Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Race to Nowhere- any thoughts?

Still waiting for hard scientific evidence.


I didn't mention rates specifically. I just said "processes," which also can include the amount of a particular neurotransmitter. There may also be anatomical considerations, such as the amount of white matter, myelin thickness, placement or number of synaptic connections, and on and on.

Again, you're going to have to give me hard scientific evidence for your ideas in order to convince me.

Also, and this is something I didn't mention in my last message --- much athletic ability also depends on brainpower. Aspiring pro athletes, for example, have to take the Wonderlic test, which is a test of cognitive ability. There are minimum scores for different positions (e.g. quarterbacks need higher scores than most other positions). This makes perfect sense: to be a good quarterback, you need more than muscles. You also have to make a rapid assessment of conditions on the field and be able to make a correct split-second decision about the best person to throw the ball to.

Your basic argument is that teaching affects intelligence. It's a nice idea and I wish it were true, but I don't believe it is. Good teaching can have a huge effect on comprehension, but understanding something because someone explained it well isn't the same thing as getting smarter because someone explained something well.


Studies have shown that permanent environmental effects are modest and more striking effects are temporary. Scientific studies support this point. For example, JamieH mentioned the discredited twin study and provided references.

Here's an example of a large and very well-known study. It showed that intensive interventions between the ages of 0 and 5 in low premature children had an obvious effect at age three that started to peter out after that.



Another study called the Abecedarian study showed real but modest gains: the average IQ in the intervention group was around 4 points higher than the controls. I don't know the statistical significance of this difference.

That said, there were other real gains, as the Wikipedia entry shows. Yet they were modest: fewer criminals, fewer teenage pregnancies, and more people in college at age 21 (no mention of how many graduated and what they studied).

If the treatment group (but not the control group) had produced, say, a theoretical physicist or a neuroscientist, the people running the project would have plastered this fact all over the place. I can't find anything along these lines. The study subjects were all born in the early to mid-1970s --- making the oldest ones are 39. We would have heard by now if this had happened.

So yes, there were gains, but no, they didn't turn people of below average intelligence (the average IQ at age 15 was in the 90s for both groups) into very smart people. They just made them less below-average. See page 44 of this report for IQ scores. Note that IQ scores in the control group went up while those in the intervention group went down. What does this mean?

Everything I've written goes back to one idea: talent exists, and it's real. It would be nice if we could make individuals more talented, but we can't really. We can make them a bit more talented, which is great. It's too bad our society doesn't put more emphasis on free pre-natal care, high-quality school lunches and other critical social programs. If we cared more about poor people, we'd try to ensure that they get medical care, food, and safe housing. These interventions would probably go a long way toward raising our society's average IQ and making life better for the poor.




You're assuming that going to college is part of a perfect world. Yet some people have no interest in college. Why should their aspirations be considered less worthy than some arbitrary ideal just because of this?

Val