My title for this piece is the subtitle of "None of the Above," Malcolm Gladwell's review of What Is Intelligence?, a new book by James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, New Zealand. The book and the Gladwell review deal with "the Flynn effect," discovered over 20 years ago by Flynn himself. Flynn noticed in 1984 that, according to Gladwell, "I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as [intelligence] tests had been administered."
Many social scientists have long thought I.Q. ("intelligence quotient") reveals something innate and largely genetic in each individual human being's intrinsic mental capacity, something "real" which I.Q. tests supposedly show is larger in some of us than in others of us. True, the nurture we get as infants and the environment we are brought up in contribute heavily to our person-to-person I.Q. differences, for better or for worse. Yet we each supposedly start out life with an immutable mental potential that varies with our heredity. If we have the right genes, we can be smart. If not, we're average — or, worse, we're morons, idiots, imbeciles.
Thus, when intelligence tests in the first half of the 20th century showed significant I.Q. differences among various races and ethnic groups, those groups who scored lower on average were deemed genetically inferior. The people Gladwell calls "I.Q. fundamentalists" believed — as many still do — that the genes we inherit by virtue of our race put brackets around our potential for mental achievement, as measured by I.Q. tests.
I.Q. fundamentalism is something like religious fundamentalism as it applies to Darwin's theory of evolution and the origin of species. Creationists counter Darwin by asserting that natural selection might be able to account for some degree of variation within fixed species established by the divine creator, but it isn't powerful enough to make new species. I.Q. fundamentalists say the influence of environmental factors might be able to swing I.Q. up or down around a point fixed either high or low by heredity or race, but it can't turn a dope into a mental giant.
But that's what the Flynn effect seems to show: the passage of time and the succession of generations can turn below-average I.Q.s into above-average I.Q.s, and above-average scores into genius-level scores. That's why the I.Q. tests have to be constantly "renormed" (made harder) to hold the average score at 100.
How could time and generational succession, occurring over far too few years for genetic improvements to take root and make a difference, make people smarter? What sort of cultural evolution accounts for it?
Flynn and Gladwell say the question itself is flawed. We are not getting smarter in any fundamental sense. Rather, we are getting more modern. Gladwell: "An I.Q. ... measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are."
I.Q. tests don't really measure intelligence, then. They measure the extent to which our cultural milieu has fashioned what Gladwell calls "scientific spectacles" for us and taught us to put them on.
When the Flynn effect is broken down into subcategories of mental functioning, it is the category of I.Q. test questions called "similarities" in which we beat the pants off our fathers, and especially our grandfathers. Questions in this category ask us to say what goes with what, and why — as in "In what way are dogs and rabbits alike?" The "right" answer is supposedly the "taxonomic" one: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. "A nineteenth-century American," though, says Gladwell, "would have said that 'you use dogs to hunt rabbits.' "
For a like reason, when I.Q. tests were given to members of the Kpelle tribe in Liberia, the self-styled "wise" of the tribe would — wrongly, per the official answer book — sort potatoes (a food) with knives (a tool), because you use the latter to cut the former. Only when asked how a "fool" would answer the same questions did the Kpelle sort potatoes with other foods and knives with other tools.
The Kpelle, as members of a traditional society, did not wear "scientific spectacles" and automatically assume that a "taxonomic," category-based answer was best. Nor did our nineteenth-century American ancestors, unless they were in the minority who were highly educated. Today, college degrees and "scientific spectacles" are more prevalent ... and people generally have higher I.Q. scores (unless, that is, the tests are renormed).
But not all Americans have benefited to an equal extent from the Flynn effect, or at an equal pace. In the last century, various immigrant groups (Italians, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Hispanics, and others) were called inferior for failing to score as high on intelligence tests, on average, as people of Northern and Western European descent. The gaps were erased — and then some, in the case of Asians — in succeeding generations.
Except, sadly, in the case of African Americans. Though blacks narrowed the I.Q. gap during the 25 years following World War II, "that trend stalled" over the subsequent quarter century, Gladwell notes. Though, Gladwell adds, "more recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again," the gap still perplexes social scientists and encourages I.Q. fundamentalists to deem blacks inferior.
But, Flynn shows, blacks start out life with I.Q. parity, according to the (admittedly crude) tests measuring infant cognitive functions. By age four, blacks' I.Q.s are on average just a tad behind whites', at 95.4 to whites' 100. But by age 24, the black shortfall has widened to 83.4.
It is a slew of adverse environmental factors that account for this, Flynn shows, by keeping African Americans from learning to put on the "scientific spectacles" of the modern American mind. There's no reason to believe blacks aren't just as smart, but they don't necessarily end up filtering the world through the same cognitive categories as the supposed mental giants among us do.
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