Actually I said that I think I learnt long-division at my state-funded primary school, so the 'tiny minority' argument is a bit misplaced....


No, I'm not joking. If you take a bird's eye view of human development, that statement is obviously true.

The statement that human intelligence is improving is 'obviously true'

Er, no it isn't.

Human intelligence, at least until the development of truly smart drugs and gene therapy is likely to remain pretty constant.

It is very unlikely that the mean 'intelligence' of the entire human population in 2006 is much different from that in 1906.

You might be able to make the case that evolution has selected for the smarter humans to survive and pass on more of their genes since the first hunter-gatherers left Africa 100,000 years ago but even that is a very dubious assertion. Australian Aborginals (belonging genetically to pretty much a stone age culture) have astonishing visual memory and 3d visualisation functions for example and when Intelligence tests are weighted in favor of such matters (as opposed to verbal-logical reasoning) they smack the average prep school/university pupil like Phil Ivey would playing $50/100 against me.

Certainly there is no way that the few remaining evolutionary pressures on humans over the past 100 years will have effected any increase in intelligence whatsover. You can read the opening chapters of Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for a far more lucid exposition of the topic than I could possibly attempt..

You might get a small improvement of human intelligence, as I said above, with increased average nutrition, but with the AIDS pandemic ravaging Sub-Saharan Africa, this may well have been falling recently..

Anyway 'intelligence' is a red-herring.

What we are talking about here is the school system and education (in its truest sense meaning a 'leading out' of the human mind). And whether private sector or state funded there is no doubt that absolute standards of basic literacy/numeracy (vocabularly, grammar and maths) have been falling over the past 50 years, no matter what the grade inflation caused by the political imperatives of the education system is showing..

The point Excession made about 11+ questions being too difficult for A Level exams stands separate from the issue of private education. They are both exams, across time, designed to measure cross-societal ability in given subjects.

Since the main influencing factor upon a persons intelligence is their genes (and a slight effect of nutrition) it's fair to say that even 3 generations of extremely selective breeding in the past 100 years is not going make the human race much smarter. It maybe doesn't help (but is obviously necessary) that concepts like intelligence are constantly being refined.

On the assumption that the previous paragraph is accurate (Kuso?) then the issue boils down to what, in my opinion, is a ever-weakening academic standard. Peoples capacity to learn has not significantly changed, more that the schooling process has become less rigourous.

Maybe it's due to increased living standards where because one is born poor they generally have it a lot better than their equivalents 100 years ago and there is more scope for overcoming that and aquiring prosperity beyond studying like a beast (the lottery! ). I don't know.

This is the most high-brow thread hijack I've ever seen!

Molina

EDIT - Ugh, Ex out-typed me AND he did it more eloquently

In the history of intelligence, please consider the people like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the ohers living at that time. They were far more educated than modern people. They spoke several languages, composed music, invented things, and created the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and America.

Jefferson and Washington were master farmers among their other skills. Jefferson brought plants, fruits, and vegetables from all over the world. He kept the weather and plant records for fifty years. He played a mean fiddle and composed music. Of course, one way he could get so much done was to own slaves. He designed his house. It is certainly obvious these were brilliant people without google or modern ideas of education and communication. Franklin was a leading writer and scientist.

One thing that makes me believe in the braiin power of the twentysomethings is their rapid learning of poker and their success at out sport.

If you read a biography of one of the leading writers and thinkers of the 1770s, it blows your mind thinking about their minds. It tells us that people are capable of massive intelligence and varied interests.

Hang on a minute Monk - I am using 'stone age culture' in a non-derogatory and technically correct way here and am very concerned that you seem to be inferring tacit racism.

When the British arrived the Aborigines were a 'stone age culture' in the literal sense - semi-nomadic slash and burn agriculture only (with the exception of some coastal tribes who were more settled fisherman) and no writing or metal tools. They had been relatively isolated (apart from some trading contacts with PNG on the North coast) for some 40-50,000 years - when they had arrived from the exodus from Africa having worked their way along the coast thru India. Of course their culture wasn't static and they were developing settlements in some areas just as the Europeans arrived, but in essence a 'stone age culture' is exactly what they had.

Absolutely none of this makes them in any way inferior by the way, nor did I for a second imply that it does..I have spent over 8 months in Oz on three separate occasions and have on each trip spoken to Aborigines about their history and culture and hold it in the highest respect. They have multiple uses for every single plant and animal, sucessfully surivived in an often hostile environment and possess a fascinating worldview and mythos..

I think you will agree that 200 years (since colonisation) is a blink of the eye for humans in evolutionary terms - so for the purposes of 'intelligence' comparisons comparing a westerner with an aborigine today is a valid and informative exercise.

Now most of the idea of 'race' is bunkum - it is well known that if you take the DNA of any two random Africans there will on average be more genetic difference between them than between either one of those Africans and any other non-African human being on the planet. That of course means that those white racists performing IQ tests on black and white kids in the States are measuring little more than the effects of racism in the US.

That said 50,000 years of stone age culture and life outside in a particular environment has meant that there has been selective pressure on the Aboriginal population and their brains have developed in a way that is unique amongst modern humans. Tests consistently show better spatial awareness and visual memory than non-aborigines at the expense of worse logical skills. This is to be expected in the circumstances. This does certainly not them any less intelligent than anyone else (as westerners lost in the outback over the past 250 yrs would attest) -if anything it just shows even more how nebulous the concept of 'one size fits all' intelligence is.

Got AA got nothin!

rigged

North: that's kind of a stupid comment, the bird's eye one. As long as we become generally more advanced and "common knowledge" assimilates that knowledge such that common knowledge grows over time, then of COURSE people now will know more, in general, than those before...it goes without saying...that doesn't mean that people are getting SMARTER. Intelligence needs to be relativized, if that's the measure you're using. It's not fair to say that ancient scientists were 'stupid' because they couldn't possibly have access to the volume of information that the average person now has. It's remarked that the sunday new york times has more info in it than a well educated 18th century person would know in their lifetime: but that says NOTHING about their intelligence.

From my recollection the tests were done on primary school children living in modern Australian cities (both aboriginal and caucasian in mixed classes) and all living a western lifestyle to try to isolate genetic factors..I will try to dig it out..

Of course I am no geneticist at allso I defer to your professional knowledge in this area..