> Thanks! Now I'm all curious about that "psychometric g" construct being referred to by
> Stephen J Gould ("The chimerical nature of g is the rotten core of Jensen's edifice..."). What is
> g?...why was something like that so important, if it can be defined in straight-faced terms?

g is "general intelligence". If g exists, then all intelligent people are intelligent in the same way, and being good at maths or brilliant at chemistry is just the same thing showing up in different ways.
Many people would prefer for g to exist, because it would make measuring intelligence a lot easier. (If g doesn't exist, then measures like I.Q. are pretty meaningless.)

On the other hand, some people think that there is no one intelligence, that being good at maths or brilliant at chemistry are different things, and that everybody has high levels of some types of intelligence and not-so-high levels of others.

The problem is that most of the data can be made to show either the existence or the non-existence of g, depending on what statistics you use.

The current hot theory is that the whole argument is based on an oversimplification, and that the mind is a complex machine made up of a combination of general bits and specific bits, resulting in the ambiguous results that have been confusing people all this time.

Paul