Whenever I see something like this, I'm reminded that really smart people have always existed. We're not at some pinnacle of human intelligence (the opposite actually [1]), we're just in a different context.
This is a much more controversial view than as suggested in the comment -- specifically there is very little data backing up the hypothesis that intelligence is decreasing. This is compounded by the fact that we really don't have great tools for measuring intelligence or a deep understanding of how it develops and manifests in humans. IMO the jury is still out on the general direction human intelligence is moving, but realistically if you are concerned the best thing you can do is improve environmental factors and educational access.
2. We do not have genetic data to show that these mutations are happening. This is theory only without empirical data.
3. There's a lot of debate over the role of genetics and intelligence. It's very possible that our understanding and implementation of childhood development has a larger impact on intelligence than these presumed random mutations.
4. Intelligent people are more likely to pair with other intelligent people, so maybe there is still selection effect for intelligence. This effect could be increases as world travel means a greater geographic range for potential mates.
Bones from burial sites of past hunter-gatherer societies are associated with larger jaws and mouths, while bones retrieved from former farming cultures have decreased jaw size. [0]
I believe jaw development has effects on mental health. Thus, I think our non-genetic changes do happen to affect our mental capabilities. There must be other factors than jaw size that do so.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage?wprov=sfti...
Why? I am honestly curious.
It's important to note that the aforementioned are all extremely mainstream, with leading academic and corporate institutions adopting and promoting them.
Come on people. We’ve been down this road before. It’s not good.
Or if it does not, are we better off staying ignorant than trying to discover some knowledge, however fractional and incomplete?
I don't believe in either.
IMHO other intelligence tests are the same - they tend to measure familiarity with established systems of rationality and response within a given culture only.
Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a student who can't read, or who can't read the language the test is written in, or are an elementary learner of that language. They would tend to score poorly. All communication is like this, not just written tests. But the logical basis upon which rationality is measured within said tests is also a language, and its drawbacks exactly parallel that of language itself. Perhaps what IQ and similar metrics are really measuring is cultural indoctrination and familiarity as a highly tangential proxy to the basic cognitive abilities which they actually purport to grade.
As others have said before me, an IQ test measures how adapted you are to IQ tests.
There's a claim that the reversal of the Flynn effect is environmental (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115), by two Norwegian researchers, but they've argued in a way which is obviously fallacious-- they basically said that environmental effects explain the drop in Norway, but the drop in Norway is relatively low, around 1 IQ point per decade (although that is of course incredibly bad) and the argue that this is the case for the other countries as well, but that doesn't follow since the drops in the countries they do not even consider are so much larger. In fact, they could have made another argument, for example that the drops in the UK and France can't be environmental because those effects in Norway can only be made to account for one 1 IQ point per decade.
I have no opinion on this topic, merely pointing out the mechanism.
If intelligence were some super drug every life form and human would evolve to maximize it. As an extreme example, Koalas evolved to have extremely energy efficient brains that are as small as possible.
Having a powerful "CPU" is worth very little when it is mostly empty and idle most of the time. We send our kids to the program loader (school) for 12 years for a reason. It takes a lot of effort to get the most out of our brains.
People aren't getting dumber. They are getting more isolated and out of touch with the old way of living that was considered the only way 500 years ago. A lot more people are living a lifestyle that used to be associated with aristocracy. More children are being sheltered from the outside world.
It’s basically survival of the survivors.
Or, in other words, we are definitely selecting for and against certain kinds of intelligence differently now than thousands of years ago.
The better or worse element is a judgment call. But definitely different.
There is 1) survival of the fittest and 2) random genetic mutation and 3) survival of the luckiest.
You could be part of the fittest, most well-evolved tribe of people on the planet that gets hit by a meteor which completely obliterates your entire lineage, while a much less "fit" group of people on the other side of the world soldiers on. These survivors didn't survive the meteor strike because of any inherent strengths or benefits of evolution or genetic mutation, but they are the only ones left out of sheer chance.
It's about how their geniuses compared to ours, not how our average Joe compares to theirs.
Lost knowledge usually happens because it stops being useful or because it wasn't actually widespread.
David Herlihy made the argument in The Black Death and the “Transformation of the West”, that much of feudal Europe prior to the plague was caught in a Malthusian deadlock, where labor was abundant and thus cheap enough that there was no return to investment in technology or capital. It was only when labor became scarce and expensive that investments in productivity were justified.
(I don't think it's something we should worry about, though: humanity has far more pressing and serious problems to deal with.)
I believe you’re talking about the Flynn effect of rising IQs in the past several decades, which might have actually leveled off recently (or even reversed slightly) in developed countries.
If you look at older literature or school tests from the 19th century or similar it doesn't seem like people one hundred years ago were dumber than modern humans.
Here is one piece of evidence against it: for upper half of Americans (in terms of economic prosperity), the improvements in nutrition and material living condition have, to a first approximation, maxed out by 1960 at the latest. The wealthier half of Americans in 1960 had no lack of food, neither in terms of quality or quantity, and things have not got significantly better since then (if anything, you could argue that the diets today are less healthy now). Certainly, they ate much better than even the wealthiest people did back before 1700, and had much better material conditions of existence. However, the Flynn effect gains kept steadily growing decade after decade, until 2010 or so.
We have known all of this for more than 2 decades now. This thread is full of people saying completely inane things about psychometric and intelligence research. I don’t blame them: the field itself is very technical, and at the same time there are plenty of people who don’t like its findings, and then misrepresent them (often deliberately) to the general public.
For one thing, if you want to talk about anything related to IQ tests, but have no idea what the g factor is, please note that you are missing the absolute basics of the field, and you’ll be completely hopelessly confused by some easy to explain and understand facts.
No doubt, but the person(s) that produced this carving don’t have to be smart, just skilled artisans/craftsman.
And this is the proposed driving factors for that supposed reducing intelligence.