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

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

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.

I have yet to read “the bell curve” said, but did they really use an argument that flew in the face of the abundant evidence of IQ increases unlinked to genetics as a result of better nutrition and education? Hell America gained a few IQ points nationwide from banning leaded gasoline alone so we also knew of environmental means to affect IQ levels. This was all known about and very well established at the time of authorship. Is there an excerpt?

> According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect. At the close of this discussion, they write:

> > If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Part_III._The_N...

The part I find especially amusing is how often the Flynn effect is used to refute The Bell Curve, even though the term "Flynn effect" comes from The Bell Curve.

Either IQs are going up (and racial gaps closing) on a non evolutionary timescale due to environmental changes that should be studied and encouraged by government policy or IQs are not a good measure of genetic intelligence.

Their policy preferences are for the government not to intervene to improve IQ scores or close racial gaps. But they also want to make radical policy based on IQ because it's such an important measure.

Or 3) they're going up at the same rate, so gaps aren't closing. That's what I've always understood to be happening.

Scrolling down to the graphs that have all sorts of breakdowns, it looks like in general it hasn't been converging. The third group, which breaks down by race/age, looks like a mixture of noisy sameness and diverging.

> For example, Hauser (1998) and Grissmer et al (1998) documented convergence of the race difference in data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Until the current study, this finding could be explained by a differential Flynn Effect in which minority scores increased at a steeper rate. However, we found no interaction in our data; the three different race categories each showed substantial FE’s, but they also tracked closely to the same consistent increase.

So again, they accept the gap is closing, but their result suggests this is not due to a differential Flynn effect, but to something else.