Less Than Human

More Than Human

by Theodore Sturgeon

One I missed back in the early Eighties when I was going through the classics of science fiction like a hot knife through butter. Maybe I’d have liked it better if I’d read it back then. Probably not.

It's an act of charity to call this book SF at all.  It’s supposed to be about the emergence of a new species, but from an evolutionary point of view the emergence described could not possibly take place – the whole concept is ridiculously unscientific. The story does contain one authentic science-fictional device – an antigravity generator – but it has only peripheral relevance and the author doesn’t even bother to make it credible. In fact, his account of how the thing is made and used positively insults the reader's intelligence.

The real story here is about a group of subnormal or disturbed young people with parapsychological powers. That’s right, telepathy, telekinesis and so forth. Such mumbo-jumbo, good reader, makes up the ‘scientific’ content of this ‘science fiction classic’ – justified by one lame paragraph in which the author asserts that credible evidence for such things exists. It does? Show me.

Oh, all right then, never mind: let's shove the ‘science fiction’ definition and ask how this works as fantasy. I think the answer is: it probably works all right if you’re a lonely, disturbed teenager who wants to believe your social ineptitude is a sign that you’re different and special. Readers over the mental age of sixteen, however, are likely to find it all a bit infantile and pathetic.

The writing has moments of genuine quality, but Sturgeon tries too hard and is much too fond of the egregiously quirky metaphor or syntactical conceit to be able to write good prose consistently. The general structure of the novel is messy and contains several confusing chronological shifts, which seem to exist only because the author couldn’t find a better way of telling the story. The consistent ferment of juvenile anxiety is exhausting and, if you’re a grown-up, tedious to a degree. As for the ending, it is irritatingly moralistic and even the genuine surprise at the end is spoiled by too much preaching.

So why was this ever a classic? I suspect the answer lies with those lonely, disturbed teenagers mentioned above. It spoke to them. It told them they were special – that maybe, just maybe, they were... more than human.

But they weren’t special, and neither is this book.

Breeding Stupidity

What is the average Sri Lankan IQ? Two recent global studies of the relationship between IQ and other important national statistics (popular religiosity and national disease burden) both include Sri Lanka among the countries studied. Naturally, both studies give a figure for mean national IQ. I confess I don’t know how far we should trust these figures, but I don’t see any reason for discounting them altogether.

IQ is, I know, a controversial statistic. There is massive disagreement about whether it is a fair measure of intelligence or whether, indeed, it measures anything at all. Its origin in eugenics makes it suspect – and scandalously, black people tend to do worse on IQ tests than whites. Less scandalously (since they didn’t invent the tests), East Asians do better than either. All this is worth remembering, yet there is no other measure of general intelligence that works as well as IQ, and it correlates to other measures of intelligence too. Perhaps intelligence cannot be measured at all; yet IQ tests certainly measure something like intelligence.

With all these caveats in hand, then, what do the statistics tell us? The IQ-vs.-religiosity study uses data from a famous and controversial book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, and it puts the average Sri Lankan IQ at 81.

This is pretty shocking. However, it’s probably an extension of the figure for India, which is the kind of thing the authors of that book did quite a bit of. The more recent Economist study gives figures of 82 for India and – more shockingly yet – 79 for Sri Lanka. This puts Sri Lanka on par with Nepal as the lowest-IQ countries in the non-black world.

Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me. The Sri Lankan environment actively selects for - that is to say, breeds - stupidity. Here's how.

• Because life here is nearly unbearable for an intelligent person, and prospects are so poor, the brightest Sri Lankans of every generation emigrate, taking their genes (IQ, like intelligence itself, is strongly heritable) out of the pool. This has been happening without pause since a few years before Independence – a matter of three generations now.

• The society they leave behind is one that has evolved to nurture and celebrate stupidity, while intelligence and originality are penalized at every turn. Tradition, religion and caste all load the dice against independent thinking and creativity; you can’t even record a new version of the National Anthem without being accused of disrespect to the nation. So intelligent people prosper less than stupid conformists, have fewer children and perpetuate their genes less.
  

• Arranged marriage, which works against the natural tendency of intelligent people to marry one another and produce intelligent offspring, is widely practised.

In fairness, it must be said that other South Asian countries are not a great deal better than Sri Lanka when it comes to average national IQ. This does not surprise me: the same driving-away of the most intelligent in every generation, the same coddling of stupidity through religion, caste and ‘the way we do things here’, is as evident in these countries as in Sri Lanka. India, of course, is changing fast. But will Sri Lanka? From a Ceylonese perspective, the prospect doesn’t look good.

Map source

Religion: Addictive Drug, Social Poison

Evolutionary Psychology, an online magazine that publishes new research in the field (not always peer-reviewed) features a report on a fascinating study, snappily titled 'The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity on Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions'. If the title doesn't put you off, you may find it makes interesting reading. 'Nationalists' and others who think that what Sri Lankan society needs is a dose of that good old-time religion may be in for a shock, though:

Conservative religious ideology apparently contributes to societal dysfunction... The antagonistic relationship between better socioeconomic conditions and intense popular faith may prevent the existence of nations that combine the two factors.

As a bonus for trend-watchers, the study findings also explain why, as Sri Lankan society disintegrates, publicly-professed concern with 'insults to religion' has become ever more frequent and more ridiculous. Read it and tell me what you think.