The Flynn Effect: are we getting smarter?

I enjoy a habit of contrarian-poking at overused assumptions. Especially the hoary nostrum that humanity is not improving. Elsewhere I take on one aspect of this cynical calumny, where folks sadly shake their heads over how "our ethics haven't kept pace with technology." What malarkey. What stunning ability to ignore all we have done in the last 60 years.

Oh, I'll avow we may not be getting better fast enough to save ourselves or the planet.  That tense race is central to my novels Earth and Existence. I'm no complacent polyanna. Rather, the fact that we've improved a bit demands we redouble our efforts! It is cynics who are at best lazy and unhelpful.

Putting ethics aside, what other areas of improvement might do the most good? How about making everybody smarter?  Better able to grasp complex situations and knowledge. Better equipped to understand diverse views and negotiate pragmatic solutions. Yes, there are forces in today's society, especially America, that seem bent on pushing in the opposite direction - lobotomizing large swathes of the public  The worst of these at present is run by Roger Ailes on behalf of foreign trillionaires, but there are noxious forces pushing moronic oversimplification on the far-left, as well. So it has always been.

Decades ago, science fiction author Poul Anderson wrote a terrific novel -- Brain Wave --  that asked: what if every creature on Earth started getting smarter at a steady pace, beginning the same day?  In that story, it happens because our solar system moves out a galactic zone that repressed electrical activity slightly. A magical story device but one that may have some relevance after all, as I'll assert below.

Today, much talk revolves around expanding human intelligence the way that it has increased for thousands of years -- through prosthetics. By using external devices to expand what we can know and see and pay attention to.  This revolution began with cave paintings and then writing, but really took off with the invention of printing presses and glass lenses... then newspapers and steamships, radio, television, libraries, the Internet. Each generation, grouches greeted these advances with: "normal people cannot cope!" Countered by transcendentalists proclaiming "this will make us all as wise and mighty as gods!"

The irony, of course, is that both the cynics and fervid technophiles always turned out each to be about half right. (For more on this, see  Third Millennium Problem Solving. A 90 minute Google Tech Talk spanning the entire range of human "discourse" and how it is evolving.)

But today let's veer away from obsessing on our toys and prostheses and external cyborg enhancements and instead focus on the central, "meatiest" aspect of all this. Are we - on average - getting smarter within our squishy human brains?  To explore this briefly for us, I invited fellow member of the Lifeboat Foundation Francis Heylighen, of the Free University of Brussels, who will offer some background about the "Flynn Effect."

== Guest post: "Why it appears that we are getting smarter" ==

... by Francis Heylighen

James Flynn, a political scientist working in New Zealand, observed in the 1980's that the score-results of different groups of people on standard intelligence tests had consistently increased over the past decades. Earlier researchers had failed to pay attention to that trend, because IQ scores are always calculated with respect to the average score for the present group. By definition, the average is set to 100, and the standard deviation to 15. Someone who scores one standard deviation better than the average would therefore get an IQ of 115. But if that person's score would be compared with the average for the corresponding group, but tested one generation earlier, then the final score would be about 125! Flynn was the first to systematically make such cross-generational comparisons.

Since then, the so-called "Flynn effect" has been confirmed by numerous studies. The same pattern, an average increase of some three IQ points per decade, was found for virtually every type of intelligence test, delivered to virtually every type of group. This means that people nowadays are on average some 20 IQ points smarter than people in 1940. People with a perfectly normal IQ of 90 then would according to present norms merely score 70, i.e. as having a mild form of mental retardation. For one type of test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, Flynn found data that spanned a whole century. He concluded that someone who scored among the best 10% a hundred years ago, would nowadays be categorized among the 5% weakest.

One might expect that the Flynn effect would be most pronounced for tests that measure the results of education. The opposite is true, however: the increase is most striking for tests measuring the ability to recognize abstract, non-verbal patterns. Tests emphasizing traditional school knowledge show much less progress. This means that something more profound than mere accumulation of data is happening inside people's heads.

Flynn himself admitted being baffled by his initial results, and finding it hard to believe that his generation was significantly more intelligent than the one of his parents. Indeed, compared to the previous generation, the number of people who score high enough to be classified as "genius" has increased more than 20 times. This means that we should now be witnessing, in Flynn's own words, "a cultural renaissance too great to be overlooked". Because he found this conclusion implausible, he suggested that what has risen is not intelligence itself, but some kind of "abstract problem solving ability" that may have more to do with skill at test-taking than with creative intelligence.

But if we look at the ever-accelerating production of scientific discoveries, technological innovations and cultural developments in general, the "cultural renaissance" does not seem such an absurd idea anymore. Perhaps we cannot pinpoint a dozen contemporary Einsteins simply because there are so many of them that their contributions have not had the time yet to diffuse to the level that everybody would know them.  If there would be hundreds or thousands of Einstein-level geniuses in the scientific community nowadays, then it seems likely that none of them would stand out enough to get the kind of worldwide recognition we associate with exceptional figures like Darwin, da Vinci, or Newton. Moreover, our society and the problems it investigates have become much more complex than in the days of these historical geniuses. (We have already picked the "low-hanging fruit" -db)  It should not surprise us that present-day geniuses may be working on subjects too complex or abstract to be appreciated outside a relatively small circle of specialists. But that does not diminish the superior intellectual level of their contributions.

Nowadays, most authors tend to consider the Flynn effect as a real cognitive improvement, not a mere artefact of testing methods (although the fact that people are more used to taking tests may have helped somewhat in getting better scores). There is less agreement about the origin of the effect, though. Most likely, it is due to the interaction between a variety of factors that tend to accompany the tremendous economic and social advances of the past century:

o        better health care (less serious illnesses that can delay or damage brain development, less exposure to toxins such as lead, smog, food poisoning, etc.) 

o        better nutrition (better availability of fresh foods, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals such as iron and iodine, etc. that are necessary to build and support the brain)

o        higher levels of education (although this is not the whole story -- as Flynn found that the IQs of children have been rising even during periods when the time spent in school remained the same).

o         higher cognitive stimulation by an increasingly complex environment

This last factor may be particularly important. Indeed, our everyday world offers ever more abstract information to be processed ever more quickly-in the form of computer games, books, high-tech gadgets, television, advertisements, news items, magazine articles, blog entries, movies, etc. This requires ever more activity from the brain, thus "training" it to become more intelligent.

Some people like to complain that our society is "dumbing down", noting that very few read Shakespeare or listen to Bach nowadays. However, these people typically fail to notice that hardly anybody read Shakespeare a century ago (if they could read at all), and that probably more are reading him now than ever before. Moreover, an objective observer cannot fail to notice that a typical TV series or even an ad nowadays is much more complex and fast-paced than it used to be half a century ago. Thus, even the "non-intellectual" stimuli we are bombarded with demand ever more intense cognitive processing. In the workplace too, we see that what used to be repetitive industrial and agricultural jobs tend to be replaced by knowledge work, caring for people, or controlling complex machinery. As a result, people with a low intellectual level find it increasingly difficult to find a decently paying job, thus being stimulated to develop themselves.

A final plausible factor contributing to intelligence increases is that families have become smaller: with fewer children, parents have simply much more attention and resources to invest in each child. The effect on intelligence is confirmed by the observation that first-born or single-born children are on average some 2 to 3 IQ points smarter than second or third-born children, who had to compete with their siblings for parental attention.

In sum, while there are of course always methodological and other question marks about something as difficult to measure as intelligence, it seems well established now that we are indeed getting smarter. While the causes are not fully clear yet, those we do understand leave plenty of room for further improvement: we can definitely eat and live more healthily than we do now, while there does not seem to be a limit to the quantity and quality of education and cognitive stimulation achievable via the Internet. There is certainly cause for optimism in these observations. However, we should note that our rise in intelligence might simply be paralleling the rise in complexity of the problems we have to deal with, so that subjectively we may not really feel more competent to do what we need to do.

More to read

--Bernheim, J. (1999). The Cognitive Revolution and 21st Century Enlightenment: towards a progressive world view. Science, Technology and Social Change, Einstein meets Magritte (p. 63). Kluwer.
--Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological bulletin, 101(2), 171.

--Flynn, J. R. (2012). Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press.

--Heylighen, F., & Bernheim, J. (2000). Global Progress I: Empirical Evidence for ongoing Increase in Quality-of-life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 1(3), 323-349.

--Neisser U. (1997). Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests, American Scientist, September - October 1997

--Neisser, U. (Ed.). (1998). The rising curve:  Long-term gains in IQ and related measures (Vol. xv). Washington,  DC,  US: American Psychological Association.

 --Francis Heylighen; Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group, Free University of Brussels.

== Afterword by Brin ==

Thank you, Francis, for that excellent summary of a fascinating phenomenon. Which makes us wonder -- is humanity "uplifting itself?"

There are so many aspects to this that we have no time to explore thoroughly here.

1. Can this phenomenon be partly genetic?  It is a truism, widely held, that civilization must have slowed human evolution because it gave the weak opportunities to survive and to breed. But in fact there is every reason to believe that human evolution sped up with the arrival of civilization, and especially after we discovered beer! See Christopher Wills's book  CHILDREN OF PROMETHEUS. For example, clothing and shelter technologies empowered some groups to settle the Tibetan Plateau, an environment so harsh that selective pressures have turned Tibetans into almost a sub-species of their own. This may really take off if segments of humanity start adapting to space and other worlds.

2. I would add a few recent factors, such as changes in the toxic loads supported by most human populations. Francis mentioned the gradual elimination of toxins like lead from paint and gasoline - (though resisted strenuously by the same dopes who claimed Tobacco was harmless and cars don't cause smog and that human industry cannot change a planet's climate). Removal of lead has now been shown to have dramatically reduced levels of violence in the U.S. and other populations since 1970. (See my own role in getting the lead out of gas, as a 19 year old Caltech student in 1970!)

The same can also be said regarding our burdens of living parasites. In Korea after 1960, a vast de-worming effort eliminated endemic intestinal parasites which helped improved diets to increase the height of children by many centimeters and no doubt affected brains. Likewise, the parasitic paramecium Toxoplasma gondii is endemic in much of the human population and now is known to dramatically alter personality and behavior.

I am hoping we'll find dozens of such things that have long nibbled away at humanity's potential! Why? Because no simpler way can be imagined to boost human mental and moral performance than just by eradicating factors holding it down. It would mean that we can improve in the easiest and best way... by eliminating that which had been crippling us.

3) Then there is selection. Elsewhere I discuss the question of whether humanity performed its spectacular mental "overshoot" beyond what was necessary to become the top predator, for the same reason that many other species acquire exaggerated traits -- sexual selection. Only in my theory, it was two-way with both males and females choosing each other based in part on savvy and smarts.  In which case, might that sort of thing resume?  It could do so... if tastes changed just a little.

Alas, none of these things can possibly act fast enough to turn the tide and help us in time. The real solution will be harder.  It will involve looking in the mirror - each of us, one at a time - overcoming the allure of self-righteous dogmatism and rage, pondering little steps of self-improvement, adding grace to our thought processes, calm consideration, subtlety, curiosity and contingent wisdom... plus finding subtle ways to convince our neighbors to do the same.  Learning to accomplish the latter, without getting killed... that's a sure intelligence test, if there ever was one!

Oh, even if we optimists are right, and a road to gradual and eclectic, free, voluntary, individualistic and diverse improvements in human nature and intelligence can be found, rest assured there will be many ructions and difficulties before we finally adapt at last to a mature and relaxedly sane state. To a world without brutish evil, rage, violence, illogic, dogmatism or Fox News.

Getting the lead out: a quirky tale of saving the world

This somewhat autobiographical missive was sparked by recent research that confirms something long suspected -- our civilization dodged a bullet a while back. A bullet made of lead. We dodged it thanks to science, open argument, and the power of dramatically-conveyed evidence...

... plus a fascinating coincidence in which I played a minor-but-interesting role.

== A root cause of violence? ==

Lead has long been rumored as a major culprit of individual and societal downfall - even in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Starting in the 1960s we found that remediation of houses that had lead-based paint correlated with improved IQ tests for children in poor neighborhoods.

A connection with violent crime now seems to be statistically proved.  The elimination of lead-based octane enhancers from gasoline in the United States just may have been the most dramatically cost effective step taken to improve the lives of Americans, and then people around the world.

A couple of snippets from a fascinating article, America's Real Criminal Element, Lead: "...if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America."  and "If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly." And that's exactly what the data showed.

Read this fascinating look into how science can be used to rescue us from devastating errors, then contemplate whether those now waging relentless war on science are dangerously life-threatening to your kids.

== Strange angles to a weighty matter ==

Okay so here is my first of three interesting addenda you won't find in the article:  Leaded gas is still sold in some countries.  These include Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Algeria, Yemen and Myanmar,  Holy mackaral, just look at that list and tell me there aren't alarm bells.

Second addendum: this is almost certainly not the only case where some environmental factor may have debilitated or hampered millions of humans into being or behaving less than they could be.  Beyond malnutrition, poor sanitation and general poverty, I mean.  Or even the lobotomizing effects of TV, video games and Twitter. Take the parasitical paramecium Toxoplasma gondii which is endemic in many populations around the globe, entering human brains and - according to strong studies - systematically altering the behavior of tens or hundreds of millions on this planet.  Suppose we find even more such mind-altering infections?  Would that be good news, allowing us to use simple medical techniques and thus eliminate harmful behavior biases that cynics always assumed to be inherent in human nature?  Should this perhaps be made a really, really top priority for research?

I'll get to my third addendum - the personal one, describing my own role - in a moment.  First though...

== How we got the lead out ==

By 1970, some far-seeing types had begun pushing for regulation or legislation to curb this horrific poison  pouring from the tail pipes of millions of automobiles. But they got nowhere, foiled by The Ethyl Corporation (TEC), which successfully pioneered obfuscate-and-delay tactics identical to those later applied by the tobacco industry and then by the Climate Denialist Cult.  Using some of the same public relations firms and "think tanks."

That year, opinion polls showed a majority of Americans opposed to changes that might (according to scare-mongering by TEC)  cause everyone's car engines to erode or explode, if we were all forced to use abominably inferior unleaded gas.  That, in turn, would destroy the economy, all because a bunch of pointy-headed scientists, doctors and public health officials were spreading chicken-little panic about a "purely hypothetical and overblown danger." That was the situation in August 1970.

And yet, by 1972, the situation was transformed! In less than two years' time, with rapidly changing public attitudes, the EPA launched an initiative to phase out leaded gasoline. What led to the plummet in support for lead?  Could a simple demonstration have been responsible?

Let's get to that final addendum.  This one is a personal anecdote. For you see, I was an eyewitness and participant in an event of some historic significance, though it has only been in the last few years that I came to realize just how important it was.

Many of us thought we were participating in something like a great big science fair.  Little more.  But we helped to change the world.

== The Clean Air Car Race of 1970 ==

Do smoking cars cause CACR?

In July and August, 1970, while an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, I served as a member of the coordinating committee for the Clean Air Car Race, which pitted 44 student-built vehicles against each other in many categories (electric, propane, natural gas, hybrid....) for a rally-race from MIT across the continent to Caltech. There were some truly amazing innovations.  No, not the electric cars, which were way, way not ready for prime time! But several of the very first hybrid gas-electric vehicles participated, including one from the University of Toronto that we all voted "grooviest car" because it had regenerative braking and several other features now standard on your Prius.  It required a full-time co-driver, in those days, way back when putting a computer in a car was the stuff of science fiction.  But it worked and got real attention.

There was also a truck propelled by a Lear Jet turbine engine that scored well on exhaust quality, but got a zero in the noise pollution part of the competition, leaving a trail of seared underpasses and shattered toll booths across the nation. (It also parked outside my room at Caltech for a week, after the rally, while the drivers gave ear-splitting demos to the press, ouch!)

And yes, here I am, among the cars and drivers and officials of the 1970 CACR, posing for a full-page center spread in LIFE Magazine below the dome at MIT.  I'm the fellow with all that black hair and no tie, standing in the front row at the far left, looking like I actually know what I'm doing there.

Surprised by the prominent national coverage?  That's nothing!  We were mentioned every day during the race by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Much of America tracked our progress. It was one year after the Apollo 11 landing, so folks were expecting good things from science. And we delivered! Though perhaps not precisely in the way that we imagined.

== Okay, then what was world-changing? ==

So what does all of this have to do with getting the lead out of gas?  Simple. There were three cars participating in CACR whose sole "clean air" attribute was that they ran on unleaded gas.  Deliberately kept in stock condition, these performed perfectly and made it to Pasadena without a glitch... which is more than could be said for the entry subsidized by the The Ethyl Corporation.

Remember all that press coverage?  These results got lots of play. Moreover, while we students were enthralled by things like hybrid-electrics (and CACR 1970 definitely helped push those ideas into research labs at Toyota and Honda and Wayne State etc, leading eventually to your Prius), it turns out that the most historically significant thing we accomplished was effected by the least romantic or innovative vehicles in the race!  Those three boring old internal combustion cars that made it across the country on unleaded gas... without any explosions. Not even any excess engine wear.  They still went vroom in Pasadena, and then were driven all the way back east again...

... and the public noticed. Poll numbers shifted. Scare tactics about "panic-mongers destroying the economy" withered. Within 18 months the EPA had enough support to start acting to reduce lead poisoning, which soon resulted in far lower parts-per-million in the blood of children. And 20 years later, when a new generation of boys entered their "high crime age" something amazing happened.  They did a whole lot less crime.

Am I claiming credit for the sharp decline of violence in the United States of America, and later around the world?  Nonsense. I wasn't the chairman or prime mover of the Clean Air Car Race and anyway, there were thousands of scientists , engineers, doctors and activists at the forefront of the struggle against lead poisoning, folks who made the real difference.

Still, to have been  a participant and witness -- and to realize, decades later, that a very public blow was struck, a clear demonstration that might have accelerated progress by a year or two or more, affecting many lives? Well, that's priceless.

It also teaches a lesson.  Good things happen because of human effort.  But sometimes in twisty ways that aren't obvious at the time.  We were jazzed and excited (rightfully) by the hybrids. But all we accomplished was to interest some companies and labs who then needed thirty years to actually deliver them.

Meanwhile, we ignored or barely tolerated unromantic vehicles that cruised placidly amid the tech-dazzler jalopies. But that placid cruising was what most significantly and rapidly changed our world.

Ah well.  Story finished.  Except to suggest that we should all learn the basic lesson.  That progress will always be blocked by fools who emphasize short-sighted greed and play upon the prejudices of the gullible. By now their suite of tricks is well-known and perfected. But so should be our quiver of responses. Sometimes, the ongoing War on Science can best be stymied with symbols and imagery that are simple, clear... and utterly true.

Only now, on a related topic, a bit of lagniappe...

== A plague of psychopaths? ==

Just because overall statistical rates of violence have plummeted, that is poor comfort when tragedies such as Aurora or Newtown erupt, sending shock and despair through communities and terrifying the innocent, everywhere. As fresh calls arise for measures to reduce gun-related devastation, let me again suggest that sensible approaches to gun control will only happen if advocates study the needs and fears of moderate gun owners and then tailor proposals with those concerns in mind.

But let's agree that weapons aren't the core problem. (Nor will filling our schools with armed guards provide a solution.) Indeed, much has been said recently about the fact that mass-shooting calamities are rooted in desperate problems of mental disease and our inability to grapple with needed changes. We all need to start by doing what we can, locally, to see to it that those isolated "loners" out there get shown less harshness and more kindness -- more reason to feel connected -- during formative years. A final end to bullying won't make this go away. But if we haven't reached out, we can never say we weren't in part to blame.

Still... that only illustrates one end of a spectrum in which - it appears - civilization is being harmed by socipoaths at all levels, including the political and economic elite.

I've spoken elsewhere of the worst addictive problem in the world today - a plague of self-doped self-righteous indignation that is so rooted in brain chemistry that I gave a talk about it at the National Institute for Drugs and Addiction. Strong evidence suggests that much of our current "culture war" --  thwarting the American genius for can-do negotiation and pragmatic solutions -- is amplified by this modern curse that prompts us to rage instead of negotiate.

Yes, the Indignation Addiction Plague is bad.  But sociopathy is another aspect: one that probably does just as much harm. Have a look at an interesting (even though overly partisan) perspective on psychological factors plaguing the high end of the socio-economic spectrum: Psychopaths holding America hostage?

"Dr. Dale Archer, a psychiatrist and frequent guest on "FoxNews.com Live" of all places writes, "Physically, studies have shown that the brain chemistry is different in powerful politicians, leading to sensation seeking and risky behavior. They have lower levels of the brain chemical monoamine oxidase-A, which means they have higher highs when they engage in risky behavior and that they get bored much more easily than the norm." 

Another excerpt: "Psychopaths often appear normal, even charming. Underneath, they lack conscience and empathy, making them manipulative, volatile and often (but by no means always) criminal. The psychologist Kevin Dutton in his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, notes society, and especially Wall Street, admires and rewards many of the qualities of psychopaths - fearlessness, emotional sterility, supreme confidence, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, refusal to take responsibility, narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Who could argue that those characteristics virtually defined the Wall Street crowd responsible for blowing up the world's economy in 2008? In fact, a recent study showed psychopaths were four times more common among business leaders than among the general population." (Babiak P, Neumann CS, Hare RD. Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk. Behav Sci Law. 2010 Mar-Apr;28(2):174-93.)

== A path to sanity ==

So, what can we conclude? Despite the fact that the lower and middle classes have languished economically, without growth in prosperity for 20 years, there appears to be less danger than ever of dissolving into chaotic, spasmodic violence from below, of the kind that lead poisoning once fostered.  That bullet is being dodged. If the lower castes get violent, it will be with cause, as in 1789 France, not out of inchoate, poison-induced rage.

We are in danger, however, from other forms of mental illness. That plague of indignation, tearing through our middle class politics, causing neighbors to despise each other over abstract issues and to disdain experts like scientists.  Plus a tsunami of psychopathy where it is most dangerous, in the top layers where any self-serving machination or risky behavior can be rationalized away, the manner that such things always were, back in feudal times.  By proclaiming (without cause or evidence or justification) that "My kind of folks are inherently superior."

The stakes are high.  But remember this.  Our scientific enlightenment is the great exception to the rank/repeated stupidity of feudal oligarchies that ran 99% of human cultures.  We are capable of detecting and noticing and even dodging some of the bullets that struck down other societies. We've proved this can happen. So let's ignore the cynics of both left and right, and let's believe we can do it again. And again. Dodging bullets and gradually making larger the fraction of children who grow up healthy, un-poisoned, with sane and knowledge-filled and vigorously curious-empathic brains...

...until our grandkids -- vastly saner and smarter than we neanderthals can now imagine -- are ready to take over.

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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