The history of humanity in the last 3 centuries could be summarized as an evolution of our most primitive desires towards a state of rationality, we have gone from using the physical and manual use to using the intellect as the main tool for economic, social and cultural development. The workers of the eighteenth century were mostly peasants and then had been part of the manufacturing sector with the emergence of the industrial revolution. Today, the sectors with the greatest growth are related to the field of technology, information, and ideas.
I conceive that one of the problems that most affect the human being today is sedentarism, our work no longer demands the use of our body to perform an action, only our intellect. That burden of the use of our body has been released mostly in first world countries with the use of machines and robots. Intelligence and efficiency demand almost exorbitant levels in the labor fields that today we dedicate millions of resources to the machines to replicate it, and apply it to tasks where the human being was efficient to achieve them in a shorter time.
This new market demand has had a negative effect on some indications that human intelligence, which has accompanied those needs during the twentieth century with remarkable growth, has declined substantially.
The evolutionary process of evolution with the passing of generations is known as the "Flynn Effect". Human intelligence is a very complex phenomenon, and it is difficult to assess the extent to which through tests the intellectual performance capacity of an individual is calibrated. But, with all their limitations, the tests have a methodology that allows a comparison in time and have resulted in increased human intelligence. For example, Flynn observed that from 1938 to 1978 there was a substantial improvement in the score of intelligence tests of about 13% in the United States.
However, a study conducted in Norway by the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research shows that, based on the results of 730,000 intelligence tests from 1970 to 2009, those born after 1975 show a decline in intelligence in those tests of about 7 points less than the passage of a generation.
Flynn also observed this drop in test results in Great Britain. In 2008 a large number of 14-year-olds were tested in 1980 by other boys of the same age, and the result is a drop of more than two points.
Why has human intelligence risen appreciably from decade to decade during the three-quarters of the twentieth century, and declined from the last two or three decades of it?
The first trend with positive results is attributed with different elements such as a better balanced diet, which would have allowed a better intellectual performance, to be less prone to diseases, or the development of material culture, which demands greater treatment with knowledge, more stimuli and greater interaction with people, which is Flynn's own main explanation.
What, then, would explain the correction of the last half-century? Some studies attribute this decrease in human intelligence to mainly environmental and customary causes. In particular, the latter, has emerged a completely new way in which new generations consume culture, in the last 60 years we have shown a rapid development in the way in which human beings consume knowledge, if in the past we read books, now we see summaries of 10 minutes of that book on youtube. We dedicate more time to other areas such as the consumption of banal content and we dedicate less time to the exercise of reading.
Reading requires a greater intellectual effort and is the firmest path towards the conception of complex and abstract ideas. If this phenomenon had a clear incidence of average intelligence, we could be faced with a real problem that has not yet been grasped in all its dimension, since there is a boom in audiovisual communication that does not stiffen the left hemisphere of the brain that is responsible for the processes of reasoning, the use of logic and memory (hemisphere that is stimulated by reading). On the contrary, it is in charge of stimulating the right hemisphere of the brain which is mainly in charge of emotions, feelings, and creativity. Therefore a conclusion to this problem could be that the lack of stimulation of the left hemisphere among people has resulted in a decline in the development of intelligence.
There is another alternative that proposes a solution to this problem. Flynn in a book called IQ and the wealth of nations finds that there are substantial differences in the results of the intelligence tests (IQ) of the different countries. In first place are the Asian countries, followed by some European countries, Canada is the first country in America, with the United States in second place on the continent. If we read the index from the end, we see Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and the countries south of Rio Grande.
Therefore, the correlation between economic factors and the results of intelligence tests cannot be ignored. It is logical that better levels of intelligence are found in more developed countries because they have access to much safer and more accessible health care, they have free access to information and they have better diets. In their jobs, workers are required, as I mentioned earlier, to be able to handle information and ideas with the use of logic. In the poorest countries, on the other hand, there are no such factors as health, a healthier diet and even the area of work in these countries are devoted to more traditional sectors such as manufacturing, cultivation, among others.
Could the arrival of immigrants from poor countries have contributed to this correction in intelligence levels?
This theory seems to have created more confusion within the scientific (and political) community than it really was an answer to the problem. As I mentioned earlier there is an element in the economic, social and cultural development of a country that explains in a very simple way the development of intelligence levels from the beginning of the twentieth century. However, in The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein demonstrate the opposite by conducting a United States-wide study of the different levels of IQ of Races, in which they analyzed different populations of different social strata by ethnic groups, they found that there is a better result in IQ with respect to different races. However, the hobbies of these same people were also studied, where it was found that people of color tended to spend more time consuming audiovisual media and doing sports than Caucasian people who dedicated part of their time to audiovisual media but more to reading and studying.
This shows that the great boom in audiovisual consumption and the fall in reading are worrying elements that should be taken seriously. We have already seen how governments use these media to brutalize and manipulate the population.
The importance of human intelligence lies in the fact that it is the last resource of development and is a key factor for the strength of society against the manipulation of power.
NOTES:
- What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect
- The Bell Curve
- https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289617302787
- http://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674
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