The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 28, 2023


Is IQ Decline No Big Deal?? | Guest: Prof. Edward Dutton | 3⧸28⧸23


Episode Stats

Length

56 minutes

Words per Minute

183.56226

Word Count

10,442

Sentence Count

575

Misogynist Sentences

8

Hate Speech Sentences

25


Summary

In this episode, Dr. Edward Dutton talks about why IQ is falling and how this could be a big deal for society. Dr. Dutton is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the founder of The Jolly Heretic, a YouTube channel that focuses on intelligence and civilization.


Transcript

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00:01:25.960 Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream
00:01:41.280 with a great guest who I think you're really going to enjoy. Now, Professor Edward Dutton
00:01:46.600 has a great YouTube channel of his own under The Jolly Heretic. He talks a lot about intelligence
00:01:52.420 and research, all kinds of different things about civilization and how intelligence impacts
00:01:56.760 it. So when I saw the story in the media recently about IQ falling, they're kind of finally
00:02:03.540 admitting that IQ scores are falling. People do seem to be having lower IQ scores, but they
00:02:09.120 said it's not a big deal. We shouldn't worry about it. I thought Ed Dutton would be an excellent
00:02:13.340 person to talk to. Ed, thanks for joining me.
00:02:15.300 Hello. Good afternoon. Good evening. How do you do?
00:02:20.120 Doing great. Good. Doing great. So we're going to get into all these different aspects of
00:02:24.240 IQ. Is it falling? Is that really an issue? How does this affect society? What does IQ
00:02:29.180 actually do? We're going to get into all of those questions, but first let's hear from
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00:04:09.020 to it. All right, guys. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. Professor Dutton, a lot of people
00:04:16.800 were talking about intelligence, but they might be confused as to all the different aspects.
00:04:21.180 What is intelligence and why is that so important if it's going down?
00:04:25.120 Okay. Well, intelligence is the ability to solve cognitive problems and how quickly you solve them.
00:04:33.840 So the harder a problem is before you're stumped, the less intelligent you are, and the longer it
00:04:41.440 takes you to solve a problem, the less intelligent you are. So a highly intelligent person can solve
00:04:46.240 extremely difficult problems and can solve them quickly, which is why reaction times, basically
00:04:51.620 overall body nervous system functioning is a robust correlate of intelligence. To go into slightly
00:04:58.480 more detail, intelligence, it can be conceived of a bit like a sort of a pyramid. At the base of the
00:05:03.940 pyramid are specialized abilities, which are weakly associated with intelligence, you know, the ability
00:05:08.860 to drive a car or, I don't know, do up your laces or make an advertisement for something to do with
00:05:14.600 liver. And then above that, you have the three main kinds of intelligence, that is to say, spatial,
00:05:20.900 verbal, and mathematical, and they all intercorrelate. And above that, you have something called G,
00:05:25.320 general intelligence, which is the pinnacle of intelligence. So that's intelligence. And it's
00:05:31.920 about 80% genetic, which means that about 80% of the reasons why people differ in intelligence is to
00:05:38.180 do with genes. And about 20% is to do with environmental factors, such as having a highly stimulating
00:05:45.000 environment or whatever. And we measure it by IQ tests, and the average is set at 100, and you get
00:05:51.040 smaller and smaller, it's like a bit like height, you know, smaller and smaller percentages as you get
00:05:55.780 away from the mean. And why is it important? Well, because it underpins basically every, why are we
00:06:01.780 having this conversation, it would be unthinkable, as recently as 20 years ago, it's important because
00:06:07.300 every aspect of civilization is underpinned by intelligence. If you think about the
00:06:13.720 correlates of intelligence, achievement, motivation, altruism, analytic thinking, abstract thinking,
00:06:19.120 artistic preference and ability, creativity, diet, with reference to what you were advertising
00:06:23.660 a minute ago, educational attainment, eminence and genius, fitness, income,
00:06:30.500 basically any, any component of civilization you can think of, law abidingness, I mean, I could go on and on
00:06:37.920 and on, any component of civilization you can think of. And in fact, we have very reliable data on national
00:06:45.360 differences in average IQ. And what you find is that the lower is the average IQ, the less able they are to
00:06:51.340 sustain things like good sanitation or education system or, or lack of corruption or whatever. So intelligence
00:06:59.320 underpins civilization. And if intelligence goes down, then ultimately what that could lead to is
00:07:05.120 the collapse of civilization. Now, I think a lot of people would look at that and they'd say, okay,
00:07:10.380 well, I understand why IQ would be really important if I want to program computers or design buildings or,
00:07:16.480 you know, make sure that certain things function. But I know plenty of really smart people who are awful.
00:07:21.820 I mean, some of the dumbest things coming from our society right now are coming from people who are so
00:07:27.320 supposed to be the smartest people who have really high IQs, don't know what a man is, can't define
00:07:32.520 what a woman is. Can you explain why intelligent people would be saying that kind of thing?
00:07:37.760 There's a number of things to break down there. So first of all, the fact that you, a person can say,
00:07:44.520 I know plenty of people that don't have high IQ and I don't know, they do well in life or whatever.
00:07:49.180 That's just appeal to anecdote. That's just a fallacy. We have sound data on this. How well you do
00:07:56.240 at school, let's say. So how well you do in school leaving exams. And that is a good proxy for
00:08:02.820 intelligence. That correlates to the IQ scores at about 0.7. Your income correlates to the IQ at about
00:08:08.380 0.4. So these are reasonable correlations. It means there's lots of variations, other factors
00:08:13.600 involved, like personality and things like this. But your income, your education level, and many,
00:08:20.240 many, many other things all correlate with intelligence at the individual level. So that's
00:08:25.020 based on the data. That's the first thing. And it's important to reach conclusions based on the data,
00:08:30.080 not just based on personal anecdote. The second point that you made is regard to what you might
00:08:35.420 call clever sillies, intelligent people saying manifestly stupid things. Well, there are reasons for this.
00:08:42.000 So one of the correlates of intelligence is social conformity, essentially. So people who are highly
00:08:48.700 intelligent are good at norm mapping. They are good at looking around the society, noticing what
00:08:54.380 the dominant set of values is, and forcing themselves via their effortful control, via their intelligence,
00:09:00.960 essentially, to believe those things, to accept the veracity of those things, and then competitively
00:09:07.140 signaling their adherence to that dominant set of values in order to attain status. And what that can
00:09:16.060 lead to, ironically, is a situation where the views that they will advocate will be less in line with
00:09:22.280 the objective reality than a less intelligent person who doesn't have, as it were, sufficient
00:09:27.920 intellectual, can't perform the intellectual gymnastics necessary to force himself to believe
00:09:33.940 something so manifestly stupid. And so the, the, the, that is one of the sort of more subtle and
00:09:39.760 interesting reasons why it is that at the moment, it would be a less intelligent person that would
00:09:44.020 say, yeah, a woman's a woman, a man's a man, and a more intelligent person who would probably say,
00:09:48.840 oh, well, we have to define what we mean by a woman, we have to define what we mean by a man, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:09:53.380 So, so the overall, what you will find is that it is certainly true that intelligence correlates with
00:10:00.080 all of the things I read out and many, many more, and certainly with socioeconomic status.
00:10:05.860 So if that's the case, and I think there's probably a decent case for most people to understand that,
00:10:11.100 you know, the, the intelligent rebel isn't exactly the, the archetype people think it is. Most people do find the,
00:10:17.680 the advantage of, of, like you said, understanding the social norm and the advantage that go along
00:10:22.660 with it, then wouldn't that mean that a lot of people who are opposing the current wokeness,
00:10:27.340 the current woke ideology, wouldn't they be overall lower IQ if they're not noticing the social
00:10:33.720 benefits of going along with this? Um, uh, yes. Uh, well, no, it's not, no, it's, it's slightly,
00:10:40.300 I'm slightly more complicated than that. So, um, you can see that there would be some people,
00:10:44.520 let's, let's, let's break this down. It's a very good question. So on the one hand, yeah,
00:10:49.560 you're going to say overall in a very left-wing society, you're going to expect right-wing
00:10:54.760 opinions to be associated with low IQ. That's, that's true. Um, and overall, you're going to
00:11:01.200 expect intelligence to predict social conformity. Um, and therefore, uh, uh, uh, you're going to expect
00:11:09.000 intelligent people to be very much, um, in with the current ideology, uh, if not spearheading it.
00:11:15.240 But the other thing that is associated with social status is a certain kind of personality.
00:11:21.040 And so we have to look at the, um, interaction between the personality type and the heritability
00:11:27.260 of personality, i.e. the genetic component of personality is a bit less than intelligence.
00:11:30.780 It's about 50%. Um, the interaction with the personality type and the intelligence and the intelligence.
00:11:36.340 And we also have to make a distinction between what we might call normal range, high intelligence,
00:11:42.840 i.e. anything between, uh, normal range, you know, uh, uh, I don't know, a hundred to 130,
00:11:48.240 that's the normal range. And then outlier high intelligence, i.e. above 130. And those can be
00:11:55.360 quite different things. So with regard to the intelligence, um, people who have outlier high
00:12:01.940 intelligence, this tends to be associated with, with aspects of autism.
00:12:06.340 Why? Because autistics are obsessed with the truth. Uh, autistics take in large amounts of
00:12:13.680 information and the more information you can take in, the more subtly and therefore parsimoniously
00:12:19.420 and accurately you can solve a problem. And the essence of intelligence, remember, is solving
00:12:24.680 problems. And autistics also tend to notice subtle differences and notice them very quickly.
00:12:30.220 So you would predict then that yes, in general, intelligent people would be, uh, in very much
00:12:36.400 in favor of the current thing and would competitively signal their conformity to it. But you would also
00:12:41.620 expect people with outlier high intelligence to do the opposite, to critique the current thing and,
00:12:48.300 um, in, in, in pursuit of truth or in pursuit of, uh, systematizing or, or, or whatever would be
00:12:53.640 associated with, with autism. So that's the first nuance. The second nuance is the interaction
00:12:58.860 between personality and intelligence. So if you've got that kind of personality type where,
00:13:04.740 uh, you are, um, high in, uh, sort of conscientiousness and agreeableness and this kind
00:13:12.080 of thing, then this will tend to make you generally quite socially conformist. And so if you add to that,
00:13:17.600 the intelligence, then this might make you to a certain extent conformist to the, to the current,
00:13:22.500 the current thing. Right. But on the other hand, if you have high intelligence and you add that to
00:13:28.620 agreeableness and conscientiousness, then what that can mean is agreeableness and conscientiousness can
00:13:33.240 be associated with traditional religiosity. And this can make you then inculcated with certain
00:13:39.180 conservative views. And therefore, because of your religiosity, you might oppose the left-wing
00:13:44.700 society and, and the current thing, even though you have a reasonable, uh, level of intelligence.
00:13:49.360 And then we have to look at the dark triad traits and the evidence is that people that are
00:13:54.560 intelligent plus high in narcissism, that is to say, they like to be admired and looked up to and so
00:13:59.520 forth, or high in Machiavellianism, that is to say that they like to be, uh, uh, they like power.
00:14:05.700 Uh, those people tend to be woke because that's how you get power in the current society. It's by,
00:14:10.700 by a competitively signaling wokeness and so forth. And then people look up to,
00:14:14.700 however, uh, people that are high in psychopathology, those people are high in
00:14:20.340 risk-taking. They enjoy risk and conflict and whatever. And that, those people tend to be
00:14:25.860 associated with the alt-right. So you, they could get intelligent people that are high in
00:14:29.740 psychopathology. So you can see how you're getting these nuances that you're going to get
00:14:33.000 overall. Yes. If you were to interview the population, I'm sure you'd find a weak correlation
00:14:38.140 between wokeness and IQ, but there's all kinds of reasons for there to be nuances where you're also
00:14:42.740 going to find high IQ people that are opposed to workers. Interesting. So the IQ test itself,
00:14:48.820 this is the thing that the article, uh, in, in fatherly, which is kind of a ridiculous progressive
00:14:55.020 rag, but they, they had a very funny, uh, headline to basically, yes, IQ is falling, but it's not a big
00:15:02.060 deal. And their reasoning was that basically we're getting a reverse Flynn effect that IQ tests are
00:15:08.860 getting worse at measuring general intelligence. Could you explain the Flynn effect and kind of what,
00:15:14.880 how good IQ tests are at measuring IQ? Well, um, the, the, the, the measure of the
00:15:22.920 usefulness of an instrument is normally how well it, um, it normally, how well it correlates with, um,
00:15:30.940 with, with, with other, other intuitive measures of the same thing. Um, and, uh, and so, you know,
00:15:37.460 and people don't like that. People don't like, uh, the discussion of, of intelligence and objective
00:15:42.020 intelligence because often it triggers them if they've had some negative experience at the moment
00:15:46.160 in, in their life on it. You know, we've got someone, um, in the chat at the moment called
00:15:50.220 Neural Network, for example, who is extraordinarily triggered by everything I'm saying, you know,
00:15:54.480 wonders whether to feed the trolls or not, but perhaps he did badly in an IQ test when he was a child
00:15:59.220 or whatever, and it sort of scarred him. But these IQ tests are, um, they, they correlate very strongly
00:16:05.180 with other intuitive measures of intelligence, such as, uh, educational attainment, such as, uh,
00:16:10.940 national scores on these, uh, on, on these, uh, scholastic tests that they do, um, such, such as
00:16:19.580 whatever. So that's the measure. It's a good instrument, but it correlates with these objective
00:16:22.620 things, you see. And then people want to say, oh, well, it's, it's, it's culturally,
00:16:26.420 it's culturally mediated. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's biased against certain cultures, but that
00:16:31.520 can't, that's, if that were the case, then it, it correlates with objective things outside of IQ
00:16:36.180 tests, such as 0.3 with, with reaction times or, um, 0.3 with the size of the head. So it correlates
00:16:43.400 with objective measures. So what this is telling you that it's, um, it's, it's tapping into something
00:16:49.180 real. It's tapping into something objective. It's measuring something, um, accurately. And so it's,
00:16:55.020 it's reasonably reliable. Um, and your second question was about the nature of the Flynn effect.
00:16:59.440 So what the Flynn effect was is I, I, I mentioned earlier this, um, this sort of, uh, triangle of,
00:17:04.940 uh, this, um, pyramid of pyramid of intelligence and, uh, and these, these, these, these levels of
00:17:11.340 intelligence. So what was happening, uh, was that the IQ test is an imperfect instrument at measuring
00:17:18.020 intelligence. Um, and it's, it's, um, so what was happening was that across time from about the
00:17:24.260 thirties till about sort of the nineties, certain specialized abilities at the base of the intelligence
00:17:31.380 pyramid, which are, which are very weakly associated with intelligence were increasing and increasing
00:17:37.540 massively. And at such speed that they came across on the imperfect IQ test as an IQ rise,
00:17:45.820 because they were, they were overwhelming everything else that was happening. And the theory of James
00:17:51.340 Flynn was that these, it was that society had across that period, increasingly adopted scientific
00:17:57.620 spectacles, he calls it. So society was making us think in a more scientific way. And so these,
00:18:04.160 um, similarities, these specific subtests, which are weakly correlated with G, uh, were, were massively
00:18:11.700 going up. And the model is that at the same, it's called the co-occurrence model. At the same time
00:18:17.180 that was happening, general intelligence, uh, and these of course are very, very environmentally
00:18:21.760 sensitive, I should stress. Yes. These things at the base of the pyramid, very, very environmentally
00:18:25.060 sensitive. So they were being pushed to their phenotypic maximum at the same time, by all other
00:18:31.060 measures that we are able to trace across that period, we were becoming less intelligent. And so what
00:18:36.440 you would expect to happen is that, is that the IQ scores would go up until the phenotypic maximum
00:18:42.180 for similarities was reached. And then you would start to see IQ scores going down, even on the IQ
00:18:50.760 test, because they'd already been going down based on other measures that are more, um, measurement
00:18:56.060 invariant across time, like reaction times or color discrimination or whatever, but you'd expect,
00:19:00.800 and that's exactly what happened. And in about 1997, you start to see evidence of a negative
00:19:05.940 Flynn effect. And that is on G and G the G factor is, uh, highly, um, uh, genetically mediated.
00:19:15.060 And indeed that was on the sub tests because intelligence, again, it's like height in the
00:19:19.240 way that it's distributed, but it's also like height in the way that, um, like how big your
00:19:23.080 trunk is, that's massively genetic and how long your legs are. That's massively environmental.
00:19:28.480 And in the same way you get different intelligence sub tests that are highly genetic and those
00:19:33.220 which are highly, uh, environmental. And if the effect is on the genetic ones, we call that a
00:19:38.100 Jensen effect after, after, after, after Jensen. And the, the, um, flip, the negative Flynn effect
00:19:44.980 is a Jensen effect. I eat is, it is on G. So it's caused by genetic effect.
00:19:50.740 So everybody kind of shifts into modernity. The average person learns a lot more about scientific
00:19:55.840 language and concepts. And so this kind of artificially inflates the way that people take IQ tests
00:20:01.780 until it reaches, it reaches the kind of the max, uh, ability of people to kind of adjust
00:20:07.860 for that. And then once that effect is over, we're, we're left with the fact that IQ has
00:20:12.800 actually been decreasing despite of this artificial rise.
00:20:15.820 The point is intelligence is, is decreasing. Intelligence is decreasing, but it's not showing
00:20:19.900 up because the IQ test is an imperfect measure of intelligence. Uh, uh, the, the IQ scores are not
00:20:25.740 increasing. In fact, they are increasing. And yeah, that's because this specific thing,
00:20:29.940 this specific, uh, uh, correlative intelligence is being pushed so massively and so quickly to its,
00:20:36.340 to its phenotypic maximum. And I'm trying to find here, there was a, here we are, um, in the,
00:20:40.800 in my book, this is my book, Adalwitz saying why we're becoming less intelligent and what it means
00:20:43.680 for the future. And this is a quote from, uh, a Russian, uh, academic who interviewed in about
00:20:49.980 1920 Russian peasants to try about with cognitive problems. Okay. I had the question,
00:20:55.420 there are no camels in Germany. The city of B is in Germany. Are there camels, are there camels in
00:21:02.480 Germany or there or not? I don't know. He says, I've never been to German villages. If B is a large
00:21:08.400 city, there should be camels there. Question. But what if there aren't any in Germany at all?
00:21:15.720 Answer. If B is a village, there is probably no room for camels. And you see, he just can't,
00:21:21.840 the subject just can't think in a way analytically, though, to say that we now take for granted.
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00:21:58.220 So I think a lot of people, this might be obvious, but we might want to clarify it real quick. A lot
00:22:02.620 of people might say, okay, well, if IQ tests could be wrong in one way, if they could not be able to
00:22:08.000 properly measure because of the flood effect, couldn't they be wrong in the other direction? Could the
00:22:12.600 article from Fatherly be right? And the IQ test is just not measuring newer ways in which, or different
00:22:20.360 ways, like spatial reasoning, in which people are improving? Is that a, I know that's, I know the
00:22:27.280 answer is going to be no. Well, there's two points I would make. One point is that although we have
00:22:30.960 found in the earlier negative effects that it's on G, and it's on genetic components of IQ tests,
00:22:37.360 what one might expect to happen increasingly is that because we are becoming stupider at the genetic
00:22:42.000 level, then we would, this would set off a literal Flynn effect in reverse, i.e. we would become
00:22:49.500 stupider for environmental reasons. And this would show up on the IQ test, because the scoring system
00:22:55.180 would be worse, and we would be less able to push people to their phenotypic maximum intelligence.
00:22:59.740 There'll be a literal Flynn effect in reverse. So we could start to see that. I'm not aware of it
00:23:04.140 yet, but we could start to see a reverse Flynn effect, and it's on, it's not a Jensen effect. It's on
00:23:09.600 the more environmentally mediated traits. As for the argument, oh, what, the IQ test, oh, it's just
00:23:14.480 an unreliable test. Well, if that were the case, then I have provided you with a model which explains
00:23:21.700 why it is that the IQ test is unreliable. I have made a prediction as to what would happen
00:23:28.900 if my model, or Michael Woodley and Mene, my colleague's model, of what's going on is correct.
00:23:34.720 And I have shown that that is correct. And that's what's going on. And we are declining
00:23:38.880 genetically on IQ, on these IQ tests. And while we're doing that, then we know that the prevalence
00:23:47.280 of alleles in Western native populations that is associated with IQ is going down. We know that we
00:23:56.300 are breeding for alleles, which are negatively associated with IQ and also negatively associated
00:24:02.900 with health. And all of these other measures, there is evidence that such as reaction times or
00:24:09.320 color discrimination or backward digit span or creativity or whatever, we are becoming less
00:24:15.640 intelligent. So I don't think that that does not imply that there is some fundamental flaw with
00:24:22.620 the IQ test at all. That implies that we've identified one flaw with the IQ test, and we know
00:24:28.380 why it's happening. And that it therefore fits with the overall picture. And I should emphasize
00:24:36.000 that IQ tests and their abilities to measure IQ, not across time, but among one cohort at any given
00:24:43.860 time, it replicates again and again and again and again and again.
00:24:48.800 So I guess the next question most people would be asking then is, why is IQ going down? Why is
00:24:54.300 intelligence going down? Why are we selecting for this? How's that working?
00:24:58.440 That's an interesting question. There's a number of reasons for it. So the first
00:25:01.420 was that we were under harsh Darwinian selection until about 1800. And then we have, of course,
00:25:08.200 the rise of the Industrial Revolution. And the child mortality rate in 1800 was about 50%.
00:25:13.460 And gradually, it's gone down to about 1% today. And there was a relationship, it seems,
00:25:19.780 that we know we were selecting for intelligence because the richer 50% of the population had doubled the
00:25:23.940 completed fertility of the poor and a half based on English parish records. And we've got evidence,
00:25:28.240 other markers that were becoming more intelligent across time. And so therefore, we were essentially
00:25:34.060 selecting or bootstrapping the population. We were selecting out those with low IQ every generation.
00:25:40.380 And we were doing that via the high child mortality of, I guess, what one would call the lower classes
00:25:45.620 of the time. Which is why if you trace your family tree back to about 1600, everybody in England
00:25:52.560 will find they're descended from the upper middle class. Because anyone that was below that does not
00:25:56.620 have surviving descendants today. And so what will happen then, things that are genetically selected
00:26:04.860 for tend to become play atypically correlated. And so intelligence would have been play atypically
00:26:10.420 correlated with genetic, mental and physical health. And so once you bring in the Industrial
00:26:15.780 Revolution, and you bring in better medicine and whatever, and inoculations, then these people that would
00:26:20.700 have died due to poor health, who would also have had been more likely to have mental problems and
00:26:26.540 low IQ, they're not dying off. They're surviving and passing on their genes. And this was noticed and
00:26:33.020 people were worrying about it as early as about 1860. The French doctor, Benedict Morel, was the first
00:26:38.520 person to present his concerns about it. So the result of that is that whereas once people with low IQ
00:26:44.300 who would be purged from the population, every generation, along with those that had poor genetic
00:26:51.340 health, that's not happening. And so by about 1900, the evidence indicates, there is no longer,
00:26:57.420 we have this based on education data, there is no longer a relationship between intelligence and
00:27:03.380 breeding. The relation doesn't exist. It's just nil. And then it starts to become negative. Now, why does it
00:27:10.000 become negative? First of all, contraception, reliable contraception, it's taken up by the higher
00:27:15.680 classes, moves down the society. And contraception is basically an intelligence test. If one of the
00:27:23.380 correlates of intelligence is impulse control and time preference. So people have low IQ, they're too
00:27:30.280 impulsive, and they're too unable to think about the future, and they just accidentally get pregnant.
00:27:34.120 The second is that it has to be used properly, it has to be used correctly. The example I always give
00:27:41.000 is when you take the pill, do you take it at exactly the same time every day like you're supposed to,
00:27:44.760 or do you just sort of take it when you remember? And that's the difference between getting pregnant
00:27:48.100 and not getting pregnant. So the second thing is contraception. The third thing is, to a certain
00:27:51.900 case, feminism, really. So if we think back to when we were at school, think about the 16-year-old
00:27:58.140 girl, she drops out, she's not very bright, she drops out of school at 16, she has a series of
00:28:03.120 relationships by a series of men, she has kids by each man, and by the time she's about 38 or
00:28:08.360 something, she's becoming a grandmother. And then the more intelligent girl, well, she spends all of
00:28:13.780 her 20s, and increasingly even the first half of her 30s, concentrating on her career and things like
00:28:19.520 that. And so she either doesn't have children, and the evidence is that the more intelligent a woman
00:28:25.460 is, the more likely she is to literally not have any children, or she just has one, and so on.
00:28:32.420 So that means that those with low IQ, which remember is 80% genetic, will only have more
00:28:39.100 children, they have more generations. And the third key reason, I think, is welfare, which is that it
00:28:47.040 permits people that have low intelligence, they can live off it. And indeed, they often will calibrate
00:28:53.340 their childbearing decisions in order to take advantage of it. And the evidence is at the moment
00:28:58.560 that only people, only in the UK, only people who are on welfare, and also not just on welfare, but who
00:29:07.060 have them, you know, the criminal underclass involvement from the police and the social workers,
00:29:12.100 whatever, only that category of society among the native population has above replacement utility.
00:29:16.880 So all of these factors have come together to mean that IQ is going down. And another related factor
00:29:25.240 seems to be that there is some evidence that people at least at this stage of civilization, I don't mean
00:29:30.280 all the time, I don't mean 200 years ago, but I mean, at this stage of sort of high civilization,
00:29:37.040 highly intelligent people just kind of just don't want children. And this was noticed even in the time
00:29:42.520 of Augustus, he noticed that the upper classes weren't having children, he imposed a tax on
00:29:46.960 childless men, and they paid the tax. And it's some sort of dysphoria that is experienced perhaps
00:29:54.760 by more intelligent people, they just don't want children, they lack the instinct to have children.
00:30:01.740 And this could be there is some evidence that people that are more intelligent are more
00:30:04.780 environmentally sensitive. And this might mean that in order for their instincts to hit in their
00:30:10.820 instincts are less built into them. So they have to be put in the exact correct evolutionary roadmap
00:30:15.520 of life. And this, we're in an evolutionary mismatch. I mean, it's like we're in a zoo,
00:30:20.760 you know, we're so wealthy, we're not surrounded. There's evidence that I did a video on this today
00:30:24.520 on my channel, The Jolly Heretic, that the thing that makes people want to have children
00:30:27.640 is mortality salience. If you prime a person with death and whatever, which is basically our
00:30:33.480 evolutionary match, then they have a desire to have children. So it could be that it's something to do
00:30:38.340 with a lack of instinct, essentially, among the more intelligent. But anyway, these are the main
00:30:42.900 reasons why we will, there's a relationship of about minus point one to minus point two
00:30:49.300 between intelligence and having children you have in Western countries.
00:30:54.640 Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up at the end there. Because I think, you know, my question was
00:30:59.540 going to be, is this just an effect of modernity, just modern technologies and such? Because you look at
00:31:05.300 something like Oswald Spangler, you know, and he says that, you know, in all of these high
00:31:10.580 civilizations near the end, you know, kind of kind of in the winter phases, the people lose their
00:31:16.100 instinct for child rear. Once having children becomes a question rather than a natural pattern
00:31:21.400 of life, then the ability to kind of do it reliably just falls away. And so this is not something
00:31:28.640 that's unique necessarily just to our modern condition, but something that many different
00:31:33.160 civilizations have gone through, kind of a, maybe intelligence is in some ways a great filter
00:31:37.860 that limits the growth of great civilizations.
00:31:42.800 Yeah, I think, yeah, certainly if you read Sir John Glob's book, The Fate of Empires,
00:31:47.940 he was astonished when he wrote it in the 70s about the points of similarity between Rome,
00:31:53.500 Greece and Baghdad, and now our modern condition. And I think the most parsimonious theory is that when
00:32:00.160 you're under these harsh, intense Darwinian conditions, you don't really have time to think,
00:32:05.600 you believe in the religion, everything is outsourced to the religion, and religiosity hits
00:32:10.460 in due to mortality salience, which you're going to be high in, and also due to stress,
00:32:14.480 just general stress, which you're going to be high in. So everybody is extremely religious all the time,
00:32:19.280 and you just don't really have, you just act according to what the religion says, and what the
00:32:23.980 religion tells you to do is to go forth and multiply and have lots of children because they're blessings from God.
00:32:28.120 There are certain nuances to that, but that's basically what it does. It takes that which is
00:32:32.660 evolutionarily adaptive, and it makes it into the will of God.
00:32:36.520 Eventually then you get to this point of luxury, you get to this, okay, I mean, we've got a lot further
00:32:41.440 obviously than Greece or Rome or Baghdad, but they did get to a point where you don't have to fear
00:32:45.560 being invaded by foreigners all the time, you don't have to fear people coming into your city and
00:32:49.300 massacring you, you have in the case of the Greek, you have plumbing, you have sanitation, you have education,
00:32:54.260 you have all this kind of stuff. And it allows more and more people to kind of think, essentially,
00:33:00.740 you have time to think about things and to be, as it were, more self-aware and to really contemplate
00:33:07.820 the nature of life in a non-religious way. And your religiosity will go down because there's
00:33:12.920 less mortality salience and there's less stress and whatever. So then this means that suddenly,
00:33:18.320 if something is not instinctive and built into you, then perhaps you won't do it. And that's true
00:33:23.540 of fertility. And if my model is correct with regard to more intelligent people, that they are
00:33:27.560 more environmentally sensitive, then you would expect this to be more true of them. And then,
00:33:32.240 of course, they would get caught up in any maladaptive ideas that came along, perhaps, if they became
00:33:36.460 fashionable, sort of decadent ideas. And so you just get a decadent society that no longer really
00:33:43.540 believes in anything. And people don't want to have children. And then they think to themselves,
00:33:48.340 well, if we do have children, they're going to be expensive. So wouldn't it be better that they
00:33:51.820 don't have a sense of the eternal? And there's, as I say, mortality salience makes you want to be
00:33:58.180 eternal. It makes you want to have children. It makes you want to be famous, actually. There was a
00:34:02.540 study I was reading today that people desire to become famous and well-known more if they are
00:34:07.260 primed with mortality salience. And it even makes you more likely to want to name a child after
00:34:12.980 yourself. So mortality salience elevates this idea of wanting to make yourself eternal and last
00:34:19.560 forever. You know, it's our evolutionary match. And in every case, Greece, Rome, Baghdad, and now
00:34:25.140 us, you get this decadence where people just stop, the more intelligent, particularly stop having
00:34:29.780 children. And what that ultimately leads to is the society going into decline, because you become
00:34:35.340 less and less intelligent. And eventually, you can't, the society breaks up, trust levels collapse,
00:34:41.400 collapse, and you can't really do things you used to be able to do. And then, of course,
00:34:47.220 the society collapses. But on the plus side, it doesn't die out from an evolutionary perspective,
00:34:51.720 because presumably, if this went on forever, then nobody would want to have children, and you just
00:34:56.100 die out. So perhaps it's kind of built into the nature of things. These collapses must happen so that
00:35:01.820 the species remains optimally healthy.
00:35:04.040 Yeah, it makes me think about Vilfredo Pareto and his circulation of elites. Yeah, he has these
00:35:10.440 different residues, these different base kind of personality types that pursue things. And
00:35:17.600 his foxes and lions are kind of your two types of main elite personalities. And, you know, foxes are big
00:35:25.240 on combinations. They're going to be your intellectuals. They're going to be ones that want to take different
00:35:29.020 ideas and put them together. And lions are going to be kind of your more standard, you know, patriotic,
00:35:34.980 you know, continuing the religious tradition, continuing the identity types. And he said,
00:35:39.540 basically, you know, most civilizations, when they become decadent, are just filled with foxes,
00:35:44.760 that they are wholly interested in intellectual pursuits and combinations, they lose all senses of
00:35:50.780 kind of identities, identity and the need to, you know, continuation of the of the culture. And that's
00:35:56.840 where you start to get kind of the these ebbs and flows like you're talking about where you, you know,
00:36:02.780 the the ruling class kind of is just not interested in perpetuating the civilization. And you kind of
00:36:08.020 have to have a new group come in. Now, he says, often that comes through a violent matter, because
00:36:13.180 the foxes, the more intelligent people have solved everything through kind of cunning and guile. And so
00:36:18.220 they tend not to be very good at conflict. And the and the lions, of course, are good at conflict,
00:36:23.560 they tend to be your more, your more martial cast. And so when you see that kind of circulation,
00:36:28.820 that that re injection of those who would be more interested in having children and perpetuating
00:36:33.620 the culture, it would come from those who are actually more willing to involve themselves in
00:36:38.360 violence. Well, yeah, and I looked at this in another book that I've done with my colleague,
00:36:42.380 J.O.A. Rainer Hills, The Past is a Future Country, The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution. And that was
00:36:46.980 informed a bit by the kind of philosophers you're talking about. And also would be discussing this with
00:36:52.680 Nima Parvini. And this is that there is this theory that look, once you are in the situation
00:36:59.160 that we are in, then you have to ask yourself, who's having children? Well, yeah, it's the low IQ,
00:37:03.940 fine. But also, there are certain other groups that are breeding. One of those is people that are
00:37:08.380 conservative and people that are religious. And that predicts breeding for various reasons. But
00:37:13.980 that predicts fertility. And so one model would be the kind of breed them out model, which is,
00:37:19.900 well, all we have to do is wait. And eventually, the liberals, because the heritability of political
00:37:24.680 viewpoint can be quite high, it can be about 0.6. The heritability is quite high. And so all we have
00:37:31.080 to do is wait for these conservatives to just breed them out. Now, there's two problems with that
00:37:36.260 argument. First of all, this is happening in a context of decline, of intelligence decline. So it's
00:37:41.500 not going to be that it's the same, even one day, if that does come to fruition, it's going to be a much
00:37:47.860 less advanced society, perhaps than we have now. But the second problem is, as you say, elite theory,
00:37:53.800 that there are various ways in which it's not important what the majority think, it's important
00:37:57.900 what the elite think. And sometimes the smaller the elite get, the more embattled they get, and the
00:38:03.340 more they flex their muscles and whatever, and take even more power. And so that's not a, that's not
00:38:09.060 a, what's therefore more interesting is that if you look into the data of breeding patterns in the US,
00:38:13.780 and you look just at the top quartile of intelligence, then the big sterilizer is liberalism.
00:38:21.980 So liberals are particularly residing from the gene pool among the very, very clever.
00:38:27.320 And the big fertilizer is conservatism, i.e. among the very, very clever, it is conservative,
00:38:34.980 it's the conservative ones that are having children, which makes sense, because if you're very,
00:38:40.480 very intelligent, then you will be presumably highly inculcated with this woke ideology.
00:38:46.140 And so there'd have to be something to stop that. Why would you, as an intelligent person,
00:38:52.300 be having children? And the answer would be, well, perhaps you have a genetic propensity towards
00:38:55.900 religiousness and conservatism and whatever, and that you just can't, you can't be inculcated.
00:39:00.560 So it is that that would imply that over the coming decades, we would start to see the percolation
00:39:05.220 upwards into positions of power, just as the conservatives died off in the fifties and sixties
00:39:10.060 and were replaced at the universities by liberals. You would see something like that in reverse.
00:39:15.300 And that would, that would spread throughout other organs of power in society. But I should emphasize
00:39:21.180 that this would be happening at, in a period of decline, which, which is of course, slightly
00:39:26.820 different from, from the idea that they're just going to take over the country and make everything
00:39:30.860 glorious again. Yeah. Really interesting dynamic there would be, yeah, I think about, uh, the,
00:39:36.020 the cognitive stratification that someone like Charles Murray worried about, uh, in kind of coming
00:39:41.380 apart and the idea that, you know, only, only the, you know, everyone who's smart is going to college
00:39:46.780 and only the, those who go to college are, are, are mating with each other. And so you're not
00:39:51.100 distributing intelligence the way you used to across different, different classes. But interestingly,
00:39:56.440 you would also have a situation where that means that fewer people in the general population
00:40:00.600 are capable of doing like maintenance for complex systems. And so you end up in a, with a
00:40:06.640 concentration of people who, uh, are very good at the manipulation of content, complex systems
00:40:12.360 and combinations. Your Fox is kind of in your ruling elite, but they're generally fighting over
00:40:18.300 control of a population that has a smaller and smaller pool of people who have the ability to
00:40:22.900 maintain the very mechanisms that they've been trained to manipulate.
00:40:25.800 So that's a very good point. And that raises, I think, two interesting possibilities. So on the one
00:40:29.860 hand, you could say, well, you have a stupid, a stupid population. And so there's nobody who can
00:40:35.400 emerge from among that population who can challenge you. So we can think about, I don't know, if you go
00:40:41.440 back to the twenties, uh, we had a prime minister in England, Ramsey MacDonald, who was the illegitimate
00:40:48.020 son of a Scottish crofter. I mean, you, you couldn't get much more of a lowly background than that,
00:40:53.020 but he was obviously an extremely intelligent and able man. Um, but then on the other hand,
00:40:58.840 you would have a population that would be very low in IQ. And so what that would mean is that they
00:41:04.020 would be difficult to brainwash. They would be very low in social conformity. They would be very low in
00:41:10.180 social trust. They would be very open to, to balkanization, um, to things like conspiracy theories,
00:41:17.280 to, to, to all kinds of stuff. And so therefore it would be a very restless population that would
00:41:21.980 actually be very difficult to control in some ways, more difficult to control than it was when
00:41:27.020 you had among them, uh, a smattering of highly intelligent people that would be the, you know,
00:41:32.340 the, the, uh, the ministers of their local Methodist churches or, or, or, or whatever,
00:41:37.760 and would sort of keep them in line. So, and so then you would end up with a cultural chasm,
00:41:43.220 uh, increasingly developing between the elite and the, the sort of lumpen proletariat who would,
00:41:50.140 who would have very little in common with them. And so that would be entirely consistent with the
00:41:54.420 coming apart, uh, metaphor, uh, of Charles Murray. And also you'd get more and more things going
00:42:00.240 wrong. And he did look at this. So imagine, um, a situation, I don't know, 50 or 60 years ago,
00:42:07.820 you might get somebody that was perfectly intellectually capable of being a doctor,
00:42:11.040 but they're born into the working class. They have a poverty of ambition. And so they end up
00:42:15.360 becoming a postman and they end up becoming rising in the, working in the postal sorting office and
00:42:20.220 they end up becoming the foreman of the postal sorting office. And then something goes wrong
00:42:24.280 that one couldn't predict. So some unpredictable thing goes wrong, but that person is able to solve
00:42:29.380 that problem because he is intelligent enough to be a doctor. Now with a more meritocratic society,
00:42:36.200 of course, that person is probably not there. Uh, or maybe if he is there, he's a, I don't know,
00:42:41.800 a foreigner who's trained to be a doctor in Libya or something. I don't know, but he's probably not
00:42:46.460 there. And so that then opens up for more little things to go wrong. So it's, yeah, it's not a good
00:42:51.160 situation. I also wanted to pick your brain about the idea of globalization and how this could impact
00:42:57.620 kind of the intelligence deficit. So we have these different areas where obviously, you know,
00:43:03.520 smart people are not having children, populations are going down. And so kind of the only option,
00:43:09.420 if you want to avoid this decline and you can't seem to get your own population to have children
00:43:14.040 is immigration. And so we end up in the situation where we have some of these societies, some of these
00:43:20.280 cities, uh, like say like a Singapore that have like a very like eugenic, uh, uh, uh, um, immigration
00:43:28.300 policy to only let in like the best and the brightest to fill very particular jobs.
00:43:33.280 But they're only funneling that intelligence from other regions and from other civilizations in order
00:43:39.200 to basically shred it. And the city becomes an IQ shredder where these, that you funnel off the
00:43:44.520 best and the brightest, but they don't themselves have children. They just disappear into these cities
00:43:50.040 where they don't perpetuate themselves. And then you're not just draining the intelligence of a
00:43:55.380 particular culture or society. You're actually draining like global intelligence into this situation.
00:44:00.780 That's a very good point. I hope that you're, you're, uh, but by doing that, by putting them
00:44:04.220 in the city, you're putting them in the most extreme evolutionary mismatch you could put them
00:44:08.320 in. And therefore, to the extent that they're intelligent and to the extent intelligence relates
00:44:11.860 to environmental sensitivity, you're making it more and more and more likely that they won't have
00:44:15.840 children. And you're giving them reasons not to as well, such as the flats too small or, or,
00:44:20.720 or whatever, which are the kind of things that an instinctive person would care less about.
00:44:24.380 They just have children and hope that the children would take care of themselves.
00:44:27.100 Whereas the more intelligent person will want to have a small number of children and really,
00:44:31.420 really invest in them and really, really look after them and so forth. So, um, yeah, it's also,
00:44:36.260 I mean, the problem with Singapore is it's a, it was built as a multi-ethnic society.
00:44:40.700 And, um, in that sense, it's a, it's not a, I mean, one of the things immigration does is it
00:44:46.180 reduces social trust. Uh, it reduces social trust because people are evolved to be with people
00:44:51.480 that are genetically similar to themselves and they will trust people that are genetically similar
00:44:54.580 to themselves. And they will not trust foreigners for that reason. Uh, but secondly, it reduces
00:44:58.540 social trust even among the natives because the natives kind of become paranoid. Uh, this is, uh,
00:45:03.460 James, uh, this is, um, uh, the paper that E Pluribus Unimus, the name of the paper that found this
00:45:09.440 in America. And the guy, the guy, the guy sat, the guy, the guy that researched it sat on the results
00:45:13.600 for years because it was so embarrassing, but it reduces social trust even among the natives because
00:45:18.260 they have become paranoid correctly. Uh, that other members of their own group will collaborate
00:45:22.900 against them with the foreigners to get sort of individual status, uh, in, in the group.
00:45:27.420 And so it just reduces social trust there. And so then all of the, the civic society that's based
00:45:33.180 around social trust, even things like democracy, um, start to fall apart because it destroys social
00:45:39.340 trust. So immigration is a, a sort of sticking plaster over a, over a severe burn really. It doesn't,
00:45:45.760 it doesn't solve the problem. And in some ways it makes it worse because one of the correlates of low
00:45:49.860 IQ is, is low social trust. And you are facilitating low social trust by, by having any kind of policy
00:45:57.680 of anything other than the tiniest amount of immigration. And, um, the tiniest immigration
00:46:02.340 is no good. They need serious immigration. If you look at somewhere like Korea, where the average
00:46:06.500 person's having 0.8 children, I mean, within, it's not gonna be long before Korea just dies out.
00:46:11.460 So, so you, you, you, um, there needs to be something done. Um, as far as I can see as a
00:46:18.720 policy, it would be reverse elevating mortality salience. So I don't know how you do that,
00:46:23.520 you know, in an ethical way. Um, or the other way to look at it is the sort of doom mongering way,
00:46:29.120 which is that these cycle, look at Greece, look at Rome, look, look at Baghdad. Why should we be
00:46:33.000 any different? These cycles of civilization are just what happens. They're just built into the nature of
00:46:37.080 things. And that we shouldn't see ourselves as individuals. We should see ourselves as people
00:46:41.260 with a place in a cycle. And as far as I can see, that place is early winter and we should just try
00:46:46.820 and make the best of it. Yeah. I think that is the, the way that many people have looked at that.
00:46:52.400 Like I said, uh, Oswald Spangler kind of goes on quite a bit at length about that process. And so I
00:46:58.640 think there are a lot of people who think that is kind of an inescapable part of that. But then I think
00:47:03.600 there are people who are hoping that intelligence, uh, and, and, and ingenuity and, and innovation
00:47:09.340 allow people to kind of escape what has otherwise been a civilizational trap, you know, has, has,
00:47:15.280 has been a limiter in a, in an eventual collapsing mechanism.
00:47:18.800 Well, why would it, I, yeah, I find that very hard to get my head around. Why would it do that?
00:47:23.600 So how would it do that?
00:47:25.280 So for instance, Nick Land, um, I don't, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him at all,
00:47:29.020 but, uh, he's a near reactionary philosopher and basically his idea is that basically you need
00:47:34.540 to outrun the need for IQ. You need to run, outrun the need for if human intelligence is,
00:47:39.340 is necessarily going to kind of eat itself alive as part of a civilizational cycle,
00:47:44.160 then the only escape from that cycle is to reduce the need for it, which means you have to rely on AI
00:47:50.000 or you need to free human intelligence from kind of its biological necessity, uh, you know,
00:47:56.180 through technological innovation. Um, uh, pretty horrific ends for those of us who are big fans
00:48:01.640 of humanity and tradition.
00:48:03.080 So you'd have, you'd have, all right, so you'd have a society that rather than,
00:48:06.900 so what would be happening if we follow his idea is that society is, remember that there's a
00:48:11.480 pleiotropic relationship between intelligence and health. So we're in dysgenics. It's not just that
00:48:16.200 we're becoming less intelligent, we're becoming less genetically healthy. We're breeding for strokes,
00:48:19.980 we're breeding for heart attacks, we're breeding for all kinds of things. Um, so you'd have this
00:48:23.980 society of people that would be becoming stupider and stupider and stupider and sicker and sicker
00:48:28.880 and sicker. And there'd be a small, um, elite of people who will be getting smaller and smaller
00:48:36.340 and smaller that would have the intelligence to program these computers because it is a high
00:48:45.060 intelligence thing, uh, to be able to machine learn. And these people would be, would have to
00:48:51.480 somehow, I mean, it would be the humans that would be solving the problems that such a low
00:48:56.680 IQ society had. And they'd have to, and it would just keep going until eventually what humans would
00:49:02.980 just have, we'd be like pygmies. I mean, we, we, we, we'd be like, we'd be just like children. I mean,
00:49:10.060 it would just be chaos. I think eventually the level of societal chaos, if the IQ was that low,
00:49:14.660 would be such that we wouldn't be able to maintain electricity grids. We wouldn't be able
00:49:19.080 to maintain the internet. We'd be like what's happening in South Africa now, which is that
00:49:23.700 there is no electricity grid in South Africa. And you have to, you have to have your own sources
00:49:28.020 of electricity. It would be that kind of thing that would be happening. I don't see how his AI could
00:49:32.360 be sustained in that context. I think the idea would be that the AI would be self-sustaining,
00:49:37.280 that it would escape the need for humans to sustain that, which it needs to grow and, and,
00:49:42.020 and, uh, move forward. It would be an open loop. The AI wouldn't be machine learned to solve
00:49:47.180 very specific problems like it is at the moment. The AI would itself have the ability to notice
00:49:52.300 what problems needed to be solved and solve them. Right. I think that that would be the idea. But
00:49:57.520 like I said, you're the, uh, kind of the, the horrific results that you're describing,
00:50:02.140 even if that was true, I think are, uh, are really important aspect of the AI would basically be
00:50:09.120 farming human pigs. Right. Very unhealthy human pigs. Right. Um, at that stage. Yeah. So, but then
00:50:18.360 presumably it would, it would institute eugenics. And if it did, it would be farming humans towards,
00:50:23.820 towards being, I mean, it's just terrific. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And it's certainly, uh, certainly,
00:50:30.320 uh, an evolutionary mismatch. And I think our lives to the extent that some of us were still
00:50:34.520 intelligent would be very unhappy. Uh, anyway, all right. No, I'm with you. I, I, I don't think
00:50:40.140 it's a, it's a, I don't think it's so much a solution, but yeah, it is, it is, I guess, a, a
00:50:45.020 possibility though, horrific one, if it's the case. Uh, that said, all right, guys, I think we got to
00:50:50.540 most of what I wanted to touch on there. So we'll see, I think we've got a few questions for Professor
00:50:57.720 Dutton, but before we pivot over those, Ed, could you tell everyone where to find your excellent work
00:51:03.020 and let us know if there's anything you have coming up that people should look forward to?
00:51:06.800 Uh, yes, I'm on the YouTube and Odyssey. Please particularly subscribe there. I want to plug
00:51:11.340 Odyssey, uh, and BitChute, the Jolly Heretic. And I live stream on Mondays and Thursdays at 7pm UK
00:51:16.140 time, 2pm New York. I have a guest on the Thursdays and I answer the various intelligent questions that
00:51:20.980 have been sent in on the, on the Mondays. Uh, and then in the description to that, you'll see all the
00:51:25.800 information I have. I've got various books out, all of which you can get on Amazon. And the latest
00:51:30.400 one is the past, the future country, the coming conservative revolution. Uh, and I've got a book
00:51:34.900 coming out in May, uh, called breeding the human herd, eugenics, dysgenics, and the future of the
00:51:39.880 species. Excellent. All right. So, uh, Bob honk, honk honk for, uh, 249 there. Uh, oh my God,
00:51:48.160 it's the billions must die guy. I'm not sure that, uh, that it is the guy from that meme. I know the
00:51:53.300 meme you're talking about, but I don't think, uh,
00:51:55.280 and about must die. I'm saying just will. If we, if we, if we get back, if we collapse back to an
00:52:02.860 agricultural economy, which is what happened with Rome, Rome didn't get anywhere near as high as us.
00:52:07.480 Rome got to probably the equivalent of the mid 1700s or something, maybe the cusp of an industrial
00:52:11.380 revolution. And then it collapsed and they go back to the land and lots of people died. And then there
00:52:16.480 was a, uh, the great Justinian plague and about 60% of the population were killed. Okay. And I'm saying
00:52:22.380 that if we got into that situation, it would be 90% of us or more that would be, that would,
00:52:27.720 would, would, would, of course die. Not least because most people could not cope without modern
00:52:31.660 medicine. I mean, lots and lots of people are reliant on, uh, modern medicine for their physical
00:52:36.840 health and, and, uh, the medical system is one of the first things that will go. Yeah. Just a very
00:52:41.100 difficult reality. Not any kind of prescription there. Uh, let's see, Adam E for $2. Thank you,
00:52:47.380 sir. Uh, is IQ today equal to IQ a hundred years ago? So has IQ, uh, has, uh, maybe, maybe this is a
00:52:56.840 good time to kind of understand how the IQ scale works. What does a hundred IQ mean? How do they
00:53:01.800 derive that? Is it stable over time? No, a hundred is the average at any given time. So we talk, we talk
00:53:08.900 about the, it's a bell curve, right? A hundred is in the middle. So a hundred is the average at any
00:53:14.580 given time. So, um, if we say there are various ways, various proxies we can use to measure
00:53:21.060 intelligence across time. Uh, one of the ones that we can use is per capita major innovation,
00:53:26.040 per capita genius, because if you have a highly intelligent population, then you have a, I think,
00:53:32.780 I have a large graph of this in, hang on a minute. Um, if you have a highly intelligent population,
00:53:37.800 then you have, uh, the, their, their outliers, their geniuses, they're going to be sort of mega
00:53:43.580 intelligent, aren't they? And so then they innovate, they innovate. Uh, so this is the
00:53:47.960 one IQ looks like, you see, so it's a bell curve, right? Like that. And in, in, in the center,
00:53:52.660 that's the, that's the 100. And so if we would talk about IQ being a hundred now, let's, let's say
00:53:59.160 IQ is a, is, is a hundred now, then, um, it is, um, it was, it reached a peak based on per capita
00:54:09.580 major innovation. We use the major innovation as the, as the proxy measure. Um, it reached a peak
00:54:16.160 in about 1870. Um, uh, between about 1880 and the year 2000, we lost based on reaction times,
00:54:26.460 which is probably an even better measure of IQ than per capita major innovation.
00:54:29.660 Uh, we lost about 15 IQ points. So that is the, uh, that's a significant difference. That's like
00:54:38.360 the difference between, I don't know, a policeman and a high school science teacher or between a high
00:54:45.460 school science teacher and a university professor. And if you look at this graph, you can see the
00:54:50.020 way it works across time, you see, and it peaks, this is per capita major innovation and it peaks in
00:54:55.080 about 1870. So that would imply that was when we were at our most intelligent, which makes sense
00:54:58.980 because those people have been born just at the beginning of the industrial revolution, i.e. they
00:55:02.560 had been born just after harsh Darwinian selection pressures that have been selecting for intelligence
00:55:06.680 for hundreds of years, uh, began to break down and then you get the peak that is there for that
00:55:11.820 generation. And then it starts to go into decline, right? Uh, there's humps and bumps to that. Um, as for
00:55:18.320 understanding intelligence in the more distant past, uh, we can look at major per capita
00:55:23.660 innovation again. That's another possibility. Here's a graph. This is from Hubner. Uh, and
00:55:28.920 you can see, look at that peak at the top, that peak is about 1870. Uh, and then we go into decline
00:55:34.820 and you can see these humps and bumps and they represent. So you've got, you've got over here,
00:55:39.500 this one here, this is the time of Plato. This is classical civilization. So that was a peak
00:55:44.700 and that it makes sense that it would be because there's lots of amazing stuff that came from that
00:55:48.920 point and you see how it, how it goes. So that's how we can understand it. That's one of the ways we can
00:55:52.760 understand from the past. Another way of these things like alleles and the prevalence of alleles in
00:55:56.760 ancient, uh, ancient, ancient genomes. And we certainly, uh, uh, have higher IQ now than we've
00:56:02.860 had at certain points in the past. Based on per capita major innovation, uh, and also based on
00:56:07.360 the use of very hard words, uh, in, in, uh, representative bodies of texts, we have about
00:56:13.400 the same IQ now as we did in 1600. All right. I think that's all of our questions there, guys. So
00:56:22.400 thanks for coming by. I want to say again, thank you to professor Dutton for coming on,
00:56:27.760 make sure that you check out all of his work. And of course, if this is your first time on the
00:56:32.820 channel, please make sure to go ahead and subscribe. If you want to catch these broadcasts as podcasts,
00:56:37.740 you can go ahead and subscribe to the Orrin McIntyre show on all of your favorite podcast
00:56:42.260 platforms. And if you do so, please make sure that you go ahead and give it a rating and review.
00:56:46.220 That really helps with all the algorithms. Thanks for coming by guys. And as always,
00:56:50.880 we will talk to you next time.