The Neanderthal theory, your thoughts?

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General intelligence (g-factor) is widely criticized by cognitive and educational psychologists as presenting an overly mechanistic view of intelligence. It also attempts to bracket culture and socialization.



They also generally result in small eta squared values, indicating that little of the variance is explained.

Just what is g-factor? Is it certain (yet to be determined) abilities that result from certain (yet to be determined) combinations of neurotypical and neuroatypical traits with the end result being that the most common hybrids tend to score better?

People that work on intelligence research does not care about neuroatypical traits. They just put whatever traits they think contributes to intelligence into an IQ test and watches the result they get out from factor-analysis.

I realize that they are unaware of the NT talents vs. neuroatypical talents. Testing for what is thought to contribute to intelligence sounds a bit subjective and like "flying on the seat of one's pants". What I am getting at is whether or not g-factor is in fact a particular "mix of apple and oranges". With the exception of possible very recent evolution, our potential is limited by genes which come either from H.s.n. or archaic H.s.s.

I decided maybe I should read up on what factor analysis is. From what I've read, I'm beginning to think that the correlations that result in the g-factor are a result of the interaction of not only certain neurotypical and neuroatypical traits but the environment as well. In other words the correlations and resulting g-factor are products of primarily NT hybrids living in their cultures (almost everyone everywhere except most people of African decent and (to a lesser extent?) neuroatypicals which fall outside the normal range in genetics, culture or both).

Last edited by DemocraticSocialistHun on 11 May 2008, 6:38 pm, edited 3 times in total.

"...researchers Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, Spain and Holger Rompler of the University of Leipzig in Germany announced last week that Neanderthals, who died out 35,000 years ago, had the same distribution of hair and skin color as modern human European populations. By inference, that means that about 1 percent of Neanderthals must have been redheads, with pale skin and freckles."

The Scariest Thing about Neanderthals by Meredith F. Small 02 November 2007
http://www.livescience.com/history/0711 ... -hair.html

A book by the author of the above article "The Culture of Our Discontent; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness" has an interesting title too.
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Our-Disco ... 920&sr=1-1

One of reasons the Neanderthal "Theory?" appeals to me is that psychiatry simply pathologizes what it doesn't understand and discounts such possibilities as dysfunctional others in the lives of patients with "mental illness" and dysfunction of society as a whole.

From what I've heard on another forum a while back, all the Neanderthals found so far supposedly had red hair but researchers assume a 1% incidence.