Height and Intelligence (IQ), a correlation.

There is a correlation between height and intelligence, as measured by IQ. The correlation is 0.2. Although this is a weak correlation, it is statistically significant and accounts for about 4% of the variation in IQ between people.

Now, before I go on, I should add that this correlation is not strong enough to bar the idea of a short, smart person. They exist, no doubt, in plenty. What it is saying, however, is that there is a tendency for intelligent people to also be taller.

Studies suggest that there are common genetic factors involved in both height and intelligence. So, it is no coincidence that they correlate, positively.

All this leads me to look at my own children. Ainan, for instance is notably tall for his age and race. He is about 1 metre 36 centimetres, as of a month or two ago (maybe taller now) - and growing fast. He is the tallest person in his class (barring another child of similar height). I understand there are about 40 people in his class. His shortest classmate is a full head shorter than Ainan. That is, his friend's head sits under Ainan's chin.

Ainan is not the tallest person in his year. That accolade goes to a friend of his. However, according to a chart of heights of American boys from 2000, he is now at least the average height of an American nine and a half year old boy. So, he is tall for his age.

I look at Fintan, too. In another post, I pointed out that Fintan was of the weight of a six year old Caucasian (actually, the weight of a six and a half year old, Caucasian American boy.) What I failed to point out, however, is that he is also of the HEIGHT of a six year old Caucasian boy (though he is only four years old). So, he, too, is rather tall for his age.

This impression of their heights is a little distorted (underestimated) by the fact that I am comparing them to a Caucasian population, when both are, of course, Eurasian (who tend to be slighter, and not so tall, as full Caucasians).

Looking at them, now, I can't help but wonder how tall they might be, one day. Will they be taller than their Daddy?

We will see. I wouldn't be surprised if both of them make it.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and one month, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and six months, and Tiarnan, twenty-three months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

The mysterious genius of Athens

Consider these names: Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Anaxagoras, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, Phidias and Simonides. Consider also these lesser known names: Aspasia, Aristippus, Polynotos, Lycurgos, Lysias, Protagoras, and Praxiteles.

What do all these people have in common - apart from being known by but a single name?

The answer is more surprising than at first it seems. They are all Athenians, from Ancient Athens. Does that shock you? It did me. It shocked me because I troubled myself to find out a little more about Ancient Athens and its Golden Age. What I learnt is both humbling and terrible news for the modern era.

The first thing that should be noted is that all of these people lived in the period 440 BC to about 380 BC. This is the Golden Age of Athens. As you will have noted the first of the two lists is unequivocally a list of some of the greatest geniuses who ever lived - accounted by not only their impact and reputation in their own times, but by their subsequent effects on the development of Western civilization and rational thought. Without their impetus, most of what we enjoy today, would not have come to being. The underlying way of thinking would not have evolved. So, we owe a debt of great gratitude to these early rational thinkers and scientific philosophers - and playwrights, too, (for inventing the theatre), among other achievements.

The second list are also regarded as geniuses, but are of lesser reputation - but still, they are all Athenian - and that, in itself, is telling.

You see, I tried to find the population of Athens at the time in question. I saw estimates varying from just 90,000 people to a high of 250,000. The highest estimate, according to one historian, implied that were about 60,000 adult males in Athens at the time. This estimate is not just for Athens but for the city plus the entire surrounding territory of Attica, on which Athens stood. So, it is actually an over-estimate for Athens itself. (Quite a few estimates for Athens' population placed it at around 100,000 - so divide all these calculations by 2.5, if that figure is correct for the city of Athens, proper).

So, the largest estimate of the possible pool from which all these geniuses - and some of them were great geniuses indeed - is drawn - is just 60,000 men.

Think long about that. A significant number of the greatest thinkers in Ancient times were drawn from a pool of just 60,000 men! (At the highest estimate).

How many geniuses are there today in a gathering of 60,000 men in a typical developed country? I mean, true geniuses - people of genuine creative power? I would be surprised if there was even one, really surprised.

How many true geniuses are there alive in the world's 6,000,000,000 plus people, today? Very, very few.

How many should there be? Well, let us use Ancient Athens as our template - and just so you don't accuse me of massaging the figures, let us use a worst case scenario. Let us count the number of major geniuses in Athens in the list above - and forget about the ones of lesser reputation, in the first instance. There are 14 major geniuses in the list above - for a population of no more than 250,000 (including children and slaves - who didn't really have much chance of participating - so this actually dilutes the true impression of Athenians, proper).

How many great geniuses would there be in the world today, for a population of six billion?

Well it is 14 divided by 250,000 multiplied by 6,000,000,000. That gives us a total of: 336,000.

There would be a third of a million geniuses on a par with Plato and Socrates alive today, if modern humans were as the Ancient Athenians had been.

I, for one, do not believe that there are a third of a million such individuals alive today. It may even be that such a number of great geniuses have never, in fact, lived, in the whole history of the human race. (Had they lived, one would expect history to be littered with many more great men and women than seems to be the case).

Now, that calculation only looked at those geniuses of greatest reputation in Ancient Athens. Let us consider the whole list - but remember that these lists may have accidentally excluded other great names, too. So, it will be, if anything, an underestimate of the true situation.

Doing the calculation for the second list of seven names gives another 168,000 geniuses who should be alive today - but most probably aren't.

Now, it doesn't make sense that the lesser names should be half as numerous as the greater ones. Clearly, therefore, my list is incomplete. So this is just a rough guide to the situation. There should be several lesser names for every greater one. Remember though that these lesser names are geniuses too - great enough to be remembered by some two and a half millenia later. So they are not insignificant.

Adding the two estimates gives us at total of 504,000 geniuses for the modern world. That is enough to populate a sizable city. Yet, I doubt the actual number is great enough to fill a sizable hotel.

The conclusion we can draw from this is either something is wrong about modern man - or something was great about Athenian man. It is basically the same, relative, conclusion.

Francis Galton (February 16, 1822 to January 17, 1911) once noted concerning the Athenian situation that, for Ancient Athens to have possessed so many geniuses, that the average intelligence of its population would have had to have been "two grades above the mean for a modern European" (That is a 19th century human, who, I propose, would have been genetically superior to people of today for reasons to be discussed elsewhere). For Francis Galton, a grade equated to about 10 IQ points in the current way of looking at it. So, in Francis Galton's estimate, for there to have been so many geniuses, in such a small place as Ancient Athens, the mean IQ of the Athenian population must have been about an IQ of 120.

No nation, city or race on Earth in the modern world comes remotely close to such a figure. By comparison the mean IQ of our "world leader" - the United States is just 98. The highest is Hong Kong at a mean of 107. As for races and IQ, the highest is for the Ashkenazi Jews at just over 107 mean according to the biggest study I could find (and therefore likely to be the most representative), with a sample size of 1,236 Ashkenazi Jews, by Backman in 1972.

So, Athenian man (and woman) stood far above modern people in mean intelligence. Such a huge disparity in mean intelligence, would have led to a situation in which gifted people - by modern reckoning of that term, were super-abundant. A significant proportion of the population would have tested as "gifted or above". If the mean IQ was, in fact, 120 for Ancient Athens, then assuming a standard deviation of 15 about that mean (as it is today in the West), then fully 25 % of the population would have tested at the gifted range of 130 or above. One in four Athenians would have been considered gifted by modern standards, by this reckoning.

Let us look a little deeper. One in four would have been moderately gifted (IQ 130); One in twenty-one would have been highly gifted (IQ 145 and above); one in two hundred and sixty one would have been exceptionally gifted (IQ 160 and above) and one in thirty-one thousand five hundred and sixty would have been profoundly gifted (IQ 180 and above). By the way, this suggests one Athenian had an IQ of 187 (one in a quarter of a million).

Now even these figures will be an underestimate of the true situation because they use a normal curve to derive the probabilities - whereas the true, observed curve is trimodal, with higher than expected upper and lower occurrences of IQ.

By comparison, for the modern world, using the rarity expected in a normal distribution of standard deviation 15, gives 1 in 44, moderately gifted, 1 in 741 highly gifted, 1 in 31,560 exceptionally gifted, 1 in 20,696,000 will be profoundly gifted (or say fifteen people in the United states, today).

These figures can only, therefore, give you a feel for the situation - but an incredible one it is. Were modern men as gifted as Ancient Athenians, genius would be more common than footballers. Such a world would be far different from the one we actually have. Presumably, we would be far more advanced culturally, scientifically and technologically.

Yet, we are not as the Athenians were. Neither are the modern Greeks. Their mean IQ is a saddening 92.

What happened, then, to the great Athens and their superhuman Athenians? Well, plague took a lot of them (including Pericles) - one third in one bite. Then Sparta took a lot more of them, by defeating them. The sterility (and military discipline) of Sparta triumphed over the genius of Athens. In 338 B.C Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great's dad) conquered Athens ending its independence. Athens never shone again, as once it had.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and nine months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and two months, and Tiarnan, nineteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

IQ and the Politics of Science

IQ has been a contentious issue since it was developed in the early part of the twentieth century. The most common reason for contention has been the connection between IQ and genetics.

One of the early pioneers on the matter of IQ and genetics was Cyril Burt. You may have heard of him - and what you may have heard may not be entirely flattering - yet...have you been misinformed?

Cyril Burt was born in 1883 and his heyday was in the 1920s and 1930s. His work pioneered not only the question of genetics in IQ but also the sociological factors involved in poor school achievement and his work called attention to such matters, which seem obvious now, of poverty, overcrowding and the like. At the time, however, it was fresh work.

This is not why he is most famous, however - or infamous, for that matter. His work on the heritability of IQ is what led him into trouble. He published some studies of twins raised apart - and therefore growing up in different environments. If IQ was environmentally determined, one would expect that there would be little correlation, therefore, between their IQs. What his results showed, however, was that the correlation was very high indeed: a correlation of 0.77, in which a correlation of 1.0 would indicate identity of IQs.

This result caused an outcry among his environmental (nurture type) opponents. They were just not willing to accept his results. In due course, in 1973, Leon Kamin, then at Princeton University, cried "fraud" and stated that the fact that his correlation remained unchanged despite moving from 15 pairs of twins in 1943 to 53 pairs of twins in 1966, remaining at 0.77, once rounded off, indicated that the results were fraudulent.

The whole world joined in the ambush with even newspapers as eminent as The Sunday Times in England calling him a fraud and pounding his reputation into the ground. Cyril Burt was destroyed by this.

One curious accusation levelled against Cyril Burt was that his two assistants, referred to in his work, never existed. The charge was that he made up his assistants to lend corroboration to his work - which they also said he made up.

However, in 1989, a re-examination of the case against Burt by Robert B. Johnson, showed that the "evidence" was ill-founded and that it was most certainly not proven.

Tellingly, there have since been five other studies of monozygotic twins raised apart. The average IQ correlation shown in these studies is 0.75. This is remarkably similar to Burt's "fraudulent" results of 0.77. For a "fraud" his work is spot-on: how strange.

The worst part of this case though was what happened immediately after Cyril Burt's death in 1971. Liam Hudson, one of Cyril Burt's greatest enemies and most outspoken opponents rushed around to his house. Now, do you think he went there to express his sorrow? No. I am afraid not. He went there to instruct Burt's secretary-housekeeper to burn Burt's data and papers - which she duly did. Liam Hudson, Burt's opponent, personally oversaw the destruction of as much of Burt's lifework as he could.

This act appals me as much as the burning of the Library of Alexandria by the ignorant Romans.
The question is: why wasn't Liam Hudson sentenced to life in prison? He should have been for destroying the scientific work of a lifetime - but, as far as I am aware, nothing happened to him at all. He should still be in prison - but he never set foot in the place.

The other question is: why would Liam Hudson destroy Burt's work? If he genuinely believed Burt to be wrong about the hereditability of IQ, as he said, publicly, what would he have to fear from Burt's data? Clearly, though he spoke against it, he believed that Burt's data was correct and that IQ was highly heritable - otherwise he would have no motive to destroy the data set laboriously collected over a lifetime. The whole matter is absolutely shameful.

As for those mysterious "non-existent" assistants, both were later located. However, no newspaper, that I know of, published an apology for their accusations that these two people had been nothing but fiction.

This whole case tells us much of the danger of politics infecting science. Science should be pursued for the truth - whatever that is. No-one should try to impose the answer they want onto the world - or the data. Burt's opponents strongly believed that environment was all. Yet, Burt's studies showed IQ to be almost entirely hereditary. Instead of performing experiments of their own to investigate the matter - they set about with ad hominem attacks - to destroy his reputation and then, upon his death, one of them destroyed his lifework and data.

Politics should have no part in science. That which is not purely scientific should not be considered - for when it is, the truth is murdered.

Ultimately, Burt's conclusions have been verified by five other independent studies which all came to the exact same conclusion he had. There seems to be little mileage, therefore, in the idea that he was nothing but a fraud. He had, after all, stated the right answer.

So, the next time you see a scientist - or other seeker of the truth - being publicly vilified, look at who is doing the accusing - and ask why? Is it science or politics that drives them? If it is the latter, then you should have a pretty good idea of where the truth actually lies.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and nine months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and two months, and Tiarnan, nineteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)