6 ms·

How about dysgenic fertility? > Meisenberg (2010) found that intelligence in the US was negatively related to the number of children, with age-controlled corre

by defen 10y ago

How about dysgenic fertility? > Meisenberg (2010) found that intelligence in the US was negatively related to the number of children, with age-controlled correlations of −.156, −.069, −.235 and −.028 for White females, White males, Black females and Black males. This effect was related mainly to the general intelligence factor and was caused in part by education and income, and to a lesser extent by the more "liberal" gender attitudes of those with higher intelligence. Without migration the average IQ of the US population will decline by about 0.8 points per generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence

guelo 10y ago
meh, that's probably swamped by the effects of reducing lead poisoning in children. The younger generations today are probably the smartest in human history with the added benefit of being the best educated and having access to the best information.
- defen 10y ago
  Not poisoning ourselves with lead is great, but I'm not sure that the younger generations today are the smartest in human history - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613...
  - hexane360 10y ago
    I personally find those results really dubious. How accurate were the measurements from the mid 19th century? And even then, the leverage on those scatter plots is huge. (eg: http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs199/lectures/one-outlier.png http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs199/lectures/one-outlier.png) Additionally, because of a lack of a data, they used means instead of medians on highly skewed data. A few individuals could have a much larger effect on results this way. Finally, just because we measure good correlations between IQ and RT in modern times doesn't justify extrapolating these conclusions to the 19th century. P.S. I find this a little dubious "The Victorian era was characterized by great accomplishments. As great accomplishment is generally a product of high intelligence. . ." Sure the 19th century had better innovation than came before, but so did the 20th and 21st century. This doesn't have much impact on the findings, but it still bugs me.

by defen 10y ago

guelo 10y ago

meh, that's probably swamped by the effects of reducing lead poisoning in children. The younger generations today are probably the smartest in human history with the added benefit of being the best educated and having access to the best information.

defen 10y ago
Not poisoning ourselves with lead is great, but I'm not sure that the younger generations today are the smartest in human history - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613...
- hexane360 10y ago
  I personally find those results really dubious. How accurate were the measurements from the mid 19th century? And even then, the leverage on those scatter plots is huge. (eg: http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs199/lectures/one-outlier.png http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs199/lectures/one-outlier.png) Additionally, because of a lack of a data, they used means instead of medians on highly skewed data. A few individuals could have a much larger effect on results this way. Finally, just because we measure good correlations between IQ and RT in modern times doesn't justify extrapolating these conclusions to the 19th century. P.S. I find this a little dubious "The Victorian era was characterized by great accomplishments. As great accomplishment is generally a product of high intelligence. . ." Sure the 19th century had better innovation than came before, but so did the 20th and 21st century. This doesn't have much impact on the findings, but it still bugs me.