It may seem unremarkable to assert that we've got such a thing as a cognitive surplus, but just in case, I'd hate for anyone to assume that it's because we're fundamentally different than our ancestors in much more than lifestyle technology. From Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel:
... [A]n entire field of science, termed ethnobiology, studies peoples' knowledge of the wild plants and animals in their environment. Such studies have concentrated especially on the world's few surviving hunting-gathering peoples, and on farming peoples who still depend heavily on wild foods and natural products. The studies generally show that such peoples are walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names (in their local language) for as many as a thousand or more plant and animal species, and with detailed knowledge of those species' biological characteristics, distribution, and potential uses. As people become increasingly dependent on domesticated plants and animals, this traditional knowledge gradually loses its value and becomes lost, until one arrives at modern supermarket shoppers who could not distinguish a wild grass from a wild pulse. ...
We didn't necessarily get smarter, as such, we made our environment simpler. It might not always be optimally healthy, but in general, all you need to do to survive food-wise in our society is get money (which may itself be quite a complicated procedure) and exchange it for things labeled as food in a clearly marked grocery or convenience store. That leaves a lot of mental labor free for other activities.
So while our base capacity for intelligence is unlikely to have changed much, and has likely just been devoted to other things, I'm going to turn around and suggest that we may actually be somewhat smarter than past generations. It's been long and well documented that malnutrition damages brain development (pdf), particularly protein malnutrition, and that this is a lifelong, permanent effect for the individual, even though it has no bearing on one's genetic makeup.
In the middle of last month, Slate magazine's William Saletan madeafoolofhimself with an article titled "Liberal Creationism", in which he revived the long-discredited arguments--and underlying data--of the racist neocon domestic policy opus, The Bell Curve. It's no accident, really, that Saletan tried to equate the liberal belief in racial equality with the conservative disbelief in evolution. It's the perfect embodiment of the gospel of even-handedness, which holds that every leftwing truth must be balanced by a rightwing lie (if not always, or even often, the opposite).
Indeed, I just feel it in my bones that one of the main reasons Saletin rushed headlong so eagerly into this act of stupidity was the perfectness of this embodiment. "This will show those holier-than-thou anti-racist, noses-in-the-air, we're-so-scientific dirty fucking hippies!"
Yeah, right. Well, having been through this movie before, I was well aware of how it would all turn out. (Saletin was also encouraged by a similarly ignorant outburst by James Watson, which should have served to remind folks of the intentionally neglected crucial role of Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of DNA's structure. But, I digress.)
Three primary compass-orienting facts stand out--aside from the prima facie racism, that is: (1) There is more genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa than there is in the entire rest of the human race. This is a general truth of population genetics: whenever a species emerges in one place, and sub-populations migrate away, the sub-populations always have less genetic diversity. Thus, any attempt to make arguments that would compare African (not just African-American) populations and other populations must take into account the substantial differences in degree of variation. This naturally plays havoc with common, garden-variety racial stereotyping. But it also means that pseudo-scientific studies have one more problem with their fundamental lack of genuine scientific validity.
(2) The existence of multiple intelligences. It is patently obvious that IQ does not measure one unified thing, which is the basis of all human intelligence. It's not just the whole body of work conceptually unified by Howard Gardner, the most up-to-date IQ tests are themselves composed of different modules that clearly reflect a multifaceted conception of intelligence, even if it isn't as diverse as Gardner's. That said, the internal weighting of such tests is undeniably arbitrary and subjective to a certain extent. Which is another way of saying that IQ is a construct, not a thing-in-itself.
(3) The fact that IQ has risen constently from generation to generation shows quite clearly that it is not a measure of a genetically fixed quantity.
These three facts were all well-known to the scientific community when The Bell Curve was published, and this fact did get out to those who cared to be informed. Now, 13 years later, with the fully-functioning internets in place, it seemed intellectually suicidal for Slate to publish such drivel. And so it was.
But a recent New Yorker article has appeared, vastly expanding on point #3, which ties in directly to some of my earlier posts on cognitive development. And that actually gives this tired old subject reason for a fresh look.
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