I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part One

“Number one, we’ve got this guy, Not Sure.  Number two, he’s got a higher I.Q. than any man alive.  And number three, he’s going to fix everything.” – Idiocracy

This will be the only meme today . . . more on Wednesday!

Dr. Edward Dutton is the co-author of At Our Wits’ End, which I’ve reviewed in two previous posts here At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilizationand here At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy).  Dr. Dutton was kind enough to allow me to interview him, and the first part (of two, I believe) of the interview is below.  I heartily recommend the book, and don’t pretend to be unbiased about my opinions – I sent Dr. Dutton a copy of the transcript prior to publishing and he made very few edits, mainly corrections of typographical errors as a result of the transcription.  How embarrassing is that, right?  I’ll note that any errors in the interview below are mine.

John Wilder (JW):  What led you to the study of genetics, civilization and intelligence?  

Dr. Edward Dutton(ED):  Serendipity, really.  I was interested in religion.  I did a Theology degree and Religious Studies doctorate.  And then I got to know various people that were studying intelligence such as Richard Lynn. And it was through them, reading their research that the importance of intelligence dawned on me, and the importance of genetic factors.

When I did my degree, every Humanities department in the U.K. 20 years ago, a bit less, said everything is about environmental causes. You don’t even look at genetic causes at all.  When I did my doctorate I mentioned something about this to my thesis advisor and he said something along the lines of, “Oh well no that’s good. You don’t need to think about that. That’s what scientists think about: you’re anthropology and religion.” It’s as if he was saying, “You know . . .  you just have to produce something within the bounds of the dogmas of the Church. You know it’s not up to you to think outside those.”  It was a bizarre thing to say and I didn’t really realize the full significance of what he was saying at the time, until much later. He was exactly saying:  “You don’t think outside the tent you know, dangerous thinking.”

A lot of the theories that I was espousing and that I was writing didn’t make sense and I could never quite put my finger on why they didn’t make sense. Why was it that some people were more religious than others when the environment seemed to be the same?  Was it just coincidence?  Was it just some minor alteration in the environment?

And of course, I realized that when I discovered that there was a strong genetic component to religiousness, about 40 percent of the variance:  then suddenly everything started to make sense, everything I experienced when I was an undergraduate at the Christian Union. You have Campus Crusade for Christ in America. You’ve heard of them?

JW:  Yes. 

ED:  A little bit like that, evangelical group on campus and the university I was at, Durham, which is a kind of mini-Oxford really.  There were loads and loads of them – a third of my corridor – 15 people, in my first year were fundamentalist Christians.  Fundamentalist by English standards, not by American standards.  What was so interesting was that there was this certain social demographic.  Understanding the genetics of it made it make sense and this made me question more things that I’ve been told. And suddenly I came across intelligence research and that’s how it happened.  And then I started meeting other people that were researching the same thing and getting to know other people.  And then you realize you’re actually researching something genuinely interesting.  It’s controversial and it’s a bit taboo but that’s in a sense, that’s what makes it interesting.

JW:  That’s what really shocks me about the [subject of intelligence], is the controversy.  Because as you lay out very well in your book, going back into the 18th century. [Even then] it was clearly thought that this would be the case, that within humanity, intelligence would be selected for.  In the 1950s [C.M.] Kornbluth wrote about it in the short story The Marching Morons (LINK – you can read the story here) almost exactly word for word.  The movie Idiocracy laid it out as well.  So number one it makes sense. Number two it’s been thought of before.  So what’s driving this controversy?

 

ED:  Well I guess it’s the fact that since the War [World War II – JW] anything that relates to genetics has become taboo.  Once that’s happened then people can virtue signal and thus attain status by making it even more taboo and more taboo and more taboo. And so they can find whole new areas that they can make taboo in order to virtue signal and you end up with a situation where these Humanities departments are basically just teaching dogma – teaching quasi-religious dogma rather than anything that’s scientific. And you’ve had this split between the Humanities departments and social science departments and the science departments, although even the science departments are infected by this. But it’s less easy to become infected because they are more quantitative. They have objective standards.

JW:  The War. I think that is a good point because I certainly think had an impact. But in the 1950s, for instance, going back to the C.M. Kornbluth story The Marching Morons – no one even batted an eye when that was published up in the 1950s.

ED:  I think it’s a slow process. It probably sped up in the 60s.  In the 60s, late 60s there was a linguistics expert.  He did this study of linguistics and variation between classes and he showed that working class people, he didn’t dare look at intelligence, because by then that was taboo.

But he talked about the way they talk, and he said the working class people talk to their children in a qualitatively different way from middle class people and their way of talking, the working class people, doesn’t encourage the kids to think.  Whereas middle class people they talk to them more and they ask them questions and they use higher order vocabulary and it encourages them to think. And so you end up with this growing gap in achievement between the classes.  The researcher was just pilloried for that, just for that, and that wasn’t even touching on intelligence overtly.

When my mother was at university in the 70s, Marxism was de rigueur so on that you just couldn’t discuss intelligence differences between classes.  That was out.  And so I think it started with the War. As these crazies, these leftist equality cult kind of ideologies, become more and more powerful then intelligence research has become more and more difficult to pursue in a reasonable environment and particularly then with regard to issues such as race and sex and less so perhaps, class now.  But even so there was a British psychologist, Adam Perkins, who wrote something he didn’t even look at intelligence – he daren’t look at it – he looked at personality.   He showed that there’s a different modal personality between classes and that it’s highly genetic and he was absolutely pilloried for that.  People at the academic journals refused to review his book, The Welfare Trait, I cited it in At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means For the Future.  And just for that.  As you may have read in At Our Wits’ End, we went further and we said, “look it’s intelligence that underpins this.”  It’s become awfully taboo and you get brave people occasionally like Herrnstein and Murray in 1994 who came out with The Bell Curve and you get this strong reaction because it’s cognitive dissonance.

People have taken on a religion, really a kind of quasi-religion, which they know on a certain level is not empirically accurate or at least they can’t prove it. And when you confront them that triggers them and they go a bit mad.

JW:  I think part of it is the framework that we’ve been set up with. One of the things I noticed where I was doing some early research, for me, on intelligence is when I went to Wikipedia.  I looked at intelligence of nations versus national wealth.  Wikipedia had a table of national I.Q.s and I was shocked.  I was just utterly shocked because I had had this assumption that, you know, plus or minus let’s call it 10 points, that everybody would lay out the same given that IQ isn’t a function of schooling, it’s a function of raw intellectual capacity. But yet here this table that laid out something that was very different and it led to Dr. Lynn (I.Q. and the Wealth of Nations) but now I go back to Wikipedia and that table is completely gone.

ED:  Wikipedia is increasingly corrupted by the left.  That’s the terrible thing about it, it’s increasingly the go-to source for students.  There are lazy academics, they think, “I’ve got to do an article (for a journal – JW)” and they’re told in their peer review, put something in on, let’s say, intelligence. What they’ll do is go to Wikipedia and the things that are cited in Wikipedia will then be cited by them without citing Wikipedia.  But then that means that the leftists that are controlling Wikipedia are literally influencing proper academic knowledge.

JW:  The [National I.Q.] table is gone and there’s a map there, and the map that shows various gradations of color indicating the average I.Q. in various nations.  And I thought to myself, I thought, well you know if there is a problem with Dr. Lynn’s data then why wouldn’t you go and get better data?  But no one seems to have done that.

ED:  They have.  There’s a colleague of mine, David Becker, he’s a spunky German fellow.  And his website is View on I.Q. (LINK) and he has redone all of Lynn’s calculations.  Lynn was an elderly man (he’s eighty-nine now) and he was elderly man even when he did [his original work] and there’s various mistakes.  [Becker] redid it and he put all the information online so if anyone wants to have a go at it and say it’s inaccurate they can see exactly what’s been done, exactly what the maths is.  He [Becker] found that the correlation between Lynn’s calculations and his was something like point nine eight.

It’s constantly updated so whenever our research group discovers a new I.Q. study we put it on.  I’ve just got new I.Q data today from South Sudan, for example. I’m going to write up a study probably sometime this week on this I.Q. data, and it’s looking like the IQ is like 60. [JW note:  View on I.Q. indicates the global average I.Q. is 82.  Scary.]

This map is from View on I.Q. (linked above).  You can see one that is quite similar on Wikipedia.

JW:  When you look at society as a whole the first example in your book was the Concord, and the irony is a couple of weeks previous to that I had written in my blog about the SR71 jet, which was 18 months between funding and flying, and I don’t think we could do it within six or seven years today.

I just I just found that stunning that we’d lost that capacity.  Then I thought about something I’ve thought about for actually more than a decade. If you look at the American Founding Fathers, you had a George Washington, a John Adams, a Ben Franklin, and a Thomas Jefferson all born about 1750.  That same year as your 1750 A.D. maximum societal I.Q. [as discussed in the book]. And these people came from a population less than that of San Antonio.  I hate to say it but if you compare them to the politicians available today, I mean . . .

ED:  No I don’t think Trump is a Thomas Jefferson.  He has many qualities about him but he’s not exactly Thomas Jefferson. No that’s true.  The I.Q. was obviously higher. And I suspect, I don’t know if this can be provable, but I would suspect that perhaps at that time the I.Q. of America was perhaps even higher than the I.Q. of England because you were under more intense selection pressure so you have these people that went to Jamestown, you had entire populations that just died out.  You were under selection pressure. I would say you were under group selection with the Native Americans and so on which we weren’t to the same extent in Europe.

JW:  There was an additional selection, not selection pressure but self-selection for people who are adventurous enough to strike out across an ocean.

ED:  Yes, that’s true and openness correlates with I.Q. at 0.3.  So you have that element as well.  Voluntary migration is correlated with I.Q.  You’ve got that probably the religiousness of the Americans in comparison to the British . . . you are more religious than us even now. Your attendance rate at church on Sundays is about 40 percent.  In England it’s about 7 percent. And I think that that’s no coincidence. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s a genetic legacy.  That’s one of the things that harsh selection selects for . . .  is ethnocentrism and thus religiousness because religiousness often goes in parallel with ethnocentrism.

I think the founding Americans were a select British population. You don’t want to be British. But you are. And therefore you can’t help having certain British characteristics but they’re select characteristics of the population from which you came. But I think you’re quite right. I think it’s because what you’ve got is the difference in the average I.Q. and the smart fraction. That’s quite a separate issue.

And you get some societies such as Japan where the average I.Q. is high but the standard deviation is narrow.  And so even though they have an average IQ that’s higher than us they have a smaller smart fraction than us. They don’t have many outliers.  That’s why we’re ahead of them in terms of innovating the Industrial Revolution, because they just don’t produce geniuses. We Europeans do.  So there’s two elements to it.

There’s the smart fraction and then there’s having sufficient organization of the population to be able to do something massive like the moon landing or the Concorde which is undermined by having a low average I.Q. lots of little things going wrong. So in India . . .  they’re very clever they’ are some very clever people in India. India is so genetically diverse. India has a smart fraction it has some people who are very inventive and can do brilliant things. But the problem is that the I.Q. of the country is so low that it is very difficult for them to achieve something that’s complicated where you can rely on everything going exactly right. Whereas Japan could definitely do something like that, but the problem is it probably wouldn’t have people that would innovate the inventions.

More next Monday . . .