Analyzed F. Galton's data on the sensory, psychomotor, and physical attributes of 1,639 females and 4,849 males. The reliability of the measures, developmental trends in mean scores, correlations of the measures with age, correlations among measures, occupational differences in scores, and sibling correlations are described. Developmental trends during later childhood, adolescence, and early maturity are compared to those described in contemporary developmental psychological literature.

Many people claim to have had direct perceptual awareness of God. William Alston, Richard Swinburne, Gary Gutting, and others have based their philosophical views on these reports. But using analogies from our encounters with humans whose abilities surpass our own, we realize that something essential is missing from these reports. The absence of this element renders it highly unlikely that these people have actually encountered a divine being. (Published Online August 11 2004).

Discussion of "the problem of conceptual change" has been imprecise, partly because the problem has never been spelled out as clearly as it could be. The purpose of this study is to offer a clear formulation of the problem. ;Beginning with an uncontroversial definition of "problem," I suggest criteria by which problem formulations can be evaluated. I then use these criteria to evaluate the four most important formulations which have been given of this problem: Stephen Toulmin's in Human Understanding, Thomas (...) Kuhn's in Paul Hoyningen-Huene's Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions, Jean Piaget and Rolando Garcia's in Psychogenesis and the History of Science, and Paul Thagard's in Conceptual Revolutions. ;I find that Toulmin's formulation is detailed but incomplete, because it does not give us even a preliminary definition of "conceptual." Kuhn focuses primarily on one aspect of the problem: that of argumentation. Piaget and Garcia introduce a new level of discussion, but gloss over other important details. Thagard inherits these fragments somewhat incompletely, showing in a number of ways that he has forgotten some of the history of the problem. ;I therefore attempt to improve on past problem formulations by taking a wider historical perspective than has been done before. I show that this problem is a local instance of a much larger problem which has been at the heart of Western philosophy since its inception: that of justifying knowledge claims in a changing world. I argue that none of the formulations which we have examined takes this larger problem seriously enough, and that the problem of conceptual change will never be solved until this larger issue is recognized. I then suggest a way in which the problem can in principle be solved. (shrink)

Data from 949 families of Caucasian and 400 families of Japanese ancestry who took part in the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition were used to ascertain the associations of parental cognitive ability, parental education and paternal occupation with offspring cognitive ability. In particular, analyses were focused on testing the possible moderating effects of parental socioeconomic status on the familial transmission of cognitive abilities. Parental cognitive ability was substantially associated and parental education and paternal occupation only trivially associated with offspring performance. (...) In contrast to the findings of Turkheimer etal. (2003), there was no evidence in these data that familiality for cognitive abilities was lower in the lower as opposed to upper levels of socioeconomic status. These results were consistent across measures, ethnicity and sex of offspring. (shrink)