The 20th century witnessed a dramatic increase in IQ, as much as 3 points per decade (see Are you smarter than Aristotle? Part I). The fact that IQ scores increased so much in such a short amount of ...
The Flynn Effect -- the finding that IQ rose quite a bit during the 20th century -- raises quite a few paradoxes. Working backwards, the average IQ of people living in 1900 would be just under 70.