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If a young Englishman scores highly on IQ tests they will likely be admitted to a three year degree program and complete it successfully. Sitting their final exams, they will be recalling material learned at the beginning of their course, three years earlier: success depends on having a retentive memory. Retentive for years. But the IQ test only took an hour or two; no chance to probe multi-year memory retention. How does that work?
One idea is that IQ tests are probing for a healthy brain and a low mutational load. It is still a little unclear why the genes that help with rapidly solving little puzzles should be the same ones that boost memory.
I could imagine that sustained selection based on IQ test will eventually break the correlation of test performance and long term memory. In a dozen generations, say 2323 or 2384, there may be a crisis in University admissions. Too many students are really sharp mentally, but they forget their course work after 6 months and end up failing.
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