How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (22 page)

This requires being able to ask not just ‘What happened?’ but also ‘Why did it have to be that way?’ Animals, it seems, take the world as it comes. Only humans seem able to detach themselves from their own parochial concerns to imagine that things could be other than they are. Only then is it possible to ask the all-important ‘Why?’ questions that adults find so infuriating in children.

In the social context, this ability to stand back from the way things are is referred to as possessing a ‘theory of mind’. It underpins our ability to understand another person’s beliefs and the way we use this knowledge to exploit and manipulate each other. Children do not possess it at birth: they acquire the ability at around four years of age. In fact, some humans (such as autistic people) never acquire it. Neither sophisticated lying nor fictive play are possible until a child has acquired theory of mind. Without it, fictional literature is impossible and both science and religion, with their need to imagine impossible worlds, are out of the question.

It is equally clear that no animals reach this exalted state of mind. Monkeys can, of course, engage in deception, but it is deception of the kind that three-year-old children are good at. They can read another’s behaviour well enough to exploit them, but they cannot understand that another individual can hold beliefs that are different from their own. The only exception, yet again, seems to be the great apes, as we saw in the previous chapter.

The substantive point is surely that the continued insistence that culture is a phenomenon which sets humans apart from the rest of creation seems to smack more of generic chauvinism than anything else. There are, of
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course, aspects of human culture that are not found in other species, just as there are aspects of language that appear to be unique to humans. These are but the high points on what in reality is a continuum. And therein perhaps lies part of the problem: humans seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to think in terms of continua, preferring instead to deal in simple dichotomies of them-and-us. We should recognise that neither language nor culture are simple unitary phenomena and that we share many of the processes that underpin them with at least some of our fellow creatures.

One thing, however, does seem to be uniquely human, and that is the fictional world. Animals simply could not understand what a story was – not just because they lack the language to understand the words, but because they are unable to comprehend the whole notion of imaginative fiction. If they did have language, they would take the story at face value, and be utterly perplexed by statements about a world that did not exist.

This is obvious if you think about William Shakespeare sitting down to write his play
Othello
. He has three core characters: Othello himself, Iago and the ill-fated Desdemona. To make the play work, he must persuade his audience (when they eventually get to see the play) that Iago
intends
that Othello should
believe
that Desdemona
is in
love
with someone else. That involves three separate mind states on the stage. But to make the story really convincing, he has to add in Cassio, the apparent object of Desdemona’s desires. If Desdemona merely fantasised about Cassio,
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Othello would, surely, have been much less bothered by it all. It might have led to a bit of leg-pulling in the garden, but why otherwise should Othello be so exercised about the intelligence that Iago offers him – unless he is led to believe that Cassio reciprocates Desdemona’s interest? It is this that racks up the intensity of Othello’s angst and causes him to do what he eventually does. So, to make the story really sell, Shakespeare has to show or imply four mind states: Iago
intends
that Othello should
believe
that Desdemona
loves
Cassio and Cassio
loves
her.

But this is not the end of the story, because Shakespeare has to persuade the audience to believe all this stuff. If they are not taken in by it, the play will be dead in the water. So Shakespeare has to factor the minds of the audience (or, at least, the virtual mind of a nominal member of the audience) into his calculations. And last, but not least, he has to be doing the imagining of all this himself. So when he sits down with his quill pen poised above a sheet of foolscap one wet Monday morning in Elizabethan London, he has to be able to work – minimally – at sixth-order intentionality: he
intends
that the audience
believe
that Iago
wants
Othello to
suppose
that Desdemona
loves
Cassio and he in turn
loves
her.

That’s no mean feat, because he is already working at one level of intentionality above what the average adult human can cope with. Notice that he is also pushing his audience to its limits – they are having to work at fifth-order intentionality. It is probably precisely because Shakespeare could work successfully at this level, and so challenge his audience to their limit, that he came to be such a successful playwright.

However, the real issue for our present concerns is that
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only a human could have done this. With its cognitive limits set firmly at second-order intentionality (at best!), even the proverbial chimpanzee sitting down at its typewriter could never have produced the script for
Othello
. If it had actually done so after many millions of years of typing, it would have been a purely statistical accident, and not a very interesting one at that. For the ape typist would not have
intended
the action of the play, and it certainly would never have pondered the audience’s capacity to follow the unfolding story as it did so. It might have appreciated that Iago intended to say something to Othello (‘I
believe
that Iago
intends
. . .’), but it would not have been able to understand how, in addition, Iago intended Othello to interpret his words – that would have required third-order intentionality that it could never aspire to.

So the lesson for us is that the flights of fancy that we engage in when dabbling in literature, even when just telling stories around the campfire, are far beyond the cognitive capacities of any other species of animal currently alive. Great apes might be able to imagine someone else’s state of mind, and so they might even be able to construct a very simple story, but it could never be much more than a narrative involving one character. Only adult humans could ever intentionally produce literature of the kind that we associate with human culture. It is possible, of course, to produce stories with third- or even fourth-order intentionality (perhaps the equivalent of the cognitive abilities of eight- and eleven-year old children), but they inevitably lack the sophistication of the stories told by the average adult, never mind those of a Shakespeare or a Molière.

More importantly, to really be able to challenge and
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fire up the audience, a great story-teller has to be able to take the audience to the limits of
their
intentional abilities at fifth-order intentionality. But that means that the story-teller has to be able to work at least one level higher at sixth-order intentionality. That is beyond the scope of more than three-quarters of the rest of us. Shakespeare really was a genius.
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At root, it is, of course, our intelligence that has made us what we are – one of the most successful species ever to have lived (well, if we don’t count most beetles anyway, given that forty per cent of all the animal species that have ever been described are beetles... ). But to be fair, without our remarkable capacity to think through problems while building on the accumulated knowledge of the past, we would not have colonised every continent on earth, built the Great Wall of China, discovered radium, composed Bach’s cantatas and Mozart’s operas, landed men on the moon or devised the internet. In fact, being smart has all sorts of unexpected consequences for us and we shouldn’t knock it. IQ is good for you.

If you were born in Scotland in 1921, the initials IQ might just prompt you to remember Wednesday 1 June 1932. It was not a day of particularly high drama: no cup tie saw crowds streaming to one of the great football stadiums, no unexpected summer storm lashed the Western Isles, the Forth Bridge did not collapse. In fact, it was quite an
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ordinary day as summer days go. But that day you took part in something that was quite unique. Instead of the usual joys of school, you were taken off to some draughty hall to sit an intelligence test. Perhaps the recollection of it is only hazy now, lost beneath the memories of life’s more important ups and downs. But think back for a moment, and reflect on the fact that, on that day, you took part in a remarkable experiment. Scotland’s entire cohort of schoolchildren born in the year 1921 sat that exam with you – a complete and unique record of a country’s scholastic abilities at one particular moment in time.

And you will probably be glad to know that, after all these years, your earnest struggles with pen and paper that day have not gone unrecognised: they have become a goldmine for researchers. One of the most remarkable findings to emerge has been a link between IQ, health and death. Indeed, if you are reading this now, it is in part because you were among the smartest of the children born in 1921. Of course, we have known for a long time that intelligence, health and mortality are related to each other, but we have always supposed that the link was indirect –through social deprivation and educational opportunity. Now a major study led by Edinburgh University’s Ian Dearie has discovered a more direct link between IQ at age eleven and your chances of celebrating your eighty-fifth birthday.

Showing this was not an easy task. Dearie and his team had to track down the vital records of the individuals who took part in the original study, matching up the records of death so that they could determine who had died and who was still alive. An earlier study based on a sub-sam-ple of 2,800 Aberdonians provided the first evidence that
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IQ affected your chances of surviving into your seventies.

But it was impossible with these data to separate out the effects of social deprivation from those of IQ. Then someone remembered that there had been a follow-up study during the 1970s of a cohort of people living in Paisley and Renfrew who had sat the IQ test in a second study in 1932. The follow-up study had focused on health, employment and levels of deprivation. From the Paisley/Renfrew study, they were able to locate 549 men and 373 women who had sat both the Moray House IQ tests in 1932 and the 1970s mid-life health check, and whose lives in the subsequent quarter-century could be tracked through the national records.

IQ is standardised at a notional value of 100 as the average for the population as a whole, with around two-thirds of people having an IQ between 85 and 115. Ian Dearie’s analyses of the data from the 1932 Moray House study revealed that when socio-economic class and deprivation were controlled for statistically, each point drop in IQ at the age of eleven corresponded to an extra one per cent chance of dying before the age of seventy-seven. For someone at the bottom edge of what we usually consider the ‘normal’ range (i.e. IQ = 85), that meant that their chances of celebrating their seventy-seventh birthday were fifteen per cent lower than someone with an IQ of 100.

The effect was much stronger in lower socio-economic groups than it was among the better-off families, reflecting the well-known effects that economic deprivation have on health. However, this makes it clear that social, educational and economic deprivation alone are not the causes of IQ-related mortality, though they each obviously have some effect. Rather, the causes must lie in something more
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organic.

The most likely explanations are either that IQ is an index of early developmental factors or that it provides us with a general measure of what we might think of as ‘organic integrity’ – the effectiveness with which all the body’s systems work. We now know, for example, that your experiences in the womb influence your chances of coronary disease and the risks of dying from heart attack or stroke later in adult life. We also know that these risks are associated with your birth weight, which is itself partly a reflection of your experience in the womb. We also know that low birth weight affects childhood academic abilities, and IQ more generally.

The film
A Beautiful Mind
paid tribute to the genius, if also the troubled mind, of John Nash, discoverer of the Nash Equilibrium in mathematics and winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics. But what the headlines don’t tell us is whether behind the beautiful mind there was also a beautiful body – and not just that of Russell Crowe who played Nash in the film. In fact, it has always seemed to me that not all the swots I knew at school and university were dull, ugly or uncoordinated. Many were body-beau-tiful and not a few excelled in sports.

It now seems that there may be more to this than mere hearsay. Tim Bates, a psychologist at Edinburgh University, has recently shown, in a sample of over 250 people, that there is a small but significant correlation between IQ and bodily symmetry (based on the left-side/right-side symmetry of finger, hand and ear length). Symmetry is one of
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the components we recognise as beauty. So it seems that beautiful people are, on average, more intelligent, even though – as with all things biological – lots of other factors intrude to affect any given individual’s performance.

Alas, there are knock-on consequences of this. Not only is it a well-established fact that taller people are more successful in social and economic life – on Wall Street and in the UK financial markets, taller people earn more, even when doing the same job – now it seems that the same correlation holds with IQ: several recent studies have demonstrated a correlation between IQ and success in the adult world. One study used a longitudinal sample of American baby-boomers (in this case, the cohort born between 1957 and 1964, representing the tail-end of the spike in births that followed the end of the Second World War). It found that each point increase in IQ added between $234 and $616 to income (though that didn’t necessarily affect gross wealth). Other studies yielded similar results, but have also found an additional effect due to parental socio-economic status. It evidently pays to pick your parents carefully, but if all else fails it seems you can still haul yourself up by your bootstraps if you are smart enough.