IQ is not some obscure aspect of personality but an attempt to measure directly the kind of “smartness” that explains why some people do better than others on a wide variety of intellectual challenges. The previous comfortable consensus of gender equality in IQ now appears to have been blown apart by Lynn and Irwing’s confident assertion that if you look at the data carefully, and through coldly scientific unbiased eyes, there actually is a profound gender difference in intelligence.
To be specific Lynn and Irwing reviewed and summarised 57 separate previous studies of sex differences in abstract reasoning of general population samples from all over the world, with participants numbering a total of 80,928. The new data has stirred up a hornets’ nest partly because the old heated and politicised debates of differences in IQ between races and gender had been widely believed to be laid to rest decades ago. The wider the geographical range of the deadly virus, the greater the risk it poses to humans. We are, warns the WHO, closer now to a pandemic than at any time since 1968, when the last of the previous century’s three pandemics began.
This is a nightmare that our politicians, not just our scientists, should be losing sleep over.. Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn, distinguished academics at the Universities of Manchester and Ulster, have recently published research that has stirred up controversy by suggesting that men bear on average significantly superior intelligence, or general cognitive ability, than women. As an animal health issue, it would pose a major problem, but with the right sort of biosecurity measures, it would not be insurmountable.What we should really be concerned about are the human health consequences of avian flu. The discovery yesterday of a gull in Finland thought to be infected with a non-deadly strain of bird flu suggests this could well be only a matter of time.This, of course, would be a major threat to free-range poultry kept outside, where they can easily come into contact with wild birds. The H5N1 strain has probably infected millions of birds, both domestic poultry and wild species.
It has also been found to infect pigs – the classic “mixing vessels” where different flu viruses swap genetic material to generate even deadlier strains. The more animals the virus infects, the greater the chances of it mutating into a form that could be easily transmitted between people.This is why we should be taking avian flu seriously. The appearance of the virus in Central Asia and Siberia shows how readily it can be spread by migrating birds. Obviously, migrating birds infected with a deadly form of avian flu are not going to fly very far.
But some species may be relatively immune to the virus, and so able to carry it over great distances.In Britain, no species of migratory waterfowl that winter here come from the areas of Russia currently affected by avian flu. A virus that kills 50 per cent would be far, far worse.
The world now is far more densely populated and urbanised than it was in 1918. Global travel makes it possible for flu viruses to spread rapidly from one part of the globe to another. These viruses are also able to mutate into more infectious forms.
