We never knew for sure whether it was real, what caused it or whether it was limited only to the left side of the curve. But the Flynn Effect appears to be at the end of its days in Europe, at least.
This from the Times:-
WE ARE ABOUT AS SMART AS WE’RE GOING TO GET, SAYS IQ PIONEER
* Test Results are starting to level out
* Morality skills are the next step
It is a common refrain, repeated in response to every new television reality show and every bumper crop of school exam results: society is dumbing down. Scientists have long argued the opposite, pointing to the now widely accepted “Flynn effect”, which shows that over the past century average IQ scores have improved across the developed world, irrespective of class or creed.
Now the man who first observed this effect, the psychologist James Flynn, has made another observation: intelligence test scores have stopped rising.
Far from indicating that now we really are getting dumber, this may suggest that certain of our cognitive functions have reached — or nearly reached — the upper limits of what they will ever achieve, Professor Flynn believes. In other words, we can’t get much better at the mental tasks we are good at, no matter how hard we try.
If we are to make any further progress, we will have to start exercising different parts of our brain, particularly the parts controlling language acquisition and empathy, according to Professor Flynn, an emeritus professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
So a couple of observations about this.
First, the Flynn Effect has been tossed into more IQ arguments than Arthur Jensen has hairs on his eminent head - most always, of course, by the environmentalist left. It has been interesting, if not altogether surprising, to contrast the reaction on the race-realist right to this activity. Has it launched a campaign of outright denial, blatently ignoring