damn, this right-wing think tank did a lot of research on iq. it sure would be a shame if iq turned out to be a useless and arbitrary metric that completely fails to represent human intelligence

edit: a few sections in we get an attempt to disprove the Flynn effect using a handful of barely-relevant cherrypicked studies and some questionable back of the envelope maths. I am sensing a distinct lack of academic rigor in this article. I certainly felt like I was getting stupider while reading it

edit 2: ironically enough, the second section ends with a bizarre and mostly unsourced word salad on literacy and numeracy rates. according to the article’s own metrics, these rates are increasing, but the author somehow manages to draw the opposite conclusion and then sneaks a bit of the blame on ‘low-skilled immigrants’

edit 3: I noticed that a lot of the citations in the article come from a single author: Michael A Woodley, so I looked him up and discovered that he is a eugenicist (and a cryptozoologist) who has written multiple papers in the subject of race and intelligence despite his PhD being in a completely unrelated field.

As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.