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A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement. The company, Heliospect Genomics, has worked with more than a dozen couples undergoing IVF, according to undercover video footage. The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 (£38,000) for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have helped some parents select future children based on genetic predictions of intelligence. Managers boasted their methods could produce a gain of more than six IQ points. Experts say the development...

I have long known that fluoridating water was a terrible idea, but I have been reluctant to write or even discuss this fact with people because the expert consensus was that anybody who opposed it was a kook. Remember this scene from Dr. Strangelove? It perfectly encapsulates the attitude of "experts" and the people who believe them about those who questioned fluoridation: they are insane.

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to further regulate fluoride in drinking water because high levels could pose a risk to the intellectual development of children.The ruling, which came with little fanfare, appeared to validate one of the longest-running so-called conspiracy theories in America’s alt-right subculture—that the government’s use of fluoridation, especially in specific communities, might be part of a deliberate attempt to lower intelligence in order to create a more compliant and subservient population for the New World Order.It follows a series of recent vindications for skeptics after propagandist media have been proven wrong in...

Human intelligence scores are dropping across the US for the first time, research suggests, and experts warn technology could be to blame. Since 1905, there's been a 30-point increase based on scores in logic, vocabulary, spatial reasoning and visual and mathematical problem-solving skills. But there are signs that IQ may have dipped, according to a study last year. It found the average IQ score in the US fell from 100 to 98 last year - the first time rates have fallen since we began tracking them. Now, separate data shows there is a gap of about eight points between states,...

Angry protestors fail to recognize that Murray is not a white supremacist. He’s a thoughtful researcher who has published more than a dozen scholarly books about things like the impact of welfare, the pursuit of happiness, and the meaning of libertarianism. Some of his work influenced presidents. One of his books influenced my way of thinking. The video above is my full interview with Murray. Transcript Follow along using the transcript. .....

The average college student has average intelligence, concludes a meta-analysis by Canadian researchers, writes Ross Pomeroy on Big Think. In 1939, when only 10 percent of Americans enrolled in college, the average IQ was 119. By 2022, it's down to 102, not significantly above the average of 100. “The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years,” the researchers wrote. “Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.” The “Flynn effect” -- a steady rise in IQs from 1940 onward -- has been well established,...

Susceptibility to misinformation and disinformation likely to have played part in Leave vote.New research from the University of Bath’s School of Management finds that higher cognitive ability was strongly linked to voting to Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union Membership.The study shows that cognitive skills including memory, verbal fluency, fluid reasoning and numerical reasoning, were correlated with how people decided to vote. Lead author Dr Chris Dawson, from the University of Bath’s School of Management, said: “This study adds to existing academic evidence showing that low cognitive ability makes people more susceptible to misinformation and disinformation. People...

It's always nice to see smug people get a slice of humble pie, isn't it? This is a few years old, but it went viral again over the weekend and it's a great laugh/lesson: 1 minute video at link........... The smug PhD was SO sure of herself! "Two, me. I don't know! PhD, cancer biology, scientist, I work in a biotech company, we make Covid-19 testing kits, stuff like that!" Credentials ≠ intelligence! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ She was last!.......................

... This can be averaged to 68.75 rounded to 69.This figure needs to be corrected because the test was administered to groups rather than individually and the test has been standardized in Britain for individual administration. A previous study has shown that in an Arab sample of this age group that took the test individually and in groups, the group administration gave a score 12.5 IQ points lower than individual administration (Bakhiet & Lynn, 2014). Thus, we propose that 12.5 needs to be added to the 69 to give 81.5 as the best estimate of the British-scaled IQ of the...

Is the white-black IQ gap shrinking in the United States? Although many assume that the existence of sizable disparities in average IQ among the races simply must be “pseudoscience,” that different ethnicities average different levels of mental ability is one of the most overwhelmingly well-established findings of the social sciences. Exactly why ancestral groups have varying IQs remains controversial, but the fact that they do is not disputed among the well-informed. A general rule of thumb among researchers has long been that whites and blacks differ in average IQ by about one standard deviation. It’s natural to be interested in...

For decades IQs were climbing in the Western World. It was called the “Flynn effect.”Average IQs were defined as 100 in each succeeding iteration of the IQ test, as by definition the average was normed to 100. But if you rescored earlier IQ tests based upon prior norms, the average IQ would have increased by about 15 points or one standard deviation.In other words, if you took an IQ test in 1942 and scored 100, by today’s scoring you would have an IQ of 86.That is, until the past 10 or so years. In the past 10 years, IQs have...

None offered—-video

The proverbial Martian would find contemporary discourse about race in the West peculiar, even paradoxical. On the one hand, many modern intellectuals insist that race is a pernicious reification of superficial human differences that has been decisively refuted by modern science. On the other hand, many of these same intellectuals obsess about racial disparities and injustices and actively promote policies that treat people of different races differently (e.g., affirmative action). Thus, mainstream discourse simultaneously contends that belief in race is an anachronistic superstition and that racial equality is an ethical imperative that can only be achieved through racially conscious policy...

In the debate over the causes of group differences in IQ, it is often claimed that no serious scientist believes genes play a significant role. The only people who believe this, it is said, are assorted cranks and amateurs. We can quickly dispense with this claim by consulting the various expert surveys that have been conducted over the years. Both Sean Last and Emil Kirkegaard have covered these before, but for several reasons I thought I do my own write-up: to correct a minor error in Sean’s post; to add results from the most recent study; and to present a...

Stop the press! Cambridge hired someone who said something that was debunked — debunked by experts, no less. How could this have happened? Well, here’s the story from the perspective of the one who was supposedly “debunked”. I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Cambridge. (I feel like Jason Stanley when I say that.) My research areas are the philosophy of biology and ethics. Three years ago, when I was a PhD student at Oxford, I published a paper in a highly respected philosophy and psychology journal calling for free inquiry...

New research has found a link between the omega-3 fatty acid known as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and increased IQ among children born prematurely. Preterm children are more likely to have lower IQ scores and cognitive impairments compared with term-born children. Dr. Jacqueline Gould says infants born at the earliest gestations are deprived of the natural supply of DHA that normally builds up in the brain during the last trimester of pregnancy. "These babies have low concentrations of DHA in their brain tissue, which may contribute to poorer cognitive outcomes," Dr. Gould said. "The goal of our research was to test...

I have somehow not heard of this case, but there’s an ongoing case in Sweden where a 80-ish year old man, Bertil Malmberg, talked about the intelligence of nations, specifically mentioning that South Sudan’s recorded mean intelligence is one of the lowest in the world (Mankind Quarterly has no less than 15 recent studies from Sudan). In his words (Google translated from Swedish): It is relevant that the population there is among the peoples with the lowest intelligence in the entire world, which is well documented in research. According to the UN, the country has a very low HDI (Human...

If you can spot the hidden message in this image then you’re smarter than most. The visual puzzle challenges you to find the “hidden tiger” in the jungle scene – and it’s harder than you think. That’s because the artwork contains not one but two big cats, with one much easier to identify than the other. Alongside the fairly obvious striped predator in the middle, rather than a second tiger, the image contains the text “the hidden tiger”. It’s this text that you’re tasked with finding in order to solve the fiendishly difficult puzzle.

A new study of monozygotic twins raised apart in South Korea and the United States provides unique insight into how genetic, cultural, and environmental factors influence human development. The new research has been published in the scientific journal Personality and Individual Differences. “I have studied identical twins reared apart for many years. They pose a simple, yet elegant experiment for disentangling genetic and environmental influences on human traits. This case was unique in that the twins were raised in different countries,” said researcher Nancy L. Segal, a professor and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University in...

One of the main drivers of notions like systemic racism has been the ban on public discussions of IQ. A psychometrician published some results in 1970 that caused an uproar in an early manifestation of cancel culture. Charles Taylor and Richard J. Herrnstein in The Bell Curve, published in 1994, point out that the connection between IQ and success or the lack of success is indisputable at this point. In the social sciences, there can be one study that suggests one thing, and another one that contradicts it. But, the effects of IQ on lifetime achievement is not like that....