The Neanderthal theory, your thoughts?

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I want to share with you the prologue of a book written by a well known mathematician from Argentina, my country.. that's why my english sucks by the way. He's a recognized proffessor of the University of Buenos Aires and a very nice person to meet. Excuse my poor translation...

IT REALLY WORTH THE TIME READING.

"For long years I was in the search for a good definition of the word intelligence.
What is it exactly? Everybody and when I say every is because there's no way I couldn't speak to someone in any given time who wouldn't say: That's an intelligent person.. or he's a very intelligent guy.. or quite the contrary: He does not have an ounce of intelligence.
I stop here because... you know what I mean. But what really amazes me is that If you ask someone to define intelligence. It is quite probably you'll hear a wide range of answers.

A. It's about the skills to solve problems.
B. It's about the capacity to quickly adapt to new situations.
C. The skills to learn and comprehend to get profits of the experience.
D. It's the capacity of an individual to perceive, interpretate and adapt a response to the environment.
E. It's the innate capability to perceive relationships and indetify corelationships.
F. It's the dexterity to find sameness and diferences and recognize things that are iddentical.

Obviously that list could go on. The problem resides in the fact there's not a universally accepted meaning. So, when people talks about intelligence what do they mean?

Far beyond my reluctancy, there's a thread in what do people believes when they are talking about intelligence.

But I have some questions:

-One is all-around intelligent?
-One who is intelligent for business is also intelligent for physics?
-To be intelligent.. you have to be quick?
-Do you have to make conclusions faster than average? How do you measure average?
-Can you be intelligent being deep and profound but not necessarily quick?
-Being intelligent is having new ideas?
-The intelligent people are prepared to understand all the questions to search for the answers?
-Where's the point or line when you go from not intelligent to intelligent?

Classic positions.

Since 1930 there are some people who believes It's a genetic factor. Therefor is hereditary. Others say It's the environment in which a kid develops, and the stimulus he receives. In the 60's and the 70's the public and private sectors held the voice of the scientist who didn't dare to say it loud. Ingelligence is genetic!
In 1994 was published the first edition of the Book The bell Curve. Which was a best seller. It's authors Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray presumed they had found a good definition of intelligence, a way to quantify it and therefore a way to measure it. They show statistical analisis and a pormenorized study of the IQ (intelligent quotient). The IQ becomed the general method to express the performance of an individual in a given population.

That book splitted the american society public opinion in two.

What could be essential to analize this discussion is a less passionate point of view. It's hard to debate a topic so undefineable with certainty.

Another scientits who are in strong disagreement with the IQ tests claims that the more important aspects of human skills are so diverse, so complex, so changing, so dependable of cultural context and above all means so subjective to be measured with a list of questions.
And they go on "intelligence is more comparable to beauty or justice than to height or weight"

From another point of view, Howard Gardner a psychologyst from Harvard says "there is not just one type of intelligence or a general intelligence. There are seven types of intelligence.

Ambience or heredity?

Hot argues go on between the ones who believe is the social context and the other party that firmly believes it is determined in the moment of the birth. This discussion boils because it touches the controverted cuestions of education, social classes and racial relationships.

My position facing this hot debate is that the conditioning of the environment are a decissive factor. An example:If the day I was born the nursery switched babies. The baby who took my place in my familiy could have large possibilities to develop his skills freely. Of course, not necessarily he would become a mathematician and journalist. But what it is clear to me is he could exploit his inborn abilities and dreams to a large extent.

I don't want to sound an expert in the subject because I am not one. I just want to make an opinion to this and it is as valuable as anyones.

But I want to do it anyway: I am convinced with every child is born with a set of skills, a taste for something in particular, with a talent or easyness to perform a task. But if a child has no economic possibilities, or adecquate stimulus then It is very likely he never finds out what he likes and enjoys.


If we could give to every child the possibility to live in the right conditions to develop ot its full potential then we could analize who is intelligent and who is not. Even if we manage to agree what is intelligence.

Adrian Paenza.

I hope you liked..

it's not conclusive...i doubt if it's the actual truth

Yes, or even worse, they will, in many countries, be placed into a lower educational track. In the U.S., the lower tracks are disproportionately populated by African Americans and Latino Americans. That is why I have difficulties with claims that Negroids have lower average IQs than Caucasoids (no matter how one parses it). Similarly, many nonverbal autistics, who have subsequently continued on as university students, will present on those tests as intellectually disabled (mentally ret*d). The problem is that the IQ testing process is not isomorphic with all subpopulations.

Actually, I think it is significant that the third factor in Aspie-quiz seems to be the well-known "g-factor". It explains around 1% of the variance (compare that to 70% of the Aspie-NT aspect). The main problem I see in measuring intelligence based on this 1% of human variation is that whatever the tests measure they will be heavily messed-up with the Aspie-NT aspect. This is clearly the case for the personality-tests. Big Five has the extraversion factor that is indistinguishable from the NT social & compulsion aspect (IOW it loads high on the Aspie-NT aspect) and another factor that is almost entirely related to secondary problems many autistics have (neuroticism). The third factor clusters to "Aspie activity" (and thus ADD/ADHD). The other two factors, although they don't cluster on any specific aspect in Aspie-quiz, still correlates about 0.2-0.3 to the neurotypical factor. So, I think it is both meaningless and impossible to construct a general IQ-test, since there is no significant factor in factor-analysis of broad questionaries that actually can be said to be the IQ-factor. The entire concept of the "g-factor" is grounded in factor-analysis of IQ-tests with too small variation and without first eliminating the much more significant Aspie and NT factors.

General intelligence (g-factor) is widely criticized by cognitive and educational psychologists as presenting an overly mechanistic view of intelligence. It also attempts to bracket culture and socialization.



They also generally result in small eta squared values, indicating that little of the variance is explained.

Just what is g-factor? Is it certain (yet to be determined) abilities that result from certain (yet to be determined) combinations of neurotypical and neuroatypical traits with the end result being that the most common hybrids tend to score better?

People that work on intelligence research does not care about neuroatypical traits. They just put whatever traits they think contributes to intelligence into an IQ test and watches the result they get out from factor-analysis.

I realize that they are unaware of the NT talents vs. neuroatypical talents. Testing for what is thought to contribute to intelligence sounds a bit subjective and like "flying on the seat of one's pants". What I am getting at is whether or not g-factor is in fact a particular "mix of apple and oranges". With the exception of possible very recent evolution, our potential is limited by genes which come either from H.s.n. or archaic H.s.s.

I decided maybe I should read up on what factor analysis is. From what I've read, I'm beginning to think that the correlations that result in the g-factor are a result of the interaction of not only certain neurotypical and neuroatypical traits but the environment as well. In other words the correlations and resulting g-factor are products of primarily NT hybrids living in their cultures (almost everyone everywhere except most people of African decent and (to a lesser extent?) neuroatypicals which fall outside the normal range in genetics, culture or both).

Last edited by DemocraticSocialistHun on 11 May 2008, 6:38 pm, edited 3 times in total.

"...researchers Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, Spain and Holger Rompler of the University of Leipzig in Germany announced last week that Neanderthals, who died out 35,000 years ago, had the same distribution of hair and skin color as modern human European populations. By inference, that means that about 1 percent of Neanderthals must have been redheads, with pale skin and freckles."

The Scariest Thing about Neanderthals by Meredith F. Small 02 November 2007
http://www.livescience.com/history/0711 ... -hair.html

A book by the author of the above article "The Culture of Our Discontent; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness" has an interesting title too.
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Our-Disco ... 920&sr=1-1

One of reasons the Neanderthal "Theory?" appeals to me is that psychiatry simply pathologizes what it doesn't understand and discounts such possibilities as dysfunctional others in the lives of patients with "mental illness" and dysfunction of society as a whole.

From what I've heard on another forum a while back, all the Neanderthals found so far supposedly had red hair but researchers assume a 1% incidence.