Is the film "Idiocracy" coming true?
The 2006 comedy film "Idiocracy" made the projection, intended as a joke, that because people of high intelligence supposedly tend to have only a small number of children while people of low intelligence supposedly tend to have lots, there would tend to be a catastrophic fall in intelligence.
In the film Luke Wilson plays Private Joe Bauers, a contemporary US soldier of perfectly average intelligence for the early 21st century who is selected for a suspended animation trial and accidentally put to sleep for five centuries instead of the one year period intended. He wakes to find a population consisting entirely of morons and that he is now far and away the most intelligent man in the world.
I had never taken the film too seriously, not least because intelligence is the product of a whole host of factors and not just genetics, and I don't take things reported in the Daily Mail as always being correct either, but I must confess that their article this week
"Are we becoming more stupid ?"
quoting research which suggests that average IQ levels in several western countries have dropped, did ring alarm bells.
The article referenced a more detailed and nuanced article in New Scientist manazine by Bob Holmes,
"Brain Drain: Are we evolving stupidity?"
The article begins by recording evidence that for at least a century average intelligence was increasing in a number of countries including the UK, Australia and Demnark. The fastest rise was recorded in Denmark between 1950 and about 1998 where average IQ scores for comparable age cohorts of young men were rising by as much as three IQ points per decade.
Unfortunately the same evidence suggests that that the rise seems to have peaked at or just before the turn of the millenium and since then average intelligene as measured by IQ tests (which are not, of course, a perfect measure) may even have dropped slightly.
There are suggestions that the increase in average intelligence during the 20th century was due to better nutrition, living conditions and education: this is sometimes called the "Flynn Effect" after Professor James Flynn of the University of Otago. There is a suggestion that we have reached the limits of the Flynn effect and that average intelligence has been pushed down either by a less intellectually stretching culture or by genetic effects.
It would be very easy at this point to make faux-clever responses along the lines of
"well of course people are getting more stupid, how else do you explain the election of (insert name of your least favourite politician here)"
Actually that would be a classic "dumbed down" response. This is a more serious and more long-term potential problem, if the data are right, than the election of one generation of witless politicians.
I think we should be very careful to avoid jumping to conclusions about what is really happening to intelligence and why, but I must confess to being concerned about the evidence that we are not, as a civilisation, maintaining the progress in brain power that we were previously making.
Perhaps both as iondividuals and as a society we should be thinking about what we can do to stretch our minds more.
In the film Luke Wilson plays Private Joe Bauers, a contemporary US soldier of perfectly average intelligence for the early 21st century who is selected for a suspended animation trial and accidentally put to sleep for five centuries instead of the one year period intended. He wakes to find a population consisting entirely of morons and that he is now far and away the most intelligent man in the world.
I had never taken the film too seriously, not least because intelligence is the product of a whole host of factors and not just genetics, and I don't take things reported in the Daily Mail as always being correct either, but I must confess that their article this week
"Are we becoming more stupid ?"
quoting research which suggests that average IQ levels in several western countries have dropped, did ring alarm bells.
The article referenced a more detailed and nuanced article in New Scientist manazine by Bob Holmes,
"Brain Drain: Are we evolving stupidity?"
The article begins by recording evidence that for at least a century average intelligence was increasing in a number of countries including the UK, Australia and Demnark. The fastest rise was recorded in Denmark between 1950 and about 1998 where average IQ scores for comparable age cohorts of young men were rising by as much as three IQ points per decade.
Unfortunately the same evidence suggests that that the rise seems to have peaked at or just before the turn of the millenium and since then average intelligene as measured by IQ tests (which are not, of course, a perfect measure) may even have dropped slightly.
There are suggestions that the increase in average intelligence during the 20th century was due to better nutrition, living conditions and education: this is sometimes called the "Flynn Effect" after Professor James Flynn of the University of Otago. There is a suggestion that we have reached the limits of the Flynn effect and that average intelligence has been pushed down either by a less intellectually stretching culture or by genetic effects.
It would be very easy at this point to make faux-clever responses along the lines of
"well of course people are getting more stupid, how else do you explain the election of (insert name of your least favourite politician here)"
Actually that would be a classic "dumbed down" response. This is a more serious and more long-term potential problem, if the data are right, than the election of one generation of witless politicians.
I think we should be very careful to avoid jumping to conclusions about what is really happening to intelligence and why, but I must confess to being concerned about the evidence that we are not, as a civilisation, maintaining the progress in brain power that we were previously making.
Perhaps both as iondividuals and as a society we should be thinking about what we can do to stretch our minds more.
Comments
When i was doing trade training in the RAF, we were trained to repair something right down to component level. In other words, you find the single component on a circuit board that is not working, remove it and re solder in a new one. these days though systems tell you what is wrong with them, and in most cases you replace either the entire circuit board or in some cases the entire system.
There used to be people who made a living fixing televisions and things, well who gets a telly fixed these days, you just buy a new one.
Old currency was a sod to add up, £:s:d but people had to think about it shops and what have you, now we have decimal currency and the till tells you everything you need to know.
I think education has been dumbed down a lot, and everything these days is so politically correct that people are simply not allowed to devop as they once did.
Though i do think the main thing is because we dont have to. I was always terrible at foreign languages, though there is an old saying "use it or lose it" basically meaning if you do start to learn a foreign language you need to be able to practice it, otherwise you will forget it. This i can see applies to a lot of things, so its not really that people are less intelligent, just we got lazy.
Perhaps, though i think you mean the last thing they want.
Regardless of what the government needs or wants, I think an intelligent, thinking electorate would be a good thing for the country.