Are We Actually Smarter — or Just Later?

The belief that intelligence moves forward in a straight line is not a fact of biology, but a cultural inheritance. It emerged from the Enlightenment and solidified during the Industrial Revolution, when progress itself was reimagined as an upward trajectory. History came to be understood through the metaphor of an assembly line, with each century producing a more refined version of the human product. Standardized schooling and metrics such as IQ reinforced this view by rewarding the forms of abstract reasoning and cognitive endurance required to sustain an industrial society. Because modern life privileges these narrow capacities, we mistake them for intelligence itself rather than recognizing them as adaptations to a particular environment. We look backward and interpret the absence of accumulated infrastructure as evidence of diminished minds, as though human cognition had only recently begun to fill.

This belief feels intuitively true because our perception is easily seduced by visible artifacts. A smartphone, a power grid, or a global communication network presents itself as an object of immense complexity, and we instinctively credit the individual modern mind with the full weight of that collective achievement. The psychological error is subtle but consequential: we confuse convenience with competence. The ability to summon food with a thumb tap or navigate a city with a GPS feels like mastery, yet it is largely the result of outsourcing survival intelligence to an invisible and fragile grid. We are standing on a massive booster seat of inherited technology and mistaking our elevated view for increased height. We ask how much smarter we are than our ancestors, but we fail to distinguish between the intelligence of the system and the intelligence of the individual. The system has grown more complex; the individual mind has often become more specialized within it, increasingly dependent on scaffolding it neither designed nor understands. The further we look into the past, the simpler life appears, because the nuances of earlier existence—the genius of the oral tradition or the sophistication of the kinship map—do not leave fossils. We mistake the absence of a record for the absence of a mind.

As a result, we fundamentally misread the nature of intelligence in non-technological societies. When comparison is framed vertically, earlier humans appear deficient, inviting either condescension or romanticization. Both miss the point. Intelligence did not ascend along a single axis; it diversified horizontally in response to different pressures. Our ancestors were required to process the world as a dense, living text—a high-bandwidth sensory integration that we have not outgrown, but merely silenced. This intelligence was not abstracted or symbolic in the modern sense. It required the simultaneous integration of sensory cues, social knowledge, and environmental pattern recognition in real time. The difference is not one of sophistication versus primitiveness, but of what the mind was required to coordinate moment by moment. We have traded the ability to read the forest for the ability to read the spreadsheet, but the eye doing the reading remains the same. This is not nostalgia. It is taxonomy. The environments we respond to have changed with astonishing speed, but the underlying architecture of the human mind remains remarkably stable.

Part of the anxiety that characterizes modern life may stem from this quiet misrecognition. We feel the height of our position without feeling the strength of our own legs. We sense, at some level, that our competence is scaffolded rather than embodied, inherited rather than integrated. The grid holds, until it doesn’t. And beneath the comfort of convenience lies a diffuse awareness of fragility.

Perhaps the problem is not that intelligence has failed to progress, but that we have mistaken efficiency within a system for the capacity of a mind, and built an entire worldview around that confusion.