7 ms·

Are humans getting cleverer?

48 points by sebgr 12y ago

buckbova 12y ago
So the opposite of the premise of Idiocracy is true?
- nwatson 12y ago
  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/1594481946 http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/15...). Though Idiocracy is a great underappreciated film.
  - buckbova 12y ago
    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.
- MasterScrat 12y ago
  Yes. Very relevant: http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/
  - defen 12y ago
    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.
smutticus 12y ago
"cleverer" or "more clever" I think I prefer more clever.
- k1t 12y ago
  'Cleverer' is correct[0], but definitely an ugly word. 'More intelligent' would probably have been a better choice. [0] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleverer?s=t http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleverer?s=t
qiqing 12y ago
Fewer women are also dying in childbirth as nations get more developed. Slightly relevant.
weeksie 12y ago
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.
- jacobolus 12y ago
  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.
  - nicolethenerd 12y ago
    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.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      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.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        By that I mean, no evolutionary pressure on intelligence. Of course a healthy upbringing will increase exhibited intelligence.
    - Retric 12y ago
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
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'.
rndn 12y ago
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.
- chadgeidel 12y ago
  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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett (Google is correcting "Dannet" to "Dennett"). Thank you.
  - rndn 12y ago
    Your spelling is correct. There you go: http://devoutnone.com/tools-for-thinking/ http://devoutnone.com/tools-for-thinking/
svachalek 12y ago
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.
Sevzi 12y ago
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).
hyperion2010 12y ago
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. 1. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx
Brodersen 12y ago
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.
gwern 12y ago
> 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 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...
- TrainedMonkey 12y ago
  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.
anonymousfox 12y ago
Perhaps a result of epigenetics?
mseepgood 12y ago
No, my observation is that the youth is getting dumber and dumber with every year.
tracker1 12y ago
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.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
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)
- robflynn 12y ago
  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.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    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.

48 points by sebgr 12y ago

buckbova 12y ago

So the opposite of the premise of Idiocracy is true?

nwatson 12y ago
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/1594481946 http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/15...). Though Idiocracy is a great underappreciated film.
- buckbova 12y ago
  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.
MasterScrat 12y ago
Yes. Very relevant: http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/
- defen 12y ago
  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.

smutticus 12y ago

"cleverer" or "more clever" I think I prefer more clever.

k1t 12y ago
'Cleverer' is correct[0], but definitely an ugly word. 'More intelligent' would probably have been a better choice. [0] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleverer?s=t http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleverer?s=t

qiqing 12y ago

Fewer women are also dying in childbirth as nations get more developed. Slightly relevant.

weeksie 12y ago

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.

jacobolus 12y ago
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.
- nicolethenerd 12y ago
  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.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    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.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      By that I mean, no evolutionary pressure on intelligence. Of course a healthy upbringing will increase exhibited intelligence.
  - Retric 12y ago

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

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'.

rndn 12y ago

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.

chadgeidel 12y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett (Google is correcting "Dannet" to "Dennett"). Thank you.
- rndn 12y ago
  Your spelling is correct. There you go: http://devoutnone.com/tools-for-thinking/ http://devoutnone.com/tools-for-thinking/

svachalek 12y ago

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.

Sevzi 12y ago

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).

hyperion2010 12y ago

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. 1. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx

Brodersen 12y ago

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.

gwern 12y ago

> 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 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...

TrainedMonkey 12y ago
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.

anonymousfox 12y ago

Perhaps a result of epigenetics?

mseepgood 12y ago

No, my observation is that the youth is getting dumber and dumber with every year.

tracker1 12y ago

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.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

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)

robflynn 12y ago
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.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  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.