Lack of creativity in adults.

Yesterday, Fintan, eight, was listening to the radio. There was a song playing which caught his attention.

“Mummy, was that song made by a kid, or an adult?”. Genuine puzzlement had settled in his eyes and inflected his tongue.

His mother, Syahidah gazed down upon him, knowing the answer, but wondering how there could be any doubt.

Fintan explained. “They keep repeating the words.” It was clear he thought this both silly and evidence of an undeveloped mind.

“It is by an adult.”, she assured him, a little unimpressed herself that it should be so.

Fintan didn’t know what to make of that. It seemed that he didn’t believe it worthy of a child, never mind an adult.

She didn’t explain to him further about the parlous state of modern culture – about how many “artists” produce trite and empty work. Perhaps she should have done.

It is interesting, however, that a young child of only eight was able to identify the essential emptiness of a song that had too much repetition in it. He already expected more from a song – more complexity, more variety, more of a story than this particular “artiste” was able to give. This, of course, prompts the question: if a young boy can see modern music as lacking, how can the adult audience not do so as well? Why is there even a market for such trivial “music”?

In moments like this, it is becoming apparent that Fintan is growing in awareness of the mental and cultural limitations of the modern adult world. He is beginning to see a mismatch between his expectations of that world and what it actually is and delivers. It is both telling and somewhat sad, that even an eight year old boy can expect greater quality and complexity from the adult world than it is able, in this instance, at least, to offer. In his innocent question, there lies a potent criticism of the state of modern music , in particular, and modern culture in general. It has degenerated to the point that even a young boy sees that something is missing. That something, of course, is intelligence and creativity. Once, one might have expected it in the typical cultural product, now, however, it has become a rarity. In its stead, we have derivativeness, “sampling”/plagiarism, simplicity to the point of banality, and a general sense of stupidity, in the “creator”. Even a child can sense it and wonder why it is so.

I hope that the future is better than the present, culturally, because much that is modern seems to have declined from the past. I hope that this decline does not continue and that the future holds music and other culture that children won’t puzzle at, that an adult could possibly have produced it. However, looking around, there is not much hope for the near future. It may be a distant future, before human culture recovers the complexity, depth and originality it once had – at least, in terms of popular expressions in any media. Right now, much of the work can be described by one word: mindless. Even a child can see that - or hear it, anyway.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Living in a time of morons.

For the gifted, particularly the most gifted, the world can seem a dull place, sometimes. By this I mean that the most gifted people are accustomed to encountering people who don’t seem very bright (to them). For such people, life can be difficult in ways that few people understand. Many people will, of course, have no sympathy for the plight of the more gifted members of society. “So what?”, such people might think, if they can’t find people to talk to, who will understand them. Many people would dismiss their concerns as the meaningless worries of an “elite” or, worse still, “an elitist”.

Well, the irony of the world situation is that many of these people, who dismiss the gifted, and their concerns, will one day find out exactly how the gifted feel. I shall explain. You see, the modern world is in decline, owing to dysgenic fertility – such that the bright have fewer children than the dim and so the intellectual quality of human populations is in decline – and has been so declining since at least 1850, according to the research of Richard Lynn. Now, you might think, surely we shouldn’t be worried, since human evolution is slow? Well, no, it isn’t slow in this respect at all.

Our view of the world is limited by our own lifespan and what that has allowed us to see. However, it doesn’t take much time in a library comparing the literary works of say the 19^th Century, to the vapid effusions of many modern writers to be led to wonder if Man has degenerated over that timescale. Well, research shows that Man, has indeed fallen pretty far, in that time. Richard Lynn calculates that the mean IQ of English people has fallen 6.9 IQ points between 1920 and 2010. Helmuth Nyborg further calculates that Danish IQs have fallen 10 IQ points since 1850. So, we already live in degenerate times – but what is to come, is far, far worse than what has been.

Helmuth Nyborg has written a paper on the future of Denmark, entitled, “The Decay of Western Civilization: Double Relaxed Natural Selection”. His example is Denmark. Now, I am not going into the details in this first post – I shall revisit his work further in another post. I would just like to point your attention to a couple of choice items from his paper. He calculates that the phenotypic (expressed) IQ of the Danish population will fall about 21 points from 1850 to 2072 – that is, it will fall a further 11 points, by 2072. The underlying fall in genotypic potential IQ is 17 points or so over that period. Furthermore, by 2050 children with IQs between 70 and 85 will dominate the school system and will constitute the MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION, shortly after 2075. Now, I should remind you that children whose IQs are in that range are the kind of kids that, when I was growing up, would have been singled out in school as “slow” and “stupid” and subject to teasing over their dimwittedness. (Yes, school children can be cruel, I know.) I suppose that the only “silver lining” is that, in a time when most kids have such low IQs, they will no longer be teased. Then again, the teasing of the few bright ones will undoubtedly be more intense.

What does this mean for a young person who is not gifted, now, in the present world, but who is of above average intelligence? Well, it is simple. The mean IQ of the world population (because Helmuth Nyborg’s observations apply to the whole Western world, to a great degree…and there are similar problems in most of the rest of the world), will fall, to such a great degree, in their lifetime, that, when they get old, the world will seem to them, as it does to the gifted now. The young, but not gifted person, will get old in a time of morons. The average person in this future world will seem rather dim to the person who is now only a bit above average. The great irony of this is that many, who now have no sympathy for the social problems of the gifted, will face exactly the same social problems themselves as they get old. The whole world is becoming stupid, at an astonishing rate.

Of course, those who are now gifted, will be even less happy about the situation than they are now - but at least more people will come to understand the situation, of the gifted, from personal experience.

I am not looking forward to this demographic shift. Much that is great about Humanity, depends on higher intelligence – and that is precisely what is going to be in short supply, as I get old. It seems ultimately ironic that old people in that time, will be the brightest people – not the young, at all. This is the ultimate reversal of age stereotypes, of the senile oldies, and the vibrant, bright young things. It is the old, who shall be bright – and the young who shall seem “senile” to them. What a sad world is coming to us all – a time of morons.

Note: I am not denigrating those of low IQ. All who are human, can contribute in certain ways, to the world and may live lives of happiness that add to the quality of life of others. However, my concern is that the elements of civilization that require higher thought, are not accessible to low IQ people and these people are not able to contribute to the maintenance and advancement of civilization and society, in complex ways. They thus do not raise the world in which they live, technologically, scientifically or culturally. However, if they constitute the majority of people, they WILL LOWER IT. This is not to devalue them as people - but just is to note that they are not mentally equipped to contribute to higher civilization. The world is not improved, in any way, by increasing the numbers of low IQ people, until they constitute the majority of the population. Anyone who thinks they do, is just looking for an easy population to control and manipulate...but that is another blog post altogether.

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.htmland here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

The triviality of modern medicine.

So much about modern life is trivial - even, it seems, at times, medicine.

I will explain. There is a glaucoma drug called Lumigan which had an unusual side effect (well, more than one unusual effect, but I will get to that). Commonly, users of Lumigan noticed that their eyelashes grew longer and thicker than before. So, being alert to any opportunity to make money, the pharmaceutical company behind Lumigan has remarketed Lumigan, the glaucoma drug, as Latisse, the eyelash-lengthening-plastic-surgery-in-a-pill-drug.

On hearing this news, I found myself quietly astonished. Now, there is a drug to lengthen eyelashes...and people actually want it. Journalists in the news piece I saw, interviewed women who said that they would "take the drug for the rest of their lives". The estimated cost of the drug, by one doctor, was over 100 US dollars per month, for the privilege of elongated eyelashes.

What kind of world do we live in, in which companies would actually develop drugs to lengthen eyelashes - and people would actually buy them? To my, perhaps old-fashioned way of looking at things, this preoccupation with minor details of appearance seems appallingly trivial. I cannot imagine anyone or anything more superficial than the lifelong consumption of a medical drug purely to lengthen one's eyelashes.

Interestingly, this drug, Latisse, has another side effect that its consumers might not be so keen on. Users of Lumigan, for glaucoma, also noticed that their irises tended to darken over time: light blue eyes, would darken and become brown, for instance. This is a permanent change in iris colour that cessation of the drug does not reverse. However, progression of the darkening stops once the drug is no longer consumed.

I wonder how many people are going to start consuming this drug? If it becomes popular, long eyelashes might become universal - and everyone would have dark eyes: blue eyes would become something only young children have, before they lose them to Latisse.

I would like to think that it is just my own sensibilities becoming more demanding, as I get older, but, it seems to me, that the world we live in, is becoming one of the most trivial Ages there has ever been. People are preoccupied with matters of such triviality (and superficiality) that not one thought should be devoted to them - yet they are major matters of attention, for so many. People devote their lives to pointless activities; people spend money on useless commodities - and people actually take drugs to change the length of their eyelashes. It is all mind-bogglingly stupid.

As for medicine...you know, the Ancients may not have known much, but I rather think they were trying to address serious issues, and did not overly concern themselves with the length of eyelashes.

Which would you rather have? A cure for a major illness...or long eyelashes? The same research and development funds that are committed to nonsense like "eyelash extending drugs" could have been committed to matters of greater import. When the trivial is allowed a voice, it tends to crowd out matters of more substance. No drug company should be devoting funds to trivial projects, when there are so many untreatable, or inadequately treatable, illnesses in this world that need attention.

Once, medicine was a serious calling and drug manufacturers were serious businesses engaged in matters of great importance to us all. Not anymore, however: now we can look forward to a plethora of drugs for every trivial issue that ever concerned the most trivial of people. However, I bet you one thing: the serious diseases will still be incurable - and enough attention will fail to be devoted to them.

Perhaps it comes down to one thing: more people have eyelashes than have cancer - so why not treat "short eyelashes" and make money, rather than "treat cancer" and save lives (and make money, too)? It seems that triviality is an infectious disease and the pharmaceutical/medical establishment has caught a serious case of it. Perhaps it will be fatal. Let's hope so. Perhaps the doctors and pharmacologists who replace them will be a serious bunch, instead.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

How old is democracy?

How old is democracy? I asked this question, once, of a group of foreign students in Singapore. The answer was telling: silence fell across the room. Then, hesitantly, an Uzbek girl raised her voice: "It is an American invention."

I shook my head and repeated the question: "How old is democracy?"

The Uzbek woman, in her twenties, said: "Fifteen years."

Again, I shook my head.

"Twenty years."

I pursed my lips.

"Twenty five years." she said, stretching it a bit.

My unacknowledging gaze said it all.

Finally, in one huge last effort at pushing the origin of democracy back to the deep past, she guessed: "Forty years!"

"No." I said, quietly, to a listening room.

I found myself amazed. In a room of perhaps twelve Asian students, from China, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Indonesia, not one had any idea of the origin of democracy, or just how old it was. That these were not children, but students in their twenties (some as old as 28) gave me further pause to consider the state of modern education.

"Two and a half thousand years." I said, to surprise and disbelief all around. "No!" some of them actually said.

"Yes. Democracy was invented by the Ancient Greeks."

"Where?" said the Uzbek girl with the encylopaedic knowledge.

"Greece."

The name didn't seem to register with her at all. It seems that she had not even heard of the country, itself.

"In Athens."

For, as you probably know, a direct democracy (direct voting by the people, not through representatives) took root in Athens in around 510 B.C, owing to changes implemented by Cleisthenes.

Democracy succeeded in Ancient Athens, though it was only adult male citizens who could vote. The model spread throughout the Mediterranean, though none was so successful as Athens (the others tended to restrict voting too much, to those, for instance, who owned their own homes, ie. the rich).

Had Rome not come along the whole world would, no doubt, soon have been democratic...but Rome squashed the flowering democracies and stamped them out in about 100 B.C. That was the end of democracy, for a thousand years, when it was adopted, once more, by some Italian city states (ironic, that, given the history of Rome regarding its suppression), in Pisa, Venice, Florence, Genoa and Siena.

The ignorance of my Asian students regarding democracy left me to wonder about the state of the modern world. How is it possible that some can reach their late twenties (as some of them were) and still not know the first thing about how many modern societies are run? It points to a system of global education (for they came from many different countries) that is simply not preparing the modern, young person, for fully aware participation in modern life. I am left to wonder whether this is a reflection of the dullness of the individuals, or the deficiencies of the system. If it is the former, then it is unfortunate, but largely unavoidable; if it is the latter, then I wonder whether the deficiencies are due to systemic incompetence, or deliberate policy. Perhaps, in some societies, it is deliberate policy to ensure the ignorance of their people, for ignorant people are always easier to deceive and manipulate than an informed populace. Whatever the cause, deliberate or incompetent, the effects remain the same: young, modern people, from around the world, simply know nothing about the world, these days. They have no grasp of what is going on now, around them - and no historical perspective to set it against. They do not have the basic equipment to allow them to begin to reason about what is happening in the world. It is quite shocking to see.

Those who teach, or who have taught, are in a privileged position that allows them to gauge the understanding of their students, on many issues. From that vantage, at the front of the classroom, it is possible to learn much about what is happening in the world, in other countries, particularly in the minds of their people. What I have so often discovered is ignorance, a very profound ignorance on so many basic matters. It leaves me to wonder what they spent their childhoods learning in classrooms, back in their home countries - for little seems to have left a mark.

These classroom observations are supportive of a trend that has been noted, by researchers into intelligence. There is a generation on generation decline in genetic intelligence, throughout Mankind. For the last 150 years or so, each generation of Man has been dimmer than the last. (see Richard Lynn). What I see in the classroom does nothing to disconfirm this finding. I am coming to think that the future of Man may be less bright than the past - in every sense of the word "bright". In such a situation of global decline, every gifted child should be supported to be the best they can be: for such bright people will be needed more than ever, to support the structure of their societies, as engineers, scientists, artists, lawyers, architects and business people etc, as the quality of people in general declines.

I only hope that gifted children are given what they need to flower. They seem all the more exceptional against the backdrop of what I have seen in the classroom over the years.

A final thought: if young people don't know anything about democracy, how difficult would it be to take it away from them? Perhaps that is just why they don't know anything about it...

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.)

Efficient School Administration: an unmet need.

There is a tendency, in many cultures, to pay little for the work of a receptionist. Being of a lower salary, the receptionist is, in turn, frequently of lower ability. I think this is a mistake. Just because the job does not, in theory, require much intelligence, this does not mean that intelligence, in such a role, is without its utility. In fact, it seems from my experience, that greater intelligence is required in such staff, than is usually present.

Today, we needed to make arrangements for our son to come home at an unusual time. I wanted to leave a message for his teacher that he should be allowed to leave the class to go down to a bus that could take him home. There was only one opportunity to catch this bus.

I called the school office, around lunchtime. Someone picked the phone up - and immediately put it back down again.

I was somewhat surprised.

Then they picked it up again and started to dial out.

I said: "Hello!". Whether or not they heard me, they put the receiver down again.

Then they picked it up again. I said: "Hello!"

They said: "Hello?"

I repeated myself: "Hello."

They put the phone down.

Then they picked it up again and tried dialling out again.

I gave up and replaced the receiver. Clearly, whoever was on the reception at lunchtime was unfamiliar with how to use a phone. Such people still exist in the early twenty-first century. They were also unfamiliar with what you must do when you find someone on the other end of the phone: speak to them.

I decided to call back a bit later in the hope that someone with a functioning central nervous system might pick up the phone instead.

Sometime after 2 pm, I called back.

The conversation seemed quite straightforward. I explained that my son was to leave at a particular time and needed to catch the bus. I asked for a message to be delivered to his teacher to allow this to happen. She assured me that all would work out just fine. My son would catch the bus home.

Later this evening, I got home and discovered that Ainan, who should have been home about two and a half hours before, was still not home.

I called the school and began: "Where is my son?" without introducing myself, precisely because I rather suspected that the person I would be speaking to would be the person to whom I had entrusted my message.

"The boy, ahh?" she replied, eloquently.

"Ainan: my son."

"Ahh...here, ahh. In the office."

"Why did he not take the bus home?"

"Mum get him...or something." she said, with meaning, but without regard for the conventions of language.

I couldn't speak to her anymore, I was too irked - and let my wife handle the rest of the conversation.

In brief, she denied being the person who had taken the message - and denied knowing who might have taken the message. It must be an awfully big reception.

When I finally got to the office to collect Ainan, who had been waiting for three hours to be collected, rather than taking the bus home, the receptionist was on the phone. She didn't even look at me in the several minutes I stood in front of her. It was as if I didn't exist.

I didn't bother to interrupt her call: she would only have denied being on duty earlier, anyway.

From this experience I have come to understand that it is important to ensure the quality and ability of staff in all roles - even those that seem to require little in the way of real intelligence. At my son's school, the reception is unable to answer the phone - and unable to relay a message. Failing in these two functions means that the reception is failing entirely in its role. The proper response to this is either to retrain the staff (I know it seems incredible but some people need training on how to take a message) - or sack them.

I didn't need the surprise of finding my son not at home in the evening when I got home. My first thought was that something might have happened to him. Such worry is unnecessary and was created purely by the incompetence of the school administrative staff.

I worry, further, now. You see, if a school system cannot even do simple things like answer the phone and take messages - how can they handle the vastly more complex challenge of educating a child? The clear answer is that they can't.

I suppose I have been warned. So have you.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and one month, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and seven months, and Tiarnan, two years exactly, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Can Britain survive trash culture?

I am constantly amazed at the way expat British people, recently moved to Singapore, speak of the country I grew up in. It is not what it was, by a long way.


It is saddening to be told that all those forces that were just beginning to take hold when I was in school, have now triumphed, and become the dominant culture. A nation once known for breeding sophisticated "gentlemen", is now best known for the abundance of its yobs, or "Chavs" as they are now known.

Let me explain. The Chav represents all that was once regarded as base in the human. They revel in stupidity, actively hate all who are intellectual, have no respect for the law, for education, for employment (they often live on benefits and petty crime), or for anything that once was remotely considered a social value. Yet, this moronic creed is now the dominant culture in Britain: it is the nature of the "masses".

I left Britain almost eight years ago. It is now clear that, though I have often wanted to, I can never return. That is, the place that once I knew, is no more. Britain of today, does not resemble the Britain of only a few years ago.

The problem is only just beginning. The next generation of British kids are showing shocking signs of being subnormal, compared to the kids of only fifteen years before. There is a twenty-five per cent drop in intellectual function of the average British child compared to 1990 (according to a study of 10,000 children by Michael Shayler of King's College London). That means that, in a few short years, these rather intellectually impaired children (by recent historical standards) are going to become adults. They will add to the dumbing down of British culture. They in turn will become parents, and so the problem will grow, over time. Unless something effective - and rather major - is done, Britain promises to be a country without a future.

An insight into the minds of the people of each nation can be garnered from the kinds of comments they leave on my site. This morning, I found a handful of posts from the same person, from Lambeth, London. None of the posts were publishable. Some of them lacked capitalization and punctuation. None could be classified as sentences. But that wasn't what struck me. What struck me was their coarseness. Two comments consisted of nothing but expletives. That was the sum total of their ability to contribute to the debate of ideas that the internet - and blogging - should be about.

On reading them, and recalling what my colleagues recently arrived from the UK had told me, I was moved to write of the declining situation, in the UK - and to do a little research.

I found something, in my search that should appal all who have ever been a parent. I found the story of one "chav" who had won 9.7 million pounds in the lottery. He set about living "large", in a rather grotesque manner (for instance he appears to have bought 30 vehicles, so that they could be smashed to pieces in a demolition derby in his spacious garden). That, though crass, wasn't what worried me. My concern was his proud boast about his two year old daughter: "Her first words were f*** and s***." He thought it was great.

England was once a nation of refined and cultivated gentlemen, renowned throughout the world for their manners, wit and "breeding". Now, they have become a moronic breed who delight that their babies' first words (and therefore, implicitly, the words they had heard most frequently) should be two expletives. What hope is there of such a child growing up to be an adult of wit, manners and "breeding"?

How long can Britain hold its position in the world, when the quality of its people - in a very real sense - is in such decline?

Britain is a nation that once possessed a rich intellectual tradition. It produced world-class thinkers by the bundle. Its universities were among the best in the world. But now, it is a nation that loathes all that is intellectual. Thinking has become socially unacceptable. To sit in a pub, and speak intelligently, is to court a jeer at best, or a beer glass (broken), at worst. Only stupidity and vacuity are now socially permissible. The intellectual is on the run - and lives in perpetual hiding, marginalized in society, daring not to raise a voice, lest they be denounced and set upon.

Once a society has marginalized its thinkers, it cannot be long before such a civilization collapses. Britain has taken that step of marginalizing its best people. Not even mediocrities have taken their place. It is the idiots who have taken the reigns - it is they whose voice shouts loudly. Britain, is now a land of the lout.

I don't believe that anyone in a society should be marginalized - but if any class of people had to be marginalized - it should be the louts, not the thinkers.

Britain needs to step back from this particular abyss. It needs to discourage loutishness, to subdue the creed of the moron, encourage intellectual activity, reward brilliance, foster thinking. It needs, in short, to be what it used to be: a great nation, brimming with great people who dedicated their lives to serious endeavour (or at least, enough of them did so, to make it the leading nation it once was). It is time to shrug off this attack of idiocy - and return to the values and sophistication of yesteryear.

It won't be easy. It won't take place overnight. But if Britain is to survive as a nation worthy of the term, it must fight the decline of its people. It must urge them to better themselves, as people, and not just as economic units. If nothing is done, many of us will live to see the "decline and fall" of a once great nation.

The land that produced William Shakespeare, also produced the barbaric poster of expletives on my site. Would it not be a better nation, if it fostered more geniuses and less loutishness?

I hope, one day, to see, comments of wit, and brilliance, from the British Isles, as once might have been written. We will see just how long I have to wait.

(If you would like to read of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and eight months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and one month, or Tiarnan, eighteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)