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

HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 281

As described in chapter  6, cognitive systems evolved to deal with
deeper structures in experience. Learning is much more than a mirror
refl ection of the outside world. It captures the subtle depths and struc-
tures behind it that furnish predictability. Knowledge also includes
emergent aspects that have not been directly experienced. Th ese are the
cognitive structures that make familiar prob lems predictable and solv-
able. Th e Raven tests are widely accepted as tests of “pure reasoning” (i.e.,
of individual reasoning strength or power, detached from experience).
But, as explained in chapter 3, they simply mea sure the extent to which
cultural tools of text management and the like have been assimilated by
some individuals more than others. It is not that others cannot deal with
that kind of trick prob lem; they are just not used to such prob lems.
It is a relatively simple matter to illustrate how human t hink ing arises
in a cultural context. Consider the case of multiplication in what is, to
most of us, simple arithmetic. It emerged as a cultural tool thousands of
years ago; we all now use it to some degree in our thinking; and its
development in children is well described in Piaget’s studies. Children
generally develop the concept of addition from direct experience, for
example:

3 + 3 + 3.

Th at concept is one of “empirical abstraction,” as Piaget called it. We can

presume that it was pres ent in early humans. But the refl ective abstrac-

tion generated from communication with others in a group turned it into

the concept of multiplication:

3 + 3 + 3 = 3 × 3.

So, as Piaget insisted, the entire history of the development of mathe-
matics from antiquity to the pres ent day may be considered as an exam-
ple of the pro cess of refl ective abstraction. But that was only pos si ble
through the mind sharing of cultural dynamics. He showed how the cog-
nitive demands result in new syntheses vastly extending individual pow-
ers of calculation and predictability.
A long tradition of research, especially in child development, has
revealed an almost universal dependence of reasoning on background

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