Is there such a thing as intelligence?

On dailykos, Nonlinear asks: Is There Such A Thing As Intelligence?

Writing about himself,

As I moved forward in school a pattern began to emerge. I am what is known as a three tier learner. There are subjects in which I express severe learning disabilities. ....Then there is a second tier, subjects where I am right around average. In school this was things like Social Studies, English, Art, Chemistry, Biology, Auto Mechanics, Wood Working, Drafting, Literature and Physics. I was a B student in all these things.

Then there were the things I was gifted in which included  Math, Metal Work, Music and Physical Education. And once I got into an enriched High School you can add Agriculture, Ag Mechanics, Home Ec, Electronics, Plumbing, and Economics. In these I was an A+ student

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But depending which IQ test you administer and how you administer it I go off the conventional scoring table (over 200) or am far below average and profoundly disabled at 69. You can manipulate the test you give me to get a result anywhere in between. The smartest move I have ever made was refusing to allow them to write about me in journals and turn me into a circus freak. I am a human calculator. I honestly can’t understand why people can’t just multiply and divide large numbers in their head. I also calendar calculate. And yes I have been called an Idiot Savant, for a while that was my diagnosis.

But being a freak has lead to me being fascinated by intelligence and how it works. I have come to conclude that there is no such thing as general intelligence. All mental activity is situational. 

Nonlinear then takes up the case of animal whisperers of which he is one to make his point.

I am a horse whisperer, well I can do it with dogs, cows, goats, pigs, and sheep as well. This is no magical thing, it just means I am super aware of small behavioral cues and know what they mean. And I know how to communicate with gestures, body language and tone of my voice to reassure the animals. Then I know enough standard veterinary science, animal husbandry and handling to train them and handle them. A lot of high functioning people on the spectrum can master these things. We can often do with animals what we cannot do with people.

At university I took courses in animal science, animal physiology, comparative physiology, anatomy, comparative anatomy, animal nutrition, animal behavior, animal husbandry, and animal psychology. I grew up in a family that bred and trained animals. I trained under my granddad to be a blacksmith and a farrier.

I am compassionate and kind and very empathetic and animals like me. I could have, and nearly did, become a veterinarian but humans just interested me far more. And there are only so many hours in a day. But I have spent significant parts of my life, breeding, raising, and training animals.

You could fairly say I am a highly intelligent and highly educated animal trainer. And you could even rank me against other trainers with similar backgrounds (grew up on farms in Canada, in families that bred, raised, and trained, went to university and studied animal science, and worked with mentors who taught them the tricks of the trade for being a farrier, or a trainer, or a vet, or doing Artificial Insemination). And you could design a test to rank us.  

But would that test work in the US? In China. In South Africa? 

Now for sake of argument imagine we could develop a test that you could use all over the world to rank animal whisperers. Would that test look anything like an IQ test?  

Yet think what I said about being an animal whisperer. To be good at it you need to be good at all the things IQ tests claim to measure. Minus the cultural elements the test designers biases have baked into these tests they measure reasoning, analytical ability, forethought and spatial reasoning. Do you think any animal whisperer walks into a paddock, a barn, a pasture, a corral without a plan, without a sense of where they are, without constantly analyzing the animals’ behavior, without reasoning what the next step should be? Not being good at this stuff gets you dead or badly injured. I work with as many as 8 big bulls at a time, each weights more than 2,600 lbs. One mistake, and I have done this, and you have multiple broken bones and a life lesson.   

So why doesn’t an IQ test measure this kind of intelligence?  

There are a number of reasons. And you can read about them online in hundreds of scientific papers and magazine articles. In part it is because the kind of intelligent you are isn’t the kind of intelligent I am. Our intelligence is shaped by our culture.  

Culture is a much more complicated and powerful force than we admit.

The argument continues:

Our cultural language separates “us” from “them.” What makes this worse is every culture includes shared cultural perceptions. These perceptions often come to focus on “them” and how to reinforce their status as “them”. Cultures develop all manner of clever tools for maintaining “us” versus “them”.

In western European neo-colonial culture these tools include IQ tests and comments on the inferior Intelligence of “them”. The theory that there is such a thing as an abstract concept of intelligence is very useful (if you are the person determining who is intelligent) for maintaining the illusion that “us” are better than “them”. I will leave that for you to think about and move on to my closing argument.

which concludes:

In summary, in some ways I am brain damaged and mentally challenged in other ways I am pretty average. However, there are a few ways in which I am  truly gifted. I have come to realize that is a near perfect description of the human condition. We just don’t see that because we are blinded by a cultural construct called intelligence.