IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
There certainly appears to be something interesting here, but I'd be hesitant to draw any conclusions from this data the way TFA does, which reeks a bit of sensationalism. At best I'd call it something worth investigating more thoroughly, at worst it's statistical noise.
[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2016-dutton.pdf
[1] http://differentialclub.wdfiles.com/local--files/assigned-to...
The more attention grabbing the headline is the more skeptical I am of the study.
We know that elevated CO2 is negatively correlated with cognitive scores: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2016/07/indoor-co2-du...
>"But a new Danish study failed to confirm these findings. The paper, published in February 2016 in the journal Building and Environment, reports no cognitive decline even when subjects breathed air containing 5,000 ppm carbon dioxide."
>"Even scientists who have found an effect say more research is needed before they are convinced that modest amounts of carbon dioxide are a public health problem. Satish says that, so far, nobody even knows by what biological mechanism carbon dioxide might dim the brains of test subjects."
I feel like people are way too readily accepting this CO2 cognitive decline thing. There are other comments here saying that we know CO2 causes cognitive decline.
The single and/or the first children have higher IQ, so the Flynn effect is a reverse to the number of children per family, ie. it is a reverse to that graph:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
And on the other side of the world - the "one child” policy results are in:
"An increase of intelligence in China 1986–2012" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
If we look at the past and see when and where the IQ increase took place, we see it increasing when when we were required to complex terrain and protect ourselves from harsh climate.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/quilted-science/2009...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2785721/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes...
And there are other plausible explanations. Intelligence is highly heritable and negatively correlated with fertility. Also, there has been an overall increase in measured intelligence since IQ tests were first invented. Nobody really knows why. But this could be a reversal of that trend. And, importantly, people have been getting more sedentary during the entire extent of the increase. So it would be hard to square that with the hypothesis that this recent decrease being caused by less activity.
Given that there was no concerted effort to move either of them, my answer is "of course not! They are correlated"
humans have become less active → our intelligence has suffered as well
Eg: Less active = more weight gain = higher likelyhood of GERD and sleep apnea = less sleep = lower attention span and memory.
Boom, lower IQ because of lower fitness.
More accurately, intelligence is negatively correlated with fertility in women in the Western world. The correlation is still positive for men.
Generally it's believed that the negative effect on fertility is due to intelligent women getting more education, rather being a direct negative effect of intelligence.
Interesting topic, in any case.
More cohorts of people are entering the so-called "lower" classes and with this likely comes factors that affect mental aptitude such as decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed and unchallenging jobs.
This would agree with the study, which shows that families' IQs are getting lower with each generation.
Far as I can tell, this is the opposite of the trend, in the U.S. and Canada.
> I wonder if the drop in IQ is related to the increase in wealth inequality in these past 50 years as well.
Not sure what mechanism you think would enable that. Thinking that the richest people in society are, in relative terms, more rich than you than before has no obvious effect on anything related to IQ. Average and median PPP wealth and income continue to grow.
We've got an obesity epidemic. The average American is clearly not eating healthy. Maybe you misinterpreted the OP's statement? "Decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed" is awkward, but the intent is clear from context.
0. https://www.tnp.no/norway/economy/poverty-income-inequality-...
Norway has been able to (due to oil revenues) avoid the (non-imported) increased inequality that has affected most other western countries over the last decades.
[0] https://www.faktisk.no/faktasjekker/ZoD/innvandring-er-den-k...
I also do think that wealth inequality correlates with lower average IQ. Rich people want to keep the majority of people dumb; breed them like cattle, hook them up to machines and milk them.
In this society, a complete idiot with capital can achieve much more than a genius can achieve without capital.
Much more common are ways of starting with a lot of wealth and turning it into even more wealth.
One example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/huntington-har...
What evidence is there of that?
> The luck and social component is so strong that there is very little incentive for people to be intelligent.
People tend to make their own luck. For example, if you sit home and watch TV 6 hours a day, you are highly unlikely to get lucky. If you're out swinging the bat, you're far more likely to get a hit.
But even if it is, that just pushes the question back another stage. People make choices for reasons, based on their experience and predictions. Lucky to be someone who had the appropriate experiences and made appropriate predictions to choose drive and motivation. There should be no reason to doubt this unless you believe in some kind of external soul or intervening deity - a child who is hit every time they speak or move without being told to, will make different choices about "drive and motivation" as a child who is encouraged and praised when they do things of their own accord. It can't be otherwise, to suggest that people do things /without/ their environment affecting them at all is so absurd as to be instantly dismissible. The idea that infants might know what "drive and motivation" even are, without being taught, that everyone must learn that they are effective and valuable, independent of all experiences, doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever.
Put simply, if what you say was true, /everyone would choose that/.
People are all born with different characteristics, sure. But this does not predestine them. You, with your brain, can choose your path. You can choose to take advantages of your inborn advantages, and train to overcome your inborn deficits. It's why you HAVE a brain.
You can CHOOSE. People do it every day.
To claim to be fated to be a victim of circumstance is choosing to be a loser. You'll not be what you could be.
Free will implies that if you make a decision (after a long process of deliberating) then roll back the universe to before the start of that process and run it again, you can make a different decision even though exactly nothing changed.
In deterministic universe, everything will run right on the same tracks, and your cognitive process influenced by its internal structure, its accumulated experience and current inputs, will arrive to the same conclusion. No free will here.
In non-deterministic universe, something will randomly happen differently and you will arrive to a different conclusion, but that is still not your doing. You don't control that atom decaying or not decaying and flipping your neuron or something. So no free will here either.
In dualistic universe, your "soul" will influence the decision differently, but that is merely moving the problem into soul realm. Depending on how much decision making your theology places into the brain and how much into the soul, the soul acts as a generator of randomness (it is is not influenced by materialistic inputs and experiences) or as a whole processing unit (if all thinking is done there). You don't control that either.
Yes, I am.
You are using a dream of free will as an excuse to put down people and be rude and judgemental, and to put yourself above others.
One can choose to go jogging, but one can't choose to have the motivation to choose to go jogging.
Of course you can. Sheesh. Take responsibility for yourself.
> Income, yes, but not wealth.
Why is that? Wealth is just an accumulation of income.
To be wealthy, you just need to have assets and not do dumb things. Wealthy people either inherited it or had a liquidity event. Nobody gets rich via income. There is some intelligence involved in the liquidity part, but also alot of luck. If you have inherited property in NYC in the last 40 years and didn't sell it, you are wealthy. If you operate a McDonald's franchise, you are wealthy, and probably are of average intelligence.
85% of American millionaires are self-made (i.e. first generation).
"The Millionaire Next Door" https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer...
You can choose to read the book and determine how it is done, and what you can choose to do to become a millionaire yourself, or you can choose to remain a victim of fate. Your choice.
Finally, the causal relationship you have set up between intelligence and quality of living situation, while undoubtedly true to _some_ extent, ignores everything we know about system racism, system sexism, our horrific healthcare system and a host of other factors that complicate this idea - at least in the US.
Again more conjecture, but maybe IQ has more to do with concentration and abstract thinking. If there were a relationship between wealth and childhood trauma/stress that could impair abstract thinking, it would make a good case for policies designed to prevent childhood trauma, in particular those brought on by poverty.
The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less, in Western Europe of all places, is absolutely ridicolous. If anything the opposite is the case. As regards jobs we also have the opposite problem: too few simple jobs.
Wealth, inequality, and poor are not well-defined. Using the typical measures: poor being near the poverty line for an area wealthy being access to capital (be it over 100x the poverty wealth line or double the average) and inequality, the gap in absolute terms from top to average. The pareto principle will always illustrate how greater inequality defines that there are more poor people, even when the poverty line changes. Abstract equations, notwithstanding.
> The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less
The amount of food, available, is changing. The most popular bananas (https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-confirms-that-bananas...), beef, fish (http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/cetaceans...), are all in decline for differing reasons. So there's a little truth to it from a perspective. Yours isn't any more valid than theirs, so what did you add to the discussion?
Ironically, the beef industry may be kept on life support due to the ongoing climate change. New grazelands will appear from beneath the tundra across the world offering another few generations of opportunity. Buy your land in the US Dakotas for your grandchildren. It's a golden opportunity.
> bananas
It should be obvious that Europeans don't need bananas for proper development. In addition that has nothing to do with poverty.
Also, fascinating that if you haphazardly connect the hand wringing topic du-jour with anything at all you get people that scour the internet for even the tiniest scrap of evidence for you.
> Yours isn't any more valid than theirs, so what did you add to the discussion?
At least I know some economics and history so of course my perspective is more valid. There has never been a time or place where everyone was better off materially and if you are not aware you and OP should start reading some of those books.
Given these are orthogonal situations, I don't know why you think I said they are connected. I was speaking to the valid perspective of change in the food chain.
> At least I know some economics and history so of course my perspective is more valid
Appealing to your own authority? What about everyone else? Not compelling.
> Also, fascinating that if you haphazardly connect the hand wringing topic du-jour
Bringing something to the table should be the defacto approach. Bring something to support your views, other than rhetoric. You'll be a more effective poster (and speaker) if there's something there to talk about. Good luck with whatever.
Yesterday he said he read through 2 GoT books over the course of a weekend and asked me if reading raises IQ. I cited that famous "Freakonomics" chapter that correlates having books with high IQ but can't define a causal link between the two. I told him reading allows us to see patterns in the world around us, which is what IQ testing tests for, therefore if he can detect patterns through reading that apply to the real world he'll be increasing his IQ by reading.
People offload to these things tasks that were previously given to the brain.
Some of those tasks were mundane; yet, even mundane tasks exercise the brain better than no tasks.
The device substitutes for memory, both short term and long term. Why try to remember something? Snap an image, stupid! Lost? Doh, turn on GPS, crack open Maps. Why bother knowing anything by heart? The Wikipedia has your back; you can instantly access a detailed article featuring more than you'd ever want to know on almost any topic in any knowledge area. Skimming through text to find something? Just use search! Alphabetically searching through a paper dictionary? You're kidding, right? Paper magazine? Holy crap, why: you can't click on the table of contents. You have to read a number, then hold it in your head while finding a page that has the same number in the corner! Why would you do that to yourself?
Devices can easily be turned into tools to boost cognition; that's just not fun though, and not how most people use them. Some games are good for certain cognitive skills. There are applications for learning. Mobile devices are great for foreign language learning: you can train your vocabulary, or review audio-visual materials, anywhere.
But when it came to writing Theuth said, 'Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.' But the king answered and said, 'O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reasons of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.'
(from Phaedrus)
Being able to scribble memos to yourself probably does bring neglect to memorization; if you do nothing else with your literacy than replace your short and long term memory with writing, it's possible that your memory will stagnate.
When we introduce literacy, people read a lot more than they write, and they remember a lot of what they read. That boosts their memory and learning, even if writing down notes is otherwise detrimental.
In the modern age, you don't have to remember what you read, just the search engine keyword or piece of URL to find it again (and for the latter, there are bookmarks). Basically it's down to just remembering that you read something.
Unless you show both of those you haven't shown that dropping IQ rates are related to the proliferation of mobile devices.
Having the answers to "everything" at your fingertips may be blunting that for us.
In the very 1st week of my PhD studies, we had a host of eminent researchers advising us on how to succeed in graduate studies. One of those professors put up a slide that had a giant 1-line “Don’t use smartphones”
The entire audience - all 30 fresh PhD students, simply took a picture of that slide with their smartphone, just as they did the previous slide & the next one & so on. Not even a hint of irony.
That’s when I thought - that ship has sailed.
And a related episode on air pollution in general: https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-38-dead-air
https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/carbon-monoxide-trends
https://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/air/data/...
-- Alfred North Whitehead
What he is saying is that as civilization advances, the amount we need to think to survive decreases. We don't need high IQ's to survive anymore. While being smart is a selective criterion in a mate, other criteria will tend to overweight IQ when the amount of IQ needed to survive decreases.
Thus, IQ will decrease as civilization advances past a certain threshold. Perhaps we have passed that threshold.
There were more constraints, so people had to be more clever to survive.
I think Alfed Whitehead is supporting IQ rise as civilization advances, since baseline abstractions, problems solving techniques, and patterns are taught to us by our parents / community, and are accumulated over time. We have observed this to be true continuously.
An IQ test is timed and requires pattern recognition and selection for the most part. These things are exactly the type of "operations we perform without thinking" that general intelligence supports. Being good at finding and acting on general patterns without deep thought is extremely helpful and is probably (at least loosely) associated with high IQ.
> However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.
It is expected that the children of high IQ parents have lower IQs than their parents (and that children of low IQ parents have higher IQs than their parents). That is just regression to the mean. How are they separating this from that effect?
that would certainly be true if IQ were independently and identically distributed (iid), but the point here is that IQ is hereditable (not independent nor uniformly distributed) and so should show, in the long run, measurable durability in those differences across lineages. it's likely not reversion to the mean (or more to the point, the mechanism is not simply statistical in nature).
Is it? Hadn't IQs been trending upwards for the past several decades?
That kind of thing is illegal in America.
In America, unsupervised time outdoors is illegal in many states.
Parents are routinely investigated or get police contact because of this. Of course, being America, it varies a lot from place to place (you probably won't have a problem if you're in an extremely rural place and your kids are playing around in the 40 acres that is your backyard, but in a conservative suburban subdivision you certainly can have CPS investigate just for letting your kids play in your back yard).
As for "always", things were definitely nothing like this when I grew up in the 80s. This isn't the same country I grew up in.
The whole point of the story is that it's not illegal. An inappropriately nosy neighbor caused a stir, and that sucks. But there's no reason to escalate and downward spiral the situation by countering with factually incorrect claims.
Either way, though, it's still not in support of calling it "illegal" to have your kids playing outside unsupervised.
The common nostalgic "this isn't the same country I grew up in" topic just gets brought up all of the time, I'm guessing because it garners a lot of clicks from us who miss our naive childhoods but I just don't see it being as illegal as you do.
I can google around for all sorts of "florida man" stories. Just because I can find some very weird and newsworthy stories, doesn't mean that everything and everywhere is like that. I can probably live in Florida and have a normal life, and raise my children however I would like.
> Back in December, Rafi and Dvora made national headlines when police picked them up as they walked home from a local park. The children’s parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, subscribe to the philosophy of “free-range” parenting, which holds that children develop self-reliance by exploring their neighborhoods or riding public transportation on their own, if their parents judge them ready. [...] After the first incident, Montgomery County Child Protective Services investigated and found the senior Meitivs responsible for “unsubstantiated neglect.”
> A few states have laws stipulating the minimum age when a child can be left home alone. In Illinois it is 14, in Maryland, eight, and in Oregon, 10. Maryland’s law further stipulates that a young child left in the care of a person under 13 is “unattended.” Many more states offer home-alone guidelines, which vary as widely as the laws do (age six in Kansas, age 12 in Mississippi). [...] In most cases, whether such home-alone rules extend to outdoor spaces is something lawyers could argue either way.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/04/the-murky-law-on-free...
I would also add that CPS investigations are holistic, and look at the totality of the children's care. It is possible for them to investigate something innocuous but discover other problems.
Parent of my original comment states "There has always been unsupervised children everywhere that I have lived," and that's something that's changing in America as families don't want to deal with the possible legal consequences that may arise.
In previous decades the group of people taking IQ tests might have belonged to a resource rich group.
Now that IQ tests are more commonplace, we might finally be getting more signal from the below median side of the bell curve.
The article didn't mention if these biases were accounted for, and it is a critical detail to leave out.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.035...
This hypothesis seems reasonable to me, and yet I don't see any mention of it in the 2018 study [0] although they do address concerns about the conscript data in other respects.
For evidence of the irrationality of intelligent people, I proffer the example of every pointless university faculty departmental meeting, ever.
Becoming a corrupt government official and lining your own pockets at the expense of the rest of the population isn't necessarily a dumb thing, nor is working in an oil company or developing weapons for the military. Every dictatorship through history has had scientists and academics working for them on all kinds of horrific things.
That's not saying intelligence can't help fix problems or that being dumb is good. But being selfish or evil or sociopathic doesn't seem to have a lot to do with your intelligence, and the issues often come down to selfishness, greed or a lack of morals more than anything else.
I don't think we should entertain those studies personally, but I'm not sure you can honestly conclude anything about this without that data.
The article mentions a Norwegian study [1] measuring an IQ decline within families.
So it looks like the cause must be environmental.
My pet theory is that reading as an activity has been replaced by the consumption of audiovisual content.
And this will only get worse... until we're like the Eloi, surrounded and dependent on technology no one understands anymore.
1. The rise of social media is a huge contributing factor to misinformation and shortening attention spans.
2. Consumption, consumption, consumption. Most consume but don't create.
3. The unknown effects of technology on our brains. We're all just primates playing with extremely complicated toys. We don't know their effects on us.
The next decades will be interesting...
That's where I'd put my money. All of a sudden, the need to consume crappy pop culture has exploded around us, and people simply don't do things any more -- "Netflix and chill" has simply pushed other activities aside.
This is, of course, nothing new; it's just that modern streaming services deliver makes it so much more available than it was 30 years ago.
But was leisure so much more creative with television and work rather than Netflix and work?
I've had some conversations recently about how [my generation and socioeconomic group] would go outside more often as children because we only really had an hour or two of cartoons in the morning before the telemarketing-disguised-as-content started, but I'm also cautious about drawing too many conclusions because (purely based on my own experiences) I feel like people will search for an opportunity to explore or be creative if the environment is at all conducive to it.
See: a lot of our early experiences with computers. Games (consumption) existed, but that didn't stop us wanting to modify them or explore how they worked.
This illusion of having all human knowledge at hand is one of the reasons people are becoming dumber, not smarter.
But yes, there's access to an immense amount of books and resources.
If you look at social media today, it's all about creation. You create posts or photos or clever tweets and share them with your peers. This is the opposite of sitting down in front of the television for a few hours to watch corporate-generated programming.
Female obesity is known to lead to preganancy complications which cause cognitive deficits.
Obesity in general is known to cause systemic inflammation which affects cognition and speeds up dementia.
The opioid crisis and various other types of drug abuse lead to brain damage.
Various nutritional deficiencies could play a role. Historically, iodine deficiency caused the condition of cretinism, but sub-clinical deficiencies can lead to more subtle effects.
Sleep deprivation is known to cause cognitive deficits, and electronic lights and jobs with nocturnal schedules are more common now. Light pollution and spending too much time indoors during the day throws off our circadian rhythms.
We still have various types of neurotoxins plaguing our environments. More people are living in urban environments now, which causes greater exposure to automobile exhaust. Coal plants are still spewing neurotoxins. Lead pipes are still common in many cities.
High indoor CO2, from poor ventilation, is known to cause cognitive deficits.
> We observed no evidence that obesity contributed to a decline in IQ, even among obese individuals who displayed evidence of the metabolic syndrome and/or elevated systemic inflammation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3813310/
> Overall there was an inverse FIQ/obesity association, except in pre-school children. However, after adjusting for educational attainment, FIQ/obesity association was not significantly different. A lower FIQ in childhood was associated with obesity in later adulthood perhaps with educational level mediating the persistence of obesity in later life.
If intelligence was correlated with salary that would be a symptom of bad outcomes in the economic system. I'd expect that, but wouldn't be happy to see it. Eg, whoever is running the local plumbing small business is in a position to make a lot of money. The plumber might be smart or might not be, really shouldn't matter.
I've seen situations where truck drivers make a higher salary than engineers. More intelligence almost correlated with a lower salary.
Perhaps what you're getting at is 'how much does IQ matter' which is an interesting question.
In modern society the answer is probably a lot. And when you factor in the negative correlation between intelligence and aggression / self-control, probably a lot more.
I'm not saying that assumption is not wrong; I certainly have my doubts about the validity of IQ tests. But salary isn't a valid measure of intelligence either.
Honestly, I don't think we can even really agree on what intelligence is, and as long as that's the case, we can't really know what we're supposed to measure either.
http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intellige...
There are a lot of reasons you would expect divergence when just looking at salary. A Reporter is averaging 41k, a Postdoctoral Research Associate is averaging under $48k while a nurse makes $65k and a elevator repairman is making 79k. Higher status jobs don't necessarily pay more.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/money-academic-su...
If you think about what is involved in an IQ test and all the ways someone's intelligence manifests itself, it seems clear to me that IQ is at best a very distorted and narrow measurement of intelligence.
- Intelligence is not correlated with salary
- Intelligence is negatively correlated with materialism
- Intelligent people get paid more for doing work that requires I but less for having an unpleasant job (given equal pay, would you rather be a programmer or a garbage collector?)
- Intelligence is negatively correlated with other abilities (brain areas specialized in reasoning can't be specialized in social skills, energy spent on the brain can't be spent on the immune system)
- Intelligence is negatively correlated with mental health (Less Intelligent people don't notice or understand problems more intelligent ones do – ignorance is bliss; the things that make one intelligent also make one less stable – the genes that make one less intelligent haven't died out because evolution hasn't progressed that far yet but because the brain designs intelligent people have are buggy.
Come on, surely you aren't suggesting that genetics have anything to do with intelligence, are you?
Also I just listed all possibilities that came to my mind, whether I think they're likely or not.
As it should be, there's simply no data to back up claims like this.
No it's not, it's flat out racist.
But seriously: Isn't considering material wealth one meaning of "materialism"?
Do you have a source for this? Everything I have read suggests IQ is highly correlated with income (without considering a threshold).
The higher your IQ, the greater the odds of you making more money. The higher the collective IQ of a nation or group, the greater the odds of that nation or group being successful or wealthy.
https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html
If you look at the list of successful and wealthy countries and the list of national iqs, they tend to correlate fairly well. Barring war or some external impediment, the nations with the highest iqs tend to be wealthier and the lower iqs tend to be poorer.
Cognitive ability and fertility among Swedish men born 1951–1967: evidence from military conscription registers "We examine the relationship between cognitive ability and childbearing patterns in contemporary Sweden using administrative register data. The topic has a long history in the social sciences and has been the topic of a large number of studies, many reporting a negative gradient between intelligence and fertility. We link fertility histories to military conscription tests with intelligence scores for all Swedish men born 1951–1967. We find a positive relationship between intelligence scores and fertility, and this pattern is consistent across the cohorts we study. The relationship is most pronounced for the transition to a first child, and men with the lowest categories of IQ scores have the fewest children. Using fixed effects models, we additionally control for all factors that are shared by siblings, and after such adjustments, we find a stronger positive relationship between IQ and fertility. Furthermore, we find a positive gradient within groups at different levels of education. Compositional differences of this kind are therefore not responsible for the positive gradient we observe—instead, the relationship is even stronger after controlling for both educational careers and parental background factors. In our models where we compare brothers to one another, we find that, relative to men with IQ 100, the group with the lowest category of cognitive ability have 0.56 fewer children, and men with the highest category have 0.09 more children."
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.035...
At lest for this group of men, higher iq correlated with more children. There might be something to the belief that dumb people procreate more, but it might also be a stereotype popularized by movies like Idiocracy.
> among Swedish men born 1951–1967: evidence from military conscription registers
What's that?
The key omission from the article was any hint of a number. Without numbers there is no way to evaluate the claim. Is the purported decline within the range of noise of the measurements?
The lack of numbers is usually a red flag indicating that the author does not want readers evaluating his claims for themselves.
That said, my 2c is that high IQ causes people to become professionals and being a professional reduces the number of children they have. From my personal observations, poor people seem to have children as their purpose in life while professionals have other purposes and don't feel as much need for children.
Contrast this to most of the last couple of millennia where the highest status men had lots of children to multiple mothers, and famines were common, which would wipe out the poorest people. The poorest people would have included those least able to climb the class hierarchy by being merchants or intelligently winning the games of politics. There also wasn't social welfare to enable the poorest people to support as many children as they want. It sounds like a breeding ground for intelligence.
I'd be curious as to what effect having a phone in your face for 6 hours of the day has on IQ, compared to whatever the heck it was people did before social media.
A majority of the content I watch on YouTube gives me more knowledge, from Programming to Fishing. A chunk of what I look at is absolutely junk and I feel like it rots my brain if I watch/read too much.
Knowledge isn't the same as intelligence though. Maybe having effortless access to knowledge actually makes us less intelligent because we don't get to practice figuring things out ourselves as much.
I couldn't help but laugh at this. Is the author trying to spin the USA as second- or third-world? We are the top global economy!
America is a 3rd world nation in many aspects.
- Roughly 1.5 million US households are living in 'extreme poverty' by global standards, meaning <$2 per day at ppp before government aid.
- Hookworm is still a relatively common problem in parts of Alabama, because sanitation is nonexistent; sewage is piped from homes but dumped untreated nearby. Outside the US, it's viewed as an "underserved tropical disease" which only goes untreated in the absence of functioning medical systems.
- The UN Human Rights Commission sent a special reporter to the US to study extreme poverty, who concluded that on many metrics like youth poverty rates the US is more comparable to developing or underdeveloped nations than other first world countries: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...
This isn't just "we could help poor people more" or "things are less nice than in Canada". Significant portions of the US, mostly in the rural Southeast and West, are literally impoverished at the same rates as mid-rank third world countries.
The US ranks ~56th on infant mortality; of the countries that do better, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are the poorest by far. The IMF classifies both as "developing", and the World Bank calls them upper-middle-income. Even by the Cold War standard, all of them are either First or Second world. The first entry I see that clearly counts, Nauru, is about 40% worse than the US.
Mississippi, though, is ~60% above the national average, with some regions well above that. Which is to say, down around Barbados for infant mortality.
(Of course, I don't mean to imply that "rivaling poor and corrupt developing countries" is something to be proud of. It's just staggering to me how incredibly bad the situation in some parts of the US is.)
The US matches third-world countries in numerous other indicators, and is declining in most of them. This is not accidental; it is a direct consequence of choices made by those in power.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/3/editorial-th...
More to the point, US infant mortality is still increasing. Reporting within the US has not changed.
From this page: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/keep-it-in-mind/2010...
"The study also found that, as opposed to IQ, working memory is not linked to the parents' level of education or socio-economic background. This means all children regardless of background or environmental influence can have the same opportunities to fulfil potential if working memory is assessed and problems addressed where necessary."
To what end effect, I don't know. But it's an open and interesting hypothesis to explore.
It also stands to reason that higher global CO2 levels would have some sort of correlation to higher indoor CO2 levels. What’s really scary about this is that if such a cognitive effect were to be true, it would ultimately impact our ability to address the problem.
But you’re right, no need to sound the alarm bells yet but I think this is something that needs to be looked into.
I would not be surprised if typical school-air CO2 level has changed by 50% over the last century, but which direction I would struggle to guess. We have more indoor space per person now, but also seal buildings tighter. Especially in summer.
So when I see something like this, presuming it's real, I'd first look at changes in diet, presence of environmental hormones from plastics, and things like that to explain it.
The most likely reason scores are dropping, is that test-makers are not keeping up with changes in culture. People are 2019-smart and getting lower scores because they're not 1970-smart.
It's possible there is something to this.
People in 2019 do not, so they don't get the same amount of spatial reasoning exercise from that activity.
Part of the IQ test I took years ago involved memorizing and repeating sequences of digits. When I was growing up in the 80s, I had a large number of phone numbers memorized for friends, family, businesses I needed to contact regularly, etc. Presumably, memorizing dozens of seven- and ten- digit numbers regularly improved my ability to memorize long strings of digits.
Today, I no longer know any phone numbers besides my own and my wife's. And I know hers only because it's just one digit different than my own. I'm sure children are not getting any practice at this sort of thing.
So, does memorizing strings of digits have anything to do with how smart you are? If this is still part of IQ tests, then I'm not surprised raw scores are decreasing.
Imagine a CPU with an eternal spinning-rust hard drive and no cache, vs a computer with a 10x slower CPU and a 4MB cache. Which do you thing is more powerful at solving problems?
And having a specialized ability to memorize numbers is quite useless.
"What is intelligence?" is a broad enough question that you could write your dissertation on it.
Do you not think in general, people who score higher on IQ tests are in fact "more intelligent" than people who score lower on IQ tests?
Even the ones that just have shapes in them and you have to find the correct next matching one for the position? How can those be culturally biased?
Perhaps, you know, in the past, it was more difficult for those with lower IQ's to survive. Now people with lower IQ's can survive for longer, which is good for them -- absolutely! -- however, it would reduce average IQ's.
That would also suggest, this isn't something bad for civilization like the article suggests. Perhaps the same number of incredibly intelligent people like the ones you mention are better able now in this modern age to get their solutions to more people to make it easier to live.
That's basically saying "there's a systemic trend in this data. Let's hope it's not correlated with other trends in this data".
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't - but until we know the whole dataset is suspect.
IQ says little about the specific skills someone has trained, so more specific tests are useful for that, but it provides a lot of information on the general aptitude it is intended to assess.
That being said, IQ is highly predictive one's ability to perform a broad range of cognitive tasks (along with many other important life outcomes).
Might IQ be a measure of the aggregate of the benefit of equivalent measures of neurons?
For example, we know that MS patients have autoimmune diseases that attack the myelin sheath on neurons which slows their neuronal processing speed. Perhaps higher IQ people might have more Schwann cells to speed neuronal transmission more than lower IQ people.
Maybe the diameter of neurons or the width of the gap between the synapses. Or the sheer number of neurons and synapses might be different.
IQ could be an indirect measurement through test taking, that approximates a combined measure of all the physical properties of neurons and their arrangements that contribute to higher intelligence.
- there is a meaningful (albeit small) correlation between IQ and reaction times
- people with higher IQs show lower brain activation when performing cognitive tasks compared to people with lower IQs. That is, their brain has to do less work to perform the same task.
Unless we embrace the culture of "there are no wrong answers".
You can claim bias against blind people, but cultural bias is nonsense.
There are (or were) actually tests used by psychologists that include testing one's vocabulary. Which is knowledge, not intelligence.
Really? You can't think of any factors other than innate genetic intelligence that would influence your success in answering questions like this?
Let me give you the first example that springs to mind. I can come up with many more.
I used to know someone who had anxiety issues about their intellectual ability and would clam up when they felt they were being tested. Anything that seemed "test-like" to them would make them stressed and confused. I would bet any attempt to measure their IQ that triggered this behaviour would produce a lower score than if they didn't suffer from this.
Is that a measure of innate intelligence?
Like I said I can think of many similar scenarios although they would be more hypothetical.
But, the trend of increased screen time in my opinion is a bad one and would probably lead to lowered IQ. There's no reason to get stuck on a problem or spend time being bored. As children playing with Lego, Mechano, K'nex, etc, we taught ourselves to solve problems with no shortcuts. We were bored, we found a problem, we got stuck, we troubleshooted and we overcame. It seems like the younger generations of today are losing this Scientific process.
Probably the most concerning issue is that the reward system doesn't require pushing your mental abilities. You can see interesting output without having to put the work in. Because many of the websites/apps measure success in engagement, they literally want you to do as little work as possible to see as much interesting content as possible. Contrast that to pre-screen time, where if you wanted to play with the Lego model on the box you had to build it. Mechano would even actively put mistakes into the instructions to allow kids to problem solve.
I think a lot of newcomers from very poor countries may not be exposed to some things as often, they might not be thinking about shapes and geometry in the same way - more importantly, the notion of tests and test taking.
Solving little abstract problems in a test format as we understand them ... I think is something that's only normalized in certain countries.
I think there's enough potential variance in those things to make a difference.
It's not like people can't grasp what a 3D cube is ... but some cultures just may have that much more exposure to things, more familiarity. Enough to move the needle.
I went to a French immersion school as a kid, in an English city. I studied mostly in French for most of the day until high school. When they did some kinds of testing, there were 'word tests' which depended on some degree of vocabulary.
Though my peers were basically 'a cut above' in almost everything (French immersion was basically public school's version of private school) ... we did noticeably more poorly on that test, granted the lexical nature of it makes 'cultural bias' more obvious.
I think it's 'a thing' though maybe a small thing.
Things like 'bear is to dog as fish is to: a) flower b) whale c) door d) donkey' ... kind of thing.
It's not supposed to test language proficiency, but it can have an effect.
Black and (a) white, (b) blue, (c) proud, (d) decker.
No, but whether that is a meaningful measure of intelligence is where the bias creeps in. In our times having high mathematical aptitude is considered to be a sign of intelligence and intelligence is associated with success, so the very same people who like mathy things design IQ tests and hand out credentials and make the most money, so the entire process is largely circular.
What constitutes intelligence is dependent on what environment you're in. If in 100 years all the technical things have been automated it's conceivable that people with high degrees of social intelligence or creativity who can leverage technology rather than implement it will get to define what intelligence means.
IQ predicts those as well, not just mathematical ability. The theory of "multiple intelligences" has serious weaknesses which have not been addressed by its proponents, chief among those is that the "different intelligences" are highly correlated.
For "name the next number in the series" questions there literally are no wrong answers unless you place further restrictions.
IQ tests typically use shapes and not numbers, but that doesn't solve this specific question. Finding the answer is more about finding the same answer as the official solution, which is culture dependant
Now a good question would give me only one of these as possible answer, but in practise having multiple viable answers happens and I have to judge how complicated the question was supposed to be, what the test's expectations are etc. If you ask a Japanese you might get a different answer than if you ask a French simply because of how different their academic cultures are.
What about this would be culturally biased? The test could literally be administered in any language or even orally to someone who couldn’t read.
not everyone has. I don't think these are as unbiased as we like to think they are.
Well, a culture that doesn't stress pattern finding in schooling would be at a disadvantage, for example.
You can also practice pattern finding, and get better at it. That indicates it's not a very effective test of intelligence, which you're supposed to just either have or not have. You're testing a learned skill, not raw intelligence.
Also what does it mean to be 1970/2019-smart?
2019 smart is to know how to browse Instagram while on your way to work without running headfirst into a wall.
/jk
In order for something to test intelligence you shouldn't be able to improve your score by learning, practicing, or studying. Scores should be reproducible. I've yet to see an IQ test that didn't test skills you could improve by practicing.
They also assume knowledge. For example, the IQ test I had when I was young included word comparisons. This tested vocabulary more than intelligence. Someone who didn't have a formal education or didn't know English well would score lower regardless of their intelligence.
IQ is not highly regarded in psychology. It's more reliable than garbage like Meyers-Briggs but is not a true test of intelligence.
You cannot really improve your IQ score by any significant margin by studying in general, unless you memorize the answers on a particular test. This doesn’t make the IQ tests any less useful or valid than SAT or MCAT.
Scores should be reproducible.
They are. Test-retest correlation on high quality IQ tests are well north of 0.9
I've yet to see an IQ test that didn't test skills you could improve by practicing.
If you practice (I.e. memorize the answers) for a specific test, e.g. Wechsler, you won’t get any gain on Stanford Binet, for example.
They also assume knowledge. For example, the IQ test I had when I was young included word comparisons. This tested vocabulary more than intelligence. Someone who didn't have a formal education or didn't know English well would score lower regardless of their intelligence.
Yes, because intelligent people tend to have more knowledge. People don’t attain vocabulary simply by being taught the words at school. Vocabulary is learned by experiencing contact with words, and intelligent people tend to seek these experiences more. But yes, comparing an Englishman and Korean on an English-language analogies section of WAIS makes no sense. Fortunately, there almost always is measurement invariance within same country/culture, meaning that the tests measure the same latent ability.
They're not infinitely adaptable, though. The further you go from whatever baseline you're working with, the harder it will be to make significant progress. What's more, people with higher base scores will tend to progress faster. These repeat effects also tend to fade over time (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED076675). Finally and most importantly, virtually all types of skill training are extraordinarily domain-specific. In the digit span example above, the individual who trained up to a digit span of 79 was tested on chains of alphabetic characters instead and went right back down to the standard 7 +/- 2.
What does all this mean for IQ tests? Well, the goal is to identify broad baselines, not specific trained skills. The best ones will test a broad range of specific cognitive skills (like the Stanford-Binet) or a specific g-loaded skill that an individual hasn't practiced (like Raven's Progressive Matrices). It's fine for them to assume knowledge if they are directed towards specific cultures (for example, English vocabulary is fair game in an IQ test aimed at teen/adult native English speakers), but tests like Raven's should be used for broader contexts. If someone really needs an accurate idea, comparing several tests is worthwhile: A determined individual can practice some specific skills on one test, but those skills won't transfer.
IQ isn't perfect, but it's a useful proxy for intelligence that correlates meaningfully with quite a bit. Specific IQ tests can be trained for in limited ways, but such training only reflects narrow skills and so can easily be avoided by testing a variety of skills in thoughtful ways.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Pract...
IQ is not intelligence, but it's the closest thing to approximate it for certain cognitive aspects.
Anecdotally I've talked to some teachers who say that children's media nowadays is simplified. Less 'difficult' words, always explaining (never leaving things to be figured out by the consumer).
Here's the best source I have on Norway: https://www.fhi.no/nettpub/hin/levevaner/overvekt-og-fedme/
I wouldn't disregard it as a factor.
I started thinking about possible other reason's this could occur and checked into the data about the Norwegian study. The data was all from mandatory conscription so it couldn't be tainted could it?
Guess again.
At the same time that IQ started dropping Norway changed their conscription policy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Armed_Forces
"In practice recruits are not forced to serve, instead only those who are motivated are selected.[14] In earlier times, up until at least the early 2000s, all men aged 19–44 were subject to mandatory service, with good reasons required to avoid becoming drafted."
Hmmmm so IQ in the tested cohort started dropping when it was only tested in people who chose to take part in Military service rather than all 17-18 year old males?
That seems like it could have another explanation...
EDIT:
So it seems I missed some info ->
I went back and looked at the data in the study to see whether it used the preliminary research or only for successfully recruited candidates and discovered this:
"Cohorts born before 1962 were subject to a different scoring norm, and cohorts born later than 1991 faced a radically different conscription process with less than 50% invited for in-person testing after completing a web-administered survey. As a result, representative data are not available for later birth cohorts. Data for immigrants are excluded as information on full family size and exact birth order is of lesser quality, while selection into scoring is markedly different as immigrants typically do not face mandatory conscription testing but need to self-select into conscription."
So it seems the preliminary examination does not include enough information or the conscription in general has changed to radically for that information to be reliable.
After more investigation it seems that basically they're saying that from 1980 - 1993 IQ rose, then fell again from 1993-2007 reaching roughly the same levels as previously.
All data after that is tainted as too much has changed in the data source (conscription).
However one very important point about this is that all data is pre-smartphone.
+1 for actually hunting down the original study and interpreting it.
-1000 for spoiling our self-righteous party.
Even with the resulting edit there appears to be, at least to me, a clear need for additional investigation utilizing non-Norwegian conscription data before the original research question can be validated.
Good find.
Sounds like all men are tested, not all serve.
> Since 1985, women have been able to enlist for voluntary service as regular recruits.[citation needed] On 14 June 2013, the Norwegian Parliament voted to extend conscription to women.[15] In 2015 conscription was extended to women making Norway the first NATO member and first European country to make national service compulsory for both men and women.[16] There is a right of conscientious objection.[citation needed]
So at least since 2015, all men and women called in were apparently tested.
I went back and looked at the data in the study to see whether it used the preliminary research or only for successfully recruited candidates and discovered this:
"Cohorts born before 1962 were subject to a different scoring norm, and cohorts born later than 1991 faced a radically different conscription process with less than 50% invited for in-person testing after completing a web-administered survey. As a result, representative data are not available for later birth cohorts. Data for immigrants are excluded as information on full family size and exact birth order is of lesser quality, while selection into scoring is markedly different as immigrants typically do not face mandatory conscription testing but need to self-select into conscription."
So it seems the preliminary examination does not include enough information or the conscription in general has changed to radically for that information to be reliable.
Seriously now, partial reason probably is that life quality does not correlate with intelligence in the West. Maybe here there are some people reading this, who could confirm or disagree with the following. Coming from the East, one of my first persistent impressions was puzzlement when faced with barely human intelligence in a rather wealthy aspect.
Not to say that the usual pattern recognition type test is no longer valid, but perhaps it is a lesser predictor of functional intelligence now that computers have shouldered a large amount of the cognitive burden traditionally placed on human brains?
I believe that there could be a lessening biological imperative to be "intelligent" as more and more is provided to us rather than created / taken by us. We are more likely to be controlled today (of our own volition) than to seek out ways to control that which we currently do not.
"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." - Thomas Gray (repurposed as a slogan for culture in 2019 and beyond)
[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-sele...
> One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term).
> [...]
> However, a 2018 study[1] of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.
The studies would seem to contradict each other, which isn't all that surprising.
Edit: Upon reflection, that's rather an ugly way to say it. And in saying that, I was thinking of the well-established fact that reproduction rate is inversely related to educational level and so on.
E.g., how many kids play with blocks these days? Building model skyscrapers, log cabins, model railroads? Outdoor games? -Unstructured- play time?
Quite a bit different from Minecraft, physically and mentally.
Or, possibly the testmakers are modifying the tests, but the new numbers are not readily comparable to the old ones.
Maps replacing spatial awareness in the brain. In other word if you drive by GPS you do not have to remember the way, the gps device remembers. Social media replacing real social interactions Automatic translation replacing language abilities We are also increasingly disconnecting from the real world senses through devices.
In part, this is regression to the mean. They do not explicitly mention this in the article.[0]
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=IQ+regression+to+the+mean&ie...
This is why these headlines are somewhat misleading. Just because mean IQs are falling does not mean that intellectual output must fall, so it's possible to have simultaneously lower mean IQs but more output if for example low-IQ populations have a higher fertility rate but otherwise tend to not procreate with high-IQ populations due to assortative mating. The good news is mating patterns are not random. People generally seek out partners of equal intelligence.
The idea of a 'global iq' is somewhat fallacious. To take this fallacy to its logical extreme, imagine including house pets and other animals as part of such a score. suddenly, there should be no technology at all given that such a mean would be probably 50 or so. Rather, we should be looking at IQ by quantity for each 10-20 point interval of iq above 100, not by proportion.
IQ brings to mind "screen time" as a trendy but useless metric as it is even worse than "print time" where the contents could be anything from pulp fiction and comic books to advanced textbooks qnd latest articles and more.
Even the article lazily goes with the cliches of pop culture to blame (certainly not calling the Kardashians and their associated personal image cult/business venture anything but vapid) but this "issue" inevitably turns into yet another choose your own useless scapegoat based upon preconceptions fest based upon no evidence.
Folks, it's OK to be uncertain. This is fairly recent research, the world is complex, and we don't know everything.
This does not mean people are getting dumber, it just means there is a narrowing gap, which is good, not bad, assuming you want the best for all humanity.
Pre 1990, the immigration in Europe was very limited, and after the fall of Communism there have been large immigration movements within Europe, and now from outside it.
Two main reasons immigrants could cause IQ changes:
1. Genetic variation (you are actually not measuring the same population in the 80s, and the 2000's). eg, Denmark's minority/immigrant population has changed a lot since the 80s, going from 3% to almost 12% today. That could be affecting the score. You are not measuring just Danes, but 88% Danes, 8% Turkish, and 4% others.....
2. Lots of immigrants came either for economic reasons, or actually from WAR (Yugoslav wars in the 90s). Early child trauma, lack of nutrition, and the difficulties of restarting life somewhere could affect IQ scores, as we know environment, especially in early childhood could affect the score
If these measurements are coming from the Army, but they are not actually differentiating from first/second gen immigrants and original Danes, and then they are not really indicating that the local (original) population is having a decrease of IQ. Mostly than the newcomers have slightly lower IQs.
Since Denmark was mentioned in the article, here is a chart of their immigrant population change over time, and it is pretty drastic. From a homogeneous population to a more diverse one:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emil_O_W_Kirkegaard/pub...
https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r...
"In the new study, the researchers observed IQ drops occurring within actual families, between brothers and sons – meaning the effect likely isn't due to shifting demographic factors as some have suggested, such as the dysgenic accumulation of disadvantageous genes across areas of society"
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0084-x
That seems rather... prescriptive.
There is no central authority that dictates the use of the English language (that is both descriptive of reality and prescriptive in that I don't think there should be).
Meaning is not purely a matter of emergent use however, it also derives from the meta discussion around that use and the collective attempts to codify use in dictionaries etc.
In this case I'm being prescriptive and saying this is a terrible way to use rate and reflects typical journalistic mathematical illiteracy. Anyone and everyone is however free to ignore my opinion of course.
Every socialist Country will fail earlier or later, just like USSR did.
It'll be enough to grunt in the general direction of the nearest piece of smart furniture. Amazon will know everything about your physical, mental and emotional state needed to know what has to be dispatched, cost deducted automatically from your UBI account.
To give an absurd example your descendants may decide for some bizzare reason it would be awesome to keep pet dodos fenced in their yards. Given that dodos are long extinct immediately it is impossible. But if their biotech advanced enough to recover the DNA and clone them and either manually reconstruct or mutate the cloned base until an acceptable genepool was produced operation "yard-dodo" would once again be a possibility - although very remote.
Such change is both economically and politically incentivized, and people will almost always err toward convenience. Some recent research[0][1] suggested that purchasing free time (through paying for convenience) makes people happier than material purchases.
Further, potential criticism of such changes is swept under the rug as high end / high tech brands pioneering these services align themselves publicly with the fairytalesque yet disembodied/unassailable image of a "sophisticated" "urbanite" "consumer" who is "time poor" "cash rich" and thereby "successful" because they are "going places" (being content with where you are is unsexy). Moreover, they have "choice" so are "empowered" and can "express themselves" and "their aspirations" through "their choices" (read: spending / conspicuous consumption / subsequent social network image spam). The mythical "successful neighbour" or "keeping up with the Joneses": aspects of human social behavior (and thus capitalist marketing norms) are such a crock of shit sometimes.
A motto for the future? iCaveman: I can't.
[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/18/1706541114.full
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/science/study-happy-save-...
If we are living in a crisis of confidence about society- one in which people are plagued by pessimism about too many humans causing global warming, secular stagnation, overpopulation, where all the low hanging fruits are already picked, lack of moral purpose, with the impression that humans are a plague upon the world-
Won't the average pessimistic person care less about trying hard to do anything? And won't this manifest as less effort to be smart and just?
I don't worry about any of that stuff and have a lot of extra energy to explore random topics and generally more positivity to power my endeavours.
It seems the like overt consumer marketing of the 20th century has morphed into a social/political marketing in the 21st century. Because this is a new phenomena people don't seem to realize it's happening and instead blindly contribute their mind the borg, so to say.
However, I don't think there is strong enough evidence to jump to that conclusion. From what I understand a simple bad attitude can dramatically alter an individuals test score. No, I think the testing methodology and the scale of the testing would have to dramatically improve before a statement like: "People are getting dumber." can be taken seriously.
Person A has an IQ of 102 Person B has an IQ of 104, therefore; the child will have an IQ of 103. There is no specific IQ gene and so I would imagine that it would take just as long from an evolutionary standpoint to decrease the average IQ as it would for us to loose our tails and stop living in tree's. It certainly wouldn't happen in a matter of 30 years. At least, I don't think it would... I could be wrong but I don't believe I am.
Birth control is currently the primary natural selection criteria. Anything that can defeat birth control is extremely strongly favored by evolution. Evolution is quite rapid when the selection effects are strong, especially when also starting from a diverse population.
The ability to use birth control properly requires some intelligence.
The needs/career ambitions of a knowledge work career sometimes push aside the desire for a family.
Not trying to be down on people who have lots of kids! There's just tons of factors, some less obvious.
And it isn't that IQ is all genetic, it's that it's half genetic, half something we don't know how to measure, and very little shared or family environment.
First is that intelligent people tend to obtain more education, and more educated people (especially more educated women) tend to have fewer children on average. This has quite obvious effects from evolutionary perspective.
The second, less obvious, is that evolution works by selecting more fit variants of genes out of the pool, and the pool is made of existing variants and random mutations that happen all the time. These random mutations are typically negative for fitness, so the evolution selects against them. However, humans these days are operating under extremely relaxed selection regime, and gene variants which would have had significant negative impact on fitness in the past, while have the exact same effect today, are no longer as detrimental for reproductive purposes, which is basically the only thing evolution cares about.
For a good reference, see Woodley of Menie & Figueredo, 2013.
Think about it this way: in pre-modern times, fertility rate was high, and women would bear many children, much more than 2 on average. Despite high infant mortality, still much more than 2 would survive childhood. Yet, the population has been growing extremely slowly. This implies that many people haven't had a chance to reproduce, and even among those who could, many of their children didn't, so on average people would have only around 2 descendants who would maintain the progeny line, despite relatively many births -- otherwise the population would have grown, and it didn't. We also have good evidence that it's more intelligent and richer people who enjoyed better reproductive success in pre-modern times, for example from the dying wills of medieval and pre-modern Englishmen. See Gregory Clark's "Farewell to Alms" for references, it's a great book by the way.
Also, the fact that IQ was on the rise was probably due the Flynn effect, which is confounding the issue. There are two effects going on: one is the Flynn effect, which is apparent growth in IQ scores without corresponding increase in what we tend to think of intelligence. The Flynn effect is unrelated to genetic influences on intelligence, it's unrelated to g (which is why it's not predictive of real life outcomes, since it's g that's predictive). At the same time, there was a sort of anti-Flynn effect that I'm talking about above, which is in fact genetic, and acts on g, so it is predictive of real world outcomes. The Flynn effect rise in IQ score was masking the drop in actual intelligence, and now that the Flynn gains are starting to plateu in developed countries, the second effect is starting to become more apparent.
Intelligence:
https://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/more/articles/22-gene...
And aggression:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A
As we continue to research, and hopefully one day allow embyro selection and gene insertion/deletion for genes linked these traits, we can resume the increase in IQ.
Epigenetics complicates things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics but it just means we have more research to conduct!
We aren't close to understanding intelligence as it relates to cellular or molecular biology.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev...
There's good reason to believe most of the "single gene affects complex trait" stories are false.
Sitting at a desk all day and getting no exercise makes you dumber and that's exactly where the trend is up:
https://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2016/images/sp-so-2016-09-21...
Evolving up from little snails
I say it's all just wind in sails
Are we not men?
We are Devo
Are we not men?
D-E-V-O
>One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.
>However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.
The article (and study) make it clear that IQs are dropping from parent to child, even.
SAT tests are rooted in eugenics theory. IQ testing, despite the original developer warning of incorrect application, was weaponized in that direction.
Yet here you find yourself getting voted down.
https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...
https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/Intelligence-Testing-a...
“Objective” is something that has been up for debate since the dawn of epistemology. It hasn’t been solved yet. It’s also worth understanding the Demarcation Problem.
But still a danger and probably the core of the antipathy towards a closer look at data about intelligence.
Even if group X is lower it telks you nothing about Y and allows the jump to justification for travesties like eugenics if it is "clearly their genes", wiping out culture and engaging in mass child theft "if it is their culture" and whatever other sick and twisted rationalizations occur.
Except oops - it was comparing subsistence farmers in a disease ridden area to vaccinated and well fed and educated upper middle class! Or the tests are based upon preconceived notions themselves and they did worse because the "neutral" puzzles assumed left to right as associated with temporal flow.
How do you already know this a priori? We know intelligence is strongly heritable, there's no reason to prematurely conclude that there are no variations among ethnicity tied to genes.
>Even if group X is lower it telks you nothing about Y and allows the jump to justification for travesties like eugenics
Nonsense. Slippery slope fallacy. Acknowledging that people have different levels of intelligence does not imply that we should deny them rights to life. But it would, for example, potentially explain certain discrepancies in socioeconomic outcome, which is critical when considering efficient allocation of resources to combat inequities.
>Except oops - it was comparing subsistence farmers in a disease ridden area to vaccinated and well fed and educated upper middle class
You seem to imply that all IQ studies are and will be poorly constructed. This does not have to be the case.
There is an unfounded presumptive bias in society currently that all people are born with identical potential IQ and that all discrepancies arise from socioeconomics. Moreover, we've been strongly conditioned not to question this assumption, lest we be shamed with accusations of racism. But this is a fundamentally unproven assumption and denying evidence to the contrary will likely lead to worse outcomes for society.
Look at the complete lack of a shitstorm over actual science - MAO-A should be by all rights far more controversial given the areas delved in. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A
That should help bury and put to rest the persecution complex.
Medicalization.
You should worry that about the possibility that recent tech has sidestepped the IQ feedback loop. That is, the tech is good enough without human input that it can sustain a low IQ society. In that case, it's downhill from here.
Interesting read: http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com
I agree that there is some evolutionary negative feedback loop but we are doing are best to work against it because that seems like a right thing to do.
The feedback loop we haven't handled yet is automation which is increasing minimum IQ required to get a job.