[Kudzu_Bob]

We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. The literature on this subject is quite extensive.

[smtddr]

We do not. Are there answers to the questions I presented? You can't observe any exact thing and say "Right there! This person is exactly 49 intelliunits smart". IQ tests may give you an idea of one point of view of a measurement of intelligent is, but it is certainly not concrete like 12 inches is. Not concrete like we know 2 hydrogens & one oxygen is water. I think our obsession that everything must be measurable & categorized fails when it comes to the human mind. We are more than the sum of our measurable parts... for now. You can look at a car engine specification and know exactly the maximum speed given optimum conditions and assuming no mechanical failures. There's no such measurement for the human brain. You cannot know what my top performance is. At the absolute best, you can have a ball-park guess. You could end up being right or being way off.

[Kudzu_Bob]

Human personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.

[lutusp]

> We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years.

Concrete, yes. Accurate, absolutely not. Any number of people have exploited the systematic errors in I.Q. testing for purely racist and political objectives.

> The literature on this subject is quite extensive.

Indeed it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

[nitrogen]

The fact that something has been exploited for evil or trivial ends does not mean that the thing exploited is itself evil or trivial.

[Kudzu_Bob]

Gould has been exposed as a fraud.

[011011100]

What's "intelligence"?

[Kudzu_Bob]

It's the thing that blank slatists say can be improved by a better environment when they're not busy claiming that it can't be measured.