PHYSICAL AND MENTAL WELFARE

Waipawa Mail, Volume LXVII, Issue 91, 19 April 1939, Page 1

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL WELFARE

DECLINE OF INTELLIGENCE. (By P.M.W.). In view of the fact that it has been detex-mined as a result of largescale tests in various parts of the world that the I.Q. (intelligence quotient) of the human race is declining at the rate of ten points in every century, it becomes a simple matter of mathematics for the experts engaged in this work to calculate the change of intelligence from one genex-ation to another. It is seriously stated by several independent authorities that should the pi’esent rates of decline in mass-intelligence x-emain fairly constant during the next eight hundred years or so, the average intelligence of the population would then be about the level of the highest grade of feeble-minded persons at the present time. At that time there would, of course, be approximately the same amount of “scatter” about the new level of intelligence as there is to-day about the present average: some intelligence would be above, and some below, the average. Were mankind ever to reach such a level, even that amount of intelligence needed for a skilled occupation would have become almost extinct. RESULTS OF LOWERED I.Q. Before any such point could be reached, however, much of the structure of our civilisation would have undergone gradual but inevitable disintegration, because organising ability —dependent on superior intelligence —would have disappeared from the face of the earth. In the absence, therefore, of constructive measures for the fostering of the intelligent types of mankind, the whole structure of our civilisation will pass away within the next two or three hundred years at the latest. Ancient civilisations declined less rapidly. The slower rates of becoming extinct were due to the fact that the more youthful races were able to withstand and to recover from the degenerative diseases which brought about their

downfall; but with our own declining civilisation, matters are very different. We have allowed ourselves to become feebler and less virile, and, as foretold by Petrarach in 1350 In some dread moment By the Fates assigned, We’ll pass away nor Leave a rack behind! OFFICIAL MURDER OF I.Q. Declining intelligence shows itself in many ways. It shows itself in a constitutional inability to grasp the urgent impoiiance of maintaining Nature’s symbiotic equilibrium between the soil and its products (including man). It shows itself in a slowness to understand that the syn thetic application of science would do much to retard—perhaps even to prevent altogether—the extinction of the l’aee. It shows itself in a want of encoui-agement to the more intellectual strata to many early with a view to repi'oducing their kind in larger numbers. It shows itself in a neglect to legislate for the protection of those who are actually born with a normal or supei'ior I.Q. but whose mental attainments are stultified from birth onwards by poor psychological handling, by noise urii’estricted to such an extent as to deafen the brain, and by permitting a flourishing trade in poisonous foodstuffs—all of which evils play an important part in the lowering of the massintelligence of the human race by some ten points in each century.