Just ahead of Part Eleven of our nightly audio adventure, a reminder that tomorrow the Thursday rerun of Steyn's Song of the Week airs on Serenade Radio in the UK at 9pm Greenwich Mean Time - that's 4pm North American Eastern.
Thank you all for your kind comments on Out of Time, my variation on a theme of H G Wells, in which the Eloi and the Morlocks show up 800,000 years ahead of schedule. J Sparrow, a Vancouver member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
Mr. Steyn-
Your extrapolation of H. G. Wells' story into the contemporary world is very clever. One can wonder at what our predecessors and ancestors would have thought about us. Just we routinely look down at them, they might well scorn us. And even taking cultural differences into account some of their criticisms might be on the money.
There is this proposition floating about that, all talk of the Flynn Effect aside, we may actually collectively be declining in intelligence since the 19th Century. A horrible thought, if true.
I think that's rather more than a mere "proposition" by this stage, Mr Sparrow. Headline:
IQ Scores Are Falling in 'Worrying' Reversal of 20th Century Intelligence Boom
"Worrying" is putting it mildly. In the western world, human intelligence seems to have peaked in the Seventies:
A defining trend in human intelligence tests that saw people steadily obtaining higher IQ scores through the 20th century has abruptly ended, a new study shows.
The Flynn effect – named after the work of Kiwi intelligence researcher James Flynn – observed rapid rises in intelligence quotient at a rate of about 3 IQ points per decade in the 20th century, but new research suggests these heady boom days are long gone.
An analysis of some 730,000 IQ test results by researchers from the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway reveals the Flynn effect hit its peak for people born during the mid-1970s, and has significantly declined ever since.
"This is the most convincing evidence yet of a reversal of the Flynn effect," psychologist Stuart Ritchie from the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, told The Times.
Hmm. Why would that be?
In tonight's episode of Out of Time, our Victorian time-traveler is outraged at the sacrifice of England's most vulnerable girls on the altar of diversity:
My blood was up. When a group of Mohammedans boarded the train at Prince Regent, their impregnable cocksure confidence, with all its implied contempt for the remnants of the English race, disgusted me. I waited two minutes and then yelled at them: 'Do you know your brethren are violating this poor lady's twelve-year-old sister?'
But they laughed in my face. 'They're white slags, not "ladies",' one jeered. 'Yeah,' said another. 'Won't leave us alone. We're the ones being violated.'
So I yelled at the three white men in our carriage. They were pasty, paunchy; I could not tell their age: perhaps sixty, but dressed as four-year-olds...
'Are you "men" going to sit by while these savages rape your daughters?'
One shrugged. Another looked away. The third said: 'Not my daughters, bruv. I'm Ukrainian. We don't bother with kids.'
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Eleven of Out of Time simply by clicking here and logging-in.
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Please join me right here tomorrow evening for another episode of Out of Time.
