I'm not confident that you can really correlate simple reaction times with intelligence in general. But if our reaction times are indeed getting longer, that's interesting for other reasons.
Consider the relatively recent development of video games, many of which depend heavily on reaction time as a basic skill. We spend our childhoods immersed in these twitch-critical tasks: training the Victorians would have envied, if they had been all that concerned about simple reaction times. Yet our reaction times continue to go up, seemingly unabated. Why would that be the case? Shouldn't the extra practice at least slow the decline?
Consider the relatively recent development of video games, many of which depend heavily on reaction time as a basic skill. We spend our childhoods immersed in these twitch-critical tasks: training the Victorians would have envied, if they had been all that concerned about simple reaction times. Yet our reaction times continue to go up, seemingly unabated. Why would that be the case? Shouldn't the extra practice at least slow the decline?