h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi, quite a good article.

I read it all and the first impression i got was of having a lecture about intelligence quantification history and search for definition. But because i never had psychology i enjoyed to read your article and learned some interesting stuff.

I accept the view that intelligence can be an inherited trait and that there are multiple types of intelligence.

Genetics define our abilities to do all, but because the environment influence the genes and genes influence our abilities i believe intelligence could never be a static mesured quality: a kid can always train and become an average good athlete, a chess fan can improve, a lot of nobel winners have changed their way of studies after they won the nobel. Maybe we should define intelligence test as a sort of potential tests: they would give out our best and worst aptitudes at the moment of the test.

In another way of thinking: school exams, sports tests, the evaluation of art paintings, game competitions are all kinds of intelligence tests and they all define our score of success in any kind of show of our abilities.

You mentioned also that there are some important studies of some phichologists in order to justifie descrimination ( the nazis used to mesure the size and form of the head to prove the alleged inferior intelligence of jews ), to that i can all say i have pity, because, as you whrote, one of the objectives of intelligence tests were to find people with educational problems in order to help.

Another interisting and funny fact was of a doctor hi tryed to prove how inferior were the women just by the wheight of the brain ( it was in average above of the men). When he died , the autopsy tests revealed that his brain wheighted less than the average he stipulated for men and was in the women line of values. ( nowdays it is considered that the wheight or size of the brain is not a form of quantifying intelligence)

Curious how little feedback you've got so far.

One thing -- at the end you quote "Further essays extracts"; you really have to tell us who these essays are by. If they are by yourself, they must be incorporated into the text, not pinned on.

A few infelicities and typos:

"One of the initial difficulties that psychologists face when attempting to create a theory for intelligence is *what it actually is*." Not quite; *deciding* what it is is (presumably) the difficulty, not the thing itself.

". . . smarter or dumber; cleverer or stupider; or more intelligent" is a case for commas not semicolons.

". . . one of two paths. Either that there is a single underlying factor that accounts for all intelligent behaviour - a 'general intelligence' or alternatively that . . ." is a case for a colon after "paths", or else you should remove "that" after "Either" and again after "alternatively". Also the dash before "a 'general intelligence'" should be followed by one after it (as parentheses) or else a comma should replace the single dash.

"On the 'general intelligence'; path, we find the theories of Charles Spearman, Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, Michael Anderson and; Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (Gardner, Kornhaber and Wake, 1996)." This is confusing; what is the distinction between the names cited inside and outside the brackets? The same applies to the next paragraph. Also remove the two semicolons.