How We Know That Humans Are Getting Smarter [Excerpt]

In this excerpt from his new book, James R. Flynn explains how he came to understand how our minds have gained in cognitive skills over the 20th century

By James R. Flynn

Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, by James R. Flynn. Copyright ? 2012 James R. Flynn. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Image: Cambridge University Press

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Reprinted from Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, by James R. Flynn. Copyright ? 2012 James R. Flynn. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

The phenomenon of IQ gains has created unnecessary controversy because of conceptual confusion. Imagine an archaeologist from the distant future who excavates our civilization and finds a record of performances over time on measures of marksmanship. The test is always the same, that is, how many bullets you can put in a target 100 meters away in a minute. Records from 1865 (the U.S. Civil War) show the best score to be five bullets in the target, records from 1898 (Spanish-American War) show 10, and records from 1918 (World War I) show 50.

A group of "marksmanship-metricians" looks at these data. They find it worthless for measuring marksmanship. They make two points. First, they distinguish between the measure and the trait being measured. The mere fact that performance on the test has risen in terms of "items correct" does not mean that marksmanship ability has increased. True, the test is unaltered but all we know is that the test has gotten easier. Many things might account for that. Second, they stress that we have only relative and no absolute scales of measurement. We can rank soldiers against one another at each of the three times. But we have no measure that would bridge the transition from one shooting instrument to another. How could you rank the best shot with a sling against the best shot with a bow and arrow? At this point, the marksmanship-metrician either gives up or looks for something that would allow him to do his job. Perhaps some new data that would afford an absolute measure of marksmanship over time such as eye tests or a measure of steady hands.

However, a group of military historians are also present and it is at this point they get excited. They want to know why the test got easier, irrespective of whether the answer aids or undermines the measurement of marksmanship over time. They ask the archaeologists to look further. Luckily, they discover battlefields specific to each time. The 1865 battlefields disclose the presence of primitive rifles, the 1898 ones repeating rifles, and the 1918 ones machine guns. Now we know why it was easier to get more bullets into the target over time and we can confirm that this was no measure of enhanced marksmanship. But it is of enormous historical and social significance. Battle casualties, the industries needed to arm the troops, and so forth altered dramatically.

Confusion about the two roles has been dispelled. If the battlefields had been the artifacts first discovered, there would have been no confusion because no one uses battlefields as instruments for measuring marksmanship. It was the fact that the first artifacts were also instruments of measurement that put historians and metricians at cross-purposes. Now they see that different concepts dominate their two spheres: social evolution in weaponry?whose significance is that we have become much better at solving the problem of how to kill people quickly; marksmanship?whose significance is which people have the ability to kill more skillfully than other people can.

The historian has done nothing to undermine what the metrician does. At any given time, measuring marksmanship may be the most important thing you can do to predict the life histories of individuals. Imagine a society dominated by dueling. It may be that the lives of those who are poor shots are likely to be too brief to waste time sending them to university, or hire them, or marry them. If a particular group or nation lacks the skill, it may be at the mercy of the better skilled. Nonetheless, this is no reason to ignore everything else in writing military history.

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