Hard to see this as anything but an indictment of IQ tests.
People have not gotten smarter so whatever these tests are measuring and however well they predict success, they're not measuring intelligence.
Previously I had thought iodization was mostly for preventing thyroid issues in the event of nuclear fallout, but no! It was a way bigger deal. For example, I had no idea it was the origin of the term "cretin"[2].
I actually had to buy the cheapest 99 cent salt shaker to get one with iodine and I add a few sprinkles to most of my kids meals. Just to be safe.
Even if average intelligence has climbed up, genius is about the absolute top of the heap and I doubt that has changed.
Null hypothesis? By default we don't assume presence of changes, in the absence of reasons for that, and those reasons - that nutrition is causing IQ growth - need to be explained.
There shouldn't be no reasons not to assume something, it's not enough. Sorry for triple negative.
This isn’t a by default issue, this is claiming counterevidence to increase in intelligence that justifies rejecting the validity of IQ in measuring intelligence because it is increasing. The null hypothesis doesn’t support that, only independent evidence of intelligence not increasing would.
The idea that evolution stops at the neck seems completely laughable to me.
Why do you assume this to be the case? All kinds of early-environment things have adverse, lifelong cognitive effects, and both society at large and aware individuals for their own kids have tended to direct energy at reducing exposure to them. People getting smarter is a pretty predictable effect.
This is obviously true, except other changes have happened. People have got taller. I'm no expert but I believe that's mostly down to better nutrition. Is it possible that better nutrition has also led to people getting smarter? I'm not sure. I wouldn't bet on it, but it doesn't seem completely impossible either.
If you count lead paint "wall candy" chips, nutrition definitely has improved intelligence.
Another contributor might be that the model of intelligence that the IQ tests is close to a model that is used by education and development experts, and that kids are getting pre-educated in skills that allow them to do better on IQ tests.
Careful, there are a lot of people who have an emotional attachment to IQ tests and their implications for determining intelligence. Implying that IQ tests don't measure intelligence usually brings them out of the woodwork.
This flies in the fact of lots of evidence to the contrary:
1) High-school students now understand mathematics that only advanced degrees would have understood in 1919.
2) High-school musicians now regularly play pieces that were considered meant only for "virtuousos" in 1919.
I can go on and on.
At the very least, your hypothesis that people haven't gotten smarter is quite suspect and demands evidence. The fact that IQ tests (whatever they measure) have shown an aggregate increase is also evidence against your hypothesis.
Your examples are not evidence of higher IQ. They are examples of human progress.
> 1) High-school students now understand mathematics that only advanced degrees would have understood in 1919.
Being the first to do something and following in their footsteps is two very different things.
Sure but that is just because it is better understood now. All this this means is that the idea / technique is better understood and understood by more people.
> 2) High-school musicians now regularly play pieces that were considered meant only for "virtuousos" in 1919.
Again this is just evidence that more people understand how to play the pieces.
Doing something novel and unique is much more difficult than understanding something that is already understood. That is why scientists sometimes say they are standing on the shoulders of giants
> The fact that IQ tests (whatever they measure) have shown an aggregate increase is also evidence against your hypothesis.
You are oversimplying the findings, I made the same mistake when I first heard of the flynn effect. What you are referring to is the Flynn effect. This is where the average IQ increases each generation. While there is an increase of ~3 points every decade, it is on the low end of the distribution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Rise_in_IQ
> Some studies have found the gains of the Flynn effect to be particularly concentrated at the lower end of the distribution. Teasdale and Owen (1989), for example, found the effect primarily reduced the number of low-end scores, resulting in an increased number of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores. In another study, two large samples of Spanish children were assessed with a 30-year gap. Comparison of the IQ distributions indicated that the mean IQ scores on the test had increased by 9.7 points (the Flynn effect), the gains were concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half, and the gains gradually decreased as the IQ of the individuals increased. Some studies have found a reverse Flynn effect with declining scores for those with high IQ.
In other words the people with the lowest IQ scores are increasing more greatly and pushing the average up. The whole distribution itself is not moving with it though.
I dislike the whole idea though of IQ as a test of intelligence (which is a nebulous concept in itself). I've seen people with high IQs believe in very ridiculous things and engage in behaviour which most would consider to be stupid.
As someone that did 2 proper IQ tests back in the 90s because my school thought I mentally handicapped (I am dyspraxic so technically I am). The tests are good at identifying whether you are good at abstract reasoning. There are other forms of thinking that I am very bad at even though I am on the higher end of the IQ scale (I was graded at 142 at the time).
This follows whether it is due to better education, better training, better tools, or better nutrition.
Are programmers "smarter" than they were 50 years ago? They can certainly create much more complex programs that do MUCH more than we could 50 years ago.
Are chess players "smarter" than they were 100 years ago? ELO ratings sure suggest they are.
Would those people of 100 years ago been able to do the tasks we can now given our current society? Maybe. But that indicates that "intelligence" is also a function of "current environment". And, if the current environment is better, then the humans are "smarter", too.
No it isn't. I have seen otherwise quite smart people completely fail to do the most basic tasks especially when it comes to repair.
You can work it out (I for example can do many home DIY projects now). But just because you can do a complex task in one domain it does not mean you can do a relative simple task in another domain. You can see this in this industry. The number of C# programmers that cannot do simple CSS.
The fact the you can't give it a proper name means that you cannot quantify it properly.
> This follows whether it is due to better education, better training, better tools, or better nutrition.
No it doesn't. Better training for doing X just means you will be better at doing X. It does not say anything about how well you may perform in other taks.
> Are programmers "smarter" than they were 50 years ago? They can certainly create much more complex programs that do MUCH more than we could 50 years ago.
More complex doesn't mean it is better. In fact if you are a good engineer you will know that unnecessarily complexity is a sign of a poor design. So this does not follow what-so-ever.
Also most of the literature written 50 years or more ago from the pioneers of the field are constantly being re-discovered.
So no.
> Are chess players "smarter" than they were 100 years ago? ELO ratings sure suggest they are.
No. No. No. Just because a number goes up, doesn't mean that everyone is getting better. It could be because weaker players may not bother at all with such matches where they are rated, while better players are more likely to participate in any ranked or scoring system. So you cannot draw that conclusion.
> Would those people of 100 years ago been able to do the tasks we can now given our current society? Maybe. But that indicates that "intelligence" is also a function of "current environment". And, if the current environment is better, then the humans are "smarter", to
No I am sorry that conclusion is incorrect. There are many here that would struggle doing some very basic things in other fields especially if it involved their hands (carpentry, joining, brick laying) because they have no expertise in it and those fields have been around a very long time. So you cannot come to that conclusion at all.