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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crabbe who wrote (3254)	1/12/2006 5:01:51 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 219500

The extreme stopped raising. Only the mean is getting higher! But let me diggest this on my daughters' day trip to country side. Will write back later

To: Crabbe who wrote (3254)	1/12/2006 2:39:47 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 219500

If I recall correctly, the Flynn Effect allows for nutrition, which hadn't changed in many countries, but I'm sure nutrition must contribute. Lead and mercury consumption would be significant too, but I can't recall if that was adjusted for as a confounding variable. <for 25 years we obeyed nutritionists and avoided eggs. > Not me. Or my brother. We decided way back that it wsa nonsense and that eating eggs is a good thing. Some things don't make sense. I also don't think butter causes heart disease. Good point on average heights. <note the change in average height of soldiers from world war II to the present. > Women also preferentially select taller men [on average]. I know nutrition is the popular explanation for height, but perhaps there's a Flynn Effect for height too with shorties being selected out. Go to Holland and see how tall men are! My theory was that Dutch are tall because of selection processes over the years as shorties drowned after falling into canals, so only the tall went on to breed. But perhaps it's just that Dutch women have put great importance on tall me. Japanese women haven't done that. Nor have Italian. Nor have Pygmy. It doesn't seem to be just a matter of nutrition, though just over the Dutch border are the Belgians, who are shorter and rounder, which I had ascribed to lack of canals and a fondness for Belgian chocolates. Maybe it's sexual selection, not canals and chocolates. I recall that height and intelligence are strongly correlated [Google would have data I suppose] so perhaps while selecting for intelligence, women get tall men. Or, when selecting tall, they get smart. Or, they want both tall and smart and there is pressure on both. Tall, dark, handsome, kind and smart. On learning speed and IQ, while smart people learn faster, time itself isn't sufficient. Even with a longggg time, a chimp can't solve simultaneous equations. It's simply outside the scope of their intellect. SAT tests aren't a matter of learning [more than to a small extent]. They are intellectual gymnastic tests. People study SATs and still can't do them. A smart 12 year old can learn a few simple rules in a couple of hours and do really well on the maths test while a dull 18 year old can slog as long as they like and won't be able to beat the 12 year old. <The Flynn Effect would indicate over the 20th Century the average learning speed increased by a factor of 32. 30 IQ points. even if the change in learning speed were halved by 12 IQ points the increase over the century would still be a factor of 6 > It is possible to raise the mean without raising the extremes. <It is impossible to raise the mean with out raising the extremes. > If there are a certain variety of genes in the population and the extremes have the right combination, then the extremes can't get smarter using the same genes, but by removing the dull genes from the general population by sexual selection, leaving only smart genes, the extremes will stay the same, but the average will increase. I guess that the extremes don't have the perfect combination of DNA, though they are close. They are still more or less a random collection of DNA. They haven't been carefully selected like race horses over generations of careful breeding programmes. <The Flynn Effect is best understood as declining test standards.> Not at all. The Flynn Effect was determined by unchanging test methods. Have a read about it. Flynn was originally wanting to show that IQ tests showing Negroes were not as bright as others were flawed. When he found not what he expected, he didn't deny the data, he went on to explain what he wanted in other ways. Mqurice