Monday, May 25, 2009

IQ and the Origins of Religions

Richard Nisbett makes a compelling case in Intelligence and How to Get It that IQ is much less heritable than we once thought and that environmental factors like culture and schooling play a much larger role in making people smart. He estimates that the effects of family, nutrition, schooling, home environment, and surrounding culture could be as large as 18 points of IQ. The Flynn effect is another important recent IQ phenomena. IQ tests are regularly renormalized to keep the average IQ score at 100. Flynn has demonstrated that over that period IQs have been increasing by about 3 points a decade. That is all to say that we are getting smarter, and it's not because humans are changing that much. It's because our environments are changing. We have access to huge amounts of sophisticated information now, we have better nutrition, we have better healthcare, affluence has increased, education has improved and so on. But we are getting smarter in two ways: we have more information and better access to it now than we once did—high school kids are doing experiments with recombinant DNA in class. But the environment is actually raising our intelligence independent of increased informational knowledge. The IQ increases show that we can solve problems, reason critically, and employ better cognitive strategies now than we used to. Nisbett quotes Linda Gottfredson’s definition of intelligence: “a very general mental capacity that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.”

What are the implications of the rise in IQs if we project it backwards in time? It means that the average person plucked off of the street 300 or 500 or 1,000 years ago would be what would be considered developmentally disabled today. Their average IQ would have been a 75 or 65 or worse. The reason is that culture, education and other external factors play such a large role, it turns out, in making it possible for people to actualize the potential they have for being smart. And only in the last 50-100 years have we brought the level of education and affluence up high enough for enough people to really start seeing the effects.

These points raise serious issues for all of the historically based religions. The people who founded the world’s religions, on average, would have had distinctly worse reasoning abilities, less ability to comprehend complex ideas, and worse comprehension of their surroundings. There would have been outliers, of course. Newton, Copernicus, Aristotle, and Kant would have stood out intellectually from their peers, and they would most likely still stand out among the modern elevated standards. But what about average people? The people who became believers in the major religious movements? If there were people 2,000 years ago who thought they saw a ghost, or thought they saw miraculous, supernatural events, we might not blame them for their conclusions. They can't be faulted for not knowing what we know and not having the IQ that we have. But an assumption in our religious culture seems to be that if those people were satisfied that Jesus was resurrected or that Mohamed was Allah's prophet, then we should be satisfied too. The original believers would have been sufficiently thoughtful, reflective, objective, critical, and smart to figure out the truth, so we can trust their conclusions. But as soon as we bring the assumption out that way, it is obvious what a mistake it is. Would you accept the conclusions about the most important questions facing humanity without questions from someone today with an IQ of 60? Do you think they would be the most reliable, thoughtful, objective source of information you could find? Compared to you, they lacked an enormous amount of relevant information and they were equipped with reasoning skills that were far worse.

The suggestion here is outrageous and offensive, I know. But what other conclusion can we see? If we know that IQ is highly responsive to environmental factors and that those factors were worse in previous eras of history, then we know that IQs were lower--significantly lower--in those eras. And if we are getting our information about alleged supernatural events like miracles, invisible gods with magical powers, people coming back from the dead, and so on from these same people, then surely the fact about their mental capacities is relevant to our assessment of their reliability. We've got to consider the source, and we shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that they were just like us in all of the epistemically relevant ways. What would you think if you found out that your doctor or someone else entrusted with very important matters in your life had a 60 IQ? So why would you be willing to entrust the 1st century believers to provide you with answers to the ultimate questions about God, reality, and the place of humanity in the cosmos?

14 comments:

Ketan said...

Hi!

Maybe, lower IQ was associated with more entertaining fantasies!

Well written!

Take care.

Danny Boy, FCD said...

Malcolm Gladwell has his own take on the Flynn effect and the rise of IQ scores. Personally, I'm not too keen on IQ studies after reading Gould.

Anonymous said...

LOL! I knew it...

Anonymous said...

See this is exactly the problem with modern philosphers and why the current world rebukes them> they contribute nothing but lousy conjecture based on their professors.

Nothing new here professor in claiming people that disagree with you are dummer...

Anonymous said...

On the other hand, the Jews have always put a high value on learning and literacy. The writers of the gospels (who, by definition, could read and write!) would have grown up in a better intellectual environment than the 1st century average. I doubt that their IQ could be as low as 60.

Eric Sotnak said...

(A) I am very very skeptical of IQ as a measure of intelligence (assuming 'intelligence' can be reliably defined in the first place).

(B) Projecting backwards in time and assuming a steady decline in IQ as we go assumes that as we go back we will not run out of IQ-elevating factors. This seems implausible to me. Rather, we would expect that people 100 years ago would probably be relevantly similar to people 1000 years ago.

(C) It just seems implausible that the average IQ during the heights of the great ancient civilizations was around 70.

(D) Cancelling out the IQ-boosting factors of education, diet, etc., what is the average IQ in the current world of people living without the advantage of these factors (in parts of the 3rd-world, for example)? I highly doubt it is around 70, and if it is, for me that would most likely show that IQ is an unreliable measure of intelligence.

Matt McCormick said...

Thanks Eric. But being doubtful that these claims about IQ are true doesn't amount to much unless we have some substantial reason to doubt them. I don't make a strong claim about what exactly the average IQ was in ancient times, nor do I think we should project a steady decline backwards in time. What is clear from Nisbett's argument and the research is that it will be much lower--dozens of points lower--in ancient times than it is now. If our culture, education, medicine, families, and environments are contributing to our IQs now, then if you remove those advantages, you remove the positive contribution to IQ.

As for smart ancients--no doubt there were stand outs. I concede Aristotle and Newton, for instance. But we can't be selective here about the geniuses and then generalize about the population at large. We can see that the average would have been much, much worse then than now on the basis of Nisbett's argument.

And yes, it does appear from the empirical research that IQs are commensurately lower in 3rd world countries and places where the positive contributing factors are present.

MM

Anonymous said...

hey matt, you are saying IQ's were lower in the past compared to now. How is it fair to comapre IQ's from diiferent eras when the available data set is drastically different? Isnt there a hint of argumentum ad novitatem going on here?

逆円助 said...

さあ、今夏も新たな出会いを経験してみませんか?当サイトは円助交際の逆、つまり女性が男性を円助する『逆円助交際』を提供します。逆円交際を未経験の方でも気軽に遊べる大人のマッチングシステムです。年齢上限・容姿・経験一切問いません。男性の方は無料で登録して頂けます。貴方も新たな出会いを経験してみませんか

精神年齢 said...

みんなの精神年齢を測定できる、メンタル年齢チェッカーで秘められた年齢がズバリわかっちゃう!かわいいあの子も実は精神年齢オバサンということも…合コンや話のネタに一度チャレンジしてみよう

メル友募集 said...

最近仕事ばかりで毎日退屈してます。そろそろ恋人欲しいです☆もう夏だし海とか行きたいな♪ k.c.0720@docomo.ne.jp 連絡待ってるよ☆

家出 said...

最近TVや雑誌で紹介されている家出掲示板では、全国各地のネットカフェ等を泊り歩いている家出娘のメッセージが多数書き込みされています。彼女たちはお金がないので掲示板で知り合った男性の家にでもすぐに泊まりに行くようです。あなたも書き込みに返事を返してみませんか

Miguel said...

I have lived in a third world country 45 of my 50 years, and it was in that where I was born. Since I was preschooling through college I was scoring all the time in IQ tests over 140, but I did not feel smarter than most people around me. BTW those tests usually where directly translated from English, a foreign language to us and not adapted to our cultural background. Since my teen years I have been in the USA and Europe many times and the common people in those places appear to me less sharp than the folks backhome, and This is especially worse in the USA. I don't know, maybe the rednecks were dummered by environmental pollution. We have very few religious fundamentalists, attendance to church is low and most people agree with the evolution theory. Our per capita income is about a fifth of the USA's.

Matt McCormick said...

It's almost always a mistake to generalize from a single case like this. Avoid the temptation.