Theree are two things that I think we are getting really wrong in this
thread, and I realize that I have been guilty of being swept up in some of
it myself. The first is confusing correlations with causation. Playing
sports or loud music doesn't make you dumb, nor does much of any other
activity. Some things that happen in association with athletic injuries can
certainly affect mental abilitiy. It doesn't help to get repeatedly bopped
on the head, so being a boxer or an inside lineman or a soccer player
(remember how often they hiit the ball with their heads), and probably
others can have an adverse effect based on repetitive insults to the brain.
But in general there is almost no correlation between intellectual ability
and athletic or musical activity (or much of anything else, for that
matter, with the possible exception of the higher academic pursuits). I
know or have listened to some very intelligent athletes (Bill Bradley pops
into my mind) as well as rock musicians (Since I am not a rock enthusiast,
no names pop to mind here), And some pretty unitelligent ones. But I think
that by and large, they were that way before they became musicians or
athletes.
I agree that there are things that can be done to affect intelligence, but
they are almost all things that must be in place very young-before age 5 or
so-after that the neurological paterns are pretty much set and you don't
get much smarter. Then age makes you dumber. Some of us faster than others.
The idea that rock musicians and athletes are dumb is much more of a
stereotype than a rule. They are sometimes not well educated, but often
they are well educated. If we could devise a reliable measure of
intelligence (whatever intelligence may be), my guess is that, barring
brain injury, the range of intelligence of musicians, athletes,
stockbrokers, electronic tycoons, or whatever, will be pretty much the
same. I haven't seen evidence that either Ross Perot or Mr. Bill, in spite
of their great wealth, are of towering intellect. So it is probably true
that, in general money doesn't correlate with intelligence.
By the way, I am a pilot of some 40 years atanding, and while I have a
hearing loss due to long exposure to aircraft engine noise, I do not recall
feeling intellectually deprived while flying, nor have I ever heard that we
pilots "leave half our brain on the ground." In fact I have done some of my
best thinking while dodging the clouds at 8,000 feet. Again, I have known
some very intelligent pilots and some not very intelligent ones, who were
also good pilots. Another case of no particular correlation between
aviation ability and intelligence. I don't think that it takes loud music
to enable one to enter into an altered state of consciousness. I was at a
concert the other night and while listening to Frederika von Stade sing
some German Lieder, I slipped into an altered state of consciousness that
lasted until my wife elbowed me because my snoring was disurbing the people
around me. German Lieder can put me to sleep even when sung by the best,
and she is.
The other thing I think we are getting wrong is the historical thing. There
are short term fluctuations in average abilities of students, teachers and
stock brokers over the years, and we are stuck with short-term
recollections because, as Keynes once said, "In the long term we are all
dead." But I would guess that, by any objective measure, the range of
intelligence, as well as other abilities at the present time is about what
it has been for the recoverable past. There are still some very smart
people and some very dumb people and most of us are in between. Some things
are different,though. One of them is that we are now trying to educate
everybody up to a higher level than has been tried in the past. It is a
difficult job. Athletic records get better because there is something to
shoot for and in that quest, we develop better techniques, equipment and
training methods. And we devote more resources to it (How would you like to
be the physics "Coach" with five or six assistants and twelve "students,"
who you got to choose from among a lot of "tryouts" and who you "owned"
during the entire school year, so that you controlled what other courses
they took, where they lived, who they associated with, etc., etc.-do you
think you could turn out some pretty good students with that arrangement?),
and reward the best beyond our wildest dreams. I suspect the great athletes
of the past would, for the most part be competitive today if they had
access to the modern equipment and training methods. Same with students.
One reason SATs are going down is that more people are taking them, and
since all of the top students have always (since they were started) taken
them, as the test-taking population expands it can only expand into the
lower levels of ability or preparation, except where the test is now opened
up to those who were before prevented from taking it for reasons that had
nothing to do with their ability. They are still a small group as the elite
always will be, and the net effect is to add more of lesser ability as the
population expands. Remember that a freshman physics class at a top
univeristy in, say, 1900 might be as many as 50 students (I'm guessing),
while in 1997 it will probably be closer to 500 students. Since the general
population has not increased ten-fold, while the class size has, it can
only mean that the average ability of the students is lower, not because
the pool of students is worse, but because we are and were skimming our
students off the top, and as we take a bigger percentage of the students,
we of necessity must take mostly worse ones, since we already have all the
best ones (at least all of the best ones that will ever take physics)
There are far too many people out there who believe weird things, and I
would very much like to see the population become less gullible. But most
of the population has always been gullible and believed weird things, and I
don't think the percentages of those who fall in those categories are much
different from what they were 100 or 200 years ago, may be even lower. What
has changed is our expectations. Since we are better able to refute some of
the weird things people believe now, we are dismayed at our inability to
get people to believe our refutations, and assume that they must be dumb,
maybe from listening to too much rock music. Nonsense. They are the same as
they have always been, its just that we expect more of them now. That is,
we expect them to be able to perform intelectually up to the level of the
smaller elites of 50 or 100 years ago, and they are no more or less capable
of doing that now than they were 50 or 100 years ago.
So why don't we get on with the job of teaching physics to as many students
as we can, as well as we can, and quit complaining about the loss of a
world that in all liklihood never was, except in our fantasies.