Ranges of Intelligence
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
~ Arthur C. Clarke
In my work I meet people from more or less every conceivable background. My current position in law is such that yesterday I was defending a down and out beggar on a charge of assaulting a police officer, and yet today I am advising an engineer on the legal implications of his contract with a local council. Tomorrow I'll probably be pleading that a loan shark shouldn't take some lady's Mercedes. Now, I don't pretend that the background of a person determines their intelligence, that is clearly wrong, but such varied exposure to different areas of society does present a wide view. What never ceases to amaze me is the variety of intelligence displayed by different people.
I'll quickly define my meaning of intelligence: "the ability to perceive the meaning and implication of one's surroundings."
It really can be anything from simply understanding a legal concept upon explanation to conducting an intelligible (even interesting?!) conversation. It's about understanding the effects of actions and the meanings of static concepts. I'm no closer to defining it am I? My definition, in short, attempts to define intelligence by reference to perception, rather than 'knowledge' or 'wisdom' ('wisdom' seems to me to be 'experience' applied to 'perception').
The question, then, is how does it happen? I have some vague idea how evolution works. I've studied it, thought about it, and examined it in nature about me. I have a great deal of difficulty in understanding how it accounts for the vast chasm between, on the one hand, someone who does not see the causative link between spending money and finding you have none left, and on the other, someone who can describe the rules of our very existence with algebraic equations.
Or, the person who doesn't understand that if you hit someone, they'll hit you back, compared to Sun Tzu. Paris Hilton compared to Aristotle. George Bush to Einstein.
It's the bell curve, right? But what, is the church tower the size of a city?
I think the answer may lie in a continuation of a debate I posted a while back, namely that evolution has been surpassed by humanity.
If humanity was still governed by natural evolution then stupidity would be slowly eliminated. Humanity would tend to greater and greater intelligence. Instead, something quite different is happening. It isn't evolution, but it still follows some of the same patterns. It seems that now the stupid will copulate with the stupid, and the intelligent likewise. But both have a similar chance of survival - and crucially, both chances are high enough to sustain their respective populations.
BUT, as the stupid copulate with the stupid, and the intelligent copulate with the intelligent, the bell curve gets wider and wider. I think that sinice the dawn of civilisation this process has been accelerating, and it will continue. In the end it may well be that a new classification system is required: sub-human; human; super-human. And the 'human' category will thin out and eventually disappear as its remnants tend to one side or another.
Could it be that humanity is coming to dividing point? Will the castes split?
posted by Matt McGrath at 5:18 am
2 Comments:
Intelligence as capacity to grasp meanings and implications sounds like intelligence chiefly as capacity to interpret, to understand, etc. I would include that among three others: (1) to form an object, conceive, form an impression, objectify; (2) to judge, represent, or express, to measure, qualify, correlate, etc.; (3) to interpret, infer to a concept or a perceptual implication or a hypothesis or etc., and (4) to recognize, corroborate, verify, to infer to a judgment.
The difference between (3) & (4) is that between, on one hand, meaning, value, good, and, on the other hand, validity, soundness, legitimacy, etc.
One interprets according to standards of value, relevance, etc., and, given one's finite knowledge and changing conditions, but given also one's unvegetable-like capacity to learn," one also checks one's interpretations to some extent at least, rather than leave that task to evolution which could otherwise penalize one for a wrong or inopportune interpretation by removal from the gene pool. So evolutionary lessons can be learnt without sacrifice of oneself and in the course of one's own lifetime and mental "evolution." The tendency of humanity is increasing culturalization and artifice; to process everthing into cultural products, including ultimately ourselves. We seem on course to take over the tasks of evolution in increasingly radical ways. I've no idea whether this will lead to divergent speciation or what sorts of products of this process will end up at the steering wheel(s)! Maybe not quite the eating of the fruit of that second tree in the Garden of Eden; but not so utterly remote from such an act either.
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