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There was an Icelandic study that tended to provide some support for the hypothesis to the effect that people with high educational achievement had fewer children which led to an overall trend of decreasing educational achievement in the population [0][1]. Proving the world is unjust, Mike Judge wasn't listed as an author and didn't even receive an acknowledgement.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-sele...

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The article covers this:

> 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.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf

This seems to be data for males (conscripts) only. It seems they didn't examine correlation with lower-IQ mothers, which may have been a factor.

Norway conscripts men and women.

Since 1985 women can volunteer, mandatory conscription for women was introduced in 2015. So at least historical data is definitely skewed. Currently, there are 13% women in the Norwegian army... https://forsvaret.no/aarsrapport/statistikk/personell

There is no contradiction. Iceland study states upfront that genetic decline size is 10 times smaller than environmental effect and is masked by it.

Or, as XKCD said it... https://xkcd.com/603/

As much as a I like the movie it's worth noting that on such short timescales there's probably a more significant impact of nutrition differences and the failure of IQ measures across different society structures ie agrarian, industrialized, service oriented.

The paper deals with the issue. It is measuring genotype score, not IQ, so failure of IQ measures is irrelevant.

The article discussed this but said that even within family's IQ is going down by generation so it cannot be entirely the effect you described.

Maybe, even within families, it's higher-IQ siblings who'd rather do non-reproductive stuff.

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.

Sending our smartest women to spend their most productive child bearing years at university is not sustainable if we want to raise or maintain population IQ via the traditional breeding methods. Hopefully these same college women will get us enough skill at manipulating genetics to surpass the incredibly slow optimization process of natural selection. It is currently a race against time. Which will win out, gene manipulation or dysgenic selection?

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