A study finding IQ today lower than it was a generation ago is getting a bad reception in the Human Behavioral Diversity community and Bruce Charlton thinks he knows why:

What I think this incident reveals is some implicit but covert assumptions in the HBD community; and that these assumptions are very important to the participants – such that a challenge to them provokes the same kind of aggressive defence as would be expected from a challenge to someone’s existential basis – such as a ‘religion’ (bearing in mind that almost all the HBD community are agnostic/ atheist and those few [just a handful, it seems] who are not atheist/agnostics, are very reticent about their religious beliefs).

I have not got to the bottom of this matter as yet, but I think there are a couple of things I can say:

1. High IQ as a virtue

High intelligence is regarded as a virtue in the HBD community – therefore to suggest     that intelligence is declining is equivalent to saying that people are getting morally worse.

2. Salvation through technology

The HBD community seeks salvation through technological breakthroughs, and declining intelligence suggests that this salvation will not come.

(This belief is most obvious among explicit transhumanists; but cryto-transhumansism is very common among scientists, and pretty much the background religion of atheist modernity: the major alternative to traditional religion.)

3. Belief in progress

Belief in progress is so powerful in this group, that it seems not so much false as an outrage for modern people to be forced to acknowledge that earlier generations were (on the whole) considerably superior in some attribute which modern people deeply value – such as intelligence.