Dec. 12, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:32:30
3529 Why Civilizations Rise and Fall | Michael Woodley of Menie and Stefan Molyneux
Within academic circles there is continued debate as to whether humans are becoming more or less intelligent. Dr. Michael Woodley of Menie joins Stefan Molyneux to explain the the current trends in human intelligence, why the Flynn Effect is misleading, the importance of reaction time, trends in fertility rates and why civilizations rise and fall throughout human history. Dr. Michael Woodley of Menie is a research fellow at Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and a scientist with Technische Universität Chemnitz. Dr. Woodley of Menie has published extensive research on cognitive abilities, reaction time, general intelligence and human personality.Center Leo Apostel: http://www.fdrurl.com/Woodley-of-MenieHow cognitive genetic factors influence fertility outcomes: A meditational SEM analysis. Twins Research and Human Geneticshttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/309343887_How_Cognitive_Genetic_Factors_Influence_Fertility_Outcomes_A_Mediational_SEM_AnalysisFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He is a fellow at Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Brussels in Belgium, of course, and a scientist with Technische Universität Chemnitz.
He has published extensive research on cognitive abilities, reaction time, general intelligence, human behavior, Thank you for having me on your show, Stefan.
So we had Dr.
Flynn, of course, recently on the show, and he talked about the Flynn effect, right, which is a considerable increase in IQ testing.
Whether it's G-loaded or not, we'll get to in a second, but the IQ testing seems to be going up.
People seem to be getting smarter.
On the other hand, you and others have uncovered some troubling reaction time information that might seem to indicate that there's a little bit of an undertow when it comes to human intelligence flourishing.
I wonder if you could give people sort of an introduction to the landscape of where IQ and human genetics are heading at the moment.
Yes, certainly.
Big questions, but has dogged research on secular trends in human intelligence, is what exactly is happening to intelligence over time?
And for a long time, at the beginning of the 20th century, really starting the work of Sir Francis Galton in the 1860s, People thought that because there were negative associations between people's levels of cognitive ability and the numbers of offspring that they produced, this would necessarily entail a decrease in heritable general intelligence.
And this was actually called Cattell's paradox, because the fact that this wasn't observed in the data, rather, was called Cattell's paradox.
Because Raymond Cattell, who was one of the founders of modern psychometrics, he developed this distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence, among other things.
He's a very prominent psychometrician.
He set out looking for evidence that IQ had actually declined due to this selection pressure, and he compared cohorts We're good to go.
Sir Cyril Burt, McIntosh, a couple of others found the same thing.
Tuddenheim is another one.
They all found this thing which is now called the Flynn effect, this ubiquitous increase in measured intelligence, that is to say intelligence measured using pencil and paper type IQ tests.
So, believe it or not, this fact was actually forgotten.
And people recognized that IQ certainly wasn't going down.
They didn't know why it wasn't going down.
There was much speculation.
And there seemed to be this sort of general acceptance that in some quarters it might be increasing.
But there was a lot of sort of, I call it historical amnesia.
People weren't really interested in this too much.
And people kept independently rediscovering the effect over and over again.
And really, it wasn't until the 1980s when James Flynn, and also Richard Lynn, he has to be given credit for this as well, Flynn and Lynn both bought large-scale attention to the effect with a series of publications showing how ubiquitous the effect was, not just across time, but across countries as well.
And it was on that basis that Marian Herdstein of the Bell Curve chose to name the effect, the Flynn effect, as Flynn probably slightly more so than Richard Lynn, sorry Richard, actually drew huge amounts of attention to the effect and gave it really wide scale fame essentially and it's called the Flynn effect as a consequence.
And sorry, just to give people that context, we kind of skated past that earlier.
What has been shown repeatedly in studies around the world and across time is that more intelligent women have fewer children.
And given, of course, that there is genetics involved, 50 to 80 percent, depending on where in life you measure, that there's a lot of genetics involved in intelligence, the sort of 3,000 to 5,000 genes that tend to make up our capacity for human intelligence and Yes,
a couple of recent meta-analyses which show that the increase in IQ is on the order of three points per decade.
And it's not just confined to specific measures of IQ, it's found across the board.
So you have broad abilities like crystallized intelligence, which is your ability to accumulate and use knowledge, fluid intelligence, which is sort of raw abstract problem solving ability, visuospatial ability or ability to manipulate shapes and objects in two dimensions and three dimensions, that sort of thing.
Yes, you find that across these different measures, IQ is increasing.
But across the board, full-scale IQ, which sort of incorporates all of the above, plus some extra bits and pieces, is showing this increase of three points per decade.
I just want to make a point also, it's not just intelligent women that are having fewer children.
Intelligent men also, on average, have fewer children.
It's just there is a sex difference in the strength of the correlation between IQ and fertility.
Well, and of course, you know, for more intelligent people, when you have a free market and some political and economic liberties, you have the choice to, say, run a corporation, or you can read Itsy Bitsy Spider 400 times in a row.
And so particularly when kids are young, it's not the most intellectually stimulating environment.
So there is, I think, that tendency to say, well, I'm going to go and spread my intellectual wings in the market or in academia or in the media and so on, rather than stay home.
The opportunities are that much greater to exercise your intelligence, at least when kids are young, out in the market than it is at home.
You're right, yeah, it's both males and females who will be hesitant to invest those kinds of resources.
Yes, it's not just IQ tests which inversely predict fertility.
It's also the polygenic scores, which are these...
Genetic markers of cognitive ability which are coming to light as a result of higher resolution genome-wide association studies.
And people have been able to assemble these polygenic scores made up of specific nucleotides which predict variation in IQ. And a composite of these nucleotides actually predicts fertility, predicts it negatively.
And I recently produced a paper on this looking at why A genetic index of cognitive ability should predict fertility negatively.
It turns out that it's due to education.
So essentially what seems to be happening is having the genes for high ability, they do not dispose you towards producing fewer children, all else being equal.
It's only when you look at the effect of education, That you see where the trade-off is made, and it is essentially a trade-off.
People are trading opportunities to acquire educational capital for opportunities to produce offspring.
And you can't have it all, essentially.
You have to trade one against the other.
So we see very clear evidence that the educational attainment level actually mediates the association between these genetic markers of cognitive ability.
And also fertility.
So yes, that's consistent with what you just said.
That is congruent with the data.
Well, and of course, given that people tend to go from high school to university to graduate school to doctorates to academia or into the business world or other areas, these are peak fertility years for women.
And of course, if they say, well, I'm going to defer, defer, which, you know, if you want to get your intellectual chops in younger rather than later on in life, you're going to push that fertility window to the point where, I mean, just statistically, you're going to have fewer children, even if you have the same desire.
Yes.
Also, males have a higher tolerance for hypogamous mating.
So there are studies which indicate that males are more likely to, for want of a better term, mate downwards for traits like intelligence.
So if you take males and females of very high IQ, women with high IQ are less likely than males of equivalently high IQ to produce offspring.
And what those males are in essence doing is they're mating hypogammously.
So they're choosing female partners We've lower average intelligence, which means they end up producing more offspring at the end of the day relative to equivalently able females.
And that also weakens the strength of the correlation between IQ and fertility in males relative to females.
So that's also part of the equation.
There's a mating market component to it as well.
Well, of course.
I mean, I think every man, you know, occasionally you'll look at the hot cashier or the hot waitress and say, yeah, I could date that.
But it's very rare, of course, that women would date down.
Their hypergamy tends to look for higher status, more intelligent males.
And this is, of course, one of the paradoxes that women achieving educational excellence in the marketplace tends to reduce the number of men who are going to be available to them to mate up with.
Exactly, yes.
Okay, so let's also talk about the diminishment of family size as well, because, of course, if you have fewer children, you can devote more energy, interest, conversational skills, reading time, and so on.
Per child, does that have an effect on raising the IQ over time, do you think?
Yes, it seems to be the case that that's one of the factors that predicts the Flynn effect in some of the models that I've seen in which you can actually try and predict the size of the effect in different countries using different sets of covariates.
And yes, changing size of families does seem to predict the size of the Flynn effect.
So in instances where family sizes are shrinking the most, you tend to get bigger IQ boosts.
So one possibility is that smaller families, as you pointed out, allow parents to...
Increase the degree of resource confluence per offspring.
So you can actually allocate more effort per offspring, which may have the effect of boosting their cognitive ability, at least with respect to more environmentally plastic specialized abilities.
Now, before we offend everyone, at least with my particular take on current events and current politics, let's sort of go TARDIS-style way back in time because some of the stuff that I was reading to prepare for our conversation was that there are people who make the case that it was thousands of years ago where human intelligence peaked under the sort of rigor and strictness of the hunter-gatherer societies before we got the giant welfare state of modern agriculture and could just feed everyone no matter what.
But that seems to me rather surprising because, of course, I have the stereotype, looking back, the sort of low-browed, ooga-booga caveman did not seem to be producing a lot of geniuses.
What do you think of that particular approach?
Well, this is actually something that I'm in the process of testing.
I have, believe it or not, in my possession, 95 Cro-Magnon genomes.
And I also have a large and representative sample of modern European genomes.
And with a few adjustments to the data, I should be able to make the two datasets intercomparable in terms of being able to actually track the frequency of these polygenic scores, these specific variants that I mentioned earlier over time.
Because just as these variants predict variation in intelligence within a population, they should also predict variation in intelligence between two different populations where the mean of intelligence is different.
So if we look at Cro-Magnon living, say, 50-60,000 years ago, and some of these models of strong recent directional selection favoring higher aggregate intelligence, Among the descendants of these populations hold true, then we should see a difference between the Cro-Magnon and modern Europeans when matched for degree of ancestry, because that's something we have to do very careful.
So we're not comparing apples and oranges.
We have to make sure the modern Europeans are actually matched based on degree of Cro-Magnon ancestry.
We have all sorts of fancy techniques for actually harmonizing two data sets to make them comparable.
But in theory, we should be able to see For the first time ever, a direct signal of polygenic directional selection in the descendants of these Cro-Magnon, favoring variants which promote higher cognitive ability, which will allow us to test all these models of culture gene co-evolution,
accelerated directional selection for intelligence proposed by people like Greg Cochran and And Henry Harpending, the 10,000-year explosion model, the idea that the hollow scene represented this epoch of very, very strong directional selection for various traits, which predisposed to better problem-solving ability, that sort of thing.
And we should be able to actually start to interrogate the data in such a way which allows us to test these theories.
And there might be nothing there.
We have to be prepared for the possibility that there's been no change.
The prior probability of that being the case is very, very low.
I suspect there will have been some kind of a change probably favoring higher enrichment of modern genomes for these variants relative to these historical genomes.
But again, we have to actually test this.
It hasn't been tested yet, but we now have the means to do so.
Well, and of course, if you end up repudiating the thesis, that's still good science because you've eliminated a possibility that won't need to be reinvestigated again.
Now, this is a kind of paradox that we always think of intelligence as a positive.
Most parents, of course, want their kids to be smarter and so on.
But it's kind of a weird paradox that intelligence arises out of very strict environmental adversity.
You know, like if you eat all of your seed crop in the fall, then you're going to starve to death and the genes which don't allow you to defer gratification will die.
You know, die with you, so those who are able to defer gratification, think long-term, and so on, will do better.
So intelligence arises out of very harsh environmental and very strict environmental negatives, but intelligence being produced from environmental negatives ends up Creating an environment that allows for less intelligent genes to flourish.
Because you come up with agriculture, you come up with refrigerators, you come up with welfare states, you come up with all these things that seems to undermine the genetic advancement of intelligence.
And I'm not saying there's any particular solution, but it is one of these paradoxes that's well worth mulling over.
Yes.
As you say, does intelligence create the conditions necessary for its own undoing?
And the answer to that question is...
Undoubtedly, yes.
But we also have to be very careful, I think, in discussing this issue when we talk about selection.
So people use terms like dysgenic, for example, to describe selection which favours the carriers of traits deemed socially undesirable.
And what do we mean by socially undesirable?
These are traits which people on average agree are good.
It's good to have more of them.
It's It's bad to have less of them in the case of socially desirable traits.
Intelligence, yes, is considered a highly socially desirable trait, but you have to ask why do we valence our conception of social desirability in such a way which leads us to ascribe social value to certain traits over other traits?
And this leads us back to your question, actually, in terms of maybe getting at more foundational issues.
What sort of selection pressures favor intelligence?
What sort of selection pressures disfavor it?
And I produced a monograph with an academic colleague of mine at the University of Arizona, Professor A.J. Figueredo, in which we proposed that the sort of selection pressures which favor increasing intelligence are associated with group-level success.
So the success of groups in conquest, for example, the expansion of groups, that sort of thing.
And the sort of selection pressures which disfavor traits like intelligence are selection pressures which favor individual level reproduction at the expense of the group level fitness.
We call this a multi-level selection model.
There's people like D.S. Wilson, E.O. Wilson, Boyd, Richardson, etc.
They talk about multi-level selection.
Selection doesn't just operate on groups.
It doesn't just operate on individuals.
It operates on different levels of aggregation simultaneously.
And sometimes the selection pressure favors individual selection over group selection, and sometimes it's the other way around.
Now, if you look historically at the sort of periods in time where intelligence was probably increasing very rapidly, You're looking at periods characterized by great clashes of empires and periods where groups were competing with other groups and periods where geniuses,
these very, very rare individuals who combine high intelligence with other rare personality dispositions and traits associated with high creativity, These people were fueling the success of these groups through their own innovations.
This is an idea that was first proposed by W.D. Hamilton.
Figueredo and I just refined it, but the credit has to go to William Hamilton.
He was the first to really intuit this idea that genius itself is a group-selected phenomenon.
You look at geniuses, they fail terribly in reproduction.
There's historical data collected by Dean Keefe Simonton showing that the vast majority of them die childless, celibate.
They don't reproduce.
And this is a strong indicator that they're group selected because what they're doing is the benefits of their genius accrue at the group level.
The innovations in cartography, for example, allow groups to map new territories and expand into those territories.
Innovations in weapons manufacture allow groups to get an advantage over other groups.
It's sort of guns, germs and steel, except it's fueled by geniuses, essentially.
And the other thing that's going on as well is cold selection.
We find that areas of the world where you have lower temperature tend to have populations with higher average ability.
And one theory that's been put forward is that cold essentially imposes high extrinsic morbidity and mortality on those populations of a sort which may favor adaptations to better cold coping, one of which may relate to cognitive ability.
And Cold selection was also a characteristic of the early modern era, the period essentially leading up to the early 18th century, where you had extreme low global temperature.
Global temperature was much colder than it was today.
You had a thing called the Little Ice Age.
And that little ice age was impacting the peasantry in particular, the old peasantry, driving them into extinction, essentially.
There's good data on this.
It's horrible.
You know, it's absolutely horrible.
This is not pretty.
As D.S. Wilson likes to say, group selection is not this big Kumbaya thing.
It's not everybody gets together and cooperates of the good of a whole.
No, no, no, it's not.
It's actually really, really brutal.
And...
One of the things which drives groups into competition with other groups and may fuel the rise of these extreme phenotypes which predispose groups towards success in group-level competition is cold.
Cold makes groups more likely to want to expand and take over the territory and the resources held by other groups, particularly groups in more clement areas.
And essentially, this is European history and American history.
It's horrible, you know, but that was the history up until the end of the early modern period, up until the point at which global temperatures started to shift.
We started to enter into a period where global temperatures increased.
And they did increase.
You know, whatever you think the cause may be, they did increase.
That is an undisputed, to me, that is an undisputed fact.
And this is starting from the 1680s onwards, that there has been an increase in global temperatures.
So I just wanted to give context for that in time, but go ahead.
Well, yeah, it's really sort of, we're talking about the late 18th century.
But yes, there are indications that could have started earlier.
Global temperature increased.
And what this would have done is it would have reduced the amount of stress, the amount of ecological stress operating on these populations.
And that would have relaxed group selection operating on.
There's no need for these groups to get together, gang up on other groups, take over their territory.
That also relaxed the need for conservation.
That also relaxed the need for these rare but expensive group-selected phenotypes like these geniuses.
They're very costly to maintain.
People who don't reproduce, who only give to the group, you need a lot of group success to pay for that genetically.
So they're quite costly to maintain.
So if there's no selection favoring group cohesion, then you don't maintain that.
And that also relaxation of this selection, which started with the period of global warming, led to a relaxation of extrinsic mortality and morbidity among the peasantry.
They were no longer dying in droves, essentially.
And this combined with innovations in hygiene, and you mentioned these earlier, innovations in medicine, hygiene, various technological inventions such as, it's funny, actually, Richard Lynn was once asked what he thought was the principle, but the one factor that he would consider to be the main source of a negative association between cognitive ability and fertility, he said the vulcanization of rubber.
I can't quite make that leap, so please connect these dots for me.
Contraception.
Ah, yes.
Okay.
Yeah, control over fertility, deferral of gratification.
Okay, got it.
Fertility control, exactly.
Alterations in our social structure, which led to these trade-offs that I mentioned earlier, which I'm seeing in these data where I try to link...
The carrier frequencies of these genes with reproductive outcomes.
You can see a lot of it is mediated by educational attainment and the need for people to attain higher and higher levels of education is largely a context of increased individual level competition within modern populations for resources.
So all of these factors combined would have relaxed group selection, increased the strength of individual level selection, and would have increased the strength of individual, increased individual selection, in particular for the carriers of lower than average levels of cognitive ability, for those with variants which predispose to lower than average ability relative to those with higher than average ability.
And again, because the reason we consider that socially undesirable And the reason we use labels like dysgenic to describe that is because a lot of our innate moral preferences have been shaped by the degree to which our ancestors were actually subject to group selection.
So we tend to associate things like heroism, virtue, genius with things that are good for the group.
And as a consequence, we assign to these things social desirability.
So when we talk about traits going in a socially undesirable direction, what we really mean is they're going in a way which disfavors group selection but favors individual selection.
Now, Darwin doesn't care.
Darwin doesn't care.
As long as you're executing gene reproduction, that's all he cares about.
So, people who are having more offspring, who have personality traits or intelligence of a certain level or type, they're just doing Darwin's will.
But we look at this, right, and we say, well, because a lot of our nature was shaped by, was forged essentially by selection occurring in the Holocene, group selection in particular, we look at this and we think, oh, this is a bad thing, this is a terrible thing.
So I want to make that clear that this is our normative sense of the direction of these traits.
In terms of the direction that selection is pushing them, is itself a by-product of our evolved natures.
And our evolved preferences are shaped that way.
They're shaped by our ancestral past.
Well, and as far as socially positive characteristics go, I mean, higher intelligence generally tends to be better.
Higher intelligent people tend to be more moral.
This evil genius thing is just something, I think, invented by resentful, less intelligent people.
They tend to be healthier.
They tend, of course, to be wealthier, to produce more, to create more, and so on.
And of course, as I'm sure you're aware, around IQ 85, like in the mid-80s and so on, you get the sweet spot for criminality.
Where you have enough intelligence to plan to do nefarious things, but not enough intelligence that competing in the free market seems like an appealable alternative.
So when you do have lower IQ proliferation, it does, I think, contribute to significant problems within society.
Yes, inasmuch as these things are syndromatic of a broader breakdown of group selection within these populations which are undergoing, which have transitioned into this regime of selection favoring lower ability.
And I also want to add that the data indicates that this regime of selection favoring those with low ability variance, low ability cognitive variance, is worldwide.
It's not just restricted to It showed that many different measures of reproductive success, sibling numbers, and also actual completed fertility numbers, numbers of offspring produced when reproduction ceases, and also different cognitive ability measures.
So measures of IQ and also measures of educational attainment are negatively correlated with one another.
So it's even present in modern China.
It's not something that's a uniquely...
Right.
And of course, given the one-child policy favored by the Chinese government over the past couple of decades, that would be negative relative to the buoyant effects of having fewer children and more parental attention.
So that would be a significant undertow.
And just so people get this context, and I've talked about this on the show before, but...
I always have to remind myself that there are the new listeners, but of course there is, in general, group hierarchies in terms of intelligence.
I just want to run through it very briefly and correct me if I go astray.
But Ashkenazi Jews at the very top, particularly when it comes to verbal abilities, less so for spatial reasoning and so on.
And then Orientals, the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and so on, clocking it at about 103, 105.
I've sort of seen a variety of IQs normed for Caucasians or Whites at about 100.
And then below that, you have Mestizo, or often referred to as Hispanics.
And then below that, you have Blacks.
And this does seem to be correlated, of course, with the degree of cold that ancestors experienced and experienced.
The fact that, again, if you don't plan for the winter, if you don't defer your gratification during the winter, you're going to get hungry to the point of starvation or death come spring.
And so there is a brutal sort of selection that occurs in the production of these kinds of higher or lower intelligences.
And the argument that I've heard with Ashkenazi Jews, of course, is that in the West, you took your most intelligent people and put them in celibate-styled monasteries and nunries and so on, which had a disjanic effect in the general population, somewhat offset by the Black Death, which tended to take out less intelligent members of society.
And of course, in Judaism, the most intelligent people, the rabbis and so on, often had the most children.
And you could see sort of a third of an IQ point increase per generation, which has resulted in some significantly high IQs, at least in the Ashkenazi Jewish population.
And so I just want to talk a little bit about the sort of group dynamics and the effect it might be having on aggregate intelligence in more diverse countries.
But have I got that sort of layer cake fairly spot on?
Well, as I understand it, yes, those correspond to the group means that I have seen published and meta-analyzed in the literature.
Right.
So let's talk about this reaction time issue.
I was reminded of this, and I knew we had this interview coming up.
I took my daughter to Palladium, and they have one of these dance games.
I don't know if you've ever tried them.
I'm probably a little old for it.
But, you know, and there was this...
He was an Oriental fellow who was doing this dance game, and his legs were like this Flintstone running off a cliff blur.
I could barely even see.
And I was talking to a friend of mine who's younger, and he said, oh, it's sort of well-known in the video game community that if you're facing a Chinese guy or a Japanese guy...
The reaction times are very, very fast, and if it's a Twitch kind of game, if it's a button masher, you're kind of in a lot of trouble.
And so the reaction time metric as a crude substitute for an IQ test is something that you've been looking at in the Victorian era.
And you've got some rather chilling numbers and conclusions.
I wonder if you could help people understand the process by which you're trying to measure Victorian intelligence, because, of course, the IQ test wasn't developed until the early 20th century, so you don't have the same characteristics to compare.
Yes.
Well, just to sort of preface this, if we rewind a little back to the very first question you asked, which was about the Flynn effect and its ubiquity, And the cartels paradox, the failure to observe the loss predicted by selection.
Instead, we see this apparent increase in phenotypic IQ. What got me interested in measures like reaction time, and reaction time is really part of a family of measures which actually show the same sort of decline dynamics.
It's gone beyond reaction times.
Now, we'll get to that momentarily.
But if you just look at reaction times, reaction times have a very interesting property.
They kind of bypass the pencil and paper method of getting at your cognitive ability.
Because what they do is they measure a phenotype, which is probably very latent in your ability to solve problems.
And that is the speed with which your neurons conduct impulses.
This is based on the idea, this is an idea which, again, like many good things, had its origins in the mind of Sir Francis Galton.
It was based on the idea that quickness of mind was literally true, that people who are quick in terms of reactions are also quick in terms of their ability to solve problems.
And yes, there are correlations between IQ and reaction time.
The simple reaction time correlation isn't so great.
It's about 0.3.
If you use a big sample where you take out restriction for range and if you correct for validity and reliability, you find the correlation may go up to 0.4, possibly 0.5.
Nerve conduction velocity, literally the speed with which an electrical impulse travels along a stretch of nerve, will correlate positively with IQ. And these are called endophenotypes, incidentally.
They're sort of endogenous measures of energy.
Of endogenous phenotypes which combine, if you like, to give rise to general intelligence, problem-solving ability.
So the question I had, actually it started with Bruce Charlton.
The question he had many years ago was, if you look at populations over time on measures like reaction time, these endo phenotypes, these physiological, neurophysiological indicators of cognition, What are populations doing?
What's happening?
And a third party called Erwin Silverman, unbeknownst to either of us, actually published a paper in 2010 in which he used a sort of comparison of means.
He took Golden's data.
Golden collected this hugely population-representative data set from tens of thousands of Victorians, essentially, and Really, really nice data set, actually.
Very, very large scale data set.
Relatively representative, although some people say it wasn't.
If you look, for example, at data on height means a standard deviation in height.
Collected from other samples, larger samples, and you compare them to the data in Galton's sample, you actually see that the heights are not too different, the standard deviations are fairly similar.
So I say on that basis the representativeness of the Victorians of the whole population was probably reasonably good.
And Silverman compared their mean performance, which was something like 186 milliseconds, to the mean performance of modern populations.
There's lots and lots of modern samples from various countries.
And what he found was that generally, with a couple of exceptions, the modern samples were significantly slower than the Victorians when you compared them on a sort of sample to sample basis.
What I did with two colleagues, Regan Murphy and Jan Tynhoenheis, was I decided to formally meta-analyse these data.
So I added an extra data point to the sample, which Silverman forwarded to me, an extra 19th century data point.
And we ran a thing called a meta-regression, random effects meta-regression, which is a fancy way of looking to see if there's a correlation with time, essentially.
So...
Is there a significant tendency for reaction times to slow over time?
And we found in our 2013 reanalysis of Silverman's data that yes, there was.
And you can use the correlation between reaction time and IQ to sort of estimate the degree to which general intelligence should be declining over time.
And we estimated a decline of, I think in that paper it was something like 1.3 points per decade.
But that's when the trouble began.
And boy, did the SH1T hit the fan, because we got five, probably one of the most commented on papers ever published in the journal Intelligence.
I might be wrong about that.
Someone might want to fact check me on that.
But I think it may be the most commented on paper in Intelligence, in terms of numbers of commentaries.
There were five commentaries published in Intelligence, and there was one other published in another journal, all of which sort of critique different aspects of the study.
And one of the sort of consistent tropes across these critiques was the idea that to an extent we were comparing apples and oranges.
Specifically, the way that Galton was measuring the reactions of his Victorian population might have been incomparable to modern instruments, which have all sorts of biases and all sorts of problems associated with them.
So there were two researchers, a Russian husband and wife team, Yuri and Yulia Dodonov, who published a response to our paper in which they actually rebuilt a sort of miniature version of Galton's pendulum chronoscope.
And they concluded that actually, Galton's chronoscope probably reasonably accurately measured reaction times in terms of the time taken to push that button and stop that pendulum from swinging.
The interval between those two gives you an idea of a reaction time as a simple distance speed calculation you can do.
And they found that the real problems, probably not with Galton's instrument, although there may have been a problem with how he sampled The real problems were with modern instruments, all these newfangled computers, because what these newfangled computers were doing were adding dozens of milliseconds onto the modern populations in terms of their apparent speed.
So in other words, modern populations were many, many milliseconds slower because of the processing lags and button-pushing lags and variable four-period lags and all these other lags, essentially, all of which were acting to slow, to bias the samples.
In such a way which exaggerated that difference between the two groups.
And my response to this was to go, okay, you've got a point.
Absolutely.
So what we're going to do is reanalyze the data using these corrections.
And also by using just Anglophone countries.
So we're now adding an extra constraint onto the study.
We're going even further to compare apples with apples.
We're now looking at just Anglophone countries.
So Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, etc., America.
And I went even further in a recent paper.
I just looked at four large British samples.
So I only looked at four samples, Goulton and three conducted in the 1980s, all of which had sample sizes bigger than 500.
So big, big samples just from the UK. So I went even further.
And I applied all these corrections for method variants that came from the Dodd-Nova's paper.
And the trend doesn't go away.
It's attenuated, so it's weakened, but it doesn't go away.
And an interesting byproduct of applying these corrections is it doesn't necessarily lessen the IQ decline either, because the IQ decline still hovers around a one point per decade loss.
So that's still current as far as the work on reaction time is concerned.
That still seems to hold true so far.
And I also like to point out it's not just comparing different studies that gives us slowing reaction times.
There are other ways, ingenious ways, of teasing out a secular slowing.
For example, if you take cohorts who have been evaluated longitudinally, so for example, if you take a person and you measure their reaction time, same person only 10 years later, you'll see age-related cognitive decline.
It's well known.
People get slower as they get older.
They get dumber as well.
Because the brain gets addled, basically.
It gets filled with intracellular junk and extracellular junk and all these proteins which contribute to aging, which people like Aubrey de Grey like to talk about.
And one effect is it actually reduces general intelligence.
And you can see this.
You see it in reaction times.
However, if you also have cross-sectional data, that's where you take a sample of people at time point A and another sample of people at time point B, And you compare their reaction times.
What you can do is subtract one from the other, so you can actually take out the organic slowing from the cross-sectional slowing, and you can see if you have anything left.
If you have anything left, what you have is a real slowing that's not confounded by age-related slowing.
And And the ratio of the two gives you an idea of a degree to which there's still something left over after you control for the age-related slowing.
And I applied this to a large Swedish sample with Guy Madison, a colleague of mine, and Justus Sanger, another colleague of mine.
And what we found was astonishing.
This very large Swedish sample, we corrected for age-related decline.
We didn't need to correct for age-related decline to actually see the slowing in reaction times.
It was so strong.
When you corrected for age-related decline, it potentiated the slowing.
So we're now getting this using other methods.
And this is suggestive of a very robust effect.
Okay, but if we're talking...
You said sort of between one and after you control for misrecording of the data with modern instruments or delay.
Let's just say you get it down to a point decline per decade.
That's staggering.
I mean, completely staggering.
I mean, from a Caucasian standpoint, at least, that would be like a 1% decline in height per decade.
I mean, it wouldn't take us long to end up like the tiny little inside of one of those Russian dolls things.
But the Flynn effect, of course, is considered to be a three-point float, right, in a similar time period.
So I'm trying to sort of figure these two things out.
I mean, in my mind, I can make the case either way.
But is the reaction time more closely G-loaded?
And by G-loaded, it means sort of measuring raw intelligence rather than sort of knowledge you may have acquired or other things.
So, it's more G-loaded to, like if you hear five numbers and you repeat them back straight, that's less G-loaded.
If you repeat them back reversed, then that's more G-loaded because you've got to manipulate the information in your mind more.
Is there a relationship between reaction time and its G-loading versus the Flynn effect and its G-loading?
Okay.
We call this the co-occurrence model because a lot of my work of late has focused on testing, prediction, stemming from this model.
The model is based on the idea that the size of the Flynn effect increases when the g-loading of your indicator decreases.
More G-loaded indicators, smaller Flynn effect.
Less G-loaded indicators, bigger Flynn effect.
The opposite is true when you look at the correlation between ability level and numbers of offspring.
It turns out that more G-loaded abilities are better at predicting fertility outcomes than less G-loaded abilities.
So one prediction is that G should be going down over time due to selection, right?
And the specialized abilities should be going up over time.
As a consequence of environments enriching them, essentially, because these specialized abilities are also less heritable.
It turns out that the more g-loaded the measure, the more heritable the measure.
So, yes, heritability and selection strength increase as a function of g-loading.
The Flynn effect decreases as a function of both heritability and g-loading.
And the Flynn effect decreases as a function of both heritability and g-loading.
And this makes sense, really, if you think about it, because traits which are measures of intelligence which are highly heritable are traits where selection has the most raw material on which on which to act on them.
And if a G factor is the principal source of heritability in ability batteries, and there is some data indicating that that's the case, then yes, selection is really going to get its teeth into that rather than these specialized, more ephemeral mental abilities, which are the sort of thing you can train, the sort of thing which can which are the sort of thing you can train, the sort of thing which can respond to educational improvements or exposures, and the sort of things which might And that's what the Flynn effect really is.
So now we have these two different variance components.
We have G going down and specialized abilities going up.
Now, what we think is going on with something like reaction times, simple reaction times, is although simple reaction times are not in and of themselves, Very strong measures of G. Like I said, the correlation is lukewarm at best, 0.4.
Maybe you could get it up to 0.5 with various adjustments for validity and reliability, etc.
Very generous corrections.
But what reaction time is, is it's not a pencil and paper test.
And this is critical.
Because reaction times have a real zero.
They're a ratio scale.
They're like the Kelvin scale in temperature.
So not only do they measure something that's biologically tangible, but they also measure something that is scaled absolutely.
So when I look at my cohorts born, say, in the 1980s, and compare them with cohorts born in the 1880s, I'm comparing apples with apples, at least as far as the scaling is concerned.
This is the ratio scale.
However, with pencil and paper IQ tests, if The Flynn effect does indeed represent an increase in the profusion of specialized abilities and that the data do seem to indicate that the strength of the G factor is decreasing over time and abilities are becoming more separate from one another over time, which would be consistent with the environment, sort of leveraging them apart.
Then what you might be looking at there is a situation in which the IQ test At time point A does not measure the same thing that the IQ test measures at time point B. Hence, the Flynn effect would kind of be analogous to measuring a population using Celsius, like a temperature.
Measuring the boiling point of water, for example, at time point A and then re-measuring it using Fahrenheit at time point B and concluding that the boiling point of water had changed radically.
It hasn't.
It might not have changed at all.
What's changed is the intervals on the scales that are being used.
So the Flynn effect seems to occur.
The largest Flynn effects are on interval scale measures of IQ, where the meaning of the test can change over time.
These reverse effects, these anti-Flynn effects, seem to be occurring on indicators which are ratio-scale indicators, where populations can be compared on absolutely the same parameter over time.
And if that same parameter those indicators are tapping is G, and if, as we presuppose, G is decreasing due to selection, then that decrease increases.
May well be a decrease in G due to selection.
We may have uncovered the psychometric dark matter, essentially, that evaded the scrutiny of Ray Cattell back in the 1950s.
Okay, let's talk about this dark matter, because, of course, this is some of the X factor that goes on, and for those who, I'm sure you're fairly aware of it, but...
You know, the fact that galaxies don't fly apart indicates that there must be some gravitational matter at the center of the galaxies that holds them together.
But no one's been able to see it there.
You just kind of know it's there.
And they're still, of course, looking for it.
Astronomers and physicists are still looking for it.
So let's sort of explicate a little bit about the dark matter in intelligence studies, because I think that's really, really important for people to understand.
Okay.
Well, yes, you gave a good overview of the phenomenon of dark matter and why astronomers think it's there.
We know it's there, but it evades visual detection.
In psychology, you can say this is a bit of physics envy here, because I like using physics analogies to illustrate things.
In this field of psychology that I'm studying, this sort of secular trend analysis, It's been known for quite a while that there are certain measures of social productivity.
Which do not seem to reflect the action of a Flynn effect that should be boosting all abilities equally, i.e.
should be boosting G. So basically the psychometric dark matter...
So I've often drawn the analogy between the hidden effects of dysgenics or the sort of signals that indicate that it ought to be there and this concept of dark matter from astronomy.
My...
The first inkling that I got that all might not be entirely right and proper was when I looked at innovation rate data and also per capita rates of eminent individuals, compiled by Charles Murray in his excellent book, Human Accomplishment, published in 2003, and also a wonderful paper by Jonathan Hubiner.
Published in the Journal of Forecasting and Technological Change, I hope I haven't mangled the name of the journal, published in 2005, in which he reanalyzed an even bigger data set and found the same thing.
What they found was per capita rates of macro innovation, that is to say innovations which are disruptive.
We have this term buzzword, disruptive.
Disruptive basically means an innovation which has very, very prolific consequences.
Downstream of its discovery.
So a good example of this would be the transistor discovered by William Shockley, also known as the tunnel diode.
The principle of a transistor has led to miniaturization.
It's led to Moore's law.
It's led to accelerating returns in price per computing power, etc.
So lots of good things have come out of it.
Lots of micro innovations, which are refinements on a macro innovation, have come out of it.
The same with the plough, the same with the steam engine, the same with splitting the atom, for example.
These are all macro or disruptive innovations.
So how do we measure the impact of innovations?
How do we discriminate disruptive from non-disruptive or macro from micro innovations?
Well, we use, again, this method going back to Galton, who came up with a lot of good ideas, and this was yet another of his good ideas, convergent bibliography.
So the eminence of an individual or the significance of their innovation is a function of a degree to which historians independently agree on the importance of that.
So you can take different histories of science and technology and you can correlate that.
And what you find is highly, this is what Charles Murray found, across several different indices of innovation, you actually find high levels of agreement in terms of who is declaring what or whom to be important.
And you can use the aggregate of this to sort of plot out across history the prevalence of these innovations.
And the best way to do this is to actually...
The really important number is the number of innovations per capita.
So it's not about the total numbers of innovations.
As populations grow, you're probably going to get more and more things being produced.
But that doesn't necessarily tell us about whether those populations, as they grow, are necessarily getting more efficient at producing macro innovations or innovators.
So you have to actually weight these innovation rates per capita against the size of the populations responsible for producing them or against the size of the global population.
It doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
And what Murray and Huebner and others as well have found is that between the years approximately 1400 to the middle of the 19th century, innovation rates per capita were increasing.
Numbers of geniuses or eminent individuals were increasing per capita in tandem.
This is hardly surprising, as one necessarily entails the other, up until around the middle of the 19th century, at which point the trend became sharply negatively inflected.
This varies from field to field.
In some fields like mathematics, the rate of decline is quite significant.
In other fields like medicine, not so much, but it is still there.
And in toto across the sciences, It's present to quite a substantive degree.
So the trend starts in the middle of the 19th century, and it continues into the present era.
And here's some interesting statistics for you.
Based on Hubner's work, the per capita rate of innovation in the middle of the 19th century was approximately 16 major innovations per person, per billion of the world's population per year.
So every year, Per capita, per billion of a world's population, you've got 16 new innovations coming online, essentially.
Big, conspicuously novel innovations.
Steam turbine, that sort of thing.
You know, really important things.
Today, the rate is four per billion of a world's population per year.
So we're buoyed up by overpopulation, but dragged down by the ratio.
Okay.
This is interesting because it's four per billion, but guess at what point in history It was last four per billion of world's population, about the 1600s.
So our innovation rate per capita today is about equal in terms of our productivity to populations living in the 1600s, in the West, that is.
Again, comparing apples with apples.
Well, this is a great challenge when I sort of look back at the kind of language, at the kind of works that people were reading, at the kind of plays they were going to throughout the Renaissance, throughout the Enlightenment and so on.
I mean, to take the obvious example of Shakespeare, I mean, Shakespeare was considered to be sort of hoity-toity at the moment, but back then he was extraordinarily popular with the average man.
You could get workers coming in and they would enjoy it and maybe they'd laugh a little bit more.
At the comedy, but I'm sure that they cried at the tragedy as well, going back to Chaucer and Tom Paine and John Locke and Moby Dick and things that were read by, you know, reasonably educated average people and compare that to what people are consuming now.
And again, I know you're going back and you're looking at the sort of very tips of the icebergs from a great distance and so on, but these were very popular works and these were very prevalent works and very influential works, and I don't know what the equivalent is in the modern age for those.
It's interesting.
We actually have data that speaks directly to that issue of how this selection pressure may directly have affected the way in which people use language over time.
But just going back slightly to the issue of innovation rates and eminent individuals, it was the fact that these are declining.
But these are going down despite the massive growth in the population, despite globalization, despite increasing communications, despite massive increases in education, massive increases in health care expenditures, massive increases in social safety net scope.
All of these progressive things, the sort of things that Steven Pinker talks about in Better Angels of Our Nature.
Well, you have all these amazing trends showing positive growth, so violence is decreasing and everybody's getting more education and fewer poor people and so on and so forth.
In all of these wonderful trends, wealth is going up, yet our ability to actually produce these major breakthrough innovations is decreasing despite that.
And that was, to me, the eureka moment, because I found, and with all due respect to Charles Murray, who's a friend of mine, I found that his explanation for this was subpar.
Hubner's explanation for this, well, he didn't really offer an explanation for it.
The explanations I'd seen for this phenomena were subpar.
This, to me...
Wait, what were those explanations, just so we...
Well, okay.
Well, Charles, I mean, I'm not saying they're completely wrong.
I'm saying, for example, with Charles Murray, Charles Murray's explanation is the idea that this represents a kind of values shift away from truth-seeking orientations, which were intrinsic in this thing called neotomism, which was this idea that scientists had in the 19th century.
But when they actually engaged in research, it was a sort of an act of worship.
Uncovering fundamental truths was a kind of a minor revelation.
And God worked through scientists to basically give humans a bigger and better understanding of his works so that he may be revealed in his works and so that the scientists responsible for them could greater attest to his glory.
This was Neo-Thomism.
And it kept scientists on the straight and narrow, because literally among certain scientific circles in the 19th century, to tell lies was considered an act of blasphemy.
So this metaphysics essentially kept these scientists very honest.
And with modern populations, this is lacking.
Modern populations do not consider, they don't consider scientific research to be an act of divine revelation.
They consider it to be an instrumental means to an end, sustaining or promoting their careers.
And this values shift seems to, according to Charles Murray, may explain why societies are less productive.
Now, I'm saying he's right.
That at a sort of epiphenomenal level, because I think the tendency that he is noting there, and I think it's a real thing, is actually a consequence of the decrease or relaxation of group selection.
I think that when you have strong group selection, What you have is you have populations which tend to be more religious, tend to be more group-oriented, tend towards stronger free-riding controls, you know, controls, recreation and maintenance of culture, elements of culture which actually constrain free-riding that curb the impulse to cheat.
Essentially, because cheating breaks groups.
It stops groups from being able to function effectively as units of selection.
So you need these mechanisms in place to keep everyone on the straight and narrow.
And that's what things like Thomism look like to me.
To me, it looked like a group level free rider control to keep the elites on the straight and narrow, essentially, because, of course, truthful inquiry, which yields actual, real, useful, tangible benefits, is more likely to promote group level fitness than the promulgation of a bunch of lies. is more likely to promote group level fitness than the Right.
Right.
But in populations, the situation is getting a bit different because it seems that people are less oriented towards truth.
a sort of platonic or abstract ideal Truth is more relative.
And unfortunately, this culture seems to have tainted modern science.
It's got a liberal dose of this, which is unfortunate to read the works of people like Bruce Charlton to see learned expostulations on this issue of how modern populations, particularly modern scientists, seem to have You have a very nice way.
not to fundamentally truth or it's very nice.
Very, very briefly, I would sort of dive in and say that, and this is why it's so, for me, it's so important to talk about genetics and intelligence, the denial of which I think is literally strangling the very future of our civilization, because what happens is there are disparities among intelligence between groups and at the extremes with genders, because what happens is there are disparities among intelligence between groups
So as I've sort of pointed out before, the female IQ curve is more like a penis and the male is more like a breast, because men are sort of more represented to the extremes, which is why you have more homeless men and more brilliant men and so on.
But I think what's happened is this cause and effect has been reversed.
So it used to be that you had to be really smart to get into college.
And now what happens is people say, well, if we put people in college, they'll get really smart, which is sort of like putting people on a basketball team hoping that they'll get taller.
This is not really what happens.
And so I think, like, I went to three different schools of higher education in Canada, the undergraduate and graduate degree, and there wasn't one of them.
I'm telling you, I don't mean to sound vain, but there wasn't one of them where I didn't look around and say, man, you people just aren't that smart.
And it wasn't just my fellow students.
It was also the professors.
And I think that jamming a lot of people into higher education has diluted the focus that society needs to identify the geniuses.
And it seems to me that the promotion of genius should be one of the central tasks of any civilization because they're the people who make and sustain and grow that civilization.
And that, I think, has been lost in a numbers game and a quota system of just trying to stuff as many people in to achieve demographic representation, regardless of ability.
The result of which is that geniuses are not being identified in universities as a whole and may, in fact, avoid that situation as understimulating.
Yes, and that would be consistent somewhat with Charles's take that essentially the modern environment is not conducive to eminence.
It's not conducive to macro innovation.
The ecology is wrong, essentially, and that's why these rates have declined.
Now, as I mentioned, this is a symptom of group selection, shifting towards individual selection.
This is the distal level explanation for this.
And essentially, we also mentioned that selection favoring the carriers of variants that promote low rather than high ability is also a consequence of this shift away from group selection.
And the way I connect Murray's thesis with the dysgenic model, essentially, is that what is it that's actually...
What is it that's actually suppressing the high ability faction?
Yes, there are ecological processes at work, but also there are fewer of them.
Because don't forget, one of the things these eminent people are capable of doing is creating schools of thought.
One thing geniuses seem to be particularly good at doing is convincing lots of other people of their genius, essentially, and building these large schools of thought which revolve around their personages.
You saw this with many prominent individuals, Einstein, Darwin, etc., who were vigorously promoted in their own lifetimes and who were pushed to the forefront of their intellectual climates, essentially, in which they existed.
They were pushed to the forefront and were given an instrumental role in shaping those intellectual milieus.
Milieu being a better term in climate, perhaps.
But essentially, in modern populations, as you say, even when those geniuses are present, the milieu is wrong.
It's reactive to them rather than synergetic with respect to them.
They're more likely to be sort of isolated and expelled from the academy because they pose a threat to entrenched interests than embraced and incorporated into bodies of thought and academic schools and things.
But also you have less of them.
Well, I think brilliant teachers want to promote genius, but mediocre teachers resent genius because they think that, you know, the Dunning-Kruger effect.
They think they're better at things than they are, and everybody thinks they're fantastic at something until somebody with great ability comes along, and then the average person tends to resent it for revealing their own limitations.
And then there's even the unusual case of...
This has been documented of teachers in giftedness programs, programs which teach teachers how to deal with gifted students.
Coming to the conclusion that because they now know how to teach gifted students, they are gifted themselves.
Right.
Right.
But that's actually happened.
There's data on that.
Well, and this is one of the great tragedies of modern education.
We would really say government education, that in general, the people with the lowest test scores tend to flock towards the educational departments.
And we've handed over our offspring and our young budding intellectuals to be taught in general, on average, By the least competent of those in the intellectual fields.
And that's just got to have an effect.
I mean, I can't quantify it in any way, but it feels like that would just have to have an effect.
Well, I mean, in as much as education actually has an effect on intelligence rather than the other way around, because of course that's the issue of causation, educational attainment and intelligence IQ share approximately 60% of their linkage pruned genetic variants in common, which is quite substantive.
But education will have an independent effect on intelligence.
But again, it's like the Flynn effect.
It's concentrated on abilities which have low heritability and high specificity.
It doesn't affect the G factor itself.
No, and to me, innate intelligence is like physical strength.
There are people who are naturally, you know, Jean Valjean style, going to be physically stronger than other people innately.
But to me, education, philosophy, critical thinking, what could be called the trivium or Socratic methodology or whatever… What that is, is a machine that a human being uses.
And machines are the great equalizer of physical strength.
You know, you see, to lift a whole series of crates takes a huge amount of upper body strength and lower body strength too, I guess.
But, you know, any fat, weak person can drive a forklift and sort of lift up what they need.
And I think that what also has happened is the methodology of critical thinking, of rational thought, and so on.
has declined as less competent people have had to teach less competent students and what the result of that has been is that the methodology that allows native intelligence its greatest scope and allows it to harness its native ability the best has been stripped of that methodology and thus native intelligence is now we have the strongest people.
We don't give them forklifts anymore.
We just ask them to lift by hand and that is a pretty exhausting process.
Yes.
Yes.
Also, it must be said that individuals with particularly high IQ may not benefit from the educational system as a whole.
There's a structured environment in which people are acknowledged.
All I did was fight with people when I was in university.
All I did, because I'm very much Aristotelian, very much objective truth and reality and reliability of sense data.
And so everywhere from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics to politics, all I did was fight.
And then when I got tired of that, I went into the business world.
So, I mean, my personal anecdotal experience conforms with that, though I know that doesn't prove anything objective.
I hear similar anecdotes from people for whom I have solid reason to believe are exceptionally intelligent.
And such individuals report the same thing.
They report adversarial relationships with their peers and their teachers.
They report a fundamental boredom, lack of interest in the curricula, a feeling that the curriculum doesn't challenge them in any meaningful way.
And even gifted education does not seem to mollify these individuals.
They're often far ahead of that as well.
So you get the phenomenon of the autodidact.
And that's a powerful testimony to the fact that when you have a sufficient amount of intelligence, as Linda Gottfriedson says in one of her papers, the world is the world is your oyster, essentially.
It's yours to lose.
You can acquire intelligence.
Through strategic targeting, pretty much any arbitrary body of knowledge you want, as long as you're interested in that particular subject, and you can learn it to a degree where you have an expert level of knowledge of that thing without necessarily having to have undergone any formal tuition with respect to that subject.
So yes, there might be, I'm thinking possibly a A peculiar-shaped distribution in terms of the maximum effect, beneficial effect of intelligence, in terms of the amount you might get out of people, sorry, effective education, in terms of the amount of mileage you might get out of people as a function of IQ level, which...
It sharply drops off above a certain IQ level to the point where you're actually setting up what behavior geneticists call a reactive gene environment covariance.
They do not want to be in there.
They don't want to be in that environment and they will repulse away from it at the earliest opportunity.
Well, and this is, I got out of higher education before the social justice warrior leftist hysteria came in, came in to the point where now, you know, all people do is know how to bring fields to a fact fight, which is not really what you want when it comes to actually learning about the world.
Now, let's just talk a little bit about, we had Dr.
Helmuth Nyberg on the show, and of course he's done a lot of work which says that At around the threshold of IQ 90 or so, once you start to dip below that, hey, you don't get a democracy anymore.
You don't get a free market.
You don't get limited government.
And I think that aspect of things is really important because we are worldwide.
Hovering around a little bit below.
I think this is as of 2011.
I don't know if there's more recent data.
But the last sort of worldwide scan was sort of cooking around the high 80s for IQ as a whole.
And as we see, so the size and power of governments around the world expanding considerably, civil liberties diminishing and so on.
I think we're good to go.
I mean, are we not just spiraling back even to the pre-Socratic era?
Are we going to end up with the ruins of a civilization and people sort of digging around looking for DVDs and avoiding the books?
I don't know.
I mean, where do we end up if this goes on?
Well, we've been here before.
There were civilizations, historical civilizations, Mycenaean Greeks, Roman civilization, Athenian Greeks, in the Cambodians as well, experienced civilizational highs and civilizational lows.
As Oswald Spengler pointed out back in the 1920s, the civilizational cycles proceed in a seasonal fashion.
You have a sort of the spring and the summer Blossoming of civilization.
He's botanical analogy.
And then you have a civilizational autumn and then a sort of winter phase and so on and so forth.
And things start again.
Things come back into bloom, essentially.
The garden comes back into bloom and civilization rises once again.
But it is always cyclical.
And the sort of Spenglerian model of rise and fall seems to be the one that is congruent with the innovation rates data.
Because, again, we can take these metaphysical musings of characters like Spengler.
And what I like doing is I like putting hard numbers to them and saying, well, you've got this basic model here.
How does it compare against the actual numbers?
And we have the actual numbers because we have innovation rates not just going back to the 14th century.
We have innovation rates going all the way back to the Stone Age.
And yes, you can see if you look at the period corresponding to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, a trace of it appears in the innovation rates.
There's a boom in innovation.
Plateau, and then it drops.
4th century AD, which is the time taken by most historians, the point at which the Roman Empire had pretty much mutated into something unrecognisable, by around the 4th century AD, innovation rates in Rome were very, very low.
Innovation rates in the Western world, rather, were very, very low.
And then there was a thing called the Dark Age, which you see in the data.
It's a period of relatively little innovation.
And then it picks up again around the Renaissance.
And it grows and grows and grows to an even greater height by the middle of the 19th century.
And now it's starting to decline again.
So in terms of parallelisms, we're looking at a situation in the modern world that is analogous to the period of Roman history in the early part of the first centuries of the first millennium, essentially.
So sort of year zero to four A.D., And we're looking at a situation in modern populations which is somewhat analogous to that empirically in that we're seeing similar dynamics.
In both cases, we're seeing a decline and fall.
And we look back at the Roman Empire and we see that consistent with this, there was a decline and fall.
It's gradual.
It took a long time to happen, but it did happen.
And a similar thing seems to be happening in the West.
And again, I like to bring this back to group selection and individual selection.
I like to make things very clinical and just look at the distal causes of this.
There are broader climatic fluctuations.
When it comes to the male-female dynamic and these kinds of stuff as well, and again, this is very much speculative, so if you have any hard data, great.
If not, we'll just put it down in the big speculation pile.
But when I was growing up, I was very competitive with my male friends.
But we shook hands after whatever it is we were competing about and so on.
The willingness or the capacity to let individuals fail seems to be a little bit more on the masculine side of the equation.
Whereas for me, at least in my experience, the women tended to be the girls who are more supportive and let's do something where everyone can win and nobody competes and so on.
And that seems to be the case to some degree in kids' education these days because the male influence among daycare teachers and kindergarten teachers and primary school teachers seems to have almost vanished.
Now, I'm not into...
I don't want government programs for anyone to breed, although I do view the welfare state as a kind of disgenic government program which takes resources from the more competent and provides them to the less competent.
But I wonder if the more women participate in public affairs within society, the degree to which that might...
End up in a situation where we don't like to let people fail, which is going to have, I think, a kind of dysgenic.
And I don't mean starve to death in the streets.
I don't mean anything like that whatsoever.
But I'm sort of comparing it to the Ashkenazi Jew thing that I talked about earlier, where the richest people had the most kids and married the smartest women, and there was an upward curve when it came to intelligence there.
And the Jews who were less intelligent tended to have fewer children.
Now, nobody was stopping them.
Nobody was sort of Giving them vivisectional horror shows of amputations or anything to prevent that.
But there was a sort of natural tendency that occurred.
And it seems that as women get involved in politics, as women get the vote and so on, going to some degree with Charles Murray's thesis, though not to blame him for anything that I'm saying.
But it seems that there does seem to be this, well, let's go for security rather than freedom.
And let's shield people from the consequences of their actions rather than let them fail.
And I don't know if there's any data around that or any facts around that or if that's completely sexist speculation.
But my sort of sense is that when you get women involved in a lot of public discussions, there is this fear of letting people fail.
There's this let's, you know, shore up things.
And if the, you know, if the woman chose the wrong man to have kids with, well, let's just give her a whole bunch of money and so on.
And that I can't help but think that there has some of it are just somewhat of a dysgenic effect.
Well, again, these cultural shifts that you're describing, so the breakdown of what could loosely be called traditional gender roles, again, probably has its distal cause in the relaxation of group selection.
Because for groups, it's necessary to maintain And certain cultural controls which affect reproductive ecology within the population.
And based on the way that selection has put these groups together adaptively, the bits of the groups, the extended phenotype of the group hang together adaptively.
So we see a lot of these things we dismiss as tradition and we dismiss as old sort of value systems and things.
But they're actually the perfect values if you want a group.
to succeed in intergroup conflict.
But if there's no longer any ecological stress on the group, then those dynamics will break down.
And you'll inevitably end up with a situation in which, yes, traditional roles, social roles, etc., mores, values, virtue ethics will change in ways which reflect the new normal, which is essentially strong individual level selection.
Are you familiar with something called post-materialism, post-material values?
I am afraid so, but I viewed it as too toxic to stick my brain into any great depths.
So if you've been braver than I and dug into it, please go ahead.
Well, basically post-materialism is a concept which derives from Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
So the idea is with Maslow is there's a kind of hierarchy of needs that everybody has.
And if people satiate their basal needs, such as food, water, etc., That's fine.
They can then move up the hierarchy to another level.
And then they might look to build shelter and they might look to defend or fortify that shelter.
And then they might start looking for mates.
And then eventually you get sort of into civilization where everybody has plenty and everybody has everything and nobody goes for wanting.
But people still want, but they yearn in a kind of, they want in a kind of metaphysical rather than physical way.
And they start getting worried about big issues.
Like inequality and tolerance and things like that.
So Maslow saw those things as being apical values.
Those are the values at the top of the hierarchy.
Now, that thinking has been applied to understand a thing called the values transition, which took place in the 60s and 70s.
It might not have escaped your notice, but society lurched in a profoundly more egalitarian direction circa 1960 to 1970.
And this values transition, or silent revolution as it's sometimes called, because there were no tanks and bombs and things would usually accompany a revolution.
It was just basically a lot of academics and a lot of students getting together and deciding to change the world, essentially.
And that's what happened.
They spread out from academia.
Entered government, entered the education system, etc., and started altering the normative structure of society.
Now, this values transition is very big.
The post-materialist values transition has been documented quite rigorously by people like Englehart and Wellesle and other sociologists studying these secular trends.
And yes, it's a lot of things related to Breakdown of traditional gender roles, breakdown of rigid hierarchies, increasing what Peter Singer would call circles of care or circles of reciprocal concern.
So we've gone from being very focused on ourselves, for example, to being focused on the welfare now of animals, right?
They've now entered into our circle of concern, essentially.
So it's widening circle of concern.
And A lot of these value systems are nice sounding.
It sounds wonderful.
More equality, more opportunity for everyone, more tolerance of differences, more care for animals, etc.
What is there not to like about this?
Well, it turns out there's a sort of a flip side to it.
People have been noticing an alarming increase in the rates of narcissism, for example.
Narcissistic-like personality, extreme Egocentric personality, not necessarily pathological, because pathological narcissists, they lie a lot, they're fantasists, etc.
So these are non-pathological narcissists.
These are just people who are incredibly me-oriented.
And there's another interesting phenomenon first noticed by Barbara Oakley.
She's a fantastic researcher.
She put out a paper in PNAS, one of the top journals, also an edited book, on a phenomenon called pathological altruism.
And what pathological altruism, the idea behind pathological altruism is that individuals can harm other people.
Through acts that they consider to be philanthropic, but actually damage the recipients of that philanthropy.
Now, another thing in codependency, codependence behaviours, codependent behaviours, so enabling substance use in other people, for example.
And there are lots of ways in which modern society seems to enable substance use in modern people through the relaxation of controls on substance use.
That would be another example of a potentially altruistic act, which may have negative consequences in as much as a subset of individuals who have genetic dispositions towards addictive personality.
Or there's the one that pops to my mind as well, which is quite a big issue these days, is in the past, before the welfare state, parents had a very strong incentive to control fertility among the young, basically to wait until they were married before having children.
And now with the welfare state, because the parents would have to pay or there would be a giving up for adoption of the child and there would be a loss of sexual market value for the young woman, maybe even for the young man as well.
But with the welfare state, nobody in particular pays, and therefore there's this relaxation, which seems kind of nice and kind, but is actually quite harmful to the children who grow up usually without a father, and all the negative consequences that come out of that.
So, sorry, I just wanted to mention one of the things that I've sort of noticed in these trends.
The other thing, of course, is self-righteous behaviors.
And these are all coming from the book, incidentally.
So these are all as written.
And self-righteous behaviors.
So these would be behaviours where individuals actually perform acts of philanthropy which are purely designed to make themselves look good.
So virtue signalling, for example, is a term which gets bandied around a lot.
And this would be a very good example of a sort of self-regarding form of altruistic display where the actual altruism doesn't necessarily incur costs upon the altruist.
For example, it's very easy to say, I support open borders, for example.
There are a lot of people in places like Michigan and Wisconsin who actually have to suffer potential negative externalities from this.
And so the altruism in this instance, again this is an example, the altruism in this instance, the costs of the altruism, rather than being borne by the altruist, Such as in the case of classical philanthropy, where the person had to actually give physical amounts of money to charity like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Westinghouse, etc.
Or time, at least, if they're going to go at a soup kitchen and ladle out some soup, there's some time, yeah.
That's right, yes.
So physical investments of capital, time, etc.
Today, all you have to do is hold the right opinions.
You will be rewarded as if you were highly philanthropic, but the costs to your altruism is always costs to altruism.
Nothing ever comes for free.
The costs, rather than being born by yourself, may be born by other individuals.
This, of course, is very topical in the current election.
In terms of how the current electoral dynamic may well represent a kind of rejection of the costs of this form of altruism in as much as it's emanating from a relatively elite group who are not themselves having to pick up the costs of this kind of altruism and pushing it onto other parts of the country which are reacting rationally essentially to this.
Now these would be examples of pathological altruism.
And all of these things are on the rise.
So we've had all these great sort of progressive moments, essentially, where everything is getting better and there's more equality and more expectation of equality of opportunity and more expectation of tolerance and having good feeling towards one's fellow man, that sort of thing, irrespective of who they may be.
That sort of adage has become integrated into our sort of matrix of social interactions.
It's expected that that's how we deal with other people, basically.
But that beneath the surface are these other trends, which are consistent with this breakdown of group selection, where people are becoming more self-interested.
And the altruistic acts, the costs are being pushed on to other people in a way which might be producing externalities for those people.
And this situation is not necessarily a good one in terms of maintaining a baseline level of civilization.
And I'll Preface what I just said with this.
I'm something of a pessimist.
Because I believe that the rise and fall of civilizations is largely contingent upon ecological factors and patterns of extrinsic morbidity and mortality and things like that, there is very little we can do, I think, to avert I think there's very, very little that can actually be done.
And some people say, I know the more sort of optimistic people say things like, well, you've got this idea of gene editing, and you can...
Select for genes and embryos and things like that.
And you can make people smarter this way.
And look, we're finding the genes and surely there's something we can do.
There's all these bioethicists now jumping on this bandwagon.
You know, we've got like Savalescu at Oxford University saying we've got to make smarter, more moral babies.
Let me ask you this.
If individuals really are becoming more sort of self-interested and less groupish and more atomized and there's more social alienation among individuals and less communication between people, more sort of talking at each other rather than trying to find common ground, that sort of thing.
And if there are all these sort of What do you think is going to result from allowing those people freedom of reproductive choice in terms of being able to produce designer babies?
Do you think they're going to produce designer babies which are just going to make the problem worse?
Or do you think they're going to produce designer babies which are going to offset the problem and sort of restore the components of civilization that we had, given that those things are no longer valued under the current regime of individual level selection?
Well, not many people would choose to have babies that would almost certainly grow up to be wiser and more moral and smarter and so on.
I mean, everybody says they want a really smart baby as long as it's like a show trial with trophies in the case.
But in my experience, if you have a child who's substantially better than you are as a human being...
Generally, your impulse will be to squelch that person.
And we know this, of course, because IQ mates with IQ.
I mean, we know this in terms of less intelligent people tend to mate with less intelligent people because they want someone like themselves to mate with.
And they, of course, know deep down that they're going to get a child like themselves, most likely statistically, in terms of the same sort of band of intelligence.
So if narcissism is a significant problem, people get to design their own babies, they're going to end up designing those babies to look like them because they're great.
And so I don't think – and plus, we have to have enough time in Western civilization that at least two generations can occur.
And I don't think we have that kind of time left, given the way that finances are running and debt is running and demographics are running.
So I'm not sure that gene editing is going to be our sepulchre of solutions.
But, you know, we'll see how that goes.
Yes, like yourself, I don't necessarily see it as playing much of a role, if any, actually, in influencing individual reproductive choice, despite the hype and optimism emanating from those who see it as a real panacea.
They see it as having the potential to solve all our problems, and it really boils down to the fulcrum problem.
I think it was what ancient Greek was.
It was Aristotle who said, give me a lever that's long enough and I can move the earth.
I think it was one of the geometrists.
Euclidean?
You something, but I can't remember right now.
One of these ancient Greeks, brilliant ancient Greeks, said, give me a lever long enough and I can move the earth.
The problem is that it's the positioning of that fulcrum.
There is no, in an evolutionary context, there is no absolute basis.
On which any kind of intervention, be it environmental or genetic, which changes the patterns of selection pressure operating on a population.
There's no privileged frame of reference with which all of these decisions can be adjudged in terms of their capacity to actually affect meaningful change.
Because the very act of trying to change who we are constitutionally And this includes social engineering as well, which all it does is set up different selection pressures on a population.
So the very act of trying to change who we are through melioristic social policy or through direct genetic intervention, the very act of doing that changes the position of that fulcrum, you see?
It changes the location of that fulcrum.
And it means you can never get a real pivot effect.
Because the very act of changing these things simply alters the selective pressures.
Yeah, this is the public choice theory, which says, okay, we only have 5% poor people, so we only need to apply funding to 5% of poor people, and then we can make it.
But the problem is, as soon as you start applying funding or giving money to poor people, guess what?
You get a whole lot more poor people because people on the edge are going to make that choice to become poor, to get the money.
And as soon as you touch it, it's not like a paintbrush.
You get to just apply the colors you want.
It is like water.
The moment you touch it, you've changed it.
I want to say thanks so much, Dr.
Woodley, for a fascinating conversation.
I hope we can do it again.
We'll put some links to your materials below.
Do you have anything coming up that you would like people to know about and keep their eye out for?
Nothing that's coming up.
We have a monograph looking at this group selection model and looking at not just reaction times, but also measures of working memory and vocabulary usage across lexical databases and things, which will hopefully be published in the next year or so.
So maybe look out for that, but be warned, it's a very technical book.
It's not a fun read.
If my eyes don't go squiggly with equations, I just don't feel like I'm doing my job.
So thanks again so much for your time.
I really, really appreciate it.
For those who don't know, this is like a masterclass in contemporary intelligence research and so on, which Dr.
Woodley is kindly giving away for free.
So I really, really appreciate that.
I'm sure the listeners will as well, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
