Unfortunately, the cocktail of traits that made Western civilization doesn't seem to constitute an evolutionarily stable strategy.
That cocktail created prosperity, which, coupled with empathy and egalitarianism, led to the welfare state, which in turn is dysgenic for almost all civilization-making traits.
Not only that, the Western man decided to extend the welfare state to the whole world, subsidizing the proliferation of masses that will not be able to sustain modern civilization or themselves once the global welfare state is gone. And in the final phase of suicidal empathy, he decided to import a sizable share of those Third World masses into his own home, turbocharging the decline.
Nah, I used to think like this, but I realized it's a fast path to hell. Galton and the original eugenicists wanted to create a literal society of slaves ruled by an elite class. It sounds good on paper, but when you look at the writings of the elite—from the formation of UNESCO to the parasitic ideology of transhumanism—you see the grim reality.
These people claim they want to re-engineer humans to be smarter, but their real goal is to make us more hackable and pliable. In theory, it sounds great, but in reality, it's garbage. Now, if this technology were decentralized, it might be fine. But if it ever gets into the government's hands, we are utterly cooked
"What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction."
— Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (1909)
"The aim of Eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation."
— Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (1909)
The Danger in His Words: The danger is the calm, rational-sounding justification for dividing society into "useful classes" and others. The word "kindly" is chilling; it implies that managing human populations—deciding who should and should not reproduce for the good of the state—is a benevolent act. This is the foundational logic for coercive state control over the most personal aspects of human life.
"Thus, even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable."
— Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946)
"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization."
— Julian Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Now i don't support banning tech like Embryo selection but if your not careful in the words of the elites themselves we will be slaves to there new world order I'm not a conspiracy theorist they tell on themselves it's a conspiracy if they speak about it
Democracy can work if the middle class is sufficiently large and if the majority feel they have "skin in the game." But that doesn't seem to be where we're headed.
and what's your solution government enforced Eugenics ? like that can't ever go wrong but you seem have a lot in common with these eugenicists and they were the elites of yester year in other words your opinions share the same foundations as the globalist think tanks that's the funny part
"Thus, even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable."
— Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946)
"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization."
I wasn't referring to eugenics. I'll try to summarize my views on the topic:
- I have no problem with parents exercising reproductive choices, including prenatal screening. It's their children, and they're the ones who'll have to raise them.
- Criminals should not be allowed to reproduce while still serving a prison term.
- Family benefits should not be reduced or clawed back for middle-class parents. The aim should be to redistribute money from childless individuals to couples with children, and not from the rich to the poor.
- Gamete donation and surrogacy for infertile couples should be fully legalized.
- The age of mass migration must end. Population growth should come about primarily through natural increase.
- I have issues with eugenics per se. Supporters of eugenics focus almost entirely on IQ, and selection solely for IQ would have unintended consequences, i.e., an increase in the number of high-IQ sociopaths and autists.
"Family benefits should not be reduced or clawed back for middle-class parents. The aim should be to redistribute money from childless individuals to couples with children, and not from the rich to the poor"
Many valuable people are childless precisely because the government confiscates a huge share of their income to promote the ceaseless multiplication of human biomass.
I've thought about this as well. I think that generally the amount of money you need when you're raising children is massively more than when you're a single person.
In the past the cost-benefit was reversed: if you didn't have children, you would have no one to support you in your old age. Children were also cheap labor for family businesses and family farms.
I agree. I'm talking more about state-enforced eugenics, and that's what these elites are heading us towards. It's a deal with the devil, and I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but these people tell on themselves.
I don't think they believe in a literal devil; they believe in the Promethean fire of gnosis that brought man out of Eden and into the light.
They want to basically create a world system where humanity is god, and some gods are better than others. Essentially, they want to create a cosmic caste system. I don't mean that, like the 'mustache man,' they got in a boardroom and are all working together. No, it's competing ideologies, but they have the same goal and aim for that on a personal level. If you want to use embryo selection, I'm more than for it.
I'm more worried about the eugenics framing from a state level. If the government gets access to this tech, we are utterly cooked, especially with the coming world order they are trying to move us towards
Yuval noah harrari
History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods
Once technology enables us to re-engineer human bodies and brains, we will no longer be Homo sapiens
strongly believe that given the technologies we are now developing, within a century or two at most, our species will disappear. I don't think that in the end of the 22nd century, the Earth will still be dominated by Homo sapiens
We are now hackable animals. The whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will... that's over
If you don't get to know yourself better, there is somebody out there who is, right now, trying to hack you
Jacques Attali
Finally they will manufacture the human being like a made-to-measure artifact, in an artificial uterus, which will allow the brain to further develop with characteristics chosen in advance. The human being will thus have become a commercial object
Klaus Schwab,
New technologies and approaches are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that will fundamentally transform
The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril
Julian Huxley: "A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them." (This quote is often attributed to Huxley, though its primary source is sometimes debated, it reflects the sentiment of the era's eugenics movement). He also stated, "What man can do with wheat and maize may be done with every living species in the world — including his own
Now I'm not accusing you of anything I'm just pointing out there are words from there own mouths how can we seriously trust these people with this tech especially when they call for a nwo .
I've known elite individuals, here in Canada. All of them—bar none—are globalist on economic policy and woke on social policy. Or at least they pretend to be.
Above a certain level of income, it's difficult not to be globalist. Some of your income will come from outsourcing of jobs to countries where wages are lower and labor standards are less effectively enforced.
Some of your income will also come from insourcing of low-wage labor and degradation of basic labour rights. This is certainly the case if you own shares in companies like Tim Hortons or Canadian Tire.
I agree with this. However, the problem is that in the West countries' spending is so insanely high that we have to generate more income in order to pay for all of the benefits we now redistribute. Most of the money which contributes to this redistribution comes from the rich and so in order to raise enough taxes to pay for all the benefits we have to do all these things you list above in order to increase the income of the wealthy so we can tax them more. If we weren't spending so much money on benefits we wouldn't have to do this.
Maybe that's the case in Canada, but in my experience, many elites are liberal socially with regard to the government, but quite conservative with regard to family, occupation, government overreach and civilizational outlook. Most laugh at much of the woke stuff, although my experience is mostly Mexican elites and some Americans.
I want to differentiate globalism from global trade, as I believe there's a slight bait-and-switch at play. Global trade is beneficial for everyone—it drives economic efficiency, fosters cooperation, and makes goods and services cheaper across the board. I'm all for it. However, globalism, the idea of pushing a single, mono-ethnic culture, religion, or creed orchestrated by elites, feels parasitic to me. It erodes diversity and individual identity for the sake of a homogenized world, which I strongly oppose.
Similarly, I view transhumanism with skepticism. The notion of merging humans with technology to create a uniform, enhanced species often feels like another elite-driven agenda, sacrificing what makes us human for a controlled, artificial ideal. Like globalism, it seems parasitic, prioritizing a narrow vision over natural variation.
While global trade promotes mutual benefit, the concept of a one-world government with a singular ethical framework or religion is something I'm absolutely against. The danger, though, isn't just human elites pulling the strings. A far greater threat looms with artificial superintelligence (ASI). In the eschaton, these entities could outpace human control, creating a one-world machine interface that no one anticipates. Everyone expects a human-driven one-world system, but few see the risk of a machine-driven one.
To me, this feels deliberately planned—not tightly controlled, but steered through social engineering. The push toward globalism and transhumanism seems less about progress and more about reshaping humanity to fit a mold, whether by human hands or, more alarmingly, by the systems we're building.
You are delusional if you think transhumanism is our most pressing enemy, and not the 5 billion savages of the global south currently washing over our frontiers.
1) Not sure why you identify the start in western England in 7th century. That area was a real economic backwater.
2) In the table, I notice that the IQ increase does not appear to start until the 16th century. This meshes well with when southeast England started commercializing. As you note, the tiny sample size is a problem, but there appears to be no clear trend before that time.
3) I think the city/states of Northern Italy is a more likely start for the trend as they were the first Commercial society after the Roman Empire.
4) You seem to be making two competing claims that contradict each other: the increase in IQ started long before the Roman Empire (which you go into more detail in the article below) and the increase started with rise of commercial cities in the early modern period. I am much more persuaded by the latter.
1. You may be misreading the text. I associate the start of the rise in mean IQ with the late medieval period, possibly beginning in England and Holland c. 1300 and then spreading to the rest of Western Europe.
2. I would say around the 1300s, but that's just my eyeballing of the data. We definitely need more data.
3. That's my impression from the historical data. There seem to be several zones within Western Europe that have unusually high mean IQ. Northern Italy is one of them. Another is Brittany. They seem to be associated with cottage industries, i.e., ma and pa operations that were incentivized to have larger families (and hence more workers for the family business).
2. Those two claims don't contradict each other. There seems to have been a long rise in mean IQ after the introduction of farming. This rise ended not long before the time of Christ, possibly due to the uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success. There was then a decline in mean IQ that ended around the time Christianity became the state religion. The Christian era was generally a time of steadily rising mean IQ.
I've discussed this earlier rise and fall in earlier posts:
Well written. I would add that there was a institutional substrate that enabled and in some ways just outright generated the “cognitive advance” you describe. In England and across northwestern Europe, the spread of literacy, numeracy, and innovation wasn’t simply a matter of genes meeting markets; it was enabled and accelerated by lower-case “d” democratic governance structures. From guilds, parishes, and town meetings to local courts, mutual societies, and later civic associations, there existed dense, federated networks where ordinary people continuously deliberated, debated, and organized collective projects. These bodies diffused authority, distributed capital, and embedded knowledge in everyday civic practice. That’s why coffeehouses and debating clubs mattered, they were the outgrowth of a centuries-old culture of local participation. Where Rome concentrated power in imperial bureaucracies and kinship patronage, some parts of medieval and early modern Europe diffused it, creating the very redundancy and pluralism that allowed new ideas, new skills, and new forms of cooperation to scale. In other words, the “smart fraction” did not simply emerge in isolation; it was given continuous institutional traction by civic-democratic machinery that amplified its effects across society whileat the same time lierally growing it
Yes, the smart fraction arose within a more open society, where people could more easily create networks that went far beyond those of kinship.
Rome's elites were fearful of associations, seeing them as dangerous to public order. This was true not only for political collegia (which were banned by Julius Caesar) but also for religious associations.
East Asians have followed a parallel evolution. They resemble Europeans in some respects and differ in others:
- similar rise in mean cognitive ability, which then stalled after the Tang era with an uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success among elite individuals.
- high level of cognitive empathy (i.e., strong ability to understand how one's actions impact other people), but low level of affective empathy (i.e., weak ability to experience emotionally how one's actions impact other people). Affective empathy ("ren") has to be learned. This is why Confucianism places so much emphasis on the acquisition of "ren."
- rule following is experienced as a social obligation; relatively low level of guilt proneness; "shame culture" rather than "guilt culture"; guilt is generally not experienced if no one else witnesses the rule breaking.
References
Frost, P. (2020). The large society problem in Northwest Europe and East Asia. Advances in Anthropology, 10(3), 214-234. https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2020.103012
Morality is similar in East Asian and European cultures. Both have shifted toward moral universalism and away from the moral relativism of earlier times.
But the emotional basis for morality is different. Affective empathy and guilt proneness are more hardwired in Europeans, particularly the WEIRD populations of northwest Europe. East Asian behavior is regulated more by shame than by guilt. What matters is not whether you witnessed your wrongdoing but whether someone else did.
East Asians are also less emotionally distressed by the suffering of others (unless that person is a family member). Empathy has to be learned. It's not a given.
Affective empathy is lower in East Asians than in Europeans. In most human populations, affective empathy is primarily expressed in the relationship between a mother and her children.
East Asians have followed a parallel evolution that resembles the European trajectory in that they have a high level of cognitive empathy. This hardwired capacity is combined with "softwired" learning of correct behavior and concern for others, as expressed in the concept of "ren."
East Asians score lower on antisocial personality according to Lynn’s research. Shouldn't one predict from that that they'd be higher in affective empathy?
One should not. It's possible to achieve the same end through different means.
Europeans and East Asians have resolved the same adaptive problem in different ways; in this case, the "large society problem." Both have succeeded in creating large, complex, and high-functioning societies.
No, not really. Cognitive empathy is much less hardwired.
As for affective empathy, keep in mind that a heritability of 52-57% doesn't mean that the remaining 43-48% is learned. That non-heritable portion includes accidents during fetal and neonatal development.
Affective empathy has a high heritability according to a study of German participants: 52-57%. It's cognitive empathy that is mostly learned: 27%.
Melchers, M., Montag, C., Reuter, M., Spinath, F. M., & Hahn, E. (2016). How heritable is empathy? Differential effects of measurement and subcomponents. Motivation and Emotion, 40(5), 720-730. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9573-7
Atkins (2014) found that affective empathy is more hardwired in British participants than in East Asian participants.
Atkins, D. (2014). The Role of Culture in Empathy: The Consequences and Explanations of Cultural Differences in Empathy at the Affective and Cognitive Levels. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent.
No more ironic than it is for other people with high levels of affective empathy.
In northwest Europeans, the level of affective empathy has been greatly increased in relationships beyond the one between mother and child (which seems to be where it originally evolved). In this behavioral system, the "Other" is defined much more in moral terms. The "Other" is considered morally worthless, and not simply different, and it is this moralized perception that inhibits feelings of empathy.
Yes, you are misunderstanding it: he is talking of means: statistical reality. And (in good MBTI terms) they are biased toward T compared to the West (which is no monolith either in itself).
To what degree could significant genetic stratification have been possible in imperial era Rome (central Italy)? I notice in the chart above that there appear to be some upper outliers in intelligence polygenic scores in the imperial sample, if I am reading it correctly. I could imagine a civilization still functional under such a model, sort of like Brazil, but comparatively even better because the cognitively demanding tasks are less (fewer and less beneficial per capita?) and the manual labor needed more than in the modern era.
Also, this was probably addressed before, but why does literature, art, and infrastructure seem to decline in late antiquity even with respect to the imperial era? I know quantity can be its own quality, but it seems a bit extreme given how foundational intelligence is to those pursuits.
Society was much more stratified during the Roman Imperial Era than in subsequent periods. Upper-class youths could do as they please with lower-class men and women. Beat them up. Rape them. Whatever. The courts always sided with the upper-class defendant, if the case even went to court. There wasn't even a pretence of fair play. People simply didn't believe that everyone was spiritually and legally equal.
You're right about the cognitively demanding tasks being fewer than today (or even than in the Middle Ages). There was little technological or scientific progress.
Mean IQ seems to have bottomed out in the 4th century. At that point, cognitive evolution began to point upward, but time was needed to reap the benefits. Unfortunately, the Empire was running out of time. It was like the Titanic heading toward the iceberg. You can reverse the direction of cognitive evolution, but it takes time to experience the benefits of that reversal.
There was also the excessive pacification of the Roman population. The average Roman was unsuited for army life. Recruits had to be found in the unpacified populations beyond the Empire's borders.
You mention social stratification, but I was thinking that perhaps this reflected real genetic stratification with respect to intelligence, not just the apathetic disposition of Roman society as a whole. Perhaps most of the population followed a normal bell curve, but with a heavier right tail. Building on this idea, maybe central Italy shifted from resembling a modern European country to something more like South Africa, where the distribution is bimodal. I guess that this is me being lazy, because the data is probably somewhere to prove or disprove this hypothesis.
I also believe that other psychological traits, such as lower aggression, played a role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I suspect that other psychological traits, and perhaps even differences in IQ subscores, could explain one of the paradoxes of Roman civilization: that they were smart but not really innovative. It would be interesting to study not just what led to general high intelligence or pacification, but also how other or more specific psychological traits arose. After all, Roman civilization (high intelligence, comparatively low innovation), produced impressive yet ultimately ephemeral material advantages, whereas Greek civilization (high innovation), laid the foundation of science, the true engine of civilization (and perhaps, admittedly, also the engine of its eventual undoing).
In Rome, social stratification initially led to genetic stratification. During the Imperial Era, however, it became common for upper-class men to adopt the children of their mistresses (who were often fathered through previous relationships). I discuss this point in:
The State monopoly on violence is a recurring feature of human societies. Rome, like many other states of the ancient world, was founded by violent men, but once in power they selected strongly for submissiveness and pacifism in their subjects. As a result, male violence was selected out of the gene pool. See:
I was thinking, since a lot of what you talk about relates to delay of gratification and hard work: that a key behavioural trait relating to this might be the General Factor of Personality. And if so, this might be a good target for tapping polygenetic scores.
I'm sure you'll know this but Jack Block, who spent his life developing this theory, proposed that this incorporates two related traits:
1) Resilience and
2) Over- versus under-control.
He suggested that the latter would bear a u-shaped relationship with the former (the global factor). I.e.people who scored higher on resilience would score at the extremes of over- versus under- control. Under-control is impulsiveness. It would seem to me likely that all of this will relate to the traits that you're talking about which have developed in the West and in countries that have undergone much trade development.
the subsequent and perhaps not so great cognitive retreat that has occurred since then is salient and disturbing to those of us whom would likely be average or above average individuals in times of great cognitive affluence..
In a way, it seems to me that the *relative backwardness and less dense settlement of NW Europe compared to the Mediterranean and other older civilizational centers ended up being the advantage that enabled the Great Divergence. Densely populated places that have been established for a long-time have sophistication and trade, but have low social trust and very family-based systems of wealth, trade and power. Look at India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Italy. China is an exception, although obviously less WEIRD than Northwest Euros.
Look at hunter-gatherer societies and early farming societies. They too were strongly family-based. And they too had low trust in people who were not family or close kin.
Northwest Europeans created much of the modern world from about 1500 - early 1900. Looking at the present state of the UK, I think it only took about 100 years for them to destroy themselves.
So what happened? "Good times create weak men" and "Weak men create hard times"? Given the dysgenic effects that has taken place in the last 100 years, I'm starting to doubt that the present British population have the genetic material necessary to reverse this trend even if there's extensive embryo selection coupled with a rise in birth rates.
I believe in the importance of consciousness raising. Many problems seem intractable because no serious effort has been made to deal with them. And no serious effort has been made because the nature of the problem is poorly understood.
I finished reading Gregory Clark's farewell to Arms. The description of the workers in India doing about a 6th of the work of an American worker within the same time frame was very interesting to me. This got me thinking about processing speed. I appreciate that people with lower IQs will generally have lower processing speed. So of course If the lower prices and speed of the workers could be related to IQ. However, I embody an interesting scenario. My IQ measures in the 2% the population; but my processing speed measures in the bottom 32% of the population. It's been so debilitating that I have not been able to hold down a job in the employed world. (I'm a self-employed music tutor.) I recently joined the NHS as a cognitive behavioural therapist. It was extremely embarrassing but in the end they reduced my workload to 50% because I just couldn't keep up with everyone else.
So a lot of what was said about the Indian workers resonated with me. So I guess most of the slow work speed could be linked to IQ. But I was wondering whether alleles associated with slow processing speed might be involved and might be worth targeting for research regarding population differences relating to work speed. Wondering if you had any thoughts on this.
- Processing speed seems to be more hardwired than IQ in general.
- Rare genetic variants contribute disproportionately to variation in processing speed.
There has been some work on identifying alleles associated with processing speed:
"Processing speed is an important cognitive function that is compromised in psychiatric illness (e.g., schizophrenia, depression) and old age; it shares genetic background with complex cognition (e.g., working memory, reasoning). To find genes influencing speed we performed a genome-wide association scan in up to three cohorts: ... Meta-analysis of the common measures highlighted various suggestively significant (p < 1.21 × 10−5) SNPs and plausible candidate genes ..."
"We conducted a genome-wide association study of Digit Symbol Substitution Test scores administered in 4207 family members of the Long Life Family Study (LLFS). Genotype data were imputed to the HRC panel of 64,940 haplotypes resulting in ∼15M genetic variants with a quality score > 0.7. The results were replicated using genetic data imputed to the 1000 Genomes phase 3 reference panel from 2 Danish twin cohorts: the study of Middle Aged Danish Twins and the Longitudinal Study of Aging Danish Twins. The genome-wide association study in LLFS discovered 18 rare genetic variants (minor allele frequency (MAF) < 1.0%) that reached genome-wide significance (p-value < 5 × 10−8). Among these, 17 rare variants in chromosome 3 had large protective effects on the processing speed, including rs7623455, rs9821776, rs9821587, rs78704059, which were replicated in the combined Danish twin cohort. These SNPs are located in/near 2 genes, THRB and RARB, that belonged to the thyroid hormone receptors family that may influence the speed of metabolism and cognitive aging. The gene-level tests in LLFS confirmed that these 2 genes are associated with processing speed."
thanks so much for your response! I'm extremely interested in procesding speed obviously because of the problems I have so this is all very interesting and I'll have a good look at these references.
I'm totally confused however as to how IQ could be processing speed plus working memory. My processing speed measures in the 32nd percentile yet my IQ measures in the second percentile. My working memory is about the 8th percentile. So surely my IQ cannot be my processing speed plus my working memory?
I think the broad ability that correlates highest with the general ability factor is fluid reasoning: "includes the broad ability to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar information or novel procedures". Surely someone could have strong fluid reasoning ability but also have slow processing speed?
This is my best understanding of the relationship between processing speed and general intelligence. Though it sounds like you are saying there is new series that supersede this.
According to the CHC theory of intelligence, processing speed is one of a number of abilities that correlate with a general intelligence factor (although I believe Horn didn't really believe in a general intelligence factor). From this perspective, processing speed is one of the 8 to 10 broad intelligence abilities that correlate with the general ability factor. Along this line of thinking then, processing speed would consist of the general ability factor plus a specific ability of processing speed. In order to measure the general factor, one would have to take scores on a number of broad factors and average them in order to hopefully tap the underlying general factor.
I guess the way I understand processing speed is that if there are no problems in this area, one expects processing speed to correlate highly with the general ability factor. But if someone has an impairment in the specific processing speed ability, then this score will be an outlier. This would be the case if someone scored high on most of the other correlating tests but conspicuously only scored a low score on processing speed. In this instance, I think the psychologist would usually discount a processing speed score when trying to measure the general ability factor score, because it is an outlier and therefore probably overly influenced by the specific factor of processing speed.
But it sounds like you are referencing more a new theory which contrasts with this theory?
Unfortunately, the cocktail of traits that made Western civilization doesn't seem to constitute an evolutionarily stable strategy.
That cocktail created prosperity, which, coupled with empathy and egalitarianism, led to the welfare state, which in turn is dysgenic for almost all civilization-making traits.
Not only that, the Western man decided to extend the welfare state to the whole world, subsidizing the proliferation of masses that will not be able to sustain modern civilization or themselves once the global welfare state is gone. And in the final phase of suicidal empathy, he decided to import a sizable share of those Third World masses into his own home, turbocharging the decline.
Nothing is stable in evolution. It's not a purposeful process with a plan and an end goal.
But we humans have the ability to understand where we're going and act accordingly.
Nah, I used to think like this, but I realized it's a fast path to hell. Galton and the original eugenicists wanted to create a literal society of slaves ruled by an elite class. It sounds good on paper, but when you look at the writings of the elite—from the formation of UNESCO to the parasitic ideology of transhumanism—you see the grim reality.
These people claim they want to re-engineer humans to be smarter, but their real goal is to make us more hackable and pliable. In theory, it sounds great, but in reality, it's garbage. Now, if this technology were decentralized, it might be fine. But if it ever gets into the government's hands, we are utterly cooked
"What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction."
— Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (1909)
"The aim of Eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation."
— Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (1909)
The Danger in His Words: The danger is the calm, rational-sounding justification for dividing society into "useful classes" and others. The word "kindly" is chilling; it implies that managing human populations—deciding who should and should not reproduce for the good of the state—is a benevolent act. This is the foundational logic for coercive state control over the most personal aspects of human life.
"Thus, even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable."
— Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946)
"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization."
— Julian Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Now i don't support banning tech like Embryo selection but if your not careful in the words of the elites themselves we will be slaves to there new world order I'm not a conspiracy theorist they tell on themselves it's a conspiracy if they speak about it
I think Aristotle predicted this. That democracies would demand more and more benefits until they overextend themselves and go into decline.
Democracy can work if the middle class is sufficiently large and if the majority feel they have "skin in the game." But that doesn't seem to be where we're headed.
The importing of great masses of low-IQ people was not decided by "Western man": really not at all.
and what's your solution government enforced Eugenics ? like that can't ever go wrong but you seem have a lot in common with these eugenicists and they were the elites of yester year in other words your opinions share the same foundations as the globalist think tanks that's the funny part
"Thus, even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable."
— Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946)
"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization."
— Julian Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
I wasn't referring to eugenics. I'll try to summarize my views on the topic:
- I have no problem with parents exercising reproductive choices, including prenatal screening. It's their children, and they're the ones who'll have to raise them.
- Criminals should not be allowed to reproduce while still serving a prison term.
- Family benefits should not be reduced or clawed back for middle-class parents. The aim should be to redistribute money from childless individuals to couples with children, and not from the rich to the poor.
- Gamete donation and surrogacy for infertile couples should be fully legalized.
- The age of mass migration must end. Population growth should come about primarily through natural increase.
- I have issues with eugenics per se. Supporters of eugenics focus almost entirely on IQ, and selection solely for IQ would have unintended consequences, i.e., an increase in the number of high-IQ sociopaths and autists.
"Family benefits should not be reduced or clawed back for middle-class parents. The aim should be to redistribute money from childless individuals to couples with children, and not from the rich to the poor"
Many valuable people are childless precisely because the government confiscates a huge share of their income to promote the ceaseless multiplication of human biomass.
I've thought about this as well. I think that generally the amount of money you need when you're raising children is massively more than when you're a single person.
In the past the cost-benefit was reversed: if you didn't have children, you would have no one to support you in your old age. Children were also cheap labor for family businesses and family farms.
I agree. I'm talking more about state-enforced eugenics, and that's what these elites are heading us towards. It's a deal with the devil, and I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but these people tell on themselves.
I don't think they believe in a literal devil; they believe in the Promethean fire of gnosis that brought man out of Eden and into the light.
They want to basically create a world system where humanity is god, and some gods are better than others. Essentially, they want to create a cosmic caste system. I don't mean that, like the 'mustache man,' they got in a boardroom and are all working together. No, it's competing ideologies, but they have the same goal and aim for that on a personal level. If you want to use embryo selection, I'm more than for it.
I'm more worried about the eugenics framing from a state level. If the government gets access to this tech, we are utterly cooked, especially with the coming world order they are trying to move us towards
Yuval noah harrari
History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods
Once technology enables us to re-engineer human bodies and brains, we will no longer be Homo sapiens
strongly believe that given the technologies we are now developing, within a century or two at most, our species will disappear. I don't think that in the end of the 22nd century, the Earth will still be dominated by Homo sapiens
We are now hackable animals. The whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will... that's over
If you don't get to know yourself better, there is somebody out there who is, right now, trying to hack you
Jacques Attali
Finally they will manufacture the human being like a made-to-measure artifact, in an artificial uterus, which will allow the brain to further develop with characteristics chosen in advance. The human being will thus have become a commercial object
Klaus Schwab,
New technologies and approaches are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that will fundamentally transform
The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril
Julian Huxley: "A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them." (This quote is often attributed to Huxley, though its primary source is sometimes debated, it reflects the sentiment of the era's eugenics movement). He also stated, "What man can do with wheat and maize may be done with every living species in the world — including his own
Now I'm not accusing you of anything I'm just pointing out there are words from there own mouths how can we seriously trust these people with this tech especially when they call for a nwo .
I've known elite individuals, here in Canada. All of them—bar none—are globalist on economic policy and woke on social policy. Or at least they pretend to be.
Above a certain level of income, it's difficult not to be globalist. Some of your income will come from outsourcing of jobs to countries where wages are lower and labor standards are less effectively enforced.
Some of your income will also come from insourcing of low-wage labor and degradation of basic labour rights. This is certainly the case if you own shares in companies like Tim Hortons or Canadian Tire.
I agree with this. However, the problem is that in the West countries' spending is so insanely high that we have to generate more income in order to pay for all of the benefits we now redistribute. Most of the money which contributes to this redistribution comes from the rich and so in order to raise enough taxes to pay for all the benefits we have to do all these things you list above in order to increase the income of the wealthy so we can tax them more. If we weren't spending so much money on benefits we wouldn't have to do this.
Maybe that's the case in Canada, but in my experience, many elites are liberal socially with regard to the government, but quite conservative with regard to family, occupation, government overreach and civilizational outlook. Most laugh at much of the woke stuff, although my experience is mostly Mexican elites and some Americans.
I want to differentiate globalism from global trade, as I believe there's a slight bait-and-switch at play. Global trade is beneficial for everyone—it drives economic efficiency, fosters cooperation, and makes goods and services cheaper across the board. I'm all for it. However, globalism, the idea of pushing a single, mono-ethnic culture, religion, or creed orchestrated by elites, feels parasitic to me. It erodes diversity and individual identity for the sake of a homogenized world, which I strongly oppose.
Similarly, I view transhumanism with skepticism. The notion of merging humans with technology to create a uniform, enhanced species often feels like another elite-driven agenda, sacrificing what makes us human for a controlled, artificial ideal. Like globalism, it seems parasitic, prioritizing a narrow vision over natural variation.
While global trade promotes mutual benefit, the concept of a one-world government with a singular ethical framework or religion is something I'm absolutely against. The danger, though, isn't just human elites pulling the strings. A far greater threat looms with artificial superintelligence (ASI). In the eschaton, these entities could outpace human control, creating a one-world machine interface that no one anticipates. Everyone expects a human-driven one-world system, but few see the risk of a machine-driven one.
To me, this feels deliberately planned—not tightly controlled, but steered through social engineering. The push toward globalism and transhumanism seems less about progress and more about reshaping humanity to fit a mold, whether by human hands or, more alarmingly, by the systems we're building.
I'm all about Individual choice
You are delusional if you think transhumanism is our most pressing enemy, and not the 5 billion savages of the global south currently washing over our frontiers.
Interesting article. A few small points.
1) Not sure why you identify the start in western England in 7th century. That area was a real economic backwater.
2) In the table, I notice that the IQ increase does not appear to start until the 16th century. This meshes well with when southeast England started commercializing. As you note, the tiny sample size is a problem, but there appears to be no clear trend before that time.
3) I think the city/states of Northern Italy is a more likely start for the trend as they were the first Commercial society after the Roman Empire.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/how-medieval-northern-italy-transformed
4) You seem to be making two competing claims that contradict each other: the increase in IQ started long before the Roman Empire (which you go into more detail in the article below) and the increase started with rise of commercial cities in the early modern period. I am much more persuaded by the latter.
https://www.anthro1.net/p/when-did-northwest-europeans-become
1. You may be misreading the text. I associate the start of the rise in mean IQ with the late medieval period, possibly beginning in England and Holland c. 1300 and then spreading to the rest of Western Europe.
2. I would say around the 1300s, but that's just my eyeballing of the data. We definitely need more data.
3. That's my impression from the historical data. There seem to be several zones within Western Europe that have unusually high mean IQ. Northern Italy is one of them. Another is Brittany. They seem to be associated with cottage industries, i.e., ma and pa operations that were incentivized to have larger families (and hence more workers for the family business).
2. Those two claims don't contradict each other. There seems to have been a long rise in mean IQ after the introduction of farming. This rise ended not long before the time of Christ, possibly due to the uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success. There was then a decline in mean IQ that ended around the time Christianity became the state religion. The Christian era was generally a time of steadily rising mean IQ.
I've discussed this earlier rise and fall in earlier posts:
https://www.anthro1.net/p/adapting-to-an-environment-of-their
https://www.anthro1.net/p/how-christianity-rebooted-cognitive
https://www.anthro1.net/p/was-the-roman-empire-eugenic
Well written. I would add that there was a institutional substrate that enabled and in some ways just outright generated the “cognitive advance” you describe. In England and across northwestern Europe, the spread of literacy, numeracy, and innovation wasn’t simply a matter of genes meeting markets; it was enabled and accelerated by lower-case “d” democratic governance structures. From guilds, parishes, and town meetings to local courts, mutual societies, and later civic associations, there existed dense, federated networks where ordinary people continuously deliberated, debated, and organized collective projects. These bodies diffused authority, distributed capital, and embedded knowledge in everyday civic practice. That’s why coffeehouses and debating clubs mattered, they were the outgrowth of a centuries-old culture of local participation. Where Rome concentrated power in imperial bureaucracies and kinship patronage, some parts of medieval and early modern Europe diffused it, creating the very redundancy and pluralism that allowed new ideas, new skills, and new forms of cooperation to scale. In other words, the “smart fraction” did not simply emerge in isolation; it was given continuous institutional traction by civic-democratic machinery that amplified its effects across society whileat the same time lierally growing it
Yes, the smart fraction arose within a more open society, where people could more easily create networks that went far beyond those of kinship.
Rome's elites were fearful of associations, seeing them as dangerous to public order. This was true not only for political collegia (which were banned by Julius Caesar) but also for religious associations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associations_in_ancient_Rome
Slowly piecing more and more new findings to our cognitive history. Love to see it!
But East Asian countries seem to be doing alright in the market economy, even better than the WEIRD countries now. How is that explained?
East Asians have followed a parallel evolution. They resemble Europeans in some respects and differ in others:
- similar rise in mean cognitive ability, which then stalled after the Tang era with an uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success among elite individuals.
- high level of cognitive empathy (i.e., strong ability to understand how one's actions impact other people), but low level of affective empathy (i.e., weak ability to experience emotionally how one's actions impact other people). Affective empathy ("ren") has to be learned. This is why Confucianism places so much emphasis on the acquisition of "ren."
- rule following is experienced as a social obligation; relatively low level of guilt proneness; "shame culture" rather than "guilt culture"; guilt is generally not experienced if no one else witnesses the rule breaking.
References
Frost, P. (2020). The large society problem in Northwest Europe and East Asia. Advances in Anthropology, 10(3), 214-234. https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2020.103012
Frost, P. (2025). Cognitive evolution in eastern Eurasia, Peter Frost's Newsletter, March 25, https://www.anthro1.net/p/cognitive-evolution-in-eastern-eurasia
So morality in East Asian culture is largely performative rather than instinctual or authentic? Interesting
Morality is similar in East Asian and European cultures. Both have shifted toward moral universalism and away from the moral relativism of earlier times.
But the emotional basis for morality is different. Affective empathy and guilt proneness are more hardwired in Europeans, particularly the WEIRD populations of northwest Europe. East Asian behavior is regulated more by shame than by guilt. What matters is not whether you witnessed your wrongdoing but whether someone else did.
East Asians are also less emotionally distressed by the suffering of others (unless that person is a family member). Empathy has to be learned. It's not a given.
Low level of affective empathy compared to whom? Europeans and East Asians score lower on antisocial personality than other groups.
Affective empathy is lower in East Asians than in Europeans. In most human populations, affective empathy is primarily expressed in the relationship between a mother and her children.
East Asians have followed a parallel evolution that resembles the European trajectory in that they have a high level of cognitive empathy. This hardwired capacity is combined with "softwired" learning of correct behavior and concern for others, as expressed in the concept of "ren."
East Asians score lower on antisocial personality according to Lynn’s research. Shouldn't one predict from that that they'd be higher in affective empathy?
One should not. It's possible to achieve the same end through different means.
Europeans and East Asians have resolved the same adaptive problem in different ways; in this case, the "large society problem." Both have succeeded in creating large, complex, and high-functioning societies.
Affective “empathy” is as teachable and learnable as cognitive “empathy” and cognitive ability, lol.
No, not really. Cognitive empathy is much less hardwired.
As for affective empathy, keep in mind that a heritability of 52-57% doesn't mean that the remaining 43-48% is learned. That non-heritable portion includes accidents during fetal and neonatal development.
Affective empathy has a high heritability according to a study of German participants: 52-57%. It's cognitive empathy that is mostly learned: 27%.
Melchers, M., Montag, C., Reuter, M., Spinath, F. M., & Hahn, E. (2016). How heritable is empathy? Differential effects of measurement and subcomponents. Motivation and Emotion, 40(5), 720-730. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9573-7
Atkins (2014) found that affective empathy is more hardwired in British participants than in East Asian participants.
Atkins, D. (2014). The Role of Culture in Empathy: The Consequences and Explanations of Cultural Differences in Empathy at the Affective and Cognitive Levels. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent.
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/47970/
I reviewed this literature at: https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2020/03/affective-empathy-double-edged-sword.html
Ironic to study empathy in Germans though lol
No more ironic than it is for other people with high levels of affective empathy.
In northwest Europeans, the level of affective empathy has been greatly increased in relationships beyond the one between mother and child (which seems to be where it originally evolved). In this behavioral system, the "Other" is defined much more in moral terms. The "Other" is considered morally worthless, and not simply different, and it is this moralized perception that inhibits feelings of empathy.
Yes, you are misunderstanding it: he is talking of means: statistical reality. And (in good MBTI terms) they are biased toward T compared to the West (which is no monolith either in itself).
Thanks for an interesting and informative article.
To what degree could significant genetic stratification have been possible in imperial era Rome (central Italy)? I notice in the chart above that there appear to be some upper outliers in intelligence polygenic scores in the imperial sample, if I am reading it correctly. I could imagine a civilization still functional under such a model, sort of like Brazil, but comparatively even better because the cognitively demanding tasks are less (fewer and less beneficial per capita?) and the manual labor needed more than in the modern era.
Also, this was probably addressed before, but why does literature, art, and infrastructure seem to decline in late antiquity even with respect to the imperial era? I know quantity can be its own quality, but it seems a bit extreme given how foundational intelligence is to those pursuits.
Society was much more stratified during the Roman Imperial Era than in subsequent periods. Upper-class youths could do as they please with lower-class men and women. Beat them up. Rape them. Whatever. The courts always sided with the upper-class defendant, if the case even went to court. There wasn't even a pretence of fair play. People simply didn't believe that everyone was spiritually and legally equal.
You're right about the cognitively demanding tasks being fewer than today (or even than in the Middle Ages). There was little technological or scientific progress.
Mean IQ seems to have bottomed out in the 4th century. At that point, cognitive evolution began to point upward, but time was needed to reap the benefits. Unfortunately, the Empire was running out of time. It was like the Titanic heading toward the iceberg. You can reverse the direction of cognitive evolution, but it takes time to experience the benefits of that reversal.
There was also the excessive pacification of the Roman population. The average Roman was unsuited for army life. Recruits had to be found in the unpacified populations beyond the Empire's borders.
You mention social stratification, but I was thinking that perhaps this reflected real genetic stratification with respect to intelligence, not just the apathetic disposition of Roman society as a whole. Perhaps most of the population followed a normal bell curve, but with a heavier right tail. Building on this idea, maybe central Italy shifted from resembling a modern European country to something more like South Africa, where the distribution is bimodal. I guess that this is me being lazy, because the data is probably somewhere to prove or disprove this hypothesis.
I also believe that other psychological traits, such as lower aggression, played a role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I suspect that other psychological traits, and perhaps even differences in IQ subscores, could explain one of the paradoxes of Roman civilization: that they were smart but not really innovative. It would be interesting to study not just what led to general high intelligence or pacification, but also how other or more specific psychological traits arose. After all, Roman civilization (high intelligence, comparatively low innovation), produced impressive yet ultimately ephemeral material advantages, whereas Greek civilization (high innovation), laid the foundation of science, the true engine of civilization (and perhaps, admittedly, also the engine of its eventual undoing).
In Rome, social stratification initially led to genetic stratification. During the Imperial Era, however, it became common for upper-class men to adopt the children of their mistresses (who were often fathered through previous relationships). I discuss this point in:
https://www.anthro1.net/p/was-the-roman-empire-eugenic
The State monopoly on violence is a recurring feature of human societies. Rome, like many other states of the ancient world, was founded by violent men, but once in power they selected strongly for submissiveness and pacifism in their subjects. As a result, male violence was selected out of the gene pool. See:
Frost, P. (2010). The Roman State and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology, 8(3), 376-389. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F147470491000800306
Hi Peter,
Thanks as always for your fantastic work!
I was thinking, since a lot of what you talk about relates to delay of gratification and hard work: that a key behavioural trait relating to this might be the General Factor of Personality. And if so, this might be a good target for tapping polygenetic scores.
I'm sure you'll know this but Jack Block, who spent his life developing this theory, proposed that this incorporates two related traits:
1) Resilience and
2) Over- versus under-control.
He suggested that the latter would bear a u-shaped relationship with the former (the global factor). I.e.people who scored higher on resilience would score at the extremes of over- versus under- control. Under-control is impulsiveness. It would seem to me likely that all of this will relate to the traits that you're talking about which have developed in the West and in countries that have undergone much trade development.
the subsequent and perhaps not so great cognitive retreat that has occurred since then is salient and disturbing to those of us whom would likely be average or above average individuals in times of great cognitive affluence..
In a way, it seems to me that the *relative backwardness and less dense settlement of NW Europe compared to the Mediterranean and other older civilizational centers ended up being the advantage that enabled the Great Divergence. Densely populated places that have been established for a long-time have sophistication and trade, but have low social trust and very family-based systems of wealth, trade and power. Look at India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Italy. China is an exception, although obviously less WEIRD than Northwest Euros.
Look at hunter-gatherer societies and early farming societies. They too were strongly family-based. And they too had low trust in people who were not family or close kin.
Are the IQ scores generated in that table normed on the modern white British average?
Yes. As you may have noticed, there has been a decline since the mid-19th century. https://www.anthro1.net/p/the-great-decline
Northwest Europeans created much of the modern world from about 1500 - early 1900. Looking at the present state of the UK, I think it only took about 100 years for them to destroy themselves.
So what happened? "Good times create weak men" and "Weak men create hard times"? Given the dysgenic effects that has taken place in the last 100 years, I'm starting to doubt that the present British population have the genetic material necessary to reverse this trend even if there's extensive embryo selection coupled with a rise in birth rates.
I believe in the importance of consciousness raising. Many problems seem intractable because no serious effort has been made to deal with them. And no serious effort has been made because the nature of the problem is poorly understood.
Hi Peter,
I finished reading Gregory Clark's farewell to Arms. The description of the workers in India doing about a 6th of the work of an American worker within the same time frame was very interesting to me. This got me thinking about processing speed. I appreciate that people with lower IQs will generally have lower processing speed. So of course If the lower prices and speed of the workers could be related to IQ. However, I embody an interesting scenario. My IQ measures in the 2% the population; but my processing speed measures in the bottom 32% of the population. It's been so debilitating that I have not been able to hold down a job in the employed world. (I'm a self-employed music tutor.) I recently joined the NHS as a cognitive behavioural therapist. It was extremely embarrassing but in the end they reduced my workload to 50% because I just couldn't keep up with everyone else.
So a lot of what was said about the Indian workers resonated with me. So I guess most of the slow work speed could be linked to IQ. But I was wondering whether alleles associated with slow processing speed might be involved and might be worth targeting for research regarding population differences relating to work speed. Wondering if you had any thoughts on this.
The current thinking is:
- IQ = processing speed + working memory.
- Processing speed seems to be more hardwired than IQ in general.
- Rare genetic variants contribute disproportionately to variation in processing speed.
There has been some work on identifying alleles associated with processing speed:
"Processing speed is an important cognitive function that is compromised in psychiatric illness (e.g., schizophrenia, depression) and old age; it shares genetic background with complex cognition (e.g., working memory, reasoning). To find genes influencing speed we performed a genome-wide association scan in up to three cohorts: ... Meta-analysis of the common measures highlighted various suggestively significant (p < 1.21 × 10−5) SNPs and plausible candidate genes ..."
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.11.008
"We conducted a genome-wide association study of Digit Symbol Substitution Test scores administered in 4207 family members of the Long Life Family Study (LLFS). Genotype data were imputed to the HRC panel of 64,940 haplotypes resulting in ∼15M genetic variants with a quality score > 0.7. The results were replicated using genetic data imputed to the 1000 Genomes phase 3 reference panel from 2 Danish twin cohorts: the study of Middle Aged Danish Twins and the Longitudinal Study of Aging Danish Twins. The genome-wide association study in LLFS discovered 18 rare genetic variants (minor allele frequency (MAF) < 1.0%) that reached genome-wide significance (p-value < 5 × 10−8). Among these, 17 rare variants in chromosome 3 had large protective effects on the processing speed, including rs7623455, rs9821776, rs9821587, rs78704059, which were replicated in the combined Danish twin cohort. These SNPs are located in/near 2 genes, THRB and RARB, that belonged to the thyroid hormone receptors family that may influence the speed of metabolism and cognitive aging. The gene-level tests in LLFS confirmed that these 2 genes are associated with processing speed."
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2022.11.018
Hi Peter,
thanks so much for your response! I'm extremely interested in procesding speed obviously because of the problems I have so this is all very interesting and I'll have a good look at these references.
I'm totally confused however as to how IQ could be processing speed plus working memory. My processing speed measures in the 32nd percentile yet my IQ measures in the second percentile. My working memory is about the 8th percentile. So surely my IQ cannot be my processing speed plus my working memory?
Hmm. What else is there?
I think the broad ability that correlates highest with the general ability factor is fluid reasoning: "includes the broad ability to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar information or novel procedures". Surely someone could have strong fluid reasoning ability but also have slow processing speed?
This is my best understanding of the relationship between processing speed and general intelligence. Though it sounds like you are saying there is new series that supersede this.
According to the CHC theory of intelligence, processing speed is one of a number of abilities that correlate with a general intelligence factor (although I believe Horn didn't really believe in a general intelligence factor). From this perspective, processing speed is one of the 8 to 10 broad intelligence abilities that correlate with the general ability factor. Along this line of thinking then, processing speed would consist of the general ability factor plus a specific ability of processing speed. In order to measure the general factor, one would have to take scores on a number of broad factors and average them in order to hopefully tap the underlying general factor.
I guess the way I understand processing speed is that if there are no problems in this area, one expects processing speed to correlate highly with the general ability factor. But if someone has an impairment in the specific processing speed ability, then this score will be an outlier. This would be the case if someone scored high on most of the other correlating tests but conspicuously only scored a low score on processing speed. In this instance, I think the psychologist would usually discount a processing speed score when trying to measure the general ability factor score, because it is an outlier and therefore probably overly influenced by the specific factor of processing speed.
But it sounds like you are referencing more a new theory which contrasts with this theory?
But doesn't fluid reasoning largely correspond to working memory? I remember reading a study to that effect.