Honest question that keeps bothering me.
In the absence of reasonably strong natural selection pressure to select for IQ, how could IQ not be falling over time?
replies(5):
In the absence of reasonably strong natural selection pressure to select for IQ, how could IQ not be falling over time?
IQ at best measures something that correlates with SAT. And with better education, less exposure to damaging pollutants, etc. it should always be on the rise (as demonstrated by the Flynn effect; an effect which this poor paper desperately tries to refute).
IQ research has always been about proving the superiority of one race over others, this superiority doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t stop these pseudo-scientist from trying. They bend the definition of “intelligence” and device test batteries (and in this case, interpret test battery) in skewed and bias ways to manipulate results like these. Regrettably media outlets like the Popular Mechanics and lifestyle journalists like Tim Newcomb take these researchers at their words and publish their results, despite their results pretty much being lies.
It is incredibly arguable if during an obesity crisis if population wide health is actually improving and if population wide health isn’t improving that could certainly contribute to lower IQ. We’re also seeing population wide declines of health in other ways like sperm count. Food is becoming less nutritious as soil depletes. Our fish stocks being about to collapse is going to be another hit against brain health as omega 3s will become rarer in the diet.
The heritability of IQ is only well established within true believers of a pseudo-science tightly linked with the eugenics movement. Most psychologists today believe that the supposed heritability was observed because of bias within the research. And given the people who were doing these research in the 1970s and the 1980s, and their motivation for doing those, there is no question on what these biases were. Some of the researchers went so went quite far in bending the data such that it would fit their narrow—and racist—world view. They tried really hard to define intelligence such that it would make rich white people smarter, they were regrettably successful for far to long, but ultimately failed.
Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES parents have high SES children, and is the main reason for why parents with high SAT scores are likely to have children with high SAT scores.
What IQ researchers discovered was basically the same thing that Marx described in 1867, class, however the eugenics were no communists, and instead of providing the simpler explanation, that society rewards the ruling elite, and wealth inherits, the eugenics went all conspiratorial and blamed other races for their perceived decline in society.
This is the crux of your comment and its a huge statement. Do you have evidence supporting this claim?
Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.[11][12][13][14] The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[15][16][17][18][19][20]
And a quick search on Google Scholar:
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-295X.1...
https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/230/1/19...
Sure, but this is not the claim I originally quoted. I was taking about heritability, and you're taking now about disparities between groups.
Nevertheless it seems you agree the heritability of IQ is well established, which you were denying originally.
First of all I do not believe that IQ is a good metric for intelligence, nor that intelligence is a useful scientific construct.
Secondly, there are whole subthreads here that go into the nuances of what heritability means for measured IQ. From what I’ve gathered is that findings which assign 50-80% of the variance to inheritance neglect to account for covariance, or use very biased assumptions about G×E correlations or G×E interactions which skewes the results in favor of genetic explanations, i.e. they are biased.
It has been shown from biased studies that IQ has a large hereditary component, where these studies failed to account for genetic × environmental interaction and covariation.
By the way the wikipedia article it self goes into these nuances and caveats. Reading it, it is pretty clear that there may be a large inheritance factor to IQ, while at the same time large IQ differences between individuals have no genetic basis.