Financial

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Intelligence, the power of the universe. In André Malraux's novel Man's Fate, a character repeatedly asks others what intelligence is, knowing that each person will respond with their own definition. The greatest known power in the cosmos is the one that seeks to understand it. It is astonishing how little attention has been paid to this gift, which consists of paying attention to everything. It is measured with rudimentary tests that fail to reveal whether they reflect talent or knowledge. It is unknown why it appears in a select few and, outside of them, in almost no one. Intelligence, like wealth, is unevenly distributed. It is stated that it is transmitted through genetic inheritance in between 20% and 50% of cases, a vagueness that amounts to saying nothing at all. The higher the parents' IQ, the more likely their children are to have a high IQ. Unfortunately, genius is not hereditary.

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Whoever masters intelligence will master everything. Given this certainty, the historical scarcity of attempts by those in power to cultivate or reproduce it is astonishing. In The Republic, written around 380 BC, Plato posits a society in which wise men would arrange unions between chosen parents to intensify the qualities that would make their children excellent producers, warriors, or philosopher-kings. The only recommendation that royal power adopted from this utopia was the prophylactic rejection of poets. But Percy Bisshe Selley asserts that the poet is the hidden legislator of the world. Power only moves when it stirs emotions.

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What we know least about is knowledge itself. Why did Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy, and Golden Age Spain emerge? Every achievement stems from the intensive use of our abilities, including thought. Decline occurs when arrogance interprets warning signs as praise. Every golden age is born of thought; every decline, of its absence.

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The splendid legacy of the intellect called civilization tempts us to overlook its ups and downs. A naive reading of *On the Origin of Species* (1859) gave rise to the illusion that evolution is an uninterrupted ascent toward excellence. Fascinated by this ascending paradigm, Herbert Spencer invented upper social classes, Auguste Comte conceived of culminating civilizations, and Nietzsche imagined supermen, but he astutely refrained from defining what would characterize them. Certainly not *unbefleckten Erkenntnis* (immaculate knowledge) or wisdom. The superhuman will be a blond beast, or a superbeast. But there are already plenty of those. The rigorous Darwin never postulated such things. Natural selection eliminates certain organisms and allows others to multiply with no other criterion than random adaptation to a changing environment. Intelligence is the mutation that constitutes us as humans. Whether it will preserve us or destroy us remains to be seen.

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Light of the world, intelligence seems at times to be fading or intensifying. Thomas Flynn verified a 0,3% annual increase in intelligence test scores, according to which the current generation would have an IQ 15 points higher than half a century ago. The so-called Flynn effect is explained by the influence of an increasingly stimulating environment, better nutrition, parental care, and education. Flynn points out that modern life presents increasingly abstract problems, which enable better test scores. Voltaire observed that we see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Will we eventually glimpse infinity from the ascending peak of generations?

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Just as this rollercoaster ride catapults us to optimism, on January 15, 2026, a group of neuroscientists warned the U.S. Senate Committee on Science, Commerce, and Transportation that today's youth are scoring lower on intelligence tests than their predecessors. Ted Cruz, the committee chairman, reported that children spend between five and eight hours a day on electronic devices, defining it as "a cell phone-based childhood," which he said would lead to a crisis in mental health, learning, and creativity. Neuroscientist Jared Horvath concluded that "our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age," and that Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012 and the first generation addicted to the internet, would score worse in attention, memory, reading, math, and IQ despite having more schooling. A summary of 71 studies applied to 100.000 people verifies that the greater use of short video platforms such as YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok coincides with a worse state of cognitive and mental health.

(https://www.agenciasinc.es/Reportajes/Es-la-generacion-Z-menos-inteligente-Que-hay-detras-de-su-declive-en-algunas-pruebas-cognitivas). The news sets off alarm bells; the media are talking about a “reverse Flynn effect.” Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy (2006) prophesies a United States populated by cretins, where cultural institutions would be advertising agencies.

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In an unparalleled paradox, while we make artificial intelligence increasingly threatening and omnipotent, our natural intelligence is degraded to stupidity and irrelevance. Yet the introduction of any tool for thought is interpreted as a diminishment of it. Socrates deplored the use of books because they weaken memory. The blind Homer recited the 12.000 hexameters of the Odyssey without missing a single one. Does the calculator diminish our capacity to perform mathematical operations? Is it conceivable that, as the intelligence of computers becomes infinite, ours would be reduced to zero? Every generation denigrates those that precede and follow it. If we believe them, the world began with it and will end with the next. When we were young, the old folks scolded us for seeking national liberation or utopia. Perhaps the current alarms about cognitive decline in the youngest are merely a manifestation of the same phenomenon.

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We are frantically building artificial intelligence without knowing what natural intelligence is, or if it even exists. We can't create a fly, yet we intend to annihilate the universe. Whoever masters the enigma of intelligence will destroy the world by stripping it of its mystery.