The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of
innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined
subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western
nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be
related to declining IQ. This is because IQ
scores are excellent predictors of job performance and high-IQ persons are more
productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were
cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely
measures of simple reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time
measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence and are
therefore considered elementary measures of cognition. In
this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time
described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries
conducted between 1884 and 2004 to estimate the decline in general intelligence
that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using
psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple
reaction time and g, yielding a
decline of -1.23 IQ points per decade
or fourteen IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate
that with respect to g, the
Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.