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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @01:10PM (3 children)
This must be the most ignorant thing I've seen posted on SN, and that's despite the frequent contributions from the likes of Jmoris and Idiotking.
Evolution today not only doesn't move faster, but we have reasons to believe that it has come to move slower because the period between generations, or in other words, the average time it takes for humans to be born and produce viable offspring has been steadily increasing, whilst the rate of mutation has remained consistent to the best of our knowledge.
Introducing new selection pressures does not make evolution go faster. It might make certain traits emerge or diminish at a greater rate, but you won't see people grow wings anytime soon, no matter how much anime they watch.
The only way we could truly increase the rate of "evolution" is if we supersede the underlying mechanisms through artificial means such as selective breeding or genetic engineering.
This alludes to one of the commonly misunderstood aspects of evolution - that it only rewards individual reproductive success.
This is wrong. If that was the case, then we would have long since evolved not to have gays and suicidal people. If your brothers, sisters or even more distant kin are reproductively successful, that's good enough for evolution. It doesn't matter if you specifically have offspring, what matters is that the mutations you have proliferate, including those inherited from your ancestors.
This is also incorrect. Cancer doesn't help reproduction, but it hardly impedes it, which is why we haven't evolved out of it.
It doesn't. SizeOfPopulation != EvolutionarySuccess. Evolutionary success is measured through long term population viability, so unless people in those countries are under any threat to go extinct, intelligence is not maladaptive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:25PM (1 child)
Oh really? Hold my beer ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:52PM
Your beer is being held sir....
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:44PM
Not certain.
E.g., it's not the length of generations that matters, but the rate at which viable mutations persist in the population. If the rate of mutation is unchanged, and the percentage of survival of variants per unit of time is unchanged, then the accumulation of variants in the population will be unchanged.
What seems to be happening is that selection pressure has been reduced. This means that more variants persist. But this is only half of evolution. You don't get the full aspect until selection pressure is imposed. And you don't know ahead of time how that's going to work out. Right now, if I were to guess, I would guess that the ability to work well with others was the thing most strongly being selected for. (And I say this as someone who isn't that good at that task. I failed as a supervisor because I just wanted to program.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.