There is the mammal way and there is the bird way." This is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind.

System architects: equivalents to architecture and planning for a world of knowledge and data Both government and business need new skills to do this work well. At present the capabilities described in this paper are divided up. Parts sit within data teams; others in knowledge management, product development, research, policy analysis or strategy teams, or in the various professions dotted around government, from economists to statisticians. In governments, for example, the main emphasis of digital teams in recent years has been very much on service design and delivery, not intelligence. This may be one reason why some aspects of government intelligence appear to have declined in recent years – notably the organisation of memory.57 What we need is a skill set analogous to architects. Good architects learn to think in multiple ways – combining engineering, aesthetics, attention to place and politics. Their work necessitates linking awareness of building materials, planning contexts, psychology and design. Architecture sits alongside urban planning which was also created as an integrative discipline, combining awareness of physical design with finance, strategy and law. So we have two very well-developed integrative skills for the material world. But there is very little comparable for the intangibles of data, knowledge and intelligence. What’s needed now is a profession with skills straddling engineering, data and social science – who are adept at understanding, designing and improving intelligent systems that are transparent and self-aware58. Some should also specialise in processes that engage stakeholders in the task of systems mapping and design, and make the most of collective intelligence. As with architecture and urban planning supply and demand need to evolve in tandem, with governments and other funders seeking to recruit ‘systems architects’ or ‘intelligence architects’ while universities put in place new courses to develop them.

Although we believe that this study establishes the presence of g in data from these non-Western cultures, this study says nothing about the relative level of general cognitive ability in various societies, nor can it be used to make cross-cultural comparisons. For this purpose, one must establish measurement invariance of a test across different cultural groups (e.g., Holding et al., 2018) to ensure that test items and tasks function in a similar way for each group.

The mean sample size of the remaining data sets was 539.6 (SD = 1,574.5). The large standard deviation in relationship to the mean is indicative of the noticeably positively skewed distribution of sample sizes, a finding supported by the much smaller median of 170 and skewness value of 6.297. There were 16,559 females (33.1%), 25,431 males (48.6%), and 10,350 individuals whose gender was unreported (19.8%). The majority of samples—62 of 97 samples (63.9%)—consisted entirely or predominantly of individuals below 18. Most of the remaining samples contained entirely or predominantly adults (32 data sets, 33.0%), and the remaining 3 datasets (3.1%) had an unknown age range or an unknown mix of adults and children). The samples span nearly the entire range of life span development, from age 2 to elderly individuals.

Alternatively, one could postulate that a general cognitive ability is a Western trait but not a universal trait among humans, but this would require an evolutionary model where this general ability evolved several times independently throughout the mammalian clade, including separately in the ancestors of Europeans after they migrated out of Africa and separated from other human groups. Such a model requires (a) a great deal of convergent evolution to occur across species occupying widely divergent environmental niches and (b) an incredibly rapid development of a general cognitive ability while the ancestors of Europeans were under extremely strong selection pressures that other humans did not experience (but other mammal species or their ancestors would have experienced at other times). We find the more parsimonious model of an evolutionary origin of the general cognitive ability in the early stages of mammalian development to be the more plausible one, and thus we believe that it is reasonable to expect a general cognitive ability to be a universal human trait.

Panga Munthu test of intelligence

Berry (1986)

We believe that members of the public likely learn some inaccurate information about intelligence in their psychology courses. The good news about this implication is that reducing the public’s mistaken beliefs about intelligence will not take a massive public education campaign or public relations blitz. Instead, improving the public’s understanding about intelligence starts in psychology’s own backyard with improving the content of undergraduate courses and textbooks.