Are We Becoming Smarter

Are We Becoming Smarter

Are we getting smarter?


In my opinion I think that we are getting smarter for these reasons. For the last 75 years the average IQ (intelligence quotient) test score has been increasing in every industrialized country in the world. Some suggest that this increase could be as much as 25 points. So are we really more intelligent than our grandparents? The first inkling of this effect dates from the early part of last century. In 1949 the Scottish Council for Research in Education looked at scores from two different generations of people of the same age. Comparing the IQ test scores of 11 year olds in 1933 and 1947 suggested that the average IQ score had increased by 2-3 points. But the effect wasn't solely confined to Scotland. James Cattell carried out a similar study on schoolchildren in the English city of Leicester between 1936 and 1949, which showed an increase of 1.28 IQ points, and in 1948, using databases of US Army recruits from the first and second world wars, Reid Tuddenham also found that IQ scores had increased significantly over this time. Subsequent studies carried out on the same groups of people by researcher James Flynn, using two styles of intelligence tests, have also shown that the average IQ in America appears to have risen by 15 points between 1930 and 1980.
Could this be a result of genetic changes? The process of assortive mating occurs when there is selective mating between individuals with similar characteristics, and there is evidence this occurs in the context of intelligence. In other words, individuals of similar intelligence are more likely to mate with each other. But, rather than increase the intelligence of the population as a whole, this should only increase the variance, or range, of IQ scores because a child is the result of genes from the parents, half coming from the mother and half from the father. If we think of intelligence as partly being a product of various genes, then the offspring of two intelligent people, who...

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