As I understand it, according to the well-documented ‘Flynn Effect’, the non-normalized median IQ score has been steadily increasing at a rate of about 3 points per decade. The average IQ score is set at a constant value of 100, and the cutoff for being classified as ‘mentally retarded’ is having an IQ less than or equal to 70.
But if IQ’s have been increasing 3 points every decade, then the average person 10 decades ago would have an IQ of just 70, making him ‘retarded’ by today’s stricter IQ standards.
If we could go back in time a century and observe ordinary people, would most of them appear ‘retarded’ to us?
This has been discussed here many times. The problem is that the issue is nowhere near as simple as that “the non-normalized median IQ score has been steadily increasing at a rate of about 3 points per decade.”
You couldn’t possibly believe this if you extended your timeframe back a few more centuries. That would give Shakespeare’s contemporaries the intelligence of dogs, and Chaucer’s–what? A negative intelligence?
Actually, if you think about it, they would find you to be “special.” After all, you wouldn’t know how to farm, or ride a horse, or trim a candle, or stoke a coal furnace, or… The farther back you went, the “stupider” you would get.
Maybe you would be special, I bet you can’t even knap flints.
You bring up a good point. Much of modern society would have trouble functioning in the '30s or '40s let alone a hundred or more years ago. I found the PBS program Frontier House to be particularly interesting because a lot of my own family is “pioneer stock.” My own parents who are in their early sixties grew up in conditions that weren’t all that different.
I think we are presented with opportunities to learn much more problem solving partly because we have computers as such a pervasive part of our lives and we don’t have much of the drugery that used to consume much of it. Who has spent time darning socks lately.
I would say that the people would be deficient in the skill of taking standardized tests, thus having very low measured IQ. This skill has very little to do with intelligence. They would strike me as being no less intelligent than am I, and a damned sight better at practical skills.
Me? If I turned up 100 years ago, I would barely be qualified to assist a microbiologist, and only then because I once worked for an old coot who insisted that everything be done the same way it was done when he was an undergraduate.
Actually, I can knap flint. You learn all sorts of diverse skills when you are an Anthropology Major in college.
And due to my incipient paranoia about the fragility of technological society, I keep myself reasonably skilled in all sorts of pre-Industrial, pre-Technological ways. I am quite sure that I could survive in the 1800’s for oh…maybe 15 whole minutes!
Possibly less if we whipped up some 20th century mojo (disposable lighter, flashlight, portable electric generator, etc) in the 1600s. Might look a bit like a witch to the wrong person. There’s no out thinking pitchfork swinging mob of witch hunters!
Aggregate world IQ by date. Okay, let’s pretend the whole “3 points per decade” thing is valid (which it isn’t). Just for grins, let’s see what that tells us about history:
First, IQ (as a number) was invented in 1912–the Binet tests are older, but they were not measured by “IQ” until 1912. So we will presume that the human population had a perfectly 100 IQ in 1912. What does that mean about history?
In the era of the US Civil War, the mean IQ was not too low, about 90. But the Founders, who wrote the Constitution, they were all running around with a mean IQ of less than 70. In the era of Shakespeare, the average human being had an IQ of less than 10. The poetry of Chaucer, the Arthurian corpus, and the Chanson de Roland were meant to be appreciated by people who had an IQ of less than zero.
Something is funny about the popularizer’s approach to this effect. However, we do learn something valuable:
As observed by Mark Twain:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
I just had the weirdest off-the-wall idea:
If we start using IQ tests more and more, then being succesful at these tests will become a useful trait (from the viewpoint of natural selection). The better you do at these tests, the more money you make, the more chances you have of getting your genes passed on, etc. So, the human race will become better at IQ tests, but probably intelligence falls a bit by the wayside.
(Of course, this ignores any negative correlations that can be observed between income and number of progeny).
Can we honestly say that we are better educated than people in prior generations? What about this “dumbing down of America” I keep hearing about?
here’s an interesting example of how tests don’t measure what you think they do:
there was a standardized test for young children, in which they had to circle the 2 pictures that belong together, out of a group of 8 pictures.
one question showed a teacup, a saucer, a table, and 5 other items ( a bed, a cat, etc)
of course, the “correct” answer was for the child to connect the cup with the saucer, right? But for some reason black children scored more poorly than whites
Reason: in low-income homes, a child naturally puts the cup on the table, not on a (non-existant) saucer.
IQ hasnt changed over the years–our ways of defining it have.
Yeah, don’t get me started on IQ tests. I had two 4th grade students tested, and was sure one of them was going to get into GATE and get him off my hands, but they both failed because of the lack of problem solving and testing training in that horrible school district.
Put either of them in a good district, and you’d have one more kid who’s taking 3 honors classes a semester in high school.
For what it’s worth, I believe that if you went back in time 100 years ago, average Americans would probably seem less intelligent. I suspect that education and nutrition were not as good back then as today.
I doubt it would seem that half of people were retarded. But I think you would probably get the feeling that people (average people) were a little slower. Just my WAG of course.
I’ve seen examples of grade school tests from the late 19th century or early 20th century that no student today would be able to pass. I haven’t been able to find one using Google, but I’ll keep looking…
