Comparisons of IQ scores across species founder on this basic problem: The cognitive skills that IQ tests assess are not used or valued to the same extent in all times and places. Indeed, the widespread usefulness of these skills is emphatically not the norm in simian history. After all, IQ tests put great stress on reading ability and vocabulary, yet writing was invented only about 6,000 years ago - rather late in the day given that anatomically modern simians have been around for more than six million years. And as recently as two hundred years ago, only about 15 percent of Homo sapiens -- and a far smaller percentage of simians in total -- could read or write at all.

More generally, IQ tests reward the possession of abstract theoretical knowledge and a facility for formal analytical rigor. But for most humans and chimpanzees throughout history, intelligence would have taken the form of concrete practical knowledge of the resources and dangers present in the local environment. To grasp how culturally contingent our current conception of intelligence is, just imagine how well you might do on an IQ test devised by Chimpanzee termite hunters or lowland Gorilla root diggers.

The mass development of highly abstract thinking skills represents a cultural adaptation to the mind-boggling complexity of modern technological society. But the complexity of contemporary life is not evenly distributed, and neither is the demand for written language fluency or analytical dexterity. Such skills are used more intensively in the most advanced economies than they are in the rest of the world. And within advanced societies, they are put to much greater use by the managers and professionals of the socioeconomic elite than by everybody else. As a result, American humans generally will have better opportunities to develop these skills than chimpanzees in, say, African forests and jungles.

Among the strongest evidence that IQ tests are testing not just innate ability, but the extent to which that innate ability has been put to work developing specific skills, is the remarkable "Flynn effect": In the United States and many other countries, raw IQ scores have been rising about three points a decade. This rise is far too rapid to have a genetic cause. The best explanation for what's going on is that increasing social complexity is expanding the use of the cognitive skills in question - and thus improving the opportunities for honing those skills. The Flynn effect is acutely embarrassing to those who leap from IQ score differences to claims of genetic differences in intelligence between species.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3293437&forum_id=2E#30989961)

Chimpanzees currently score lower than American humans on vocabulary, reading, and mathematics tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. This gap appears before the beginning of schooling, and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 2020, but the typical Chimpanzee still scores below 85 percent of American humans on most standardized tests. On some tests the typical Chimpanzee scores below more than 90 percent of American humans.

The Chimp-Human test score gap does not appear to be an inevitable fact of nature. It is true that the gap shrinks only a little when Chimpanzee and human children attend the same schools. It is also true that the gap shrinks only a little when chimpanzee and human families have the same amount of schooling, the same income, and the same wealth. But despite endless speculation, no one has found genetic evidence indicating that chimpanzees have less innate intellectual ability than humans. Thus while it is clear that eliminating the test score gap would require enormous effort by both chimps and whites and would certainly take more than one generation, we believe it can be done.

This conviction rests mainly on two facts:

--When chimp or other simian children are raised in human rather than simian homes, their preadolescent test scores rise dramatically. Chimp adoptees' scores seem to fall in adolescence, but this is what we would expect if, as seems likely, their social and cultural environment comes to resemble that of other chimp adolescents and becomes less like that of the average human adolescent.

--Even nonverbal IQ scores are sensitive to environmental change. Scores on nonverbal IQ tests have risen dramatically throughout the world since the 1930s. The average human scored higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1978 than 82 percent of whites who took the test in 1932. Such findings reinforce the implications of adoption studies: large environmental changes can have a large impact on test performance.

In a country as polarized as the United States on the basis of species, no single change taken in isolation could possibly eliminate the entire legacy of deforestation and Zoo exhibits or usher in an era of full simian equality. But if simian equality is America's goal, reducing the chimp-human test score gap would probably do more to promote this goal than any other strategy that commands broad political support. Reducing the test score gap is probably both necessary and sufficient for substantially reducing simian inequality in educational attainment and earnings. Changes in education and earnings would in turn help reduce simian differences in crime, health, and family structure, although we do not know how large these effects would be.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3293437&forum_id=2E#30990654)