It takes a lot more than one paper and a CNN article to overturn the evidence that is against this. I'm not talking about IQ scores falling, but rather the caus

It takes a lot more than one paper and a CNN article to overturn the evidence that is against this. I'm not talking about IQ scores falling, but rather the cause of it suggested here. Although the environment does have notable roles (for example the impact of lead), it's naive to come out and say that the environment is all that matters in driving these effects. Dysgenic Fertility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics#Fertility_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics#Fertility_and_intell...) is different in different countries, and the pattern of change mentioned in the article is also different, with Norway often being a bit of an outlier. >It's not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It's something to do with the environment This is false. The correlation between cognitive ability and number of offspring is negative. Here's a link to a systematic review on this topic: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886918302903 http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... that covers many datasets, where you can see the negative correlations on page 114 (8 in this pdf), which vary from -0.01 to -0.27 depending on the group in question. Although this does not rule out an environmental influence by itself, it's dishonest to simply dismiss it as the article has done. > In a separate study that has not been released, he and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to higher IQ scores. Keyword here is "an effort to demonstrate". That sounds like they really want the results to come out in their favor, and we know that is not a good sign. They can mess around with correlation and causation and p-values and subgroups and framing all they want, but whatever they come up with will contradict a lot of the existing literature in this area in order to push their agenda.