IQ is supposedly an objective measure of innate intelligence. It’s how smart you are.
Period.
But then why is humanity’s IQ increasing? Are our brains getting better? Our blossoming genius is so profound that every twenty years or so we need a new, harder IQ test just to keep up. (The average person from the year 1900 would score near 70 on today’s test, or on the edge of profound mental retardation.)
I’ve got the brain of a four-year-old. I’ll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
—Groucho Marx
People have suggested that this phenomenon is created by better diets, improved schooling, smaller families, or more liberal child-rearing techniques.
But is there something else going on here?
It turns out that only specific parts of the IQ test show significant increases: modern humans are better than our forebears at spotting abstract patterns and at reordering scrambled pictures, but we are no better than Jefferson, Washington, and Abigail Adams at memorizing sequences of numbers, and our scores for vocabulary and general knowledge are similar.
It turns out the question of increasing IQ is one of priorities and not one of intelligence. While modern humans place value on spotting abstract patterns and connecting widely disparate ideas, our ancestors thought abstract reasoning was silly, preferring a “show me the corn” focus on concrete reasoning.
And so researchers watch with interest today’s shifting priorities. Specifically, we increasingly devalue the ability to store information. No longer does schooling focus on memorizing dates and places and the Declaration of Independence. To a large degree, we’ve off-loaded the storage function of our brains to Google. If we can so easily get information, why memorize it? (This is like a couple generations ago when we realized that machines could add, subtract, multiply, and divide … and lost the ability to do so ourselves.)
Are we living at the top of an IQ bubble in which we can both reason abstractly and recall concrete information? Eventually, will the devaluation of memorization lead to underperformance on the concrete knowledge sections of the IQ test, dragging our overall IQ scores down? Will our IQ bubble pop like the tech and housing bubbles?
In short, are we due to get dumber?
IQ Cycle
As described above, every twenty years or so we design a new, harder test to compensate for steadily rising scores. One effect of this cycle is that around year nineteen of each test’s life span, fewer people earn low scores and fewer public-school students qualify for low-IQ support programs. The enrollment in these programs shrinks and so does their funding. Then, with the adoption of a new, harder test, a glut of students qualifies, overrunning the support system.