IQ-ism: the Third Phase in the Development of Psychology as a Pathological Discipline

One of the things I have to tell you about IQ research is this: if you don't buy IQ research, you might as well throw away all the rest of psychology. And the reason for that is that the psychologists who developed "intelligence testing" were among the early psychologists that instantiated the statistical techniques that all psychologists use to verify and test all of their hypotheses. So you end up throwing the baby out with the bath water.

And the IQ people have defined intelligence in a more stringent and accurate way that we have been abnle to define almost any other psychological construct. So if you toss out the one that is most well defined, then you're kind of stuck with the problem [of] what are you going to do with all the other ones that you have left over.... whose predictive validity is much less.
Jordan B. Peterson

In a comment thread at the Unz Review, among the most thoughtful and well-informed participants remarked on  what they held to be the importance of IQ research. The claim prompted me to the following remarks dismissing the entire business of what may be called IQ-ism as, at best, a scholastic blunder of epic proportions, and at worst, a grotesque fraud:

Speaking of "reasons to support IQ research," I would say that there are none. IQ-ism is just a phase in the development of psychology as a pathological intellectual discipline. IQ-ism is the latest in a series of attempts to comprehend the vast complexity of the operation of the brain by alchemically simplistic means.

First, in the history of this crackpot discipline was psychoanalysis, aptly described by Peter Medowar as:

... like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.

Then there was Behaviorism, which sought to explain human behavior and personality in their entirety solely in terms of the acquisition of operant conditioned reflexes. That theory crashed and burned as cybernetics confirmed what Behaviorists had denied, namely, that humans are conscious beings and that what consciousness tells of our feelings and intentions is a valid source of information.

And now we have IQism, which claims to be able to quantify a person's intelligence on a unidimensional scale by means of a simple paper and pencil test involving a few logical puzzles plus, depending on the test of choice, miscellaneous other items.

How do the IQ-ists sell this idea? Primarily by the artful use of language. Their little test, they call an "intelligence test," thereby establishing in the minds of the masses the unquestioned assumption that intelligence is what the IQ-ist's test measures. In fact, however, as a Google search will confirm, intelligence is the ability to acquire and to use information, whereas an IQ test measures neither except in an incredibly limited domain and with a test the results of which are subject to massive circumstantial bias.

But the IQ-ist scam has worked so well for so long that psychology has yet to even broach the real scientific questions that must underlie the measurement of  intelligence: namely, how to measure the capacity for information acquisition; and how to measure skill, effectiveness, Darwinian fitness, or whatever, in the use of information.

When one considers the measurement of intelligence in those terms, one is immediately confronted with the complexity of reality, and in particular, the fact that information is acquired via multiple channels, auditory, olfactory, visual, proprioceptive, etc. with data from each channel processed by a specialized brain module, or probably in most if not all cases, by multiple specialized brain modules.

So now if we take account of the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of structural genes that impact the development and characteristics of those sensory channels and processing modules, we see that the capacity for the acquisition of information is not dependent on a single characteristic of the brain but on a large collection of independent variables. This fact is well known to common sense. People vary hugely in powers of memory and, moreover, that variation is type specific. Mozart transcribed the entire Allegri miserere after a single hearing, Stephen Wiltshire sketched the whole of Red Square from memory after a brief visit. But, so far as we know, Mozart had no special gift of visual memory, and Stephen Wiltshire is no musical genius. Others do more or less brilliantly remembering faces, voices, poetry, the numbers of pi, conversational tittle tattle, etc., but as far as is known, no one able to remember the first ten thousand places of pi, has composed  a decent symphony or a popular opera.

So in only the matter of data acquisition, we see that intelligence is multiple not unitary. But much more complex to analyse than the capacity for information acquisition is the capacity for the use if information. In fact, perhaps, that is an impossibly difficult challenge. But it is a challenge that must be faced by anyone who claims to measure intelligence in a scientific and quantitative way.

As for the innateness of intelligence, something about which IQ-ists are most emphatic, it is axiomatic that the potentiality is entirely innate. Moreover, we know that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of genes that direct brain development, plus probably many thousands of hereditary controlling elements, most yet to be identified, that shape the development of the brain and hence intelligence.

But the function of the brain is to record both sensory inputs, i.e., experience, and the internal workings of the brain, i.e., the development of our ideas, both of which shape the way we use information. So it is beyond question that environmental factors, through their effect on the contents of mind, have a huge impact on the degree to which the innate intellectual potential is expressed. Thus focusing on the genetic basis of intelligence to the exclusion of environmental factors, such as education and culture, cannot result in a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.