American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'

Could this have to so with smart people increasing pursuing hedonism over reproduction? Maybe Idiocracy was right all along.

From a strict evolutionary perspective I have doubts that a high IQ is useful anymore.

The point of the original Flynn effect being a big deal was that the changes were faster than was possible with genetics alone.

A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics and so any money spent on low IQ people (African-Americans in the book, but the author followed up by attacking poor people more generally) was a pointless waste.

It turns out he wasn't just an asshole, he was also wrong.

What is going on with Bell Curve apologists all of a sudden replying to this post. I thought the debate was slowly fading out and than I count 5 different account replying within an hour.

"Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%,[6] with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.[7] IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood." [0]

You're denying settled science. Trying to tie it to the Bell Curve to assassinate the basic character of the science isn't tricking anyone. Pronouns in your profile only make this bad faith move easier to identify.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Twin studies can't prove something is caused by "genetics"[0]; twins are not free of environmental factors and don't necessarily have the same genome. Genetics, like many scientific fields that can't do real experiments, is just people abusing statistics for fun.

[0] if it did, this wouldn't mean anything, because it can't be used to make predictions, because you don't know if any random person X you are trying to predict trait Y of has these "genetics".

I don't really have a horse in this race but you're basically denying the ability of science to have anything to say outside of the hard sciences, which I disagree strongly with.

"Can't be used to make predictions"... seriously? These factors can be used to make predictions. Now whether these things are just correlates with other more fundamental factors, or causal - I thought that was where the conflict was.

https://xkcd.com/435