Source: Bigstock

Still, Rogeberg insists:

The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to environmental factors. It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families.

The authors also found some informational nugget suggesting that among white Norwegian Army members, low IQ and high fertility are not positively correlated—in fact, smart military Norsemen may actually breed more prodigiously—but the giant leap we’re supposed to make from that is to assume that any study suggesting that low IQ and high fertility are correlated has not only been discredited and debunked, it is racist, and being racist means you’re a dumb dummy who probably has a low IQ. If you believe in “dysgenic fertility theory” as hilariously proposed in the film Idiocracy, it’s not because that’s what the stats suggest—it’s because you have a stain on your soul.

What could we learn if, oh, let’s say we were to broaden the frame of reference away from white male conscripts to the Norwegian Army? What if we were to, I dunno, compare the average IQ scores of the nations with the five highest and five lowest birth rates in the world?

Here’s what I found. The country’s estimated mean IQ is in parentheses.

Five highest birth rates
Niger (84)
Angola (68)
Chad (68)
Somalia (68)
Burundi (69)

Five lowest birth rates
Italy (102)
Japan (105)
Greece (92)
Portugal (95)
Taiwan (104)

Are you seeing a pattern there? If not, are you blind?

Since geneticists are still honest enough to admit that IQ is mostly if not overwhelmingly hereditary, a global—rather than a Norwegian—approach to this matter would lead one to conclude that the world is getting dumber and genetics have quite a lot to do with it.

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