Posted on 05/26/2013 8:06:05 PM PDT by Slings and Arrows
A new study from researchers in Europe claims that the average IQ in Western nations dropped by a staggering 14.1 points over the past century.
"We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study," the researchers wrote in the study, which was published online in the journal Intelligence on Thursday. "Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence and are considered elementary measures of cognition."
-snip-
The results were measured using data from 1889 to 2004 and were analyzed by Michael A. Woodley of Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Jan te Nijenhuis of the University of Amsterdam and Raegan Murphy of the University College Cork in Ireland.
So why has there been such a steady drop? As UPI notes, previous research studies have found that women of higher intelligence tend to have fewer children on average, meaning that population growth may be driven by those with a lower IQ. And over time, the abundance of less intelligent offspring would affect the overall IQ average.
On average, the general intelligence of those populations measured dropped by 1.23 points per decade.
"These findings strongly indicate that with respect to general intelligence the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations," the study says.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
The world owes Dan Quayle an apology.
Flies in the face of what we’ve been told, that as societies become more intelligent, they become less religious. It seems our secular utopias are getting dumber and dumber.
According to actual IQ tests, scores increase at an approximately equal rate in all societies. I’ve personally never heard a really logical reason for this.
Love that movie. It gets truer every day. We are already living in an idiocracy.
Television rots your brain. Especially sports and reality TV shows.
The demographics of the West have also changed over the past hundred years. Members of these demographics consistently score lower on IQ tests so that’s a contributing factor to the lower average IQ of the West.
People also don’t critically think as much now as they once did. They have the TV tell them what to think, and calculators and computers to give them instant answers.
Robert Pirsig, in his book LILA, makes the strong argument that the brilliant Victorians charged their Soldiers across open fields where they were mowed down by machine guns and quick firing artillery. The survivors rebelled against the Victorians with the results you see today.
And during the same period the Muzzie population increased by at least 14%
Best comment yet!
It’s so easy to figure out, but politically incorrect to name! It’s nothing more or less than the unrestricted immigration from the low IQ countries into the West that accounts for this.
Leftists and muslims.
Add to any society and watch it descend way below orangutan level.
Are these the same researchers who are part of the Western Civilization whose IQ’s have dropped 14 points?
Why should we believe them?
Hmmm...just about the time that the teachers started organizing.
Uh...DERP?
14 points? That’s all? I think who ever came up with that number is dyslexic.
I laughed. Then I cried.
It’s all those warning labels on products. If chainsaws didn’t have a “Warning: don’t scratch back with blade while saw is running” label then natural selection would help keep things the way they were meant to be.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.