Are we getting smarter?

I guess everyone would have noticed that kids nowadays on an average seem much more intelligent. This might not appear very surprising but I got thinking about this phenomena a bit more and it seems that there might be more then what meets the eye.
It is a well known fact that the rate of evolution in humans is 10 to 100 times the average long term rate. You might be surprised to know that 10,000 years ago no human had blue eyes but now the gene OCA2 has emerged and so we do. The mundane (and perhaps logical) explanation for this phenomenon is that the population explosion that mankind has experienced provided for a lot opportunities for mutations to creep in. That plus the added challenges of post industrial life may have contributed to this accelerated rate of evolution.

From this viewpoint it seems natural to assume that generation next will be better equipped to deal with the challenges that we now face and indeed we do see this happening in the animal kingdom as well. However, can this phenomena alone explain this growth in intellect? Rats, ants, rabbits, mosquitoes even, all propagate at rates much higher than humans but I am yet to see a rat that can understand calculus (not that I have tried teaching it to one :-)). Cockroaches have a few million years of lead on us but they havent done much beyond survival yet. There seems to something else driving our evolution that cannot be explained away by physical processes.

Here is my hypothesis:

Before I present it I think I need to point out a surprising form of memory called "Flatworm memory". In an experiment conducted in in 1953, Dr James McConell made a few worms get through a maze and then he killed them and fed them to a second batch of worms. These made it through the maze faster than all the control groups. The same experiment has been repeated with goldfish, rats and canaries with similar results. An injection of RNA seems to induce the same result. So, this cannibalistic experiment seems to point out that somehow memory is being absorbed and hence knowledge is being passed on by the act of digestion.

Maybe humans also transmit information in some way to their surroundings. If we assume that mankind as a whole is connected to a hypothetical meta physical universe that holds the consciousness of the species itself then things start getting interesting. Knowledge acquired by prior generations get accumulated in this "cloud" and any new sentient being that can tap into it instantly inherits this vast expanse of knowledge. This can explain why people are getting smarter. Yes, we have the internet and news travels fast but that is information. Knowledge is a different ball game. It is the ability to interpret information and God knows that the internet does anything but help that cause. Looking at major religions we can draw similarities between many stories and all seem to have a similar theme. Is this coincidence because during ancient times it was not possible for stories to circle the globe rapidly or is it something else? Here for example is a list of the similarities between Jesus and Krishna.
This is not mere speculation, the Global Consciousness Project has been running for over 10 years gathering data and analyzing correlations between random numbers and for many major events they have noticed a significant deviation. This is being speculated to be the result of a global consciousness that can actually have physical and measurable effects. Surprised?

Maybe there is more than just our appearance and genetics that makes us HUMAN. Certainly a tantalizing prospect.