Michael Woodley


Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, Younger is a British ecologist and intelligence researcher.

Biography

Woodley is the eldest son of Caroline Cuthbertson and Michael Woodley of Menie, 28th Baron of Menie.
He received his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2011, with a dissertation on the life history ecology of Arabidopsis thaliana. Since then, he has focused his research on the evolution of human intelligence and life history traits.
In January 2013, he became a permanent research fellow with the Center Leo Apostel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium. From 2015 to 2016, he was scientist in residence at Chemnitz University of Technology.

Research

Woodley is primarily known for his research on secular trends in human intelligence. He first gained widespread attention in 2013, when he authored a study reporting that average general intelligence had decreased by about 1.16 intelligence quotient points per decade, possibly due to dysgenic selection, since the Victorian era. This was based on a meta-analysis of studies measuring simple visual reaction time, starting in the late 19th century. Woodley's co-occurrence model predicts that cognitive measures which serve as stable and highly heritable measures of should decline with time due to genetic changes, the Flynn effect being restricted to narrower and less-heritable abilities and skills that rise over time due to environmental improvements. Other researchers have looked for evidence of this model in meta-analyses of time trends in measures of short-term and working memory, visuo-spatial ability, and ability-based emotional intelligence.
Woodley authored a 2014 study arguing that the Flynn effect is, in part, a result of people becoming better at using simple rules for identifying solutions to IQ test items, rather than a true increase in. In 2016, he authored a study which found a negative relationship between a population’s level of a polygenic score linked to educational attainment and fertility rates. A study he authored in 2017 reported that polygenic scores linked to both educational attainment and are more common among Europeans now than was the case earlier in the Holocene epoch, three to five thousand years ago. In 2018, he joined the editorial board of the journal Intelligence.

London Conference on Intelligence controversy

In 2018, Woodley was criticized for his involvement with the controversial London Conference on Intelligence, for which he co-wrote a paper with the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, Gerhard Meisenberg. He subsequently organized a formal response to the controversy which was co-signed by fourteen other academic attendees and was published in the journal Intelligence.

Books

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