. Not really. I know many, many people who easily avoided military national service in Austria , making up the most bogus of excuses. Admittedly, this was in peacetime, but a coward can easily fake enough ill-health etc. in order to be put well behind the front lines.
It's not a coward who refuses to fight in an unjust war. Actually, the coward is the one who does everything he's told without even questioning it, for fear of punishment.
Not remotely valid, as that very change has nothing to do with genetics but is said to be solely due to the sudden rise in food-intake in modern times. Obviously, someone with a larger brain is going to suffer in more ancient times when famine was far more likely an occurrence.
Height has also increased in modern times due to a lack of famine
And likewise the smarter and taller ones who survive pass on their smarter and taller genes on.
BUT we are still shorter than our palaeo ancestors, despite this. The point being that to get back to the brain-size of Cro-Magnon, and especially the Neanderthals, we would need significant natrual selection and the like to do get to that point.
This could be the case, although this wouldn't indicate that the dysgenic effects are as terrible and as pressing as what you think. That said, I remain highly skeptical of the theory that says that neanderthals and cro magnon were much smarter than us. I could accept that on average, they may have been slightly smarter, but they didn't have the raw numbers to produce unlikely geniuses like we have today, which are the ones who truly move civilization forward. If they were so smart, why did they all die out? And why didn't they produce technology like the kind we have today? Or are you saying that they did have such technology, built the pyramids, ruled over us, and when they got tired of playing god, left the planet and went for the stars?
The Flynn Effect has been discredited. People have pointed out that all it shows is that people have become better at doing IQ tests, not that they were growing more intelligent. I myself have done endless IQ tests and steadily scored ever higher points as I did more and more IQ tests which were very similiar in nature. As soon as I did more complex IQ tests which had far different methods, I would end up scoring much lower than usual. My scores have varied anywhere from 113 IQ points to 170!
The Flynn Effect applies to subsequent generations. Yes you can teach yourself to do better at IQs, but like you said, as soon as the type of IQ test is changed drastically, your benefits are gone. The Flynn Effect applies to people who've never done IQ tests before, certainly not the ones used to test for it.
Oh, and the Flynn Effect has been recently broken. This is linked by some to recent mass immigration:-
Yes, of course, you could have a situation where every race is getting smarter on average, but the population as a whole is getting less smart on average because basically the only ones who are growing in numbers are africans, who on average are less smart. Notice that this applies worldwide too, so it's not simply about immigration/emmigration.
One idea has been that the level of dygenics over the last 200 years has been temporarily masked by the fact that better conditions arose such as less exposure to famine and better environment, along with better education. The idea being that dysgenics is now so dominant that a better environment/adequate nutrition etc. can no longer cloak it.
I'd doubt some of that. There might be less famine, but quality of foods has gone down substantially. And like you said, famines should have an eugenics effect, no?
Likewise the formal education has gotten terribly worse, while informal education has gotten much better in very recent times due to the internet.