genetics yes but there is also a pronounced local environmental factor in the decline of intelligence...
(or at least, integrity)
just look at the intense concentration in WashDC
Well d’uh!
How can anybody draw any conclusions about intelligence levels when the intelligence hasn’t been allowed to develop with the indoctrination which the liberal school systems have imposed on the children during their most impressionable years, from head-start all the way through college?
Also, when people learn or decide to become dependent, their brains don’t get or need to be exercised or used as much as someone who needs to be out there in the workplace, making decisions day in and day out. What you don’t use you lose, and the brain needs “brain food”, or knowledge and daily challenges, in order to develop and remain active.
The law of God, the law of nature is survival of the fittest. Now we have a nanny state taking care of those who would not survive without subsidizing etc. Recently I heard someone say something like “You can’t fix stupid. Though take the obvious warning labels away and stupid will fix itself by process of elimination. heehee”
Over the past 75 years in America, and perhaps even longer in other lands, we have been subsidizing the reproduction of the least cerebral, while taxing the more intelligent to a point where they have far fewer children. We have also, since 1965, encouraged the immigration of a less skilled, less cerebral segment of the outside world, than we drew earlier.
Thus there has been a measured fall in school achievement levels, since the early 1900s. Thus there has also been a considerable "dumbing down" in our observed levels of political discourse. Contrast the Phd. thesis level of public political addresses in the 1840s, with the moronic 30 second sound-bite today. The public with little formal education, followed the oratory of Webster, Clay & Calhoun; while college graduates today, chant in unison, like Nazi robots at the slogans of an Obama!
The reporter's commentary that follows the common sense--so far as it goes--quotes from the geneticist, in the balance of the featured article, is itself an indication of the dumbing down of contemporary "analysis."
William Flax
It’s obvious that the left side of the Bell Curve is breeding like rats. The long term results can’t be good.
The average Athenian citizen from 1000 B.C. would be a malnourished shrimp with a malnourished brain in comparison to the average American of 2013 A.D..
As to what the prevaling culture encouraged the citizen to DO with that strength, size, and intelligence; other than encouraging rampant pedophilia and male homosexuality - Athenian culture had a lot going for it as far as encouraging intellectual endeavors.