Is Stupidity Innate?

Is Stupidity Innate?

This is a question people are too polite to raise. We can just about ask whether intelligence is innate, wholly or partly, but please don’t ask whether some people are born stupid! Can it be responsibly maintained that some people are condemned by their genes to a life of stupidity? And here I mean common-or-garden stupidity, not the clinical kind; I am referring to ordinary adults and their opinions—political, scientific, philosophical, ethical, practical. Some people are very intelligent compared to others as a result of their genes; could some people be very stupid compared to others as a result of their genes? Could you be born a stupid person, as opposed to acquiring stupidity from the environment in which you were raised? Is there a stupidity gene that some people have and others don’t?

It might be replied that this is trivially true, since some people are less intelligent genetically than others; if we call these individuals “stupid”, then, yes, they are innately stupid (i.e., on the low end of the intelligence spectrum). Just as some people are born brighter than others, so some are born stupider than others, with some just straight-out stupid. But that is not what I mean; I mean “stupid” in its colloquial sense. Admittedly, this is not easy to pin down (as is the concept of intelligence): the OED gives us only “lacking intelligence or common sense”. But what is stupidity more positively characterized—what is its specific nature? Interestingly, Roget’s Thesaurus gives us a long list of synonyms, which I will not repeat, thus suggesting a clear and distinct psychological trait identifiable by any normal person. What emerges is that stupidity is poor judgment, proneness to error, rashness of opinion, foolishness, unthinkingness, gullibility, unreflectiveness, and logical ineptitude. People are often said to be stupid in matters of love and money, but also in their political attitudes (various kinds of prejudice, in particular). I think we know it when we see it. I want to know whether thisconstellation of traits might be innate—caused by a stupidity gene. It would be possible to have this gene but be quite intelligent otherwise; there might even be stupid geniuses! You could be super-smart at math but remarkably stupid in politics or practical matters.

From a lifetime of observation, I am convinced that stupidity is likely inborn. You just have to talk to people to notice it. It seems to run in families, like its opposite. It is correlated with other traits that are plausibly regarded as innate—emotionality, conformity, impulsiveness, verbal crudity, anger, hot-headedness. People who latch onto wild conspiracy theories fit the profile perfectly, as well as people who never see anything coming (like Austin Powers about Liberace’s gayness). They also seem humorless, or at least humorously simple-minded. It seems like a positive lack, if I may put it so; it’s as if they have something definite in them that makes them stupid, and they like it that way. There doesn’t seem to be much intermediate ground between them and their less stupid brethren; you are either stupid or not stupid, never a bit stupid or only when tired or drunk. Stupidity doesn’t come in degrees, like intelligence in the IQ sense. It is a kind of congenital blindness (“reason blindness”). There is a marked reluctance to reason from facts and logic. It doesn’t align exactly with the right and left in politics; there is plenty of left-wing stupidity (and tons of right-wing stupidity). It is really like a genetically determined syndrome. Logic is powerless against it; facts wash over the victim’s countenance. Vehemence replaces cogency. I would like to see a psychologist do some research on this subject instead of focusing on intelligence all the time; twin studies would be the place to start.[1] I don’t think we would find any racial or national preponderance of the stupidity gene; I think we would find a common incidence across peoples and cultures. What is the proportion of people that harbor the stupidity gene? Now that is an incendiary question: I am going to say anything between 30% and 70%, but that estimate may be influenced by spending my life among professional philosophers (cooks might do better). In any case, it’s a hypothesis to ponder; it would be stupid not to.[2]

[1] Do identical twins reared apart score high on a stupidity test? Does stupidity appear earlier ontogenetically than can be explained by environmental factors? Can it be remedied by intensive anti-stupidity training?

[2] I suspect that this is an extremely taboo subject for a number of reasons, some good and some not so good. Who would want to take part in a study of human stupidity? Who would want to be told they scored high in the stupidity rankings? How might such information be used? What if the CEO of an important company were to be revealed as really quite stupid? What if people from Yorkshire were to be rated as markedly stupid? We might need a euphemism for marketing purposes, say “neuro-variant”.