A rare instance in which — authors' credentials may significantly matter — a book about humanity's supposedly declining intelligence

29 August 2018

Caveat

Am I being distastefully grumpy?

Or is this about critical thinking?

A splash-making book title

Today, I came across notice of this soon to be published book:

At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future

The publisher (Imprint Academic) promotes the volume this way . . .

Hold onto your seat:

We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End.

The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago.

The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it’s currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer.

With At Our Wits’ End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest.

But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future.

Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?

Yikes

Sounds like we should pray for an imminent Second Coming.

Hmmm — to read or not to read?

Let's contemplate how difficult the "declining intelligence" hypothesis is to demonstrate.

Given the scientific complexity underlying intelligence:

its measurement,

uses and variable applications

— as well as —

the complicated genetics passing it on,

combined with obvious perplexities surrounding differences in how it manifests

as influenced by environmental surroundings —

. . . I wondered who the authors were.

This is not a good subject for nitwits

A scientific background of some slightly pertinent kind, given the mind-bending complexity of the topic, probably matters.

At least insofar as having encouraged the authors to be aware of the range and depth of the variables (and confounding variables) that they are purportedly investigating.

In view of that — guess who wrote the book

Coauthor Edward Dutton was trained as a theologian and owns a PhD in religious studies. He's married to a Lutheran priest.

Theology is (arguably, from a scientific perspective) a nonsense subject about which one makes up still more nonsense.

Otherwise, there would not be such an extremely wide and absolutely contradictory range of religions. All claiming exclusivity.

Coauthor Michael A. Woodley's PhD "work concerned the molecular characterization of aspects of the life history ecology of the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana."

Arabidopsis thaliana is considered to be an unintelligent life form.

Studying A. thaliana's "molecular" ecological reactions — to its presumably equally unintelligent surroundings — does not translate particularly well into addressing more difficult to characterize human ones.

The moral? — I will probably give At Our Wits' End a miss

The publishers' sensationalizing blurb does not help the (un)persuasiveness of the authors' probably non-ideally suited backgrounds.

Maybe the planet is increasingly supplied with morons.

Note

I know I've given the book a micro-miniscule boost. First, I could be both unfair and completely wrong in my pre-read criticism.

And second, even if not — proportionately more morons may be a good thing.

Only God, that theologically created Being, knows for sure.

PeteFree.com

A rare instance in which — authors' credentials may significantly matter — a book about humanity's supposedly declining intelligence