Why are IQ Scores Declining?

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Contributing writer for Wake Up World

Intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, which had been rising for decades throughout the 20th century, are now on the decline, and researchers with the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway set out to determine why. The increasing trend, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, peaked in the 1970s and has been falling since. In fact, when the Norwegian researchers analyzed IQ scores from 730,000 men born between 1962 and 1975, IQ scores rose by about 3 percentage points a decade.1

Then, beginning with those born after 1975, they started to decline. IQ scores have often been tied to genetic factors, and it was long believed that people with higher IQs would have children with higher IQs and also that people with lower IQs would have more children (known as the dysgenic fertility theory), leading to an eventual lowering of IQ scores across the population.

But the Norwegian study challenges both of these assumptions, suggesting instead that declining IQ scores have little to do with genetics and everything to do with the environment.

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