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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.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday June 14 2018, @12:47PM (6 children)
You are correct, but there is more to it than that. There are two aspects to evolution, development of variation, and selection within the range of that variation. Development of variation is a slow process, radical variants tend to be fatal. But, selection within variation can be extremely rapid.
If 'heightist' aliens landed tomorrow and killed the tallest half of the human population each generation, then within very few generations, humans would be about 5 feet tall. To actually breed them down to say, 3 feet tall would take proportionally much longer as that is outside of the current normal range.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:00PM (5 children)
If the gene pool contains a high level of variation, it can change very fast. The two most diverse gene pools are domestic dogs, and humans. You can develop a new breed of dog, which will produce offspring reasonably true to type, in as little as three generations. (We know this because it's been done multiple times in just the past 150 years, documented by extensive pedigree records.)
Also, if selection happens to be for recessive traits -- there's no going back.(Eg. you can start with wolves and end with toy spaniels, but you can't start with toy spaniels and end with wolves.) Genes related to intelligence are generally dominants. If we ever manage to breed it out entirely, it may be gone for good.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:20PM (1 child)
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).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 14 2018, @09:22PM
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.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:47PM (1 child)
For a massive IQ you sure make a lot of unfounded assumptions. Since we all came from single celled critters how do you explain the 999,999,999X explosion in intelligence?
Don't let me pop your little self assured bubble though.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:37PM
While many mutations are disadvantageous all the way to fatal, more of them are neutral, which expands variation, and a few of them are even favorable. And you're talking about a period of perhaps 3 billion years, which is a lot of time for variation to build up. It doesn't only build up, because local conditions will favor some variants and disfavor other variants. (What is neutral depends a lot on the local environment.)
When the genes get too different, the groups can no longer interbreed, but the same process keeps continuing.
That's the entire theory in a capsule. Everything else is either evidence that that's what's going on, or elaboration of the details. (But there's a lot of evidence, and a *LOT* of details.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:46PM
Better dumb and happy than smart and without any friends.
-- Danny Elfman