Todd:
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IQ or "g" factor, which is itself relatively highly heritable, turns out to have tradeoffs as well. It is not a panacea. It has tradeoffs in the kinds of cognitive processes we tend to use and in the ability to focus on and persist in solving particular kinds of problems…. a single factor like "g" doesn't completely describe what we think of in everyday terms as intelligence or problem solving ability, even though it is a part of the picture, especially when dealing with particular kinds of problems.
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Sure Todd, and I suppose you could also say that oxygen’s not a panacea. You tend to dilute/convolute things beyond usefulness.
Decades of intelligence research indicates that g factor has a considerable influence on a person's practical quality of life—it is the single most effective predictor known of individual performance at school and on the job, and also predicts many other aspects of well-being, including a person's chances of divorcing, dropping out of high school, being unemployed or having illegitimate children.
Linda Gottfredson, in a 1998
Scientific American article, explains things at
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~reingold/ courses/intelligence/ cache/1198gottfred.html —here’re a few paragraphs:
The General Intelligence Factor—Despite some popular assertions, a single factor for intelligence, called g, can be measured with IQ tests and does predict success in life, by Linda S. Gottfredson
No subject in psychology has provoked more intense public controversy than the study of human intelligence. From its beginning, research on how and why people differ in overall mental ability has fallen prey to political and social agendas that obscure or distort even the most well-established scientific findings. Journalists, too, often present a view of intelligence research that is exactly the opposite of what most intelligence experts believe. For these and other reasons, public understanding of intelligence falls far short of public concern about it. The IQ experts discussing their work in the public arena can feel as though they have fallen down the rabbit hole into Alice's Wonderland.
The debate over intelligence and intelligence testing focuses on the question of whether it is useful or meaningful to evaluate people according to a single major dimension of cognitive competence. Is there indeed a general mental ability we commonly call "intelligence," and is it important in the practical affairs of life? The answer, based on decades of intelligence research, is an unequivocal yes. No matter their form or content, tests of mental skills invariably point to the existence of a global factor that permeates all aspects of cognition. And this factor seems to have considerable influence on a person's practical quality of life. Intelligence as measured by IQ tests is the single most effective predictor known of individual performance at school and on the job. It also predicts many other aspects of well-being, including a person's chances of divorcing, dropping out of high school, being unemployed or having illegitimate children [see illustration].
By now the vast majority of intelligence researchers take these findings for granted. Yet in the press and in public debate, the facts are typically dismissed, downplayed or ignored. This misrepresentation reflects a clash between a deeply felt ideal and a stubborn reality. The ideal, implicit in many popular critiques of intelligence research, is that all people are born equally able and that social inequality results only from the exercise of unjust privilege. The reality is that Mother Nature is no egalitarian. People are in fact unequal in intellectual potential--and they are born that way, just as they are born with different potentials for height, physical attractiveness, artistic flair, athletic prowess and other traits. Although subsequent experience shapes this potential, no amount of social engineering can make individuals with widely divergent mental aptitudes into intellectual equals.