Our Shrinking IQ: New Icelandic Study Shows 0.04 Point Drop In IQ Per Decade
A new study in Iceland is one of the latest to show that natural selection may be slowly eradicating our education genes and reducing our IQ scores each decade. The newest research on this phenomenon was conducted by deCODE, a genetics firm located in Reykjavik. They have discovered that groups of genes which would normally “predispose” people to spend many years involved in higher education have gone down in Iceland over the years 1910 to 1975.
In order to study the phenomenon of the shrinking IQ, scientists looked at a database of 100,000 people in Iceland to try to learn how different gene variants could affect education over time and found a small decline over 65 years. But scientists also discovered that these same genes not only affected education, they also affected fertility, as The Guardian report.
The fertility issue was noticed as the Icelandic people who were found to carry more of the education genes had less children than others. Scientists decided that perhaps this was because those with education genes tended to have smaller families, thus contributing less to the gene pool than others in Iceland. However, this study showed that spending longer years studying wasn’t the cause of those with education genes having fewer children as many of those who had these education genes left school early and still had fewer children than the general Icelandic population.
Kari Stefansson, who led the study on the declining IQ, explained that education wasn’t the cause of people with education genes have less children.
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Our Shrinking IQ: New Icelandic Study Shows 0.04 Point Drop In IQ Per Decade is an article from: The Inquisitr News
