I really like what you said about it being difficult to measure intelligence but I think our easy lives have so muted our ability to think that we would be in the dark ages without it our technology.

Here is a humorous example. I was leaving a nursing home with a friend who can not read at the 8th-grade level. Most people would consider him retarded. We came to a gate that required knowing a code to open the gate and I was stopped, sure I could not get out of the gate without the code. Mind you I have a college education so I am smart, right? :lol: My retard friend didn't think twice before putting his hand through the bars in the fence and opening the gate from the outside handle. I have known a couple of people I would rather be within a survival situation than college-educated people, because they are free from our programming and are more like animals that have a keen awareness of what is around them and how to achieve what needs to be achieved.

Just making conversation mostly. Sorry, 95% of that post was me just chiming in, the only reason I quoted the two references I saw to the Flynn Effect is that it sounded like they might have been given in the sense that the Flynn Effect shows that intelligence is increasing, not decreasing, which is indeed what the term meant until quite recently, when decreases began to show up.



The graph is growth in scores from regional means so you can't compare between them; growth is relative, not absolute. Because both genetics and enviornment influence g, you need to scale IQ tests, with 100 as the mean for a given population. This is why they are often critiqued. Scores vary depending on if you use a national mean, or a mean using some sort of ethnic identifier (always poorly defined to varying degrees, and worse, self reported). The mean also changes over time, so 100 today would be significantly higher than 50 years ago. It's also meant for age cohorts.

Ideally the mean should always be 100 for a given population. That population should be selected based on genotype, and for a given region with similar economic development. Instead, the mean from Western European nations is used, or a mean of "White" Americans to set 100.

Oh, ok. I'd be happy to take the rise in IQ as evidence of better diet and the recent "decreases" as normalisation. I'd be reticent to take it as evidence in support of the titular contention.

Your example just makes the point that @L'éléphant has an argument, perhaps it's just too much to say that human intelligence is declining. Yet our modern lifestyles and all the assistance we have from our machines does have an effect on us. The most obvious issue, which is again far easier to measure, is how we actually have to change our diet to have far less calories as we simply don't do as much physical work and how being overweight has become a problem. Once you don't have to use a skill and you don't even use it on your spare time, that skill will be lost or it won't be ever gotten. Starting from obvious things like earlier people had to walk a lot when going from one place to another.

There is a better term for people before us like hunter gatherers being "smarter" than us. We use the term "street-smart". For a homeless child growing up in a modern slum in the Third World, the life expectancy is decades lower from the nation's average and there are a lot of dangers and life is about survival, about where to get the next meal. For hunter gatherers the life expectancy was low: those that survived to 15 years had a reasonable chance to survive over 45. But one slight injury that got infected, something easily preventable by modern medicine, might end it. Today, the life expectancy in slums can dip below 40 years, even if the national average even in Third World countries can be in the 70's.

We likely would notice that many of the "street smart" are quick witted, but lacking formal education they likely would do not so well in an IQ test. And likely would our ancestors, the hunter gatherers, would do not so well on an IQ test either...if the piece of paper is given to them with a pencil.

The thing is, our society needs that kind of intelligence that at least partly is measured by IQ tests: to notice patterns, to use mathematics and formal logic and above all, have a lot of educational knowledge and to use it when seeking those patterns out that others have not noticed.

I love trying to think with a consciousness of the past. An impossible thing because we can not unknow what we know. But if it were possible, wouldn't it be fun to think as a hunter-gather not knowing anything else, not thinking we can call a doctor or turn on the evening news or pick up the phone and call someone. But knowing one mushroom has medical uses and another mushroom is good for starting fires as the iceman knew these things. Imagine our brains not being cluttered as they are today but keenly aware of our surroundings. That would be a different intelligence and I don't think we have it.

Intelligence is very much about curiosity. People who think they know it all have a serious problem learning because they are close-minded. That can make forums a terrible experience and it might also be harmful to society in general? Perhaps our increased hostility and violence comes out of being close-minded and really uninterested in what other people have to say? Like talking to a teenager who knows it all. :grimace: When there is no curiosity there is no learning.

On the other hand, good logic skills, with curiosity can greatly increase our intelligence. Then, as a hunter-gather learns from his/her environment, we can learn from each other. But only if we have learned those high-order thinking skills and we remain open-minded. Unfortunately, nature starts closing our minds when we pass age 8. Our brains literally change preventing us from absorbing knowledge as we do when we are very young, but if we learned the high-order thinking skills and remain curious we can greatly increase the knowledge in our heads. Then in our later years, our brains change again and instead of learning new facts, we begin having enlightenment experiences that are a more complex understanding of the meaning of those facts. This is a time of wisdom unless, of course, one stops thinking at age 30 and goes through life with a closed mind. Too many of those people are in forums pissing everyone off. :lol:

The 2012 Texas Republican agenda was to stop education for higher-order thinking skills. Their well-meaning intent was to keep people dependent on authority, the authority of parents, and the authority of the church, and the authority of experts. That is conservative thinking and not the way to increase our intelligence. It goes with teachers taking Texas to the supreme court, to end the Texas drive to make teachers teach creationism as scientifically equal to evolution. :grimace:

Intelligence is very much about curiosity. People who think they know it all have a serious problem learning because they are close-minded. — Athena

This is so true. And once we have no curiosity and just close our minds, we start to go backwards. The idea of lifetime learning is extremely important. I remember how refreshing it was in the late 1990's when the internet was still a new thing an old relative in his 80's gave his email address to be intact. I always respect old people who learn new things and keep up with current times even after retiring.

Perhaps the ease that we can be complacent is the problem when our environment doesn't challenge us.

I'm reading this cute children's book (still 200 pages to wade through) on philosophy and one section is on why people are (kept) ignorant. It appears that ignoramuses are more easily controlled than the brainier ones (re: Socrates & hemlock).

Could the decline in IQ be a sign that Orwell's depressing prediction about an authoritarian world order is coming true? :chin: We, the boiling frogs get cooked and all the tyrants have a cannibalistic feast! :fear:

Another possibility: Intelligence isn't decreasing, in fact it's rising, but this is offset by problems getting harder to solve. The entire calculation for IQ, appropriately adjusted, then registers as a decline.

Third: The clever ones never marry or have children. Genius and antinatalism, there's something goimg on between 'em.

Nice topic.

It has nothing to do with brain size -- the Neanderthals have larger brains than us. — L'éléphant

Right.

The reason for losing our intelligence is due to the fact that we are no longer pressured to live under the fight and flight situations. — L'éléphant

I don't think knowing how and being good in fighting and hunting makes man -- has made him, in any period of this history-- more intelligent. Are bullies, barbarians, belligerents, primitive tribes intelligent than civilized people?
So, I don't think that intelligence has started to decline since the primitive man. But I believe it is in a declining phase. It has reached a peak, and then started to decline.

This has to do with the historical phenomenon of the rise and fall of civilizations. During these periods, between rise and fall, civilizations reach a peak and then start to fall. At their peak, morality, intelligence, creativity and other human mental abilities seem to also at a high point. There is no specific evidence for that, but I think it is evident. For example, ethics (morality) and rationality (intelligence) go hand in hand. So goes with creativity, which characterizes these periods and which depends much on intelligence.

Now, I believe that the decline of intelligence we are witnessing today, is very closely related to the decline in ethics (morality, moral behavior) which I think is quite evident, since ethics and rationality are directly and closely connected. Actually, ethics is based on rationality. (I have explained that a few times elsewhere (e.g. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/582354)
But intelligence is also affected by ethics. E.g. Lying or stealing on a frequent basis impairs your intelligence, because going against of what you actually believe is true or right, produces a strong conflict, breaks your personal integrity and shatters your reality. It can go so far that at some point you can't know what is true or not or distinguish between right and wrong, which is a case of mental illness.
Greeks' IQ is very kow relatively to other European countries (maybe the 2nd lowest). So is their ethics level!

I had to pinpoint this much neglected factor, because it has to do a lot with the decline of intelligence, which is the subject of this topic.

@Josh Alfred, @Banno, @Schootz1, @Count Timothy von Icarus

I think we can all agree that the Flynn effect's scope are the changes in IQ that happened in the 20th century. That's environmental, since a study like that cannot possibly address evolutionary/mutation with only a century's worth of observation. What I have been referring to are studies that cover civilizations worth of data. Well, the smithsonian article cited a study talking about 1.5 million years ago. But there's also the Crabtree study which goes back only to 6000 to 2000 BC.
But both deal with the changes in the brain structure. For example, this passage from the link I provided earlier in this thread:

2. Cortical networks for speech and tool use

Speech and tool use are both goal-directed motor acts. Like other motor actions, their execution and comprehension rely on neural circuits integrating sensory perception and motor control (figure 1). An obvious difference between speech and tool use is that the former typically occurs in an auditory and vocal modality, whereas the latter is predominantly visuospatial, somatosensory and manual. Nevertheless, there are important similarities in the way speech and tool-use networks are organized, including strong evidence of functional–anatomical overlap in IFG and, less decisively, in inferior parietal and posterior temporal cortex (PTC).

So while the above does not address the hypothesis of decline in intelligence, I pasted it here to show that the studies focus on the evolution of the brain as influenced by the motor actions.

I don't think knowing how and being good in fighting and hunting makes man -- has made him, in any period of this history-- more intelligent. Are bullies, barbarians, belligerents, primitive tribes intelligent than civilized people? — Alkis Piskas

Yes, you have a point. That's why I think the studies do not refer to mere brute force as factor in intelligence. Rather, environmental pressure (this is their description) is the one area they're looking at.

So, going back to the issue of evolution/mutation, another passage citing measurements the researchers performed:

The brain’s plumbing

The blood flow to the cognitive part of the brain, the cerebrum, comes through two internal carotid arteries, one on the right and one on the left. The size of these arteries is related to the rate of blood flow through them.
Just as a plumber would install larger water pipes to accommodate a higher flow rate to a larger building, the blood circulatory system continually adjusts the sizes of blood vessels to match the rate of blood flow inside them. This in turn is related to the oxygen demand of the organ.
If we can measure the size of the large arteries that supply an organ such as the brain, we can calculate the average rate of blood flow with some accuracy.
This principle has been known for a century and its beauty lies in its simplicity.
...
We found that the size of the carotid canals increased much faster than expected from brain size in 12 species of our human ancestors over a period of 3 million years.
While brain size was increasing 3.5 times, blood flow rate surprisingly increased sixfold, from about 1.2ml per second to 7ml per second.

And again, while the above passage does not address the supposed decline, I pasted it here to show what they're focusing on.

We came to a gate that required knowing a code to open the gate and I was stopped, sure I could not get out of the gate without the code. Mind you I have a college education so I am smart, right? :lol: My retard friend didn't think twice before putting his hand through the bars in the fence and opening the gate from the outside handle. — Athena

:grin: Intelligence in action.

Another possibility: Intelligence isn't decreasing, in fact it's rising, but this is offset by problems getting harder to solve. The entire calculation for IQ, appropriately adjusted, then registers as a decline. — Agent Smith

I like where you're going with this, but this doesn't even factor in to the explanation as to why, if intelligence is declining, it is so. The modern problems aren't harder. The logistics of living in the ancient times required acuity of the mind. Remember that without them pushing the civilizations forward with their primitive thinking, we wouldn't be here.

Perhaps the ease that we can be complacent is the problem when our environment doesn't challenge us. — ssu

That is an interesting notion. I know my brain started shutting down when we were in lockdown in Oregon, even though I got on the internet daily. I couldn't go to the pool or anywhere else, and I was not sure I was going to get my brain or my body back! I am serious. I was so thankful when I could return to going to the pool and driving around and it all came back. For sure being physically active is part of having an alert brain and now that you mention it, I think the stimulation of driving was helpful. :lol: We might not have to worry about tigers, but driving can be an alarming experience that gets the adrenaline going. We can not have lazy dreaming brains when we drive.