I was surprised to find that the mean of these numbers is 97.36. While that is not too much of a deviation from the expected mean, I am still surprised. It was not so long ago, i.e., when I was in university (1974), that the mean IQ of the United States people was established as 104.5.
This is a good reason to question the validity of the data used, assuming an adequately large sample was involved.
Just remember, as with penis sizes, it has never been demonstrated, let alone proven, that human intelligence follows a normal distribution. Yes, you can make the scores fit a normal distribution - and this is what psychometricians do - but that is akin to Sherlock Holmes' warning that it is a capital error making the facts fir the theory, rather than vice versa. It's only value is in saying "Hey, you're two standard deviations above the mean."
jonb mentioned Richard Lynn. Richard Lynn was involved with a journal of exceedingly dubious scholarship: The Mankind Quarterly. Sadly, this publication, often distributed free of charge to academic libraries to give it the patina of scholarship, has a thinly veiled agenda that is - at best - disenheartening and at its worst downright dishonest. And yet, I can take you romping through academic libraries all over the map where you will find the lovely matched buckram bound sets of this rag - may its name be spoken with a bad taste in one's mouth forever.
Anyone can compile anything and give it enough "polish" to lead most people into thinking that it is scholarly - witness the recent spate of nonsense papers that are finding their way into "respectable," peer-reviewed journals. Some of these papers are written by computer programs. I have long believed that Richard Lynn and his henchmen did this with far more flash and style than any computer can manage.
A long time ago, I wrote as novel in which an addict to drugstore fiction himself wrote a computer program called "Schlock 86" into which you put in names of characters, settings, and the basic plot and the result was appropriately turgid prose in whatever vein you chose, be it science fiction, detective, western or romance.
Now, life imitates art, yet again.
So, are Americans getting dumber, even if only in terms of whatever IQ tests purport to measure?
Is academia going down the tubes in obsessing over falsely profound questions of racism, political correctness, and whether, at bottom, we are all animals with the blessings of an opposable thumb and hand to eye coordination?
Is the United States in some stage of cultural de-evolution?
Is "evolution" a now bad word - even in that connotation?
Alas, I fear that the answer to each of these four is becoming a resounding yes.
Sad....so very, very sad.
