Guess so. That's the premise of "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter" by Steven Johnson (http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/15...). Though Idiocracy is a great underappreciated film.
It does make sense the humans would get better at pattern matching. Interacting with UIs constantly and exposure to video games with loads of information must be good for the brain.
For an alternative view...see "A Farewell to Alms" by Gregory Clark. From about 1200-1800, in England, the rich actually had more surviving descendants than the poor. I don't know who had more births, but that doesn't matter. Basically, the poor would periodically die off from famine and disease, whereas if the economic upper classes had too many children, they would move into the lower classes (rather than die). Most people of English descent today are descended from the upper classes of the Middle Ages.
I would be surprised if humans are getting smarter. Show me the selective pressure on intelligence in the modern world, because I don't see it. You don't have to be smart to be evolutionarily fit. Not even close. I'd be very surprised if humans were changing much as far as cognitive capability is concerned, animals that become domesticated almost universally have smaller brains than their wild counterparts.
There doesn’t need to be DNA change to make people smarter. Just having a few generations in a row with adequate diet, not breathing smoke from a wood fire every day, less damage from childhood disease, etc. could make a huge difference.
On the contrary, the evolutionary argument here is that a few generations under these conditions would allow more biologically "stupider" humans to survive (since intelligence isn't being selected for) and pass on their genes, creating future generations of dumber humans.
Jared Diamond makes a similar argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel for why the people of New Guinea are smarter than their western counterparts.
Deny. There's no reason dying of wood smoke or disease selects for the smart or the dumb. Removing those pressures has no obvious effect on the intelligence of the survivors.
There has been shrinkage in the average brain size over the last five thousand years. Intelligence is a very complicated thing and brain size might not be the only factor—that shrinkage might not even be relevant. But that does not mean that evolutionary change cannot take place on thousand year timelines.
Current theory is skull size was adapting based on temperature not intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#mediaviewer/File:Bra... Also, there are likely more people alive now with larger brain volumes vs five thousand years ago and the same apples to just about any trait you can name due to the rapid population boom.
The important thing to note is the human population covers the globe. There are plenty of sifts in populations like Lactose tolerance becoming widespread over the last 7,500 years, but even that is a long way from becoming effectively universal.
I think that was my point. You said that ten thousand years of civilization was too short for meaningful evolution. At least that was my understanding.
10,000 years is long enough for significant beneficial traits to spread widely. It's not enough time to Change neutral traits that used to be beneficial.
That's generally a vary slow change consider most animals don't need dietary vitamin C even if there diets provide plenty of the stuff.
However, you used the term "a few generations" as in below 1,000 years and that's rediculusly fast for a species that takes as long as we do to reproduce and have so few children.
I didn't use the term "a few generations", that was another commenter. :)
That said, you mentioned a beneficial trait becoming neutral, and that's making the assumption that greater intelligence is neutral. It could be that larger social organizations reward slightly less intelligent critters. That would do the trick rather quickly. I'm not making that claim, but am saying that discussions around evolution and traits that we have bias toward seeing as "good" are fraught.
There's also the further issue of intelligence being a very nebulous term that encompasses tons of cognitive traits, which makes any discussion of intelligence in evolutionary terms even more difficult.
It's also possible that some of what we call intelligence is epigenetic.
I don't think we have good data on people’s intelligence 10,000 years ago. But, civilization as we think of it only impacted a fairly small chunk of humanity for a relatively small time period. So, at best 'larger social organizations' was rather localized.
Just 500 years ago lots of people in North America where living nomadic hunter gather lifestyles. Even just 100 years ago you could find tribes in many parts of the world still living hunter gather lifestyles little changed over the last 15,000+ years and probably similar to how people lived 100,000+ thousand years ago.
As to epigenetic factors, the classic hunter gather lifestyle could be very healthy as long as population numbers stayed low. Farming actually lowered many heath indicators even as it allowed for massive increases in population sizes.
PS: Anyway, evolution is only 'fast' when there are significant benefits or harms. If a single mutation or environment change increases survival chances by say +/- 1% it takes exponentially longer to spread than a +/- 10% change.
I don't disagree with any of those points. My original post just stated that I couldn't imagine any fitness pressure that would be making humans smarter and, if anything, we were probably going in the other direction. My secondary point was that change can happen on short timelines.
I do want to mention that larger social organizations were quite widespread in the Americas, despite the existence of hunter-gatherer tribes. The new world certainly wasn't an uncivilized wasteland when Europeans arrived.
Epigenetic factors can be triggered buy group size (domestication) as well. So those hunter-gatherer tribes might share the same genetic traits but express them differently based on their environment.
any fitness pressure that would be making humans smarter
I don’t recall the study, it was either men in the US or Britton. But, income was positively correlated with number of children. Income and intelligence are also linked so that's evidence that right now intelligence is positively correlated with number of children. This may be strongly linked with prison time but again that links with intelligence.
The important thing to note is men often have children with more than one person and can have children vary late in life.
There is a fundamental mistake in assuming a "couple generation" linear trend will continue to infinity providing us with 30 foot tall men with IQs of 200+. We are probably at or around peak height and peak IQ right now for various rather obvious income inequality reasons, and we can expect both to decline in the future.
There is a coupling between womens pelvis size and newborn head size and medically assisted survival during childbirth which could provide some multigenerational effect to growth.
There have been a lot of arguments relying on generational inheritance of intelligence / IQ, however:
"As Flynn pointed out in his Ted Talk on the Flynn Effect, in 1900 only 3% of Americans performed "cognitively demanding" jobs - now the figure is 35%"
That would imply the percentage of humanity where cognition has no effect on their job, and presumably lifestyle, is at least 65% and has always historically been higher, as high as 97%, so an evolutionary argument for IQ growth seems extremely weak. It would be as if doctrine were peacock females select their mates based on tail feather size leading to large tail feathers, yet actual data shows 97% to 65% of actual living peacocks come from bald ancestors.
> Show me the selective pressure on intelligence in the modern world, because I don't see it
Other humans!
You have to outsmart them and avoid being outsmarted by them, because they compete for the same resources and some of them will act in a predatory manner.
Evidence for such negative pressure is inconclusive [1]. Such an effect may be more a result of socioeconomic status, not intelligence. As for a counter example of positive pressure on intelligence, I would expect the trait of humor [2], an attractive trait that is a by product of intelligence, to increase the probability of fertility.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
2. Kaufman, Scott Barry, et al. "The role of creativity and humor in human mate selection." Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind’s reproductive system (2008): 227-262.
Why are you assuming that the sheer number of first-round offspring generated is the only winning strategy for genes? It's a heck of a lot more complex than "who can pop the most babies the most quickly".
What about the multi-generational odds of survival and reproduction? What about surviving famines or predators? What about competition in sexual selection?
Idiocracy was an amusing movie, but it's underlying premise was never realistic.
Just speculating here - I wonder if the human cortex is somehow "special" in that regard. What if evolutionary pressure in the past drove the increase of computing power in the cortex so much that now you could have new emerging properties and "features" and so on come out by simply re-wiring what's already there.
You know, like when you're Amazon and you build a huge infrastructure to serve existing business, only to realize later you could do a lot more with it by simply re-purposing and re-configuring.
Outbreeding is one possibility. There are now more people migrating than ever before, and over long distances. In the past most people stayed very close to where they were born, which greatly increased the odds of inbreeding especially among lower classes. Today we have ubiquitous cheap transportation and more than 50% of the human population is now urban -- meaning bigger gene pools and lower odds of breeding between close relatives.
I also must point out that "hard selection" (differential survival) is not the only operating mechanism in evolution. In complex organisms that reproduce sexually, it might not even be the dominant mechanism. You've got sexual selection and genetic drift, which in a species with low infant mortality and low mortality in general (a.k.a. us) are probably the dominant mechanisms. Beyond those you have things like the Baldwin effect, which get very interesting when coupled with epigenetics. Epigenetics is unquestionably real but as yet is not well understood. There could be all kinds of interesting things going on here.
The first point—increased mate choice—seems to invalidate the second. At least to my understanding, a larger population makes genetic drift less likely to fix on a trait.
My point was pretty general -- that there are multiple overlapping mechanisms at work, and some poorly understood. People often have this really simple flat "survival of the fittest" view of evolution, and that isn't accurate.
I heard a radio show recently where the host mentioned a study in the 50's where people were asked what rabbits and dogs had in common, and the answers were usually something along the line of "they both have two ears". The same question was asked some time in the 2000's and the more common answers relied on abstraction like " they are both mammals". I'm not sure if that is reflective of a shift in "intelligence" but I do think it's a shift in thinking.
Standards going up play a big role in all of this, in my opinion. To clarify what I mean, could you consider track running or swimming? In these and other physical sports, it is evident that world records keep climbing year after year, to the now much-noted point that the best high schoolers typically are "faster" than the world best for a few decades ago. Obviously nothing has happened on an evolutionary scale in the timespan of a century, so what explains it?
It's almost like how a goldfish will grow to the size of its bowl-- new humans will grow to and exceed the standards of the last generation, it's just human nature.
It's a bit trickier to apply the principle to creative pursuits than it is to physical ones, but I think it may help explain why students could appear cleverer over time without anything changing biologically.
To give one final example that doesn't involve sports. I am a trumpet player and am pretty familiar with the phenomenon that the best of the best in trumpet playing goes up as the decades go by. Rafael Mendez, Maynard Ferguson, etc. will forever be considered as the all time great virtuosoes, but the cold hard fact is that their technical abilities were only good in light of the time-- exceeded by hundreds if not thousands of the best trumpet players today. It's all about context.
May be that's the answer: we domesticated ourselves with school, police and other institutions and therefore we no longer need all our intelligence to survive.
We evolved to be the master hunters and nowadays our children aren't even aware meat comes from animals.
This same limited amount of intelligence we evolved with, is then free to do something else, like literature, art and music.
Socializing in close quarters (civilization) provides pressure to compete in more technical ways than brute force. Rule-lawyering, arguing, backstabbing etc. You might call that 'cleverer'.
Daniel Dennett explains the Flynn effect with a trickle down effect of engineering knowledge to the general public (as an example he mentions percentage calculation). It provides people with more useful thinking tools than what is traditionally passed on, which makes people more efficient thinkers and thus they achieve higher scores in IQ tests.
Can you point to a work (video or article) where he describes this? Also, is this the person you are referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett (Google is correcting "Dannet" to "Dennett").
As to the last point in the article about why we don't have so many more geniuses, I'd like to add the possibility that it's similar to longevity: although we are seeing the average lifespan increase dramatically, the upper end is not really moving. It seems that more people are just living their full lifespan.
Perhaps it's the same with intelligence, where more of us are forced to develop to our potential now but we haven't necessarily raised the bar for our species. I think if you look at other statistics such as college attendance rates they would support this scenario.
I assume this is one of those statistics that is the opposite of what is commonly thought? Crime rate is another (most think it is going up, while it's been going down for decades).
I remember reading about the Flynn effect awhile back. Can't find the exact article, but this one [1] will do.
This quote really does it for me:
"The second factor is what Alexander Luria discovered when he tested rural Russian peasants in the 1930s. He discovered that pre-scientific people can't take the hypothetical seriously. That is, if you pose to them questions like, "There is snow at the North Pole; where there is snow, bears are white; what color are bears at the North Pole?" they would say, "Well, I've only seen brown bears. And only if a person came from the North Pole with testimony would I believe that the bears there are white."
It seems like the brain doesn't think abstractly when it doesn't need to, and for many thousands of years it didn't. The nice thing about culture and education is that it seems like more than just knowledge is passed down. Whole modes and ways of thinking, perspectives on the world that are useful and revealing now exist in the greater collective consciousness. We can't really measure this, but I think it makes a huge difference that there is this idea that everything in the world is not simply magical or arbitrary and that given the right tools we can figure it out. The idea that there ARE knowable underlying principles that govern the universe (even randomness!) completely changes the way that we think about the world.
Yes humans are getting more clever, and I find it quite easy to see why. As times are changing, certain personality traits become more preferable, advantageous and then attractive.
More than ever is it attractive to be intelligent. We celebrate Intelligence like never before. Intelligence is more likely to lead to work/money/power, and people are more likely to seek mates that are intelligent.
Any trait that is preferable at the time, is more likely to lead to offsprings. Ask your local sperm bank.
I'm not saying I think it's the only, or necessarily the most important trait (Hitler was likely quite intelligent), but it is increasingly important, and therefore increasingly likely to affect the human evolution.
Human evolution is constantly changing us, and I'd say it makes little to no sense, to argue that our intelligence specifically, is not changing with it (for better or worse). But with our short lifespan, it might not change fast enough for some to recognize it.
> Focusing on one part of the IQ test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, they found that on average intelligence has risen the equivalent of 20 IQ points since 1950. IQ tests are designed to ensure that the average result is always 100, so this is a significant jump.
The problem is, that's about the only part that has risen. The limited number of subtests showing the gains has long been one of the big question marks about how the Flynn effect could possibly be about the underlying intelligence rather than an artifact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect).
> This is a puzzle not just for the US, but for all countries demonstrating the Flynn Effect. "Does it make sense," Flynn wrote in one paper, "to assume that at one time almost 40% of Dutch men lacked the capacity to understand soccer, their most favoured national sport?"
This sort of point comes up often, but it's not a good point to make. The people discussing IQ tests typically have lived in a tight bubble their entire lives and have not meaningfully interacted with the general population. They typically have even less interaction with the populations of poor countries who might be comparable to long ago. For example, just today I was reading a Wired article which remarks offhand that "In some areas of the country, up to 40 percent of children under 5 are affected. The effects are mental as well as physical. A 2008 study by the National Intelligence Council found that a quarter of North Korean military conscripts are disqualified for cognitive disabilities". Flynn asks whether it's possible for a quarter of Dutch men at some point to not be able to follow soccer well; I ask whether it's possible for a quarter of North Korean men to be rejected by the notoriously voracious NK military because they are too stupid or mentally broken. The latter seems to be true, however...
My personal opinion is that Flynn effect is a combination of factors that aid developing of brain:
1. Better nutrition and medical care.
2. Teaching abstract concepts such as predicate logic early on.
3. Increasing complexity of the world in terms of information streams.
4. Urbanization of population.
4. Mandatory schooling and various programs aimed at increasing graduation rate, which is proxy for total amount of time an average child is schooled [0].
I was writing out long and detailed argument based on clustering of scholars and their presence in ancient civilizations, but after realizing amount of details such argument would need to stand I gave up. My argument was along the lines of: presence of clusters of extraordinary scholars in ancient civilizations show that prospering economy[1], knowledge communication, and education play crucial role in preparing those scholars.
[0] Now thinking about it - I think there should be strong correlation between average time children are schooled and standardized test scores. Probably also has additional wide variety of rippling effects including better economic growth.
[1] An economy that is capable of bearing load of academia.
> I think there should be strong correlation between average time children are schooled and standardized test scores.
Surely the simpler explanation is that the tests don't really measure "pure" intelligence, and the results are affected by all sorts of social features, including a general familiarity with IQ tests. Time-in-school is part of that.
Re clustering of scholars, prosperity is probably important, but Bloom's two sigma problem[0] probably contributes also. Would Aristotle have been anywhere near as profound without Socrates and Plato as predecessors?
That was part of my point, would kids today perform better without benefit of all the scholar achievements before them? I was arguing that academic development of a society is part of the reason for Flynn effect.
All this means is that the spread of intelligence is more homogenized towards the center (100 being average). What I'd be more curious about is the spread of those people in the top 5-10%, or even some more raw comparison data, not necessarily averages or spread.
Given some truly clueless people I've interacted with in my lifetime, it seems to me that there are plenty of people who may have more generalized knowledge or even be able to reason about some things better but still can't think of a way out of a paper bag let alone a box.
Just because you can use an iPhone, or a remote control for a TV with some understanding of how it works isn't the same as being able to build one. The average man in the 60's in the U.S. had a better understanding of relatively simple things like changing a light switch, or replacing a toilet than the average man today. Understanding more of the machines we use every day is being lost in recent generations imho.
TFA mentions reasoning over memorizing names and numbers, but doesn't mention much in support of that.. I'd say general health of the overall population beyond historic poverty and starvation has had more effect than actual increases in human reasoning.
Folks tested in the 40's and 50's averaged IQ 70. Were they dumber then? Or just not as test-savvy, having less exposure to education, logic etc? What we call IQ today can be boosted by exposure to more cognitive tools (memorization, speed reading, puzzles and games)
Are you talking their averages then scaled with current averages? I thought IQ was averaged around 100. I'm on mobile with a spotty connection right now, so I can't look much up at the moment. I am doing well to reply on my fourth attempt.
SOme previous HN post about old intelligence test results, filed away for 60 years. Rescored, those people who took those tests long ago, had an average IQ of 70.
57 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadI think I prefer more clever.
'More intelligent' would probably have been a better choice.
[0] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleverer?s=t
Jared Diamond makes a similar argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel for why the people of New Guinea are smarter than their western counterparts.
The important thing to note is the human population covers the globe. There are plenty of sifts in populations like Lactose tolerance becoming widespread over the last 7,500 years, but even that is a long way from becoming effectively universal.
That's generally a vary slow change consider most animals don't need dietary vitamin C even if there diets provide plenty of the stuff.
However, you used the term "a few generations" as in below 1,000 years and that's rediculusly fast for a species that takes as long as we do to reproduce and have so few children.
That said, you mentioned a beneficial trait becoming neutral, and that's making the assumption that greater intelligence is neutral. It could be that larger social organizations reward slightly less intelligent critters. That would do the trick rather quickly. I'm not making that claim, but am saying that discussions around evolution and traits that we have bias toward seeing as "good" are fraught.
There's also the further issue of intelligence being a very nebulous term that encompasses tons of cognitive traits, which makes any discussion of intelligence in evolutionary terms even more difficult.
It's also possible that some of what we call intelligence is epigenetic.
Just 500 years ago lots of people in North America where living nomadic hunter gather lifestyles. Even just 100 years ago you could find tribes in many parts of the world still living hunter gather lifestyles little changed over the last 15,000+ years and probably similar to how people lived 100,000+ thousand years ago.
As to epigenetic factors, the classic hunter gather lifestyle could be very healthy as long as population numbers stayed low. Farming actually lowered many heath indicators even as it allowed for massive increases in population sizes.
PS: Anyway, evolution is only 'fast' when there are significant benefits or harms. If a single mutation or environment change increases survival chances by say +/- 1% it takes exponentially longer to spread than a +/- 10% change.
"Farming actually lowered many heath indicators ..."
Indeed, it's uncontroversial that farming degrades the heath.
I do want to mention that larger social organizations were quite widespread in the Americas, despite the existence of hunter-gatherer tribes. The new world certainly wasn't an uncivilized wasteland when Europeans arrived.
Epigenetic factors can be triggered buy group size (domestication) as well. So those hunter-gatherer tribes might share the same genetic traits but express them differently based on their environment.
I don’t recall the study, it was either men in the US or Britton. But, income was positively correlated with number of children. Income and intelligence are also linked so that's evidence that right now intelligence is positively correlated with number of children. This may be strongly linked with prison time but again that links with intelligence.
The important thing to note is men often have children with more than one person and can have children vary late in life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_human_h...
There is a fundamental mistake in assuming a "couple generation" linear trend will continue to infinity providing us with 30 foot tall men with IQs of 200+. We are probably at or around peak height and peak IQ right now for various rather obvious income inequality reasons, and we can expect both to decline in the future.
There is a coupling between womens pelvis size and newborn head size and medically assisted survival during childbirth which could provide some multigenerational effect to growth.
There have been a lot of arguments relying on generational inheritance of intelligence / IQ, however:
"As Flynn pointed out in his Ted Talk on the Flynn Effect, in 1900 only 3% of Americans performed "cognitively demanding" jobs - now the figure is 35%"
That would imply the percentage of humanity where cognition has no effect on their job, and presumably lifestyle, is at least 65% and has always historically been higher, as high as 97%, so an evolutionary argument for IQ growth seems extremely weak. It would be as if doctrine were peacock females select their mates based on tail feather size leading to large tail feathers, yet actual data shows 97% to 65% of actual living peacocks come from bald ancestors.
Other humans!
You have to outsmart them and avoid being outsmarted by them, because they compete for the same resources and some of them will act in a predatory manner.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence 2. Kaufman, Scott Barry, et al. "The role of creativity and humor in human mate selection." Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind’s reproductive system (2008): 227-262.
What about the multi-generational odds of survival and reproduction? What about surviving famines or predators? What about competition in sexual selection?
Idiocracy was an amusing movie, but it's underlying premise was never realistic.
You know, like when you're Amazon and you build a huge infrastructure to serve existing business, only to realize later you could do a lot more with it by simply re-purposing and re-configuring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterozygote_advantage
I also must point out that "hard selection" (differential survival) is not the only operating mechanism in evolution. In complex organisms that reproduce sexually, it might not even be the dominant mechanism. You've got sexual selection and genetic drift, which in a species with low infant mortality and low mortality in general (a.k.a. us) are probably the dominant mechanisms. Beyond those you have things like the Baldwin effect, which get very interesting when coupled with epigenetics. Epigenetics is unquestionably real but as yet is not well understood. There could be all kinds of interesting things going on here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
It's almost like how a goldfish will grow to the size of its bowl-- new humans will grow to and exceed the standards of the last generation, it's just human nature.
It's a bit trickier to apply the principle to creative pursuits than it is to physical ones, but I think it may help explain why students could appear cleverer over time without anything changing biologically.
To give one final example that doesn't involve sports. I am a trumpet player and am pretty familiar with the phenomenon that the best of the best in trumpet playing goes up as the decades go by. Rafael Mendez, Maynard Ferguson, etc. will forever be considered as the all time great virtuosoes, but the cold hard fact is that their technical abilities were only good in light of the time-- exceeded by hundreds if not thousands of the best trumpet players today. It's all about context.
We evolved to be the master hunters and nowadays our children aren't even aware meat comes from animals.
This same limited amount of intelligence we evolved with, is then free to do something else, like literature, art and music.
Thank you.
Perhaps it's the same with intelligence, where more of us are forced to develop to our potential now but we haven't necessarily raised the bar for our species. I think if you look at other statistics such as college attendance rates they would support this scenario.
"The second factor is what Alexander Luria discovered when he tested rural Russian peasants in the 1930s. He discovered that pre-scientific people can't take the hypothetical seriously. That is, if you pose to them questions like, "There is snow at the North Pole; where there is snow, bears are white; what color are bears at the North Pole?" they would say, "Well, I've only seen brown bears. And only if a person came from the North Pole with testimony would I believe that the bears there are white."
It seems like the brain doesn't think abstractly when it doesn't need to, and for many thousands of years it didn't. The nice thing about culture and education is that it seems like more than just knowledge is passed down. Whole modes and ways of thinking, perspectives on the world that are useful and revealing now exist in the greater collective consciousness. We can't really measure this, but I think it makes a huge difference that there is this idea that everything in the world is not simply magical or arbitrary and that given the right tools we can figure it out. The idea that there ARE knowable underlying principles that govern the universe (even randomness!) completely changes the way that we think about the world.
1. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx
More than ever is it attractive to be intelligent. We celebrate Intelligence like never before. Intelligence is more likely to lead to work/money/power, and people are more likely to seek mates that are intelligent.
Any trait that is preferable at the time, is more likely to lead to offsprings. Ask your local sperm bank.
I'm not saying I think it's the only, or necessarily the most important trait (Hitler was likely quite intelligent), but it is increasingly important, and therefore increasingly likely to affect the human evolution.
Human evolution is constantly changing us, and I'd say it makes little to no sense, to argue that our intelligence specifically, is not changing with it (for better or worse). But with our short lifespan, it might not change fast enough for some to recognize it.
The problem is, that's about the only part that has risen. The limited number of subtests showing the gains has long been one of the big question marks about how the Flynn effect could possibly be about the underlying intelligence rather than an artifact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect).
> This is a puzzle not just for the US, but for all countries demonstrating the Flynn Effect. "Does it make sense," Flynn wrote in one paper, "to assume that at one time almost 40% of Dutch men lacked the capacity to understand soccer, their most favoured national sport?"
This sort of point comes up often, but it's not a good point to make. The people discussing IQ tests typically have lived in a tight bubble their entire lives and have not meaningfully interacted with the general population. They typically have even less interaction with the populations of poor countries who might be comparable to long ago. For example, just today I was reading a Wired article which remarks offhand that "In some areas of the country, up to 40 percent of children under 5 are affected. The effects are mental as well as physical. A 2008 study by the National Intelligence Council found that a quarter of North Korean military conscripts are disqualified for cognitive disabilities". Flynn asks whether it's possible for a quarter of Dutch men at some point to not be able to follow soccer well; I ask whether it's possible for a quarter of North Korean men to be rejected by the notoriously voracious NK military because they are too stupid or mentally broken. The latter seems to be true, however...
1. Better nutrition and medical care. 2. Teaching abstract concepts such as predicate logic early on. 3. Increasing complexity of the world in terms of information streams. 4. Urbanization of population. 4. Mandatory schooling and various programs aimed at increasing graduation rate, which is proxy for total amount of time an average child is schooled [0].
I was writing out long and detailed argument based on clustering of scholars and their presence in ancient civilizations, but after realizing amount of details such argument would need to stand I gave up. My argument was along the lines of: presence of clusters of extraordinary scholars in ancient civilizations show that prospering economy[1], knowledge communication, and education play crucial role in preparing those scholars.
[0] Now thinking about it - I think there should be strong correlation between average time children are schooled and standardized test scores. Probably also has additional wide variety of rippling effects including better economic growth.
[1] An economy that is capable of bearing load of academia.
Surely the simpler explanation is that the tests don't really measure "pure" intelligence, and the results are affected by all sorts of social features, including a general familiarity with IQ tests. Time-in-school is part of that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem
Given some truly clueless people I've interacted with in my lifetime, it seems to me that there are plenty of people who may have more generalized knowledge or even be able to reason about some things better but still can't think of a way out of a paper bag let alone a box.
Just because you can use an iPhone, or a remote control for a TV with some understanding of how it works isn't the same as being able to build one. The average man in the 60's in the U.S. had a better understanding of relatively simple things like changing a light switch, or replacing a toilet than the average man today. Understanding more of the machines we use every day is being lost in recent generations imho.
TFA mentions reasoning over memorizing names and numbers, but doesn't mention much in support of that.. I'd say general health of the overall population beyond historic poverty and starvation has had more effect than actual increases in human reasoning.