She Blinded Me With Science

I see that we’re sciencing the Fall of the Roman Empire again. Science reveals that, while conventional non-science studies are obsessed with what the Romans might have done for us, actually what mattered is what they did to themselves, releasing huge quantities of lead particles into the atmosphere as a result of their mining and metal-working. If our scientific estimate of the total volume of lead released over two centuries is combined with scientific reconstructions of how this pollution might have spread across Europe and scientific studies of how this might have lead to increased levels of lead in people’s blood then we might hypothesise, following other scientific research, a possible drop of 2.5-3 points in overall Roman IQ levels.

Which, given that IQ is defined in terms of a normal distribution of ‘intelligence’ across a population with 100 as the mean, is completely meaningless unless it’s compared with something else, whether that is “Romans were stupider than they might otherwise have been”, or “Romans of the Principate were stupider than Romans of the Republic”, or maybe “if we could carry out IQ tests on the Roman population, and then compare the data with the equally non-existent data on IQ from other parts of the world in this period, then we would see that the Romans were statistically stupider, which explains Something,”. Here’s a 1965 article by a scientist speculating that lead poisoning caused the Fall of the Roman Empire, which is a purely historiographical construct located centuries later, but don’t worry about that because Science.

I mean, the least they could do is offer another scientific study on how quickly one might expect changes in atmospheric pollution, blood levels and notional IQ to shift after the substantial reduction in smelting activity revealed by those same ice cores. Were the Romans still cognitively disabled in the late third century, explaining their hapless economic management? Is this why they were so easily outwitted by wily fourth-century barbarians whose healthy lifestyle out on the steppe had kept their blood pure and their minds clear? Or, on the contrary, was it lead poisoning that kept the population quiescent during the famed Pax Romana, whereas the clearing of minds in later centuries resulted in social disruption and hostility to the Establishment, just as we have seen in Western societies since bans on lead in petrol? Science!

I hope it’s obvious that my objection is not to the study of historical atmospheric pollution levels through analysis of ice cores, which was revelatory when it began thirty or more years ago, nor – rather more hesitantly – to drawing out the possible implications of this data through the multiplication of if/then conjectures. What annoys me is rather the breathless and frequently silly reporting of such studies, which may or may not be driven by the university’s press release or the laziness of the journalists, or both. New scientific findings rewrite history through Science! Because obviously that is so much less speculative and more significant than anything that those silly historians might get up to.