From Heroes to Zeros

The counter-selective (from an eugenic standpoint) effects of war.

Read this; emphasis added:.

Being dumb has its benefits. Scottish soldiers who survived the second world war were less intelligent than men who gave their lives defeating the Third Reich, a new study of British government records concludes.

The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test – which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 – averaged 97.4.

The unprecedented demands of the second world war – fought more with brains than with brawn compared with previous wars – might account for the skew, says Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. Dozens of other studies have shown that smart people normally live longer than their less intelligent peers.

“We wonder whether more skilled men were required at the front line, as warfare became more technical,” Dear says.

His team’s study melds records from Scottish army units with results of national tests performed by all 11-year-olds in 1932. The tests assessed verbal reasoning, mathematics and spatial skills.

“No other country has ever done such a whole-population test of the mental ability of its population,” Deary says. Other studies have found that childhood IQs accurately predict intelligence later in life.

Equal intelligence

A previous study found a fall in intelligence among Scottish men after the war, and at the time Deary’s team theorised that less intelligent men were more likely to be rejected for military service. The new study appears to refute that suggestion. Men who didn’t serve were more intelligent than surviving veterans, and of equal intelligence to those who died.

Analysing their data by rank offers some insight. Low-ranking soldiers accounted for three-fifths of all deaths, and their IQs measured by their childhood tests averaged 95.3. Officers and non-commissioned officers made up for about 7% and 20% of war deaths respectively. Officers scored 121.9, bringing up the average IQ for those who died. Non-commissioned officers scored an average of 106.7.

“We also wondered whether there was an overall small tendency for more intelligent soldiers to want to do the job well, perhaps meaning they ended up in more threatening situations,” Deary says.

Phil Batterham, an epidemiologist at Australian National University in Canberra, wonders what aspects of intelligence made soldiers more likely to die in the war. “One could hypothesise that the association between greater intelligence and higher war-related mortality might be driven by the more crystallised verbal abilities, leading to greater leadership roles,” as opposed to other forms of intelligence, he says.

So, one can suppose that much (all?) of what Der Movement ascribes to “racial degeneration via race replacement and admixture” in history is actually due to a number of more endogenous factors: dysgenic breeding (the dumb have more children, even in peacetime), genetic pacification, and then, on top of that, when war occurs, it is the more intelligent, dynamic, and courageous (and physically fit) portion of the (young) male population who die, leaving more degenerate remnants to be the subject of more cycles of dysgenic breeding, genetic pacification, and, to the extent that the pacified population can be pushed to war, yet more counter-selection of the fit and courageous (whatever elements of such that are left in the degenerating population).

Although "men who didn't  serve" were more intelligent in the abovementioned study, these were a small fraction of the young male population of Britain, and may have included technical people who were engaged in high-IQ war-related activity at home; the bottom-line is that most men served and the most intelligent of these were more likely to die.

You can go from a race of heroes to a race of zeros without even needing to invoke admixture (which may also occur, of course, but perhaps more often the result of [pre-existing] degeneration rather than its cause).

Also see this book, which I read long ago.

“This book is written to show the relation of war to the downfall of nations. The certainty that war leads toward racial decadence by the obliteration of the most virile elements, these being thereby left unrepresented in heredity, is becoming widely accepted as the racial argument against the War System of the world, standing second only to the final argument of the human conscience that murder remains murder even when done on a gigantic scale under the sanction of the state and the blessing of the church." David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) was a noted educator, scientist and peace activist. Educated at Cornell University, Butler University, and the Indiana University School of Medicine he became the President of Indiana University in 1885, the youngest university president in the nation at the time. Six years later, he accepted the post of President of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he remained, first as president and later as chancellor, until his retirement. Dr. Jordan was a renowned expert in many fields. His training was mainly in ichthyology, the study of fish, and he was widely regarded in that field. He served as an expert witness on the validity of the theory of evolution at the Scopes trial in Tennessee. In addition, he was known for his work in education and philosophy, publishing many works on those subjects.