As for chess and poker, both are games of high skill and require much practice before any real profeciency can be felt. I’m an okay chess player (Class A/B on the USCF scales) and a terrible poker player. There’s only so much practice I’m willing to give to either, so I will likely never get much better.

Do you have trouble with Razib’s graphs? Sometimes I find them incomprehensible and cannot figure out why he comes to the conclusions he does.

Me too! That site is DEEP.

Right-o. Taller people TEND to be more intelligent. (I mentioned differences in racial groupings earlier. Differences by sex also apply. So a woman should be judged height-wise against other women, not men or the overall average.) It doesn’t mean that very tall people can’t be very stupid. (Jayson Williams, I’m looking in your direction) or that short people can’t be brilliant.

(I don’t think Einstein was terribly tall, and I was significantly taller than the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, and much the inferior to them in intellect. I’m talking about everyone from the merely extremely brilliant (Prof. Emch at UF, who sounds like a happy, less-gravelly version of Henry Kissinger) to giants of 20th century mathematics (John Thompson and Paul Erdos). Not the best citation for Thompson, but I couldn’t resist the headline!)

As counter examples, I can point out that many of the top poker players are VERY tall (many of the men are over 6’4″ IIRC) and that many of the current crop of top chess players are also tall. (Here I will cite a first hand account from the 2007 World Championship Tournament in Mexico:

About the players themselves, they generally managed to disappear quite effectively between rounds (except for Aronian), but they were all quite impressive in their own ways. Each had a real presence about them that could probably prove intimidating to lesser opponents (helped along by the fact that all of them but Aronian are over 6 feet tall, most of them well over 6 feet).

Also note that the correlation could simply mean that another factor is at play: One can easily envision that improved nutrition for the young would mean both more height and more intelligence later in life. Someone with the right resources could probably use the old Soviet Union as a test case. I recall reading once that those children born in the 1950s tended to be 3-4 inches taller than their parents, on average. The 1950s were a time of relative plenty for the Soviets, and the 1930s (when the parents in this generation comparison were coming of age) were a time a famine in strife in many parts of that vast nation. I wonder if their were good IQ studies made of each generation. (Quite possibly not, given the impact of Lysenkosim on Soviet science.)

Spend a few days (because a few hours won’t be enough!) reading Gene Expression. The take away message is that nothing statistical applies to individuals, only to large groups.

Intelligence is correlated with height. Presumably penis size is correlated with height, at least within a racial grouping. So maybe so. On the other hand, the Ashkenazim and East Asians tend to have higher than average average IQs, so maybe not!

I imagine that the height to IQ correlation works within racial groupings, so taller than average Askenazim or East Asians probably tend to be more intelligent than average. I could hit Gene Expression and from there other sources to look it up and actually create an informed opinion, BUT WHERE’S THE FUN IN THAT?!