Dumber Humans: Will They Kill the Future?

James Flynn is now saying that humans are not getting smarter--he is admitting that the Flynn Effect has mostly played itself out, at least in the developed world.

Steve Sailer goes further, and suggests that there are several lines of evidence suggesting that the average IQ is dropping for the US and much of the developed world. Sailer predicts that the average IQ in the US will drop from 97 to 93 by 2050.

Is a 4 point drop in average IQ really meaningful? Certainly if the drop were from a mean of 127 to a mean of 123 the practical difference for society would be negligible. Dropping from a mean of 97 to 93 is a different matter. Since IQ distribution in populations approximates a Bell Curve, such a drop in the mean reduces the numbers in the population who can serve efficiently as physicians, engineers, technologists, judges, scientists, and others who propel a modern society. Societies with average IQs below 90 cannot pull themselves up on their own, lacking the intellectual talent at the upper end of the curve.

The movie Idiocracy was meant as a satire. The concept of a dysgenic future is not a new one, and has been portrayed by some of the better science fiction authors. One of the problems in facing the threat of the dysgenic future, is the heavy political overtones of the problem. For the politically correct, the problem is invisible, swept under the carpet.

Without the intelligence at the upper end of the curve, there will be no cures for Alzheimer's, no cures for breast cancer or prostate cancer, no longevity or life extension treatments, no chance for effective smart pills.

Dumber people make dumber decisions. Combining dumber people with pre-existing nuclear weapons and other WMDs casts a pall over the future. Dumber people worry about dumber pseudo-problems, and neglect the more serious problems that are growing around them. That is why most journalists worry about global warming disasters and completely neglect the underlying dissipation of human capital. With that human capital, humans could solve more problems. Without that capital, humans will not only not solve problems, they will invent problems that do not exist, to occupy their minds.

If humans could grow smarter, rather than dumber, and live longer so as to accumulate more experience and wisdom--then humans would have a chance to move to a higher level, to the next level up.