Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Intelligence and Human Progress: The Story of What was Hidden in our Genes
    Intelligence and Human Progress: The Story of What was Hidden in our Genes
    Intelligence and Human Progress: The Story of What was Hidden in our Genes
    Ebook190 pages2 hours

    Intelligence and Human Progress: The Story of What was Hidden in our Genes

    By James Flynn

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Written by James R. Flynn of the "Flynn effect" (the sustained and substantial increase in intelligence test scores across the world over many decades), Intelligence and Human Progress examines genes and human achievement in all aspects, including what genes allow and forbid in terms of personal life history, the cognitive progress of humanity, the moral progress of humanity, and the cross-fertilization of the two.

    This book presents a new method for weighing family influences versus genes in the cognitive abilities of individuals, and counters the arguments of those who dismiss gains in IQ as true cognitive gains. It ranges over topics including: how family can handicap those taking the SAT; new IQ thresholds for occupations that show elite occupations are within reach of the average American; what Pol Pot did to the genetic potential of Cambodia; why dysgenics (the deterioration of human genes over the generations) is important, but no menace for the foreseeable future; and what might derail human intellectual progress.

    Researchers in developmental and cognitive psychology, educators, and professionals involved in intelligence testing or psychometrics will benefit from the perspectives offered here. But beyond that, anyone interested in the potential of the human mind will be engaged and challenged by one of the most important contemporary thinkers on the subject.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAcademic Press
    Release dateJun 7, 2013
    ISBN9780124170186
    Intelligence and Human Progress: The Story of What was Hidden in our Genes
    Author

    James Flynn

    James Flynn grew up in Kent, England.His ultimate dream as an author is to cause a reader to be confined to a mental institution and sectioned under the mental health act after reading one of his stories, although he admits that this is a bit optimistic.James's work has appeared in Black Petals Magazine, Yellow Mama Magazine, The Scare Room Podcast, Weird Mask Magazine, Sugar Spice Erotica Review and the short story anthology Local Haunts.Email signup: https://t.co/IQuABJ9EtaYouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtYWfq6s8ArVJSrveNMQH3Q

    Read more from James Flynn

    Related to Intelligence and Human Progress

    Related ebooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve.

      Sep 3, 2015

      When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all around us. In a recent poll, machine intelligence experts p

      7 min read

    • Article

      It’s the End of the Gene As We Know It

      Jan 3, 2019

      We’ve all seen the stark headlines: “Being Rich and Successful Is in Your DNA” (Guardian, July 12); “A New Genetic Test Could Help Determine Children’s Success” (Newsweek, July 10); “Our Fortunetelling Genes” make us (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16); a

      10 min read

    • Article

      Identity Politics in Overdrive

      Oct 22, 2018

      Identity Politics in Overdrive
      7 min read

    • Article

      Human. Nature.

      Dec 10, 2018

      Human. Nature.
      5 min read

    • Article

      Is There a Case to be Made Against Baby Making?

      Jun 1, 2017

      As the effects of climate change become more pronounced and overpopulation threatens the planet, individuals and policymakers are increasingly forced to consider the environmental implications of personal childbearing decisions. Here, two philosopher

      4 min read

    • Article

      Why Poverty Is Like a Disease

      Jan 24, 2019

      On paper alone you would never guess that I grew up poor and hungry. My most recent annual salary was over $700,000. I am a Truman National Security Fellow and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. My publisher has just released my lates

      15 min read

    • Article

      Why Poverty Is Like a Disease

      Apr 20, 2017

      On paper alone you would never guess that I grew up poor and hungry. My most recent annual salary was over $700,000. I am a Truman National Security Fellow and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. My publisher has just released my lates

      15 min read

    • Article

      Trust Me, I’m a Scientist

      Dec 31, 2016

      Trust Me, I’m a Scientist
      8 min read

    • Article

      Ability And Heritability

      Sep 1, 2018

      The mere mention of measuring intelligence, let alone estimating its heritability, is to many the reddest of red rags. So much so that the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychiatric Association felt obliged to begin its 1995 report on ‘I

      4 min read

    • Article

      Human Exceptionalism Stifles Progress

      May 2, 2019

      Last November Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of twin babies whose germline he claimed to have altered to reduce their susceptibility to contracting HIV. The news of embryo editing and gene-edited babies prompted immediate condemnati

      7 min read

    • Article

      Why It's Harder To Change Culture Than Nature

      Mar 10, 2021

      One reason for our relentless "culture wars" and anxieties about "cancel culture" might be our misguided sense of what culture is — and how easily we can change it. We used to frame everything in terms of "nature versus nurture." Either something was

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hacking Darwin

      Jan 1, 2020

      Hacking Darwin
      6 min read

    • Article

      Gene Genie

      Jan 1, 2022

      It’s deeply unfair. Shortly after we’re conceived, our genetic material – long sequences of chemical codes arranged in a double-helical structure called DNA, tightly bundled into dense thread-like structures called chromosomes – is uncoiled and scann

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Kids Are Alright

      Aug 27, 2021

      The Kids Are Alright
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Gender Agenda

      Jun 27, 2021

      The June 26 cover story, “The body politic”, asserts that “gender diversity is a worldwide trend”, but your stories focused on New Zealand and Western case studies. Has the rest of the world caught up with the idea of an innate gender identity that i

      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Intelligence and Human Progress

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Intelligence and Human Progress - James Flynn

      1

      Our Genes and Ourselves

      How much do our genes affect how we live? Addressing that theme will mean recapitulating material from my scholarly works. But the theme is important and something that I have not systematically discussed. I am writing to address the general reading public, but straight talk does not compromise anything I intend to say. As for specialists, they will, I hope, use the new data and material in Chapter 2 to clarify their thinking, and use the new method in Chapter 5 to go beyond kinship studies to measure the decay of family environment.

      Everyone has heard generalizations, such as our genes make us inherently violent, or we are irrational by nature, or the average person cannot hope to contribute much to human society. These are usually said in the context of denying the possibility of either human or personal progress. This book will test these assertions against history. If we have actually done something, such as become more rational, become more moral, made contributions to society beyond our so-called genetic potential, genes were powerless to forbid any of these things. You would think that our genes simply veto anything new. In fact, they have empowered us to progress our intelligence and moral rectitude toward limits as yet unknown. The quickest way to sell your soul is to keep saying I cannot.

      Genes are of great importance. Evidence shows that an individual’s genes have a powerful influence on his or her life history. But not so powerful that individuals cannot choose to love both the truth and the good and thereby transcend the place on the human hierarchy at which their genes would tend to fix them. Particularly over the last 10,000 years, the collective genes of humanity have evolved away from a proclivity that favors violence and the principle of might makes right; and toward genes that allow a surprising degree of rationality and moral behavior. I call these two trends cognitive progress and moral progress, respectively, and try to show how they cross-fertilize. Throughout the evolution of our genes, there runs the domestication of the human species. We have tamed our genes (rather like taming domestic animals) as we have learned to live in larger societies. Throughout the pacification of our behavior, there runs the domestication of men by women. As the balance of power shifts toward women, the latter tame male violence more effectively.

      1.1 Outline of the Chapters

      The wonder is in the detail. Chapter 2 will defend the cognitive progress of humankind against criteria that purport to show that IQ gains are hollow. New data about adults and children will drive the point home. It is followed by Appendix A, which adds background data and may be mainly of interest to specialists. Chapter 3 will look at dysgenics and eugenics: the thesis that current mating trends are sapping the quality of human genes so that, over the next few generations, hard-won progress will be lost. It will also look at whether the catastrophic events of recent history, such as the rule of Pol Pot in Cambodia, have depleted genes for cognition in various nations.

      Chapter 4 will summarize moral progress. We have turned away from violence and cruelty toward humanity. It will also emphasize the role that cognitive progress has played in enhancing moral progress. Finally, it will pose challenges for the twenty-first century: our combination of reason and morality may not be able to solve problems that could reverse our evolving international society.

      Chapter 5 will look at the role of genes in individual life history. At first, family environment, whether for good or ill, prevents the matching of genes and environment. However, it fades away at about the ages of 17–25. At that point, at whatever level of cognitive ability you choose, there is a tenuous matching of genes and environment for group achievement. This does not mean any individual’s mind is immune to positive or negative environment. Our mental abilities are always subject to the shocks that adult life holds and the determination of individuals to hitch their star to thinking their way through life. An elegant new method will be used to make exact estimates of the age at which family environment fades. Appendix B follows this chapter. It spells out certain calculations in detail and once again, its contents will engage general readers only if they have a curiosity about such.

      The last chapter will be a repeat of this introduction with the substance only detail can supply. It underlines a theme of my research: we must set aside the tendency to freeze the human mind and character in favor of assessing it as something adapted to whatever society it confronts. Since my research sets the stage for this book, I will spend the remainder of this chapter summarizing material from earlier works (Flynn, 2009, 2012) that new readers may find unfamiliar.

      1.2 Massive IQ Gains Over Time

      The record of how human beings have performed on IQ tests does more than measure us against one another for entry into Harvard law school. It provides priceless artifacts about how our minds have adapted from a simpler world to the world of modernity. We went from a society that posed mainly problems of how to manipulate the concrete world of everyday life for advantage (the utilitarian attitude) toward a society that expected us to classify, analyze abstract concepts, and take hypothetical situations seriously (the scientific attitude). They hint at a century of cognitive progress. Just as our cars altered because of modern science and the improved roads they traverse, so our minds have altered under the influence of modern schooling and the totality of the industrial revolution.

      Take a Martian archeologist who lands on earth to investigate a ruined civilization. He finds the record of marksmanship contests held in 1865, 1998, and 1918. At each time, the tests may have been designed to see who had the keenest eyesight, the steadiest hand, and the best control over the weapon. But incredibly the average performance has escalated over time from 1 shot in the bull’s-eye per minute, to 5 shots, to 50 shots. This would signal, of course, how much society had changed in terms of the weapons the average soldier used, from flintlock muskets to repeating rifles to machine guns. We have to imagine something more complex than tools. How did people’s minds change to allow them to perform so much better on IQ tests, without any mechanical aids, but with what I call new habits of mind? How did their minds become equipped to deal with the content of IQ tests in terms of classifying objects, taking hypothetical situations seriously, and using logic on abstractions?

      When Luria interviewed preindustrial peasants in Russia in the 1920s, he provided the answer. They did not classify. When he asked what a fish and crow had in common, they would not say that they were animals. One swims, one flies, you can eat one and not the other. They should not be lumped together because as objects in the concrete world, we use them differently. If you asked someone in 1900 what a rabbit and dog had in common, you use dogs to hunt rabbits. The fact that they were mammals was too incidental to be worthy of notice. They did not take the hypothetical seriously. When he asked them whether, granted that there were no camels in Germany, would there be camels in German cities, they said there must be camels if the city was large enough. When he asked them to reason about abstractions such as wherever there is snow bears are white, there is snow at the North Pole, what color are the bears, they stayed firmly rooted in their experience of the concrete world. They had never seen anything but brown bears. But they might believe a reliable witness that came from the North Pole. In frustration, they asked Luria how they could solve problems that were not real

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1