Customer Reviews

IQ in Question : The Truth About Intelligence

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Howe's book certainly reaches rather different conclusions to other recent authors (e.g., Brody, Cooper, Jensen, Macintosh). He rejects the reductionist notion that individual differences performance on ability tests is attributable to any internal feature of the individual (e.g., those associated with the structure and function of the nervous system).

But is Howe right? The discussion of the heritability of IQ, for example, considers ONLY the data from separated identical twins. Howe raises a number of methodological issues post-hoc, and suggests (without producing data) that these invalidate the generally-accepted finding that general ability has a substantial genetic component. The naive reader would not realise that adoption studies and family studies do not suffer from the well-known methodological objections that Howe raises - but that they (like the separated twin studies) also indicate a very substantial genetic component.

If intelligence has a substantial genetic component, does it correlate with other biological variables? Most authors conclude that it does, but Howe believes that the correlation between intelligence and biological variables (e.g., reaction time, inspection time, alpha activity) is too small to be of interest. Which other branch of psychology would choose to ignore correlations in the order of 0.4 - 0.5?

There are other concerns too: for example, the lack of discussion of a hierarchical model, and the lack of discussion of Hunter's work on the predictive power of ability tests.

In summary, not all of Howe's conclusions seem to be well supported by evidence or logic.

Professor Howe provokes thought about the assumptions we make in relation to IQ & what 'having a high IQ' really means. READ IT!!