According to a European study by Belgian, Dutch, Swedish and Irish researchers, our Victorian ancestors were smarter than we are . Specifically, the work, published in the specialized magazine Intelligence , shows that the reaction time of human beings has been lowered from 1889 until now in the West , and that this would be related to a decrease in the IQ, which would have decreased by 14 points , that is, 1.23 points per decade. This represents a decline in intelligence, productivity and creativity today . And it contradicts the so-called Flynn effect, according to which the population's IQ has tended to increase every year since World War II.
Michael Woodley, a researcher at the University of Umea (Sweden) and co-author of the work, attributes it to a setback in the natural selection process that attributes to the fact that the most intelligent people have fewer children now than in previous decades , while people with less favorable genes have more offspring.
