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posted by mrpg on Wednesday October 24 2018, @09:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-care-I'm-getting-intelligenter dept.

Slate:

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?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday October 24 2018, @04:30PM

    by Arik (4543) on Wednesday October 24 2018, @04:30PM (#753073) Journal
    Until very recently, the numbers would have been even higher, and this is hardly limited to the muslim world. Cousin marriage goes back long before Islam.

    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.

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