The “Flynn effect”—named after philosopher James Robert Flynn, who researched it extensively from the late 1970s onward—is well known to those involved in debates on the heritability of intelligence. It refers to the established trend for IQ scores to increase over time. Notably, this trend is consistently observed in social groups who had scored poorly on IQ tests in previous iterations.
The Flynn effect is consequential for the heritability debate, because, if intelligence is a thing encoded into genes, it is not clear why that thing’s volume would be increasing, generation after generation, absent selective breeding. Accordingly those who argue against inherited group differences in intelligence frequently invoke the Flynn effect as probative of their case, while the partisans of such differences have various elaborate counter-arguments.
It is however generally acknowledged even by those who downplay it that the Flynn effect shows that IQ tests cannot be measuring something that is purely heritable. While IQ tests aim to measure that (mythical) native intelligence that is unaffected by education and environment, it is precisely changes in education and environment that correlate with improvements in IQ scores.
The Flynn effect shows that IQ tests cannot be measuring something that is purely heritable.
Anti-hereditarians then tend to see the Flynn effect as a cause for celebration. It shows, they argue, that no social group is condemned by its dull wits to grinding poverty and ignorance, generation after generation. Rather, given the right modifications to their environment and education, all can prosper equally. Advocacy for such modifications generally follows.
What both sides in this debate share is an assumption that a high IQ score is desirable. Hereditarians see the high scores as a sign of the innate intelligence which is their idol. Anti-hereditarians see the high scores as an indication of the power of the social interventions towards which they are often equally idolatrous.
But is it really a cause for unambiguous celebration if almost everyone is doing better and better on these standardized tests? Is there really nothing lost when this sort of “progress” is made? IQ tests correlate well with success in dreary, Byzantine office jobs, involving unending formalized language games. What the Flynn effect truly suggests is not that the human race is getting wiser or more insightful or even more ingenious, but that we are being standardized towards a certain type of man or woman, suited for the abstracted, colourless juggling of the post-industrial workspace.
Is it really a cause for unambiguous celebration if almost everyone is doing better and better on these standardized tests?
The Irish peasants, or American blacks from the deep South, or Central African pygmies, or any other group that is being Flynn-effected out of its previous form of existence, are not in fact groups that could have been intelligently described as lacking intelligence, back when the IQ researchers were claiming that such people were congenital cretins. No doubt these groups, like any other, had their share of dullards. However their poor IQ scores reflected not this, but rather that they were living and thinking in ways out of harmony with the requirements of standardized, hygienized, modernized man. The Flynn effect is frightening because it suggests such alternative ways of being and thinking are eroding, that in more and more places, only one type of intelligence will remain—the sort stupid enough to imagine that “intelligence” is one thing for all people everywhere, and can be tested and assigned a number.
