Limiting smartness

A recent study (1) argues that there is a limit to human smartness by sighting examples such as the correlation between IQ and diseases and the performance loss seen with cognition enhancing drugs in those with good baseline abilities. These observations have nothing to do with the hypothesis that there is a limit to human smartness. The article also seems to suggest that the ability to memorize is part of smartness. Those who made ground breaking contributions to Science have never shown great abilities to memorize. From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to memorize should have had survival advantages. However, in the modern context, the ability to conceptualize is an order of magnitude more important than the ability to remember. Crude metrics such as the size of the head and the size of the human pelvis were sighted as limiting constraints on smartness as if size has a pronounced effect on smartness. It is true that a bigger brain to body ratio proxies higher IQ among animals but this is more related to operating system effects. It is unclear that those humans with bigger heads are actually smarter.

However, the question whether there is an inherent limit to human smartness, with any definition, is an interesting one. This may have to be studied in the context of the system and the society, the human is part off. If a human is significantly smarter than the society that envelopes her, it is likely that the society will shun (or terminate) her. Thus an increase in smartness in a random person will not be passed on and the society will assure a reversion to the mean in terms of average IQ. Thus the limit to human smartness may not be related to any inherent hardware limitation but rather a property of the complex societies that will not tolerate random increases in intelligence in small subsets within it.

(1) Why aren't we smarter already? Evolutionary limits on cognition. Published: Wednesday, December 7, 2011 - 14:37 in Psychology & Sociology