I mean, really, what is Will trying to achieve here? I hope he realizes by tomorrow's article that he's just read two racist quacks opine on whether people whose cultures revere working hard to achieve an education are good at taking tests.

Even if there were a difference among the races on "g" -- which I don't concede that any IQ test can ever accurately reflect, so what? Women really are weaker physically than men, across racial groups. What are you going to do, kick my ass?

The most successful people you know of are not "geniuses," and did not get unusually high IQ scores. They are good at what they do (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, the Sultan of Brunei, Oprah Winfrey), but IQ tests simply cannot calibrate level of success in later life, only the level of success in taking the next similarly structured test.

Here, here.

I can't believe he actually links to so many Pioneer Fund studies. I guess he isn't aware of their stated racist history, or their current and continuing cozy relationship to the American Renaissance magazine? Perhaps he is...

He probably tests really well, and has a cultural investment in his high IQ score, as proof of his value. Those of us who test well, and think it doesn't mean much compared to other traits, are cringing.

We'll see what tomorrow's article brings. I hope to God it's more responsibly researched than this mess.

This may be somewhat off-topic, but I wouldn't be surprised if whales were genetically more intelligent (in some analytical ways) than humans. Unfortunately, they have a lot working against them- no thumbs, a very visually boring environment, slow metabolism, etc. But given the strange intelligence found in the dolphins, who knows?

On that subject:

Dolphin brain stem transmission time is faster than that normally found in humans, and is roughly equivalent to the speed found in rats. As echo-location is the dolphin's primary means of sensing its environment -- analogous to eyes in primates -- and since sound travels four and a half times faster in water than in air, scientists speculate that the faster brain stem transmission time, and perhaps the paralimbic lobe as well, support speedy processing of sound. The dolphin's dependence on speedy sound processing is evident in the structure of its brain: its neural area devoted to visual imaging is only about one-tenth that of the human brain, while the area devoted to acoustical imaging is about 10 times that of the human brain. (This is unsurprising: primate brains devote far more volume to visual processing than those of almost any other animal, and human brains more than other primates.) Sensory experiments suggest a high degree of cross-modal integration in the processing of shapes between echolocative and visual areas of the brain. Unlike the case of the human brain, the cetacean optic chiasm is completely crossed, and there is behavioral evidence for hemispheric dominance for vision.

From an AAAS Science Netlinks feature (also quoted on Wikipedia)

...far more intelligent then people, if you consider what it takes for them to react, learn, and process in a span of ten minutes. their brains work faster then humans obviously and their thought process is a heck of a lot more complicated to navigate all aspects of flight, obstacles, points of intercept, etc. i was watching these suckers at the bird feeder, and programming all the steps they take, sounds they make, etc, and i know no human i know can not approach their capacity. same with salmon finding their way back to place of birth. it requires memory, lots of it, precise recall over a long period of time. heck, there are no human beings who can store and recall the various parameters to find their way to the mall 1000 miles away, after visiting once.