Welcome to the Fork in the Road Blog: Reflections on Life. These musings, reflecting on life’s “What”, “Why?” and “How?”, are for my mental wellbeing. The topics come to me haphazardly triggered by the surroundings or interaction with people or purely out of the blue.
This topic came to me when I read a comment in one of the social chat groups I belong to, about someone being clever and yet uneducated. It had never occurred to me that anyone could think that cleverness is taught.
Cleverness is classically defined as the ability to quickly think of effective, original, or resourceful solutions to problems. It often involves seeing connections that others miss and using intelligence in a practical or creative way. In short, cleverness is the ability to use your intelligence creatively and effectively to solve problems or achieve a goal. Cleverness is fundamentally an innate potential demonstrated through natural abilities, personality, and experience.
Teachers, parents, and mentors who encourage people to think critically rather than memorise facts, or ask questions and challenge assumptions, are not teaching people to be clever but helping them to apply their innate talent making it grow. An individual’s cleverness is “cultivated” through experience and practice.
It is helpful to distinguish between cleverness and intelligence, as well as the differences between cleverness and wisdom. While intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, cleverness is the practical and creative use of intelligence to solve problems effectively. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise. A person may lack the wisdom to consider the long-term consequences of their actions yet be highly clever at solving immediate problems.
There is no evidence that cleverness is in any way connected with either gender or race. Cleverness is not a measurable characteristic but inferred by quick understanding, ingenuity in solving problems, creativity, mental flexibility etc. These inferences are used by racists and misogynists to make warped statements linking cleverness with gender and race.
Research involving millions of participants show that men and women have very similar average general intelligence or general cognitive ability. Some average differences exist in specific abilities such as verbal fluency, reading and writing, memory for words and faces, emotional recognition where women tend to score slightly higher. Men score higher in certain spatial reasoning tasks and some aspects of mechanical reasoning. These differences, whatever their magnitude, are not indicative of level of cleverness.
Race is primarily a social classification. Modern genetics shows that humans share approximately 99.9% of their DNA and there is often greater genetic variation within so-called racial groups than between them.
There is no scientific evidence that any racial group is inherently cleverer than another or evidence of intrinsic racial superiority in cleverness. Observed differences in educational or cognitive test outcomes are influenced by many interacting and confounding factors, including quality and access to educational resources, socioeconomic conditions, discrimination, healthcare and childhood stress etc.
Culture shapes how cleverness develops leading to a perception of genetic differences in cleverness across cultures. For example: oral storytelling traditions may strengthen memory and verbal performance. Multilingual environments may enhance cognitive flexibility while technological societies may emphasize analytical reasoning, and traditional societies may value ecological knowledge and practical problem-solving.
Historically, claims that one gender or race is naturally more intelligent than another were used to justify slavery, discrimination, colonialism, sexism, and unequal access to social services. Many of these claims relied on flawed methodologies, biased selection of so-called study subjects, culturally inappropriate tests, or preconceived assumptions rather than rigorous evidence.
Scientific conclusion is that there is no evidence that one gender or race is inherently cleverer overall than another. Men and women may show small average differences in some specific cognitive abilities, but their overall intellectual potential is very similar. Differences observed among racial groups are better explained by environmental, educational, socioeconomic, health, and cultural factors than by inherent racial differences. Individual differences are much larger than average group differences. A person’s abilities cannot be reliably predicted from their gender or racial background.
The best predictor of someone’s cleverness is not their gender or race, but their unique combination of abilities, experiences, education, motivation, and opportunities.
The concept of cleverness is not as simple as it sounds. For example, it can be applied to a newborn baby, an illiterate person, a beggar and a criminal. All four can, in appropriate circumstances, be described as clever because cleverness is not the same as age, education, literacy, social status, health, or moral character. A useful distinction is between potentiality, knowledge, intelligence, and behaviour.
Newborns would not normally be called clever in the everyday sense because they have very little developed reasoning ability. But there are remarkable things a newborn can do.
For example, a newborn can recognize aspects of its mother’s voice, learn to associate sounds and experiences, use crying and other behaviours to obtain attention or care, begin adapting to its environment. These behaviours are largely innate and developmental, rather than evidence of the kind of deliberate cleverness we attribute to an adult. So, a newborn may strictly be referred to as having extraordinary learning potential, in lieu of “clever.”
Illiteracy means a person has not acquired reading and writing skills. It does not mean that the person lacks intelligence or cleverness. An illiterate villager, may be clever at predicting rainfall and weather changes, managing livestock and crops, solving practical everyday problems, understanding people and resolving social issues. Schooling develops forms of knowledge such as ability to read and write and intellectual skills; it does not create cleverness.
Someone who begs for a living makes decisions of considerable practical, social and strategic cleverness. For example, where and when people are most likely to give, how to approach and communicate persuasively with different people, how to avoid dangerous situations. Being a beggar tells us something about a person’s circumstances or economic position but nothing about their intellectual ability.
Cleverness of a criminal may not be desirable to the community but that is beside the point. A criminal can certainly be clever in the sense of being observant, strategic, capable of anticipating other people’s behaviour, inventive, skilled at overcoming obstacles.
Cleverness does not equal goodness. A person could devise an ingenious way of committing a crime and therefore demonstrate cleverness while simultaneously demonstrating very poor morality. We can have cleverness without wisdom and sometimes great intelligence directed toward a foolish objective.
These examples reveal something important about the word “clever.” If we define cleverness too narrowly as “someone who performs well on academic or IQ tests,” we overlook many forms of human ability. None of these social categories is a reliable measure of cleverness.
And this connects directly to gender and race. If cleverness can appear in people who differ enormously in age, education, wealth, occupation and social status, then we should be very cautious about assuming that membership in a broad group, whether racial, gender, social or occupational, determines how clever an individual is.
There is also a fascinating question underneath all this: Can a person be clever without knowing that they are clever? That takes us into the relationship between cleverness, consciousness, experience and self-awareness.
If we use “cleverness” to mean the ability to solve problems, adapt to circumstances, learn, or find effective ways of achieving goals, it is not unique to humans. Many animals display behaviours that we would reasonably call clever.
Examples include chimpanzees using sticks to extract termites; elephants solving physical problems and using objects as tools. Bees are classic at learning patterns, efficient navigation and communication of food location.
But there is an important distinction between clever behaviour and human intelligence. A bird that figures out how to obtain food from a difficult container is demonstrating an ability to solve a problem. We might call that clever. But humans possess additional capacities that are extraordinarily developed, including verbal language, abstract reasoning, sophisticated technology, ability to use symbols, words, images, gestures, or objects to represent ideas, things, or events that are not physically present (symbolic thought) etc.
It would be misleading to say that animals are simply “less clever humans.” Their cognitive abilities have evolved for different purposes and in different environments.
If we define cleverness as finding an effective solution to a problem, we can go beyond animals. Plants, for example, don’t have brains, but they can respond remarkably to their environment, altering growth, allocating resources, communicating chemically and responding to threats. I can testify to this as a farmer. Whether we call this cleverness depends on whether we require conscious intention for something to count as clever.
Which dimension should we use to define cleverness? A narrow definition is that cleverness requires conscious reasoning, leading to limitation to humans. A behavioural definition that cleverness means successfully solving problems or adapting, covers many animals. A functional definition that cleverness means producing effective responses to challenges, extends well beyond animals.
And this raises a particularly interesting philosophical question of whether cleverness requires consciousness. If it doesn’t, then the boundary between cleverness in humans, animals, plants, and perhaps artificial intelligence, becomes much more interesting.
Cleverness is basically congenital but largely developed. It grows through education, experience, curiosity, and deliberate practice. While people differ in their natural potential, almost everyone can become cleverer by learning to think more creatively, critically, and resourcefully.
Thank you for being part of the Fork in the Road Blog: Reflections on Life. Be sure to look out for the next episode when I will be writing about Choice. If you gathered something useful, please feel free to share the blog. My books, Fork in the Road: Creating a future of value starting from where you are and A view round the bend. Setting goals for your life’s journey are available for purchase at Aristoc bookshops in Kampala, Uganda and online at Amazon.
Your comments on my musings are most welcome and let me know whether there is a topic you would like me to muse over.