Home > Uncategorized > Why are we getting dumber and dumber?

Why are we getting dumber and dumber?

March 30, 2019 Leave a comment Go to comments

from Lars Syll

Human ñ business evolution

It probably shouldn’t worry us if some pocket of the population saw a decline in IQ as things like education and diet affect IQ and these factors can vary from one group or time to another. But according to this new study it doesn’t appear to be some small segment of the population whose IQ is going down. It appears to be the entire nation of Norway.

When scientists from the Norway’s Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research analyzed some 730,000 IQ tests given to Norwegian men before their compulsory military service from 1970 to 2009, they found that average IQ scores were actually sinking. And not just by some miniscule amount. Each generation of Norwegian men appear to be getting around seven IQ points dumber.

That’s pretty horrifying news for fans of progress, but it also begs one incredibly important question: Why? What’s causing IQ scores to start heading in the wrong direction?

Some have proposed that our tech obsession might be to blame, but as the decline started in the 1970s, well before everyone spent their days staring at screens, that can’t be the whole story.

Other proposed explanations are unhealthy modern diets, increasingly trashy media, or a decline in the quality of schooling or the prevalence of reading …

The bottom line, however, is that the cause of the decline remains a mystery. Whatever it turns out to be, however, we should all probably start worrying about what our sedentary, screen addicted, junk food-munching lifestyles might be doing to our brains.

Jessica Stillman

  1. Machine gun kelly
    March 30, 2019 at 1:09 am
    Reply

    CI is´not intelligence, is your capacity for CI test resolve.

  2. John Doyle
    March 30, 2019 at 1:35 am
    Reply

    I think it’s a consequence of information overload. I’m old enough to remember the early post WW2 years and what schools were like in those days. A lot of rote learning meant for example any multiplication up to 12 was automatically quick to answer. As far as I know rote learning is not done now as we can use a calculator to multiply the numbers. A useful skill has been sidelined by technology.
    We have to absorb an avalanche of information today, a lot of which seems irrelevant to the student. Schools are more lax in allowing students to bypass the more difficult subjects, like science, latin, and maths. None of help sharpen one’s intellect so this data seems evidence of this lack of ability to pick up information we need for a good education and instead are just bombarded with information and advertising on line, making it difficult to improve our minds, and it shows up in I Q tests etc. That is my educated opinion.

  3. Helge Nome
    March 30, 2019 at 1:36 am
    Reply

    Now,now Lars.
    I’m an old Norwegian. And you are a Swede. That fully explains the posting of this article. Let me quote this favorite saying here on the Canadian prairies:

    “100 Swedes, chased through the weeds, by one solitary Norwegian!”

    Enough said.

    • Rob Reno
      March 30, 2019 at 10:43 am
      Reply

      Thanks for the hint … it lead to some most fascinating material in Church and Life, the monthly newsletter with stories and articles in the Danish Folk Tradition. I have great respectd for my Swede and Norwegian (and Dutch and so on) brothers and sisters. If only America would stop dumbing them down so much and sending them back as ambASSadors! Immigrants like you made America great!

      • Rob Reno
        March 30, 2019 at 10:47 am

        As all immigrants have done from everywhere they came … just not the Nordic countries …

      • Rob Reno
        March 30, 2019 at 10:48 am

        I reverersed the words “just not” meant “not just” … arg, dyslexia!

  4. Helen Sakho
    March 30, 2019 at 2:31 am
    Reply

    We must at once stop! Some of us have a habit of posting something just to provoke reaction or test the IQ of others. Others are genuinely interested in advancing the cause of educated guesswork.

    As Economics has become an increasingly dumbing and dizzying merry go round, is it not time we created a more thought-provoking party game and invited all fascists to take an IQ test?

  5. Helge Nome
    March 30, 2019 at 3:20 am
    Reply

    So let’s get serious:
    Physical exercise and good food is a precondition for a healthy body.
    Mental exercise and good food is a precondition for an alert and healthy brain.

    Both physical and mental challenges are needed to create a healthy and engaged human being.

    It could be argued that, for a lot of children growing up in contemporary society, those ingredients are largely absent creating obese self indulging individuals without inquiring mindsets.

  6. Helen Sakho
    March 31, 2019 at 12:38 am
    Reply

    Now you’re talking!

    So one chapter on the Economics of Starvation; the Starvation Mode and what that means to the body and the soul; and, of course, the debilitating role of dehydration due to polluted air, water, and how to purify our existence out of Monopoly Fascism are in order, I think.

  7. Ikonoclast
    March 31, 2019 at 6:58 am
    Reply

    I think it is likely that the study in question is measuring a real drop in measured intelligence, although 7 points per generation seems a very high side estimate. This would imply taking only two generations to get very close to an average of “dull normal”; an IQ of 85 and a full standard deviation below the previous norm. This seems improbable. I would expect a society like Norway to be showing signs of becoming dysfunctional at that rate. I don’t believe it is showing such signs yet.

    Certain trends such as less healthy food and less exercise plus new screen media which do not require as much following of language-linear logic (except for programmers), could contribute to a fall in achieved intelligence levels. Pollutants in the environment could also be playing a role. Finally, a decline in public education standards and in the level of community and national interaction and debate also could be playing a role.

    The drop in measured intelligence is likely higher than the drop in “real intelligence” if that could be measured. The test design might not have kept up with the different skills a modern human intelligence is good at. Heavy screen use from a young age rewires the malleable young brain. Such brains may be better at certain modern tasks and slightly less adept at certain “traditional” intellectual skills. The culture’s “knowledge socialisation” or enculturation paradigm or window has shifted a little. Has the test been shifted? Remember, IQ tests generally are not culture neutral.

  8. Rob Reno
    April 2, 2019 at 11:20 am
    Reply

    The field of epigenetics may have a possible answer here. This is only speculation, but the scientific finding within the field of epigentics is not. I could cite a ton of recources from my notes database, but I don’t want to spam this site. My point is that if epigenetics (licking mother rats vs. non licking alterting epigenomes and creating adjusted vs. non-adjusted mice, for example) can alter our epigenome and result in abnormal behavior perhaps we are not aware that what we eat, what we smoke, what we do to our children and what modernity and its stress does to people, may just be negatively impacting our IQs to the extent that such tests do measure something valid. The good news is that means it is reversable too if we clean up our act.

    [Walter Kaufmann, Kennedy Krieger Institute] “We know that environmental stimulation, sensory stimulation, auditory, visual stimulation have an impact on brain development and brain function, and this impact we know now is mediated, at least in part by epigenetic mechanisms.”

    [Andrew P. Feinburg, John Hopkins University] “Epigenetic changes generally, they stand at the cornserstone, between our genome — in other words all of our genes — the development of the cells of our body, and the environment that we live in.”

    So the environment molds our epigenomes. But might it do more? At the far speculative edge of this new science, some are seeing evidence of astonishing possibilities. That genes may not be all that passes from generation to generation. The evidence comes from [a] Swedish village…. Overkelic stands out for one reason; its archives. Olov Bygren a Swedish public health expert, has been studying them for over twenty years. What makes these records unique is their detail; they track births and deaths over centuries, and harvests. This is significant, because in years past, Overkelic’s location left it particularly vulnerable to crop failure and famines.

    [Lars Olov Bygren, The University of Umeä] “In the 19th century this was a very isolated area. They could not have help from outside….”

    Bygren was studying the connection between poor nutrition and health, when he stumbled on something curious. It appeared that a famine might affect people almost a century later, even if they had never experienced a famine themselves. If so, past and future generations might be linked in ways no one had imagined. Wondering if epigenetics might explain the phenomenon, Bygren sent his research to geneticists Marcus Pembrey…. Overkelic offered Pembrey a unique opportunity to see if the events that happened on one generation, could affect another decades later.

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “Olov first reported that the food supply of the ancestors was effecting the longevity, or mortality rate of the grandchildren….”

    Pembrey suspected that the incidence of one disease, diabetes, might show that the environment and epigenetics were involved. So Olov crawled the records for any deaths due to diabetes, and looked back to see if there was anything unsual about the diet of their grandparents.

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “Indeed they had shown a strong association between the food supply of the father’s father, and the chance of diabetes being mentioned on the death certificate of the grandchild.”

    In fact, a grandson was four times more likely to die from an illness related to diabetes, if his grandfather had plenty of food to eat in late childhood. This was one of the first indications, that an environmental exposure in a man, one that did not cause a genetic mutation, could directly effect his male offsrping.

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “It really did look as if there was some new mechanism transmitting environmental exposure information from one generation to the next.”

    Because these ideas were so heretical, Pembrey new the results could be dismissed as nothing more than a curiosity. To bolster the research, he needed to find out how a transgenerational effect impacted each sex, and if it was linked to a specific period of development.

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “We wanted to tease out when you could trigger in the ancestor a transgenerational response.”

    So he and Bygren went back to the data; the more they looked, the more patterns started to appear.

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “We were able to look at the food supply, every year in the grandfather and the grandmother, from the moment they were conceived right through until the age of twenty. We found that there are only certain periods in the ancestors development, when they can trigger this transgenerational response. There what one might call sensitive periods of development.”

    They discovered that when a famine was able to trigger an effect, was different for the grandmother than the grandfather. The grandmother appeared succeptable while she herself was still in the womb. While the grandfather was effected in late childhood.

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “The timing of the sensitive period, was telling us that it was tied in with the formation of the eggs and the sperm.”

    This suggested what might be happening. Perhaps environmental information was being imprinted on the egg and sperm at the time of their formation. At last a sharper picture was beginning to emerge. The next step was to compile their findings…. When Pembrey looked at the diagram [from the data] he was immediately struck by seemingly bizzare connections between gender, diet, and health, connections that were most pronounced two generations later. Men for example who experienced famine at around age ten, had paternal grandsons who lived much longer, than those whose grandfathers experienced plenty. Yet women who experienced famine while in the womb, had paternal grandaughters who died on average far earlier.

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “Once I had plotted out the full extent of those results, it was so beautiful and such a clear pattern, I knew then, quite defininetly that we were dealing with a transgenerational response. It was so coherent, and that’s important in science, that the effect was coherent in some way, was tying in when eggs and sperm were being formed.”

    The diagram showed a significant link between generations; between the diet in one and the life expectancy in another.

    [Lars Olov Bygren, The University of Umeä] “When you think that you have found something important, for the understanding of disease itself, … this is something special.” ….

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “This is going to become a famous diagram…. It’s just amazing.”

    Much about these findings puzzles researchers. Why for exmaple does this effect only appear in the paternal line of inheritance. And why should famine be both harmful and beneficial, depending upon the sex and age of the grandparent who experiences it. Nonetheless, it raises a tantelizing prospect; that the impact of famine can be captured by the genes in the egg and sperm, and that the memory of this even can be carreid forward to effect grandchildren two generations later.

    [Marcus Pembrey, University College London] “We’re changing the view of what inheritance is. You can’t in life, in ordinary development and living, seperate out the gene from the environmental effect, [because] there so intertwined.”

    Pembrey and Bygrens work suggest that our grandparents experiences effect our health. But is the effect epigenetic? With no DNA yet analysed, Pembrey can only speculate. But in Washington State, Michael Skinner seems to have found compelling additional evidence, by triggering a similar effect with commonly used pesticides. Skinner wanted to see how these chemicals would effect pregnant rats and their offspring.

    [Michael Skinner, The University of Washington State] “So I treated .. the pregnant mothers with these compounds. And the we started seeing between six months and to a year a host of other diseases that we didn’t expect; this ranged between tumors, such as breast and skin tumors, prostate disease, kindney disease, and immune dysfunction.”

    He checked that there were no genetic mutations, and then proceeded to breed the rats.

    [Michael Skinner, The University of Washington State] “The next step was for us to go to the next generation, and the same disease state occurred. So after we did several repeates, and got the third generation showing it, and then a fourth generation, we sat back and realized that the phenomena was real. We started seeing these major diseases occur in approximately 85% of all the animals of every single generation.”

    His discoveries were a revelation.

    [Michael Skinner, The University of Washington State] “We knew that if an individual was exposed to an environmental toxin, that they can get a disease state. The new phenomena, is that the environmental toxin no longer effects just the individual exposed, but two or three generations down the line. I knew that epigenetics existed, I knew that it was a controlling factor for DNA activity [and] whether genes are silenced or not. But to say that epigenetics would have a major role in disease development — I had no concept for that. The fact that this could have such a huge impact, and could explain a whole host of things we couldn’t explain before, took a while to sink in.”

    Further work has revealed changed epigenetic marks in twenty-five segments of the effected rats DNA. The implications, if they apply to humans, are sobering.

    [Michael Skinner, The University of Washington State] “What this means then is whats your grandmothers was exposed to when she was pregnant, could cause a disease in you, even though you had no exposure, and you are going to pass it on to your great grandchildren.”

    (….) Might our lifestyle choices resonate down the ages, effecting people yet unborn?

    (NOVA. Ghost in Your GenesPBS.org: WGBH Educational Foundation; 2008. DVD; ISBN: 978-1-593757-93-9.)

  9. Ken Zimmerman
    April 6, 2019 at 12:57 pm
    Reply

    Seems like a half-twit repeat of the Bell Curve controversy of the 1990s. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual’s parental socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the “cognitive elite”, are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence. The book was controversial, especially where the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discussed the implications of those differences. Shortly after its publication, many people rallied both in criticism and defense of the book. Several critical texts were written in response to it.

    Herrnstein and Murray argued the average genetic IQ of the United States is declining, owing to the tendency of the more intelligent having fewer children than the less intelligent, the generation length to be shorter for the less intelligent, and the large-scale immigration to the United States of those with low intelligence. The authors also stated they “fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent – not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but ‘conservatism’ along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below.” But the authors worried increasing welfare will create a “custodial state” in “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population.” They also predict increasing totalitarianism: “It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the states.”

    The book was controversial not just for its findings, but also because it was not submitted for peer review before publication and was short of data to support many of its conclusions. But many of its conclusions are, for good or ill no longer controversial and as one group of reviewers/researchers noted in 2018, “…the Bell Curve is not as controversial as its reputation would lead one to believe (and most of the book is not about race at all).”

    I will only add this. This is a lot of fuss over a book written about something (IQ) about which there is no agreed-on definition and no agreement on how to measure this thing we can’t define. I must assume, therefore that Herrnstein and Murray believed in what they were measuring and how it must be measured. Wrong though they may be in the eyes of many.

  10. Rob
    April 6, 2019 at 3:30 pm
    Reply

    In support of the thesis of this post I offer the following. My brother, who doesn’t vote (thank God!) is a supporter of Trump on StupidBook (aka PutinBook). We don’t need voter ID laws, what we need is voter IQ laws!

    • Luca Ravioli
      May 6, 2019 at 11:08 pm
      Reply

      ´”Thirty-three percent of U.S. high school graduates will supposedly never read a book after high school. That number is 42 percent for college graduates,” he reports, confessing that he too once let the busyness of adult life distract him from his earlier love of reading.´

      From linked article. I don´t beleive it.

      • Rob
        May 7, 2019 at 11:00 pm

        I don’t know if the stats in the article are correct or not. I was also joking about IQ, in case sarcasm doesn’t come across in a post. The lack of reading is a problem though. But that is cultural, isn’t it?

      • Luca Ravioli
        May 8, 2019 at 11:59 pm

        StupidBook deserves a lot of criticism, legal going over and enforcement. It gives me the impression that it breaks and has broken Constitutional and California Laws.

        There are very real problems with StupidBooks´ and its “third parties” automations (just follwoing instructions) with relation to our society. Please do not let it get in the way of your fammily relationships. Judeth Martin said, “People are more important than things.”

        Sorry, Rob and others, I ment my comment to be a general reply, but accidently made it a response to you. I was going to answer about your brother´s right to vote to represent himself at the poles, but scraped it and made a diffent comment in the wrong place and the one bellow in the right place.

        Hopefully the article linked below might help bring you and your brother a little closser together. Taleb claims that the flawed IQ rating system has done much real harm to people, And, that the judging people by IQ score is incorrect and harmful.

        Also, according to the quoted supidistic more college graduates than high school students “will supposibly never read a book [after high school.]” Never! The author can also tell the future in addition to claiming the supposibly impossible!

  11. Luca Ravioli
    May 6, 2019 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    “IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle”

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    View at Medium.com

    • Rob
      May 7, 2019 at 11:00 pm
      Reply

      Ah, the answer ;-)

    • Luca Ravioli
      May 9, 2019 at 12:04 am
      Reply

      “Some argue that IQ measures intellectual capacity — real world results come from, in addition, “wisdom” or patience, or “conscientiousness”, or decision-making or something of the sort. No. It does not even measure intellectual capacity/mental powers.” –From Taleb´s linked article

  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.