Stalled

摘要

In denmark, every man is liable for military service at the age of 18. Nowadays, only a few thousand get conscripted but all have to be assessed, and that includes doing an IQ test. Until recently, the same one had been used since the 1950s. "We actually have the same test being administered to 25 to 30,000 young men every year," says Thomas Teasdale, a psychologist at the University of Copenhagen. The results are surprising. Over this time, there has been a dramatic increase in the average IQ of Danish men. So much so that what would have been an average score in the 1950s is now low enough to disqualify a person from military service, Teasdale says. The same phenomenon has been observed in many other countries. For at least a century, each generation has been measurably brighter than the last. But this cheerful chapter in social history seems to be drawing to a close. In Denmark, the most rapid rises in IQ, of about 3 points per decade, occurred from the 1950s to the 1980s. Scores peaked in 1998 and have actually declined by 1.5 points since then. Something similar seems to be happening in a few other developed countries, too, including the UK and Australia.