Do you have a more authoritative cite for this than a tabloid article?

In less time than it took you to type this comment, I clicked on the embedded link in the article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329830-400-brain-dr...

The Richard Lynn they quote, has been published in Nature, amongst many other other publications: http://www.rlynn.co.uk/

The Prof. Woodley they quote, is also a real person: http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/cgi-bin/homepage.cgi?email=michael...

As is Jan te Nijenhuis: http://www.uva.nl/en/about-the-uva/organisation/staff-member...

Sorry, but I don't think your comment added anything to the discussion.

You quoted "USA/UK have lost as much as 14 IQ points since Victorian times" and cited a tabloid article.

Presumably the reason that the parent commenter thought it appropriate to to mention that it was a tabloid article was because it used the standard tabloid technique of putting a sensational notion in a headline that is almost entirely unsubstantiated in the text.

You offer as support several links, mostly just proving that people exist. But your first link, with actual information, completely refutes your statement. [1] It refers to the effect that IQ has risen by 3-10 points per decade for several decades, and in the past few years it "may" have leveled off, or dropped by 1.5 points.

The actual author of the study has said that leveling off is to be expected, and any "decline" is quite likely noise due to chance.

But regardless of whether the 1.5 point decline in the past couple years is true, the entire article the opposite of the claim that we have lost "14 IQ points since Victorian times," since you cannot reconcile that with the Flynn effect actually being discussed in the article.

Combing down through the tabloid article, almost every other study refers to a decline of "about 1 point." Your headline claim is one single interesting (though bizarre) study that uses reaction time to try to estimate IQ, and tries to compare it to reaction times in studies from the Victorian era. [2] As you can imagine, published responses to this article from other scientists has been that of skepticism, to put it mildly. [3]

1. http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2014-September/015965.html

2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613...

3. http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/nettlebeck201...

I covered this in my original statement with the comment about "topping up" the Flynn effect.

The rest of your comment doesn't apply to my point, seeing as I was pointing out that it was easy to find the actual people at the actual uni's quoted, via simple Google searches, and that their published papers did in fact make the various claims.

Thus the original response of "this is from a tabloid" added no value.

I think the only value it sought to add was to point out that the source cited was, in fact, a tabloid. I don't mean that in the sense of "it's a trashy, tabloid-like article". It may be that, or it may not be. But what I can say for sure is that it appeared under the masthead of The Daily Mail, which is, literally and uncontroversially, a tabloid.