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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Is it odd that the IQ scores were over 100?

For example, population IQ is supposed to be 100. So a score of 105 for boys with a 5 point drop would give us the expected result of average intelligence, right?

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>Between 2008 and 2011, the Maternal-Infant Research on Environmental Chemicals (MIREC) program recruited 2001 pregnant women from 10 cities across Canada. Women who could communicate in English or French, were older than 18 years, and were within the first 14 weeks of pregnancy were recruited from prenatal clinics. Participants were not recruited if there was a known fetal abnormality, if they had any medical complications, or if there was illicit drug use during pregnancy. Additional details are in the cohort profile description.

Seems like that would filter out the lower end of the bell curve, especially regarding drug use.

This could just a) be Flynn effect in action (although I would think that would take longer) [0], or b) there are other factors in the sample group (Canadians) that shift them slightly higher in baseline IQ (nutrition? educational exposure?).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

> these children were recruited from 6 of 10 cities included in the original cohort: Vancouver, Montreal, Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton, and Halifax

Probably just the difference between this cohort vs. all Canadians (urban and rural).

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