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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @06:53PM
What was the ideal sex ratio?
I would hypothesize that a ratio of ten women to each man would be ideal. Regrettably, this would necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, as far as men are concerned. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.