I gave my speech entitled The Rise and Fall of Human Intelligence yesterday. Thanks stream for noting that the link was bad. It is fixed here.
My Toastmasters evaluator noted that the speech as given didn't exactly follow the text I gave her. I'm providing it below.
After the meeting Yuriy wanted to discuss the topic further. I told him I'd send some links. This morning's link is Victor Davis Hansen, about San Francisco, where I grew up. Here's one about what's happening in Canada. Another about Philadelphia.
There is a common thread. Pretty boy white progressives – Gavin Newsome, Justin Trudeau, Bill DeBlasio – and rabble-rousing minority politicians blaming us white people for racism and everything under the sun. They solve nothing, only exacerbate the problems.
None of the commenters in the videos above ask my question. Is it decreasing intelligence? Are these people, voters and politicians alike, just getting more stupid? Unable to connect cause and effect? I suggest once again that it is a tenable hypothesis.
In related news, Friday marked sixteen years since I left Washington for Kyiv. Happiest move of my life.
Anyhow, here is the text of my speech. The link is above.
The Rise and Fall of Human Intelligence
Introduction
I'm talking today about the rise and fall of human intelligence. This is background for a major point to come later. Civilization is in a tailspin because we are getting stupider. It is evolution, and we can't do much about it except to survive as individuals. Politics won't solve a problem of evolution.
But today's story is about stupidity.
Charlies Darwin said 150 years ago "Excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
The world was half a century into the problem when he wrote about it. It has now been two centuries. The evidence is all around us.
What is intelligence?
“Intelligence” is defined as “the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.
IQ tests measure verbal, mathematical and spatial reasoning. They aren't perfect, but IQ test results correlate better than any other measure with education, income, empathy, happiness and staying out of jail.
Twin and adoption studies show that IQ is about 80% heritable. Identical twins separated at birth are usually within a couple of IQ points. And… nobody has yet identified a factor to account for any great fraction of the other 20%. Specifically, it is not the home environment.
Our Evolutionary History – Reasons for Intelligence to Grow
Starting back when we separated from the chimpanzees, humans have been under strong evolutionary pressure to get smarter.
Hunter Gatherers
Hunter gatherers chose the smartest guys to be their chiefs. Chiefs had lots of wives; stupid guys got none. The smartest wives got the best mates and were able to raise children to adulthood. Of course, there were other factors: strength, health, aggression and personality. Most of them are correlated to intelligence.
In general, just as Darwin would have for his animals, the more capable hunters, warriors and coalition builders had the most sex, and they favored partners also of good genetic stock: young, good-looking and smart. The gene pool improved. We got smarter.
Herders and Farmers
The trend continued as we became herders and farmers. A man needed a bride price, or at least the ability to support a wife. The stupid didn't get any wife. Successful men could have several. The gene pool continued to improve.
Social mechanisms
Social mechanisms sometimes ensured that members of more intelligent groups married among themselves and had large families. Jewish law, the Hindu caste system, and overseas Chinese were like that before they adopted Western mores. These measures ensured that there was a higher concentration of high-intelligence alleles in their gene pools.
Rich men in Christendom have gotten around the limitations imposed by monogamy via divorce and remarriage and by having mistresses.
Hard work and malnutrition depressed poor women's fertility. Wives of rich men could conceive more easily and more often. Prior to the Industrial Revolution middle-class families had twice as many surviving children as laborers.
Social status is around 0.75 heritable, the same now as it was in Medieval England. High fertility at the top forced a constant social descent. Those at the bottom would die off without children, others falling to take their place. Smarts at the top continued to grow.
Then, as now, smart criminals found ways to avoid the gallows. The one or two percent per generation killed by hanging were generally the stupid.
Measuring Growing Intelligence
Those are reasons intelligence should have grown. How do we know it did? One way is to observe of what people were capable at different times in history. Second is to measure physical characteristics that correlate with intelligence.
Human Capabilities Grew
Literacy
English literacy rose from 60 to almost 100% in between three and one century ago. The use of high-difficulty words became more widespread – wider in fact than today. Popular books – Pride and Prejudice, Picture of Dorian Grey, Huckleberry Finn – expected a wider vocabulary and broader familiarity with the canon. Mark Twain expected readers to know The Bible and highlights of Roman, French and English history and literature.
Mathematics
Ordinary people became better at arithmetic. Both business and daily life required it. Double-entry bookkeeping helped businesses operate in multiple locations.
Discoveries
Printing permitted the spread of knowledge. The number of discoveries and inventions went up. The elements were discovered; electricity and magnetism explained; calculus and statistics developed; the theory of evolution; trains, steamships, automobiles, electric lights. Radio and telegraph. Inventiveness peaked about 1870.
Measurable Changes
Interest rates
Interest rates, which indicate the lender's assessment of the level of risk, are a less obvious measure. Since loan default generally hurts both the borrower and the lender, both try to avoid it. As borrowers became smarter, lenders could less, down over the centuries from 10% to 5% or less.
Head Size
Though the correlation between head size and IQ among individuals is only about 0.2, the correlation between average head size and average intelligence among populations is very significant. Across races, average skull size is highly correlated with average intelligence. English skulls grew by about 10mm over a millennium. Head size, which correlates with intelligence, went up.
Color Discrimination
The ability to discriminate colors is associated with intelligence. Your laptop computer can display almost 17 million different colors. Your ability to tell them apart is a measure of intelligence.
Tone Discrimination
The original IQ researchers – Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher – noted that tone discrimination – the kind of talent a musician or a piano tuner possesses – is also correlated with intelligence.
Reaction Times
We know about reaction times in the negative. For 130 years scientists have been able to accurately measure the time it takes a person to push a button after a light flashes. The correlation with IQ is strong. Increased reaction times suggest that IQ has fallen about 15 points since they started the measurements.
Short-term memory
Hearing, then repeating back a series of digits in reverse order is a standard part of intelligence tests. A simpler one is remembering people's names. Can you remember the ten people you met at yesterday's conference? Do you care? An obvious talent is remembering telephone numbers. If you ask three girls in a bar for their telephone numbers, will you remember numbers and names long enough to write them down? It is a real-life intelligence test.
DNA
Scientists now believe that intelligence is additive – the result of a person's inheriting a large number of favorable alleles. Analysis of ancient DNA shows that alleles associated with high intelligence became increasingly common in European populations over the millennium prior to the Industrial Revolution.
And now, the Decline
Social Changes behind the Decline
After hitting a peak sometime in the early to mid 19th century, intelligence started to decline. That decline is speeding up. We can't do things we used to. Our infrastructure is collapsing. Employees cannot understand written instructions. Crime is growing. Government is even less efficient. Trust is down. What has changed?
Public Health
Stupid people stopped dying. Government health systems keep them alive.
Harmful mutations are no longer cleansed out of the gene pool. People survive conditions that were formerly deadly.
People with personality disorders reproduce. They don't have to marry – the state, or adoptive parents – make sure the kids grow to adulthood.
I saw this as a trustee in expensive private schools in Washington. Women who did waited too long or could not take nine months out of their lives to have a child, adopted. Many from Ukraine, often with fetal alcohol syndrome, Downs syndrome and other obvious problems.
Welfare
Government welfare gives the poor money to live and reproduce. Child support payments meant that there is actually a positive incentive for the native underclass and immigrants to have children. The payment is too small to induce the smart, but attractive to the stupid.
Fashion and Philosophy – Contraception and Small Families
Smart people have mastered contraception. They don't have children by accident.
The rise of feminism meant that more intelligent women dedicate their most fertile years to their higher education and careers. It is often too late when and if they change their minds.
Having babies is out of fashion. The opinion is that there are too many people in the world in any case. The most intelligent are also the most attuned to society.
In a "trickle effect," the less intelligent are copying their social superiors. The Murphy Brown effect. Or Friends. Or Seinfeld.
Immigration
With the exception of northeast Asians and Jews – who have their own fertility problems - immigrants are not as smart as native-born Europeans. Large-scale immigration has lowered European and American IQ.
Democracy has run rampant. The native and imported underclasses outvote the smarter native Europeans. On top of that, the natives Europeans themselves virtue signal by supporting the underclass. Not having children, they lose nothing by selling out the future of their own people.
Measuring the Decline
There are declines on just about every measure of intelligence named above to show that it increased up to the Industrial Revolution:
Human abilities
There have been declines in literacy, numeracy, vocabulary, evidence of genius, and inventiveness, and corresponding increases in lawlessness and antisocial behavior.
Measurements of the human animal
Color discrimination, tone discrimination (reflected in our music), and the frequency of alleles for high intelligence have fallen. Conversely, reaction times have risen.
There are educational measurements. The National Longitudinal Study of Youth, the PISA test, the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, Graduate Record Exams. Either scores have fallen, or the tests have been re-centered downward, or both.
There are aptitude tests. IQ tests, the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery and other tests that have been given over time. These tests are re-centered periodically to account for the fact that the population average keeps falling.
Non-Genetic Factors
These considerations address only genetics. The environment also plays a role. We are exposed to agricultural chemicals, radio frequency emissions, food additives and medical interventions such as vaccines. Each has a role, and all are said to be detrimental.
What does it mean?
Different metrics show different rates of fall, but an intermediate estimate is that decline in g had been around 1 IQ point per decade between 1885 and the year 2004, or 15 points as of today.
15 points would be approximately the difference in average IQ between a low-level security guard (85) and a policeman (100), or between a high school science teacher (115) and a biology professor at an elite university or an engineer (130).
What can be done?
Within the constraints of our present democratic governments, political action cannot do anything at a societal level. We cannot force smart people to have children or dumb people not to. Government incentives to change family structure have been ineffective since the time of Napoleon.
My advice is to individuals, not politicians and not society as a whole. You should recognize what is happening. If you care about the future of your children and your people, open their eyes to what is happening around them. Prepare them to survive being surrounded, and governed, by stupid people.
Intelligence decline or the decline of cultural norms? Interesting to see street scenes back nearly 100years ago (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=new+york+city+100+years+ago+). Note how the people are dressed. We have certainly devolved since then. Perhaps the real shift might be our current youth who imagine socialism better than capitalism - an astonishment revealing an inability to understand what motivates people. OTOH, few have ever experienced any deprivation where struggle is necessary.
Another one today on San Francisco. 13 fentanyl overdose deaths in a day.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/san-francisco-records-more-dozen-suspected-overdose-deaths-one-day