Taken at face value, the Flynn effect would imply that human beings are indeed becoming more intelligent. Disappointingly, however, this seems improbable. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University and author of several popular science books including The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and How the Mind Works, says: “In terms of basic raw brainpower, most evolutionary biologists would say it’s unlikely that people are any smarter today than they were a couple of centuries or even millennia ago. Evolution is a slow process and a few millennia are not much time for smarter people to out-reproduce duller ones enough to change the make-up of the species.”

“It may be true that kids don’t know the capitals as well as they did before, but part of my reaction to that is: You know what? We have Google now,” Johnson says. “Is it more important that they have memorised the names of all the capitals or that they have great skills at using the internet to find the information they need? One is give someone fish; the other is teach them how to fish.”

Source: Financial Times
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9b4c5dc8-291e-11db-9dcc-0000779e2340.html