Wednesday, 8 March 2017

5 year anniversary of discovering the rapid, severe intelligence decline in The West

It was just over 5 years ago on this blog that Michael A Woodley and I published the discovery of a rapid and severe slowing of simple reaction times over the past century-plus; and the interpretation that this implied an equally precipitous decline in general intelligence ('g') which has been missed by IQ testing.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/convincing-objective-and-direct.html

I estimated the intelligence decline in England over c.150 years would be at-least (probably more) than one standard deviation (or 15 modern IQ points):

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/taking-on-board-that-victorians-were.html

On my part, this led to a multitude of blog posts:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk

And the whole story was rounded-up in a book co-authored with Edward Dutton

http://geniusfamine.blogspot.co.uk

On Michael's side, it led to a series of papers (one of which I co-authored) which - using multiple methods and measurements - are overall consistent with the proposed decline; and can be taken as confirmation of the thesis of that original blog post from Feb 28 2012.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZaEY0UjluV1djOG8/view

The story of 'The Woodley Effect' was summarised recently on James Thomson's blog:

http://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-woodley-effect

So, a lot has happened in half a decade - which is not a long time in science!


No comments: