I have a soft spot for Carl Sagan.
When I was growing up, my mother had a story about how she met Carl Sagan at NASA and made fun of him. And my friends loved him. Sagan may have been a lightweight as a scientist, but that’s the wrong way to judge him; Sagan was really more of a teacher, a popularizer of scientific knowledge. He had a way of showcasing the wonder of those aspects of reality which we, in our postscientific age, take for granted so often.
So when I found this relic of the 1970’s in the local library called Dragons from Eden, I thought, “Hm, book by Carl Sagan… reminds me of my favorite blog… OK, what does it say?”
Well What Does it Say?
It took a while, because I lost it in my car I was busy making music, changing diapers, and solving integrals, but as soon as I finally opened it up, right away I noticed how reminiscent this book is of modern futurism:
Most organisms on Earth depend on their genetic information, which is “prewired” into their nervous systems, to a much greater extent than they do on their extragenetic information, which is acquired during their lifetimes. For human beings, and indeed for all mammals, it is the other way around… We have made a kind of bargain with nature: our children will be difficult to raise, but their capacity for new learning will greatly enhance the chances of survival of the human species…
And then Sagan gets really excited about his toes:
An example of recent evolution of organ systems in humans is our toes. The big toe plays an important function in balance while walking; the other toes have much less obvious utility. They are clearly evolved from fingerlike appendages for grasping and swinging, like those of arboreal apes and monkeys. This evolution constitutes a respecialization — the adaptation of an organ system originally evolved for one function to another and quite different function — which required about ten million years to emerge. (The feet of the mountain gorilla have undergone a similar although quite independent evolution.)
My sense of the changing nature of modern Westerners is that, over the last century, they’ve gradually become more abstract in their thinking. Everybody focusses on changes like global rising obesity levels,1 or changes to anxiety and depression in some countries,2 but the move away from physical and mechanical thinking has mostly passed under the radar. Education has become progressively less tangible, practical, and concrete; our food comes less from the garden or even the shelves and more from an order placed online; and we’re all swimming in data streams decoded by countless devices into waveforms and arrangements of pixels.
So I don’t know about you, but to me, going over how our toes have been repurposed seems like the most random tangent Sagan could have made on page 2. Maybe in the 1970’s people were interested enough in basic physical things that they expect the digression? At least he finds his way back:
But today we do not have ten million years to wait for the next advance. We live in a time when our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. While the changes are largely of our own making, they cannot be ignored. We must adjust and adapt and control, or we perish.
Only an extragenetic learning system can possibly cope with the swiftly changing circumstances that our species faces. Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us. A better understanding of the nature and evolution of human intelligence just possibly might help us to deal intelligently with our unknown and perilous future. (emphasis added)
Lulled by a mug of steaming hot tea and the dusty scent of quiet pages where this philosophical fellow dreamily muses about our place in the universe, it would be an easy matter to ignore the giant [dubius—discuss] sign Wikipedia wants to hang on these paragraphs. So look at what I’ve bolded above:
The rate of technological advance is becoming a threat, and
Intelligence is the only solution to the serious problems we face.
The first of these claims is all over the place today. Granted, the people talking about it are mostly futurists, computer scientists, and miscellaneous technophiles (read: colossal nerds) but visit all the nerds cool kids at Scott Alexander’s blog3 and you’ll see what I mean; hanging around and talking about point #1 is seriously an entire way of life for thousands today. Everybody always points to guys like Ray Kurtzweil as the first to come up with the idea of the Singularity so they would have something to be scared about, but Sagan was already worried about this stuff before I was even alive.
And then there’s claim #2.
Intelligence: Our Only Hope?
The second of these claims, the claim that intelligence is so important as to be the only solution to the looming threats to our existence, has become a political minefield. One of the most controversial books ever published in my lifetime was The Bell Curve, and it was controversial precisely because it argued that intelligence was really important. And this didn’t stop over 400,000 copies from being sold.4 Modern Westerners are seriously hung up on intelligence—particularly the urban, coastal liberals of Democratic Blue Tribe who simultaneously see intelligence as the spark of intrinsic worthiness, as a trait which discriminates enlightened liberals from their dogmatic, uneducated, religious enemies, the unspeakable conservatives—and, on the other hand, as something which doesn’t exist, because if it did, then people who were less intelligent than others would be dehumanised.
The latter belief is held more consciously than the former, as a guilty reaction to the philosophical understanding that if the intuitive assumption about intelligence defining worth were true, then, well, some people would be less worthy, and this violates other strong beliefs about everyone being equal.
This problem could be effortlessly resolved, of course: we could admit both that intelligence is valuable to us, and that we care about everybody thriving regardless of their intelligence. Vegetarians and animal rights activists come much closer to this synthesis than most on the political left.5 But the desire to smooth over complexity and push for clean, simple philosophical consistency is too strong for most of us, so we ditch intelligence and replace it with virtues like empathy, creativity, or emotional intelligence (EQ).
You can see this in surveys by Pew Research Center on childrearing, where empathy and creativity show up as important for the children of liberals, but not conservatives, to develop. Little surprise then that in the US, liberals are not only higher in empathy than conservatives, but also are more interested in politics the more empathic they are.6 Liberals are also found in psychological studies to be more creative than conservatives7, and even their personal rooms are messier, filled with stationary, music, and art supplies.8
This is all very nice, because it allows liberals to value the traits that make us different from our political opponents. It isn’t intelligence that makes us virtuous and worthy people. No, no—it’s our empathy. Our creativity. Yes. Those things are what really count.
The problem is that empathy910 and creativity11 show positive relationships with intelligence.
Well OK, maybe that’s true, but I mentioned emotional intelligence, too. What about emotional intelligence?
The problem is that emotional intelligence also correlates with intelligence.12
It isn’t hard to see why this would be true, either. In a world where things go pretty well for everybody, maybe there would be no relationship between any of these things, fine. But now think about the real world, where you’ve just been dumped by your girlfriend; you’re not likely to be motivated to do well on an IQ test, or to connect with others’ feelings, and you might have a bit of trouble creatively for a while. Or say you’ve just been kicked in the head. Or say any number of IQ-depressing things just happened to you; wouldn’t you be worse off emotionally and creatively, too? This by itself would create a small positive relationship between these measures. Here’s what I mean:
Granted, there are ways of studying for IQ tests and improving your IQ score without improving anything else. And yes, there are probably also ways of enhancing creativity and empathy individually without improving IQ. But, in any given sample there’s always going to be a certain number of people experiencing some degree of impairment, and most impairments are going to affect all of those things together.
Yes, all of this is unpopular. But look, all of it can be resolved by admitting that we care about everybody even when they’re unintelligent, unempathic, uncreative, and have poor emotional intelligence. Because, wait for it…
…Are you ready?
OK here it is! Meet the poster child for unintelligent, uncreative beings with the emotional regulatory skills of a kitten—your local neighborhood kitten:
Admit it, you know the kitten’s score on EQ, IQ, and creativity measures is abysmal, it makes no difference, you still care about the kitten, I rest my case.
Wright, S. M., & Aronne, L. J. (2012). Causes of obesity. Abdominal Radiology, 37, 730-732.
Schürmann, J., & Margraf, J. (2018). Age of anxiety and depression revisited: A meta-analysis of two European community samples (1964-2015). International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 18(2), 102-112.
And I guess Scott Alexander is also into the subject of human digits because at the time I wrote this essay, his latest post asked whether transgender people have weird thumbs
At least, this claim is commonly circulated on sites like http://intelltheory.com/intelli/the-bell-curve/ or https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/books/review-human-diversity-charles-murray.html. If you have more accurate information, please let me know.
Though even they still say strange things like “I love animals so much more than stupid humans” out of the same desire to simplify everything: humans are mean to animals, ergo, humans are stupid. OK, granted, humans are pretty stupid, but… compared to other animals?
Morris, S. G. (2020). Empathy and the liberal-conservative political divide in the US. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(1), 8-24.
Dollinger, S. J. (2007). Creativity and conservatism. Personality and Individual Differences, 43(5), 1025-1035.
Carney, D. R., Jost, J. T., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2008). The secret lives of liberals and conservatives: Personality profiles, interaction styles, and the things they leave behind. Political psychology, 29(6), 807-840.
Raine, A., & Chen, F. R. (2018). The cognitive, affective, and somatic empathy scales (CASES) for children. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 47(1), 24-37.
Alloway, T. P., Copello, E., Loesch, M., Soares, C., Watkins, J., Miller, D., ... & Ray, S. (2016). Investigating the reliability and validity of the Multidimensional Emotional Empathy Scale. Measurement, 90, 438-442.
Sligh, A. C., Conners, F. A., & Roskos‐Ewoldsen, B. E. V. E. R. L. Y. (2005). Relation of creativity to fluid and crystallized intelligence. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 39(2), 123-136.
Ogurlu, U. (2021). A meta-analytic review of emotional intelligence in gifted individuals: A multilevel analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 171, 110503.
It is OK to be an unintelligent, uncreative being with the emotional regulatory skills of a kitten... as long as you are as cute as a kitten. But what about unintelligent, uncreative and UGLY creatures?