Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- Preface to the expanded paperback edition
- Acknowledgments
- 1 A bombshell in a letter box
- 2 Beyond the Flynn effect
- 3 Towards a new theory of intelligence
- 4 Testing the Dickens/Flynn model
- 5 Why did it take so long?
- 6 IQ gains can kill
- 7 What if the gains are over?
- 8 Knowing our ancestors
- 9 The art of writing cognitive history
- 10 About GUT: the grand unification theory of intelligence
- 11 Howard Gardner and the use of words
- Appendix I Tables
- Appendix II Declaration in a capital case
- References
- Subject index
- Name index
8 - Knowing our ancestors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- Preface to the expanded paperback edition
- Acknowledgments
- 1 A bombshell in a letter box
- 2 Beyond the Flynn effect
- 3 Towards a new theory of intelligence
- 4 Testing the Dickens/Flynn model
- 5 Why did it take so long?
- 6 IQ gains can kill
- 7 What if the gains are over?
- 8 Knowing our ancestors
- 9 The art of writing cognitive history
- 10 About GUT: the grand unification theory of intelligence
- 11 Howard Gardner and the use of words
- Appendix I Tables
- Appendix II Declaration in a capital case
- References
- Subject index
- Name index
Summary
It is a wise child that knows its own father.
(Homer, The Odyssey, i, 215–216)Everything is what it is, and not another thing.
(Bishop Joseph Butler)Even those who believe I have provided a coherent interpretation of massive IQ gains over time may wish for something better. The fact that the differences between our minds and those of our ancestors are subtle only makes the task of reading them more difficult. If only we could get into a time machine and go back and study our ancestors directly.
Colom, Flores-Mendoza, and Abad (in press) may have given us the next best thing. They did a study of children aged 7 to 11 years in Brazil. They compared an urban sample from the city of Belo Horizonte (tested in 1930 on the Draw-a-Man test) with both an urban sample from that city (tested in 2002) and a rural sample (tested in 2004). Over seventy-two years, urban children had gained 17 IQ points, but the contemporary urban–rural gap was even larger at 31.5 points. Present-day urban children and rural children were also compared on Raven's Coloured Matrices and the WISC Arithmetic and Digit Span subtests. The urban–rural gap was 31 IQ points on Raven's and 15 points on the WISC. The rural children came from Americaninha, a district without hospitals, banks, postal service, and TV (only 8 percent of homes have electricity).
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- Information
- What Is Intelligence?Beyond the Flynn Effect, pp. 170 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007