Nature, Nurture, and Human Autonomy with James Flynn

[Music] welcome to the psychology podcast where we give you insights into the mind brain behavior and creativity I'm dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and in each episode I have a conversation with a guest he will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself others and the world we live in hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast so today it is an honor to have dr. James Flynn on the podcast dr. Flynn is professor emeritus the University of Otago and a recipient of the university's gold

medal for distinguished career research in 2007 the International Society for intelligence research named him nits distinguished contributor his TED talk on cognitive and moral progress has received 2.35 million visits his latest books include are we getting smarter what is intelligence 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 in your career right do you know my basic almost 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 fate and 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 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 right 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 63 and I've been here ever since though I often visit the states I was writing a book on moral philosophy in about 1978 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 is someone who was clearly not

a racist that sheer evidence showed that blacks had on average worst genes for IQs and whites and I thought oh well I'll look into this and expand it into a chapter well of course it expanded into a whole book race IQ and Jensen but as I found that his case was far more articulate and evidential 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 IQ is environmental and then as you can imagine Jensen fired back and I

fired back and away we went for 30 or 40 years well as to how I got into psychology yeah of course some of Jensen's arguments in favor of a genetic gulf between black and white involve the concept of G or the general intelligence factor and this led me to examine it and I found it walking as a basis for the theory of intelligence so much of my work over the last 40 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 40 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 well you've certainly contribute a lot to the field along those lines good back up a second I want you be a lot of listeners who aren't familiar with all the technical aspects of this so let me just explain a little just a quick minute primer here on what is G what is general intelligence

so it's this for statistical phenomenon do you want explain it I could do it or you could do it sure I can explain there's nothing alien about it everyone at school found that there were kids who tended to be good at all sports but as they weren't just better than average at cricket they were better than average at Rugby they were better than average at five's 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 Wechsler you have 10 sub tests 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 sub tests this 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 sub test to be wetter better than worse on the lot and that leads to the concept of G loading you find that some of these sub tests are better predictors of your overall performance than others for example vocabulary give us a better prediction of your overall IQ then let's say digit span forward which is merely remembering numbers and the order in which they were read out obviously if you had shoe-tying as a xi sub test 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 and your vocabulary right it's probably more correlated with gardeners what is it athletic intelligent oh it was a dance intelligence well that of course raised a whole different question I don't know I mean I need to forget and don't IQ tests don't include a sub tests on softball right none gardener would say you could do badly on the IQ test is presently constituted but you could still have what I guess you would call athletic G the sort of

G that I've described earlier sir and you could have musical G I mean there's no test on the Wechsler for whether you're tone deaf 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 well 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 arithmetic or on vocabulary and he doesn't deny that these different intelligences have a certain correlation but that correlation is far weaker than the correlation you have within the analytic field alone you know the Wechsler subtests right so regardless of that argument G still requires explanation you want to find out what the hell it refers to exactly yeah what it what does it mean what is causing the rise of them positive manifold

or the fact that all these things are correlated which other and that's really where the crux of the debate in the field lies so Jensen as long as you mentioned thought of G as an irreplaceable fuel he thought that was the source the positive manifold but there's some other like the van der models and there's some other developmental models arguing the 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 or general 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 handicap 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 they're 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 and normal people do are great distance runner they're repulsed 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 that 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 you have a certain genetic tendency to be superior at one subject why do you also show us tendency to be better at other subjects well it may not be genetic at all it may be just that being good at math so as you in with people who are in the Chess Club who have bigger vocabulary than most and so forth so G is not a concept my mind that can be analyzed purely physiologically rather than sociologically as well further there's the 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 enlarged it's the part of the brain that exercises when you do map reading just as when you lift weights your biceps get unusual development now and we found for example the taxicab drivers who have to know the map of London from scratch have much larger hippocampus than bus drivers who follow a certain

route now of course we're getting automatic guidance systems so it means that map reading is less important and the size of the hippocampus should fall so you can see social priorities have a great deal to do with whether a particular cognitive trade is emphasized and whether it's exercised or not and this is not subject to G that is I suspect that map reading has a very humble G loading but it could fluctuate quite extraordinarily a 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 Wechsler IQ test than in the past a rote memory may not expand over time my mother knew all of her relatives to the 3rd degree in collateral and had 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 she has some explanatory against 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 in cognitive skills which rather than being governed by which is the most V loaded are governed entirely by changing social priorities yes and you and Dickens have the social multiplier model can you please explain a little practice be within a cohort you were effectively in competition with other people I experienced this in basketball now there's at any given time within a cohort people 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 her having a better free flex 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 or faster you know they weren't had better reflex arcs they just had developed 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 yes 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 yeah 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 well 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 yeah 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 didn't think you know now the kids are going to school for eight years my kid had better get a high school diploma so a competitive element could enter into it and the people don't like to think of their children as less

advantaged 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 arithmetic 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 and vocabulary stories over time it has nothing to do with the brain changing its physiology it has to do that industrial progress one of

the more educated workforce there are for wanted kids to stay in the school longer and staying in the school longer they develop bigger vocabularies it's the sociological multiplier at work good good it's really great that you distinguish between the intergenerational effects and the within generation effects obviously have different process also distinguish those two you know it's very good let me giving 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 22 with a PhD and so as my brother I do not think that we're in any way genetically superior to our father although he left school after eight years he could do the New York Times crossword puzzle on ink 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 23 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 well for my father to be considered profoundly mentally genetically because he was born in 1885 now 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 bite what I mean by that is the 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 intelligibly in so many books I don't know how you remember the titles in the mall yes 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 was jubilation and a Jewish home people would say are you crazy you may get a head injury and not qualify for medical schools you find this even today if I go into a Chinese restaurant I often see a kid asleep over his books and he'll wake up and pick up the book again you

don't usually see that at an Irish restaurant that is you don't see that single-minded preoccupation with intellectual achievement and you my father would have said well you know ok the Chinese score higher are an IQ test that 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 blocks 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 the rote memory has a very low D loading and their black-white differences were relatively minor and then he 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 was 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 I was what's happened to G here and when you look at the profile of these half black and all white kids on the lecturer 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 T if there was a slight advantage for blacks that could be on vocabulary if there was a slight advantage for whites it could be on rote memory and the torah' 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 T and then I read Elsi more 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 at 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 her kid they would say that's a good idea why don't you try that all smiles the black mothers were universally century as' 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 abilities at problem-solving that had nothing to do with black and white jeans 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 24 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 a hundred percent genetic or you say 100 percent environmental you know it's like

between black at one yeah between black and white I don't know if they're what is there any resolution to this it isn't content or 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 Bill Dickens where between 1972 and 2002 blacks made up 5 of the 15 points and are only 10 points behind whites and this showed itself in academic achievement scores on the nation's report card they made the same

gains there no I think you'd have to be mad to think that even today the black and white environment for cognition is equivalent sure let's say they make up another 5 points over the generation well that cuts it to 5 doesn't it so now we're getting down to the point where you know twins and Singleton's have a four point difference between their IQ and no one runs around the streets killing each other over that I mean if blacks get to the point where there are only two or three points behind whites that maybe because even

then white culture is more like the Chinese and black culture is more like the Irish bust though 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 some cultural and 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 right which wouldn't be 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 our child-rearing practices have you considered the extent of variance explained by other environmental factors such as I don't know like the effects of having a lot of mortality salience around you you know violence just like poor schooling or poor ability 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 their 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 II crawled under a couch 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 rights and then prejudice enters them I don't know if you noticed my statistic that in New York City alone no undercover cop has ever been shot by another cop since 1942 as I recall something like at least 30 black undercover policemen have been shot by a white cop that's because you see a black with a gum 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 who the 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 there 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 gonna conduct horoscopes right and if you make this a forbidden area for scientific inquiry well then we've got our arm tied behind our back I agree with that I agree that we need a 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 do better to get on

with building a better society for everybody and treating each kid as an individual yeah I couldn't agree with that more what you just said and you know 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 IRA 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 isn't 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 and right so I thought that was a really really wonderful no evidence no evidence at all that some major racial group in the world today they're so tainted by genes that they can't participate fully in the rich life of a good culture no yeah

I mean the fundamental question is settled no one because of race because of the frequency of racial genes I mean everyone is 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 and 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 are now talking about for a publisher and that Marie 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 and even you don't agree with the position if it's intelligent and evidentially base 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 Lynn have been the people who have educated me the most insight all oh gee Marie is the well 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 have agree with him but you'll learn a hell of a lot from arguing with the most important part of the bell curve is not what it says about race it's very guarded about race the most important thing in the bell curve is the meritocracy thesis the view that we liberal lefties 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 comment for genes going to the top and the bottom will become a sub 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 caste based 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 too hard basket they didn't want to confront this devastating critique of liberal ideals and practice and that's actually what I think most worse yeah trying to answer on the board I mean yes that's a fascinating question I would love to hear your thoughts on that I guess any we can summarize that section in two minutes well very quickly I think that rather than a tendency towards that type of society with our fluence and a humane society you find that people play to their

own strengths 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 would prefer to be a poet becomes a poet and a person who would prefer to spend 30 hours a week training for the marathon does that and a person who would prefer to be a philosopher finds they won't starve as a philosopher rather than you know 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 social progress in the fluence means that people fly off in a hundred different directions in terms of Kellogg and there is no single hierarchy of wealth and status that claims all of tallip for itself so that would be a very brief answer just wanted to take this moment to thank you all for your support of the podcast over the years it's been a real privilege to do this podcast for you all for over the past three and a half years if

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and creativity okay now back to the show so you know what I thought 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 nurture aren't the only two options on the table here you know you say autonomy actually comes at this like 20 percent unexplained sort of variance there's chance is 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 100% environmentally determined a lot of people you

know will think oh that means that we have autonomy you know right well that doesn't mean that right first it does 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 of environment have to be qualified by life history and that that type of good or bad luck in life history means 20 percent of IQ variants which is a lot you know 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 variance exists as a symptom of life history means that a lot of those people have made free choices that either benefit them or hurt them I at one time had about with chronic anxiety and I chose to take air packs which relieved it and that meant that I returned to an environment that matched my genes a Christian Scientist would perhaps not have taken up 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 so I created a correlation between genes environment through my voluntary choice but certainly the existence of that 20% of IQ variance 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 supplement to 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 two autonomous choices you

could actually make your genes and environment correlate as when I took that medication yeah and is this this really tier distinction 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 a chemist when in the 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 sergeant 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 dilatory ax sin fluence 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 it learned

that you know to love reading and so he created an external environment thanks to his own internal environment yeah so when you look at environment there is an interplay between external and internal a certain sort of person who has developed excellent traits like exercising their mind will go into an environment which for all purposes appears to be the same as another person's external environment but they will resist its dilatory ascend fluence yeah and I don't think a lot of people really are aware or make that distinction between the internal external environments I think it'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 it would do to you yeah and you calculated a very interesting calculation of the real-world implications of having a family handicap on SAT scores so you said if the typical person who scores 115 happens to

come from a home equivalent to their genetic promise they would have scored 118 but if they had the bad luck to come from a home at the 12th percentile of cognitive quality they would have scored only 109 or 9 points less and you convert nine points to that's a sixty six point SAT difference yes I tried to I tried to shows it but we're told by people that by 17 environment has faded away by an influence that you're entirely controlled by your genes well by 17 your vocabulary is enormous ly 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 17 your vocabulary there is sufficient family environment still lingering to determine very importantly what university you're eligible for hmm so there's very clear implications here of environment on your opportunities for getting up passing is that a person who suffers from an impoverished environment of course deserves help for that reason alone setting aside whether they get into Georgia Tech or Harvard yes it's still interesting that that it can have an influence yeah and we made

that point earlier as well so you have done an analysis of the different cognitive profiles that show the most persistent family affects and which showed the least persistent family that's right for example arithmetic the influence the pre-school influence of your family fades out very quickly well with the Bueller yet lingers on and all 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 into the early twenties when you've left home completely a family influences on vocabulary the arithmetic situation is almost entirely as to whether your folks have taught your arithmetic before you go to school or not and that is almost completely overwhelmed by arithmetic classes where everyone learns arithmetic and the kids are brighter learn more of it from the kids that are less bright so if you look down the different cognitive skills I thought oh

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 my methodology of that book that I didn't know what other people want to know them I look at all of the mental skills on the Wechsler test and on Ravens and I try to discern and I think I do discern that at what age does 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

metal rithmetic 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 on that and your age table method is really impressive 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 when 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 20 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 I always remember that 20% where the match doesn't occur right altona me yeah that's where the autonomy autonomy plus bad luck yeah all right yeah so chances yeah and we can't partition that it would be interesting to have some studies see how much over this bad luck and how much over this choice I you know I wrote this article for scientific and 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 on me 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 as 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 lets say gravity's main concept is that the motions of a planet are influenced by other big heavenly bodies in yerevan now you can always say why can't we have a concept of in gravity that tells us just how to measure the motions of the planets we 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 Deut inque MUP with the correct theory that you find that heavenly bodies influence one another in proportion to their mass and negatively in terms of the distance squared Descartes thought that the reason that the Sun influenced the earth was that created a whirlpool in the ether and the planets closest to the Sun were whirled around faster than the planets further away from the Sun so 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 battle ground 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 for a search 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 40 years I like that and I like how you go through all these different theories and of intelligence and kind of see how they and you show they are consistent with the meta theory which is nice right yeah and I want to ask you you know we've talked about Howard Gardner's theory earlier at the

very beginning of this show there was one point you made in that section that I really liked as 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 Gardiner I agree the car we can actually disagree with Gardeners you know statistical analysis or the fact that they are completely independent which modern research shows they're 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 a 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 correspondent and Seanie 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 X have access to as good a life as possible for example are plenty of people I know who love working with wood

and working with their hands now there is no reason why the state 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 intelligence is as Gardner calls them different from analytical intelligences have a much richer life so he and I I think have the same image of the common good it's one 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 condemned many people not to have as rich a life as they could given their non entrepreneurial talents Jim my mentor Nick McIntosh year before he died he was at the ISI our 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 which humanity and world philosophy and just who

you are to the table thank you so much for the chat today I'm very happy that appear talk to you [Music] 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 calm that's the psychology podcast calm also please add a rating and review of the psychology podcast on iTunes thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast and tune in next time for more on the mind brain behavior

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