Flynn says the Flynn effect is because we get abstraction now

Are we getting smarter? Flynn says not at birth, but instead, we are getting more abstract.

In the 20th century, greater ­educational possibilities combined with technological advances introduced abstract thought into daily life. It takes, for example, a high degree of abstract thinking to operate a mobile phone or computer. People became better at IQ tests and, steadily, the scores rose. So IQ scores are meaningless unless their date and social norms are taken into account. This leads to Flynn’s grandest and most fervently held view — that a lack of social awareness leads inexorably to folly. Indeed, the penultimate chapter is a list of 14 examples in which science has failed because of social blindness. Low-IQ people, for example, are not more prone to violence and, contrary to widespread assumptions, no clear link between nutrition and IQ has been found.

In spite of all that, Flynn himself emerges as a tough-minded, somewhat crusty but very humane character. I have seldom ­finished a book wanting to meet the author, but I want to meet Flynn
The abstract, scientific imagination can simply seem foolish when ­confronted with more concrete ways of thought. Flynn includes one hilarious conversation between a western researcher and some isolated rural ­people in Russia to demonstrate the abyss that lies between the concrete and the abstract. The researcher tells them there are no camels in Germany so how many camels do they think there are in B, a specific German city? “I don’t know,” is the answer. “I have never seen German villages. If B is a large city, there should be camels there.” These people aren’t any less intelligent than the researcher — their minds just work differently. They focus on the practicalities they know rather than hypothetical possibilities.

The implications of this explanation are startling. In the US, for example, the death penalty tends to be forbidden for culprits shown to have an IQ of 70 or less. The assumption here is that IQ is like a social security number: it stays with you through life, always saying the same thing. But — and Flynn seems to have spent a good deal of time ­testifying in American courts to this effect — ­everything depends on when the accused was tested.

Over time the tests are recalibrated and, as people seem to get better at them, they necessarily get harder. The number is in a constant state of flux. As Flynn puts it, IQ is not a number; it is a message. The resulting variations will be matters of life and death. The legal system remains baffled as to how to deal with this.

The misuses and misunderstandings of IQ tests can be very dangerous, and not only in the limited realm of judicial executions. They are neither culturally nor temporally neutral, so no simple ­figure should be taken on trust — but that is exactly what racist interpreters of the figures have done. Flynn’s interpretation overturns one of the most ­dangerous myths of IQ research — that blacks have been shown to be fundamentally less intelligent than whites. With what seems to me to be a series of cast-iron statistical analyses, he shows that this has, in fact, never been proved and that the logic on which it is based — “this steel chain of ideas” — is flawed. What the evidence actually shows is that racial differences, once all external factors are removed (primarily the social and cultural context of the testees), seem to be almost undetectably small.

The same seems to be true of gender differences. Flynn savages the research involving university students over ­several decades in Britain and America as being hopelessly — though not ­deliberately — biased against women in its sampling. Current signs of women’s IQ rising should be similarly explained if they can be seen as a correction based on improved sampling.

The developing world, which still registers very much lower IQs than the developed world, need not worry. Flynn points out the mean IQ in America in 1917 was 72; it is currently just under 100. His effect is fast-acting.

But, as he repeatedly insists, this research is in its infancy. There is much more work to be done and much of what has been done in the past has been distorted by delusions and ­preconceptions, also by various forms of censorship. “When you suppress an idea,” booms Flynn in the book’s last paragraph, “you suppress every debate it may inspire for all time.”