james flynn is in town, and gave a talk today on his famous flynn effect, on which he has built most of his career (incid: one of the big downsides of being a chinese scientist, it's awful if you find something big and want to name it after yourself. the ng effect, for example, doesn't quite have the same ring to it). his oft-cited observation is that iq scores have risen astronomically over the past century (if you've read any of the hernnstein and murray bell curve nonsense you'll know this) -- to get an idea of how dramatic this is, the average child today would have scored higher than 97% of kids in 1900 on numerous standardized intelligence tests (and i don't know about you, but considering what the average kid is like nowadays, that's kind of frightening to me).

this gain is extremely hard to explain -- the stupid wikipedia article goes for "improved nutrition, a trend towards smaller families, better education, greater environmental complexity, and heterosis", all of which flynn shot down during the talk. his big idea, and this is apparently quite new, is that it's not spearman's g-factor that's increasing (which jibes with ones experiences in the real world, see above), but that kids are thinking differently than they used to 100 years ago. that in the early 1900s, it was far more important for children to think concretely, whereas since then, abstract and categorical thinking has become a norm and a necessity. example: what is the similarity between a dog and a rabbit? concrete answer: dogs chase rabbits; abstract answer: both mammals. and while this is probably patently obvious to any grade-schooler now, the creeping influence of scientific lingo and paradigms of thinking had not yet begun several generations ago, and people apparently just did not think in the same way.

it's a more elegant explanation than the usual gene-environment interaction hokum that biologists pull out of their ass when asked the question (which gene? a combination of many, not all of which have been identified. which environmental characteristic? go ask the sociologists.), so even though it seems at least partially faulty (don't the pre-scientific revolution staples of religion and superstition live or die by symbological thinking?), i can live with it until something better comes along. plus: he's a wonderful speaker, allergic to powerpoint and projectors in the way that professors emeritus* usually are, preferring to stand at the front of the lecture theater, wave his hands, and hold the room in thrall.

* professor emeriti?