Abstract
A SYMPOSIUM on “Psychological Studies of the Quality of the Population’ was held by Section J (Psychology) at The Newcastle meeting of the British Association, with the president of the Section, Sir Godfree Thomson, in the chair. Prof. P. E. Vernon London, introducing the subject, outlined the well known facts of the differential birth-rate not on between different social classes but also between oent intelligence-level within the same class. Most authorities agree that this should lead to a decline of 1 J or more points of average intelligence quotient per generation, and that the numbers of very bright children may be halved, of feeble-minded children doubled, before the end of the century. The only direct evidence of such a decline in the national intelligence is that obtained by Burt in his successive standardizations of versions of the Binet scale, and this may have been upset by migration of many brighter families or by incomplete representativeness of the samples he tested. Similarly, the reported rise in numbers of mental defectives between 1907 and 1929 is largely attributable to more complete ascertainment.
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Measurement and Trend of Intelligence. Nature 164, 598–599 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/164598a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/164598a0