that paragraph is astonishing. But that’s exactly what they believe.
And I'll add to: "Yes. They apply for grants and they KNOW what the grant giver needs from them."
- This is done by businesses too - "drink more milk because studies show that children are deficient in calcium, drive this car, buy this because....., etc.
That is true, but the average is smarter. The second generation also tends to be less entrepreneurial and where they are not protected by the rules of the society they sink or lodge in the academy. In a free society that concentration of smarts is much more ephemeral than in an oligarchy. We live now in a concentrating oligarchy. Inheritance is a genetic thing but heritability is not a smooth curve.
I think we’re all tiptoeing around another very real genetic possibility.
Statistically, a greater number of a certain race, we’re constantly reminded, are poor. If members of that race had consistently smaller brains than another race that tended to be wealthier, couldn’t wealth be misinterpreted as the causal factor of lower intelligence, rather than an effect?
Of course saying so is anathema in our PC world, but if we’re to honestly assess the situation, shouldn’t it at least be considered?
Yes, there are mitigation factors.
Freedom is a big one.
Liberal policies create small brains. Their policies create poor inner city neighborhoods that stay that way. They keep the people angry and separate where they breed more angry separate people. Then they come up with crap like common core which spreads and reinforces ignorance.
That could become the liberal rallying cry, but none of that will work (because liberals only want to treat symptoms, not causes).
As someone pointed out in an earlier post, children are born with the genetically programmed potential to reach a certain IQ. But it takes a good environment to optimize brain development so that it reaches its maximum possible IQ.
There are three factors that must be optimized: nutrition, intellectual stimulation, and overall health.
The role of nutrition is to ensure that the body has sufficient raw material to support maximal brain growth. I remember reading a study done on starving kids in Africa; one group of kids received a nutritious diet containing all of the food groups. The other group received the same diet, but without meat (the calories were replaced by oil). After a period of time, the kids eating the complete diet had, on average, IQ scores 6 points higher than the kids on the meat-free diet. This deficit is not likely to be reversed by giving the vegetarian kids meat, since the IQ deficit reflects stunted brain development at a time when the brain is in a crucial growth phase.
The role of intellectual stimulation is to encourage full growth of the parts of the brain involved with reasoning. The brain is a lot like a muscle: areas that are not stimulated tend to not develop. Animal studies show, for example, that depriving an infant animal of sight in one eye causes irreversible developmental aberrations in the visual cortex. This phenomenon is the basis of eye patch treatment for young children exhibiting lazy eye: as long as the condition is caught early enough, an eye patch can train the weak eye to see. But older children do not benefit from such treatment. Once a certain level of maturity is reached, those early deficits of stimulation can never be reversed.
Overall health plays a role, too. Infectious disease is one of the biggest threats to overall health--a child who is sick all the time puts their nutritional resources towards surviving the illness. The same goes for serious injury. So, in that respect, infectious disease or serious injury is similar to nutritional deficiency. Also, many diseases damage the brain. Anything that causes a high fever is potentially brain damaging; some diseases attack the brain specifically. Measles can cause permanent brain damage; meningitis is very likely to cause brain damage. By protecting a kid against disease and injury, the child's body can put all of the resources into proper brain development.
Clearly, all of those factors are magnified in extremely poor families. While poor people can and do provide their kids with the best nutrition, health care, and intellectual stimulation possible within their means, other poor people do not. Within the "poverty culture", as I call it, there are a lot of negative influences on children's proper neurological development. As long as that culture is not addressed, none of the other factors are going to change--because those indoctrinated into that culture will resist being taught about nutrition, intellectually engaging children, and maintaining health--and the poor will remain poor.
“.....For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal—”social justice”—is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. “Social Justice” for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.
Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.
But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.
No matter how opportunistically the left’s agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which “social justice” prevails.”....
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24376
Of course.
When two pretty cats have a litter some of the kittens will look pretty like one or both of the parents and some of the kittens will look like the ally cat the grandparent cat mated with.
Thus the need the buy two full blooded registered pretty cats whose kittens will all look like them, their grandparents, great grand parents, ect.
People have forgotten basic knowledge that nearly everyone knew not long ago it seems.
Since vaccination prevents children from getting diseases that can damage their brains or kill them, then the vaccinated poor have a distinct advantage here.
I think that rich liberals who refuse to vaccinate their kids suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect--they think that a little bit of knowledge on a subject is much larger than it really is--and they have an ability to memorize, without understanding, a great deal of misinformation that is promulgated in anti-vax websites. By refusing to vaccinate their kids, they are creating pockets of disease susceptible populations where an outbreak could spread like wildfire. Once their young children have to fight off measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc., the brain damage caused directly by the disease, and indirectly by the child's body redirecting nutritional intake towards fighting the disease instead of brain development, will pretty much negate any advantages the child might have otherwise had due to an environment of increased intellectual stimulation.
Honestly, those who refuse to vaccinate their kids don't show much intellectual superiority. (In other words, they're dumb as rocks.) So I wouldn't expect their kids to be all that smart, or to remain in the wealthy class.
That is typical scientist language. Scientists do not like to say that the results of their research are 100% reflective of the reality that they are trying to observe and describe. So they use words like "probably, may, might, could" etc., to indicate that further research might show a different result or have different nuances than they originally thought.
“Does That Tell Us Anything?”
Yes. It tells us that poor people should work hard so they can buy big brains.
Those big brains cost a lot down at the brain store.
Hillary Clinton bought her brain at a garage sale. Turns out, it was an oil filter.
What I didn’t see in the article or any of the posts is thisd possible conclusion;
People with smaller brains tend to be poor.
To me, this makes perfect sense.
Here is a quote on an article about breeding horses for instance:
“Perhaps the greatest advantage of inbreeding is that it increases the prepotency of individuals within a herd and consequently helps to create distinct true-breeding strains or families. This prepotency (the ability of a stallion or broodmare to stamp desirable characteristics upon their offspring with a high degree of predictability) is the result of the parent being homozygous for important desirable traits. When such a parent carries two identical alleles on corresponding points of a chromosome pair, he transmits that allele to the same chromosome point within his offspring. If two such parents are mated, the offspring will always possess the same desirable trait. Therefore, as inbreeding increases homozygosity, it also enhances prepotency.
This applies to humans as much as it does to any other living thing on this planet.
If all your great grandparents were smart, your grand parents were smart, your parents were smart, YOU and all your siblings will be smart. That is simply the rules of breeding.
Now if one of your grandfathers was an idiot, but married a smart wife, around half of their children might be dumb and the other half smart. If the smart children married other smart children most of their children would be smart, BUT they could still produce some dumb children because of the grandfather was an idiot remember?
This is what confuses people.
It takes MANY generations to breed out an undesired trait, and at each generation you have to be sure your not undoing the previous progress by breeding with someone who carries the undesired trait.
Children on Medicaid are eligible to get vaccinated. Doesn’t mean they bother.
Could not find any studies directly showing income level correlated to vaccination rates.
Found a great video about the human brain that had been just removed during an autopsy! I can’t tell if this brain is poor or rich, but the video just blows my mind.
The Unfixed Brain
In this teaching video, Suzanne Stensaas, Ph.D., Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine, demonstrates the properties and anatomy of an unfixed brain. WARNING: The video contains graphic images, a human brain from a recent autopsy. Background noise is unrelated to this brain or the deceased. There are two purposes for this video: 1) to stress the vulnerability of the brain to highlight the importance of wearing helmets, seat belts, and taking care of this very precious tissue, and 2) to use as a teaching aid for students who only have access to fixed tissue, models, and pictures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHxyP-nUhUY
Now you’re venturing into risk taking and survival of the fittest.
You can protect to the point of rendering a race vulnerable.
Riding w/o a helmet might take some out but it makes some (with half a brain) THINK about consequences and options.
And it works in the opposite way too.
If two dumb people mate, they will usually produce dumb children, BUT if one of their grand parents or great grand parents were smart, then there is a chance they might produce a smart child.
This is the whole reason you buy registered cats, dogs, horses, ect.
DNA isn’t very politically correct.
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