If IQ declines in rich countries, where does that leave our better angels?

It seems that the so-called "Flynn Effect" -- the steady rise of average IQ in developed nations -- may have very recently gone into reverse in some countries. So suggest studies in England, Denmark and Norway, reports Philip Hunter in Prospect (flagged by Sullivan). If the trend is real, and lasting, and widespread, it could spell serious trouble for continued decline in violence tracked by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.


In Better Angels, Flynn attributes the "rights revolutions" of recent decades, in which oppression of one group after another has come under fire or become taboo, to the spread of capacity for abstract reasoning. Not only recognition of common humanity but a sense of proportionality in inflicting punishment and deploying violence require the "Rational-Legal model' of moral judgment, which in turn "requires the nonintuitive tools of symbolic mathematics, such as fractions, percentages, and exponentiation...and depends on the cognition-enhancing skills of literacy and numeracy" (Kindle location 14338).  What if those skills no longer continue to grow, and indeed start on average to decline, in those countries that have laid  the rules of the road for the international community?

Race and IQ: Breastfeeding Shows no Link

Contra Will Saletan at Slate, recent studies of the IQ boost that breastfeeding seems to give most babies provide no evidence of a link between race and IQ.