At Our Wits' End Read online

  Front Matter

  Publisher Information

  Quotation

  Acknowledgements

  At Our Wits’ End

  One

  Don’t be Stupid!

  The Decline of Intelligence

  The Grand Plan

  Back to the Concorde and the Moon

  Two

  Different Kinds of Intelligence

  Intelligence and IQ Tests

  The Causes of Intelligence Differences

  ‘But What Do You Mean By Intelligence?’

  ‘Intelligence Means Different Things in Different Cultures’

  ‘We Don’t Know the Genes Behind Intelligence, so We’re Just Speculating’

  ‘There Are Different Kinds of Intelligence’

  ‘Intelligence is a Very Western Concept’

  ‘Intelligence and Ranking People by Their IQ Makes Me Feel Morally Uncomfortable. It’s Very Dangerous’

  Three

  Sexual Selection

  Social Selection

  Group Selection

  Selection for Intelligence in Animals

  Hunter-Gatherers

  Pastoralists

  Early Nation States

  The Christian World

  Fertility in the Early Modern Era

  Executing the Less Intelligent

  Upward Social Mobility in the Early Modern Era

  Illegitimates

  Four

  Interest Rates

  Literacy and Numeracy

  Judicial Violence and Blood Sports

  The Size of the Head

  Democracy and Political Stability

  Corruption

  Murder

  Genetic Changes: Comparing the Bronze Age to the Present

  Five

  The Big Five

  The General Factor of Personality

  How Personality Develops and Why there are Differences

  Six

  The Nature of Genius: Meeting Sir Isaac Newton

  The Evolution of Genius

  The Growth of Genius

  Seven

  Scientists Who Predicted Intelligence Would Decline

  What is the Association between Intelligence and Fertility Now?

  Why Do Smarter People Have Fewer Children?

  Eight

  What Is Going On?

  Scientific Spectacles

  The Reversal of the Flynn Effect

  The Impact of the Flynn Effect

  Nine

  Simple Reaction Times

  Colour Discrimination

  Use of High-Difficulty Words

  Backward Digit Span

  Spatial Perception

  Piagetian Developmental Staging

  Genius Levels and Macro-innovations

  Creativity

  Putting it All Together: The g.h Chronometric Factor

  The Smoking Gun: A Decline in the Frequencies of Variants in the Genome Associated with Educational Attainment and g

  What about Pollution?

  Why Did the Murder Rate Continue to Decline?

  Should We Be Telling You This?

  Ten

  The Fall

  Progress

  Cycles

  Modern Social Cycle Theories

  Cutting Through it All with General Intelligence

  Virtue Signalling and Equality

  Climate Change

  Eleven

  Rome and General Intelligence

  Contraception and Christianity

  Islamic Civilisation

  Chinese Civilisation

  ‘What Has Been Will Be Again’

  Twelve

  The Seeds of Western Civilisation

  The Spring of Civilisation

  The Summer of Civilisation

  Autumn

  Winter

  Thirteen

  Eugenics

  Nurturing Genius

  Religion

  Long-Term Knowledge Storage

  The Bleak Mid-Winter

  Back Matter

  About the Authors

  Also Available

  Published in the UK in 2018 by

  Imprint Academic

  PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX

  www.imprint-academic.com

  Copyright © 2018 Edward Dutton & Michael A. Woodley of Menie

  The rights of Edward Dutton & Michael A. Woodley of Menie to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of brief passages for the purposes of criticism and discussion, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form either digital or physical other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The views and opinions expressed herein belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Imprint Academic or Andrews UK Limited.

  ‘They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end.’

  —Psalm 107: 27

  Acknowledgements

  In producing this book the authors have benefited from fruitful discussions with a number of colleagues. They would like to acknowledge the assistance of Prof. James Flynn, Prof. Aurelio-José Figueredo, Dr Bruce Charlton, Prof. Guy Madison and Prof. Dimitri van der Linden. Figures 2 and 3 are reproduced by kind permission of Prof. Gregory Clark. All tables cited from Lynn (2011) are reproduced by kind permission of the Ulster Institute for Social Research, London.

  One

  Can You Believe We Put a Man on the Moon?

  It’s incredible to think that in the year 2000 you could get from London to New York in just 3-and-a-half hours. These days, it takes longer than that to fly from London to Athens.

  With the advent of Concorde in 1969, we had dealt with an extremely difficult problem—how to get from A to B much faster. We had been trying to solve this problem since 1954. That was when Arnold Hall, director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, set up a committee to look into supersonic flight. The USA was an important country. Western Europe was almost as vital. There were crucial business connections between the two regions. These were massively complicated by the 8 hours it took to fly between America and Western Europe. It wasted time. It wasted money. How could we solve this problem?

  The solution was Concorde. Concorde wasn’t a minor update to existing technology which made things slightly easier, like the introduction of active power-steering in BMW cars in 2003. This was a major breakthrough, comparable to the invention of aeroplanes themselves (‘How can we fly?’) or the Spinning Jenny (‘How can we massively speed up production?’). In the 1950s, some of the world’s most intelligent and creative people were put to work to find a solution to this enormous problem and, on 2nd March 1969, Concorde was in the sky.

  It fell from the sky on 25th July 2000. Air France flight 4590 took off from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and promptly smashed into a hotel, killing all 100 passengers and 9 crew, as well as 4 people on the ground. The crash was essentially due to incompetence. A titanium ‘wear strip’ had been attached to the back of the thrust reverser of a Continental Airlines DC 10 Airliner as part of an operation to repair it. Not only was the wear strip badly produced, but it had not been made by the Airliner’s original equipment manufacturer. Accordingly, when the plane took off—just minutes before Concorde did on the same r
unway—the wear strip fell off. As Concorde accelerated over this sharp bit of metal at high speed, it punctured Concorde’s tyre, causing rubber to spin off the wheel and break open the fuel tank. This led to a fuel leak, which in turn led to a fire, resulting in one of Concorde’s engines being shut down. At the speed it was going, it was committed to take off, but Concorde couldn’t gain enough velocity or altitude to remain in the air. So Concorde crashed; all because an earlier aeroplane hadn’t been maintained properly. There had been problems with Concorde before—such as part of the rudder breaking off on a 1989 flight—but never a crash. The system had always worked. The pilots, in the heat of the moment, had always realised how to save the plane; the ground crew never made any major mistakes. Public confidence was shaken and, by 2003, Concorde was permanently grounded.[1] We were back to how it used to be. Flights between the UK and the USA were once again interminable.

  1969 was also the year that we put a man on the Moon. In many ways, this may be the greatest achievement in the history of humanity to date. This was not something that developed organically and unplanned. Things naturally develop in this way if people of reasonable intelligence and conscientiousness work on them for long enough. Science fiction writers had long dreamed of going to the Moon.[2] The American government decided they wanted a manned flight to the Moon in around 1958, as they competed with the Soviets to win the Space Race. The Soviets had already beaten them in getting a satellite into space and would soon beat the USA in landing machinery on the Moon and getting a man into space. Thousands of America’s best minds were put to work to achieve this quite fantastic goal. It was accomplished on 20th July 1969, with every step in the voyage having to be ‘checked’ by eight NASA experts. With each new twist, they had to think on their feet, calculate all the possible risk scenarios, and reach the correct decision to avoid a tragedy. There were 5 further manned flights to the Moon until December 1972.[3] But we carried on dreaming of exploring the stars until the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster in 1986. The shuttle exploded just after launch because one of the rocket’s o-rings had malfunctioned due to recent cold weather. A potential problem with o-rings had been identified in 1971 but had never been addressed and it was only the severe cold combined with this failure that led to the crash. Caution would have dictated abandoning the launch due to the freezing conditions; financial considerations dictated otherwise. Confidence in manned space travel had been damaged. The space programme—in terms of serious leaps, like getting people to Mars—began to stagnate.[4]

  Why? Why is it that we used to be able to fly from the USA to London in less than 4 hours but now we can’t? Why is it that we used to be able to put people on the Moon but now, it seems, we can’t? The answer is surprisingly simple. We are no longer intelligent enough to be able to do these things. We have become too stupid to keep Concorde in flight; let alone go back to the Moon.

  Don’t be Stupid!

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ you might be thinking. ‘There are so many complex reasons why we haven’t been back to the Moon! The economic collapse in the 1970s, the end of the Cold War meaning there was no longer as strong an incentive to compete with the former Soviet Union, and attention turning to making life fairer for people on Earth. It’s the same with Concorde. There’s been another economic collapse since then. We just haven’t got round to doing these things, but we could..!’

  Science looks for the theory that explains the most with the fewest assumptions. Named Occam’s Razor, after the English friar William of Occam (c.1287–1347), the axiom that the simplest theory is the best is accepted by all scientists. If we can plausibly explain two separate events with one theory, then that is superior to having a different theory for each event. We will show in this book that the simplest explanation, with the fewest assumptions, for our failure to get back to the Moon or to get Concorde back in the sky is that we are becoming less intelligent. Other explanations might account for one of the two events, or aspects of these, but they will not explain everything without leaving questions unanswered or assumptions hanging in the air. Our explanation does not suffer from these problems.

  The Decline of Intelligence

  Our argument is based on a number of foundations, each of which are ‘controversial’—at least among those who are sure they know best—but each of which we will demonstrate in the course of this book.

  To understand what’s going on, we have to understand what ‘intelligence’ is and why it’s so important. ‘Intelligence’ is, basically, the ability to solve complex problems and do so quickly. The quicker you can solve a problem, the cleverer you are. The cleverer you are, the more complicated the problem has to be before you’re stumped. On adult samples intelligence is 0.8 heritable meaning that 80% of the variation among individuals is due to genetic factors (a heritability of one would indicate that 100% of the variation was genetic).[5] Socioeconomic status is strongly connected with intelligence. It ‘correlates’ strongly with it. A correlation is a measure of the degree to which the change in one variable predicts the change, either positively or negatively, in a second variable. The key measure captured by correlations is the percentage of variance which is simply the value of the correlation squared. Correlations are scaled from –1 to 1—these being perfect correlations (i.e. where 100% of the change in the second variable is predicted by the first). A correlation of 0 indicates no association between the variables. So, 0.7 is a very strong positive correlation indicating that the variables share almost 50% of the variance in common. Salary correlates with intelligence at 0.3, while intelligence correlates with education level at 0.5. And intelligence correlates with how well you do at school at 0.7.[6] We all know of people who aren’t that bright but work very hard and get top marks in their school leaving exams, but they are the minority. It’s intelligence that really counts.

  We will see in this book that the process of Darwinian selection acting on intelligence did not end on the African Savannah 100,000 years ago. Rather, Darwinian selection, and social selection in particular—where Darwinian fitness stems from cooperation among or competition against other members of society—continues into the present day, with more general evolution among humans still on-going. This process led to what the British economist Gregory Clark, who we will meet later, has termed ‘The Survival of the Richest’.

  Between the 1400s and the mid-19th century, in every generation, the richer 50% of the population had more surviving children than the poorer 50%.[7] As economic status and intelligence are positively correlated this led to us becoming more and more intelligent every generation. This carried on until the most intelligent people—the outlier, super-clever geniuses—were so numerous and so capable that their innovations actually allowed us to take control of our environment to an unprecedented extent. Here we had the Industrial Revolution. This led to more and more inventions, such that our standard of living—our ability to feed the population—outpaced population growth, meaning that our living standards now are higher than those of medieval kings.

  However, this process led to a reversal of selection for intelligence. With huge leaps in medical technology, we went from around a third of children failing to reach adulthood to almost none failing to do so. In pre-Modern times, the children who died young were disproportionately the children of those with lower social status, and therefore by proxy, lower intelligence and, as we’ve seen, intelligence is strongly heritable. The main reason for this was that the less intelligent were poorer, lived in worse conditions, and had worse nutrition. This pattern of selection favouring higher intelligence ceased with the Industrial Revolution’s innovations in medicine and hygiene, such as widespread use of inoculations against formerly killer childhood diseases such as measles, in addition to social initiatives aimed at alleviating the effects of poverty. In fact, it didn’t just cease. It went into reverse.

  The resultant low death rate of children also meant that people no longer had to have large numbers of kids in o
rder to guarantee that some survived. Accordingly, they could have smaller families and use the left over money to fund an even higher standard of living. By the late 19th century, this meant that having a large family tended to be an accident. It would happen because people were less able to think of the future here in the now, meaning they would impulsively have sex and not worry about the consequences. As we will see, such impulsive behaviour is a function of low intelligence,[8] as is the inability to successfully use contraception. This meant that the less intelligent soon started having more children than the more intelligent.

  With the rise of women in the workplace, we will show that the most intelligent women dedicate themselves to their careers in their twenties and even the first half of their thirties. If they have children at all (they often don’t want to or find they’ve left it too late) they will only have a small number of them. By contrast, less intelligent women, less career-focused and more impulsive, will have larger numbers of children, starting as teenagers and sometimes becoming grandparents by the time their more intelligent contemporaries begin thinking about motherhood. For these reasons, we will show that it has long been predicted that we would have become less intelligent.