HOW I GOT TO STUDYING INTELLIGENCE

Born That Way

Back when I was a kid, when my world was being shaped by all the stereotypes that I mentioned in my last post, there was another related stream of stereotypes that had a great influence on me. They had to do with intelligence.

Back then, some kids were called brainiacs and deemed “gifted” while others were praised for their physical prowess and pushed to excel in athletics. And no surprise there, it was entirely racial. White kids and Asian kids were almost always those counted as academically “high performing” while my Black, Latinx, and Indigenous friends were almost always celebrated on the opposite account. 

I didn’t know then that teachers and school administrators were tracking kids for different kinds of achievement, giving some kids more elaborate curriculums than others. And I had no way of knowing that the standardized tests we were given, that seemed to confirm my biased outlook, were culturally and racially biased. I just assumed that some of us were born for academics and others weren’t. Like how I saw my race and the rest of me, I thought our brains were genetically programmed a certain way, giving us a relatively stable aptitude that followed us throughout our lives.

Brains, Genes, and What’s Real

Arriving at college, where I was able to finally begin looking critically at race, social class, gender, sexuality, and all the “isms” conditioning our lives, I began thinking like a scientist. Instead of accepting all the narratives I had been taught as absolute truths, I started asking where these narratives came from and whether they matched up with the facts. In the realm of intelligence, I looked at the litany of historical events that pushed certain ideas about superior brains and intelligence to become authoritative even in the absence of data. I learned that though the concept of intelligence was extremely old, it arose in a certain time and place long before modern science existed, and was invented by and for a certain group of people to become a political weapon for those in power to control everyone else. These elites did not have any proof of their theory that some people were born leaders because of their innate mental fitness. Instead, they used their power to sway the public and to create regimes of colonialism and enslavement. This is where our modern-day notion of intelligence as a rank-comparison comes from.

I found that the intelligence quotient, what we familiarly call “IQ,” was the same way. It was invented in a certain time and place at the precipice of modern science, by and for a certain group of powerful people in order for them to maintain their power over others. IQ tests were never objective tools for revealing real differences in our intellectual capacities. Instead, they were political weapons to make some people look innately good and others look innately bad.

When I got into grad school, my interest in debunking race science brought me further into contact with intelligence science by way of genetics. The more I studied the history and sociology of race, the more I realized that I needed to know the truth about human biology. I dove headlong into the science of genomics, the study of our DNA and its relationship to our environments. I found that humans are much more similar than anyone would have imagined given our longstanding fixation on differentiating races and sexes. In fact, our genes code our brains to form a uniquely human neural architecture that is defined by its ability to continually grow and improve its functionality with respect to our changing environment. Rather than only some of us being smart, we are all, in genomic terms, humanly capable. We are all always, no matter how high we test or academic we seem, growing and changing. We are all intelligent.

My journey since then has been to bring together the many threads of science, from sociohistorical analysis and content analysis to genomics, neurogenetics, and systems biology, to bring us a better definition of intelligence. My upcoming book, Rethinking Intelligence: A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential will share this new definition along with the emerging science that is telling us how inherently human it is to constantly learn about your environment, to compare and manage that knowledge with what you already know, and to seize on new information to build a better way forward.