Introduction to a discussion of intelligence

Hello everyone:

I'm Earl (Buz) Hunt, and I've been studying individual differences in cognition since (shiver) the 1970s. I'm going to try to start a discussion going about inttelligence, i.e. individual differences in cognition. In this blog I'll introduce my ideas and hope for some comments. Subsequent blogs will discuss topics as they come up.

First, shameless self promotion. If anyone is interested in an expansion of my ideas beyond a blog they (my ideas, not the person interested) can be found in HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, by Earl Hunt, published by Cambridge Press in 2011. End of advertisement.

Now the first pithy message. A few years ago, in that eminent scholarly journal CALVIN AND HOBBES, Hobbes, a tiger, observed that he was not impressed by humans for they had no night vision, couldn't smell worth a darn, their claws and teeth were jokes, and as for beauty, humans don't even have tails.

Hobbes was certainly right. The attractive stars of the movie AVATAR would certainly have looked silly without tails. But how come humans are overpopulating the globe and tigers are an endangered species?

A lot of the answer lies in our ability to invent and use cognitive artifacts. These include the two big ones, literacy and mathematics, where the beginnings can be traced to 3000 years ago or more, and the truly new ones like the smart phone that we can use to summon up maps, releiving us of a lot of the need to orient ourselves "in the mind's eye" as we move through unfamiliar territories. In these blogs I am going to expand on this theme. I will argue in subsequent blogs that being intelligent is very much a matter of being able to use the cogniitive artifacts available in one's society. This suggests that (a) individual intelligence has a large cultural component, although it also has a biological basis, and (b) that societies, cultures, and nations can be said to differ in intelligence because different societies, cultures, etc. differ in the cognitive artifacts that they have available and how they are used.

Thought question for the day: My approach would lead us to conclude that a successful student in INTRO STAT is in some sense smarter than Gauss and Galton, because the student can solve problems that baffled mathematicians in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Is this reasonable?