Matzel Louis D, Crawford Dylan W, Sauce Bruno
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA.
Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, 17177 Stockholm, Sweden.
J Intell. 2020 Jun 2;8(2):24. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence8020024.
Nearly a century ago, Spearman proposed that "specific factors can be regarded as the 'nuts and bolts' of cognitive performance…, while the general factor is the mental energy available to power the specific engines". Geary (2018; 2019) takes Spearman's analogy of "mental energy" quite literally and doubles-down on the notion by proposing that a unitary energy source, the mitochondria, explains variations in both cognitive function and health-related outcomes. This idea is reminiscent of many earlier attempts to describe a low-level biological determinant of general intelligence. While Geary does an admirable job developing an innovative theory with specific and testable predictions, this new theory suffers many of the shortcomings of previous attempts at similar goals. We argue that Geary's theory is generally implausible, and does not map well onto known psychological and genetic properties of intelligence or its relationship to health and fitness. While Geary's theory serves as an elegant model of "what could be", it is less successful as a description of "what is".
近一个世纪前，斯皮尔曼提出，“特殊因素可被视为认知表现的‘螺母和螺栓’……，而一般因素则是为特定引擎提供动力的心理能量”。吉尔里（2018年；2019年）从字面上理解了斯皮尔曼关于“心理能量”的类比，并进一步强化了这一概念，他提出一种单一的能量来源——线粒体，可以解释认知功能和健康相关结果的变化。这个想法让人想起许多早期试图描述一般智力的低层次生物学决定因素的尝试。虽然吉尔里在发展一种具有具体且可检验预测的创新理论方面做得很出色，但这个新理论存在许多以往类似目标尝试的缺点。我们认为，吉尔里的理论总体上不太可信，并且与已知的智力心理和遗传特性及其与健康和体能的关系不太相符。虽然吉尔里的理论是一个关于“可能是什么”的优雅模型，但作为对“实际是什么”的描述，它就没那么成功了。
