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 ...
I blame the Federal Reserve.
It was necessary to destroy our national intellect before they destroyed our money.
If we are to somehow believe the theme of this piece, it might be a good time to actually study what these smarter people believed.
1. They believed in God. The Judeo-Christian God of the bible, to be exact. They saw an orderly God in the sciences and His beauty in His Creation.
2. They believed that men and women were different, complemented each other, and were the fundamental basis for what we call a family. They could under normal circumstances, have children, and have them, they did.
3. They believed many sick and twisted crimes against others deserved capital punishment, as capital punishment is not only a justice method, but a societal preservation mechanism.
4. They did not believe in an endless welfare state, spending and living way, way, beyond ones means, and did not like to be known as recipients of others’ charity. It was embarrassing to have to take charity. They worked hard, did not expect anyone giving anything to them for free, did not feel they deserved anything just because they were a certain nationality.
5. They expected a lot from their children, and children were well-mannered because they knew how to raise kids and the proper use of discipline. What many learned by the eighth grade, surpasses what many today have absorbed through high school.
6. They did not send their kids to college to earn worthless degrees and piss away tens of thousands of dollars on worthless degrees.
7. They understood the Constitution of the United States better than the average person does, anecdotally confirmed many, many times for us by Jay Leno’s interviews of people on the street regarding politics and laws.
8. They did not believe anyone owed them anything unless they had an actual contract agreement.
9. They were planners, in the sense that they were their own first responders, first aid helpers, whatever. They had pantries full of goods, and root cellars. They knew how to can items and make preserves.
10. They were part of their community. They knew who was in the neighborhood. They had people they may help out, and there were others there that may step up to help them out if needed.
11. Cops were both good and bad, like today, but they were PEACE OFFICERS, not SWAT LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS. They did not regard all citizens as potential suspects and threats and did not shoot any dog in their own yard, leashed, for grins. They did not raid people’s homes and punt the family cat into the wall, saying “You’re lucky that’s not you.”
I’ll bet it was caused by “progressive” liberalism.
And over the past hundred or so years, increasing numbers of people spend most of their daily time in isolation: at a desk in the workplace or on a couch in front of a TV or Video game.
This results in a misuse of what the brain was designed for, and like any organ that is misued, damage likely will result, not just by making people socially retarded, but across the board retarded.
I tend to agree with Darwin on this point. I am not sure how Obama could have won the election without cheating and without a falling IQ.
No, I don't think so. More like IQ's have dropped 45-60 points in just my lifespan.
Cyril Kornbluth. One of the greats.
“This conflicts rather dramatically with the records of actual IQ tests, which have been increasing steadily in what is called the Flynn Effect.”
I see your “Flynn Effect”, and raise you “Smart Fraction” and “Regression to the Mean”.
“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.”
The classes have been merging in these societies, and intelligence is a dominant trait.
Geez. Nobody read LILA?
“This conflicts rather dramatically with the records of actual IQ tests, which have been increasing steadily in what is called the Flynn Effect.”
That’s actually incorrect.
You see, the Flynn Effect is easily misinterpreted by people with little knowledge of the mathematics behind a normal distribution. Such misinterpretations are made worse by the heady, and beautiful egalitarian implications that the Flynn Effect would hold for our society and the world at large if it were indeed accurate AND was a trend that could be expected to continue indefinitely. To quote that bastard Lenin (the Brit, not the Russian) IMAGINE!
The simple fact is that if you look at the original data sets, you can see that the reported increases were chiefly confined to the lower half of the curve, and the upper end of the curve saw little significant increase. Such data would support a nutrition-based hypothesis for the observed effect - namely that post-war prosperity largely did away with childhood malnutrition and significantly reduced that factor’s influence on the intellectual development of generations of low-class individuals. Though a number of studies have tried to drive a stake through the heart of that idea and champion the ideal that human beings are infinitely plastic and interchangeable units entirely molded by their educational and cultural environments.
A recent Dutch study indicated that even that modest, low-end of the spectrum increase in IQ ENDED in the early 1990’s. Since that time averages have been falling. The possible causes are numerous, but assuming the new data is sound then the most likely initial suspects would be either dysgenic influence on the upper end of the curve, or possibly our modern education systems no longer offer any significant encouragement or challenges for the best and brightest, or perhaps a combination of those factors. Frankly, the Flynn Effect was widely misinterpreted during its heyday, and the Flynn Effect has long since stopped and has actively been backtracking.
Interestingly enough, common wisdom can provide an insight into such trends before the research journals catch a hint of it. How often have you heard, or even thought to yourself, that common sense was dying out? Well, in our society we have removed many of the historical impediments to genuine stupidity. In a world of litigious attorneys, victim advocacy groups, nanny-state government and non-judgmental education and employment policies, the simple fact of the matter is a greater number and greater percentage of stupid people are being employed, cared for, coddled, and allowed to live long and prodigiously “fruitful” lives.
For example, in ages past pouring boiling liquids on your genitals would stand a good chance of seriously reducing your employment and reproductive opportunities for life. Today, you can just sue a restaurant and get paid millions.
Regardless of whether such an influence might have an effect upon the gene pool the fact remains that when governments and societies subsidize a particular behavior you can expect more of said behavior. Likewise, when government penalizes a behavior by fining or taxing it, you can expect less of said behavior. At the end of the day, we really do subsidize stupidity and tax intelligence.
Study the elementary school books from early 20th century and you will see what children were expected to master: Shakespeare, the Bible, Tennyson, etc. Now the children read simplified texts, i.e. “Run, Spot, run!”
Also, children learned to read much earlier in those days, and reading is an activity that increases inductive reasoning ability.
“Ideocracy” is a prophetic movie. People who should be having babies aren’t. Those who should never produce are.
In immigration matters, we are importing dumber people than we used to. Finally, the welfare state has greatly reduced personal initiative and self-reliance. All of these factors have reduced our collective IQ with predictable results for our civilization.
I agree, an excellent remark.
>> I learned that Richard Feynman’s IQ was just 125.
A dubious number.
Haha.
Biden says things like, “I ended up in the top 3/4 of my class.”
In other words, he wasn’t in the top quarter, he was somewhere in the top 75%, thus not in the bottom 25%.
No, they don’t. Sub-Saharan Africa borders on the moron scale.
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