A study of WWII soldiers who all took the same IQ tests when they were children suggests that more intelligent soldiers are more likely to die in battle. This would mean that -- logically speaking -- the more wars we have, the more of our best and brightest are killed. Hmm. From an evolutionary perspective, that would seem to suggest that the more wars we have, the dumber we all become, since only the dumber people are left to breed.
I guess that could explain why America -- which has insisted on staying on a more or less constant war footing since the end of WWII -- ended up allowing Republican politics to dominate it so much since. We're literally becoming too stupid to vote for smart choices in many of our elections. And so stupid that too many of us actually believe the lies spewed by entities like Fox News. So that a single rich and ill-intentioned man like Rupert Murdoch can come very close to simply buying many elections by way of propaganda.
If America's war footing truly has been causing us to 'devolve' in this manner, that would also help explain the increasingly frail health and stunted height of many Americans today, compared to Americans in the days before our policies of perpetual war. For we'd not only be dumber on average, but smaller and more frail too, if mostly the substandard among us are left to breed after the best of us have been spent on war.
University of Edinburgh, via NewScientist
Now, this does not completely true. This old war horse made it through and his IQ scores are above quite (and quite above, to boot), a few others. So further extrapolation of this theory would indicate that the most intelligent soldiers would make it through a war alive. But, then again they're only a few of us to begin with ...
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