Are we getting more stupid? Human intelligence through history: Andrew Kenny - Biznews

Andrew Kenny questions whether human intelligence is declining, comparing modern education, literature, and achievements to those of our ancestors. He explores possible causes, from genetic changes to lowered educational standards, arguing that while brainpower might not be deteriorating, our expectations and demands for intellectual rigour certainly are.

Andrew Kenny

Is the human race becoming more stupid? Much evidence points that way when you look at the works and thoughts of our ancestors and compare them with our own.

Is this because human brains have physically degenerated or because our education and upbringing have become less demanding? Why are the works of Shakespeare, written over four hundred years ago, judged to be so superior to any modern literature? (A minor point, which doesn’t matter: they weren’t written by Shakespeare, who was an illiterate corn merchant and part-time actor but, a major point, they were written by a person or persons of genius, over four hundred years ago.)

The music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart has never been excelled or even approached by modern composers. Does any modern painter have the creative genius of Titian, Rembrandt or Caravaggio? (I am told some moderns do have their technical skills; Paul Emsley, who grew up in South Africa, is an example.) There are a lot of stupid politicians in the modern world (Trump and Harris, Boris and Starmer: dear, oh dear!) and a lot of excellent science, but it could be that neither phenomenon has been caused by brain power or lack of it. Probably the best people to look at are children, and we should compare their abilities now and in the past.

I am looking via YouTube at a little book in an ornate cover. Inside are pages of sonorous prose, written in English, Italian, French and Latin, in beautiful italic handwriting, without a single error or correction. It was written by a 12-year-old girl in 1545. She was Princess Elizabeth, later to become Queen of England. At that age, she could also read and write in ancient Greek.

Enormously more demanding
Or consider the 1898 exam for 11-year-olds applying for entrance to King Edward’s School in Birmingham. (I have got the full exam question paper and can send it to anyone who would like to see it.) It has questions on English grammar, geography, Latin, English history and arithmetic. I doubt if anyone at our universities now could pass it – even if it were adjusted to South African geography and history and the metric system rather than the imperial system. It is enormously more demanding than anything at modern schools.

It is true that Princess Elizabeth had an elite upbringing and King Edward’s was an elite school. But compare her scholarship at twelve with that of modern royal children, or standards at elite schools in 1898 with them now. There is no doubt that standards were far higher in the past. I don’t think it is because children are born with inferior brains now, but because teaching demands are lower. In the last fifty years or more there has been a dreadful “dumbing down” in education and a spectacular increase in “grade deflation”, where more and more pupils get As for easier and easier exams.

When I was in England in the 1970s, one of the newspapers discovered that an Ordinary Level (O-Level) exam question of the 1950s had been re-set word for word as an Advanced Level (A-Level) exam in the 1970s. A Labour politician has suggested that school children should no longer be taught the times table because some of them find it too difficult. The appallingly low level of achievement for most South African children is caused mainly by appallingly bad teachers, thanks to ANC education ministers and SADTU. (Some of it, though, is actually caused by damage to children’s brains from malnutrition.)

All my own schooling was in South Africa, at Fish Hoek schools. I matriculated in 1965, and my degrees were at UCT. I was a schoolteacher in maths and science for one year in South Africa in 1971, and then for four years in England after that. One of the years was at a comprehensive school for boys (working class boys) in Coventry. There in front of my eyes I saw standards dropping and some of the reasons why. England in the past had grammar schools, where entrance was based on merit, not wealth or class. A poor but clever working-class child could get a good education and advance himself socially and professionally.

Dreadful comprehensive schools
The socialist Labour government ended all that, and made all working-class boys go to dreadful comprehensive schools, to which Labour ministers never sent their own children. I asked a senior teacher in Coventry if he would ever send his own children to the school he taught at. He replied, “You must be joking!”, which is exactly the attitude of SADTU teachers in South Africa. The school was obsessed with equality rather than excellence. It had begun with ten streams, divided on academic merit. The headmaster changed this into two bands. His final aim was to reduce all separation by merit and have all abilities together in one single group.

The Russian teacher told me that when they had streams, he could get about 20% of the boys to get a school leaving certificate in Russian. With bands, it went down to 10%. If all the boys were taught together, he would not be able to teach Russian at all. The socialists removed division by merit and replaced it with division by class and wealth; wealthy, middle-class parents moved into areas with richer, better schools, and sent their children there. Education in South Africa is similar, and so standards go down and down for the majority of our children.

It is rather difficult to measure brain power. In some fields, such as art, music and literature, you can measure it by achievement. The artists, composers and writers of the past produced better work than those today. This could have been just because of the fashions and culture of different ages, but maybe brainpower had something to do with it.

Incomparably higher level
I notice that in the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), not only were the words and arguments of Abraham Lincoln at an incomparably higher level than those of modern political leaders, but so were those of generals and even common soldiers on both sides of the war. “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”, said General Sherman in 1864, after the most decisive battle of the war. Robert E Lee, explaining his reasons for joining the war with the South said, “Save in defense of my native state (Virginia), I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword.”

In some fields, noticeably science and engineering, there have been enormous advances, easy to measure. But that does not mean modern scientists and engineers are cleverer than those of the past. Advance could have happened even if they had become less clever. Isaac Newton’s words about his own astounding achievements are famous: “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” (I’m afraid there is an uncharitable explanation for this remark. Newton, I think the greatest scientist of all, was a thoroughly nasty person, spiteful, jealous and vengeful. So was his older contemporary, Robert Hooke. The two scientists hated each other with childish ferocity. When they thought their utterances would become public, they exchanged oily, over-polite compliments, but often they contained toxic cyphers. Hooke was an unhealthy man crippled with a bent spine, which gave him a dwarf-like appearance. Newton’s use of “giant” might have been vicious sarcasm.)

Unpleasant certainty
A mediocre scientist of today can advance a field pioneered by a great scientist of yesterday. My own physics is poor, which I discovered with unpleasant certainty in my physics degree. But if you put me in a time machine and sent me back to the USA in 1942 among the brilliant physicists working on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, I could take a year off its development and have the bomb ready by 1944 instead of 1945. This is simply because I have learnt from them.

The human brain is really a language machine (the frontal lobes, I mean). When we descended as apes from the trees in East Africa, we were physically no match for predators and much too slow to catch prey. We survived only by teamwork, planning and strategy, all of which required better and better communication and co-operation, which required advanced language.

Our brains enlarged and improved to master language, and as a by-product, it seems, they became better at reasoning and deduction, at toolmaking and engineering, and finally science. So a measure of brain power must be proficiency in language. And sure enough, most modern schoolchildren are far less proficient than those of the past. Many British schools have given up even trying to teach French and German, let alone Latin and Greek. In South Africa, the best linguists are black. Most black South Africans can speak and understand five or more languages, and seem able to pick up new ones easily. Afrikaners are better linguists than English-speaking whites, who are worst of all. I am particularly stupid at languages, and with my university degree I feel somewhere in my self-esteem inferior to a black man without matric who is fluent in five languages. Do blacks have better brains than whites, or it is simply that they need to know many languages and English whites do not?

Indicators of success
Another measure of brain power is IQ. Jordan Peterson, the popular psychologist, says that this is the best indicator of success in life, but I don’t know how he measures success. I don’t know the significance of IQ. A South African friend has the highest IQ, 185, ever found in a man. (An American woman had an IQ of 186.) I’ve lost touch with him, but he was a nice man, although unexceptional. He did seem very intelligent but not remarkably so, and was quiet and thoughtful in his manner. He never amounted to anything very unusual and never seemed to have any desire to do so. For a long time, he was a house husband, looking after his young daughter while his wife brought in the money. He produced occasional interesting studies on this and that, which went unnoticed. He was entirely honest about his IQ, never boasting about it but never hiding it. He reckoned Einstein’s IQ was probably about 160, 25 points behind his own.

Einstein’s maths was not exceptional either. What were quite exceptional were his piercing insights into the nature of nature and his tremendous powers of concentration. I wonder if IQs today are lower than those in the times of ancient Greece, 2,500 years ago. My guess is they might be.

For most of human history, survival was precarious and depended on strength and skill. A clever, skilled hunter or toolmaker was more likely to survive and have children than a stupid, unskilled one. People were selected on brains. Two trends have probably interfered with this selection. Today, in the welfare state, survival does not depend on ability alone, or even ability at all. The welfare state provides for the stupid as well as for the clever. It even seems the case in developed countries that the richest, most successful people have fewer children than the poorest and less successful. This is probably at the heart of declining population growth in rich countries. Natural selection for humans has not only stopped but gone into reverse.

The other trend was that parts of the world, Europe in particular, advanced not because of higher IQ but because of historical circumstances. IQ tests consistently show that Asians have the highest IQs, followed by Europeans, followed by Africans. But for centuries after about 1500 AD, Europe advanced far more rapidly than Asia, and in fact colonised large parts of Asia. The Chinese, with higher IQs, were conquered by English people, with lower IQs.

Natural selection
The Jews are a special case. They have the highest IQs of all. Here it does seem that natural selection played a big part. In Europe for centuries, Jews, the most discriminated-against people in history, were barred from all professions except for those requiring the most brain power, such as in finance. The cleverer the Jews, the more likely they were to survive and have children. Of course, their disciplined culture, their tight family life and love of learning would have had an enormous influence on their success. Again, how much of their achievement is due to their IQ and how much their culture is difficult to say.

If we are becoming more stupid, does it matter? I don’t think so. Our cleverer ancestors have already developed all the science, engineering, technology and politics needed to bring about a decent, healthy and prosperous world for everyone. To achieve this, we don’t need to be brilliant but just sensible, honest and kind.

There is no reason to believe that Queen Mary of England was any less intelligent or had any less rigorous education than Queen Elizabeth, her younger half-sister. But Elizabeth brought prosperity and religious tolerance while Mary brought disaster and bloody religious persecution. The reason is that Elizabeth was wise, decent and sensible, and Mary was not. We just have to imitate Elizabeth, even if we haven’t got her brains.

Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/2024/10/13/human-intelligence-history-andrew-kenny

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.