Scientists find the human brain has grown by whopping 7% since 1930... but there are signs IQs have gone backwards in recent years

This is an interesting paradox. There is a long-standing correlation of about 0.3 between brain size and IQ. So the findings are weakly contradictory. I think, however, that I may be able to give an outline of a solution to that puzzle.

I once hypthesized that better perinatal practices were reponsible for the average IQ gains that were observed in many countries during the 20th century

http://jonjayray.com/iqgain.html

If my hypothesis is correct, the benefit of improved obstetric practice should level out once best delivery procedures became normal. And it was so. The growth in IQ scores did level out towards the end of the 20th century.

But we need to ask the old legal question "cui bono?". Which babies did it help most? Babies who were physically normal would be helped to survive with undamaged brains so brain damage due to delivery practices should be rare and hence lead to a rise in average IQ.

And the correlation between higher IQ and larger brains means that less pressure on the head during delivery (due to episiotomy, Caesarians, principally) would be particulary helpful to undamaged survival among individuals with big heads. So a major source of better and undamaged survival among high IQ individuals would be the safer delivery of big headed babies

But what about babies which had some congenital problem that only modern medicine saved from oblivion? In many cases the congenital problem would have affected the brain and Left us with an individual of lower IQ, much lower in some cases

So we have two populations with opposite effects from modernity. "Normals" who avoided damage so became brighter on average and another which survived against the odds and which was on the average of lower IQ. So what we find reported below is the averaging out of those two populations

A note of caution, however. It is much easier and more accurate to measure head size than it is to measure IQ, and the IQ gain reported is quite low and of no certain reliabiity. And in general the higher you go up the IQ scale the lower is the reliability of the differences. So much more segmentaion of the populations concerned would be needed to give any certainty about what is going on


Gen Z and Alpha may have a larger brain than people who were born 100 years ago, yet studies have indicated they also have the lowest IQs of previous generations.

Researchers at the University of California (UC) Davis Health studied different brain sizes of people born from the 1930 through 1970s, finding a 6.6 percent increased in brains among Gen X compared to the Silent Generation.

The team theorized that growth could be caused by external influences like health, social, cultural and educational outside factors and could reduce the risk of age-related dementia.

It comes as more recent studies have indicated that even younger generations' IQ scores have dropped in recent decades, which researchers have linked to an overreliance on phones and the internet.

Brain size doesn't necessarily make people more intelligent, and research has suggested that their is only a slight relationship between the two.

Neuroscientists have found that extra brain mass actually accomplishes very little when it comes to intelligence, and instead it serves to allow people to store more lifetime memories, according to Psychology Today.

However, the latest findings could be a contributing factor to why younger generations have a lower risk for developing dementia or Alzheimer's.

The new study was conducted across 75 years and found the brain consistently grew by 6.6 percent for people in the 1970s compared to those born in the 1930s.

Today's generation's brains measure about 1,400 milliliters in volume, but the average brain volume for people born in the 1930s was 1,234 milliliters.

The researchers reported that factors like greater educational achievements and better management of medical issues might explain why people's brains have grown over the decades.

'The decade someone is born appears to impact brain size and potentially long-term brain health,' said Charles DeCarli, first author of the study and professor of neurology at the UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.

Researchers looked at patterns of cardiovascular and other diseases of people born in the 1930s and introduced MRI tests (brain magnetic resonance imaging) of people of the second and third generations of the original 5,200 participants.

The MRIs were conducted between 1999 and 2019 on people born in the 1930s through the 1970s, consisting of more than 3,000 participants with an average age of 57 years old.

The area of the brain that grew the largest was the cortical surface area which controls motor activities and sensory information.

Scientists have uncovered hundreds of different and unique regions of the brain

They reported that the area increased by 15 percent in volume and the region of the brain involved in learning and memory, called the hippocampus, had also increased in size.

However, the number of people struck by Alzheimer's has decreased by 20 percent since the 1970s, according to a separate study, and researchers are now saying increased brain size may be the culprit.

'Larger brain structures like those observed in our study may reflect improved brain development and improved brain health,' DeCarli said.

'A larger brain structure represents a larger brain reserve and may buffer the late-life effects of age-related brain diseases like Alzheimer's and related dementias.'

The brain growth in younger generations could increase brain connectivity, the study said, which could lead to more accurate and efficient performances on tasks.

Yet, even as researchers report the brain is growing with each generation, Gen Z and Alpha's IQs have dropped by at least two points, according to studies in Finland, France, the UK and other countries.

A 2023 study reported that IQ scores in the US have also dropped, but did not specify the exact drop, adding that the decrease could be due to disruptions to in-person learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The researchers also said the rise in social media use could be at fault, as skills like verbal reasoning, visual problem solving and numerical series tests have all gone down.

Academic and science presenter professor Jim Al-Khalili previously told Dailymail.com in 2022 that despite our ‘vastly increased scientific knowledge… the human brain hasn’t got bigger or more efficient or better than it was thousands of years ago.'

This is in direct contrast to the newest findings that the human brain is getting larger, but also raises the question of how cognitive development is increasing while gen Z and Alpha struggle to meet the same IQ levels as past generations.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13244559/Gen-Z-Alpha-larger-brains-IQs-decreasing.html

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The media gives us not the truth, but their propaganda

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Why Product Safety Regulations Should Be Scrapped

A common objection to unfettered capitalism is that, left to their own devices, greedy industrialists would cut corners with product safety, resulting in tremendous harm to consumers. Dangerous products would flood the market, leading to a dystopia of preventable death and destruction.

Extreme hypotheticals are brought up the moment someone suggests a hands-off approach. Drugs would have life-threatening side effects, we are told, because Big Pharma would be trying to get away with minimal testing. Cars would become killing machines as companies scrap seatbelts and airbags to cut costs. And buildings would surely collapse all over the place, since companies would be using the cheapest materials available.

These fears are not merely hypothetical, either. History, we are told, is replete with examples where the laissez-faire approach was tried and led to predictably disastrous results. “Remember the thalidomide scandal?” one might say. “Remember all the traffic fatalities and building collapses?” “Do you not realize that almost all the safety regulations that exist today were created because free markets failed to ‘regulate themselves’?!”

Examples of tragic accidents are submitted to the court of public opinion one after another, each of them intended to indict unregulated capitalism for the tragedy. How, in the face of all this evidence, could anyone seriously advance the long-debunked idea of laissez-faire?

Well, here’s how.

The Parable of the Safety-First Standards

The first thing to understand about this discussion is that safer doesn’t necessarily mean better. There are trade-offs involved with almost every safety enhancement. To illustrate this point, I like to tell a story that I call the parable of the safety-first standards. It goes something like this.

A local politician is concerned about road fatalities in his town. Sure, car companies have some safety standards for their vehicles, but clearly these standards aren’t sufficient, because people are still dying in car crashes. “This is unacceptable,” he says to himself. “Car companies shouldn’t be allowed to sell death machines.”

Irate at the situation, he devises a plan to solve the problem. The next day, he presents legislation requiring every car company to adopt what he calls the “safety-first” standards, the name implying that he won’t settle for anything less than the highest levels of safety. The regulations go on for pages and pages detailing countless safety features that will now be required in all cars. “We already have a precedent for this in the form of mandatory seatbelts and airbags,” he notes. “Why should we stop there when people are still dying?”

The car companies, of course, are not particularly happy with the new regulations, but that doesn’t bother the politician. They were cutting corners on safety to make a buck, so pleasing them isn’t exactly his top priority. “People over profits,” he proclaims.

What he didn’t expect was pushback from a different set of constituents—drivers. The drivers were mighty pleased at first, to be sure…but then they saw the price tag. “The car companies are telling us that compliant cars will cost $500,000 and up,” they complain. “If these regulations are passed, 99% of us won’t be able to afford to drive at all.”

The politician is stumped. Here he was trying to help drivers, and now they are complaining! Don’t they care about their own safety?

Understanding their concerns, however, he tables an amendment the next day which reduces some of the stringent safety requirements. Compliant cars will now only cost $450,000.

The drivers keep complaining.

“That still leaves 98% of us unable to afford to drive,” they protest. “Please relax the requirements more.”

Reluctantly, the politician relaxes the regulations bit by bit, and every time he does, driving becomes affordable again for more and more people. But then he faces a conundrum: where to stop? People are priced out of the market because of seatbelt and airbag requirements, too. Should those also be dropped in the name of cost saving?

Absolutely not, he reasons. “There is a certain minimum safety standard that is necessary,” he says to himself. “And my experts and I are best positioned to evaluate what that standard should be. Anyone who is priced out of the market because of those regulations—it’s for their own good!”

Lessons from the Parable
What can we learn from the parable of the safety-first standards? For one, there is almost always a trade-off between safety and cost. Safer products means more expensive products, with very few exceptions. Fancy braking systems in cars, more testing for drugs, better materials for buildings…all of these cost more money.

Another key takeaway is that businesses are always making compromises regarding safety. Every product you buy could be safer. You can always create something with better materials, better experts, more testing, and more features. We could have cars with extremely high-tech safety systems, drugs that have undergone thousands of trials, and buildings made of titanium. But the reason we don’t make everything as safe as possible all the time is that it would be way too expensive, and people don’t want that—you don’t want that. You demonstrate this every time you buy a product that is less than the safest possible alternative.

Another thing we can see in the parable is that safety is a difference of degree, not kind. People often talk about products being “safe” or “dangerous” as if it’s a binary. But in reality, there is just a spectrum of compromises, with high safety and high cost on one end and low safety and low cost on the other end.

“That all makes sense,” you might say. “But doesn’t the politician in the parable have a point? Don’t we need to specify a certain minimum degree of safety to protect people?”

Well, that depends on your political philosophy. Clearly some degree of safety is important. But why should the government set one arbitrary standard for everyone? Why not let consumers make their own choices about how much safety they want to pay for, and let businesses cater to those choices?

It’s important to remember that people in different circumstances will have vastly different values when it comes to safety and cost. You might think it’s reckless to take a drug with fewer than 5,000 tests, but if someone else wants to take a drug with only 1,000 tests because it’s cheaper, who are you to stop them?

The question is not whether risk and reward should be weighed. Of course they should. The question is who should make that judgment: the government, or the individual?

The only justification for the government making the decision is the paternalistic one. Like the politician in the parable, those who would ban “dangerous” cost-safety compromises are effectively saying, “We are taking this option away from you for your own good.”

The nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat rightly scorned this haughty attitude. “If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free,” he wrote, “how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

By imposing arbitrary safety standards on others, politicians and their supporters are effectively declaring themselves to be smarter and wiser than their fellow man. How else could they justify this blatant interference with free choice? “Apparently, then,” Bastiat continues, “the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.”

The Case against Product Safety Regulations
Another problem with imposing minimum safety standards is that the “dangerous” options that are made illegal by these laws may very well represent the best cost-safety trade-off for many people, especially the less affluent. Ironically, then, the safety laws that are meant to protect consumers actually do a great deal of harm to consumers!

When cheaper options are taken away, people either have to pay an arm and a leg for their products or simply go without. The less-safe product would, in their judgment, be preferable to the expensive one. But the very product they believe would be best for their welfare is the one that—in the name of protecting their welfare—they are prohibited from purchasing.

In his book Power and Market, Murray Rothbard uses the example of medical licensing to illustrate how safety and quality regulations cause harm:

It may very well be, for example, that a certain number of years’ attendance at a certain type of school turns out the best quality of doctors…But by prohibiting the practice of medicine by people who do not meet these requirements, the government is injuring consumers who would buy the services of the outlawed competitors…Consumers are prevented from choosing lower-quality treatment of minor ills, in exchange for a lower price, and are also prevented from patronizing doctors who have a different theory of medicine from that sanctioned by the state-approved medical schools.

The same goes for all other arbitrary standards. When the government mandates standards for drug testing, safety features in cars, or building codes, it is taking away all the cheaper options—options that some consumers may very well have preferred if they had been allowed to take them.

Now, it’s true that in the absence of safety laws some people would make compromises that seem reckless to us. For example, a fellow might commission a $1,000 house that is riddled with cheap materials, is constantly on the verge of collapsing, and is basically the definition of “not up to code.”

But before rushing to criminalize this act of production, we need to consider the impact such a ban would have. Clearly, the person commissioning this house feels like it’s his best option given his circumstances. Perhaps he is extremely poor, and this is all he can afford. Perhaps his only other option is being out on the street. If this is the case, how is it helping him to take away his best option? Just as banning sweatshops only hurts the poor, so too banning shoddy buildings only restricts the options of those who are down on their luck. The choice they face is between a cheap building and no building at all. Insisting on expensive safety standards guarantees they will be left with no building.

To be clear, I’m not saying every cost-safety compromise is praiseworthy. Some compromises should really not be made, even if the person making them thinks it’s a good idea. But even when we disagree, there are good reasons to keep the government out of it. For one, as mentioned above, forcing our opinions on others is rather conceited. What’s more, the people actually involved in any given circumstance are often much better situated to evaluate the relevant trade-offs than are government bureaucrats. One-size-fits-all systems inevitably impose the wrong decision in some contexts, even if it would be the right decision in other contexts. A $1,000 low-safety house might be a bad trade-off for someone well-off, but it could be a life-saver for someone in need.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/03/26/product-safety-regulations/

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Top scientists call for an end to daylight saving time: Experts warn clock change fuels a rise in cancer, traffic accidents and sleep issues

I am rather sympathetic to this. I live in a State that has always resisted daylight saving, mainly because we have here a lot of influential farmers, and farmers loathe daylight saving. But I am glad of it. I don't like people messing around with my clocks. The fact that I have a lot of clocks may be a factor. I have 5 clocks in my bedroom alone. Apologies for being eccentric but at least I always know the time

With the clocks set to go forward this Sunday, many of us will be dreading losing an hour of sleep.

And if you think putting the clocks forward each is a literal waste of time, you are not alone.

Top sleep scientists say that shifting the day by just an hour can have massive consequences and claim it should be ditched entirely.

From increasing cancer rates to making car accidents more likely, daylight savings can do a lot more harm than just ruining your lie-in.

Dr Eva Winnebeck, lecturer in Chronobiology at the University of Surrey, told MailOnline: 'Chronobiologists warn against the clock change to Daylight Saving Time – each spring or even permanently.'

Problems linked with daylight savings time
Putting the clocks forward each year has been associated with:

In the UK, daylight savings time was first introduced in 1916 as a wartime effort to save electricity and provide more daylight hours for making ammunition.

Yet while Britons are no longer churning out tank shells, in the Spring and Autumn each year we still move our clocks one hour forward or backwards.

The argument is that, as the days get longer, shifting our days forward gives people more sunlight hours during their working days.

Proponents of this measure cite everything from lower crime rates in the evening to fewer deer being hit by cars as potential upsides.

However, many scientists say that the change is not only inconvenient, but is also actively harmful to our health.

The biggest and most obvious impact of the change is that we lose an hour of sleep the night the clocks go forward, and have to go to bed an hour earlier the next day.

For the vast majority of people, this will result in nothing more than feeling more tired than usual and the issue should resolve within a few days.

But having an entire nation of people suddenly all become slightly sleep-deprived is bound to have some consequences.

One study found an increase in 'cyberloafing' - the act of spending more of the work day making unrelated searchers online - on the Monday after the clocks go forward.

Another study published in 2016 even found that judges in the US tend to give defendants sentences that are about five per cent harsher on 'sleepy Monday' following the clock change.

More worryingly, it has also been suggested that the risk of fatal traffic accidents increases by about six per cent following the Spring daylight savings time transition.

Estimates suggest that about 28 fatal accidents could be avoided in the US every year if daylight savings were abolished.

Dr Winnebeck said: 'The spring clock change, where we fast forward our clocks by 1 hour, is the clock change that is usually most disruptive to our health and wellbeing.

'Sleep loss can have many negative consequences - and with the clock change it affects millions of people at the same time!'

Having our sleep disrupted in this way can also have knock-on effects on our overall health.

Dr Megan Crawford, a sleep researcher from the University of Strathclyde and member of the British Sleep Society, told MailOnline: 'There's an increased risk of cardiovascular events, increased risk of suicidal behaviours... and increased mortality in the days after switching our clocks: those are all linked to the loss of that one hour of sleep.'

Dr Crawford says the British Sleep Society believes that standard time should be reinstated and used all year round due to the 'short-term impact of the clock change, the potential impact across the summer, and the detrimental impact of potential permanent daylight saving times.'

Our bodies have a kind of internal clock called our circadian rhythm, which determines when we eat, when we sleep, when we are most active, and when our brains are at their best.

While the solar day is 24 hours long, the body's rhythm tends to be just a little bit longer.

This means that someone who lived in the dark would naturally wake up a little bit later each day as their biological clock comes out of sync with the solar day.

Humans are only able to keep our body clocks in line thanks to an initial dose of bright morning sun every day.

'We rely on a cue of bright light to bring them into line with the normal 24-hour solar cycle,' said Dr Sophie Bostock, a sleep scientist and founder of The Sleep Scientist.

'If we don't get that cue first thing in the morning, then we're lagging.'

Since daylight savings time gives us fewer hours of light in the morning, lots of people miss that initial bump of daylight that helps realign our body clocks.

Dr Bostock said: 'From a circadian rhythm perspective, there is definitely a case for ditching daylight savings time.'

There is now a growing, if somewhat contested, body of evidence that this mismatch between the sun and our bodies can have severe long-term health impacts.

The main issue with testing how daylight savings affects us in the long-term is that we don't have a lot of data from times when we did not observe daylight savings time.

Dr Crawford sad: 'The best data we can draw on comes from health differences in individuals who live on different sides of a time zone, with poorer health in those who live on the western side.

'This is because the mismatch between the sun time and our clocks is greatest [in the West].

Studies have shown that those living in the West of a time zone have higher risks of leukaemia, stomach cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and more.

Those in the west also experience lower life expectancy, higher rates of obesity, amd diabetes, and even lower income.

Since this mismatch is very similar to those experienced when the clocks go forward, some scientists say daylight savings might be having a similar impact.

Yet some scientists say the damage to our health might be even more direct.

Dr Rachel Edgar, a molecular virologist from Imperial College London, told MailOnline that these kinds of disruptions could even make us more susceptible to illness.

Dr Edgar says: 'Evidence from different animal models suggests that disruption to our circadian rhythms increases the severity of different infectious diseases, such as influenza A or herpes virus.'

While she adds that more research is needed to see if this is the case in humans, she notes that 'body clocks can impact both virus replication and immune responses to these infections'.

She concludes: 'There is a broad consensus from scientists who work on circadian rhythms and sleep that any advantages of daylight saving time are outweighed by potential negative effects on our health and well-being.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13244023/scientists-call-end-daylight-saving-time.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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