Intelligence and Human Progress

The Story of What was Hidden in our Genes

James Flynn

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780124170148
• eBook ISBN: 9780124170186
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Written by James R. Flynn of the "Flynn effect" (the sustained and substantial increase in intelligence test scores across the world over many decades), Intelligence and Human Progress examines genes and human achievement in all aspects, including what genes allow and forbid in terms of personal life history, the cognitive progress of humanity, the moral progress of humanity, and the cross-fertilization of the two.This book presents a new method for weighing family influences versus genes in the cognitive abilities of individuals, and counters the arguments of those who dismiss gains in IQ as true cognitive gains. It ranges over topics including: how family can handicap those taking the SAT; new IQ thresholds for occupations that show elite occupations are within reach of the average American; what Pol Pot did to the genetic potential of Cambodia; why dysgenics (the deterioration of human genes over the generations) is important, but no menace for the foreseeable future; and what might derail human intellectual progress.Researchers in developmental and cognitive psychology, educators, and professionals involved in intelligence testing or psychometrics will benefit from the perspectives offered here. But beyond that, anyone interested in the potential of the human mind will be engaged and challenged by one of the most important contemporary thinkers on the subject.

Chapter 1

Our Genes and Ourselves

How much do our genes affect how we live? Addressing that theme will mean recapitulating material from my scholarly works. But the theme is important and something that I have not systematically discussed. I am writing to address the general reading public, but straight talk does not compromise anything I intend to say. As for specialists, they will, I hope, use the new data and material in Chapter 2 to clarify their thinking, and use the new method in Chapter 5 to go beyond kinship studies to measure the decay of family environment.

Everyone has heard generalizations, such as “our genes make us inherently violent,” or “we are irrational by nature,” or “the average person cannot hope to contribute much to human society.” These are usually said in the context of denying the possibility of either human or personal progress. This book will test these assertions against history. If we have actually done something, such as become more rational, become more moral, made contributions to society beyond our so-called genetic potential, genes were powerless to forbid any of these things. You would think that our genes simply veto anything new. In fact, they have empowered us to progress our intelligence and moral rectitude toward limits as yet unknown. The quickest way to sell your soul is to keep saying “I cannot.”

Genes are of great importance. Evidence shows that an individual’s genes have a powerful influence on his or her life history. But not so powerful that individuals cannot choose to love both the truth and the good and thereby transcend the place on the human hierarchy at which their genes would “tend” to fix them. Particularly over the last 10,000 years, the collective genes of humanity have evolved away from a proclivity that favors violence and the principle of might makes right; and toward genes that allow a surprising degree of rationality and moral behavior. I call these two trends cognitive progress and moral progress, respectively, and try to show how they cross-fertilize. Throughout the evolution of our genes, there runs the domestication of the human species. We have tamed our genes (rather like taming domestic animals) as we have learned to live in larger societies. Throughout the pacification of our behavior, there runs the domestication of men by women. As the balance of power shifts toward women, the latter tame male violence more effectively.

1.1 Outline of the Chapters

The wonder is in the detail. Chapter 2 will defend the cognitive progress of humankind against criteria that purport to show that IQ gains are “hollow.” New data about adults and children will drive the point home. It is followed by Appendix A, which adds background data and may be mainly of interest to specialists. Chapter 3 will look at dysgenics and eugenics: the thesis that current mating trends are sapping the quality of human genes so that, over the next few generations, hard-won progress will be lost. It will also look at whether the catastrophic events of recent history, such as the rule of Pol Pot in Cambodia, have depleted genes for cognition in various nations.

Chapter 4 will summarize moral progress. We have turned away from violence and cruelty toward humanity. It will also emphasize the role that cognitive progress has played in enhancing moral progress. Finally, it will pose challenges for the twenty-first century: our combination of reason and morality may not be able to solve problems that could reverse our evolving international society.

Chapter 5 will look at the role of genes in individual life history. At first, family environment, whether for good or ill, prevents the matching of genes and environment. However, it fades away at about the ages of 17–25. At that point, at whatever level of cognitive ability you choose, there is a tenuous matching of genes and environment for group achievement. This does not mean any individual’s mind is immune to positive or negative environment. Our mental abilities are always subject to the shocks that adult life holds and the determination of individuals to hitch their star to thinking their way through life. An elegant new method will be used to make exact estimates of the age at which family environment fades. Appendix B follows this chapter. It spells out certain calculations in detail and once again, its contents will engage general readers only if they have a curiosity about such.

The last chapter will be a repeat of this introduction with the substance only detail can supply. It underlines a theme of my research: we must set aside the tendency to freeze the human mind and character in favor of assessing it as something adapted to whatever society it confronts. Since my research sets the stage for this book, I will spend the remainder of this chapter summarizing material from earlier works (Flynn, 2009, 2012) that new readers may find unfamiliar.

1.2 Massive IQ Gains Over Time

The record of how human beings have performed on IQ tests does more than measure us against one another for entry into Harvard law school. It provides priceless artifacts about how our minds have adapted from a simpler world to the world of modernity. We went from a society that posed mainly problems of how to manipulate the concrete world of everyday life for advantage (the utilitarian attitude) toward a society that expected us to classify, analyze abstract concepts, and take hypothetical situations seriously (the scientific attitude). They hint at a century of cognitive progress. Just as our cars altered because of modern science and the improved roads they traverse, so our minds have altered under the influence of modern schooling and the totality of the industrial revolution.

Take a Martian archeologist who lands on earth to investigate a ruined civilization. He finds the record of marksmanship contests held in 1865, 1998, and 1918. At each time, the tests may have been designed to see who had the keenest eyesight, the steadiest hand, and the best control over the weapon. But incredibly the average performance has escalated over time from 1 shot in the bull’s-eye per minute, to 5 shots, to 50 shots. This would signal, of course, how much society had changed in terms of the weapons the average soldier used, from flintlock muskets to repeating rifles to machine guns. We have to imagine something more complex than tools. How did people’s minds change to allow them to perform so much better on IQ tests, without any mechanical aids, but with what I call new habits of mind? How did their minds become equipped to deal with the content of IQ tests in terms of classifying objects, taking hypothetical situations seriously, and using logic on abstractions?

When Luria interviewed preindustrial peasants in Russia in the 1920s, he provided the answer. They did not classify. When he asked what a fish and crow had in common, they would not say that they were animals. One swims, one flies, you can eat one and not the other. They should not be lumped together because as objects in the concrete world, we use them differently. If you asked someone in 1900 what a rabbit and dog had in common, you use dogs to hunt rabbits. The fact that they were mammals was too incidental to be worthy of notice. They did not take the hypothetical seriously. When he asked them whether, granted that there were no camels in Germany, would there be camels in German cities, they said there must be camels if the city was large enough. When he asked them to reason about abstractions such as “wherever there is snow bears are white,” “there is snow at the North Pole,” “what color are the bears,” they stayed firmly rooted in their experience of the concrete world. They had never seen anything but brown bears. But they might believe a reliable witness that came from the North Pole. In frustration, they asked Luria how they could solve problems that were not real problems.

We take classification, the hypothetical, reasoning about the abstract for granted. How do these new habits of mind explain how we function in the modern world?

Education has escalated from an average of some years of primary school to almost everyone having a high school diploma, plus over half of Americans with some tertiary education. It also teaches students differently. In 1910, children at the end of primary school took tests that asked almost entirely for socially valued concrete things: What were the capitals of the then-44 states? By 1990, the same children were asked to link abstract concepts in a chain of logic: Why is the largest city in a state often not the capital city? Because the rural state legislature hated the big cities and picked a county seat: Albany over New York city, Harrisburg over Philadelphia, Annapolis over Baltimore, and so forth. Needless to say, all courses that deal with modern science assume the scientific attitude: classifying, posing hypotheses, and linking abstractions with logic.

Work has become modernized. From only 3% of Americans working as professionals (doctor) or subprofessionals (teacher), we now find at least 35% earning their living as such. Not only are far more of them in conceptually demanding jobs, but also the jobs have been upgraded. Compare the banker of 1900 with the merchant bankers who, with incredible expertise about computers, financial markets, the conversion of debt into assets, brought down the financial world; compare the tiller of the soil with the farm manager of today; compare the intuitive doctor of 1900 with today’s scientifically-informed general practitioner, to say nothing of the medical specialist. As we shall see, even moral argument has been upgraded. We have gone from almost everyone just treating principles, despite all their cruelty, as concrete objects impervious to change (thou shalt not suffer a witch to live) toward people holding universal principles subject to correction by logic. For example, how can you reconcile your belief in justice with discriminating against people because they are black?

Today, there are IQ data from about 30 nations spread all over the world. It appears that shortly after a nation embarks on the industrial revolution, IQs begin to rise. Indeed, thanks to birth date data (scores rising as the subject’s date of birth rises from the past to the present), we know that Britain has made massive IQ gains since 1872.

The industrial revolution demands a better educated work force, not just to fill new elite positions but to upgrade the average working person, progressing from literacy to grade school to high school to university. Women enter the work force. Better standards of living nourish better brains. Family size drops so that adults dominate the home’s vocabulary and modern parenting develops (encouraging the child’s potential for education). People’s professions exercise their minds rather than asking for physically demanding repetitive work. Leisure at least allows cognitively-demanding activity rather than mere recuperation from work. The world’s new visual environment develops so that abstract images dominate our minds and we can “picture” the world and its possibilities rather than merely describe it.

All of this may hint at a period of 100–150 years. At some date, a society begins to industrialize, enters the phase of massive IQ gains, and then these gradually dwindle away. Sooner or later, education is widespread and adequate, family size can go no lower, leisure is as packed with as many cognitively demanding pursuits and images as it can be, even featherbedding can produce no more elite jobs, and so the triggers of massive IQ gains stop. Some nations may pass through that cycle quicker than others.

For example, the developed world entered the cycle with Britain in 1850 and with China almost a century later on. Some nations, like the highly-educated and welfare states of Scandinavia, may have hit the optimum: their IQ gains may have ceased. Less progressive nations, such as America, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the nations of East Asia, such as Japan, China, and South Korea, are still in the IQ gains phase. The developing nations that have begun to develop, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, and Kenya, are just entering their massive gains phase. Much of the world is still in the doldrums.

I have left the most important point to the last. It was the record of performance on IQ tests that led me to try to write cognitive history. Just what was it about the record that testified to the adaptation of minds to modernity? First we will look at the facts, then at the interpretation. Every nation in its IQ gains phase has made enormous gains on two kinds of tests. When the average person takes the mainline Wechsler or Stanford–Binet IQ tests, they score at 130 compared to the norms set 100 years ago. This puts the average person at that time at 70 against today’s norms, or the cutting line for mental retardation. They were not retarded at all of course. No one needed the habits of mind of modernity to cope with that concrete world. When the average person takes Raven’s Progressive Matrices, they score at 150 compared to the norms set 100 years ago (remember they were set by birth date data), which puts the average person at that time at 50 against today’s norms.

Where have the Wechsler gains been the largest? First on the similarities subtest that forces you to classify. Second, on the analytic subtests that force you to use logic to devise how blocks or objects can make certain designs. Third, on the pictorial subtests which ask you to find the missing piece of a picture or use pictures to tell a story. Fourth, on the vocabulary subtest where adults made large gains thanks to more and more education. Children, of course, in recent years have had no more additional schooling, and their vocabulary gains have been modest.

Equally important, note that the Raven’s gains are at least as huge as the most prominent Wechsler subtests, and they ask you to perceive logical sequences in highly abstract symbols. They are really a kind of analogies test. Fox and Mitchum (in press) brilliantly assess what has allowed each generation to do better than the preceding one.

There is no doubt that Americans 100 years ago could do simple analogies grounded in the concrete world: domestic cats are to wild cats as dogs are to what? (Wolves). By 1961, they could handle two squares followed by a triangle implies two circles followed by what? (A semicircle: just as a triangle is half of a square, so a semicircle is half of a circle). By 2006, they could handle two circles followed by a semicircle implies two 16s followed by what? (Eight: you have to see the relationship despite the transition from shapes to numbers). Note how each step takes us further from the concrete world toward using logic on abstractions, eventually abstractions whose very identity shifts. Who can imagine the average person in 1900 able to do all of that? Is it any wonder that we get much higher scores on Raven’s?

In sum, the profiles match. Modernity means breaking from simply manipulating the concrete world for use. It means classifying, using logic on the abstract, pictorial reasoning, and more vocabulary. The IQ test items that have risen over time make the same cognitive demands. The enormous score gains are a symptom of the radically new habits of mind that distinguish us from our immediate ancestors.

1.3 The Dickens/Flynn Model

The psychometric community initially rejected the notion that IQ gains entailed the enhancement of cognitive abilities that had counterparts in the real world. The culprit was environment. My hypothesis is that environmental triggers caused the gains; their hypothesis was that environment is too feeble to cause gains of real-world significance. As we will see in Chapter 2, this issue is not yet settled. But at present, I can at least demonstrate that environment is up to the task (Dickens & Flynn, 2001a, 2001b, 2002).

The twin studies focused on identical twins that were separated at birth and raised by different families. If they grew up with identical IQs, the inference was that identical genes had trumped dissimilar and enfeebled environments. If they grew up with IQs no more alike than the rest of us, dissimilar environment had trumped identical and enfeebled genes. The result: they were far more alike for IQ than randomly selected individuals. By adulthood, all kinship studies showed that family environment had faded away to zero. Adult IQs differed only to the degree that chance events might cause them to differ (one is dropped on his head and the other was not). It is hard to see how chance events could lead to massive IQ gains over time. (Well a few less might be dropped today, but how could that encourage analytic gains and discourage say arithmetic gains). They concluded that environment had so little potency to be a bad bet.

Let us see what happens to children that are genetically identical but grow up in different families. I will use basketball as an example. Joe and Jerry are identical twins separated at birth so that one is raised in Muncie Indiana and the other in Terre Haut. Thanks to their identical genes both will be 4 inches taller and a bit quicker than average (faster reflex arc). Indiana is a basketball mad state and at the start of school both boys get picked to play sandlot basketball m...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Dedication
• List of Tables and Figure
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Our Genes and Ourselves
• Chapter 2. Genes and Cognitive Progress
• Chapter 3. Dysgenics and Eugenics
• Chapter 4. Genes and Moral Progress
• Chapter 5. Genes and Individual Differences
• Chapter 6. Frozen Minds