chappachula’s on to something here…
The whole IQ thing is very limited in it’s measurement of the range of inteligence types, it focuses mostly on what the current culture deems valuable.
…as is Futile Gesture,
I agree, (modern) humans have been around for some120,000 + years, maybe even longer.
Cro Magnons (closest human group to us) shows up around 40,000 years ago. These guys (and girls) would basically be at our mental capacity… just without the experience. 
You men this?
And so on? This is a segment from a test that has circulated in an attempt to point out the massive deficiencies of our educational system. Naturally it is false: http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.htm gives an explanation.
Don’t be so quick to jump on this bandwagon. This is the sort of lie that is made up to advance an agenda. Don’t believe everything you read, unless Unca Cecil or the fine folks at Snopes are the writers. And even then, exercise some common sense.
Excepting maybe one or two posts above, most of this thread seems to confuse ‘intelligence’ with ‘period-specific knowledge’.
IIRC correctly, some source claimed you could take someone from ancient Egypt and plop them down today in US society, and after a little immersion they’d fit right in. The engine under their hood, so to speak, was no different then ours.
Surpisingly, each generation also believes that the rise in intelligence stopped with them, and that their children are a bunch of degenerates. People usually rate themselves higher in every way than they really are.
However, people today are certainly alot better educated and fed, and this has to have an effect on the development of our brains. People today are smarter on average, but the attempts to extrapolate backwards to infininity are certainly foolish. Things don’t always change at the same rate. And if all the IQ test measures is the ability to take a test, which is only one part of intelligence, then extrapolating backwards into times when tests weren’t as prevalent is even more foolish.
The pace of life today is quicker, and our brains have to do more to keep up. The increased neural activity causes us to make more connections. More connections means we are more likely to have connections that will lead us to an answer on a test or in life. This means we are smarter, to a degree. But we can only do so much with our brains, to increase intelligence much further will require active intervention.
For what it’s worth, I think that the next generation will be a little smarter than this one. I think that we just know more and do more to nurture our kids nowadays. For example, when I was a child growing up in the 70s, it was very common for cars to use “leaded” gasoline. Of course lead in the environment is known to interfere with brain development. Nowadays, leaded gasoline is basically limited to antique cars.
Also, kids today (at least in the middle class and above) have the advantage of educational computer games. My daughters absolutely love to play these games, which teach reading, writing, abstract reasoning, etc. They are definitely learning more, more early than I did, and it seems logical that this sort of stimulation would enhance intelligence.
With respect to lower class kids, I believe that America takes their education (and nutrition) more seriously than it did in the past. There is still a ways to go, but still.
Agree.
I’ve seen tests like these in respectable sources. And I’ve read that Snopes article; note that it doesn’t say that the test is fake. The test certainly doesn’t mean that people were smarter then, or that our schools are deficient compared to theirs, but it’s a small piece of evidence that they weren’t dumber.
You’ve got to distinguish between “book smarts” and practical knowledge. Certainly we are better educated than people 100 years ago, but how much of what we learn is really useful, and how much is just so much trivia? You might be able to give an hour-long dissertation on Chinese Society in the Ming Dynasty, but why would some farmer in 1860’s Kentucky care about that?
Honestly, I don’t think that the question can be answered in any meaningful way. As others have pointed out, most of us do not have the skills necessary to survive in a pre-modern society. To the people of the time, we would probably be seen as shockingly uneducated.
Plus, most of the teachers and professors I’ve known tell me that IQ scores are pretty much meaningless, except as a measure of how good you are at taking standardized tests.
Yeah, but they wouldn’t know how to work a microwave. And if they did figure it out they’d probably put a hotdog in for 25 minutes or soemthing, within some tin foil.
Sorry couldn’t resist 
.
Got a cite on that?
I can appreciate that education and diet may improve your brain, but there’s more to intelligence than the quality of the “meatware”. There’s also a question of how the brain is applied and exercised.
It could be argued that modern society makes things too easy. People don’t have to live on their wits as much as 200 years ago. Can it not be said that an underfed, ill-educated scavenger exercises more of an intelligence to survive than a well-groomed couch potato who doesn’t do anything more taxing than change the tv channel?
Bloke I know was declared to have learning difficulties at 3 years old because the tester pointed to a picture of a beach and he couldn’t tell her what it was. He’d never been to a beach, he’d never been out of Glasgow.
He’s now a physics graduate. And I suspect he could probably answer the beach question too, though I’ve never asked (in case he still can’t do it and it’s become a sore point).
Mind you, my self-worth has long been founded on my IQ score of 141 or something ages ago on a home computer program when I was feeling particularly relaxed. I’ve done other tests since and scored anything between 90 and 150, depending on how well I feel and, presumably, how rubbish the test was. Forced to justify my poorer scores, I have now sadly concluded that IQ is a practically worthless concept, and instead, like Dilbert, have become a great proponent of emotional intelligence, “which is defined in a book I haven’t read”. Meanwhile the world continues to turn and those who scored beneath me in the school tests continue to work as nurses, doctors and social workers, while I have yet to graduate.
I forgot to add, following from Thaumaturge’s post, that the argument of ‘better education and better food equals better intelligence’ also has a logical extension that those in western society must therefore be the most intelligent.
And those in under-developed countries with a basic education system and nutritional problems are, on average, not so intelligent.
Doesn’t seem so obvious and appealing a theory now, does it?
