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from the don't-care-I'm-getting-intelligenter dept.
In November, the European TV channel Arte aired an hourlong documentary, Demain, tous crétins?—Tomorrow, everyone’s an idiot?—on a topic that would seem to be of great importance. It starts with a London-based researcher, Edward Dutton, who has documented decades-long declines in average IQs across several Western countries, including France and Germany. “We are becoming stupider,” announces Dutton at the program’s start. “This is happening. It’s not going to go away, and we have to try to think about what we’re going to do about it.”
[...] It’s wrong to hint that scores on tests of memory and abstract thinking have been falling everywhere, and in a simple way. But at least in certain countries—notably in Northern Europe—the IQ drops seem very real. Using data from Finland, for example, where men are almost always drafted into military service, whereupon they’re tested for intelligence, Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since. Similar trends have been documented using data from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. At some point in the mid-1990s, IQ scores in these countries tipped into decay, losing roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of a point per year. While there isn’t any sign of this effect on U.S. test results (a fact that surely bears on our indifference to the topic), researchers have found hints of something similar in Australia, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Are we becoming dumber, as in losing cognitive function, or merely less-well read?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @11:11AM (8 children)
"A rough estimate shows that close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred: In Pakistan, 70 percent of all marriages are between first cousins (so-called "consanguinity") and in Turkey the amount is between 25-30 percent.[11]
Statistical research on Arabic countries shows that up to 34 percent of all marriages in Algiers are consanguine (blood related), 46 percent in Bahrain, 33 percent in Egypt, 80 percent in Nubia (southern area in Egypt), 60 percent in Iraq, 64 percent in Jordan, 64 percent in Kuwait, 42 percent in Lebanon, 48 percent in Libya, 47 percent in Mauritania, 54 percent in Qatar, 67 percent in Saudi Arabia, 63 percent in Sudan, 40 percent in Syria, 39 percent in Tunisia, 54 percent in the United Arabic Emirates and 45 percent in Yemen"
The British geneticist, Professor Steve Jones, giving The John Maddox Lecture at the 2011 Hay Festival had stated in relation to Muslim inbreeding, "It is common in the Islamic world to marry your brother’s daughter, which is actually [genetically] closer than marrying your cousin."
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:10PM (5 children)
How about Jews in Israel? How many of them are "inbred"?
Anyway, marriage among cousins is legal in much of the US.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @03:13PM
That 'splains a lot.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 24 2018, @06:36PM (3 children)
Don't know why you were modded "informative", when you ask such a silly question. No, Jews aren't very inbred. In fact, there have been discussions in which it is claimed that today's Jews have little direct relationship to historic Jews. Today's Jews have been Europeanized a lot. In Israel, there are Jews with English blood, French, Italian, Spanish - the list goes on and on. Israel is probably on par with the US for genetic diversity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @06:52PM (1 child)
Which is why a boatload of genetic diseases frequently targets Jewish communities.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 24 2018, @07:03PM
Yeah - probably picked up a bunch of diseases while inbreeding with Euros.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 25 2018, @06:55AM
Runaway does not know why. Paint me surprised, not. What a Maroon! .
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday October 24 2018, @04:30PM
In the 'golden age' of the ancient world, an even closer form of marriage was practiced particularly by royalty - marriage of half-siblings. No joke.
Why? A couple of reasons are obvious - availability and inheritance.
Availability is a major consideration for all pre-modern societies and even still today. If you live in a small village in an area dotted with them (or if you're a hunter gatherer no less so) there just aren't that many people you could match with to begin with, and in those settings there's just a much better chance that many of those people are 'cousins.'
And that's as good a point as any to insert one of the non-obvious reasons. Because we use the word 'cousin' ambiguously in English. While the word may have originally meant only one's mother's sister's son, it's sometimes used extremely broadly in English - c.f. 'my second cousin twice removed.' By that broader definition large numbers of people in EVERY traditional society marries their cousin. By the stricter definition; the son or daughter of an aunt or uncle, far fewer.
On to inheritance. There are obvious advantages if you've ever tried to divide up family farmland into smaller and smaller plots as grandchildren are born. If your parents are cousins you stand to inherit multiple shares from your grandparents, countering this trend. That's a simple and neat explanation for why consanguine marriage was particularly favored in the middle east, the cradle of agriculture.
If you read the Bible you'll find that the early patriarchs commonly married close relations, and if you read the cuneiform tablets you'll find the same of their contemporaries across the region. Later on the priests and scribes added prohibitions on marrying the closest sorts of kin - as well as certain non-blood related in-laws. Both Christianity and Islam carried on the basic framework, changing it a little here and there, but essentially intact. And cousin marriage flourished under all of them, perhaps because it was the nearest relation still allowed to marry.
And that *might* be why we seem to have expanded the word 'cousin' to include more distant kin about the same time we quit marrying "full" or proper cousins to each other legally, in certain states at least. It's only banned in less than half of US states to this day.
We think of it as something 'they' do but it was common and unremarkable in this country until well into the 19th century as well.
The genetic risk was dramatically exaggerated by certain 19th century 'public health' writers and it's now socially unacceptable even where it's legal, but in reality the risk is pretty small - UNLESS you're talking about super-cousins, which unfortunately you often are in the middle east. And by that I mean, cousins whose family trees are roughly 30%+ cousin marriage all the way back to ancient times, in which case the recommendation to avoid it would probably be a very wise one.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday October 25 2018, @04:41AM
And just this week I saw a stat from the British medical system to the effect that 1 in 6 kids from these inbred "Asian" (Middle-Eastern) parents has serious medical issues. The effect might be trivial from occasional inbreeding, but from 1500 years or more of concentrated inbreeding? Well, as you see.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.