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Comment by leptoniscool | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if future historians will see a similar drop after widespread use of plastic

Maybe, but given that "plastics" are a broad category I'd expect that IQ would me a poor proxy for some of their effects.

BPA for instance, is a xenoestrogen. I'm not sure what metric to watch for it, but it's probably not IQ.

Anogenital distance is likely the preferred measure.

> Males with a short AGD (lower than the median around 52 mm (2 in)) have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as those with a longer AGD.

> Swan et al. report that the levels of phthalates associated with significant AGD reductions are found in approximately one-quarter of Americans tested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for phthalate body burdens.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance (warning on the header photos).

I was imagining something a bit more impactful (and easy to find in the data), because as far as that one goes, it's not clear why anyone should know or care.

Maybe high school graduation rate (an inverse proxy to indicate bullying)?

Obviously not as easy to screen for, but this is a very clear indicator of how strong the known adverse effects of plasticizers are.

Perhaps not with respect to IQ but there’s a chance that future historians might correlate the use of plastics with increased rates of infertility.

Perhaps there is a link between plastics and ADHD [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8910189/

I find it interesting that the article you linked didn't mention the heritability of ADHD. In around 3/4ths[0] of cases ADHD is caused by genetics, which leaves plenty of space for other causes.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0070-0

Next do fluoride.

That’s been “debunked” though right?

For those that didn’t get the memo: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/06/health/children-higher-fluori...

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/are-plastics-killing-us

Oh gosh... "insidious castration of all men" and "blurred gender roles". Really? They have been blurry for all of homo sapiens existence, just think of the matriarchal societies that still exist today[0]. Gender dysphoria has been documented from individuals[1] for a long time, societies accepted a third gender since ancient time and even in the USA, the Cercle Hermaphroditos[2] was quite early to the party, being founded in 1895 (yes 130 years ago).

I'm confident that plastic will go the way trees did: Unbothered for a long time until bacteria figured dead wood is just another food and put a stop to trees being fossilized as coal.

Stop plastics, it's a good idea to do so for many reasons, but there's no need to drag gender roles and those stupid good old times into it. I much prefer spending time with my kid instead of slaving away 9-5 six days a week.

[0] https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g2856528... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalonymus_ben_Kalonymus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cercle_Hermaphroditos

It doesn't seem as if the principal researcher behind this result is a historian:

https://www.dri.edu/directory/joe-mcconnell/

Has plastic been linked to lower IQ?

Not yet, I think the OP means it might in the future.

If anything, the correlation might be the opposite --- look at plasticiser use in East Asian countries, for example.

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