You understand that JulianJaynes.org is not an objective source on the issue, I’m sure.
I did in fact read the book. Despite what that myth page argues, I don’t see how anyone could have taken away any understanding from it except that mankind was not fully conscious and self-aware until a period more recent than Homer, and that the Greeks thought their gods literally talked to them.
As a scientific theory I rank this about at the level of the Aquatic Ape. That continues to have defenders as well.
You are being deliberately deceptive by not quoting the rest of that paragraph:
Jaynes offers no real examples to debate either, since his main hypothesis is beyond scientific investigation. Everything mentioned on that page that appeared after his death a decade ago appears to take recent scientific progress and apply it retroactively to vague statements Jaynes made. It reads exactly like defenders of Biblical science managing to twist any new science to prove the worth of the vague originals.
Probably the most telling evidence against the hypothesis occurs on that page as well. That there is a list of scholars “interested” in Jayne’s but none of them are actively pursuing the work themselves says it all. Scientists will drop everything if they come across a promising research line. Nobody is, except for those in what has to be called at this point Jayne’s cult.
That’s more or less what I said! If eating an animal found on a burnt plain isn’t scavenging, I don’t know what is? Still, I’ll agree it probably didn’t happen as quick as I implied, and that Exapno’s scenario has more of a ring of truth about it.
I often wondered if the intelligence of a society was a function of available leisure time. Wouldn’t a nation that spends less and less time on vital tasks naturally experience a growth in educated citizens?
Second, doesn’t the Flynn Curve suggest our education systems have gotten better? Why isn’t that a sufficient answer?
Your edit negates your question. But:
Both are measured within institutions. Outside of schools they’re observed, but not measured.
IQ testing is designed to measure the ability to reason. School testing is designed to measure, mostly and IMO, memory.
Being intelligent means you can learn, being educated means you did learn.
To me this is the distinction that is often overlooked in the context of this discussion. Often I hear how much smarter a population is getting in general, yet my first reaction is “well yeah, more people are being educated.” Further, our education systems are getting better. Other factors have been mentioned upthread. I just got here late.
Doesn’t this make more sense than assuming humans of today are significantly different at a genetic level?
From Wikipedia, no internal citation, so who knows if it is valid.
“The average IQ scores for many populations have been rising at an average rate of three points per decade since the early 20th century with most of the increase in the lower half of the IQ range” (underlining mine)
If human’s capacity for intelligence were increasing I would expect to see an increase across the board.
I wouldn’t. I’d expect to see exactly this, just as we have with height or strength or lifespan. The tallest people, the strongest people and the longest lived people haven’t changed much in the last 30,00 years or the last 300 years, but populations have still gotten taller and stronger and more long lived. That’s because better nutrition, health care and so forth have all prevented unnecessary shortness and weakness and death.
The upper limits on height and strength and age haven’t changed one bit because those things are determined 99% by genetics. What has happened is that we are getting more and more people to approach their genetic potential height and genetic potential age.
I suspect the same is happening with intelligence. better nutrition, better health care, better child-rearing (including education) are all allowing more and more people to approach their genetic potential in regards to intelligence. So the capacity of the human population for intelligence really has increased, just as the capacity to lift things or their capacity to see a lot of years or the capacity to see over walls has increased.
I guess I don’t understand what you disagree with.
I think humans are becoming more educated, but their capacity for intelligence has remained the same. Evidence was my quote from Wikipedia suggesting that the upper limits of intelligence aren’t increasing, instead the lower portions are catching up.
How could we see the upper limits of intelligence change without a genetic influence?
> I suspect the same is happening with intelligence. better nutrition, better
> health care, better child-rearing (including education) are all allowing more and
> more people to approach their genetic potential in regards to intelligence.
Once again, read the Wikipedia entry on the Flynn effect, which I link to in my post above. The explanation for it can’t be genetic, since it’s happening too fast for that. If it has been going on for a century or so, you would have to assume that everyone in the past was severely mentally retarded compared to people today. Nutrition and health care can only be a minor part of it. We can calculate how much improved nutrition and health care would affect the results, and you would have to assume that everyone a century ago was on the edge of starvation and there were constant plagues killing off people to account for the amount of the rise. There are problems with trying to explain it by education. There are parts of I.Q. tests that correlate more with education than other parts. Those parts are not seeing the same rise in scores as those other parts. The parts of the I.Q. tests that seem to have the least connection with education are the ones where the scores are rising fastest. It can’t be merely an increased familiarity with testing. We can figure out how much change that would cause, and it’s not enough to explain it. The only other thing that researchers have suggested is that most of the increase comes from changes in culture. There are explanations that present-day culture is so much more complex that culture just a century ago that it causes people to exercise their brains much more. This may be true, but it’s not much more than a guess. The Flynn effect is truly mysterious.
I can’t find a standard deviation anywhere in relation to the Flynn Effect.
However, I interpret the statement “the gains were concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half” to mean there are less people who score poorly. The average is increasing and the deviation is decreasing.
The question isn’t “why are there more smart people?” Instead, the question is “why are there less dumb people?”
Why is education so quickly dismissed? 100 years ago access to education (ways to learn) was incredibly limited. Is there not a correlation between the printing press and rising IQs? What about the invention of television? The internet?
We are at a historical high in terms of available information. Second, more people have time to spend after meeting their basic needs. This seems like a reasonable explanation that ties in nicely with the gain in lower IQs.
By every measure I’ve ever seen there capacity for intelligence has increased.
I suspect that you are confusing “capacity” with “potential”. Capacity is the “ability to grasp or take in impressions, ideas, knowledge”, The data all show that humans alive today have a higher ability to grasp or take in impressions, ideas, knowledge, and hence have a higher intelligence than past generations. In contrast potential is the prospective ability o grasp or take in impressions, ideas, knowledge. The potential human intelligence hasn’t increased, the actual capacity clearly has.
Do you think that is maybe why I specifically said “better nutrition, better health care, better child-rearing (including education) are all allowing more and more people to approach their genetic potential in regards to intelligence”
No, you wouldn’t because the data clearly show that the improvement has been almost entirely achieved by removing lower edge of the curve, not by moving the mode. There is no more reason to assume everyone in the past was severely mentally retarded than there is to assume that the average NBA star in 1920 was a pygmy.
Or as Hero From Sector 7G puts it “The question isn’t ‘why are there more smart people?’ Instead, the question is ‘why are there less dumb people?’” By removing those people who are suffering mental retardation for various medical and sociological reasons we have improved the mean without needing to shift the mode much at all. That does not mean that everyone in the past must have been mentally retarded, it just means that far more people were mentally retarded. Depending on the shape of your curve just removing those people who had eaten lead paint could produce the effects we have seen without even considering factors like nutrition, immunisation, education and so forth.
