A thought on the big moose post.

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You are evaluating the entirety of human intelligence based on your experience checking out of the grocery store? IIRC, you are close to being a senior citizen. I guarantee you no one in my much younger age group would be dumb enough to make prognostications on human intelligence based on what they see in the Enquirer.

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Um, no, that's not what I'm trying to say.

I'm saying the theory seems to make sense, at least on its surface; and that I've also encountered many more retards ringing cash registers than I used to encounter. When I was in my teens and twenties it seemed people ringing registers at corner drugstores, gas stations, and later convenience stores, weren't half-wits. They were just average people, give or take a bit. I didn't run into ones who could hardly do their job. Now however I seem to run into a lot of them. Granted it's personal anecdotal evidence which may be of little or no significance, and may actually illustrate another principal at work in some way, but it does seem to fit in with the theory I came up with. Basically I seem to run into more nitwits everyehere than I did two or three decades ago. And it isn't even close. But that's not the main reason I suspect this sort of devolution may be happening; rather it just seems like it would quite possibly happen if on average the dumber people were to start outbreeding the smarter people. And actually they have been doing so for quite a few decades now.

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I agree that it isn't close.

And I think the reason is that young kids are very vulnerable to insufficient brain development from inadequate nutrition and inadequate stimulation. I think both have gone up in my time on the planet.

Worse Nutrition:

-- more fast foods
-- more prepared foods
-- tremendous societal acceptance of feeding same to children, even infants; this did not used to be socially acceptable
-- school lunches for children have been cut even to orphanages
-- early childhood programs which get kids out of the house, like HeadStart, have been cut back a lot
-- drug epidemics have left lots of people having kids who don't feed them (or stimulate their mental growth properly)
-- the explosion of welfare encouraged poor, lazy, drug-addicted, or just unambitious women to have as many children as possible, turning childbearing into an acceptable career path

Worse Mental Stimulation

-- a number of the above items
-- television has become a perfectly acceptable babysitter
-- sports heroes have become virtually our only important societal role models, and sports don't demand a great deal of intelligence and are even as often as not part of an anti-intellectual culture
-- reading has fallen out of favor with both adults and children; many kids grow up with no adult role models who read or care if they read either

And finally, societally, wealth has concentrated tremendously in the hands of the wealthy and upper middle classes in the past 25 years. This of course will make people of other classes both more prone to things like alcholism and drug abuse, with their terrible effects on the development of their children, and simply leave them with less ability to properly care for their kids and feed them right even if they're not in some way crippling themselves.

All those things have happened in less than half a century, and each is a powerful shaper of which kids come into the world, and whether kids come into this world in full development of their mental and physical powers, and full genetic potential.

The huge religious upsurge in America in the last 30-odd years has also had a lot to do with it. This is partly from enormous immigration from lands in which both birth control and abortion are traditionally shunned, and partly from our indigenous populations persistently trying to keep sex education out of schools, trying to criminalize and make socially unacceptable and sometimes unavailable abortion and other forms of birth control.

One way or the other, native population or immigrants, we're spewing out the babies pretty heedlessly now, on a very large scale, consequences be damned, including the health and futures of the children. Or should I say, that is being damned especially.