The IQ Race?
After poking about on the net today I discovered some troublesome information. It’s not the information itself which troubled me, but the apparent lack of understanding which went into the presentation of the data and what it could mean.
First I encountered an article discussing how America is losing the IQ race against other countries including Europe. The claim is made that Americans just aren’t producing thinkers anymore because our average intelligence is down. Moreover, he said he felt the average IQ for the US and Europe could be far higher if we tried harder.
There is a fundamental lack of understanding regarding the nature of IQ. Specifically, IQ is the mean of the current human intelligence. An IQ of 100 today may not equate to the same brainpower it equates to 500 years from now and probably isn’t the same as it was 500 years ago.
The only way to know would be to go back and re-test all people who have come before to see how they performed against people today. Perhaps they were smarter. Perhaps they weren’t. It’s really hard to tell.
The important thing to take away from this is, if everyone started performing at a higher level on IQ tests, the average would be recalculated and people would still be at about the same place they are now, because the 100-score would be reset to reflect a “smarter” or “brainier” person than in the past. Likewise, if everyone started performing worse, the 100-score would shift again.
This is the nature of the IQ test. It is a comparison of contemporary peers to contemporary peers. Trying to use it as a gauge to discern who is winning the “brain wars” is fairly unreasonable.
Another question which comes to mind is “who is really being reported?” In the US we are going to report everyone who is tested. This means we are going to represent both problem-solving barriers, which the IQ test was intended to quantify, as well as educational barriers.
If you look at the people who are wealthier, they are also better educated than many of the people who live in poorer areas. Does this mean they are smarter or simply that they’ve been given more opportunity to learn? Does learning make you smarter or does it simply give you a bigger toolbox to draw upon than the less-educated person?
Something which further expresses my concern over whether IQ is truly a measure of processing power or simply a measure of how poorly educated a group is can be seen in the Google Knol piece displaying national IQ averages across the globe.
It becomes clear rather quickly that the poorer countries perform worse on IQ tests. Some claim that poverty comes from lack of intellect, though I believe it is the reverse. The poverty leads to a lack of education which is reflected in poor scores.
Those scores, however, do not reflect the ability to solve problems based knowledge they have gained but, instead, they reflect the fact that the people who were tested did not have the correct tools for the test before they were tested.
When I took an IQ test, it was based primarily around math. This is important as you can’t judge someone’s ability for mental gymnastics through math if they were never taught things like 12*12=144. This is an unfair judge and it is unacceptable to view this as a victory for the west that people in Africa, for instance, were not given the same educational opportunities. It is simply a failure of the governing bodies in the various African nations to provide opportunities for their people to expand their education.
Back to the article chastising the American public for a poor average IQ. In the end, I would find it particularly unsurprising to discover that the main reason for the lowered score was not due to lack of mental aptitude. Rather I suspect the lowered score is due to a blend of laziness from those who have the opportunity and the want for better education in the group who has little opportunity.
If this is what the writer of the article meant, then cheers and I agree. The impression I got, however, was one stating that the American people are simply breeding “dumber.” If this is the case then I would say you are little better than the people who believe people in Africa are less intelligent because they don’t have a “Western” education. At best this is a malformed claim and at worst out and out bigotry in the worst fashion.
Ultimately, people are not defined by base characteristics given at birth. Instead they are defined by how they wield the tools they are given to lift themselves up. Even tribespeople who were never made aware of western life have those who are thought-leaders. Those thought-leaders, ultimately, define tomorrow’s history for their people.
