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What is intelligence? The tiger and the spear.
In a previous blog I made three points. The first was that our society (and societies before us, back to the Neolithic era) have prospered because they built cognitive artifacts; things that help us think. The list stretches from the invention of writing...possibly our most important cognitive artifact...to Google and the Global Positioning System. My second point was that in any society an intelligent person is one who knows how to use those cognitive artifacts. The third was that "artifact" does not necessarily mean ''physical artifact." The term includes culturally developed ways of thinking and problem solving. Mathematics is as much of an artifact as a computer is. (For those who are familiar with their work, Lee Roy Beach and Jerome Bruner have made the same point, but they use the term "paradigm" to refer to a non-physical artifact.)
I then said that ever since the Neolithic era people have been getting smarter, simply because society accumulates cognitive artifacts. To illustrate, I said that a student who understands modern elementary statistics is, in my sense, more intelligent than the 18th and 19th century founders of statistics, such as Gauss and Galton, because the student can solve problems that they could not. And that's were I got thoughtful objections. One writer put the objection very well..
The writer said "Would you say that a man with a spear is smarter than a tiger?"That is a pretty good analogy for my argument comparing Gauss and Galton to a modern statistical student. l. The objection forces us to confront an important distinction about intelligence.
The man with the spear is not stronger than the tiger biologically, but he is stronger ecologically. (And a man with a rifle is even stronger.) The spear or rifle bearer is far more likely to shape the environment to suit his needs than is the tiger.The same thing is true of intelligence. If you mean by "intelligence" a biological capacity for information processing, then most of our modern sophomores are probably not geniuses, even on a historic basis. (I want to hedge a little bit because the modern sophomore is probably healthier than the typical twenty-year old 200 years ago, and that will affect the central nervous system.) On the other hand, if you mean by "intelligence" a capacity to solve statistical problems then the modern sophomore is probably more intelligent than Gauss etc., and is certainly much more intelligent than the typical student of mathematics in Gauss' day.
The contrast between the biological and ecological view of intelligence is mirrored in our modern theories of intelligence. There are two major theories today. One, most ably expounded by Wendy Johnson of the University of Edinburgh and Tom Bouchard, of the University of Minnesota, postulates several dimensions of intelligence; most prominently a general problem solving factor, followed by similar dimensions defined by the ability to deal with verbal or perceptual skills, and an ability to focus attention. One of the strengths of this theory is that it can be mapped onto discoveries of brain mechanisms related to performancel along each of the dimensions. This is not a small thing, especially when you are talking about intelligence in the sense of a biological capacity.
The other theoretical model, developed first by Raymond Cattell and then ably expanded by John Horn (both deceased) divides intelligence into Fluid Intelligence, by which they mean the ability to solve new problems, and Crystallized Intelligence, which is the ability to use previously acquired knowledge, including knowledge about problem solving, to attack the problem at hand. If you take an ecological view of intelligence...as an educator or human resources director well might...the Cattell-Horn model may often be the way to think about things.
Moral of the story: Theories are useful guides to action, not absolute truths to be discovered. The sort of theory you want depends on what you want to do with it. This is a very different view from the view that theories should compete, to determine which is provides the most parsimonious mathematical account (e.g. accounts for the most variance) in a data set. I believe that the "competition" model for choosing theories makes a lot of sense within the biological and ecological views of intelligence, but not across these two world views.
What do you think?
