If there is a single scientific concept in which there is the greatest discrepancy between research and the rest of the population, including a significant segment of the scientific community itself, it is probably IQ.
IQ is not what is measured by purported online quizzes and tests.
To appreciate just what this subtle metric is, you need to know a little about a founding figure of psychometrics.
In the early part of the 20th century, an Englishman by the name of Charles Spearman, in his endeavour to operationalize cognitive ability (that is, make it measurable in the same way say energy is measurable), noticed that school pupils had this statistical tendency for general academic performance.
For those of you who attended a high-school where academic performance was differentiated in some form in classes, e.g. in my high-school in England we had "sets" so that kids who habitually got As in maths were in set 1, people in the B-C range in set 2 and so on, you may have made the observation that the kids tended to be in similar sets for a wide range of subjects.
Anecdotally most of my fellow pupils in set 1 maths were also in set 1 science and English (further most of them were doing triple science and double English as opposed to the other kids). And conversely the pupils who struggled with one or two subjects were inclined to do so in many others.
Spearman invented a statistical method for describing this general correlation between school subjects. The tool he created, now called factor analysis, basically lets you distil many different variables (grades in maths, science, english, language and so on) into a more compact general factor. Spearman distilled all subject grades into one single factor, which he called 'g.'
Real IQ tests are actually a battery (i.e. several or many) of different cognitive tests. These are usually the verbal reasoning tests found in law-school admissions tests, the mathematical reasoning tests found in all sorts of standardized tests like the SAT, abstract reasoning tests found in the UK medical school admissions test UKCAT for example, and many others.
You can even use a battery of tests designed to measure physiological aspects of cognitive performance. For instance you can give people a series of tests such as this: a reaction speed test, stroop test (a test designed to measure how well you can focus on a single task when faced with distractions), digit-recall, working memory tests, and other elementary cognitive tasks.
You then use factor analysis to reduce all those variables into a single one - this is how 'g' is established. An IQ test is supposed to measure this property and so the higher the correlation between the test and 'g', the more legitimate that test is as a measure of IQ. This quality is often referred to as 'g loading.'
Hence not all IQ tests are the same. Some real single IQ tests used by psychologists in the real world have correlations with g of around 0.7 which, though high, is significantly worse than the best ones that have around 0.9 (a perfect correlation is 1.0). These better ones are always a battery of tests as opposed to a single one.
IQ in this sense, as a measure of g, is a very consequential thing. Virtually every study done ever shows significant correlation between IQ and important life-outcomes like whether or not one pursues and obtains higher education, income, job performance, and many others. Even things like divorce rates and good parenting are correlated with IQ in a non-trivial way.
But is 'g' genetically determined?
The research on this, which typically includes such studies as looking at identical twins separated at birth and raised in vastly different environments and their IQs (they tend to have very similar adult IQs regardless of how much different their upbringing is) has been decisive. It is. The only thing that is still open to question and argument to some extent is the extent.
Genes account for as little as 40% of variation in IQ and as high as 80%.
Poverty, which mediates things like nutrition especially in childhood (affects brain development) depresses IQ. This is likely the most significant factor responsible for the so called 'Flynn effect' that your article broaches. What the author does not mention or may not be aware of, however, is that the Flynn effect has come to an end in parts of the developed world like western Europe. There is a limit to how much improvement in environment can raise phenotypic IQ.
Therefore the great irony of the IQ issue - the more you eliminate environmental influences, the more genes become decisive in accounting for differences between people.
So yes, genes may account for as little as 40% of the variation of individuals among the poor.
On the other hand, genetics is 80% of the explanation for why one upper-middle class guy has a mere above-average IQ but his friend from the same socioeconomic class has a very high IQ.
Do you guys see the irony now?
The more a society prospers economically and becomes meritocratic etc, and thereby destroys environmental influences on people, so much the more that society becomes based on genetic differences.
Now in the west and East Asia especially but even in the better parts of the developing world where people are marrying ever more similar people on the basis of education and income, a phenomenon called assortative mating, society is becoming stratified into genetic castes based on cognitive ability. This transcends ethnicity and in fact, I have seen data to the effect it may be more severe for minority groups like Afrian-Americans than Whites.
This is actually what Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein identified as the greatest problem facing industrial society in their book the Bell Curve.
Murray and Herrnstein have been demonized as racists mainly promulgating the view that Blacks are genetically inferior; bent on resurrecting Nazi eugenics etc but their book actually talks little about race. Their analysis was mainly one of class.
The genes influencing cognitive ability are being searched for as we speak - on December 2015 the leftist-liberal leaning Guradian newspaper published an article entitled "New genetic theory might pave way to understanding human intelligence," which discusses recent work at Imperial College London that tackled the problem by looking at networks of genes rather than single ones, with much greater success (IQ is a highly polygenic trait and any single gene will only account for a very small amount of variance, the biggest one much less than 1%, which is why they are so hard to find).
When those genes are mostly found and it turns out that ethnic populations exhibit statistical differences in gene frequencies related to cognitive ability, what will the left do?
Banning this research is futile.
Scientists will continue to look for IQ genes without so much as whispering the topic of race (but their research may eventually pave the way to the racial question anyway), should their research be banned too?
How about the medical researchers looking for genetic influences on cognitive diseases like Alzheimer's - who knows, they may just stumble on methods and results related to the broader issue of cognitive ability in normal people too.
China is vigorously pursuing this research as I write this. The BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute), unlike any similar institution in the west, literally has a lab dedicated to the issue of cognitive ability (cognitive research lab).
Maybe we can invade China so we can stop them doing IQ genes research.
Horgan and Chomsky do, however, have one good point.
The world as it is and moral values are two different things.
If it is the case that statistical differences between populations in relation to cognitive ability do in fact exist, does that therefore imply that any individual from another population ought to be treated any different from how individuals from our own groups are treated?
I don't think so personally but this assumption certainly seems tacit in the worldview and endeavours of leftists.
The left wants to ban IQ research because it fears that the research may demonstrate that reality does not conform to leftist ideas of how it should look like.
People like to fling the fact that the Nazis claimed to found their policies on things like genetics and eugenics. How many of those people have heard of Lysenko?
How many are aware that the Soviet Union's hostility to genetics lead to retarded agricultural schemes that then conduced famines resulting in mass starvations?
A while back I read an article on gene-editing applied to medicine by some idiotic liberal contending that there are benefits to inherited diseases on the basis that diversity in the gene pool is good. Yes indeed, it's so good that we have millions of people suffering hour after hour from genetic disorders because after-all, look at all that diversity!
Let the scientists do their science, please. And let individuals decide for themselves and their societies how they will utilize the results of that science.
