Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

PRETEND INTELLIGENCE 97

from stock, inventorying, pricing of deliveries, and so on. As with most
established workplaces, the dairy had a set of evolved regulations, shared
concepts, work procedures, and instruments. But unlike programmed ro-
bots, workers exhibited a vast adaptability and variability in their prob-
lem solving. Th ese unsung cognitions improved the speed and effi ciency
of the business in meeting the wide range of specifi c orders and delivery
targets.^31
Anyone with experience in workplaces will recognize such creative
cognition as the norm. Indeed, most people could prob ably come up with
examples from other contexts, from managing public ser vices to manag-
ing a group of children, and their complex ever- changing needs, in the
home or classroom.
I recommend quietly watching two or three children playing around
a sand and water table in a play group. Dwell on the complexity of inter-
change and communication and what kinds of brain activity are called
for. True cooperation like that demands a huge leap in the complexity of
cognition. In even simple tasks like jointly moving an obstacle, each
individual must operate while taking into consideration the viewpoints,
thoughts, and feelings of others. Th ey must anticipate others’ actions and
or ga nize their own thoughts and actions to coordinate with them, all
rapidly changing in seconds or even milliseconds. Yet the same children—
all good enough for the highly complex cognition and learning in most
social life— may well have starkly diff er ent IQs.

THE FLYNN EFFECT

Another strange revelation fl ies in the face of the idea that IQ mea sures

fi xed potential or complexity of cognition: the steady rise in average IQs

over generations. James Flynn, one of the fi rst to report this phenomenon,

reminds us how average scores (maximum score 60) on the Ravens test

in Britain, for example, gained 27.5 points between 1947 and  2002. Th e

same applies to other popu lar tests, such as the Wechsler and the

Stanford- Binet, in every country where rec ords exist.

Th e phenomenon remains puzzling to IQ testers, because it could not

be due to ge ne tic or other biological changes. Th at would be equivalent,

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