Many mornings after I get back from the gym I sip on a "mocha" (french press coffee instead of espresso), read my email, google news, social media, and watch random YouTube videos for a few minutes. YouTube gives me a selection of videos based on what it perceives as my interests. Sometimes it is correct, sometimes it isn't. Through an obscure chain I have been getting Jordan Peterson videos (I don't recommend). Mostly I ignore these, but I did watch one the other day where he was talking about intelligence. Peterson seemed to think the notion of intelligence was well understood and could be measured with IQ tests. I had a professor who, when asked what an IQ score meant, said that an IQ score measured what you scored on an IQ test.
Jordan equated intelligence with what IQ tests measure. But there are other definitions. In popular culture we have "book smart" and "street smart"". Most odd to me is Donald Trump's apparent definition. He summarized it speaking about Xi Jinping, China's current dictator. “He runs 1.5 billion people with an iron fist. Yeah, I think he’s pretty smart. And they have a chain over there. If you’re a dummy, you get left here,” he said, gesturing low. “It’s like a pyramid. The smartest one gets to the top. That didn’t work so well recently in our country.” Both Peterson and Trump think they know what intelligence is and they know who has it. Of course that divides the world into two camps, smart people and not smart people. That, in turn, allows all the cruelty we inflict on the "others".
In a way, Peterson and Trump agree. They each take as markers of intelligence a measure that applies within their cultural environment. IQ tests have been criticized for being strongly associated with a particular culture. This disadvantages those outside that culture. The first IQ tests were developed to predict how successful a child will be in school. In a school system developed within and for a culture, those who are part of the culture will have an advantage. Using an "IQ" test designed in a different culture/environment, each child's score would be different. In a hunter gatherer culture what would an IQ test look like? Plant identification? Tracking? Endurance? Trump's measure of intelligence is power and money (the two are fungible). Money truly is a marker of fitness within a commercial society. Both Trump and Jordan seem to be so embedded in their own particular environments that they cannot envision different ones requiring different skills.
Book smart indicates scholarly success. Street smart indicates the ability to thrive in urban environments. In creative environments, "talent" is an analogous notion. In high school I had a friend who was brilliant at making things. He had an engineers notion of intelligence. Once he told me, while holding a borrowed object, that the person who understood the most about how something was made and operated should own it. Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dali Lama, embodies intelligence in a compassionate, more spiritual environment.
Evolutionary biologists are usually pretty careful not to associate evolution with any notion of progress, intent, or direction other than generally increasing complexity. Cyanobacteria have existed on earth for over three billion years. They are responsible for the oxygen rich atmosphere on that makes our life possible. Cyanobacteria live basically everywhere. They are genetically diverse with at least 150 genera and over 2500 described species. Each species survives in its own particular environment. On land they live from Antarctica to hot deserts. In water they are ubiquitous, living in oceans, lakes, and rivers. They live solitary and in colonies. It doesn't make any sense to speak of one bacteria species as better than another, or more advanced. Each is simply, uniquely, and beautifully adapted to its particular environment.
We are a single species and the notion of race is a social construct. Real, strong, and dangerous, but a socially constructed notion. The real differences are more broadly spread. Take a random group of ten people from anywhere, it could be from across the world or at a family reunion. In that group you will find large differences in emotional, physical, and intellectual tendencies. I don't think anyone has an answer to the blend of nature/nurture that causes these differences, but they certainly exist. I suspect this broad range is adaptive. Humans live in social groups. Depending on the surroundings, one set of tendencies maybe better adapted than another and different personalities will end up thriving. In a situation filled with immediate threats, the more adventurous and danger seeking among us will thrive. In a situation of stability and wealth, scholars, artists, and engineers will thrive. In both of these cases, the human race is more likely to survive because of this diversity of tendencies.
We live in our environment, but we also construct it, just as the cyanobacteria constructed our oxygen rich atmosphere. Unlike the bacteria, we can think about the world we want and deliberately move to create it. This is an individual ability, but more importantly it is a collective ability. As social animals we can decide as groups how we want to live and what we want the world to look like. We exhibit personality and thought tendencies, perhaps from birth, but these are just tendencies. Depending on our situation we repress some tendencies and work to enhance others to fit better with our surroundings. The human environment is largely social, our culture. Cultures are an aggregation of individuals complete with agreements both legal and informal. There are rewards for acquiescence and punishments for transgressions. Individual changes affect how others relate to us as an individual. Larger cultural changes require communication and agreement of more people and oftentimes changes to formal consensus such as laws. Culture changes all the time, sometimes accidentally through the zeitgeist, sometimes deliberately through popular movements or propaganda.
If we can deliberately change our social environment, our culture, then we leave the world of evolutionary biology behind and can introduce notions of human progress, human direction. Humans now control the planet and are causing a sixth great extinction of other species. We can continue to act largely through individual greed, ignorance, and accident or we can learn explicit cultural intent. I hope we can do this with a long view of the future to ensure our great, great, great, great grandchildren live fulfilling lives in a world they love.
How should we change our world? Each of us has to decide this for ourself, then try to find and persuade others to think and feel likewise. Not just find others, but a set of others whose span of collective intelligence is large enough to affect almost everyone. Not just find and persuade, but engage in collective action to create change.
