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

“Joe and Rita had three children, the three smartest kids in the world.  Vice President Frito took 8 wives and had a total of 32 kids. 32 of the dumbest kids ever to walk the Earth.  So maybe Joe didn’t save mankind, but he got the ball rolling, and that’s pretty good for an average guy.” – Idiocracy

It’s better than the “Girls Gone Wilder” picture featuring Kardashians.  They don’t shave nearly often enough.

Again, a single 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 Civilization and 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 the interview can be found at I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part One.  The final part of the interview can be found below, and I’ll admit that cutting the interview down from 9,000+ initial words to the two published pieces was difficult, as you can imagine some great comments from Dr. Dutton had to hit the cutting room floor.  That makes me sad, but I hope you enjoy the gems below.

I heartily recommend the book, and get no compensation if you buy it.

As before, any errors in the interview below are solely mine.

JW:  Is there an optimum I.Q. level?

ED:  Well that’s an interesting question.  We touch on that in the book.  The problem is that high I.Q. isn’t inherently good.  What’s good from an evolutionary perspective is to survive.  If you are putting energy into having a large brain and having a large I.Q. that’s energy you’re not putting into being aggressive and having big muscles.  In certain ecologies that’s better for you to do that, to have the big muscles and the aggressiveness.  You’re actually less likely to survive – intelligence doesn’t help you.  You’ll die.  Intelligence is not selected for.  Intelligent genes will pop up by random mutation and they just won’t get selected for.  What’s happening now clearly is that there’s a negative correlation of about 0.1 among women between I.Q. and how many children you have and so what that inherently means is that there must be an optimum I.Q., because above the optimum you’re not having children.  There’s something to do with the environment-gene interaction.  That means you don’t breed.

JW:  So essentially you’re less fit for the environment . . .

ED:  They’re less fit for this zoo that we live in.  Even if we were living in a zoo there’s some evidence that very high I.Q. is a bad thing.  It correlates with things that are inherently bad in some ways like autism, being easily overstimulated, allergies, and not being very instinctive and therefore not really wanting to breed.  And if you’re an outlier in I.Q. you have difficulty talking to most people and dealing with them because you find them so stupid and facile.

JW:  One of the things I’ve noted from the data is that “higher I.Q.” [that’s in quotes] professions you end up seeing occupations like judge and engineer. There seems to be a cap of around 130 I.Q. or a little bit above 130 I.Q.  You didn’t see so many of that greater than 130 fraction showing up as judges, attorneys, or engineers.  In fact they ended up working in much less “high I.Q.” jobs . . .

ED:  As the I.Q. gets higher, the positive manifold between the different components of the I.Q. battery becomes weaker and as a consequence of that at the very high level they have very, very high g, very high intelligence, you can be absolutely crap at things which only weakly correlate with intelligence like social skill.  And this then will of course preclude you from climbing up the social hierarchy.  This is, I suspect, why the correlation between income and I.Q. is only about 0.3, 0.4.  With education it’s about 0.5.

JW:  Looking at the fate of civilization is as we head into winter, what are your thoughts on timescale?  Is there a minimum societal I.Q. beyond which the center cannot hold?

ED:  That’s hard to say because it’s never happened before in a way that we can measure it.  If you look in the book, we’ve got those graphs where we compare the collapse of our society, and the difference with us is that we’ve got so much further because of industrialization and we’ve got past the contraception.   What we know is that in terms of our linguistic I.Q., we’re back at the level that we were in about 1600.  That’s where we come back to from a peak [vocabulary] in 1850.  Now we’re back to 1600.  The factors that make that an overly simplistic comparison is that first, the standard of living was much worse in 1600.  That’s going to make people more violent and more impulsive.  Secondly, we’ve gotten high in extraversion – we’ve been selecting for extroversion for a long time, which makes people adventurous and risk taking.  So, we’re not like 1600 in that way, but that was when we were last at this level of vocabulary.  There has to be some clever person you could get to do mathematical modeling of how this works, we could calculate what the boost is to our behavior patterns by the level of, say, low child mortality.  We can probably calculate that.  Then perhaps we could make an estimate, ideally better than guesswork, but I’m sure you could find somebody, maybe my colleague Emil Kierkegaard.  I imagine he might be able do something like that.  Once I.Q. starts to decline at the genetic level, which is definitely happening, then this sets off an environmental decline as well.  It’s a cascade effect, a snowball effect, because once I.Q. is declining then you can’t teach kids as well, the teachers are of low quality, the conditions are of low quality.  Then you have this environmental effect so you will push things down quite quickly.

JW:  When you talk about the Flynn Effect being having the potential to have arisen from environmental factors that means it could go away within a generation.

ED:  Well yes, if you think about what the Flynn Effect is underpinned by, this capital that we’ve built up is almost like a catapult.  I was in an interview once, and the interviewer used this metaphor:  it’s like a catapult that’s given us momentum and once we run out of that that momentum means that we can just do these little micro interventions but there’ll come a point where that momentum will run out. And when that runs out then it will undo everything quite quickly because we simply won’t be able to do things that we used to be able to do in the past.  We can’t do Concord anymore or go to the Moon, but there’ll be other things we won’t be able to do, and so it’ll collapse quite fast. That’s why I suspect it’ll collapse into war quite fast.

JW:  Nothing can stop it because even if you have some sort of smart fraction left the vast majority of people have dropped so much.

ED:  Exactly. So it reminds me that this concept they talk about in global warming research of a global dimming.  They say that it’s pushing the temperature down.  It’s causing this effect which is which is actually keeping it less warm than it would be and that once that goes then the temperature will spike up very, very, quickly.  That’s the theory anyway.  There’s this idea that there’s this effect: all these micro innovations are creating this better environment where we can control more things which is masking the evidence that should be there of us getting stupider and stupider.  When that goes then the sudden stupidity will hit. If we were suddenly put in Darwinian conditions overnight, our inability to cope would be quite extraordinary in comparison to that of previous generations, even my grandparents’ generation, because we’re so totally protected from having to think.

JW:  When you look at altruism as a whole do you think that it might be the big enemy of intelligence?

ED:  It depends.  That’s quite a complex question because if we think about group selection then it was as a consequence of us having relatively high altruism and cooperativeness that we were able to develop farming.  And farming selected for intelligence, because it pushed out those that were too stupid to be able to farm, that had such short time horizons they couldn’t farm.  In a direct sense altruism was the friend of intelligence.  But then on another level you would argue well it’s altruism that’s stopping people from introducing eugenic policies, stopping people from getting rid of the welfare state which definitely promotes low I.Q. as my colleague Adam Perkins showed that there’s no question about that – it does cause people who are lower I.Q. to have more children, and stopping people from stopping low I.Q. immigration.  You could argue, perhaps, under Darwinian conditions maybe altruism is the friend of intelligence to some extent, because under Darwinian conditions we’re under group selection and the group that is internally altruistic although externally hostile will survive.  But once you get to non-Darwinian conditions then what tends to happen is that the levels of stress are so low that religiousness, which people become more religious when they’re stressed, the religiousness collapses and religiousness tends to promote ethnocentric attitudes that tends to promote focused altruism.  Your altruism is only focused on your own group and not to outsiders because they are the devil.  Once that collapses, then you have a generalized altruism and that would seem to be perhaps in an indirect sense the enemy of intelligence.  Actually, altruism does correlate with intelligence weakly.  People who are intelligent and who are altruistic because they are better able to reason through, not where you instinctively know how someone will feel that – that’s empathy, but they can reason through how someone else might think and they can solve social situations better.  Thus there’s a weak relationship between the between altruistic behavior and intelligence.

JW:  So for intelligence, perhaps an optimal level of altruism might resemble the Spartans then? [chuckles]  Entirely an in-group focus extraordinarily trusting of in-group, but even your own offspring are outgroup if they don’t meet your specifications.

ED:  Yes possibly. But the problem was with the Spartans was that it was taken to such an extreme and that they were almost like Nazi Germany. I mean they were they were so unfree that perhaps there wasn’t sufficient space for people to sit down and be creative.  Because part of being a genius and coming up with an original idea is that you have a moderately antisocial personality combined with very high I.Q. in an environment where it’s awfully conformist like that and those people perhaps didn’t cope well. So that there’s an optimum there as well. I’ve got a book that’s just come out called Churchill’s Headmaster:  The Sadist Who Nearly Saved the British Empire and it does what it says on the tin.  It’s about Churchill’s prep school headmaster.  Anyone that knows anything about Churchill knows that his prep school headmaster was this evil sadist and I show that he’s not.  He’s actually a jolly nice chap and it’s Churchill that’s the evil sadist.  If Churchill had had more time with this headmaster then maybe he would have been molded into more of a gentleman.  Now that system of public schools like Eton was deliberately and consciously modelled on Sparta.  Everybody knew that Sparta was the way forward.  Plato said that the upper class should never know their parents.  It wasn’t as bad as that.  But for nine months of the year that you wouldn’t see your parents.  There was a degree to which the Victorians got the balance right because look at the growth of the British Empire.  It got the balance right.  It made basically militarized the upper class but it was sufficiently open to nonconformists that geniuses could develop.  I wonder if Sparta was just too far, too conformist.

JW:  Versus some of the ideas that came out of Athens.

ED:  Perhaps those ideas were ideas that came along once Greece was in decline.  That’s what happens. The best idea, the original idea, all that critical thinking . . .  that comes along in the autumn [of a civilization-JW].  Same with Victorian England. Science and whatever. It’s in the autumn of civilization that these things tend to flourish.

JW:  You mentioned that as well with Islam and Rome, that the best ideas came in their autumn.

ED:  That’s when you’re engaged in critical thinking, but by the end of autumn you’re critiquing everything and you take it too far and you destroy everything, including the things that hold society together like militarism and religion and . . . just everything.  Nothing is sacred.  When that happens then there will be people for whom things still are sacred.  We see this now with the Muslims who are more ethnocentric, more motivated.  So the desert tribesmen creates the city and it becomes decadent and the new desert tribesmen invades.  This is the problem we have.  I look at this in my new books Race Differences in Ethnocentrism and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers.

The only problem is I’m afraid I can’t think of a solution, neither myself nor my colleague Michael Woodley of Menie can think of an adequate solution to the problem of declining intelligence and so we are kind of resigned to this idea that it’s that there is an inevitable cycle.  It’s in the nature of things.  I was thinking that it could be something to do with human survival itself.  If we get too intelligent then we get too low in kind of basic instincts and violence and these kinds of things.

Therefore we can’t survive.  It’s like humanity somehow regulates itself, with the invention of contraception for example, such that intelligence never gets too high that humanity dies out.  You probably get this with other animals as well.  All of them are probably going to go in cycles. There are probably periods of time where frogs were more intelligent than frogs are now.  There was probably a period of time when frogs were less intelligent.  Not within a large range, for frogs.  I think it’s probably the same with humans.  Humans will go through these periods of high and low and ultimately the species survives.  That’s evolutionary perspective.  That’s the important thing.