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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the tv-and-video-games-cause-brain-rot dept.

A Norwegian study published Monday found a seven-point dip in IQ test scores per generation among men born from 1962 to 1991. The results suggest a reversal in the Flynn effect, an observed increase in IQ scores throughout the 20th century in developed countries.

Coverage from The Week adds:

The reasons for the Flynn effect and its apparent reversal are disputed. "Scientists have put the rise in IQ down to better teaching, nutrition, healthcare and even artificial lighting," says The Times.

But "it is also possible that the nature of intelligence is changing in the digital age and cannot be captured with traditional IQ tests", adds the newspaper.

"Take 14-year-olds in Britain. What 25% could do back in 1994, now only 5% can do," Shayer added, citing maths and science tests.

More from The Daily Mail:

Two British studies suggested that the fall was between 2.5 and 4.3 points every ten years.

But due to limited research, their results were not widely accepted.

In the latest study Ole Rogeburg and Bernt Bratsberg, of the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Oslo, found that Norwegian men's IQs are lower than the scores of their fathers when they were the same age.

The pair analysed the scores from a standard IQ test of over 730,000 men – who reported for national service between 1970 and 2009.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:20PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:20PM (#693022) Journal

    If we ever manage to breed it out entirely, it may be gone for good.

    Embyro editing is now on the table (or more likely, DNA/embryo synthesis). Population growth is trending down* and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, potentially giving them access to such a technology. Genes that have a slight effect on intelligence are being identified. So we are probably not at risk of intelligence being gone for good.

    *This invites the Idiocracy comparison, but my point is that if global population is projected to peak at 10-12 billion, that is going to limit poverty in the world and encourage greater use of fertility technologies (less unplanned pregnancies).

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 14 2018, @09:22PM

    by Reziac (2489) on Thursday June 14 2018, @09:22PM (#693188) Homepage

    Yes, and that's all to the good. Last I heard they'd ID'd somewhere over 500 IQ-related genes (not sure if this includes variant alleles). Which combinations resulted in you and me?? Recording the data is worthwhile, but not real useful if you've bred out everyone who can understand and work from it. Yeah, that's worst-casing it; humanity has the distinct advantage of a gene pool that's so huge it's difficult to entirely lose traits.But we also have the example of vast swaths of the world that never developed the wheel, not even in its most primitive form.

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