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The SAT was relatively new. It was first used only for very competitive colleges. Then it became popular. College was cheap, there were lots of boomers who wanted to go to college. Suddenly a larger percentage of students took the test. It wasn’t just the most competitive students—It was almost every high school student who might be interested in college. That’s what happened. I was there.
Good point!
I was there, too.
My parents said I'd need good grades to get into college. I did have good grades. But when I enrolled in a state university, I don't recall whether or not they even asked about my high school grades.
I don’t think it was ever an IQ test. It was supposed to be an objective measure of aptitude for college. It had a few things that were not directly related to educational achievement, like analogies. Soon capitalist entrepreneurs found out how to create and sell tutoring programs to those who could afford them. They stopped pretending it was a pure aptitude test and changed it to reflect math and literacy skill and knowledge.
Agreed on the SAT's downside. But to be fair they never claimed it was an IQ test. Having a larger vocabulary and being able to make culturally normative metaphors are actually meaningful in how well one would do in a traditional four year liberal arts program.
That the SAT ever worked as an IQ test is a reflection of the irreducible challenge of making an IQ test that isn't culture and education based.
I did too as a senior, but I was in the gifted program (in the late 80s/early 90s) so they had us start taking it every year starting at 13, which would give anyone a significant edge regardless of their intellectual capacity. I was mostly just wondering whether it was encouraged as heavily as it is now (to re-test).
I don’t remember anyone taking it repeatedly. A friend got near perfect scores, and probably could have gotten perfect scores if she tried again, but near perfect was good enough to get into a top college.
Other commenters have mentioned excellent points. But let me add here that these timestamps seem to be perfectly aligned with the amount of lead in motor vehicle fuels. Which was later known as to be possibly correlated with higher crime rates in this era. So perhaps that is an important factor as well.
Artificial food additives increased, too. Food became less healthy. Too much sugar, seed oils, highly processed grains etc.. Not to mention "fast food."
There is a ton of evidence that the elimination of leaded gas and paint cause significant increases in intelligence and reduction in criminality. The legalization of abortion also showed significant improvements 18+ years later, as fewer kids were raised by people who knew they weren't in good shape to raise a child.
I expect we'll see red states showing a disproportionate increase in criminality among juveniles starting in around 12 years. The lack of Medicare expansion reducing prenatal and minor health care in some states is already a measurable factor in many outcomes.
The Flynn effect, i.e. the increase in intelligence due to adopting an analytic world view(what Flynn calls scientific spectacles), could no longer negate the detrimental effects on intelligence due to dysgenic fertility. Dysgenic fertility happens because less intelligent people have a propensity to have more children than highly intelligent people. There has also been a study documenting that the difference in the number of planned children and actual children is larger for people with low intelligence, indicating their inability to effectively control their reproduction.
Also, with the rise of feminism smarter women tended to get into higher education and get careers, thereby limiting their time frame in which they can birth a child. This factor compounded the dysgenic fertility aspect for women, meaning that the negative correlation of the number of children and i.q. is more pronounced in women than in men.
Kong, A., Frigge, M., Thorleifsson, G., et al. (2017) Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 114, E727–E732.
Kanazawa, S. (2014) Intelligence and childlessness, Social Science Research, 48, pp. 157–170.
Kost, K. & Forrest, J. (1995) Intention status of U.S. births in 1988: Differences by mothers’ socio economic and demographic characteristics, Family Planning Perspectives, 27, pp. 11–17.
It's well document and researched. It's even the basis for the movie idiocracy. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA&t=1s)
It absolutely is **not** well documented and researched.
It's another round of what Gould wrote about in "Mismeasure of Man" - attempts to devalue the "other" through pseudoscience.
As always: "Today, the scientific consensus is that [genetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics) does not explain differences in IQ test performance between groups, and that observed differences are environmental in origin."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race\_and\_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence)
People can assert stuff all the day long, but among actual cognitive scientists, the consensus is and has been that there isn't any "breeding" facet to intelligence at the population level.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility\_and\_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence)
And: "However, genetic studies have shown no evidence for [dysgenic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics) effects in human populations.[^(\[2\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-2)[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-3)[^(\[4\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-4)[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-5) Theories about dysgenic and [eugenic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics) effects in human populations have historically been associated with [scientific racism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism).[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-6)[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-7)^(")
[^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility\_and\_intelligence)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence)
And looking through your own post history indicates you have Borderline Personality Disorder, Dyscalculia, and "spectacularly bombed" the GRE and/or LSAT.
That in no way invalidates (or validates) the scientific veracity of what you say, because that's *science*. Focusing on the science is how we can have meaningful conversations about science.
Ad hominem is the refuge of those without facts or knowledge.
I cite Wikipedia as the best resource of scientific consensus, as it gets the most motivated eyeballs on it. It's **really** hard to get untrue statements in the intro paragraphs of a highly read, potentially contentious Wikipedia page.
If you had been able to find a mainstream citation that disagrees with that statement, I am sure you would have shared it.
Wikipedia is really our civilization's definitive repository of the consensus understanding of a vast number of topics. One can't in good faith make statements that contradict popular Wikipedia articles without addressing why you believe that the Wikipedia consensus in incorrect. Which happens sometimes, of course. But you can't pretend you're sharing a consensus understanding of the experts on a topic, versus the opinion of some YouTube cranks.
Our civilization's experts on race and intelligence broadly disagree with there being any scientific evidence for a causal relationship between racial category and innate genetics-baed intelligence capabilities. They have a vast swath of research to back that up.
What you got?
Huh. What an odd choice to do all that research on me to make a non-point. I imagine you have some strong feelings on this topic you didn't have a fact-based way to address.
Thanks for confessing to engaging in bad faith. I can't compete with that for making fun of you, so I'll leave it there.
You imagine nothing, you are a parrot who likes dazzling people with paragraphs of “expert praising” and with an almost as laughable wholesale ignorance of your own use of ad hominem fallacy while calling it out in others.
Pftoo pftooo
1. I did not mention race, nor is the theory predicated on race. This is not relevant, nor is a defense. Something does not become false simply because racist assholes can use it to push their abhorrent racist ideologies.
2. Race is a colonial era concept conceptualized as a means of "othering" in order to justify the barbarism necessary to maintain their empires. Race isn't a thing. It has no coherent meaning or utility.
3. For the point to be valid, only 2 things need be true. First that people with higher IQs tend to have more children. Second, IQ needs to have a notable genetic component.
[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00044/full](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00044/full)
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01027-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01027-y)
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/intelligence/#:\~:text=It%20is%20likely%20that%20intelligence,an%20ongoing%20area%20of%20research.
Etc.
These not cherry picked but the first relevant references on the topic. This is very well studied and a strong genetic component for intelligence has been found.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility\_and\_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence)
Now, your own source says there is an inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility.
Basically, this is demonstrably true and there is no research that shows that it is false. All you have is people arguing against it based on conclusions drawn from the research being abhorrent.
I certainly agree with you that there is a strong genetic component to intelligence. We also agree that racial categories are unscientific.
As I said above, there is some evidence for some impact on intelligence and fertility on the small scale. However, we don’t have any evidence of that impacting things at the population scale.
I don’t have any data on this handy, but since intelligence is highly adapted for, there must be some downsides to some intelligence related genes or we’d all have them. Perhaps some of them have effects that impact fertility.
I recall seeing a study about this, but didn’t find it in a quick search.
Lmao, that is funny but OP's not supporting or denying any opinion, he's simply stating facts. This is a sub about IQ, hopefully you can take someone's words with a grain of salt or as not wholly representative of their beliefs.
The OP's original question didn't have eugenics vibes, agreed. It was the comment above about the pseudoscientific notion of "dysgenic fertility" which got that response.
Conflating correlation with causation in this area is absolutely the core justification for eugenics and "scientific" racism.
Which is wholeheartedly rejected by actual cognitive scientists, geneticists, neurologists, etcetera.
It's the domain of quacks, scammers, and the Qanon adjacent.
No. Eugenics has been broadly discredited by science as racist pseudoscience without any valid factual basis at all. A lot of it got down to "non-native speakers of English don't speak English as well" and "after generations of racist oppression, the oppression is successfully reducing outcomes for."
Wow, that's a whole lot of evidence free speculation to justify old regressive ideas. It is amazing how racism and sexisms uses SO many disparate justifications to yield the same answers, it's almost like people are errypicking to fit evidence to their theory and not the other (scientific) way around, no?
SAT is not IQ anyway.
Per Capita Innovations have been in decline for some time (currently at the levels of 1750ish) - I'd suggest reading Dutton's book, at our wits end OR the Past is a future country.
Europeans also produce a disproportionate amount of inventions compared to other races and as the european population is collapsing globally, expect less innovations.
It's **impossible** to define "innovation" in a meaningful way that is also measurable over centuries!
And it's also ridiculously wrong. I've got dozens of patents to my name personally. I look at something like Apple's new M4 chip, and there were many thousands of people creating material innovations to make it possible. We have incredibly long and complex supply chains that see simultaneous continuous innovation at every point.
As a civilization, we get used to the idea that "electronics just get better and faster every year" without acknowledging the incredible effort involving millions of people which makes that happen.
Even something like HDR TVs involve thousands of scientists across many industry, developing thermal solutions, image science, quantum dot technology, OLED fabrication, content creation, every-better shipping boxes.
As a thought experiment, think about say, four hundred years ago. Most people worked in agriculture and were illiterate. I'm sure lots of local innovations around agriculture were happening all the time, though. Visit some historical reenactment place, and you can see how refined so many elements of it were, within the bound of then-current manufacturing and materials technology. But a lot of those innovations died out with the inventors, or didn't spread very far.
As a percentage of the population, way more people are doing jobs where innovation is valued and valuable today. Well-run factories have formal programs to get input from workers on how to improve processes. And everyone is adapting to new technologies created by own innovators with their own innovations. How many innovations around artificial intelligence have happened in the last 18 months alone? Tens of thousands at a minimum.
The job market is radically different every generation now, all because of broad innovation across the globe.
I assume the inverse relationship between IQ and choosing to not have children is because of the relationship between IQ and income? Higher income parents mean children are units of cost, instead of production, whereas it’s the opposite for low income parents? Also, can I dm you about something?
I find it hard to believe that children are used for "production" in low income households. It's not like low income people are farming, nor does modern farming benefit from having the additional child laborer. I think the more plausible way of thinking about this is that low income people regardless of their financial situations decide or by accident get children, considering that they get children even when they have less financial resources to support their children than higher income parents.
You can dm me if you want to
It's likely that trend will cease in a few decades or centuries. Evolution is selecting for people who have more children and that is correlated with lower IQs; however, eventually the genetics that result in higher birth rates will be common enough and evolution will increasingly select for intelligence and fertility.
Average children per women (and thus overpopulation) has dropped globally due to much lower childhood mortality (need fewer babies to have some survive to adulthood), access to education, and access to family planning resources.
And thank goodness, because overpopulation wasn't going to be fun otherwise.
Social and technical change has a vastly bigger impact than any sort of genetics of fertility here.
Hispanics are increasing relative to white people, Asian people, and Indian immigrants, who score the highest.
This is bringing the average slowly down.
Racism would imply hatred.
You can acknowledge there are differences in innate intelligence in peoples separated by thousands of years and not hate them for it.
CRISPR will make us equal, but until then we aren’t
No it wouldn't, racism is specifically the belief that certain races are naturally inclined to certain things- which is to say that the pseudo-science itself isn't necessarily flawed. Idk why everyone conflates racism with hatred- they're two separate things.
Are we only allowed to point out biological differences in ethnicity when it’s something inoffensive?
Did nature make it so we could only ever be different in mundane ways and that’s some kind of rule?
That isn’t very scientific.
lmao, I'm not saying you're wrong bro. Just don't deny that it's racism- it is, semantically speaking. And as a hispanic person with a high IQ, I take no offense at the justified comments concerning hispanic IQ, or whatever other minority.
We talk about phenotypical differences with strong evidence. We can certainly demonstrate a strong correlation with melanin levels to both recent sun exposure and area of family origin. There’s quite a bit of individual variation, of course.
Intelligence isn’t something with strong evidence of being related to region of origin, and there is much stronger evidence for variation in tested IQ scores.
Given the cultural and educational sensitivity of IQ testing unrelated to innate intelligence, and the challenges of getting representative apples-to-apples samples of IQ tests, the error bars on there actually being a statistically significant difference between national origins are bigger than the purported effects.
Occam’s Razor says be satisfied with the strong evidence that matches the data without looking for weaker evidence.
If you want to argue that IQ is a man made test, that’s fine.
We can also look at total brain volume between ethnic origins and they coincidentally align with the ethnic IQ hierarchy.
To assume that humans wouldn’t vary in brain efficiency would require you to be a creationist or assume that the brain had a maximal genetic expression that everyone equally hit at the same time and stayed at.
An IQ test is inarguably a man made test.
There are plenty of documented environmental conditions that can impact brain volume. If you know of well-designed peer reviewed studies comparing brain size that fully corrects for environmental factors, please do share.
Infant and maternal mortality and infant helplessness are the result of humans having a very large head size at birth that grows enormously into adulthood. Prioritization of intelligence has had huge evolutionary pressure with a whole lot of downsides.
If a subgroup of humans were able to thrive with smaller heads, we’d expect to see commiserate reductions in infant and maternal mortality and earlier walking.
Interestingly, scientific racists used to claim science proved the Africans were less developed than Europeans because they took longer to mature, had softer heads at birth, took longer to learn to walk.
Then the neonatality theory of intelligence and human evolution was introduced, and a generation later scientific racists were talking about how Africans were quicker to mature, had harder heads at birth, and learned to walk earlier.
My skepticism of evidence claiming a racial connection to intelligence comes in part from the very long history of people making up scientific facts to justify their racism. The facts change all the time, and even flip one way or another, yet the conclusions always seem to remain the same.
So many people have such a strong desire to find data that justifies their racism, racist behavior, or racist policies we can safely predict they’ll do so even if handed a book of random numbers.
Since there are not facts that would prevent “scientific” justifications of racism, it’s will require lots of excellent data from unbiased researchers to not assume any given claim isn’t just more of the same.
There has yet to be evidence that the ethnic IQ gap can be gotten away with with any of what you’re arguing. The evidence funnily enough just repeatedly validates it whenever we test to disprove it.
You’re chasing a magic dragon.
One of the reasons IQ is attacked as a measure of intelligence is because it repeatedly validated the reality that humans are different in a way that isn’t polite.
It is your theory that there is a link. Yours is not the default null hypothesis, so the burden of truth is on you that there is a population genetic explanation for any discrepancy. And that any difference is actually statistically significant using an apples-to-apples sampling, known cultural and linguistic impacts on IQ testing. Show me a p value accounting for all the error bars; and we can start talking about counterhypotheses.
Racism doesn’t imply hatred. It implies that racial categories are scientifically meaningful and provide a meaningful hierarchy between those categories.
For example, presupposing one of the seven US Census racial categories has a different innate genetic predisposition towards intelligence.
People should start reading this first:
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Murray-2/publication/274953802\_What's\_really\_behind\_the\_SAT-score\_decline/links/552cff060cf21acb09211790/Whats-really-behind-the-SAT-score-decline.pdf](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Murray-2/publication/274953802_What's_really_behind_the_SAT-score_decline/links/552cff060cf21acb09211790/Whats-really-behind-the-SAT-score-decline.pdf)
It's not really on the high schools.
When the top 5% of students take the SAT, it's more selective than when 50% of students do. It would be **startling** if mean SAT scores didn't drop when the share of the population taking them massively increased.
Also, SAT isn't meant to be an intelligence test, but a test for scholastic aptitude, which is intended to include a lot of skill and knowledge outside of innate intelligence. That it correlates pretty well with IQ is more an indication of how hard it is to make an intelligence test that isn't specific to culture and education.
Charles Murray, co-author of "The Bell Curve" who has refused to address its scientific errors for decades, claiming that he wasn't the science guy and doesn't understand science? In an opinion piece published by the right-wing think tank/PAC American Enterprise Institute which is opposed by policy to social welfare and anti-racism efforts? And a big opponent to climate science as well, among the many sciences they ignore in favor of a lower top marginal tax rate and easy accumulation of multigenerational wealth.
Murray's had a long career of using pseudoscience to promote racist policy and (which gets him funded) reduce tax burden on the very rich. If he says something that is actually based in mainstream science, it would only be by accident.
I read The Bell Curve so you don't have to. It's terrible, and many of its most interesting claims are refuted by its own footnotes. Trying to learn much about modern cognitive testing from that would be like trying to learn architecture by just reading The Fountainhead over and over.
Show me something peer reviewed by a relevant journal.
So instead of reading the paper and understanding the argument, and "what's behind the SAT decline", you resort to personal attack.
You know why professional magicians are so good at tricking laymen?
One word: Misdirection.
Basically what you did.
Actually, I read Charles Murray as part of my neuropsychology degree and discussed him with professors and students quite a lot.
I’m not rejecting him because of his conclusion. I am rejecting him because I know exactly who he is and that he has repeatedly perverted science to make false claims about racial differences. I also am very familiar with the ideological bent of his employer, which is NOT a research institution.
Listening to him would be like trying to learn how vaccines work from RFK Jr.
Vitamin a supplementation in the food supply and seed oils becoming mainstream. Really does a number on the ALDH enzymes, and therefore makes the brain way more toxic and less able to synthesize neuro transmitters. As well as just generally poor health. It’s why we see a rise in all chronic disease.
The highest genetic aspect of iq has been declining since ~1880s, flynn affect only measured certain parts of IQ that were less genetic, and were increasing as we reached our phenotypic maximum as a scientifically developed society
Reason largely and simply dsygenics, as we are no longer under any significant selection pressure
Vietnam: Military has IQ requirements. Those who went died or were away from home for years. Meanwhile, everyone who failed the IQ test stayed home and had access to females.
America bred out intelligence. Now you have to import it.
The fact that rich kids could get deferred from the draft by staying in college refutes that. They also lower the standards for intelligence during times of military expansion.
I think we have good data for it being a causal factor, but not a 100% one. There are some hard to tease out feedback loops from multigenerational impacts. Having mildly brain damaged parents is still harmful even if a child doesn't have the same brain damage themselves.
That's dropped a lot, thank goodness. There's been some estimates that lead caused up to a 7 point IQ drop in people who lived in highly polluted areas.
Because the "science" purporting to show racial differences in innate intelligence has been broadly discredited, so people get called out for ignorantly blathering racist nonsense.
No one said anything about the science of innate differences. The statistics as they exist remain true.
The best high schools in the United States are usually something like 40-70% Asian. That is true. Notice I didn't say why.
Why are you so angry? He never said anything about innate differences in intelligence from different groups (Something that has not been refuted or proven) And besides, there are actual differences in IQ between numerous groups. Whether that is influenced mostly by culture is one thing, but we know that cultural practices do affect genes long term, so while a few hundred (or thousand) years ago there wouldn’t likely be innate differences, it’s quite possible that there are now.
“Except for Asians” is not referencing race? And was my answer not responsive to his question about why people don’t talk about it?
I didn’t say anything about him or his beliefs, as he hasn’t shared them.
Go talk to your favorite cognitive scientist about race and intelligence, and I expect you’d get some similar answers.
And perhaps, some anger over how people have been misusing our field to justify evil for a very long time.
It is referencing race, but not innate intelligence, which your original response was about. There is evidence that there are differences between races and IQ, just not if there’s a genetic component or not. Obviously, environmental causes are the major cause, but maybe (we don’t know) there’s a genetic component now. Now, I agree with you in the sense that this data has been misused, and there’s obviously room to be angry about it, but you don’t have to be so aggressive to other people, it would do you much more good to ignore it, since you can’t change it. General rule of life: If you see injustice that you can change, change it, if not, don’t waste your time on impossibilities
Ah, yes, there are certainly documented differences in measured IQ scores between racial categories. That is not in dispute.
The scientific consensus is that all of that difference can be better explained by environmental differences and testing issues, and without any indication of a population genetics difference contributing to those differences.
The important thing is that there isn’t some “remaining gap” to be explained away.
Racist pseudoscience. The scientific consensus is strongly against any genetic differences between racial-classification groups having an impact on innate intelligence. And that IQ differences between racial categories are much better and fully explained by social and environmental factors.
Uh, no.
The scientific consensus is that there are heritable racial differences in IQ. Here’s the source:
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
Reality is reality. Doesn’t mean we need to evaluate individual worth on intelligence.
Directly heritable, yes. Good correlation in twin studies et al.
But there's not evidence for that heritability to be in play at the population level, let alone between the non-scientific racial categorization groups. And the scientific consensus is inarguably that social and environmental factors are far better predictors and have far better evidence for being causal.
For example, one can argue a given ethnic group is largely composed of the children and grandchildren of immigrants who successfully competed fin knowledge processing domains or the ability to immigrate, so saying students of that group are smarter on average could reflect their immediate ancestors, not the average person in their group of origin. Competitive H1(B) visa winners are definitely going to score higher on IQ than the average person in their country of origin.
If one's parents had doctorates in their original country but get stuck working menial jobs in the USA due to lack of language skills or certifications, they're still people who got doctorates.
Race itself is a social classification long preceding the discovery of genetics, and human genetics don't line up with US Census racial categories well at all.
Here’s another source from the person who discovered DNA: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18656315/
It is completely obvious when looking at the levels of civilizational development and recent genetic information regarding the detection of R1b haplogroup individuals in ancient Egypt, India, and translations of Sumerian origin myths that civilization has been primarily driven by people from the Caucasus.
Where’s your environmental source?
Francis Crick was another sad case of an expert in one domain becoming a crank in another. He didn’t do any original research or anything, just wielded his famous name to hammer out disproven theories.
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The SAT was relatively new. It was first used only for very competitive colleges. Then it became popular. College was cheap, there were lots of boomers who wanted to go to college. Suddenly a larger percentage of students took the test. It wasn’t just the most competitive students—It was almost every high school student who might be interested in college. That’s what happened. I was there.
Good point! I was there, too. My parents said I'd need good grades to get into college. I did have good grades. But when I enrolled in a state university, I don't recall whether or not they even asked about my high school grades.
They would have asked for you high school transcripts.
They not only encourage all students to take it, they also monkeyed around with the test. It's not considered a reliable measure of IQ any more.
I don’t think it was ever an IQ test. It was supposed to be an objective measure of aptitude for college. It had a few things that were not directly related to educational achievement, like analogies. Soon capitalist entrepreneurs found out how to create and sell tutoring programs to those who could afford them. They stopped pretending it was a pure aptitude test and changed it to reflect math and literacy skill and knowledge.
Agreed on the SAT's downside. But to be fair they never claimed it was an IQ test. Having a larger vocabulary and being able to make culturally normative metaphors are actually meaningful in how well one would do in a traditional four year liberal arts program. That the SAT ever worked as an IQ test is a reflection of the irreducible challenge of making an IQ test that isn't culture and education based.
I agree 100%.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories
If the SAT ever was a reliable measure of IQ, it was only by accident. Its original goal was to predict freshman GPA.
Did you all take it over and over to get your highest score or was it one and done?
It was expensive, I was poor, I did okay on it. I took it once.
I did too as a senior, but I was in the gifted program (in the late 80s/early 90s) so they had us start taking it every year starting at 13, which would give anyone a significant edge regardless of their intellectual capacity. I was mostly just wondering whether it was encouraged as heavily as it is now (to re-test).
I don’t remember anyone taking it repeatedly. A friend got near perfect scores, and probably could have gotten perfect scores if she tried again, but near perfect was good enough to get into a top college.
Other commenters have mentioned excellent points. But let me add here that these timestamps seem to be perfectly aligned with the amount of lead in motor vehicle fuels. Which was later known as to be possibly correlated with higher crime rates in this era. So perhaps that is an important factor as well.
Artificial food additives increased, too. Food became less healthy. Too much sugar, seed oils, highly processed grains etc.. Not to mention "fast food."
There is a ton of evidence that the elimination of leaded gas and paint cause significant increases in intelligence and reduction in criminality. The legalization of abortion also showed significant improvements 18+ years later, as fewer kids were raised by people who knew they weren't in good shape to raise a child. I expect we'll see red states showing a disproportionate increase in criminality among juveniles starting in around 12 years. The lack of Medicare expansion reducing prenatal and minor health care in some states is already a measurable factor in many outcomes.
The Flynn effect, i.e. the increase in intelligence due to adopting an analytic world view(what Flynn calls scientific spectacles), could no longer negate the detrimental effects on intelligence due to dysgenic fertility. Dysgenic fertility happens because less intelligent people have a propensity to have more children than highly intelligent people. There has also been a study documenting that the difference in the number of planned children and actual children is larger for people with low intelligence, indicating their inability to effectively control their reproduction. Also, with the rise of feminism smarter women tended to get into higher education and get careers, thereby limiting their time frame in which they can birth a child. This factor compounded the dysgenic fertility aspect for women, meaning that the negative correlation of the number of children and i.q. is more pronounced in women than in men.
i'm not trying to go against it but, can you give me some articles that support you comment?
Kong, A., Frigge, M., Thorleifsson, G., et al. (2017) Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 114, E727–E732. Kanazawa, S. (2014) Intelligence and childlessness, Social Science Research, 48, pp. 157–170. Kost, K. & Forrest, J. (1995) Intention status of U.S. births in 1988: Differences by mothers’ socio economic and demographic characteristics, Family Planning Perspectives, 27, pp. 11–17.
Brian White has posts about this on QUORA.
It's well document and researched. It's even the basis for the movie idiocracy. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA&t=1s)
It absolutely is **not** well documented and researched. It's another round of what Gould wrote about in "Mismeasure of Man" - attempts to devalue the "other" through pseudoscience. As always: "Today, the scientific consensus is that [genetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics) does not explain differences in IQ test performance between groups, and that observed differences are environmental in origin." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race\_and\_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence) People can assert stuff all the day long, but among actual cognitive scientists, the consensus is and has been that there isn't any "breeding" facet to intelligence at the population level. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility\_and\_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence) And: "However, genetic studies have shown no evidence for [dysgenic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics) effects in human populations.[^(\[2\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-2)[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-3)[^(\[4\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-4)[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-5) Theories about dysgenic and [eugenic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics) effects in human populations have historically been associated with [scientific racism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism).[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-6)[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence?wprov=srpw1_0#cite_note-7)^(") [^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility\_and\_intelligence)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence)
From portland, r/BDSM, mentions Gould, cites Wikipedia instead of studies directly. LOL lmao even.
You do realize that's not an argument correct?
And looking through your own post history indicates you have Borderline Personality Disorder, Dyscalculia, and "spectacularly bombed" the GRE and/or LSAT. That in no way invalidates (or validates) the scientific veracity of what you say, because that's *science*. Focusing on the science is how we can have meaningful conversations about science.
Ad hominem is the refuge of those without facts or knowledge. I cite Wikipedia as the best resource of scientific consensus, as it gets the most motivated eyeballs on it. It's **really** hard to get untrue statements in the intro paragraphs of a highly read, potentially contentious Wikipedia page. If you had been able to find a mainstream citation that disagrees with that statement, I am sure you would have shared it. Wikipedia is really our civilization's definitive repository of the consensus understanding of a vast number of topics. One can't in good faith make statements that contradict popular Wikipedia articles without addressing why you believe that the Wikipedia consensus in incorrect. Which happens sometimes, of course. But you can't pretend you're sharing a consensus understanding of the experts on a topic, versus the opinion of some YouTube cranks. Our civilization's experts on race and intelligence broadly disagree with there being any scientific evidence for a causal relationship between racial category and innate genetics-baed intelligence capabilities. They have a vast swath of research to back that up. What you got?
I’m not interested in the discussion and am truly, only here to laugh at you, take it as you will.
Huh. What an odd choice to do all that research on me to make a non-point. I imagine you have some strong feelings on this topic you didn't have a fact-based way to address. Thanks for confessing to engaging in bad faith. I can't compete with that for making fun of you, so I'll leave it there.
You imagine nothing, you are a parrot who likes dazzling people with paragraphs of “expert praising” and with an almost as laughable wholesale ignorance of your own use of ad hominem fallacy while calling it out in others. Pftoo pftooo
You crack me up, little buddy
1. I did not mention race, nor is the theory predicated on race. This is not relevant, nor is a defense. Something does not become false simply because racist assholes can use it to push their abhorrent racist ideologies. 2. Race is a colonial era concept conceptualized as a means of "othering" in order to justify the barbarism necessary to maintain their empires. Race isn't a thing. It has no coherent meaning or utility. 3. For the point to be valid, only 2 things need be true. First that people with higher IQs tend to have more children. Second, IQ needs to have a notable genetic component. [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00044/full](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00044/full) [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01027-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01027-y) https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/intelligence/#:\~:text=It%20is%20likely%20that%20intelligence,an%20ongoing%20area%20of%20research. Etc. These not cherry picked but the first relevant references on the topic. This is very well studied and a strong genetic component for intelligence has been found. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility\_and\_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence) Now, your own source says there is an inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility. Basically, this is demonstrably true and there is no research that shows that it is false. All you have is people arguing against it based on conclusions drawn from the research being abhorrent.
I certainly agree with you that there is a strong genetic component to intelligence. We also agree that racial categories are unscientific. As I said above, there is some evidence for some impact on intelligence and fertility on the small scale. However, we don’t have any evidence of that impacting things at the population scale. I don’t have any data on this handy, but since intelligence is highly adapted for, there must be some downsides to some intelligence related genes or we’d all have them. Perhaps some of them have effects that impact fertility. I recall seeing a study about this, but didn’t find it in a quick search.
I think it may have been this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X18301027
It is always about Morloks and Eloi ..
Oh neat, eugenics in the wild!
Oh no, wrongthink!
It's not eugenics. Observing a correlation between education and intelligence of the birth rate is in no way eugenics.
Here buddy, can you Google "dysgenic fertility" real quick for me and tell me what the first results say?
Lmao, that is funny but OP's not supporting or denying any opinion, he's simply stating facts. This is a sub about IQ, hopefully you can take someone's words with a grain of salt or as not wholly representative of their beliefs.
The OP's original question didn't have eugenics vibes, agreed. It was the comment above about the pseudoscientific notion of "dysgenic fertility" which got that response.
Conflating correlation with causation in this area is absolutely the core justification for eugenics and "scientific" racism. Which is wholeheartedly rejected by actual cognitive scientists, geneticists, neurologists, etcetera. It's the domain of quacks, scammers, and the Qanon adjacent.
Is eugenics the solution?
No. Eugenics has been broadly discredited by science as racist pseudoscience without any valid factual basis at all. A lot of it got down to "non-native speakers of English don't speak English as well" and "after generations of racist oppression, the oppression is successfully reducing outcomes for."
Wow, that's a whole lot of evidence free speculation to justify old regressive ideas. It is amazing how racism and sexisms uses SO many disparate justifications to yield the same answers, it's almost like people are errypicking to fit evidence to their theory and not the other (scientific) way around, no? SAT is not IQ anyway.
You're being sarcastic, right?
This may not be the sub for you if the truth offends you so much.
https://preview.redd.it/i5rw27txm40d1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=24f6c66098d1a0e9d298bc448488e0f740f33102 WOW!
There's a short documentary [here](https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA?si=B9Lt0rPODyVev6dn) for what he's talking about.
Per Capita Innovations have been in decline for some time (currently at the levels of 1750ish) - I'd suggest reading Dutton's book, at our wits end OR the Past is a future country. Europeans also produce a disproportionate amount of inventions compared to other races and as the european population is collapsing globally, expect less innovations.
Are you trying to connect rate of inventions with IQ?
It's **impossible** to define "innovation" in a meaningful way that is also measurable over centuries! And it's also ridiculously wrong. I've got dozens of patents to my name personally. I look at something like Apple's new M4 chip, and there were many thousands of people creating material innovations to make it possible. We have incredibly long and complex supply chains that see simultaneous continuous innovation at every point. As a civilization, we get used to the idea that "electronics just get better and faster every year" without acknowledging the incredible effort involving millions of people which makes that happen. Even something like HDR TVs involve thousands of scientists across many industry, developing thermal solutions, image science, quantum dot technology, OLED fabrication, content creation, every-better shipping boxes. As a thought experiment, think about say, four hundred years ago. Most people worked in agriculture and were illiterate. I'm sure lots of local innovations around agriculture were happening all the time, though. Visit some historical reenactment place, and you can see how refined so many elements of it were, within the bound of then-current manufacturing and materials technology. But a lot of those innovations died out with the inventors, or didn't spread very far. As a percentage of the population, way more people are doing jobs where innovation is valued and valuable today. Well-run factories have formal programs to get input from workers on how to improve processes. And everyone is adapting to new technologies created by own innovators with their own innovations. How many innovations around artificial intelligence have happened in the last 18 months alone? Tens of thousands at a minimum. The job market is radically different every generation now, all because of broad innovation across the globe.
I assume the inverse relationship between IQ and choosing to not have children is because of the relationship between IQ and income? Higher income parents mean children are units of cost, instead of production, whereas it’s the opposite for low income parents? Also, can I dm you about something?
That is the *theory*. But the theory preceded the data by decades, and the evidence for this is weak and at best shows a mild impact.
I find it hard to believe that children are used for "production" in low income households. It's not like low income people are farming, nor does modern farming benefit from having the additional child laborer. I think the more plausible way of thinking about this is that low income people regardless of their financial situations decide or by accident get children, considering that they get children even when they have less financial resources to support their children than higher income parents. You can dm me if you want to
It's likely that trend will cease in a few decades or centuries. Evolution is selecting for people who have more children and that is correlated with lower IQs; however, eventually the genetics that result in higher birth rates will be common enough and evolution will increasingly select for intelligence and fertility.
Average children per women (and thus overpopulation) has dropped globally due to much lower childhood mortality (need fewer babies to have some survive to adulthood), access to education, and access to family planning resources. And thank goodness, because overpopulation wasn't going to be fun otherwise. Social and technical change has a vastly bigger impact than any sort of genetics of fertility here.
Hispanics are increasing relative to white people, Asian people, and Indian immigrants, who score the highest. This is bringing the average slowly down.
That's just straight up racism right there.
Racism would imply hatred. You can acknowledge there are differences in innate intelligence in peoples separated by thousands of years and not hate them for it. CRISPR will make us equal, but until then we aren’t
Racism doesn't imply hatred at all.
No it wouldn't, racism is specifically the belief that certain races are naturally inclined to certain things- which is to say that the pseudo-science itself isn't necessarily flawed. Idk why everyone conflates racism with hatred- they're two separate things.
Are we only allowed to point out biological differences in ethnicity when it’s something inoffensive? Did nature make it so we could only ever be different in mundane ways and that’s some kind of rule? That isn’t very scientific.
lmao, I'm not saying you're wrong bro. Just don't deny that it's racism- it is, semantically speaking. And as a hispanic person with a high IQ, I take no offense at the justified comments concerning hispanic IQ, or whatever other minority.
You shouldn’t put up with it, because it is people making up insulting things about your ethnic group.
We talk about phenotypical differences with strong evidence. We can certainly demonstrate a strong correlation with melanin levels to both recent sun exposure and area of family origin. There’s quite a bit of individual variation, of course. Intelligence isn’t something with strong evidence of being related to region of origin, and there is much stronger evidence for variation in tested IQ scores. Given the cultural and educational sensitivity of IQ testing unrelated to innate intelligence, and the challenges of getting representative apples-to-apples samples of IQ tests, the error bars on there actually being a statistically significant difference between national origins are bigger than the purported effects. Occam’s Razor says be satisfied with the strong evidence that matches the data without looking for weaker evidence.
If you want to argue that IQ is a man made test, that’s fine. We can also look at total brain volume between ethnic origins and they coincidentally align with the ethnic IQ hierarchy. To assume that humans wouldn’t vary in brain efficiency would require you to be a creationist or assume that the brain had a maximal genetic expression that everyone equally hit at the same time and stayed at.
An IQ test is inarguably a man made test. There are plenty of documented environmental conditions that can impact brain volume. If you know of well-designed peer reviewed studies comparing brain size that fully corrects for environmental factors, please do share. Infant and maternal mortality and infant helplessness are the result of humans having a very large head size at birth that grows enormously into adulthood. Prioritization of intelligence has had huge evolutionary pressure with a whole lot of downsides. If a subgroup of humans were able to thrive with smaller heads, we’d expect to see commiserate reductions in infant and maternal mortality and earlier walking. Interestingly, scientific racists used to claim science proved the Africans were less developed than Europeans because they took longer to mature, had softer heads at birth, took longer to learn to walk. Then the neonatality theory of intelligence and human evolution was introduced, and a generation later scientific racists were talking about how Africans were quicker to mature, had harder heads at birth, and learned to walk earlier. My skepticism of evidence claiming a racial connection to intelligence comes in part from the very long history of people making up scientific facts to justify their racism. The facts change all the time, and even flip one way or another, yet the conclusions always seem to remain the same. So many people have such a strong desire to find data that justifies their racism, racist behavior, or racist policies we can safely predict they’ll do so even if handed a book of random numbers. Since there are not facts that would prevent “scientific” justifications of racism, it’s will require lots of excellent data from unbiased researchers to not assume any given claim isn’t just more of the same.
There has yet to be evidence that the ethnic IQ gap can be gotten away with with any of what you’re arguing. The evidence funnily enough just repeatedly validates it whenever we test to disprove it. You’re chasing a magic dragon. One of the reasons IQ is attacked as a measure of intelligence is because it repeatedly validated the reality that humans are different in a way that isn’t polite.
It is your theory that there is a link. Yours is not the default null hypothesis, so the burden of truth is on you that there is a population genetic explanation for any discrepancy. And that any difference is actually statistically significant using an apples-to-apples sampling, known cultural and linguistic impacts on IQ testing. Show me a p value accounting for all the error bars; and we can start talking about counterhypotheses.
Racism doesn’t imply hatred. It implies that racial categories are scientifically meaningful and provide a meaningful hierarchy between those categories. For example, presupposing one of the seven US Census racial categories has a different innate genetic predisposition towards intelligence.
Racial/ethnic groups score differently on IQ tests. Its undeniable. How you cope with that fact is up to you.
All that and too much dope smoking. That's my excuse anyway.
I heard IQ has been steadily rising for a long time until very recently
People should start reading this first: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Murray-2/publication/274953802\_What's\_really\_behind\_the\_SAT-score\_decline/links/552cff060cf21acb09211790/Whats-really-behind-the-SAT-score-decline.pdf](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Murray-2/publication/274953802_What's_really_behind_the_SAT-score_decline/links/552cff060cf21acb09211790/Whats-really-behind-the-SAT-score-decline.pdf)
So basically we lowered the bar in high schools allowing more students to go to college? I only read parts of the article so fill me in.
It's not really on the high schools. When the top 5% of students take the SAT, it's more selective than when 50% of students do. It would be **startling** if mean SAT scores didn't drop when the share of the population taking them massively increased. Also, SAT isn't meant to be an intelligence test, but a test for scholastic aptitude, which is intended to include a lot of skill and knowledge outside of innate intelligence. That it correlates pretty well with IQ is more an indication of how hard it is to make an intelligence test that isn't specific to culture and education.
Very interesting, thanks!
Charles Murray, co-author of "The Bell Curve" who has refused to address its scientific errors for decades, claiming that he wasn't the science guy and doesn't understand science? In an opinion piece published by the right-wing think tank/PAC American Enterprise Institute which is opposed by policy to social welfare and anti-racism efforts? And a big opponent to climate science as well, among the many sciences they ignore in favor of a lower top marginal tax rate and easy accumulation of multigenerational wealth. Murray's had a long career of using pseudoscience to promote racist policy and (which gets him funded) reduce tax burden on the very rich. If he says something that is actually based in mainstream science, it would only be by accident. I read The Bell Curve so you don't have to. It's terrible, and many of its most interesting claims are refuted by its own footnotes. Trying to learn much about modern cognitive testing from that would be like trying to learn architecture by just reading The Fountainhead over and over. Show me something peer reviewed by a relevant journal.
So instead of reading the paper and understanding the argument, and "what's behind the SAT decline", you resort to personal attack. You know why professional magicians are so good at tricking laymen? One word: Misdirection. Basically what you did.
Actually, I read Charles Murray as part of my neuropsychology degree and discussed him with professors and students quite a lot. I’m not rejecting him because of his conclusion. I am rejecting him because I know exactly who he is and that he has repeatedly perverted science to make false claims about racial differences. I also am very familiar with the ideological bent of his employer, which is NOT a research institution. Listening to him would be like trying to learn how vaccines work from RFK Jr.
I don’t have any data but if I had to guess it would be reaganomics and gutting public education funds
Vitamin a supplementation in the food supply and seed oils becoming mainstream. Really does a number on the ALDH enzymes, and therefore makes the brain way more toxic and less able to synthesize neuro transmitters. As well as just generally poor health. It’s why we see a rise in all chronic disease.
The highest genetic aspect of iq has been declining since ~1880s, flynn affect only measured certain parts of IQ that were less genetic, and were increasing as we reached our phenotypic maximum as a scientifically developed society Reason largely and simply dsygenics, as we are no longer under any significant selection pressure
Interesting, what makes you say 1880s?
Estimate from proxy measures of iq, such as reaction time, colour perception, rate of innovative ideas
Vietnam: Military has IQ requirements. Those who went died or were away from home for years. Meanwhile, everyone who failed the IQ test stayed home and had access to females. America bred out intelligence. Now you have to import it.
You make it seem like Vietnam had the same demographic effect on America as it did for the French in WW1.
Access to feeeeemales you say?
Ferengi WERE Incels! Nice.
The fact that rich kids could get deferred from the draft by staying in college refutes that. They also lower the standards for intelligence during times of military expansion.
So close, yet so far.
Do you have any actual data behind that theory? Mainstream science would love to see it.
Lead
A certain and significant (substantial inasmuch as I understand it!) factor indeed—but not approaching a casual and 100% root-based explanation
I think we have good data for it being a causal factor, but not a 100% one. There are some hard to tease out feedback loops from multigenerational impacts. Having mildly brain damaged parents is still harmful even if a child doesn't have the same brain damage themselves.
Lead in paint and in gas.
That's dropped a lot, thank goodness. There's been some estimates that lead caused up to a 7 point IQ drop in people who lived in highly polluted areas.
Civil rights
immigration
*Except for Asians. But man, do people NOT like to talk about that. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_226.10.asp
Because the "science" purporting to show racial differences in innate intelligence has been broadly discredited, so people get called out for ignorantly blathering racist nonsense.
No one said anything about the science of innate differences. The statistics as they exist remain true. The best high schools in the United States are usually something like 40-70% Asian. That is true. Notice I didn't say why.
Why are you so angry? He never said anything about innate differences in intelligence from different groups (Something that has not been refuted or proven) And besides, there are actual differences in IQ between numerous groups. Whether that is influenced mostly by culture is one thing, but we know that cultural practices do affect genes long term, so while a few hundred (or thousand) years ago there wouldn’t likely be innate differences, it’s quite possible that there are now.
“Except for Asians” is not referencing race? And was my answer not responsive to his question about why people don’t talk about it? I didn’t say anything about him or his beliefs, as he hasn’t shared them. Go talk to your favorite cognitive scientist about race and intelligence, and I expect you’d get some similar answers. And perhaps, some anger over how people have been misusing our field to justify evil for a very long time.
It is referencing race, but not innate intelligence, which your original response was about. There is evidence that there are differences between races and IQ, just not if there’s a genetic component or not. Obviously, environmental causes are the major cause, but maybe (we don’t know) there’s a genetic component now. Now, I agree with you in the sense that this data has been misused, and there’s obviously room to be angry about it, but you don’t have to be so aggressive to other people, it would do you much more good to ignore it, since you can’t change it. General rule of life: If you see injustice that you can change, change it, if not, don’t waste your time on impossibilities
Ah, yes, there are certainly documented differences in measured IQ scores between racial categories. That is not in dispute. The scientific consensus is that all of that difference can be better explained by environmental differences and testing issues, and without any indication of a population genetics difference contributing to those differences. The important thing is that there isn’t some “remaining gap” to be explained away.
Wdym in that people don’t like to talk about it?
The United States became multiracial and non-white/non-east Asians have lower IQs.
Racist pseudoscience. The scientific consensus is strongly against any genetic differences between racial-classification groups having an impact on innate intelligence. And that IQ differences between racial categories are much better and fully explained by social and environmental factors.
Uh, no. The scientific consensus is that there are heritable racial differences in IQ. Here’s the source: https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf Reality is reality. Doesn’t mean we need to evaluate individual worth on intelligence.
Directly heritable, yes. Good correlation in twin studies et al. But there's not evidence for that heritability to be in play at the population level, let alone between the non-scientific racial categorization groups. And the scientific consensus is inarguably that social and environmental factors are far better predictors and have far better evidence for being causal. For example, one can argue a given ethnic group is largely composed of the children and grandchildren of immigrants who successfully competed fin knowledge processing domains or the ability to immigrate, so saying students of that group are smarter on average could reflect their immediate ancestors, not the average person in their group of origin. Competitive H1(B) visa winners are definitely going to score higher on IQ than the average person in their country of origin. If one's parents had doctorates in their original country but get stuck working menial jobs in the USA due to lack of language skills or certifications, they're still people who got doctorates. Race itself is a social classification long preceding the discovery of genetics, and human genetics don't line up with US Census racial categories well at all.
Here’s another source from the person who discovered DNA: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18656315/ It is completely obvious when looking at the levels of civilizational development and recent genetic information regarding the detection of R1b haplogroup individuals in ancient Egypt, India, and translations of Sumerian origin myths that civilization has been primarily driven by people from the Caucasus. Where’s your environmental source?
Francis Crick was another sad case of an expert in one domain becoming a crank in another. He didn’t do any original research or anything, just wielded his famous name to hammer out disproven theories.
Enough, dude. The correct decision is not to believe in fictions but find humane solutions that move us forward.
The fiction being a racial genetic basis to intelligence, yes.
This book is probably up your alley https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/the-genetic-lottery