Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.



What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.



But this isn't the first evidence of a possible decline in human intelligence.



As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004, including one by Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Each study gauged participants' so-called visual reaction times -- how long it took them to press a button in response to seeing a stimulus. Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.



In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, the analysis showed. In 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds. Even though the machine gauging reaction time in the late 19th Century was less sophisticated than that used in recent years, Dr. te Nijenhuis told The Huffington Post that the old data is directly comparable to modern data.

Tests carried out in 1980 and in 2008 showed that the average 14-year-old was two IQ points cleverer in 1980, according to a study published in 2009. Scientists found that performance dropped the most dramatically in teenagers in the upper half of the intelligence scale, The Telegraph reported. Brighter teens who took part in the study in 2008 were on average six IQ points less intelligent than their counterparts tested 28 years earlier.

This development in human devolution will be very difficult for the true believers in human progress or racial equality to explain away:It should hardly come as a surprise that the average level of intelligence has declined as less intelligent populations have become a larger percentage of the whole. It would be interesting to learn if that is a factor, or if the various intelligence studies are all of a homogenous Anglo-European population and the decline is even worse than it appears.Remember, intelligence scores are always normalized to 100, so what is 100 in 2004 is not the same thing as 100 in 1884. I don't find this difficult to believe at all. There is virtually no one writing today that I regard as being on the same level as many past writers; it was astonishing to read how F.A. Hayek, in addition to refining Mises's Impossibility of Socialist Calculation, refuting Keynes, and winning a Nobel Prize, also traced the intellectual roots of social justice before obliterating it 14 years before it became an observably significant cultural force.Who do we have to compare to that? Paul Krugman? Steve Keen is the one and only economist doing anything that can even be remotely compared to the giants of even the relatively recent past.Now, what could possibly account for an even more dramatic decline in average British intelligence?The 1980 UK census didn't even take ethnicity into account. The 2011 census showed that the white population had dropped to 87.2 percent, down from 92 percent in 2001. It shouldn't take an IQ much above the average to determine the reason for the decline in British intelligence over the last 28 years.Diversity doesn't only destroy a society, it makes it literally dumber. After all, you have to be pretty damn stupid and scientifically ignorant to believe in human equality anymore.

Labels: decline and fall, history