Intelligence has nothing to do with creativity nor with a large portion of speech and writing. I know a bunch of people who are brilliant in diverse subjects, but have difficulty speaking clearly or getting their point across. The ability to speak clearly is largely a function of one's ability to understand how the other person is thinking and how best to convey one's ideas through a channel that best links up with said method of thinking. The ability to do such a thing, I think, is rather independent of knowledge.
I won't even start arguing about creativity, because I think we can all agree that a certified moron can still be an amazing artist or musician. Knowledge and creativity are completely independent.
About the nature vs. nurture argument. Nurture does impact parts of who we are, but we may not be tackling the nurture aspect correctly just by doing exercises and puzzles all day. Take a kid in the ghetto who hails from a long lineage of parents and grandparents who have lived in the poorest places, who just happens to be genius. He/she certainly doesn't have the genes of intelligence, otherwise the parents would have made it out of the ghetto already. Nurture as we see it certainly isn't going to help us, since the person is surrounded by terrible influences and likely belongs to an even worse school system. How then, does the exceptional intelligence manifest itself? If we can rule out classic nurture and any "genius" genes, the intelligence must come about in a nurture that doesn't rely on stupid exercises.
Read a book.
You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing..... Descartes
Depends on your definition on what intelligence is.
If it only includes IQ, then maybe you are right, although IQ tests I've taken have been easier to do because of what I'd learned, IMO.
I'm fairly certain that pure pattern-recognition, which I believe is the foundation of what people in the west refer to as IQ, is something you can get better at through practice. There are also documented instances where people, I think it was native americans, scored very low on IQ tests and where the consensus was that there actually wasn't anything wrong with their intelligence, but rather that their culture brought a certain way of thought with it that didn't translate well into conventional IQ measurements. Hence, what we measure as intelligence is at least partly a learned behaviour.
I also know from experience that suppressing emotions makes IQ-tests much easier to do.
It's also a known fact that many people with a high IQ tend to be very bad at handling social contacts. Nowadays, many people consider EQ important for measuring a person's intellectual abilities as well, something many people with high IQs might not do so well at. And it's definitely possible to learn how to read, and work together with, people better.
Having said all that, people with the same backgrounds score differently at both IQ and EQ tests, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that intelligence, however you define it, is partly dependent on genetics.
Last edited by Snee; 08-13-2007 at 06:57 PM.
Wrong.
The existence of genius genes is far more probable than the existence of "a nurture that doesn't rely on stupid exercises"; because random mutations in genes has been proven to exist (see: evolutionary biology), while "a nurture that doesn't rely on stupid exercises [and proper nutrition]" has not been proven to exist.
Until you can directly define what "a nurture that doesn't rely on stupid exercises [and proper nutrition]" is, I cannot further rebuke your conclusion.
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