I was somewhat surprised when I read that people are getting more intelligent, on average, every decade. (Here’s more evidence of it.) But it makes sense… no matter what the cause, more people are learning how to think better all the time. And more people believe they can be smarter, from seeing smarter people around them, which has been shown to increase both the willingness to learn and intelligence itself.
Where will this trend take us? The Technological Singularity that futurist Ray Kurzweil believes in may well lie on our path. It’s impossible to predict, from this side of it, what the other side might look like. But we do seem to be headed in that direction, so it’s something that we should be thinking about.
Though we may know more facts, and understand more about our universe and ourselves than ever before, I’m hesitant to say that people are getting more intelligent decade by decade. IQ tests are well known for their biases, geared more toward western cultural understandings, and weighted more towards facts, logic and hard sciences and math, than more abstract concepts. I think intelligence encompasses much more than what is on by an IQ test, and until questions such as “Here is a feeling: (feeling is stimulated inside test subject) What is this feeling and what is an appropriate response to this feeling?”, we’ll never really know if we’re any more intelligent than people who came before us.
Facts, hard sciences, and math all have one thing in common: they’re all strongly interrelated. And to really understand and remember them, your brain has to create a lot more and denser connections that usual for other types of information. And being able to exploit those relationships to gain novel insights is really the essence of what IQ tests are trying to test for.
(Not so coincidentally, such dense neural interconnections have also been shown to stave off the mental deterioration of dementia, even in people who an autopsy later shows had it.)
Emotional intelligence certainly has an important place in human interactions, but I can’t buy the idea that it’s anywhere near as important as IQ. But then, I know that opinion is quite biased. 🙂