Not exactly germ theory, but the early concepts of contamination which ultimately led to germ theory.

The Native Americans at the time did not postulate the concept of bacteria and viruses, but they understood that sickness was not supernatural and that it was important to sterilize in order to prevent further sickness.

Native American medicine was in many ways more advanced when compared to European medicine at the time. They also introduced things like sun screen, painkillers, and dental hygiene to Europeans.

Some Major Issues:

1. The industrial revolution started almost a century and a half after 1600 (in 1760) which was well after European colonization.

2. You are assuming that Europe would have developed the same way if they remained isolated. For example, the fundamental ideas which ultimately led to the modern concept of disease (bacteria and virus causing infection) was introduced to Europeans via the Native Americans. Beforehand, Europeans thought sickness was caused by religious superstition. This is why sterilization between surgeries wasn’t really a thing in Europe beforehand. European medicine involved reusing bloody knives to perform surgerys on different people because they didn’t understand the concept of cross contamination.

The knowledge today is not purely the result of European thinkers. Your prediction grossly discounts the contributions to science and technology from other cultures in world.

Make sure we read table 2 in the paper. The reality is the people behind this study is urging folks to not draw strong conclusions from this study.

BeliefPropagator posted a link above which possibly verifies the screenshot: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/

I get that we need to be wary of AI slop, I really do; but If speaking academic English with decent grammar becomes associated with talking “like a bot”, then we are cooked.

This is a good point to bring up, but this correlation is still being debated: the causal connection between the IQ test and the correlation is unclear, and there is debate on whether the correlation is being constructed through bad data or analysis techniques. Because of this, no one can confidently claim whether IQ tests predicts good job performance, employment, etc.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4557354/

[Skip to the conclusion at the end to get the tldr, since this is a long scientific publication]

Good point. Ultimately this leads me to question the existence of some fixed quality of intelligence. People are growing, adapting, and learning through their lives, so a fixed number defining general intelligence is likely a moot concept.

On top of the prior point lies another major issue with any sort of “general intelligence” test: defining “general intelligence”. Intelligence comes in many forms: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential intelligence, and more. The IQ test does not test all forms of intelligence.

This being said, It is likely impossible to test all forms of intelligence in one test; and even if we could create this test, how would this test handle differently abled people. For example, a completely blind person would fail the visual intelligence portion every time (for obvious reasons).

It depends on the state. Oklahoma is ranked 49 of 50 for its k-12 public education system, and we are seeing evidence of this here.

I am a physics teacher in a New Jersey high school (and not even a high ranked school) and I would say that a majority of the teachers are true professionals with masters degrees in education. New Jersey is ranked 2 of 50 though (just behind Massachusetts). We also see teachers salaries around and over $100,000 in New Jersey so it entices more people to become teachers and treat the job very seriously.