James Flynn || Nature, Nurture, and Human Autonomy

on the podcast. Doctor Flynn is Professor Emeritus the University of Otago and a recipient of the University's Golden Medal for Distinguished Career Research. In two thousand and seven, the International Society for Intelligence Research named him its Distinguished Contributor. His TED talk on cognitive and Moral Progress has received two point three five million visits. His latest books include Are We Getting Smarter? What Isn'telligence? How to Improve Your Mind?

And most recently, Does Your Family Make You Smarter? Nature Nurture and Human Autonomy. Thanks for chatting with me today, Jim. Yes, that's a good list. You've certainly done a lot into your career. I tried to, you know, my basic home is moral and political philosophy. And while I have written those books on psychology, I published quite a bit in the philosophy area. I published a book called Fatan Philosophy,

which gives you my personal view. And I'm just sending to press a book entitled Homage to Political Philosophy, which is designed how to instruct students into a love of philosophy. Yes, and so you made a joke once that you kind of vacation in psychology. So what got you interested in? So I became emotionally involved, particularly because of the race issue. Yes, So when was that? When did you first start getting involved?

And you left the United States? So you had an academic post in the US, and you left and went to New Zealand. During the McCarthy period, my politics were considered unpalatable and I came to New Zealand where they were more normal. And that was in sixty three and I've been here ever since. So I often visit the States.

I was writing a book on moral philosophy in about nineteen seventy eight, and I wanted to include a few a section on how to deal with those who held racist ideals, And at that time I discovered the work of Arthur Jensen that, as someone who was clearly not a racist, that sheer evidence showed that blacks had on average worst genes for IQ than whites, and I thought,

oh well, I'll look into this, and expanded into a chapter. Well, of course, it expanded into a whole book Race IQ and Jensen that as I found that his case was far more articulateidential than anything I had expected, and so I began to research around it and to learn, and finally proposed an alternative that the gap between black and white i q's environmental. And then, as you can imagine, Jensen fired back, and I fired back, and away we

went for thirty or forty years. Well as to how I got into psychology, of course, some of Jensen's arguments in favor of a genetic gulf between black and white involved the concept of g or the general intelligence factor, and this led me to examine it, and I found it wanting as a basis for the theory of intelligence. So much of my work over the last forty years

has been trying to clarify the theory of intelligence. There is just now an article online which is by me for the journal Intelligence, which is entitled something like forty years of reflection about intelligence, and it tries to tell the reader, what are the listener my main contribution, and that is an effort to clarify intelligence and also distinguish between the contributions of genes and environment. Good will. You certainly contribute a lot to the field along those lines.

Let's back up a second. I want you we have a lot of listeners who aren't familiar with all the technical aspects of this, so let me just explain just a quick minute primer here on what is g What is general intelligence? So it's this statistical phenomenon. Do you want to explain it? I could do it or you could do it. Sure, I can explain. Ok, there's nothing alien about it. Everyone at school found there were kids who tended to be good at all sports. That is,

they weren't just better than average at cricket. They were better than average at rugby, they were better than average at fives, they were better than average at most everything. And in other words, they weren't there was a positive matrix.

They were above average in all of these things, and we would call that athletic G. You've met people who have musical G. You find they pick up the piano readily, and then you go on and my heavens, they're also picking up the violin readily, and they would have musical

G now. On an IQ test like the Wechler, you have ten subtests let's say vocabulary, comprehension, arithmetic, block design, and you find that a person who tends to be better than average on one of these subtests is far more likely to be better than average on all And G is a measure of that statistical tendency, that is, the tendency to which people who are either better or worse on a particular subtest to be better than worse on the lot, and that leads to the concept of

G loading. You find that some of these subtests are better predictors of your overall performance than others. For example, vocabulary gives a better prediction of your overall IQ. Then let's say digit span forward, which is merely remembering numbers in the order in which they were read out. Obviously, if you had shoe tying is an eleventh subtest, it would have a very low G loading indeed, and that I doubt there's much correlation between how quickly you can

tie your shoes in your vocabulary. Right, they're probably more correlated with Gardner's what is it athletic and sorry it dance intelligence? Well, that of course raised the whole different question.

I mean, IQ tests don't include a subtest on softball, right, and Gardner would say, you could do badly on the IQ tests has presently come instituted, but you could still have what I guess you would call athletic G, the sort of GS that I've described earlier, and you could have musical G. I mean, there's no test on the Wexler for whether you're tone deft or not. He has a variety of intelligence which he distinguishes from what he

calls analytical intelligence. Right, But obviously some of his so called intelligences are part of the positive manifold, like spatial, verbal, and mathematical. Well, yes, but of course it's interesting. While it is certainly true that to some degree a person good at sport may be above average in analytical intelligence,

it's certainly not always true. I mean, you can find fighters in the ring who seem to have an instinctive knowledge of tactics and can hit very hard, indeed, who are probably not particularly good on arithmetis, on vocabulary, and he doesn't deny that these different intelligences have a certain correlation, but that correlation is far weaker of the correlation you have within the analytic field alone, you know, the Wexler subtests, right,

So regardless of that argument, G still requires explanation. Yeah, you want to find out what the hell it refers to exactly? Yeah, what does it mean? What is causing the rise of the positive manifold or the fact that all these things are correlated to each other. And that's really where the crux of the debate in the field wise. So Jensen, as you mentioned, thought of G as an irreplaceable fuel. He thought that was the source of the

positive manifold. But there's some other like the Vandard models, and there's some other developmental models arguing that G is actually an emergent property. It's not a causal force in itself, but it's something that is influenced by the co development of multiple other capacities. I was wondering where you kind of stood on that. Well, you can say, does G have a physiological origin or a social origin or is

it a mix of the two. Now, I would think that probably the brain has a certain optimal blood supply, and if you have more or less than that, you may be to some degree handicapped. I don't deny that some people are born with neural connections, that is, connections between neurons that are more subject to improvement by practice. You know, my practice of mathematics certainly didn't lead me on to becoming an Einstein. So you can say that their part of G has to do with these physiological factors.

I take it the kid who's better than all sports may have a faster reflex arc than normal people do, are a great distance runner, Their repulse turns returns to normal after exercise faster than people do. So there could be general physiological portions of the brain that to some degree underlie G. But there also can be social factors.

That is, when a kid who goes to school who happens to be better at vocabulary often makes friends with people who are superior students who happen to be better at literature, and of course that social interaction rubs off on one another. You know you have a certain genetic tendency to be superior at one subject, why do you also show a tendency to be better at other subjects? Well,

it may not be genetic at all. It may be just that being good at mass those you in with people who are in the chess club who have bigger vocabularies than most, and so forth. So G is not a concept to my mind that can be analyzed purely physiologically rather than sociologically as well. Further, there's a matter of IQ gains over time, where G has no real explanatory value whatsoever, and social priorities do. Let's take something

like map reading. Well, when people began to drive cars, map reading became at a greater premium in society than before. And this means that the hippocampus enlarge. It's the part of the brain that exercises when you do map reading, just as when you lift weights your biceps skit unusual development. Now, and we found, for example, the taxicab drivers who have to know the map of London from scratch have much

larger hippocampuses than bus drivers who follow a certain route. Now, of course we're getting automatic guidance systems, so it means that map breeding is less importment and the size that the the hippocampus should fall. So you can see social priorities have a great deal to do with whether a particular cognitive trait is emphasized and whether it's exercised or not.

And this is not subject to G That is, I suspect that MAP breeding has a very humble G loading, but it could fluctuate quite extraordinarily as society evolves over time. And let's say, mental arithmetic might not expand much at all. Today we have calculators, don't we And it's less important perhaps that we can do the mental arithmetic of the wexlar iq test than in the past. Or rote memory may not expand over time. My mother knew all all of her relatives to the third degree and collateral and

have a huge history of family lore. I don't have much need for that stuff. So while when you test an individual at a given time, you find G has some explanatory significance, you know you find well at a given time, if this person is better than average on vocabulary, they're likely to be better than average on other cognitive skills. Over time, there are enormous improvements and cognitive skills which, rather than being governed by which is the most G loaded,

are governed entirely by changing social priorities. Yes, and you and Dickens have the social multiplier model. Can you please explain a little bit of pouss you see within a cohart you are effectively in competition with other people. I experienced this in basketball. That is, at any given time, within a cohart whose genes make them slightly taller than average and a better reflex arc stand out. And you can say, well, these physiological traits have a great deal

to do with who becomes best at basketball. But when I played Catholic youth basketball, we went back and scrimmaged a team that was five years younger than we were, and they just killed us. It had nothing to do with their being taller than us, It had nothing to do with their having a better freeflex arc. During those five years, American culture had made basketball glamorous and more and more people were participating in it. And originally it

was enough to shoot and pass well. But then to be better than average when everyone could do that, you had to learn to shoot and pass with both hands, your left hand as well. And then when everyone did that, you had to be good at fadeaway jump shots. So when we scrimmage these people from five years before, they weren't bigger, faster, you know, they weren't have better reflex arcs. They just develop skills thanks to changing social priorities that

left us completely in the shade. So that's what I mean by a social multiplier. You know, the individual multiplier within a cohort, being slightly taller and quicker than the others, that will almost always give you an advantage. But when you compare two groups over time, you have to introduce the concept of a social multiplier. And if society is encouraging a certain skill, that skill, when it goes up, forces everyone else to run to catch up. Now, I

don't mean to put it completely competitively. Take the fact that people over time went to school more often. It wasn't a matter that you sat down and you said, oh, the kid across the street is getting an advantage. I better keep my kid in school longer. It was just a matter that since everyone was sending their kid to school longer, you did too. You know, it was just natural to go with a trend. So it wasn't so much that you were competing, but society, wanting a more

educated workforce, was raising the average level of school. And then some parents did think, you know, now that kids are going to school for eight years, my kid had better get a high school diploma, so a competitivelopment could enter into it, and that people don't like to think of their children as less advantage than other children. So as you can see, if you look at schooling within a cohort, it may be that whether your brain is better engineered has a big effect on whether you out

compete the kid next to you. You know, if you have more talent for a arrhythme, you'll get into honors classes, you'll get special tutoring. So on that level you find the individual multiplier operating. But if you look at the rise in vocabulary stories over time, it has nothing to do with the brain changing its physiology. It has to do that industrial progress wanted a more educated workforce, therefore wanted kids to stay in the school longer, and staying

in the school longer, they developed bigger vocabularies. It's the sociological multiplier at work. Good. Good, it's really great that you distinguish between the intergent generational effects and the within generation effects. They have different to distinguish those two. Yeah, that's very good. Let me get you just a simple example. Sure Jensen said that the years of education you got was fundamentally determined by g you know, or by the

ability of your brain to improve. Well, my father had eight years of education and I have had I guess what's twenty two with a PhD. And so is my brother. I do not think that we are in any way genetically superior to our father. Although he left school after eight years, he could do the New York Times Crossford puzzle and inc. Which I can't do. But you see, within his generation six years was the median, and it may be that he had better genes for IQ than

most and not putting above average. My brother and I may have better genes today, which gives us, let's say, twenty three years of education, but at the difference between my father and me. To explain that by genes is ludicrous. If someone in the present generation had only eight years of education, it would be probably that they were profoundly mentally retarded. Or my father to be considered profoundly mentally retarded genetically because he was born in eighteen eighty five,

you know, is quite absurd. You have to see that the analogy just doesn't hold sure. And I like that. I think that is relevant when we think about human capacity and human autonomy within a generation as well. I mean, isn't it possible within the current generation to still be in it like an ancestral environment, to like kind of by what I mean by that is to kind of like to grow up an environment that is not cognitively enriched. Yes,

it's certainly possible because people live in a certain subculture. Yes. I wrote a book once called I think it was called Asian IQ. You know, Achievement Beyond IQ. Asian Intelligence. Written so many books, I don't know how you remember the titles of them all. Yeah, And in that book you found that different subcultures in America had very different atmospheres in terms of intellectual achievement. That is, Jewish subculture,

Chinese subculture, Irish subculture, Black subculture. Many of these placed a very different emphasis on cognitive and educational achievement. In my Irish household, if you came home and said you made the football team, there is jubilation. In a Jewish home, people would say, are you crazy? You may get a head injury and not qualify for medical school. You find this even today. If I go into a Chinese restaurant, I often see a kid asleepover these books and he

wake up and pick up the book again. You don't usually see that in an Irish restaurant, that is, you don't see that single minded preoccupation with intellectual as achievement. And my father would have said, well, you know, okay, the Chinese score higher on IQ tests than we do, and they get more jobs, but who the hell wants to live like that. I would rather do reasonably well at school and argue politics at the pub, and I do take satisfaction when my kids make the football team.

So you find cultural differences between groups that are very profoundly related to pressure within that group for intellectual and academic achievement. Now, let me tell you a story. Jensen said that one of the things that did blacks showed that blacks were probably genetically inferior for IQ is that black white differences became wider as you went up the G loading ladder. You remember that wrote memory has a very load deloading and their black white differences were relatively minor.

And then you get up to vocabulary with a very high G loading and whites outperformed blacks by a far greater degree. And he said, since G is physiologically influenced, that is pretty good evidence that there's a physiological difference between black and white for intelligence. Now, I was the first to look at I first data from Germany where black and white children, not the first to look at the data, but the first to look at it from

this point of view. When you had black and white occupation troops in Germany, they tested the offspring that they had with German women, and that they found that having a black father seemed to be no real handicap as compared to a white father. And there is great attention on that, but the samples are not really big enough and you can't draw strong inference. And one of the things I thought of was what's happened to G here?

And when you look at the profile of these half black and all white kids on the Weschler, you found there was no G pattern at all. That is that, in point of fact, whatever differences there were between the two didn't correlate with G. If there was a slight advantage for blacks that could be on vocabulary, if there was a slight advantage for whites that could be on rope memory, and the TAR correlation was zero. Now what

was different here? What was different here was that these half black kids raised in Germany were not being raised in a black subculture. They were just being raised by random German women spread throughout Germany with no black subculture

at all. So when blacks lived in Germany without black subculture, there was no pattern of negative correlation with g at Elsie Moore's study, and she got kids, all of whom were black, and half of them were adopted by white professional parents and half were adopted by black professional parents, where the mothers had sixteen years of education. When she tested to them at the age of eight and a half, the black kids adopted by whites were thirteen points ahead

of the black kids adopted by black professionals. And then she had these mothers come in for interview, and she found that the white mothers were universally encouraging when they encountered a problem with their kid, they would say, that's a good idea. Why don't you try that all smiles. The black mothers were universally centurious. You're not that dumb, you know better than that. In other words, there were subtle differences between the black and white subculture that influenced kids.

Abilit is it problem solving that had nothing to do with black and white genes. They had to do with the different kinds of preschool experience of kids in the black and white subcultures. And if I followed this up throughout the age of twenty four, and I've tried to show that at every stage white subculture places much more emphasis on complex problem solving than black subculture. So I don't know which is more controversial. If you said it was one hundred percent genetic or you say one hundred

percent environmental. You know it's like between black and white. Yeah, between black and white. I don't know if there what is there any resolution to this that empirical evidence sure, and that the present IQ gap, there is enormous evidence that much of that gap is environmental. Now we'll only

know whether all of it is eventually. But I did a study with Dickens where between nineteen seventy two and two thousand and two, blacks made up five of the fifteen points and there are only ten points behind whites. And this showed itself in academic achievement scores on the nation's report card. They made the same gains there. Now, I think you'd have to be mad to think that

even today the black and white environment for cognition is equivalent. Sure, So let's say they make up another five points over the generation. Well, that cuts it to five, doesn't it. So now we're getting down to the point where you know, twins and singletons have a four point difference between their IQ, and no one runs around the streets killing each other

over that. I mean, if a blacks get to the point where there are only two or three points behind whites, it may be because even then, white culture is more like the Chinese and black culture is more like the Irish. So I'm not going to say I know for certain the gap is environmental, but I do know for certain that the present gap is not entirely explained by genes, and I have a lot of evidence that seems to

indicate that the differences are really subcultural in origin. The question between black and white is an evidential one, but no one wants to say that. They want to say the sky would fall if there was a slight genetic component. Therefore, we must classify this as non scientific, and therefore we must attack everyone who investigates it, right, which wouldn't be the case. I mean, nothing would justify racism. So let

me ask you a question. You seem to be fairly confident that the environment the main core environmental factor are child wearing practices. Have you considered the extent of variants explained by other environmental factors such as I don't know, like the effects of having a lot of more saliens around you, you know, violence, just like schooling, whole different ques, poor building like buildings that are you know, like it's hard to have to score well on cognitive tests when

you're being distracted by life concerns and survival. Right. Yes, if a black kid is living in a solo parent home and there are a series of lovers who are violent. There is a case in New Zealand when a skeptic about whether poverty environments were bad for kids went into a home and as soon as the child saw this visitor, he crawled under a couch. That was the mere appearance

of a male was a threat. So I'm not discounting that in the preschool environment in black homes there is on average something that may be equally as important as less intellectual challenge. Right, so then prejudice enters in I

don't know if you noticed my statistic. New York City alone, no undercover cup has ever been shot by another coup Since nineteen forty two, as I recall, something like at least thirty black undercover policemen have been shot by a white cup and that's because you see a black with a gun, the stereotype is that he must be a criminal.

And you have these terrible situations where blacks who go undercover as policemen are the prey of whites, and the whites are for conscience stricken they don't want to shoot their black comrades. That you see with a black or a gun, you think of a criminal. When you see a white with a gun, you think he may have some legitimate reason for us. So there are a whole range of factors that enter in to the plight of

black males in America on average. Yeah, so these are really important to have these open, honest conversations as about all the potential causal factors. I mean, if we really want to help blacks, the only approach is a scientific study of their situation, right, I mean, how are people to know what afflicts blacks if they don't use science. Are they going to conduct horoscopes? Right? And if you make this a forbidden area for scientific inquery, well, then

we've got our arm tied behind our back. I agree with that. I agree that we need an open, honest conversation of all the causal factors, all the potential calls of factors. In terms of what the realistic data tells us about the races, it seems to indicate that racial differences in terms of genes would be quite small, and we'd do better to get on with building a better society for everybody and treating each kid as an individual. Yeah, I could agree with that more what you just said.

And you know there there's a quote that you from your book, your latest book, I thought was very interesting because this stuff tends to get political, and that's why I really liked you kind of transcending the politics for a second. You said, quote, to suffer as a child in an impoverished home is an evil in itself, no matter what the eventual effects on intelligence. Right and left differ only as to means that is, how to strike a balance between the welfare state and the free market

as a cure. I thought that really nailed these contentious divide, the political divide, but also transcends it in a way because it makes it clear that what we all care about as a fundamental humanity is you know, right? Right? And so I thought that was a really, really wonderful one. Evidence, no evidence at all that some major racial group in the world today is so tainted by genes that they

can't participate fully in the rich life of a good culture. Yeah, I mean the fundamental question is settled no one because of race, because of the frequency of racial genes, I mean everyone as an individual. The best genes in America, for IQ, could be a black male, but statistically, if there are differences, they're quite minor. And the fundamental thing was the one posed by Plato. He thought, unfortunately that certain Barbarian groups didn't possess the genetic quality that they

could be educated enough to be integrated into Greek society. Well, he was wrong. Every racial group has sufficient cognitive potential, and the potential is so overlapping that none of them would be excluded statistically from participation in a rich society because of their race. Right. I'm glad you made that point. Yeah, So I wanted to ask you, do you think Charles Murray has been unfairly criticized and maligned? Oh, definitely, I

mean it was shocking. I've written a book, by the way, about the decline of free speech in American universities that I'm now talking about for a publisher. That Murray was not allowed to speak at Middlebury was just absurd. In my book, I point out all of the insights I would have lost if I hadn't argued with Charles Murray over the years. I mean, even if you don't agree with the position, if it's intelligent and evidently based, you learn an enormous amount from trying to see the extent

to which it's true. And Charles Murray, along with Jensen, and along with Richard Linn, have been the people who have educated me the most in psychology. Murray is certainly without racial bias. He certainly is someone without gender bias. I happen to know him personally, and he wants to, of course follow the evidence. And when he makes a point, you can bet your bottom dollar he has evidential support

for and it's worth taking into account. And you may only half agree with him, but you'll learn a hell of a lot from arguing with him. The most important part of the Bell curve is not what it says about race, and it's very guarded about race. The most important thing in the Bell curve is the meritocracy thesis,

the view that we liberal lefty self destruct. You know, we try to eliminate environmental differences and privilege, and that means that all talent differences will now be genetic, and in an open society, you'll have all the talent for genes going to the top, and the bottom will become a sort of genetic dump. And that rather than working towards a society we on the liberal left would admire, we're working towards a society that will be a horrible

gene cast meritocracy. Now, that's a thesis that's far more worthy of refutation than anything else in the book. And I've tried to do that in several of my books. If you're interested in the one that would probably be the best, it's my little book Fate and Philosophy, in which I have a section on the meritocracy thesis. And virtually every reviewer put that in the two hard basket whether they didn't want to confront this devastating critique of

liberal ideals and practice. And that's actually one of the most worships, yeah, trying to answer in the book. I mean, yes, that's a fascinating question. I would love to hear your thoughts on that, is, anyone we can summarize that section in two minutes, well, very quickly. I think that rather than a tendency towards that type of society with affluence and a humane society, you find that people play to

their own strength in terms of personal development. That is, you don't find that every talented person is trying to get to the upper class in terms of prestige and wealth. You find that when we're not threatened by poverty, a person who'd prefer to be a poet becomes a poet, and a person who would prefer to spend thirty hours a week training for the marathon does that, And a person who'd prefer to be a philosopher finds they want starve as a philosopher rather than becoming a corporate lawyer.

So I think when you look at the dynamics of modern society, you find, assuming that it has humane values, actually the social progress and influence means that people fly off in one hundred different directions in terms of talent, and there's no single hierarchy of wealth and status that claims all of talent for itself. So that would be

a very brief answer. So you know what I found really interesting about your book, your latest book, is you bring up a point that is not raised often enough, and that is that nature and nurture aren't the only two options on the table here. You know, you say, autonomy actually comes at this like twenty percent unexplained sort

of variance and a chance this chance level. And I think it's really interesting because people seem to want to place autonomy either within so they'll say, if something is one hundred percent environmentally determined, a lot of people, you know, will think, oh, that means that we have autonomy. You know, that's right. Well, that doesn't mean that, right, of course it doesn't. I mean, imagine that you live in the

best home in America. You could be accidentally dropped on your head as a kid, you know, and that would mean that, due to an accident, your genes and your environment would not be totally explanatory of your eventual IQ. An accident of life history would be important, wouldn't it. Yes. And it may be that you're zooming along towards medical school and Vietnam comes along and you're drafted to an environment which for three years is a very unpromising environment indeed,

and sets back your intellectual and development. Now, every psychologist will admit that the factors of genes and environment have to be qualified by life history, and that that type of good or bad luck in life history means twenty percent of IQ variants, which is a lot. Now, just as someone could be drafted out of medical school and a fate of patriotism, they could volunteer to go in the army, you know, and be a foot soldier. Well, that would be an act of autonomy, wouldn't it, And

it's not distinguishable from bad luck. The fact that that amount of IQ variants exists as a symptom of life history means that a lot of those people have made free choice vices that either benefit them or hurt them. I at one time had about with chronic anxiety, and I chose to take air apacts, which relieved it, and that meant that I returned to an environment that matched my genes. A Christian scientist would perhaps not have taken it, would have made a voluntary choice and would have not

taken the medication. So voluntary choice had everything to do even in a situation where genes and environment seemed fully explanatory. I created a correlation between genes environment to my voluntary choice. But certainly the existence of that twenty percent of IQ variant shows there are a lot of people in the world who have made choices that have lifted them into an environment above their quality of genes or sunk into

an environment below their quality of genes. It isn't an index of it's an index that we know that autonomy is important. It doesn't, however, show the degree of autonomy because to autonomous choices, you could actually make your genes an environment correlate, as when I took that medication. Yeah, and is this does relate to your distinction between external and internal environments? Yes, there is, of course a big difference.

When my brother went into the army during World War Two, he probably suffered less from the environment the army gave him. He was in a chemist and went into chemical warfare, and since there wasn't any chemical warfare, they didn't know what the hell to do with them. So they sprayed all these chemists with mustard gas see how they would react to it. And you can say this was a

brutish environment. But my brother had learned to play chess, and while he was in the army, rather than just being exposed to sergeants screaming at him, he found a guy and they played chess together. In other words, he carried with him into the army a set of traits

that helped mitigate its deleterious influence on his intelligence. My uncle Ed, who went into factory work at eleven during World War One, got a reputation for being peculiar because when he was on ship he would read books by torchlight. He had learned, you know, to love reading, and so he created an external environment thanks to his own internal environment. Yeah, so when you look at an environment, there's an interplay

between external and internal. A certain startup person who has developed excellent traits like exercising their mind or go into an environment which for all purposes appears to be the same as another person's external environment, but they will resist in stillatorious influences. Yeah, and I don't think a lot of people really are aware or make that distinction between

the internal external environments. I think that's really good. So in addition to having you can have a very rich internal environment and still have what you refer to as a family handicap. Right, you can still live in your own mind to some degree, even in a bad environment. And you can be in what seems superficially like a good environment and yet somehow be resistant to every good

thing that would do to you. Yeah, and you calculated a very interesting calculation of the real world implications of having a family handicap on SAT scorers. So you said, if the typical person who scores one hundred and fifteen happens to come from a home equivalent to their genetic promise, they would have scored one to eighteen. But if they had the bad luck to come from a home at the twelve percentile of cognitive quality, they would have scored

only one or nine, nine or nine points less. And you convert nine points to that's a sixty six point SAT difference. Yes, I I tried to show that what we're told by people that by seventeen, environment has faded

away by an influence, that you're entirely controlled by your genes. Well, by seventeen, your vocabulary is enormously important in terms of doing well on the SAT verbal, and universities use the SAT verbal to see which their students are at risk and even at seventeen your vocabulary, there is sufficient family environment still lingering to determine very importantly what university you're

eligible for. So there's very clear implications here of environment on your opportunities for getting up passing today, Idea want to emphasize that a person who suffers from an umpoverished environment, of course deserves help for that reason alone, setting aside whether they get into Georgia Tech or Harvard. It's still interesting that it can have an influence. Yeah, and we made that point earlier as well. So you have done an analysis of the different cognobility profiles that show the

most persistent family effects and which show the least persistently. Yes, that's right. For example, arithmetic, the influence the preschool influence of your family fades out very quickly, while with vocabulary it lingers on and on. Right. So why vocabulary, Well, because unless you're completely alienated, you do sit at the dinner table and still talk to your parents, and you

talk to their friends. And while the family loses out to your peer group to a large degree, you know, you do start to surround yourself with peers and adapt your vocabulary to theirs. There is at least some continuity, at least in the early twenties, when you've left home completely of family influences on vocabulary, the arithmetic situation is almost entirely as to whether your folks have taught you

arithmetic before you go to school or not. And that is almost completely overwhelmed by arithmetic classes where everyone learns arithmetic, and the kids that are brighter learn more of it

than the kids that are less bright. So if you look down the different cognitive skills, I thought of the only review I've seen in my book was sharply critical, and I thought, for Heaven's sake, there are a lot of things in the method of knowlogy of that book that I didn't know, don't other people want to know them.

I look at all the mental skills on the Wexler tests and on ravens, and I try to discern, and I think I do discern that at what age current environment take over from the previous environments like family, And of course current environment has the toughest time submerging family for vocabulary, it has its easiest time for mental arithmetic. And I try to give reasons for all the different cognitive traits as to why some of them family influence

fades away earlier or later than others. Yeah, you did a heck of a job with that, and your age table method is really impressive. Well, I hope though. You know, people keep saying, do I give a sufficient theoretical justification of it? Well, I don't know a try, but let's imagine that I couldn't give a theoretical justification. The mere fact that it mimics the results of the twin studies shows that it's terribly useful when you have data where

twin data is absent. You know, you can actually go to the manuals and you can see in that particular country at that time what the effects of family and current environment are on a mental skill. Now, it might be a lot better to have twin data, but you know, twin studies have only been done in a relatively few countries. I'm not arguing that we should replace twin data. I'm

saying we should supplement it. Yes, absolutely, And one interesting finding that you did using this new age table method is the effects of adoption are very little after the age of let's say twenty right, Yes, even vocabulary after the early twenties, residual family environment becomes fairly minor and you get a good matching between genes and environment. But always remember that twenty percent where the match doesn't occur,

right autonomy, Yeah, that's where the autonomy. Well autonomy plus bad luck yeah right yeah, so chances, Yeah, and we can't partition that. It would be interesting to have some studies see how much of it is bad luck and how much of it as choice. You know, I wrote this article for scientif American recently summarizing this toy model that these physicists came up with, showing just how prevalent the effects of chance had when they compound, you know, in the rich get rich and poor get poorer sort

of way. So I think we would have to kind of model it in that sort of dynamic way, right, yes, So what can we learn from astronomy about human intelligence? Well, from astronomy we learned something that is relevant to the theory of intelligence. Some people say, why can't we give a definition of intelligence which is so precise that we can measure it. Well, that's not the role of intelligence, And the same thing is shown in astronomy. I mean, in astronomy you have concepts that you want to be

fairly broad. For example, gravity was a fairly broad concept. It didn't the concept of gravity that let's say, the gravity's main concept is that the motions of a planet are influenced by other big heavenly bodies in your vicinity. Now you can always say, why can't we have a concept of a gravity that tells us just how to measure the motions of the planet. So you don't want that.

What you want is a concept that focuses your research on planets and their location to one another, and you want it left open to scientific inquiry to see exactly how those variables influence planets. For example, Newton came up with the correct theory that you find that heavenly bodies influence one another in proportion to their mass and negatively

in terms of the distant square. Descartes thought that the reason that the Sun influenced the Earth was that it created a whirlpool in the ether, and the planet's closest to the Sun were world around faster than the planets further away from the Sun. Well, he proved to be wrong. But what you wanted was a concept of gravity that gave empirical scientists sufficient elbow room to jump in with conflicting hypotheses, and I say the same thing about intelligence.

You don't want a concept of intelligence that dictates theory as to how variables affect intelligence. You want a concept of intelligence that gives broad advice and say, well, this is the battleground on which theories should you know, vie with one another, but we all work within the advice given by that concept of intelligence, which is specific enough to direct our research, but broad enough to allow for differing results upper research. I like that. So you put

forward this meta theory. Yes, I tried the second half of the book to give as well as I can the theory of intelligence that's emerged from my work over these forty years. I like that. And I like how you go through all these different theories of intelligence and kind of see how they and you show they are consistent with the meta theory, which is neat. Yeah, and I want to ask you, you know we've talked about Howard Garner's theory earlier at the very beginning of this show.

There was one point you made in that section that I really liked, So I just want to I want to bring it out, bring out that point. Now. You made the point that your major beef is with the hierarchy of values that we have in our society, of what abilities are important, and in that way you agree with Gardner. I agree with Garden. We can actually disagree with Gardner's you know, statistical analysis or the fact that they are completely independent, which modern research shows they are

not completely independent. But regardless of that point, I think there's a really important point to be made there, which is, you know, our schooling, lot of our structures to climb that ladder rely so are so heavily g loaded in a sense, right yep. And as I say, I want just like Gardner does. I've never met Gardner, but I've corresponded and seen the stuff, and both of us want a society in which people who lack the entrepreneurial virtues and have other virtues have a better access to a

good life. I mean, it's terrible how the present economic trend is separating off people with so called entrepreneurial virtues into an elite that leaves the rest of society behind in terms of access to life. To an extraordinary degree. It would be much better if we had a recognition that human beings are more than working machines, that they

have a life outside of work. You know, it would be much better that rather than just emphasizing what pays in terms of the market, we encourage people in a humane way to have access to as good a life as possible. For example, there are plenty of people I know who love working with wood and working with their hands. Now, there's no reason why these states shouldn't provide workshops where they can go and exercise that skill that are relatively free.

There's no reason why we shouldn't subsidize sport on the amateur level or theater where people who have intelligences, as Gardner calls them, different from analytical intelligences, have a much richer life. So he and I I think, have the same image or the common good. It's when Aristotle proclaimed, he said, you have a good society when there's a rich and rewarding way of life and as many people

have access to its benefits as possible. And we by merely allowing the market to label what's socially valuable, we condemn many people not to have as rich a life as they could given their non entrepreneurial talents. Jim My Mentor Nick McIntosh, a year before he died, he was at the ISIR conference. Lubinski was interviewing him and said, who do you think is the most influential important intelligence researcher in the field, and he mentioned James Flynn and

I can see why. So thank you so much for bringing your insight with humanity and moral philosophy and just who you are to the table. Thank you so much for the chat today. Oh I'm very happy to appear and talk to you. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast

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