IQ Decline

How can we best protect the interests of still unborn generations? This is extremely difficult in a world where many regard children as an ordinary commodity. The so-called “demographic transition,” in which people in advanced societies choose to have fewer children, is even studied by economists and demographers in all manner of curves, graphs, and charts, establishing the cost of one child as the equivalent of X number of automobiles, televisions, or what have you.

What are the consequences for the gene pool of selecting out young women of ability to pursue education and careers, thus reducing their fertility (in 20% of U.S. couples, delayed fertility turns out to be cancelled fertility) while remunerating young women of lesser ability on the basis of how many children they bear, even denying them abortions when they themselves request them?

Whereas girls in countries with developed welfare programs can choose to escape school by becoming pregnant if they find themselves unable to cope with an academic program, an early 2001 study showed that fully a third of American women earning more than $55,000 a year are childless at age 40 and are likely to live out their lives without ever giving birth.

While “Total Fertility Rates” (TFR – the number of children a woman has in her lifetime) represent an important yardstick in measuring fertility patterns, generational length also plays a role. Obviously, the earlier a woman begins having children, the more offspring she can bear. Imagine two groups, in one of which women have their children at the average age of 20 and the other at 30. The first group will effectively have 50% more children than the other group even if the TFR is identical. In the New York Longitudinal Study of Youth, for example, women in the bottom 5% of intelligence had their first baby more than seven years earlier than women in the top 5%.

Abortion is significant in terms of the eugenics argument to the degree that it affects selection, particularly when the service is readily available to high-IQ groups, who can easily pay for it, but is denied to low-IQ groups, who are dependent on receiving the service on a subsidized or free basis. The abortion rate is related to years of education, which can be used as an imperfect substitute for IQ. In 1979, the standardized U.S. abortion rate by years of education for women 20 years of age and older was 44.3 for women with a high school education but only 3.2 for those who had less than eight years of schooling.

Another significant dysgenic factor is war. The creature who sees himself as molded in the image of God has used his improved technology to do vastly greater violence not only to his environment but also to himself. And it has been the egalitarians, not the hereditarians, who have been the least squeamish about murder and exile, be it in Russia, China, or Cambodia. There is a sad consistency to their logic: if everyone is the same, anyone who interferes with achieving utopia in our time can simply be eliminated and replaced when the next generation shows up.

War as a destructive mechanism of natural selection became a frequently discussed topic when “the flower” of Europe’s youth marched off to die en masse in the trenches of World War I. It was, after all, this particular conflict which introduced IQ testing to select out young men of ability more accurately for use as cannon fodder.
In instances of violent civil conflict, too, force is targeted most heavily at the real and potential opposition. Since opposition by definition involves thought and ideological dedication, the targets of destruction, more frequently than not, are persons of ability. The historian Nathaniel Weyl christened the phenomenon “aristocide.”18 Statistical analysis demonstrates that such a process produces a relatively modest lowering of the mean population IQ, but disastrous reductions in the number of persons with exceptionally high scores.

The contribution of outstanding individuals to culture, science, and the general quality of life is disproportionate to their numbers. Just imagine what the history of music would be like without just a handful of the great composers – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky, Mendelssohn. The same sort of “short list” could be made up of physicists, mathematicians, philosophers. Eliminate these geniuses and the average ability level of the next generations will not be altered perceptibly, but how impoverished our world would be!

The consequences of such a process are obviously alarming. Even with a relatively stable mean IQ, a society in which the intellectual leadership is significantly reduced is an impoverished society – at least relative to its original state. The lesson to be drawn is that the turbulence and magnitude of social upheaval do not have a necessary relationship to their genetic consequences.


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