At Our Wits' End, page 2
However, in this book we will go further. We will prove that although we are becoming better at certain very narrow abilities, due to improvements in the environment we have managed to create for ourselves, we are, in fact becoming less intelligent with respect to the core cognitive ability—general intelligence.[9] We are becoming less intelligent at a quite staggering rate as well. In the last one hundred years, we may have lost as many as 10 IQ points: the difference between the average policeman and the average school-teacher today.[10] This research is cutting edge; many scientists consider it ‘controversial’ even. But, as we will see, the fact that we are getting less intelligent cannot be ignored any longer. Only if we understand what is happening to us can we act in such a way so as to minimise the problems that this is generating and perhaps even overcome some of them.
The Grand Plan
We know what we’re up against. If we were trying to persuade people of something that they wanted to hear or something that sounded nice, we’d have no problems. A book which suggested that everything was a matter of environment and if we just did the right things we could create a utopia would be much more crowd pleasing. But it would also be nonsense. We are interested in what’s really happening and in persuading the intelligent reader that it really is happening. As such, we will assume no detailed knowledge of science or statistics. We will simply assume an open and inquiring mind.
We will begin, in Chapter Two, by looking at the concept of intelligence. We will show that it is a scientifically valid concept, as are the IQ tests that are used to measure it. We will respond to many criticisms of the concept and demonstrate that it can be robustly defended against them. Proxies for intelligence—other measures that correlate with it; are partial measures of it—will also be examined.
In Chapter Three, we will discuss the history of Darwinian selection for intelligence, from the world of dogs and chimpanzees up until pre-industrial England. We will then see, in Chapter Four, that average intelligence was increasing in Europe up until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution because wealth—and thus by proxy intelligence—strongly predicted how many surviving children you had.
In Chapter Five, we will explore the concept of personality, as it is so vitally relevant to understanding genius, which will be explored in Chapter Six. In Chapter Six, we will show that between 1450 and 1850 there was a rise in per capita levels of genius; in super-intelligent people with a very specific kind of personality who innovated hugely important ideas.
We will see in Chapter Seven that a number of 19th- and early 20th-century scientists were convinced that the cleverest people had the fewest children by that time. We will show that they were correct and, in modern Western countries, the cleverer you are the fewer children, on average, you have. We will look at the reasons for this ranging from contraception to career women.
In Chapter Eight, we will explain how something called the Flynn Effect has masked the intelligence decline on IQ tests in the 20th century, as the scores have increased year on year. However, we will see that the Flynn Effect doesn’t actually reflect a rise in ‘core’ or ‘general’ intelligence—just the imperfect nature of the IQ test for measuring intelligence changes over time. And we will show that, anyway, now even the Flynn Effect has gone into reverse in some places. In Chapter Nine, we will present evidence that on measures of general intelligence that more reliably measure this, over time, than the IQ test, intelligence has indeed been declining.
In Chapter Ten, we will demonstrate how our findings fit with the idea that civilisations don’t last forever. They rise and fall and we will see that changes in average intelligence are the simplest explanation for this process. In Chapter Eleven, we will show that Rome—like us—likely reached a peak of intelligence due to selection, then fertility became negatively associated with intelligence, causing Rome to subsequently decline and collapse. The same thing happened to civilisations in the Middle East and China.
In Chapter Twelve, we will see how Western civilisation has followed the different stages which all civilisations do and we will see that we are now in the winter of civilisation. Finally, in Chapter Thirteen, we will look—in practical terms—at what we can do about this. Can we break out of the winter of civilisation before there is further collapse?
Back to the Concorde and the Moon
So, why can we not re-launch Concorde—or make a superior version? We have a hypothesis, for which we will present more evidence as the book progresses.
We should conceive of a pyramid of technology, an idea presented by the British psychiatrist Bruce Charlton.[11] At the top are the inventors —the geniuses. Beneath these are those who develop and refine the invention. Below them, are those who can fix the invention. Then there are those who can operate it and finally those who cannot even use it, but might be employed to maintain it. When Concorde was launched, every level of this pyramid was slightly more intelligent than it is now. Between 1969 and the year 2000, those at the very top of the intelligence pyramid simply didn’t produce many descendants, while those at the very bottom in 1969 were a significantly larger percentage by the year 2000. This meant that in the year 2000, by the standards of 1969, everybody in the aviation industry was slightly upwardly socially mobile relative to their level of intelligence. A better term for this might be ‘over-promoted’. The average pilot was less intelligent—and so less able to solve a sudden, difficult problem—and, more importantly, so was the average engineer on the ground and the average worker in an aircraft hangar.
This decline in IQ meant that more and more people were making more and more short-term, bad decisions. And this culminated in the piece of defective, sharp, poorly-made metal strip falling off the DC 10 and being left on the runway, causing Concorde to crash.
But what is this thing intelligence? We all know people who are convinced that intelligence is really meaningless and it’s hard work and social skills that count. Is intelligence really so important?
1 For a detailed history of Concorde, see: Orlebar, C. (2011) The Concorde Story, New York: Bloomsbury USA.
2 See: Alkon, P. (2013) Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology, London: Routledge.
3 See: Compton, W. (2012) Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of NASA’s Apollo Lunar Expeditions, Chelmsford, MA: Courier Corporation.
4 MacDonald, A. (2009) Truth, Lies, and O-rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. See also: Walsh, P. (2015) Echoes Among the Stars: A Short History of the U.S. Space Program, London: Routledge. This argument was first presented in Charlton, B. (2012) Not Even Trying: The Corruption of Real Science, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press.
5 See Bouchard Jr., T. (2004) Genetic influence on human psychological traits, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, pp. 148–151.
6 Jensen, A. R. (1981) Straight Talk About Mental Tests, New York: Free Press.
7 Clark, G. (2007) A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clark does not consider ‘intelligence’ as one of the traits that increased as a consequence of the ‘survival of the richest’, however this is what is entailed by the mass of evidence he cites.
8 Shamosh, N.A. & Gray, J.R. (2008) Delay discounting and intelligence: A meta-analysis, Intelligence, 36, pp. 289–305.
9 Woodley of Menie, M.A., te Nijenhuis, J. & Murphy, R. (2015) The Victorians were still faster than us. Commentary: Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, art. 452.
10 Woodley of Menie, M.A., Figueredo, A.J., Sarraf, M.A., Hertler, S.C., Fernandes, H.B.F. & Peñaherrera-Aguirre, M. (2017) The rhythm of the West: A biohistory of the modern era AD 1600 to the present, Journal of Social Political and Economic Studies, Monograph Series, No. 37, Washington, DC: Scott Townsend Press.
11 See: Charlton, B. (26 November 2012) The pyramid of technology and of intellectual functions, Bruce Charlton’s Notions, [Online], http://charlton teaching.blogspot.fi/2012/11/the-pyramid-of-technology-and-of.html.
Two
What is Intelligence?
‘Intelligence’ is one of those concepts that a lot of people don’t like. Currently, the ‘politically correct’ way to think—the way of thinking that means you’re a good person who won’t make people feel uncomfortable or make them think about the possibility they might not be right—involves the belief that everyone is equal in terms of their innate capacities.[1] Everyone must be equal because they have equal value. But the problem with this idea is that some people are much better at some tasks than others. If your computer breaks down you might ask Lee, who knows a lot about computers and designs computer games for a living, to help you out. Lee is clearly not equal—in terms of that ability—to Mike, who is a doctor but knows nothing about computers. You’d be better off going to Mike if you found a lump on your neck. He would be better than Lee and of more value to you in those circumstances.
Intelligence—like computer-mending ability or diagnostic skill—is something that some people have more of than others. Intelligence, as we have already discussed, is the ability to solve complex problems and to solve them quickly. Some people are clearly better able to solve complex problems and solve them more quickly than others and those people are more intelligent than those who are slower or who simply have to give up because the problem is beyond them. We might compare intelligence to how a computer works.[2] Intelligence is like the processing speed of a computer and how much complexity it can deal with before it simply freezes and shuts down.
So, intelligence can be seen as the ability to think abstractly and to learn quickly—this leads to the ability to solve problems quickly, especially if they are similar to problems that have previously been experienced. Intelligence is measured by IQ tests. Some people argue that IQ tests don’t really measure intelligence and are essentially only a measure of how well people do on IQ tests. This is simply wrong. Child and adulthood IQ correlate at between 0.7 and 0.85.[3] IQ test scores in childhood will predict many important things in adulthood—higher intelligence predicts higher education level, higher socio-economic status, higher salary, better health, greater civic participation,[4] lower impulsivity, and longer lifespan.[5] Lower intelligence predicts higher criminality, and shorter-term future-orientation.[6] In other words, people who are more intelligent tend to live for the future whereas people who are less intelligent tend to live for the now. A test of future-orientation might involve placing a chocolate bar in front of a young child and telling him or her that he or she can have that chocolate bar now or two chocolate bars in an hour’s time if the child doesn’t take the chocolate bar now. The more intelligent the child is, the more likely s/he is to wait an hour. Higher IQ people are also more trusting. The relationship between intelligence and trust may result from the way in which less intelligent people will be less able to discern whether someone is trustworthy, meaning it would make more sense for them to trust nobody.[7] In general, therefore, high intelligence—as measured by IQ tests—predicts socially desirable outcomes. A full list of the qualities that are associated with intelligence based on IQ tests—specifically ‘general intelligence’, which we will define below—can be seen in Table 1.
Table 1. Variables correlated with general intelligence[8]
Positive Correlation
Negative Correlation
Achievement motivation
Accident proneness
Altruism
Acquiescence
Analytic style
Aging quickly
Abstract thinking
Alcoholism
Artistic preference and ability
Authoritarianism
Atheism
Conservatism (of social views)
Craftwork
Crime
Creativity
Delinquency
Diet (healthy)
Dogmatism
Democratic participation (voting, petitions)
Falsification (‘Lie’ scores)
Educational attainment
Hysteria (versus other neuroses)
Eminence and genius
Illegitimacy
Emotional sensitivity
Impulsivity
Extra-curricular attainments
Infant mortality
Field-independence
Obesity
Height
Racial prejudice
Health, fitness, longevity
Reaction times
Humour, sense of
Religiousness
Income
Self-Esteem
Interests, depth and breadth of
Smoking
Involvement in school activities
Single/young motherhood
Leadership
Truancy
Linguistic abilities (including spelling) Logical abilities
Trust (lack of)
Marital partner, choice of
Weight/height ratio (BMI)
Media preferences
Memory
Migration (voluntary)
Military rank
Moral reasoning and development
Motor skills
Musical preferences and abilities
Myopia
Occupational status
Occupational success
Perceptual abilities
Piaget-type abilities
Practical knowledge
Psychotherapy, response to
Reading ability
Social skills
Socioeconomic status of origin Socioeconomic status achieved
Sports participation at university Supermarket shopping ability
Talking speed
Trusting nature
Some people argue for a broader definition of intelligence, which encompasses ‘multiple intelligences’.[9] For example, researchers talk of ‘emotional intelligence’ as the ability to get on with people, to empathise with them, to know what the right thing is to say and when to say it. This ability is sometimes described as being distinct from intelligence as measured by IQ tests. There is no question that what gets called ‘emotional intelligence’ is important and people who are high in it will have more friends than those who are socially awkward and who constantly offend people. However, the ability to solve social problems has been shown to be weakly predicted by intelligence and all cognitive aptitudes inter-correlate in rigorous studies.[10] It may be comforting to believe, if you’re not that smart, that reality is like the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Penny is not as bright as her scientist friends but she has much greater ‘emotional intelligence’ and you’re like her. But the reality is that, on average, somebody like Leonard would not only be more intelligent than Penny but more socially skilled than her as well. This would not necessarily be true of Sheldon, but we will look at outliers like him in Chapter Six.
Different Kinds of Intelligence
And this leads us onto the real ‘different kinds of intelligence’. In general, we can understand that some people are more intelligent than others. After talking to somebody, and often after talking to them for not very long, we get an intuitive sense of how ‘bright’ or ‘smart’ they are. But this can be deceptive in a minority of cases.
