Joseph Henrich

So there are polygenic scores for IQ.

I think they actually did that one as well.

Like you said, it's correlated with education.

And yeah, but that doesn't have anything that the things that go into giving you an IQ, I mean, the correlation between brain size and IQ is only about, well, across populations, it's 0.24.

So it's not very big.

So the other thing is, I mean, IQ is massively misunderstood.

So the way to think about IQ, which has been going up over the 20th century by quite a bit.

So if you rescale modern scores to 1900, it's about 70.

It's called the Flynn effect.

I think that those are cognitive abilities for navigating the institutional world that we've constructed.

And a huge mistake would be to assume that those are the right cognitive abilities for the next century.

So it'll be a different constellation.

If you study, we study herders and cognitive abilities of herders in Northern Namibia.

And if you're in Northern Namibia, you got to be able to move through the landscape.

So being able to just pick a direction and know where you're going and not get lost is super important.

So different suites of cognitive abilities are favored in different environments.

This idea that there's this generalized thing applicable across all human environments just doesn't, I mean, education massively increases your IQ, right?

If you're uneducated, you have a totally different IQ.

Well, so I think it's a continuous scale.

So if you look at human brains, they're developing and continuing to add new connections and stuff, at least into the mid-20s.