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Are We Of The USA Getting Stupider?

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

I worked for local governments, primarily small cities, for most of my working career, and amongst my duties was to act as the cities’ risk manager relative to their participation in a cooperative local government self-insurance program. Thus, I notice things such as curb heights not within the standard range, construction sites not properly guarded, and other sources of liability exposure for which local governments often pay.

While walking through Ixtapa, Mexico in 1997 I noticed a large hole had been excavated in the street, apparently to repair a sewer collection main. The excavation was completely unguarded. No warning signs nor barricades warned folks of the hole. I remember thinking of the liability exposure that such an unguarded excavation would present the cities for which I worked. It was then I realized one important difference between Mexico and the USA. Similarly, I have often noted here that the conditions of sidewalks here in Xalapa, and in Merida, require one to engage in “purposeful walking”, as the sidewalks include such defects for which the injuries of even a stumbling drunk would be indemnified in the USA.

Due, largely, to development of case law related to tort claims in the USA, things must be made “idiot proof”, as a state department of transportation engineer once put it, as must be made the process of constructing those things. Thus protecting the stupid and careless from their stupidity and carelessness. Please understand I do not exclude myself from either category. I have committed many stupid and careless acts during my life which, but for dumb luck, rightfully should have been my end.

Sometime after my Ixtapa visit it occurred to me that folks in the USA, in the aggregate, are becoming stupider, and were becoming so for two primary reasons. One, all of the safety rules were preventing the selection of the more careless and less intelligent from the gene pool; and, two, TV. The purpose of TV is to serve as a sales medium, the programming intended to simply hold folks’ attention between commercials. To appeal to the widest market TV must aim for the lowest common denominator in is programming, thus the steady decrease in programming that requires thought from the audience.

I have shared this theory with friends, somewhat in jest; but to this point have not broadcast it. I should note that the theory is based upon absolutely nothing but the intuition of this aging hippie, whose ideas are often greeted with a rolling of the eyes.

This week a gringo who lives in my apartment building six months of each year returned and brought me a book he thought I might enjoy, Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Diamond, a “professor of physiology at UCLA School of Medicine, began his career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography.”

Diamond, in the book, seeks to answer a question posed to him on a New Guinea beach in 1972 by Yali, “a remarkable local politician”. “Why is it”, Yali asked, “that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Cargo being the New Guinea reference to tools, medicines, consumer goods, and the other products of more developed technology and economies. Thus the purpose of Diamond’s book, to answer Yali’s question.

My gringo neighbor was correct. I find the book fascinating, though I have thus far plumbed only its first fifty pages, so don’t yet know Diamond’s answer to Yali’s question..

Early in the book, Diamond, in explaining his perception that folks in New Guinea “impressed me as being on average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is”, writes:

My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.

It’s easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.

Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or 0 have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern Euroopean and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the supeerior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.

That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. Certainly, there is no hint at all of any intellectual disadvantage of New Guineans that could serve to answer Yali’s question.

This aging hippie is feeling a bit smug.

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