Summary: What makes smart people be so stupid? Could it be that intelligence is still a work-in-process?
A shipbuilder capable of designing a four-stack steamer that can carry thousands of passengers across the Atlantic would seem to be an intelligent person, right? But why wouldn't they question their own hubris and install enough lifeboats in case—just in case—the ship hits an iceberg and sinks on its maiden voyage? Or how about a film actress savvy enough to make it in the Hollywood system, landing several high-profile roles, making lots of money, but who doesn't question the logic of stealing an armfull of clothes she could easily afford at a Saks 5th Avenue store? Or how about a man clever enough to survive the presidential electoral process, but dumb enough to accept sexual favors from an intern?
Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent evolutionist, recalled meeting a plumber in his hotel room after testifying at a modern-day retry of the Scopes Monkey Trial that focused on Flood Geology. The plumber was trying to investigate the source of a water leak and was working on the toilet in Gould's hotel room. After failing to find the source of problem there, he stopped to chat with Gould and took the opportunity to describe his job, explaining to Gould in clear, logical, mechanistic terms how he went about performing his job and his understanding of the way water flows:
“...it can come only from here, here, or there, flow this way or that way, and end up there, there, or here. I then asked him what he thought of the trial across the street, and he confessed his staunch creationism, including his firm belief in the miracle of Noah's flood.
As a professional, this man never doubted that water has a physical source and a mechanically constrained path of motion—and that he could use the principles of his trade to identify causes. It would be a poor (and unemployed) plumber indeed who suspected that the laws of engineering had been suspended whenever a puddle and cracked plaster bewildered him. Why should we approach the physical history of our earth any differently?“
Michael Shermer once posed the question “why do smart people believe stupid things?” and answered it by saying that intelligent people are very good at defending positions they arrived at by nonsmart means. Everybody comes to hold opinions from some means other than logical deduction, but then intelligent people can fall into a trap called the confirmation biasD, where we leap on anything that justifies our beliefs, but ignore or rationalize-away anything that contradicts them. So the smarter you are, the better you are at self denial.
Stupidity is something most of us associate with a lack of intelligence, but you have to concede that intelligence is necessary for someone or something to be stupid. I mean, we don't say that two volatile chemicals are stupid because they annihilate each other when mixed, or that rocks are dumb because they collide with each other and break themselves into tiny pieces, that's just what they do. Even animals, once you study their behavior and evolution, are prisoners of their own instincts and reflexes and not consciously able to suppress them. No, to identify a source of true stupidity you have to look for a sentient animal, something that was born with the capability to make smart decisions, but simply didn't.
Stupidity isn't a lack of intelligence, it's more like a perversion of it. Or better yet, stupidity isn't the opposite of intelligence, it's the opposite of rational.
As someone who'd aspire to brilliance, this kind of thing terrifies the wits out of me. What good is being smart if you're just going to use it to be dumb? Having extremely high intelligence reminds us of the Darwin Award winner who strapped a solid-fuel rocket to his car and plastered himself across a sheer rock face at 300 miles per hour: sure you get great speed, but you're missing the critical element of control.
We could conclude that modern human intelligence is an unfinished product, and something that nature hasn't quite got around to polishing yet. The problem-solving intelligence part can be tuned and revved up to high levels, but it becomes unstable like early supersonic jet prototypes that shook themselves to pieces just after reaching the sound barrier. Nature has outstripped itself, producing a freak organism with a feature that's obscenely over-developed but under-refined. We've seen examples of evolution getting ahead of itself before, like the rapid conversion to an erect, bipedal skeletal frame without properly modifying the spine to withstand the back-aching load of pregnancy. To get a better grip of human failings, and human stupidity, you have to realize that modern Homo sapiens sapiens just isn't done yet.
In evolutionary spans of time man, and his absurdly advanced intelligence, is very recent. To take cognitive thinking abilities back to an honest starting point, our best candidate so far is homo habilis ("handyman") who wielded flakes, choppers and scrapers for tools about 1.6 to 2.3 million years ago. That's a walk down the driveway compared to the 3.5 billion years that life is reckoned to have been in business. But to really put things into perspective, the brains of our ancestors grew in size very rapidly from an evolutionary perspective. The earliest ancestor to start using sophisticated tools like drills and needles, and to leave cave paintings for our anthropologists to find, is Cro-Magnon man who's era dawned a mere 46,000 to 12,000 years ago. That doesn't provide for many generations of evolution's blind experimentation to refine the stability of a rapidly growing brain.
I need to better justify what I mean when I say that intelligence isn't all there is to thinking. There's still a lot of myth surrounding the IQ scale, for example, and one such myth is that as IQ goes up then certain traits or behaviors are automagically enabled. Like the idea that people with low IQs must be bad at considering the consequences of their actions (girls who marry deadbeats and have more kids than they can support must be stupid), but people with high IQs seem to pick up arrogance as an unavoidable trait (they need us to look up to them because they have better answers).
The myth treats the human brain like some kind of ultimate computer that spends its idle time working on self-improvement. But this is incorrect. IQ is not sufficient to deduce a person's behavior with, it only reflects pattern sensing and problem solving skills.
Our minds are more like the product of thousands of specialized gadgets in our heads that each have a specific purpose and often manifest a specific behavior. This theory began in the late 19th century with phrenologyD, and lead to Paul Broca's discovery of the motor speech center—a part of the brain that controls speech. Broca discovered this region because one of his patients had a lesion there and was rendered incapable of talking (the condition is now know as Broca's aphasia). Further study of the brain's layout over the last century has revealed that there isn't a single cubic inch of grey matter that isn't dedicated to a specific task.
This is consistent with the theory of evolution, which would tell us that nothing evolves without an environmental factor. Nature did not decide to chuck a thousand extra cubic centimeters of gray goo into our heads and wait for it to figure out what to do with itself. A specific cluster of neurons, for example, evolved to express sophisticated information via speech, and another to understand it, and those structures are there at birth. Reading and writing had to develop in evolutionary time, too, because there are brain structures dedicated to those tasks as well. And if you damage either of those regions the patient loses a talent, but the others can remain unaffected. So if you damage the area Carl Wernicke identified, which is the area involved with assembling coherent sentences from words, then they can still understand language, but when they speak it um figger want over because have and you'd trouble cuz say what understand if. (Yoda a mild case of Wernicke's aphasia have, yes?)
People who are consistently rude, arrogant, over-focused, or make poor social decisions are likely to have an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex, a region at the front of the brain that computes the consequences of your personal choices. The principle was explored in a recent episode of Enterprise, where a dose of Star Trek Radiation affected the crew's pre-frontals and transformed them all into raging assholes with excessively selfish concerns. The pre-frontal is one of the widgets in our heads that perform a valuable type of thought regulation, and in the aforementioned TV show, the chief engineer ignores the welfare of the ship in order to focus on the perfection of the captain's chair; we see him performing remarkable feats of engineering (and using his mental skills to justify it) while at the same time committing a greater act of stupidity through negligence.
(Star Trek seems to like exploring the extremely rational and irrational sides of intellect. On one side you have the Vulcans who are rational but diplomatically inept, and on the other you have Khan, who has intellectual superiority but an irrational sense of vengeance.)
Without thought-regulation devices like the pre-frontal cortex we can be amazingly intelligent problem solvers, but total boneheads at the same time. Intelligence is not a “stuff” that automatically figures out its own plan of action, it's a tool that can be dangerously narrow-focused. The pre-frontal cortex is just one of the mechanisms that's supposed to keep it under control, but it's not the only one. In a recent articleA we explored other innate behaviors designed to tug us in the direction of moral behavior.
The purpose of hard-wiring behaviors and regulators is to make them intuitive so we're more likely to express them. Language is intuitive according to the linguist Noam Chomsky, for example. Babies get to work on the problem almost as soon as they're delivered, which is why they turn their heads and pay attention to someone speaking: they're already trying to decipher. Same applies to walking, which babies usually get the hang of after about 10-months of practice. Soon they're immitating their parents (chosing a role model), and as early as age four they're beginning to get the hang of social dynamics by recognizing motives. This and other evidence suggests hard-wired, self-driven learning that comes naturally and doesn't need to be forced by the parents.
Now there's another kind of behavior that some people have learned with difficulty and discipline, but that doesn't seem to be intuitive. The lack of it has been getting smart people into all kinds if stupid trouble. It's called critical thinking, or the act of criticizing your own thoughts. The book Critical Thinking by Richard W. Paul and Linda Elder describes at least eight questions that critical thinkers use to analyze their own thoughts constantly:
The gauntlet of self-examination performed by a critical thinker weeds out most delusions and superstitions. It also needs to be backed up with a bit of intellectual honesty (once you've realized you're wrong, you've got to override your ego and admit it), but it means that most strong critical thinkers avoid making stupid mistakes or holding stupid beliefs. Critical thinking has to be learned, however. It takes a lot of work, must be practiced, has to become habitual, and most important: it doesn't come intuitively. It's about as intuitive as algebra, and most people are not very strong at it even though they could otherwise be very intelligent, logical, deductive thinkers.
So why haven't we evolved a critical-thinking cortex? Why isn't it instinctual to take apart your own opinions? Where's the introspection gene? Why should critical thinkers be in the minority when it could clearly make everone better off? Why is learning to speak so easy we don't even remember the effort, but learning to think is the scope of college courses and dense books?
It could be because nature just hasn't got around to that bit yet, or it could be because evolution doesn't produce perfect solutions. Or it could be because it's not in the best interests of the species; a side effect of having intelligence without introspection is that smart people can be employed to zealously defend policies that may not be correct, but that advance a group's agenda anyway (politics is not rational on the micro level).
Intelligence evolved in the first place for a variety of environmental and social reasons, but it seems one of the most important was to unshackle humans from the pace of evolution. In normal predator-prey relationships the arms race takes place across generations and not within the lifespan of a single organism. But a human doesn't have to wait for evolution to stumble upon an instinct that will help his children catch their next meal, he can figure one out before lunch. The experiment has been wildly successful, but ironically, if it's too successful it might also remove the environmental pressure for nature to finish the job.
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