General Intelligence Factor Generalizations

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Some preliminaries:
The following are some musings in response to various recent exchanges, and most recently from an article/blog at Discover Magazine arguing the greater likelihood for a "cybernetic" rather than an AI Singularity.

The Discover Magazine article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2011/06/25/towards-a-new-vision-of-the-singularity/

This is an expansion on a series of tweets I was about to send. Instead, they're here with some added notes to each.
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gFactor is one form of academic speak for general intelligence factor, usually in context of factor analysis of human information processing.

gFactor 01 Gerd Gigerenzer is reported to have said -- at the risk of oversimplification, general intelligence is lots of rules of thumb, applied flexibly.
(Gerd is one of the biggest names in intelligence research. Last I heard he was still at one of the Max Planck Institutes.)

gFactor 02 Rules of thumb are evolved out of behavioral ecologies, and species with gene pools shared over many habitats have more. (Corvids, Parrots, Canidae, etcetera.)

gFactor 03 Laland (et al) idea of cultural niches influencing human evolution may exponentiate already varied habitat roamings of hominids. (That's Kevin Laland.)

gFactor 04 Cognitive flexiblity requires self-criticism as feedback for rule abandonment. Hypothesis-testing as metaphor. Reality-sense unbound. (Generally I avoid the term consciousness. Way too much muddle. But here might involve helping movement toward the development of a useful, operational/testable definition of consciousness.)

gFactor 05 Cognitive flexiblity requires opposite of jumping-to-conclusions bias (Google Scholar phrase). Bernard Crespi that. (JTC strong in the delusional disorders. Crespi-Badcock since 1999 writing on autism-schiz as opposite poles of continuum. Most recent methylation data suggestive of autism as overly active general mechanisms of DNA methylation/cell fate certainty, schiz's as under. Story developing.. )

gFactor 06 Cognitive flexiblity difficult to evolve, as jumping-to-conclusions bias as well as niche-specialization of gene pools are in general very powerful selection pressures. (So.. SETI Fail.)

gFactor 07 Cybernetic or AI Singularity? My sense at the moment is we still don't know enough to ask the best questions to get feedback to see which rules need to be applied and which need to be abandoned. (My intuition leans toward Cybernetic preceding AI by some years if not decades, and in a very loose sense it already has.)