I ramble on about brain plasticity a lot. Somebody comes up with some crap about "National IQ" etc., I talk about how the brain adjusts to its environment. Brains change, basically.
Collins was three months shy of seven years old when surgeons sliced open his skull and removed a third of his brain's right hemisphere. For two years prior, a benign tumor had been growing in the back of his brain, eventually reaching the size of a golf ball. The tumor caused a series of disruptive seizures that gave him migraines and kept him from school. Medications did little to treat the problem and made Collins drowsy. By the day of his surgery, Collins was experiencing daily seizures that were growing in severity. He would collapse and be incontinent and sometimes vomit, he says.
Fast-forward to the happy ending, they excised the tumor along with half of the temporal lobe and the entire right occipital lobe, pretty radical, but the kid is fine. He can see, walk, talk and chew gum the same as before. Long story short, the intact side of his brain took over and now does the work of the part that was removed.
So the next time some idiot starts raging on about how the Sudanese have a national IQ of 40, or that there's a "gay brain" etc. just think about the power of the human brain to entirely replace parts that are missing, and consider what that means for "racial characteristics" and IQ.
The Phantom
1 comment:
There's also that study from Norway a few decades back that pretty much proved that IQ is tied to education. There was a trifecta of events that produced almost-perfect conditions for a large-scale study: 1) the law changed to require two more years of compulsory education; 2) all young men finishing their education were required to go into military service for a certain period; and 3) part of the entrance exams for the required military service was an IQ test. This meant that they got to look at IQ tests of pretty much every young man in the country, over several decades, so they could compare people who'd been required to take X years of education vs. people who'd been required to take X+2 years.
The results of the study were that people who'd been required to take X+2 years of education had IQ scores about 3-4 points higher than people who'd been required to take X years. So education in Norway produces a gain of about 1.5-2 points of IQ per year.
Now, I wouldn't find at at all hard to believe that a poor education could produce a lower gain, or even a loss, of IQ points. So when someone trots out the old thing about most countries in Africa having an average IQ of 61 or whatever, I find it to be much stronger evidence for the idea that the public education in Sudan sucks big-time. I spent a year in a country in West Africa (which I won't identify here), and heard lots of stories about public school teachers not receiving their salaries because it had gotten skimmed off by a corrupt bureaucrat higher up in their education department. I can't personally swear to the accuracy of those stories, but I believe them otherwise I wouldn't be repeating them here.
So IQ points are a much better measure of "How effective is your country's education system?" than they are of genetic factors. And since in countries like the US (I don't know how widespread homeschooling is in Canada), there's a widespread homeschooling movement mostly in response to the failures of the public schools, I suspect that if they did an IQ test of ONLY public-school students, they'd find an average of 92 or something like that. So of course, that won't ever happen.
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