More modern minds

From Understanding Western Exceptionalism by Richard Hanania.  An interview between Hanania and  Joseph Henrich.  Henrich is speaking.

The problem with the way that many folks think about IQ, is they think that it’s somehow a feature of our genes or something like that, rather than realizing that IQ is a set of specialized, culturally evolved cognitive abilities for navigating a particular environment. IQ, for example, just among Americans, I can tell you the story about other populations as well, just among Americans has gone up dramatically just in the [twentieth] century. It’s impossible for that to have anything to do with genes. But because of a whole series of changes related to nutrition, the nature of television, the nature of schooling, all of this has driven up IQs from what would’ve been a score of 75. Remember, IQs are normalized, so they’re always placed at 100. But what would’ve been 75 or something by modern standards. So you went up from 75 to 100 just by getting everyone to go to school.

And if you look at TV programs since the 1950s, you just have five characters. And now you have ensemble plots where you’re tracking multiple different narratives and different places. It’s training up a certain set of cognitive abilities. And the age at which kids learn their colors has gone from six or seven down to three. And that’s because we have books. “What color is that?” And we differentiate everything by these different colors and shapes and stuff. The system is evolving to train people in a certain set of cognitive abilities. Because of the structure of our society, those cognitive abilities lead to success within those domains and then they get cultivated. And so, IQ is associated with success because of the structure of society. If you are a hunter gatherer in Bolivian Amazon, those skills are virtually worthless. You’ve got to be able to track and have all these other cognitive skills. So you can imagine a hunter gatherer IQ, which would be a compilation of the things that tend to lead to success in the Bolivian Amazon, or something like that.

In my lab we’ve done research, and particularly I had a post-doc named Helen Davis, who has shown how the introduction of schooling destroys some cognitive abilities. So people get dumber when you send them to western schools in some ways, but they also get smarter in the ways that we call IQ. It’s just an interesting way that institutions manipulate our cognitive abilities. So when you see differences around the world in IQ, those can be very much the product of schooling, the importance of certain kinds of cognitive abilities, emphasis on pursuing these kinds of things, all those sorts of things. So it’s a product of... the cause and effect are all screwed up.

This is a fascinating debate which Henrich treats as somewhat settled.  At its core is the presumption of biological determinism - we are what our genes allow us to be.  If you are born with the genes that allow for a high IQ, great.  If you are born with the genes that favor good health, or good looks, or an open and winning personality, again, great.  But the implication is that your future is highly contingent on the luck of the genetic draw.

There is of course some truth in that.  Many physical, cognitive and behavioral attributes are at least somewhat to highly heritable.  But biological determinism ignores individual agency, context (historical, geographic, and cultural), the randomness of trait combinations, and choice.  

If you accept the popular, though rickety, assumption that all it takes to be great in some field of endeavor is 10,000 hours of focused practice, then all choices are open to everyone.  It is just a matter of will.

It is obvious, though, that the 10,000 hours rule is only directionally true.  IF you have some basic capability and IF you have the passion for achievement, then 10,000 hours of practice won't deliver the goods.  If you are tone deaf and not interested in singing but do want the fame of being an accomplished singer, then you are not likely to achieve your goal through 10,000 hours of practice.

I am not comfortable with the ideologically popular notion of the Blank Slate - that we can be anything we want to be, the outcome being just a matter of personal or State will.  I also do not accept biological determinism, that our futures are writ only in our genes.  We have some agency, we have some malleability, we have some inherent constraints.  It is the evolving mix of these realities which make us who we are.  

What Henrich is talking about is something James Flynn was referring to in his last few years.  That rising IQ wasn't so much about changed biology or evolving genes as that our minds are becoming more modern.   

From Thinking in More Sophisticated Ways by James R. Flynn.  

On an IQ test, the average person today would be 30 points above his or her grandparents, so we are not getting any dumber. But are we smarter? That’s a more complicated idea. In fact, it’s the subject of my next book: “Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ and the Twenty-First Century.”

If the question is “Do we have better brain potential at conception,” or “Were our ancestors too stupid to deal with the concrete world of everyday life,” the answer is no. If the question is “Do we live in a time that poses a wider range of cognitive problems than our ancestors encountered, and have we developed new cognitive skills and the kind of brain that can deal with them,” the answer is yes.

I would prefer to say that our minds are “more modern” than those of our ancestors. Our ancestors lived in a world that was concrete and utilitarian. In 1900, schoolchildren were asked, “What are the capitals of the 46 states?” Today they are asked, “If rural representatives dominated a state legislature, where would they put the capital?” (The answer is that, because they hate big cities, they would put the state capital in Albany rather than New York City.) In other words, we take applying logic to hypothetical situations seriously, plus of course playing video games that take us into hypothetical and symbolic worlds.

It is a delicate point, not unclouded by the vitriolic ideological controversy that surrounds any legitimate investigation of mind and body.

I accept that a surprisingly large number of physical and behavioral attributes are more heritable than we might have earlier assumed.  I do think there are natural constraints embedded in your genetic inheritance.  I also think that those inheritances are not near as determinative as some people might wish to assume.  I further assume that persistent and focused practice makes a distinct difference in level of achievement but that the capacity to invest in that practice is in itself constrained by latent capability and personal inclination.  

I am distressed and to some degree skeptical when I see reports of a nation having an average IQ of 70.  That seems scarcely credible and I look for issues about language barriers and appropriateness of the nature of the IQ test etc.  But having lived in some of those low IQ countries, I have seen and heard stories that are consistent with the reporting of an average of 70.

I think Henrich is pointing out a reality that we generally know to be true but don't yet have the data to properly account for.  Population health, nutrition, school involvement, and the volume and nature of information exposure are independent variables which drive increases in measured IQ outcomes.

It is not that any of those are directly causal elements.  Increasing investment in public health or nutrition or schooling won't lead to increasing IQ.  They will, however, enable the achievement of whatever the natural potential allows.  

If the US moved from 75 to 100 in a century by meeting universal basic health, nutritional, schooling and informational access needs, I wouldn't be surprised if all current day countries might see a similar rise with similar infrastructural capabilities.  

I also wouldn't be surprised, if all countries had equal provision of those influential four variables, that there might still be a +/- 5 or 10 point difference in capabilities.  We simply don't know and have no construct in which we are so confident that we can be determinative in our forecasts.

And I do think there is something in the notion that our minds are becoming more modern.  More accustomed to large volumes of low confidence information, high rates of change, an increasing importance in the capacity for abstraction and conceptualization.  It is not that these are replacing older forms of knowing.  They are adding to them and those most successful will be demonstrating not only fluency in old forms of knowing but also increasing giftedness in environments of epistemic ambiguity, volatility, abstraction and conceptualization.