IQ Anxieties

For instance, if I put two groups of mathematicians in two different rooms and lock them up for three years, but one group has access to the internet and the other doesn't, how much more progress will they make on the same open problem?

What if I give both groups internet access but only one group gets to use modern search engines?

What about finer gradations of the same idea? Is a research team confined to using only Google to search smarter or dumber than a team that must only use Bing.

I'm wondering about how much IQ actually matters compared to tools. After reading Sapiens (which I highly suggest), I don't think the principle machinery for solving problems exists in our heads and hasn't probably since the middle ages, if not before.

It makes the common assumption which was used in the 19th and early 20th century that "IQ" was a fixed quantity. Versus Flynn's observation [1] that in every country they surveyed people's IQ increased over time.

More modern thinkers recognize cognitive impairment as a function of disease or damage, but cognitive ability is not a fixed scale.

[1] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/flynn1998a.pd...