Culture and Intelligence

Dov Henis left a long comment on a posting on a blog focusing on UNESCO's education and culture programs. In that posting he comments on the link between intelligence and culture. He got me to thinking.

I rather like the definition that "intelligence is that which is measured by intelligence tests". Many people have commented that tests of intelligence are culturally loaded, and that they tend to discriminate against people from less affluent strata of the society in which they are developed, since people growing up in those strata tend to be deprived of cultural experiences that are assumed common by those of upper strata (who devise intelligence tests and against whom those tests are "validated").

Intelligence tests are supposed to be predictive and as I recall are validated against school performance. One might assume a better validation would be the ability to create new knowledge, as measured for example by later publications in a scientific career. Of course, one does not want to wait for a generation for the data to validate a test, even if the test designed for one generation would be assumed valid for the next. But I suspect that that which is measured by common intelligence tests is little related to the ability to create new knowledge.

More fundamentally, if we assume intelligence is the ability to create good solutions to real problems, it seems likely to me that different cultures would have different kinds of intelligence. Does it not seem likely that the abilities that would lead to successful problem solving might be different in a hunting-gathering society, than in a rural agricultural society, than in an urban, white-collar setting?