The Science of Human Intelligence (hereinafter SHI) is the most comprehensive and up-to-date textbook on human intelligence now available. It is lavishly and usefully illustrated, and includes hundreds of full references to the original research on all key concepts. It is a serious book for serious students, but has been carefully edited to be fully... Read More

Chanda Chisala has written a series of articles for this website, dealing with the strong performance of many Nigerians and other black Africans in competitive Scrabble. He argues that this fact invalidates the poor results of African populations in IQ tests, his key point being that you have to be very smart to excel at... Read More

It is wonderful, when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession. Samuel Johnson Intelligence researchers have always found that some jobs require more intelligence than others. A rocket scientist is usually much brighter than the person serving them breakfast. The early data came from the... Read More

The systematic study of intelligence if fraught, dangerous, since everyone instantly thinks, “Race. Blacks. I will lose my job and live in a tent on the sidewalk if I think about this.” The concern is that study might reveal differences between groups. Oh God. So: Should we study it or not? The panic arises only... Read More

The British Broadcasting Corporation is one of the world’s largest (35,000 employees including part-timers) and best funded news organisations, against which few can compete. Not only does it have a budget which in 2018-19 amounted to £4.0 billion ($5.6 billion), but it is virtually guaranteed the continuation of that level of income by a government... Read More

  It is just a coincidence, but the initials NNT are best known to me as Numbers Needed to Treat. This is a measure of the numbers of patients you need to give a drug to in order to get one cure. For example, an NNT of 5 means that you have to treat five... Read More

When I started work in September 1968 one of the first things I was taught was that intelligence testing had a long history, and that many of the subtests in the Wechsler assessments I had been taken from previous research. Kohs’ blocks (1920), I used to mutter, when people talked about Block Design. I was... Read More

David Becker has released a new version of the World’s IQ. Each country has a score showing the cognitive abilities of their citizens, this being a blend of genetics and the environment of each country, particularly as regards education and health. The world’s global score is 82. This is 12th percentile rank on the Greenwich... Read More

Although I did not entirely ignore the subject. I should have paid more attention to people’s estimates of their own intelligence. Self-estimates are error prone, and may have negative consequences in real life, as well as making discussions about intelligence remarkable error-prone. Adrian Furnham did several papers on this topic, and Sophie Von Stumm made... Read More

Newspapers have very warmly received an international project which, in the author’s views, strongly suggests that healthy babies are all alike in their developmental milestones, at least as determined by a study of particular centres in different parts of the world. The study has the following general features: Find healthy pregnant women in several different... Read More

I do not have a dog in the fight about dogs. My dad said that there was a dog in every boy’s life, and so we had some dogs when I was young, and then in my own life, no dogs. I was living a town life, and working, and had neither need nor wish... Read More

A storm, methinks, is just over the horizon: The genetics of intelligence, perhaps of behavior. Geneticists know that intelligence is largely genetic. They know better than to say so. But research advances rapidly. Laboratories close in on the responsible genes. Things like genomic-sequence correlation proceed apace. Within ten or fifteen years, I will guess, the... Read More

Thank you to all those who commented on the “Swanning About: Fooled by Algebra” blog and associated tweets. A number of themes came up, so here are individual responses I made to some comments, and also some general points. Since Taleb thought he could dismiss a century of psychometry, there are rather a lot of... Read More

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has tweeted a set of remarks about intelligence research. He has now gathered those together into one format, with links and explanations. There is no lack of confidence in his essay. There is much to discuss here, and what follows covers what I see as the main points. I have added some... Read More

A bit of back history: I started learning about intelligence and intelligence tests when I was an undergraduate in 1964-1968. This included taking group intelligence tests at the beginning of my psychology course, and giving face to face Wechsler tests in my final year. I then started my first research project leading to my PhD:... Read More

Publisher: Cambridge University Press Online publication date: January 2018 Print publication year: 2018 Online ISBN: 9781316817049 I do not wish to quote myself too often, but in my 2013 review of Sternberg’s Handbook of Intelligence I raised an eyebrow about how often he quoted himself, and by means of an internal citation count questioned whether... Read More

The ISIR July 2017 meeting in Montreal seems a long time ago, and that feeling is entirely explicable by it being 10 months since I heard the lecture in question. I was chairing the session, which normally diminishes attention to the actual content, but this talk was the exception. It came up with a counter-intuitive... Read More

Things are moving so fast in genetic research on intelligence that one cannot take a coffee break without missing important announcements. By way of small compensation, even the biggest breakthroughs are based on previous breakthroughs, so most stories in science are about a pattern of results rather than a single paper, and that pattern eventually... Read More

It is usual to distinguish between biological and machine intelligence, and for good reason: organisms have interacted with the world for millennia and survived, machines are a recent human construction, and until recently there was no reason to consider them capable of intelligent behaviour. Computers changed the picture somewhat, but until very recently artificial intelligence... Read More

As is my usual custom, I wrote to the authors whose work I had commented upon in my previous post: I asked John Protzko how long the effects of intelligence boosting interventions lasted. He said that he thought this “fadeout” effect was likely to happen somewhere between 3 and 5 years after the intervention had... Read More

I have always assumed that the Ancients were wiser than us, but I admit that my evaluation is subject to survivor bias: the best of their thinking has been passed on to us, the mediocre rest forgotten. The Ancients were not all at the level of Socrates, they also included the dullards that killed him.... Read More

Although the Bard warned against finding the mind’s construction in the face, we are apt to try. Can facial features show us the power of the brain behind the mask? Lee et al. (2017) think so. Unlike minor Scottish nobility planning regicide, they have made their judgments using the medium of facial photographs of twins... Read More

It is a measure of the quality of British life that one of its longest running TV programs is “University Challenge”, a quiz show for university students. Yes, it has always been a minority interest, but it is a showcase of talent, an astounding example of what bright young people can get to know in... Read More