HUMAN INTELLECT

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 9362, 17 April 1939, Page 2

HUMAN INTELLECT

THE DECLINE OF INTELLIGENCE TEN POINTS A CENTURY WHAT WILL THE OUTCOME BE? (By “P.M.W.”) In view of the fact that it has been determined as a result of large-scale 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 generation to another.

It is seriously stated by several independent authorities that should the present rate of decline in mass-intel-ligence remain fairly constant during the next eight hundred years or so, the average intelligence of the population would then be about the level of Hie highest grade of feebleminded 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 intelligences 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.

RESULT OF LOWERED QUOTA 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 Petrarch in 13 50—

“In some dread moment “By the Fates assigned, “We'll pass away nor “Leave a rack behind!”

HOW IT SHOWS ITSELF

Declining intelligence shows itself in many ways. It shows itself in a constitutional inability to grasp the

urgent importance of maintaining Nature’s symbiotic equilibrium between the soil and its products (including man). It shows itself in a slowness to understand that the synthetic application of science would do much to retard —perhaps even to prevent altogether—the extinction of the race.

It shows itself in a want of encouragement to the more intellectual strata to marry early with a view to reproducing 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 superior intelligence but whose mental attainments are stultified from birth onwards by poo,' psychological handling, by noise unrestricted 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 mass-intelligence of the human race by some ten points in each century.