Intelligence: All That Matters

This book is useful in clearing away misconceptions about intelligence research that have been popularized in Social Media and Liberal-leaning media outlets. One of the most shocking facts presented in this book is Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences has no basis in scientific research; at best, Musical Intelligence may be different from General Intelligence (G-Factor) but there are mixed results even there from the scientific studies. Studies on the so-called Multiple Intelligences has found no evidence that they're separate as Gardner claims them to be. The G-Factor generally shows that if you're good in one area, then you're good in others and you can improve your skills faster as a result. For instance, emotional intelligence falls into the category of IQ too and doesn't contradict the current psychological model of the five personalities. The only possible area where Gardner's theory might have merit is Musical Intelligence and the results for that are mixed from scientific research, so Gardner's claims there are also unlikely to have merit.Ritchie explains in his book that there is a strong correlation between our genes and our IQ according to repeated scientific studies, there are two more important and crucial factors that should be mentioned; the most productive way to increase your IQ is to focus on living a healthy life because focusing on one's health helps improve our physical development especially before the age of 25, similar to research that shows malnutrition diminishes our brain development as children. Equally noteworthy is that our personal motivation plays a stronger factor in increasing and determining IQ than our genes which corroborates Angela Duckworth's book, Grit, where she explains how effort counts twice. Our genes play a factor, but they're not the sole or the most important factor. The scientific consensus shows that IQ can increase depending on our social environment and strikingly enough - absent any form of psychological, physical, or sexual abuse - parenting doesn't play a significant factor in influencing a child's IQ. Ritchie repeatedly clarifies that despite the genetic influence, studies show a stronger link with motivation and good health in determining our IQ. One sad fact from the scientific studies is that there is rabid cognitive decline for all human beings in our ability to learn and process new information quickly after the age of 25, so childhood development and motivation is especially important to increasing a person's IQ over a lifetime.Ritchie goes on to dismiss the popularized book The Bell Curve by Charles Murray as there is a total lack of scientific research on the question of Race and IQ. Ritchie cautions making spurious generalizations due to the history of the eugenics movement; one such example of a genocide that I know of is the forcible sterilization of Native American women by several State governments within the US. All we can say at the moment is that we don't know enough about Race and IQ. Similarly, the IQ differences of men and women have no real scientific research to back them; at best, one country's analysis from the 1940s and it's impossible to determine what social factors could influence the results from back then. The research itself showed that men and women of a certain country were totally equal in intelligence with men having more spatial intelligence and women with more verbal intelligence as kids during the first study and as adults several years later. That isn't enough to make a determination or rule out social factors.Apart from all of this, I feel he overstated his case. The G-Factor is but one of many competing factors in determining a person's success and he repeatedly admits that focusing on proper health, nutrition, and personal motivation completely trump genetics. Moreover, social background such as our economic status and the education of our community play an equally important factor as our genetic make-up in determining our IQ. I must emphasize that the genetic basis would be one's own family and especially if your sibling is an identical or fraternal twin as that has been the basis of most of the scientific research. If we eat healthy, exercise, and have a thirst for learning then we'll end-up on the higher end, but if not then we'll slide down to the lower-end or it won't see any measurable improvements that are different from our age bracket. He kept mentioning how IQ is downplayed. However, from the psychology books that I read, I never saw any of the authors outright dismiss the genetics of IQ, but instead emphasize that it is one of many factors as he does. I can only conjecture that this book is meant for Howard Gardner's fans, people who read only Social Media articles on IQ, and people obsessed with a slanted position on IQ - whether boasting of it or dismissing it.Ritchie makes a joke based on his analysis; evidently, very intelligent people generally don't want to believe in IQ differences and prefer to argue that IQ is either biased or useless because it hurts their sense of pride in their accomplishments. After all, if you worked hard to get where you are, why would you want to hear that it was predetermined at birth based partly on your genes? Meanwhile, to Ritchie's amusement, the people with the lowest IQ are usually the ones obsessed over IQ differences and like to make vacuous generalizations on weak research that they misrepresent. I've seen such nonsense from the racist website, Alternative Hypothesis, where they linked an article about young black boys with severe cases of down syndrome and misrepresented the content that they linked to mean young black children in general.

The very idea of intelligence research can be so politically controversial that a lot of people are afraid to touch it, so it's great to see a book dealing with it in such a straightforward manner. If you're at all interested in the scientific study of intelligence, it's definitely worth a read.

Concise, clearly written, and the information it contains is largely correct. But it lacks depth, ignores key aspects of the topic, and is outrageously biased.Ritchie believes that IQ tests measure an attribute called g or general intelligence. Scientists are allowed to have preferences but they are supposed to explain why alternative views are less satisfactory. The possibility that there might be multiple kinds of mental abilities, in his view, can be summarized as "...there's no evidence for it. Gardner just came up with the concept and added the additional intelligences seemingly on a whim." (page 27)To get a sense of the degree of bias, consider this statement on page 111 "IQ critics often write off intelligence testing on the basis of this minority of slipshod work, leaving the vast majority of sensible scientists, and their painstakingly collected data, standing on the sidelines." The author never states what this slipshod work is nor why it is slipshod. Once someone denounces critics, without saying why, no further discussion is possible. What makes this especially disturbing is that the author includes extensive bibliographies for articles favorable to his position but critics are merely mentioned in passing. On page 111, he says that "interested readers should investigate the works of Keon Kamin and Steven Rose..." but he cites no articles by these authors, providing no help to anyone wanting to learn other points of view.The book is written in an easy-to-read simplified style suitable for undergraduates or people having no prior training in Psychology. But I couldn't recommend it to such people because of its bias. Nor could I recommend it to undergraduates because it lacks any information on how IQ tests are used by professionals and how subtests are interpreted. Key issues, like speed versus power tests, get no coverage at all.The sizeable bibliography might have been intended for graduate students or professionals but I can't recommend the book to those people either because so many topics are treated simplistically. For example, he introduces the formula for calculating heritability from twin studies giving no indication of how the formula was derived. He does, however, make a joke about the formula's relationship to E=MC^2. Nor does he provide any real detail on alternative methods for calculating heritability.Lots of important topics never get the treatment they deserve. The theory behind IQ owes much to factor analysis but Ritchie never mentions that literature. Multiple regression is important too but Ritchie only gives a sketchy, and misleading, overview. There isn't a good discussion of which types of tests are more susceptible to the Flynn effect.I'm a retired Biopsychologist and Computer Programmer. I purchased and read this book because it would supposedly correct my misconceptions about the field. The only opinion that it did change was that the field has been almost static. Most of the concepts in the book were being discussed in the early 1970's. Flynn published his studies since then but the effect he described was suspected by some in the 1970's. It had known by then that IQ scores are hard to change. It had been known that IQ is strongly influenced by genetics. One of my textbooks on neurophysiology cited the frontal lobe's role in abstract reasoning. Racial and ethnic differences in IQ were well known back then and widely discussed. It's pretty strange to see a field that has made so little progress in all those years.

A lot of nature-nurture controversy about IQ. It's easy to tell which side of the fence someone's on, though. If you finished grad school and have an IQ of about 125 or more, you believe that IQ is fixed and is primarily in the genes. If your IQ is below 120, you believe it's not a fixed thing and that by much study and hard reading you can catch up to all those smarty pants whose test scores always waxed yours in school. I don't know my own IQ, but I do know I'm still not smart enough for those smart aleck nerds I went to school with in sixth grade. But I paid 'em back during PE time. Boy was PE time a bad time for the brainiacs.Still, the 140 IQ is no more worth bragging about than it's worth bragging about to be born rich. The smart kid won the parental lottery just the same as the rich kid did. So bragging about it is illogical. But they do it anyway. C'est la vie.

This book does not seriously engage with either the problematic racist history of intelligence research or the alternative interpretations that have been proposed for the mainstream theories of intelligence research. These topics are not mere details, but should be central in any good book on the topic of intelligence. These omissions are surprising given that the author wrote another (very good) book on the problems with current scientific practice, so his total lack of a critical approach is difficult to understand. I was not expecting the author to debunk his own field, but to at least give a decent defense of it, sadly this did not happen at all. You will learn more by browsing trough the wikipedia page for intelligence than reading this pamphlet. The only reason I don't give it 1 star is because the writing itself is clear. Very disappointing.

The author writes clearly and the information is presented well. However it was a very short read which tended to stop just when things got interesting, or when well known ground had been covered. It could be read in not much more than an hour.

This is just the right level for an intelligent undergraduate needing an introduction

This engaging little book is a good starting point in understanding intelligence, why it matters, why it is controversial, and why the majority of the stuff we should be wary of how the popular press talks about this topic.

A short pithy read which will take only a few hours. I found it a good starter.