What Is Increasing Human Intelligence?

The Flynn effect is a well-documented effect that involves a gradual increase in performance in intelligence tests. The increase seems to be about 3% per decade, and has seemingly been occurring since the 1930's. Some of the implications are startling -- for example, that before many decades have passed, the average person living will have an intelligence level of the average Harvard freshman today.

There have been various attempts to naturally explain the Flynn effect, but none have been very convincing. One attempted explanation has been that nutrition has been better in recent decades. But James Flynn has pointed out that there was a steady growth of IQ scores among Dutch people between 1952 and 1982, even though those taking the test around 1962 should have suffered from worsened nutrition as children during World War II (there was a Dutch famine in 1944). Also, there is little evidence that very many US children suffered from malnutrition between 1940 and 1970. So it's not like we can say, “Only in recent decades have American children started to eat properly.”

People trying to account for the Flynn effect usually consider only the period from 1930 onward. But the apparent increase in human intelligence since 1930 may be only one facet of a larger mystery of unaccountable increases in human intelligence, a mystery that may stretch back many thousands of years.

Consider the blossoming of human intelligence that occurred long ago. Rather suddenly, humans started to grow crops, and not too long after that, humans started to create cities. Before long we had things such as the glories of Greek sculpture, the philosophy of Plato, the mathematical works of Euclid, and the architectural and organizational achievements of the Roman Empire. But we cannot explain the intelligence behind such things by using natural selection as an explanation. As Alfred Russel Wallace (the co-founder of the theory of natural selection) pointed out in the nineteenth century, natural selection can only explain features that are needed for an organism to survive in the wild.

So we have a general mystery that exceeds the mystery of the Flynn effect. The mystery is: why has human intelligence increased at various times in ways we cannot explain?

I will now suggest a highly unconventional hypothesis to explain the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect may be evidence that human intelligence is being gradually increased by some external reality that is a partial or major source of human consciousness. Such a reality may be gradually increasing human intelligence to help us cope with an increasingly complex world, or to help us fulfill some human destiny that requires greater human intelligence.

To understand this hypothesis, I must first explain what is meant by neural reductionism, and why there are strong reasons for rejecting this assumption. Neural reductionism is a theory of the mind and brain that you have probably heard advanced many times. It is the idea that mind or intelligence is purely a product of the brain. A neural reductionist believes that your brain generates your intelligence rather like your liver secretes bile.

But there are quite a few reasons for doubting this simple theory. One reason is that we cannot plausibly account for very long-term human memories through any neurological explanation, mainly because (as discussed here) very rapid molecular turnover in the brain should make the brain an unsuitable substrate for a 50-year storage of memories, or even a storage of memories lasting longer than two years. Another reason is that the physician John Lorber documented many cases of people who functioned well even though the great majority of their brains were destroyed by disease. Another reason is that neural reductionism cannot account for psychic phenomena such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and extra-sensory perception (the latter something very well-demonstrated in convincing laboratory experiments such as those done by Professor Joseph Rhine, which have never been successfully debunked).

Suppose we consider possibilities other than neural reductionism. It may be that our consciousness and intelligence comes largely or mainly from some mysterious external reality outside of our brains.

Let's imagine a 10-year-old child who enters some data into a smartphone. If you ask the child where that data is stored, the child will say something like: “Why in the smartphone, of course – where else could it be?” But depending on the smartphone app being used, the data may not be stored in the smartphone. It could be the app uses a wi-fi connection to connect to an external web server that connects to a relational database server which stores the data the child has entered into the smartphone. But the child knows nothing of such an unseen infrastructure, so of course when she is asked where her data is stored, she answers that it is in the smartphone. Similarly, our long-term memories and intelligence may depend on some mysterious consciousness and information storage infrastructure that is outside of our brains. But since a scientist knows nothing of such an infrastructure, when he is asked where our memories are stored, he answers: “In the brain, of course – where else could it be?”

And if the child uses her smartphone to do a math problem, and you ask her, “Where was the intelligence that helped you do that?” the child will answer, “In the smartphone, of course – where else could it be?” But the actual facility that helped her may be a remote Google server thousands of miles away. Similarly, if a scientist is asked where is the intelligence that led you to ponder some cosmic mystery, he will answer, “In the brain, of course --- where else could it be?” But our minds may depend on some mysterious intelligence infrastructure outside of our bodies.

Once we start thinking along these lines, that our intelligence may come partially or largely from some mysterious external reality outside of our brains, we have opened the door to a radical new hypothesis to explain the Flynn effect. The hypothesis is this: some external reality that is the source of our consciousness may be deliberately causing a gradual increase in human intelligence. This may be to help us cope with an increasingly complex world. Or it may be to help us fulfill some great destiny that is planned for humanity. The same reality may have increased human intelligence at the time when humans first started to build cities.

The idea that human intelligence is being gradually increased by some mysterious external power seems like a reasonable hypothesis. But there may be one thing that argues against the very idea that human intelligence is gradually increasing.

I refer, of course, to the inane drivel that is the 2016 American presidential campaign. 

Postscript: The average person probably has the idea that the human brain evolved until it was large enough to allow for thinking and spirituality, at which point human culture and religion first started to emerge. The link here reports "anatomically modern" human skull remains dated to 160,000 years ago, with what a scientist describes as "full-fledged Homo sapiens features."  But humans did not start engaging in symbolic behavior until about 80,000 years ago. How do we explain that? It's as if humans got some big intelligence boost 80,000 years after hominid brains reached their largest size. 

Are They Extraterrestrial Signals From 234 Stars?

A study by Canadian astronomers has attracted considerable attention, because the astronomers claim that they may have found evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. The astronomers used spectra, which is what results when you pass the light from a star through a scientific instrument such as a spectrograph, which splits up the light into component parts. The astronomers say they have picked up irregularities in the spectra of 234 stars. 

A cluster of stars (credit: NASA)

 

Viewed without any transformation or alteration, the “signals” in question look completely natural. But the astronomers monkeyed with the data to get it to cough up some blips.

The paper gives figures such as the one below, showing something received from one particular star. 

But this data is not raw data from the star. It is data that has been transformed by the astronomers, who keep telling us in their paper that they are showing a “Fourier modulus of the frequency spectrum (after subtraction of its smoothed spectrum).” That's some kind of abstruse mathematical contortion – something many times more complicated than an average. Why should we be impressed by some kind of blip that emerges only after some statistical or mathematical tinkering has been done? There are 101 ways to massage data to get it to produce some type of blip, if you are looking for some type of blip to appear.

 

Press reports claim that these “signals” match exactly signals predicted in a 2012 paper. But that isn't actually true. The 2012 paper shows a type of blip that might appear in a stellar spectrum, but it shows a great big blip. The type of blips shown in the new paper by the Canadians are only small blips.

Here is the graph shown in the 2012 paper, which is just a "we might get signals like this some day" type of graph:

 The graph above shows a blip much, much more dramatic than the type of blips shown in the paper of the Canadian astronomers. 

I find it rather hard to believe the idea that extraterrestrials would artificially modify the radiation coming from their stars (presumably a very expensive business) in the hopes that such signals would be detected by people on other planets who just happened to apply a Fourier transform (plus an additional subtraction) to such signals. Such a message would be merely a “we are here” type of message that would not transmit semantic content, such as you can transmit in a radio message. But if you are going to go to all the trouble of trying to communicate with planets outside of you, why not use radio signals, which allow you to send detailed, meaningful content (such as a description of what your planet is like, and what type of beings live on it)?

Then there is the coincidence problem. Since the stars in question are scattered throughout space, if we are to believe that most of the spectra blips were produced by extraterrestrials, we would have to believe that coincidentally more than 100 extraterrestrial civilizations decided to use the same weird technique for signaling their existence, a technique that is not one of the five main techniques we would think extraterrestrials would use. Such a coincidence seems far-fetched.

I am also troubled by the fact that the signal is not directly found in the data, but only emerges after some monkeying with the signal that is not straightforward. We can imagine a UFO investigator presenting similar evidence:

UFO Investigator: Here's my photo showing a disk-shaped UFO in the sky. Pretty impressive, eh?

Skeptic: Wow, nice work. So that's the original photo?

UFO Investigator: No, the UFO only showed up after I applied multiple transformations to the photo. First, I applied a “Fish eye” transformation. Then I performed a “horizontal shift” transformation. Only then did the disk-shaped UFO show up.

Skeptic: Get outta here, that's worthless. Try showing me an unaltered photo!

What is very strange is that astronomers seem to be ignoring evidence of unexplained sky anomalies and UFO's in our own skies, but then they try to go torturing data from other stars until it drips out signs of extraterrestrials. There are very many unaltered photos and videos of unexplained phenomena in our own skies. Such photos and videos do not use exotic transformation techniques to produce evidence of something unusual. There is also abundant eyewitness testimony, and the witnesses were not wearing “special light transformation” glasses when they saw what they saw. Why should not such things be regarded as something much more substantial than evidence that only emerges when you have massaged data until it produces the effect you are looking for?

Why might a scientist ignore a great deal of photographs, videos, and eyewitness sightings, all suggesting evidence of something unexplained or extraterrestrial in our skies, but instead prefer to focus on some minor blips from distant stars that only emerge after some contrived methodology in which raw data is massaged until it looks very different? Perhaps the explanation has something to do with snobbery. All those UFO photos and videos are taken by ordinary citizens. There seems to be an unfortunate tendency among the very clannish scientific community for scientists to think along the lines of, “An observation doesn't count unless it was produced by someone in our little country club.” This type of snooty elitism makes no sense.

Besides a kind of people snobbery, I think there's also a kind of technological snobbery going on. A scientist may prefer some mildly suggestive observation produced by some fancy expensive piece of scientific equipment, rather than accept a much more substantial observation made by someone using some $80 point-and-click camera. This also makes no sense, since the reliability of an observation has no relation to how complicated or expensive was the equipment used to produce it. In fact, the fancier the equipment, the greater the opportunities for error.

Dogma Doom: Two Bullets for Dark Matter, One Bullet for Dark Energy?

Our scientists are often giving us visual displays designed to impress us with their grasp of nature. Such visuals should sometimes be taken with a large grain of salt, as they are often examples of dubious dogma. An example is the type of “composition of the universe” pie graph that shows the universe as about 71% dark energy, 24% dark matter and 5% regular matter. But as I discussed in my previous post “A Second Bullet in the Chest of Dark Matter?” the case for dark matter is wobbly, and two recent findings are hard to reconcile with standard accounts of dark matter. Commenting on one of these findings, an astrophysicist has said, “Nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this and it is almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it, without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely.”

In my previous post I suggested that we should replace the dogmatic “composition of the universe” pie chart with a table listing the universe's contents as ? % dark matter, ? % dark energy, ? % atoms, and ? % unknown. Coincidentally, a few days after making this post, there appeared a news science story that seems to further shatter all confidence that we understand the composition of the universe.

The new science story dealt not with dark matter but dark energy. No one has any idea what dark energy is, but there is a vague idea that the vacuum of space may be filled with dark energy. The case for dark energy seemed to solidify when scientists announced that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Scientists said that only dark energy in the vacuum of space could account for this acceleration. We were told that dark energy has a kind of expansive pressure, rather like the gas pressure that keeps a helium balloon from collapsing, and that this is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate.

But now dark energy may have taken its own bullet in the chest. It comes from this paper dealing with supernova explosions. The conclusion that the universe's expansion is accelerating was based largely on an analysis of the star explosions called supernova explosions. The new paper also analyzes supernova explosions, but uses a more sophisticated technique and a larger database. The new paper says, “We find, rather surprisingly, that the data are still quite consistent with a constant rate of expansion.”

As discussed here, the new paper casts doubt on the claim that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. In doing so, it seems to undermine the main evidence for dark energy.

Ouch! It looks like our swaggering, strutting cosmologists may have little idea about what they are talking about when they pontificate about the composition of the universe. But we shouldn't be surprised by such dogmatic overconfidence, seeing how extremely common it is in the fields of physics, biology and neuroscience. Should we tear out those pages of the astronomy textbooks that have dogmatic “composition of the universe” pie charts? Perhaps instead we can print up some candid stickers resembling the visual below, and paste them over such “composition of the universe” pie charts. The figure in the white coat represents a scientist with the proper degree of intellectual humility. 

 Postscript: Some news reports said that the authors of the new paper on supernova explosions had said that the expansion of the universe is not accelerating. But their paper was actually entitled "Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae." They merely claimed that the evidence for an accelerating universe was marginal. Their paper is rebutted by this paper from today, entitled "Is the expansion of the universe accelerating? All signs point to yes."

A Second Bullet in the Chest of Dark Matter Theory?

The phrase “caught with your pants down” means to be found in an embarrassing situation. This is exactly what has happened to the swaggering overconfident theorists who have been telling us for decades that many a cosmic mystery can be explained by postulating the existence of dark matter.

For decades such theorists have said the behavior of galaxies cannot be explained merely by the gravitational attraction of ordinary visible matter. So, we have been told, there must be some kind of additional matter, an invisible matter, what is called dark matter. No one has ever produced direct observational evidence for such dark matter, and the Standard Model of physics does not include dark matter. But our dark matter theorists have insisted that there is indirect evidence for dark matter, and have even dogmatically asserted that the universe is 26.8% dark matter. This type of unwarranted precision about an unknown has struck many as being an absurd case of theoretical overconfidence.

Now a new study has cast grave doubt on whether dark matter even exists. (Interestingly, a recent article in Astronomy magazine states, “Scientists now know that dark matter comprises some 84 percent of the universe’s material,” which is so far off from the other estimate it makes you wonder whether someone's just picking numbers out of a hat.)

As reported here and here, the new study found that the rotation speed of galaxies correlates very strongly with the amount of visible matter in galaxies. In other words, if you know how much visible matter is in a galaxy, you can accurately predict the rotation speed of that galaxy. Such a relation is all but impossible to explain under dark matter theories. As astrophysicist David Merrit says, “Nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this and it is almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it, without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely.”

 The new study seems like a bullet in the chest of dark matter theory. And it may be the second bullet in the chest of dark matter theory. In August scientists announced findings about a distant galaxy called Dragonfly 44. This galaxy seems to have about roughly the mass of our galaxy, but only emits 1 percent of the light our galaxy emits. So astronomers stated that this Dragonfly 44 galaxy seems to be 99.99% dark matter. But such a conclusion raises the question: how could some galaxy get to be 99.99% dark matter, if dark matter is only about five times more common than regular matter? Our cosmologists have been telling us that dark matter is about five times more common than regular matter, and that the two are mixed throughout the universe. If two things are mixed together in a five to one ratio, we should not expect that you would have some local concentration that contained 99.99% of the first thing. A galaxy that is 99.99% dark matter seems no more likely than there might form over a town a lethal patch of the atmosphere that is 99.99% nitrogen and only .01% oxygen, something that would cause you to die of oxygen starvation.

Our scientists talk dogmatically about dark matter, and present arguments for its existence. But such arguments typically involve some underlying assumptions such as the following:

1. The only force acting to determine the structure of galaxies is gravitation.
2. Gravitation acts in the simple way that matches our formulas for gravitation, rather than in some more complicated way.

Since such assumptions are dubious, the case for dark matter is very doubtful. What we observe is a universe behaving in strange, mysterious ways. Our scientists try to make things look less mysterious by making precise estimates of the composition of the universe. It would be much more honest if such scientists admitted that we do not understand such things.

From a philosophical perspective, it is entirely possible that the universe is zero percent matter. All that we have direct knowledge of is what goes on in our own minds. Philosophers such as George Berkeley have presented reasonable scenarios of a “mind only” universe in which matter exists only as something perceived within a mind.

Let us imagine a savage living on some remote island in the Pacific ocean. The savage knows nothing of modern science and technology, and he often finds his little world to be a frightening place, particularly when there are thunderstorms. Yet the savage has one consoling thought: he thinks that the local witch doctor knows almost everything. But one day something surprising happens: the savage sees a distant jet airplane passing by the island, something he has never seen before. Bewildered, the savage goes to the witch doctor, and asks him to explain this wonder. “Oh that,” says the witch doctor. “That was just a big insect.” Now the savage is relieved. He can still believe that the witch doctor is a lord of understanding.

No doubt our cosmologists will try to explain away this latest cosmology anomaly in some similar way. Once society has anointed a figure as a great “lord of understanding,” such a figure will almost never say, “You know, I really don't understand these matters.”

But if our cosmologists were to be candid, they would cross out their dogmatic “composition of the universe” pie charts, and replace them with a frank diagram looking like the lower chart below. 

 Postscript: A new scientific paper notes that "no explanation exists so far for the observed dearth of dwarf galaxies in the local universe compared to the large number of dark matter halos predicted by" dark matter theory.