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Study Claims Human Intelligence Peaked Two To Six Millennia Ago
eldavojohn writes "Professor Gerald "Jerry" Crabtree of Stanford's Crabtree Laboratory published a paper (PDF) that has appeared in two parts in Trends in Genetics. The paper opens with a very controversial suggestion: 'I would be willing to wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions.' From there, Crabtree speculates we're on the decline of human intelligence and we have been for at least a couple millennia. His argument suggests agriculture and, following from that, cities, have allowed us to break free of some environmental forces on competitive genetic mutations — a la Mike Judge's theory. However, the conclusion of the paper urges humans to keep calm and carry on, as any attempt to fix this genetic trend would almost certainly be futile and disturbing."
Intel peak
And Idiocracy streak
Comes with beard
You hirsute freak.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
*looks at the robot on Mars*
No. No it did not.
But also rather pleasant...
Looks as if the movie was right. But there is a solution: elecrolytes
I clicked to see who or what Mike Judge was. The topic immediately made me think of one of the first Science Fiction stories I ever read, C. M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
That explains the Kardashians.
I was wondering about that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This would seem rather obvious. You don't see people like those of the classic Greek era anymore.
And the effects of childhood environmental factors on brain development? Which have inarguably improved over the last several thousand years?
I remain suspicious. Suuuuuspiciooouuuuus!
What about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
"The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day."
Sure IQ is not Intelligence. But, this publication should relate somehow to this effect.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
If you compared the average American to a Greek citizen of 1000 BC, who would appear more physically fit?
Because of technology, humans as a species are not evolving in a favorable direction.
Having read only the popular article so far, I confess, it sounds rather speculative.
But more to the point, there is an assumption that intelligence is itself is a single quantifiable thing, and that the intelligence that did so well on the African savannah, or in ancient Athens would do equally well in our circumstance. (For that matter, that this "intelligence" would be the primary contributing factor to who lived or died.)
That there are genetic differences relating to intelligence seems highly likely. That they produce more or less of a single linearly quantifiable intelligence seems rather less likely. That selection pressures have greatly changed (as everything else about our environments have greatly changed) seems something like overhwelmingly likely.
What this means, and what conclusions can be drawn... seems speculative to the point of parlour games.
As soon we form fixed civilizations, natural selection is no longer in effect.
For a few millennia, perhaps, we get by with early social selection, which shows people selecting mates for admire for bravery, intelligence, wisdom and strength. This puts the wealthiest, smartest, most healthy and most attractive into the same elite breeding pool.
After that, society gets faddish. Think of Rome in its final days. People no longer pick the best, but the most popular. That means people who are good salespeople, drama queens, hip cats, etc.
Thus begins the long slow path to Idiocracy.
1. Find the link between the genotype and intelligence.
2. Sequence a lot of old bones.
3. Sequence a lot of living people.
4. Profit...?
Ezekiel 23:20
Duuuuh! We see this trend everyday, people refusing to think further than what the TV tells them to, people relying on safety measures and warning signs instead of common sense, people preferring to do mindless repetitive tasks instead of thinking of ways to improve their work/life.
ics
*looks at this comment*
Yes. Yes it did.
That very slow loss of intelligence is more than offset by being able to take advantage of all the advances of those before us.
As the years progress, an ever increasing majority of people are forced, through various agencies, into a state of poverty which becomes a self perpetuating cycle of ignorance and...well, stupidity.
On the flip side, an ever decreasing minority of wealthy families become smarter and more wealthy.
Most of my evidence to this is conjecture, but only because I haven't had enough time to read all the supporting studies. This is because I have to spend an inordinate amount of time working to afford the bare necessities of survival.
This is, in my opinion, an example of man knowing what the best course of action is (spreading around the wealth to insure societal betterment, not just allowing a few to control the best resources), but being too shortsighted and greedy to "do the right thing".
I am also to blame, but as I get older I have found ways to counteract those mistakes.
I blame our much of mans greed AND ingenuity on how short lived we are. With more time, we would have less impetus to be rash and brazen while young. Given us more time to contemplate how to be more effective cohabitants.
I feel sorry for our kids...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
was perfect in the beginning and has been running down according to the laws of physics (entropy) would naturally hold these conclusions to be correct. The people who built the pyramids, were every bit as intelligent if not more so, as those who design the latest microprocessors or space rockets.
Seems like something that can be tested. You could either: (A) find a society which doesn't have cities or agriculture and see how intelligent they are (which seems odd, since if they haven't developed cities or agriculture, it sounds like a mark against them - though there are environmental reasons they might not have done so) - for example, the Khoisan in South Africa (i.e. the original natives of South Africa before Central-African people and European people moved in; admittedly, the Koisan probably didn't have too many evolutionary forces for competitive genetic mutations, since food is abundant in their native environment), (B) use artificial insemination to create a person with the genetics of ancient times (which would probably be seen as unethical, though if the mother agrees, it probably shouldn't be unethical).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan
I'll take that wager Mr Crabtree. For the defence I call Donald Trump.
Studies done by humans with peaked intelligence. Isn't that a paradox?
Agriculture and cities tend to mean individuals do not need to be able to fend for themselves as much, but it does mean they need to be able to work together and look towards the future more. Farmers need to plant crops at the right times every year, need to save seeds, plant enough to survive through winter and trade some away for other stuff, city builders need to organize the whole city for future growth, etc. That means evolution will naturally tend to emphasize long-term planning and intelligence rather than the brute strength which was almost required to survive at all before the invention of cities and agriculture. If anything, modern life emphasizes intelligence more than it did millenia and centuries ago, when strength and survival skills would have been required and emphasized. Our intelligence is, in fact, the very reason we aren't as strong or physical capable as our primate ancestors were. In fact, if it weren't for our ability to live in society, our intelligence would be nearly worthless. The whole reason our intelligence gives us an advantage is that we are able to use tools and organization in order to overcome obstacles that would be otherwise physically beyond us.
A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate
Yeah, a Wall Street executive who is homeless and hungry is sure going to attract lots of mates. (/sarcasm) Simply because our decisions now are different from what they were 3000 years ago, does not mean the intelligence required is any less so. Or any more, for that matter.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
As a society, we seem to still be advancing, even as most of our individual members spark dwindles.
It's a coincidence that our downward trend started around the time that widespread, organized religion started to take hold? :)
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I think their sample size and the selective nature of their criteria are far to small to make this type of conclusion. The shift from general agriculturalist/foragers to urban civilization would tend to make us more specialized rather than simply less intelligent.
Change to our genetic makeup is more a function of modern medicine increasing the survival rate of individuals who would normally die before reproducing. Be that cause, disease, genetic issues or simple stupidity. Modern science should never discount the effect of "Y'all watch this!" risk based behavior and its removal of unsound genes from the breeding population.
...people have been thinking that the past was the "golden era", and that the people of the past were so much better.
Of that horrid book, The Bell Curve. And yes, progress still seems to be occurring, we have for example these little handheld computers. That counts for something.
âoeI would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues,â Professor Crabtree says in a provocative paper published in the journal Trends in Genetics.
The average Athenian lived a life of drudgery and was illiterate.
Citizenship was hereditary (or very rarely granted by democratic vote) which made the "average citizen" a much different class of person than the average Athenian.
It's like saying that if the average Harvard student were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I imagine that in the modern World, an individual draws not just from their own intelligence, but from collective intelligence through advanced communications. In a way, we've become thin peer-to-peer clients in a much more powerful supercomputer.
Some Flowers for Algernon anyone ?
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I am not sure I can buy in to his hypothesis. Our perceptions could be skewed because most of what we know about the ancients was left behind by the more intelligent and intellectual members of those societies. I don't think humans are less intelligent today than they were in the past. It only seems that way because we have YouTube.
Proverbs 21:19
with the invention of widespread monotheism?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
At least, modern civilization does. I buy the study's argument if you remove the mass-education system we have from the equation, as it was in, say, the Middle Ages where monks and elites were the only ones who had a chance of studying anything. (Cue all the people lamenting the state of education in the US, but still.) But once you add mass education into the mix, you will unearth and/or create plenty of smart people that way, rather than just by the stupid people dying off.
If you define intelligence as the ability to survive off the land, then these soldiers trained to eat ants and bees to elude capture would be the most intelligent of all. They are the ones that have used all the inventions like writing, formal schooling, training from professionals to the task of surviving in the wild. If you define it as the ability solve abstract problems or as the ability to conjure up mechanical contraptions, or as the ability communicate your thoughts well, or as the ability to empathize etc etc you will get different sets of people as the most intelligent.
Albert Einstein might not have lasted three days in a the jungles of New Guinea. But New Guinean people engaged in constant chronic warfare. Incessant warfare that killed some 2% of the population every year. Now who is more intelligent?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And Christianity's prevalence was not until this, the most recent time of the two to six millennia decline. Not sure if you're a troll making the same point or serious, but you might be a compelling piece of evidence.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Congratulations on providing proof that the study is correct.
Blank until
Greg Cochran over at West Hunter has a pretty damning critique of this paper.
Cochran's review:
In two recent papers, Gerald Crabtree says two correct things. He says that the brain is complex, depends on the correct functioning of many genes, and is thus particularly vulnerable to genetic load. Although he doesn’t use the phrase “genetic load”, probably because he’s never heard it. He goes on to say that that this is not his area of expertise: truer words were never spoken!
His general argument is that selection for intelligence relaxed with the development of agriculture, and that brain function, easier to mess up than anything else, has probably been deteriorating for thousands of years. We are dumber than out ancestors, who were dumber than theirs, etc.
The first bit, about the relaxation of selection for intelligence in the Neolithic -. Sure. As we all know, just as soon as people domesticated emmer wheat, social workers fanned out, kept people from cheating or killing their neighbors, and made sure that fuckups wouldn’t starve to death. Riiight -it’s all in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the online supplement.
Why do people project a caricature of modernity back thousands of years before it came into existence? Man, he doesn’t know much about history.
Nor does he know much about biology. If he did, he’d understand that truncation selection is what makes such complex adaptations possible. If only the top 85% (in terms of genetic load) reproduce, the average loser has something like 1 std more load , so each one takes lots of deleterious mutations with him. But then, he’s probably never heard of truncation selection. I’m sure they never taught him that in school, but that’s no excuse – they never taught me, either.
If his thesis was correct, you’d expect hunter-gatherers to be smarter than people from more sophisticated civilizations, which is the crap that Jared Diamond peddles about PNG. But Crabtree says that everyone’s the same – stepping on the dick of his own argument. Of course, in reality, hunter-gatherers score low, often abysmally low, and have terrible trouble trying to fit in to more complex civilizations. They do a perfect imitation of being not-smart, amply documented in the psychometric literature. Of course, he doesn’t know anything about those psychometric results.
Which reminds me of secret clearances: it used to be that having a clearance mean that you were entrusted with information that most people didn’t have. Now, it means that you can’t read Wikileaks, even though everyone else does. In much the same way, you may have the silly impression that having a Ph.D. means knowing more than regular people – but in the human sciences, the most important prerequisite is not knowing certain facts. Some kind soul should post the Index, so newbies won’t get themselves in trouble.
He doesn’t even know things that would almost support his case. Average brain size has indeed decreased over the Neolithic- but in every population, not just in farmers. He might talk about paternal age effects, and how average paternal age varies – but he doesn’t know anything about it. He ought to be thinking about the big population increase associated with agriculture, and the ensuing Fisherian acceleration – but he’s never heard of it.
He even gets the peripheral issues wrong. He talks about language as new, 50,000 years old or so – much more recent than the split between Bushmen/Pygmies and the rest of the human race. Yet they talk. He says that the X chromosome isn’t enriched for cognition and behavioral genes – but it is (by at least a factor of two) , and the reference he quotes confirms it.
Selection pressures and mutation rates can vary in space and time. Intelligence could decrease – it
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The average citizen of 1000BC Athens (and even more so, the average inhabitant of Athens, which would include all the slaves) was certainly less intelligent than the average citizen of 1000BC Athens we know about. That's because the people who are remembered are in most cases more intelligent than the average.
There is a clear correlation between raising and intelligence. The reason for this drop in intelligence may be the increasing inattentiveness and lack of caring in parents. Of course this could be completely wrong. I have no idea how attentive parents were millenia ago.
'I would be willing to wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions.'
If he's that smart he'll get bored and leave the planet.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you have ever read ancient greek, you already know that the grammar is fantastically complex and nuanced. The writer expects the reader to be able to follow sentences that are parsed in multiple ways, carry ideas and frameworks in and out in complex and precise ways. A single sentence may continue over several pages.
Just reading and trying to dissect Plato was one of the most complicated tasks I have ever tried.
I have to agree with the article.
Is your sentiment (of decline without a subsequent rise) symptomatic of an addiction to an entrenched myopic way of thinking?
Or is this way of thinking symptomatic of your addiction to the cycle of addiction? ... Morpheus like Hmmmm.....
Back then, the common folk couldn't read, couldn't write - they talked and remembered. They learned by trial and error and memorized the procedures that lead to the results they desire. THis is how they built monuments, pyramids, etc. The pyramids of giza are technically third-generation pyramids.. the generations previous to them were inferior because they learned how to build them via trial and error, to put it so simply.
Back then, people could recite Homer's illiad in verbatim (or very close) because stories, news, and information was passed around by word-of-mouth, not by paper, or books. The gospels were remembered and only written well after jesus died and well after many of the disciples died.
Some would say that the advancement of technology can help us use our mental capacity to retain more advance information by taking the burden of "rudementary" knowledge.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
I personally know people, some family members, who are just wiling away the hours until death claims them. They sit passively in front of the TV, eating and drinking artificial flavors that trick their bodies into thinking they are nutrients as the pretty lights hold their attention. They begrudge the time it takes to remain sanitary, let alone actually engage with other family members.
Have you ever tried to hold a conversation with someone who's been on a multi-day TV bender? First, it's really hard to get and hold their attention. Second, it's hard to get them to engage their forebrains and demonstrate cognition. Oh, after a short time they'll snap out of it, but what about the next generation? And the one after that? I wonder if we really are doomed.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Brawndo: it's got what plants crave!
Civilization rises to the point where television is invented. Then it collapses.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This is what popularity does: it selects what offends least, and what is shared in common (lowest common denominator), not what rises above.
Slavery was quite common in ancient Greece. That's often suggested as the way in which they were able to have such a pure democratic process. Slavery allowed the 'citizens' to be free to do all of that voting and such. If we gathered up all the smart people today and gave them slaves so they didn't have to spend so much of their time cooking, cleaning, etc. we'd probably see a similar
Education does not improve intelligence. It improves knowledge, perhaps, but if those people lack the intelligence to apply it, it won't help at all.
Further, not all people are bright enough to benefit from education. When you insist on "educating" them, you create a memorization contest, not a thinking contest, and as a result you penalize smart people, who tend to get bored and zone out when memorization contests come around.
Perhaps educating the capable was a better idea than educating everyone and pretending they're capable, thus ruining the value of education for everyone.
When I clicked on the link to go read the article, a banner at the top of the screen read "Woman is 57 but Looks 27?" while below the article, a constantly cycling thermometer bar read "Disqus is taking a while to load. Reload?" which redisplayed the same thing when I hit "reload". This weekend, I will work on a CNC machine until I get tired of drilling holes in aluminum, then I will drink beer and surf for porn. Decreasing intelligence is clearly afoot, which is a very good thing, since it's the only thing that'll save the planet from turning into a human-made toxic waste dump unsuitable for hosting vertebrate life forms.
If you listen to all the new agers, we've been declining for the last 13,000 years and we're currently at the absolute low of human intelligence. We're at the divide between the dark/golden age in the precession of the equinox. That helps explain the Egyptians, Mayans, etc. We are the ancient aliens. Give it a couple thousand more years and things will start to pick back up.
Over the centuries, Homo sapiens diverges into two distinct species, as reported by H. G. Wells in "The Time Machine".
Life Imitating Art, or vice-versa
Because after 50 years of listening to retards I hope Derp is our future.
Just finished re-reading the Time Machine by H G Wells today, which romanticises along similar lines - as far as the future is concerned. While decay has been assumed for a while (not least by MJ's Idiocracy) I suppose the novelty in this paper is extrapolation to the past. Nice one.
I think he's mostly right. Take an average person today and put them into a situation where they have to produce their own food and shelter they would most likely fail. Our survival no longer depends on adapting to a harsh environment. I think this line of thought goes hand in hand with reproducing too. Gone are the days of morons not being able to reproduce because they were maimed or dead. Now any idiot can get it on and reproduce a baby that will grow up and be just as dim.
Where would one change their name to... say, oh, I dunno... Beef Supreme. :D
Breed the aspie's!
So with every other animal, we define intelligence by the ability to solve problems present in the animal's environment. Much of the dicussion above implies that there is some final, fixed set of cognitive skills that are environmentally independent. This has gotta be wrong. Excellent flint-knapping knowledge won't help in a data center, and calculus is not much use to a hunter-gatherer.
Why do solutions have to be either futile or disturbing?
First off, given the choice, I would prefer breeding out criminal and irresponsible behavior and breeding in good sense over breeding for traditional "intelligence".
What would be wrong with incentivising women to be seeded with optimal sperm in cases where their most likely alternate choice would be breeding with the neighborhood thug?
The author seems to be enamored with the way the ancient Greeks were able to memorize everything. He apparently doesn't realize the method they were using, which some people can (and do) still use today, but most don't care to because they have cheap paper, and more recently, computers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
Note that the summary is a little misleading. The method was almost certainly practiced by the Greeks and passed down to the Romans. Not because of the tale about Simonides, but because it's pretty clear that Plato and others were familiar with the method. The notion of a visual mnemonic memory bleeds through Greek philosophy. (Much like computers today, the technology of the day heavily influenced their philosophical systems.)
So, one can either believe that the ancient Greeks had super-human memories, or that they used these very simple mnemonic techniques (which we know for a fact that the Romans used), and which today we know (for a fact) can be used to memorize material like the Greeks and Romans.
I've used the system for taking exams. It takes considerable practice, though, and I'm still a novice. Generating visual associations for abstract material takes quite a lot of practice. This is why Roman students (and presumably Greek students) were first taught the method at the beginning of their schooling, along with reading and writing.
His argument reeks nostalgic, i.e. a return to the Greek philosophical ways. And I would guess he started off with a vague hypothesis and found facts to support his claim. Some arguments say agriculture and plentiful food allowed brains to get larger... go figure. Whatever the conclusion, I do think that mutations have allowed for a greater genetic diversity of brain types, and that is a good thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
On the other hand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
or more darkly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
So the report claims that people are dumber in the present. If the paper is shown to be speculative, shoddy "research", would that prove or disprove the argument?
I don't know, but Archimedes came awfully damned close to inventing it, despite his culture's lack of essential background concepts.
By Cyril Kornbluth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
He's talking about evolutionary pressures causing a rise in intelligence while I've read other claims that evolution has little to do with intelligence as in beyond a certain point intelligence it's affected by natural selection. I know he's dead wrong about average intelligence for a simple reason, diet. We may live on junk food but the average person alive today has a diet higher in calories and the nutrients needed for brain development. Just look at body size. Genetically little has changed in the last thousand years yet in the last 200 average height has increased by nearly a foot and in some areas it's been even more dramatic. It's going to be difficult if not impossible to compare the genetics of three thousand years ago with today. It would probably be pointless because the real determining factor isn't the last three thousand years but the next three thousand years. The major evolutionary stress at the moment is more intelligent and educated people produce fewer children which may negatively affect the gene pool. That trend could reverse over the next hundred years as fertility rates of the poor drop. The potential is the more intelligent having the financial resources to support more children reversing the trend. The future and evolutionary pressures are impossible to predict so we'll have to wait a few thousand years to see in which direction the trend is headed.
Rounding to the nearest whole number, zero percent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
This movie makes a compelling argument for the same...
We once functioned in a subconscious state and then transitioned to consciousness and the use of higher level abstraction. see Julian Jaynes's book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"
With the use of higher level abstractions we lost touch with our subconscious and its access to nature and we discovered deception and techniques of deception easy to apply and safe from proof. See Wallace Ward (pen name Frank Wallace) five set books titled Neo Tech, specifically the first book on these techniques and/or his book "Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life by Using the Advanced Concepts of Poker"
Today we have protest happening around the world and all have in common the fed up of the people over those in positions of command who have pursued a direction of deceiving the people for their own benefit. But the people are today seeing past the illusions. This is driven, as was the first transition, by population growth (re: tower of babel)
Where we are headed in this transition is to recombine the subconscious with the abstraction of consciousness and as a result people are seeing past the deceptions, but even more so learning how to make the connection between consciousness and the subconscious via such techniques as PSYCH-K as mentioned in the article starting on page 73 of http://www.iamb.net/IJMB/journal/IJMB_Vol_3_1.pdf
And when this transition happens to the degree of the majority of the population, our intelligence level will advance a great deal.
Of how my fellow humans drive their cars.... Most have been regressing rapidly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They became too stupid to get here.
The hypothesis in itself sounds logical. However, it's failing to take into an account that the human population is now bigger than ever. If exceptional IQ is merely the result of the right combination of genes, it follows that the smartest people that ever lived are alive right now. The average IQ might, however, be lower than before. As to the Flynn effect, I think that's just temporary and related to better nutrition. This being /., I'm off to reading the article now..
...human intelligence has peaked, but people are most certainly seem less intelligent now than when I was in school. The reason for this is that technology allows people to remember less than they used to be required to. When I was in school either you remembered formulas for calculus, took good notes, or you had to go to the library and look them up. You couldn't just open a browser, type in calculus formula list, and get a list of the most commonly used formulas. I actually propose that in one way this may allow people to achieve more than they would otherwise, because it allows them to use less memory for storage of formulas and more memory for actual computation. The down side is that in a few 100 more years, as people gradually memorize less and less, if we ever have some super-storm that destroys all magnetic storage on the planet then all of the knowledge of the world would most certainly be lost as paper books are growing more and more scarce.
Funny, those old creationists, The Jews... Also say man also lived longer six millennia ago.. Upto 900 some years.
Watching the wrong TV show has also been proven to make you stupider.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
From this article, (and what I know of the "Flynn effect") - - - selection bias is the strongest impact on measuring human intelligence. Not actual evolution. (whatever that means).
Hmm, wikipedia has a lot to say on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques.
IIRC one of the leading proponents of alien involvement went to Egypt to get more evidence of his beliefs, found that he was completely wrong, and became an egyptologist. Once he'd gone to take a look he didn't have much sympathy with the whole "it's a mystery" viewpoint.
I had a physics teacher who said it was known that plumb lines were used because the deformation due to the weight of the pyramid was measurable at the top. A quick estimate suggests that the deflection would not be noticeable by several orders of magnitude.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Except that humans (and mammals) don't really evolve genetically over 6,000 years.
It's not that it's not Politically correct. It's Eugenics, and not only is it immoral, and unethical, but if your assumption is wrong has a higher chance of killing the species. Lets look at an over simplified version of Ants. You have Workers, Queens, and Warriors. If your test results end up eliminating any one group you'll end up killing that entire colony. The Only test for procreation that needs to be applied is survival of your offspring. If you were too stupid and got your kids killed then Evolution is working as Intended. If you were too anti-social for other to help you out when times were tough then Evolution is working as Intended. The only place where modifying the species on a genetic level is even arguably moral is in the elimination of clearly identifiable diseases like CF. Any attempt at going further than that is wrong on every level.
And Christianity's prevalence was not until this, the most recent time of the two to six millennia decline. Not sure if you're a troll making the same point or serious, but you might be a compelling piece of evidence.
What, that making people from rocks can sometimes result in something less intelligent than rocks?
Would Einstein be equally successful in ancient Athens?
Possibly, he would have become a philosopher.
>>Excellent flint-knapping knowledge won't help in a data center, and calculus is not much use to a hunter-gatherer.
These are "knowledge" bits easily passed down to others who are not that bright (min brightness necessary though).
So there perhaps is a set of abilities and skills that can collectively be called "intelligence". But this set is likely not the same unique set - take creativeness of an artist against creativeness of mathematician.
4wdloop
I can safely say intelligence did not peak 2000 years ago.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
And Christianity's prevalence was not until this, the most recent time of the two to six millennia decline.
Then even later people became stupid enough to believe that the "religion of peace" involved following a pedophile warlord who told people to kill non believers
Garbage in, garbage out? :P
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
You idiot. God doesn't drive evolution. God simply creates and everything remains static because Evolution is a myth perpetuated by those liberal bastards trying to make our kids think outside my little church house rules.
I read somewhere that the Sunday NY Times contains more information than the typical EDUCATED person of the 17th century would have known.
I'm not sure if this was limited to what an educated person would have been taught, or if it included "natural" knowledge that a person might have learned as they lived -- for example, I would assume that most 17th century people (and earlier) would have been naturalists relative to most modern city dwellers given the rural lifestyles and the greater abundance of nature in a less populated, more "wild" era.
"'I would be willing to wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions.'"
By 'average citizen' I guess they mean no slave, no woman.
Women 50% out
Slaves, ditto.
It is estimated that in Athens, the majority of citizens owned at least one slave.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece
So I guess they mean Socrates, Aristotle, Epicurus: pick one, because Ioseph SixAmphora from those 25% didn't leave many papyri.
We had an 'edited' Shakespeare text at school. Our English teacher took great delight in pointing out that the really rude jokes had been left in because the editor didn't understand them, so a comment about the bagpipes causing some people to urinate were removed, while jokes about vaginas weren't.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I find this just a way to get to the argument that somehow our elders being smarter knew better. What a load....
If there had been no Christianity, there would have been no dark age. People thought the world was going to end real soon now, so what was the point in doing anything or maintaining vital infrastructure? Plus they had the gangster church keeping everyone down. Public health was ruined. The disdain of learning got to the point where most of the clergy couldn't even read their own books. Think of where we would be today if a whole millennium of progress hadn't been wasted on abject ignorance and superstition.
The Romans were actually very advanced. They had flush toilets (of a sort), advanced medical knowledge relative to the time (they could remove cataracts and surgical tools from the 2nd century CE are remarkably similar to what we have today), and they could build damn near anything and have it still be around ~2000 years later. They even had something like a primitive steam engine.... it is possible that if the empire had lasted a bit longer (things REALLY started going downhill post-Constantine... read Gibbon for details) we could have had the industrial revolution in the 5th or 6th century CE instead of the 18-19th.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Why is this tagged science? This is simply a publicity piece, not a science piece.
As geneticist Steve Jones says in the article itself:
"At first sight this is a classic case of Arts Faculty science. Never mind the hypothesis, give me the data, and there aren’t any,” said Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London.
This is a standard "fluff" piece that academics are forced to put out every so often in order to obtain continued sponsorship.
Wikipedia puts it best:
"emphasis on publishing may decrease the value of resulting scholarship, as scholars must spend more time scrambling to publish whatever they can manage, rather than spend time developing significant research agendas."
These are some interesting ideas, and possibly contains the start of a a research topic, but without data, evidence, research methodologies, etc, this is pure speculation.
I can seem to remember some neurological studies that examine how the brain is adapting to our modern world.
The main point these proved is that the way our memory works is changing and the mind is getting used to an "I'll just Google this" approach.
When I talk to most people around me, we all seem to think that older people are in some ways a lot smarter then the younger generation as soon as you take away the tools the younger generation takes for granted. Tasks in society are getting so specialised that people cannot perform the most basic maintenance tasks around the house or concerning their car. There allways is someone that knows "that job" better then you do and in a consumery fashion people stop caring on how to do them.
I makes me wonder what happens when a society system breaks down and suddenly you need to "know everything" again.
What would happen if a big EMP got dropped over a modern society? Would we really become cannibals?
Bear in mind that the Curiosity rover, it's parts and all the pre-requisite science was not thought up by a single person. The design probably used many pre-existing parts that had been used in previous space-missions - several of which were not designed by the Curiosity designer (or design-team). These parts have been developed and refined over the years. As for the science behind the parts and the missions, that was defined over the course of the centuries by countless intellectuals.
So basically, what it boils down to is that an intelligent person today has a lot more pre-existing knowledge to play with than an intelligent person from 1000BCE.
The Middle Eastern empires, and Rome, organised food and agriculture. It's in the Bible, even - Joseph gets promoted because he's such a good planner for dealing with famines. The 'priests' of Sumer kept family details on clay tablets to organise welfare in hard times. Egyptian peasants were highly taxed to maintain the grain stores. The exact opposite is true; those highly successful societies had a high degree of social organisation, and the peasants left planning to the educated class.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
im batin'
Some have speculated that civilization has made humans socially more intelligent, which includes specialization and mastering the use of specialization. In small groups, humans had to figure out just about everything themselves.
However, in larger groups one can pool resources and barter ideas and skills, and become a more-focused specialists rather than try to master everything.
Devoting a smaller brain to one subject may be more biologically economical and effective than trying to master everything in a large brain.
This does not make humans as a whole dumber, only individuals dumber.
Table-ized A.I.
Do you know the _real_ reason that the Egyptians could build the pyramids, the Athenians the Parthenon, and the Romans aqueduct systems?
Because they didn't have television.
I'll bet that if folks didn't need to be home to catch Undercover Boss, Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, or any of many other distractions, you might find plenty of folks naming constellations, speculating on the nature and relationship of the planets and the stars, and investigating number theory. Zap Leonidas from Antiquity and put him on the other side of Call Of Duty, and I bet he falls to the average 12 yo just like every other adult... if he can even figure how to turn the Playstation, the LCD tv, and the surround system on...
That's right my friends... intelligence is actually understanding your Universal Remote to the point of being able to operate its functions deliberately.
...or we could go with evidence. For example, the well-documented Flynn Effect. Or, for those that don't like the Flynn Effect because of the difficulty of measuring real intelligence -- right back at you, if intelligence is so difficult to measure, how can we make an absurd conclusion like "our ancestors 2000 years ago were, on average, more intelligent that people, on average, are today"? After all, we cannot even measure their (apparently rising) intelligence even today. Or we could take note of human accomplishments. Or we could take note of fraction of the human race who actively participated in irrational and unsupported world mythologies 2000 years ago. Or we could note that over most of the intervening 2000 years, human intelligence has been strongly selected for. Literate humans outsurvive illiterate ones (selecting for verbal ability). Wealthy humans outsurvive poor ones (and for the most part, a fool and money are soon parted). Smart but poor people tend to outsurvive stupid, poor people. I cannot think of any complex human social interaction or competition, including war, the economic rat race, even religious interactions where intelligence isn't advantaged relative to stupidity. War (almost unending over the last 2000 years) is a great selector of intelligence, both on the battlefield (if you are stupid enough to end up there) and off (where the smartest people have by and large avoided ending up there).
This isn't a "sharp" selector any more than anything else -- evolution is a fuzzy, imperfect process where sometimes a complete loser wins and a perfect winner loses, but on average a very good definition of intelligence is "an integrated ability to function optimally in a complex and often rapidly changing environment", a race it is difficult to imagine stupidity ever winning.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Caiss er'wuss nah kraamaaire een 1000... wat's bc?
They start out with a strong idea, then entropy takes over.
If the people aren't smart enough to reverse the process, the civilization dies.
What's left is a burnt-out husk like many of today's third world civilizations: Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Maya (Mexico), Aztec (Mexico), Persia (Iran), etc.
Futurist Traditionalism
Other conclusions:
1. Music was better back in my day.
2. Pull up your pants.
3. Get off of my lawn!
Don't forget that in the distant past, people with a very low IQ were at enough of a competitive disadvantage that they were much more likely to qualify for a Darwin Award. Today, they just get welfare (or whatever it is called in other countries) and keep having kids.
You do realize that those "welfare kids", by your own admission of them living better than "in the distant past" have a more favorable environment than those "kids of the past", while at the same time genetics tends to correlate around "fuck all" for all but identical twins?
Meaning that, not only are those "low IQ" getting smarter on welfare, it also doesn't matter much how smart (or not) your dad (or mom) was.
Clearly, we need more welfare. And it should include more and better education.
Hmm... That's a rather strange sentiment for Anonymous Cowards here on Slashdot.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I first thought the study was BS. Then I read the comments here...
Watch the movie Idiocracy.
As a whole our ability to attain, preserve, and exchange knowledge is growing at an fantastic rate, so what if our 'individual' ability to do so has plateaued.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
...that certainly explains the recent election.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
There wasn't one. The "Dark Age" is a self-congratulatory fantasy cooked up during the Renaissance that still hasn't died the lonely, quiet death it deserves.
You don't understand this as well as you think you do.
No demagoguery, except everything Romney said, ever.
No rotten politics, except voter suppression, ceaseless lying, etc.
No incessant warfare, except drone strikes in Afghanistan, the war of drugs, the war on terror, etc.
No slavery, except the poor working greater two jobs while on food stamps to support their family.
No genocide, except those who can't afford healthcare.
No ignorance, except falling educational standards in K-12 systems both public and private, increased religiosity, denial of basic facts and debt burdens that make college prohibitively expensive.
Yes indeed, in this honest, peaceful utopia of universally high academic achievement and food on every table, every night, we have come a long way.
What a wonder we are.
This idea should be easy to test, statistically speaking. If he's right, then the populations with the worst mental degradation and more emotional instability should be found in those parts of the world where civilization first took root, while those populations who lived as hunter-gatherers until relatively recently (or even up to the present day!) should have a big intellectual advantage.
I am not aware of any such effect being measured and documented.
Smart people make more money than dumb people. Rich people have less children than poor people. People with higher educations have less children than less educated people. We are selecting for poor, ignorant people. I'm 60, have four children with collage educations, and no grandchildren. In a hundred years the movie Idiocracy will be viewed as a documentary.
"The larger the number of genes required, the more susceptible we are as a species to random genetic events that reduce our intellectual and emotional fitness." There's your problem. You assume random genetic events reduce our intellectual and emotional fitness. Such event can do both harm and good. That's how evolution works.
What the article misses here is that selection of a mate goes far beyond what it once did... as a hunter gatherer you were 'married' to someone in a couple year range, and it was probably limited to a handful of people in your village. Today you can take your sweet time and meet hundreds of candidates for a mate- and if you want intelligence you can find it. I would say that evolution is going into hyper drive now more than ever.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Please compare to this paper http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047712
Abstract, methods etc....
In the past, elites had more security and well-being but resources were more abundant for all, and corruption was less organized. Now..
Crabtree is clearly unaware of accelerated genetic change that occured in response to population increases with agriculture and new environments (geographic and cultural - see Williamson 2007). He should read the paper on Ashkenazi Intelligence for starters. East Asian intelligence is another example of selection. Note that the average of these groups is 115 and 105 respectively (european is 100), well above the averages of other groups.
"The competitive advantage seems to involve three characteristics of ancestral northern Eurasians:
1. A predictable yearly cycle, which favored the ability to plan ahead and make future decisions in the present. Indeed, early modern humans had more complex tools and weapons at arctic latitudes than at tropical latitudes, apparently because of the yearly cycle of resource availability: “Technological complexity in colder environments seems to reflect the need for greater foraging efficiency in settings where many resources are available only for limited periods of time.” (Hoffecker, 2002, p. 135)
2. A low incidence of polygyny, which reduced male-male competition for mates and the consequent disruptive effects on social organization.
3. A high level of paternal investment in the family, which in turn emancipated women from food provisioning and enabled them to develop a ‘family workshop’ of garment making, structure building, food processing, etc. (Kelly 1995, p. 262-270).
These northern Eurasians were thus mentally pre-adapted, despite their simple social organization, for later technological developments, even though such developments were possible only in more southern environments for which these populations were less ecologically adapted. It is perhaps no surprise that they were able to expand southward into the temperate and tropical zones, eventually peopling almost all of Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas."
http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.nz/2011/02/rethinking-intelligence-and-human.html
http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.nz/2011/02/east-asian-intelligence.html
on recent evolution in humans. As Steve Hsu notes:
"Thus civilization, with its consequently larger populations supported by agriculture, enhanced rather than suppressed the rate of human evolution.
A related question is whether selection pressure remained strong after the development of civilization. Perhaps reproductive success became largely decoupled from genetic influences once humans became civilized? Not only is this implausible, but it seems to be directly contradicted by evidence. The graph below, based on English inheritance records, shows that the rich gradually out-reproduced the poor: the wealthy had more than twice as many surviving children as the poor. (Note the range of inheritances in the graph covers the middle class to moderately wealthy; the poor and very rich are not shown.) Thus, in this period of history wealth was a good proxy for reproductive success. Genes which were beneficial for the accrual of wealth (e.g., for intelligence, self-discipline, delayal of gratification, etc.) would have become more prevalent over time. In a simple population model, any lineage that remained consistently poor over a few hundred year period would contribute almost zero to today's population of Britons."
http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2008/12/recent-natural-selection-in-humans.html
http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2011/08/demography-and-fast-evolution.html
Devo!
That's so true. How intensely the weakest link seems most brittle and undeserving when it's not you.
At any crowded poker table there is a lamb. Everyone knows about the lamb. And there is also the lamb elect. Only the sharpest players realize how thin the boundary is between lion and lamb elect.
. . . but he doesn't seem too bright. Guess that proves his point, paradoxically speaking.
One more thought ... on a purely statistical basis, the solution to the decline of measured IQ is to measure everyone's IQ and the erase the bottom quartile or thereabouts, being careful not to measure IQ again, lest you discover how quickly the distribution regresses to the norm, discounting test score inflation, which would run rampant. Sardines at $300/lb? Extract of rhino horn is a wank irrelevancy when the guillotine has your name on it.
Greek theories on eugenics
I guess it's true. Every good idea, the Greeks had first.
I just hate it when you start tugging up your pants, then you immediately realize with the shift in abdominal pressure that there's more to squat than you suspected.
I'm reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. While I don't find his presentation compelling in every paragraph, I'm reserving judgment as yet of the big ideas. He lays out early his belief that our propensity to take the environment into our own hands is the only our species survives in this hostile biosphere. Who among us survives for long in naked solitude? Mainly the chronic sociopaths. He who survives naked is only fit to live naked.
This stupid fascination with eugenic sentiments seems to dovetail with our deep suspicion that taking the environment into our own hands was a suspect venture right from the get go.
And it's true. With every decade arrives whole new classes of threat. The drone build-out on continental America. The escalating capacity for government surveillance (and our distressing capacity to sell our intimate particulars to scratch a prurient itch). Privatization of the warehousing of social misfits, undesirables, and activist hippies (read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother).
This whole mastery of circumstance digression in the proper unfolding of our rightful evolutionary destiny is a perpetually suspicious business.
We tend to think of progress as extending into the future like a ribbon beneath our feet and ignore how much progress leers at us from our six o'clock. Always a new face, hatching a new plot.
"The gift of the Greeks to Western Civilization was Western Civilization". They, too, had a (broad?) range of talents in their society, but they left records that are still appreciated to this day. Hopefully, we, too, will do this.
Where is the nearest water source?
for
Astrophysics.
Or technology has gone from barely progressing over thousands of years to the Space Age being considered antiquated technology. In about a hundred years we are going from only the ultra rich having automobiles, to everyone almost having self-driving cars.
Lies and Balderdash.
not the caliber of peoples minds winning or losing that's the problem. Corrupt people of low integrity are dominating. Treachery is richly rewarded in this world as is disloyalty - 2 things that would have you cast out of any decent tribe. Because our tribal leaders these days are into devil worship and it just so happens that lower IQ people make better devil worshipers than smart people.
THAT explains Modern Italy!
It's true that natural selection isn't working for us now, since literally any idiot can breed, but we in a century or less, if we haven't exterminated ourselves, we should be able to rejigger our genes to order so so we don't have to resort to sterilising the subnormal to improve the species.
In the last 50 or so years, we have been putting bright young men and women together at universities where they often meet there mates or later often in job situations requiring degrees. Net result should be an increase at the higher part of the IQ curve. After a few generations this effect may be noticed.
Hmm... It could be either source-envy - cause my post actually has sources for my claims, OR it could be my suggestion that welfare system is actually beneficial to the society?
Naaah... It's probably simply low reading comprehension by moderators. I mean, yeah... sure.
Human intelligence peaked some 2-6 millennia ago after all.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Leaving aside the influence environment has on the IQ, you would also have to assume that the IQ score is an accurate measure of desirable human traits.
Since we are about 400 years past the point where one single individual could hold all the knowledge of his/her time, social and cooperative traits in problem solving will become more desirable. I'm not even talking about emotional intelligence or creativity, but the I.Q. provides a very incomplete assessment of traits we might desire as a species.
Exact same arguments were around 100 years ago.
The working class! Look at them: dumb Poles and drunk Irish. And they are having lots of babies. If they reproduce like that... What we need is some sort of eugenics for the working classes. Oh, and the Negros.. Hope they never allow mixed marriage.
Oh well, we got the robber barons back. It was about time for the rest to reappear.
(Best response too all this crap: Stephen Jay Gould "The Mismeasure of Man")
the conclusion of the paper urges humans to keep calm and carry on, as any attempt to fix this genetic trend would almost certainly be futile
Huh?
If what TFA says is true, that the human intelligent is in a slide for the past 2 - 4 millennia, keeping "calm and carry on" would mean human intelligence will slide EVEN MORE !!
Is this type of outcome acceptable?
Although I'm not completely sold on the eugenic idea but I can see that it might become something that's necessary to put a brake on the downward spiral.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Consider two components for intelligence, genetics and environment. A better environment, such as provided by nice welfare, makes an individual more intelligent. It doesn't alter that individual's genetic predisposition toward intelligence. By allowing the individual to more successfully reproduce, the makup of the population changes. Uh oh...
So imagine a society (culture, continent, race, species, country, whatever...) that has never had welfare. You add welfare. There is a sudden initial increase in intelligence, followed by a slow decline. Some ballpark estimates for the timescale would be 1 to 3 generations (15 to 150 years) for the increase, and 2 or more for the decrease.
We face a horrible choice. We can choose to have a more intelligent population in the short term, but having it will result in a less intelligent population in the long term. We are in fact making that choice.
Most mental deficiencies are caused by environmental factors, not heredity.
This does not matter much; it is random noise. In the long term, across generations, only the inheritable component matters.
That said, people sure seem stupider than they were when I was young -- but that's not nearly a long enough time for evolutionary pressures.
Actually it is long enough, given two facts: you are old enough to have generations younger than yourself, and the selection pressure is huge enough. Evolution is normally slow because the environment changes very little. You don't tend to have high selection pressure when nothing special is happening. From an evolutionary perspective, the human population is being devastated by birth control. (it can only be overcome via mental changes, and evolution dictates that this will happen) We also face selection pressure related to diet changes, new diseases, prison (it prevents reproduction normally), and the changing value of menopause.
C. M. Kornbluth's estate called, they want credit or they'll file DMCA take down notices for infringement of The Marching Morons. Education vs intelligence vs training to use tools. How bright does anyone need to be when the Oracle at Google can answer most question?
If this was true, we would expect people genetically originating from poorly evolved cultures (there are still hunter-gatherer cultures out there) to be on average smarter than people with a genetic origin from people who have been living in agricultural/industrialized cultures for millenia. I do not think that anyone has observed something like that.
Look up the "Flynn Effect".
Condition 1 is when the disability is provably not genetic, including via mental traits. For example, helping a person who got paralysed by a meteor would be fine. No reasonable genetic difference will cause such an injury, so it is not inheritable. We can help this person without causing selection of undesirable traits.
Condition 2 is when the person getting help is willing to give up the reproductive advantage that help would normally provide. This gets complicated when dependent children exist, but the situation for people without kids is simple: get neutered/spayed and you can go on welfare.
Sorry to bring bad news, but the party is over. There was an article in the BBC news about it, a month or two ago I think. You can say goodbye to the Flynn effect. It was fun while it lasted.
An IQ score has two components, genetic and environmental. We've been enjoying an IQ spike based on a nice environment while our genetic ability has been slowly declining due to lack of selection for intelligence in our comfy environment. A nice environment can only do a limited amount of good, but bad genetics can deliver pretty much unlimited badness.
In the long term, we're screwed.
The meek or dumb know the only way to rule the world is by using brute force of numbers to outnumber the smart ones. The smart ones will argue for democracy and the meek ones will inherit the earth. A two millennia old wisdom.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
In the well-developed countries (example: Germany) the Flynn effect died roughly a decade ago. IQ is now going down.
Our genetic slide was being hidden by our comfy environment, but there is a limit to how much we can gain by removing environmental damage like disease, poor nutrition, etc. We've reached that limit, at least in the better parts of the world.
If you literally brought ancient people here via time travel, you'd see that they have low IQ. If you then cloned them and raised the clones in a modern environment, you'd see that the clones are more intelligent than regular modern people.
It's hard to see a genetic decline when rapid environmental changes are helping IQ. If you could take out that factor, the genetic change would be measurable.
Sadly, it looks like the Flynn effect is coming to an end. Recent estimates show that it has been dead in Germany for about a decade, and probably also in some other advanced countries.
And then we come to the question of relative / absolute difficulty of problems solved.
Newton invented calculus, and it was the bleeding edge of what was comprehensible during his day, and the feat almost killed him to accomplish.
Compare to the sorts of math designed and performed on a routine basis in the last hundred years... cryptography, quantum chromo fuck your mother dynamics, "ordinary" statistics used in economics and social sciences, protein folding, graphics/parallel processing... The limits of a single man's capabilities have long since been surpassed and we spend about as long today just getting an education to get up to speed with the current body of knowledge as Isaac Newton's fucking life expectancy.
Do you really, honestly, believe that a paradigm-shifting advancement of current working knowledge in physics of the order achieved by Newton and Einstein is possible by a single individual person today? Garet Lisi? Bitch. Please. The poor sap has about as much chance as a beach bum of piercing the current envelop of available novel problems... Do you see the scale of the experiments being run at CERN? How many of the world's most brilliant minds are there right now brainstorming on these problems? How much you wanna bet that just the science faculty at CERN outnumbers the total population of the citizens of ?
When every ten year old today is expected to conquer algebra without difficulty, how difficult was it, really, to invent in the first place?
Recent estimates show that the Flynn Effect died about a decade ago in advanced countries like Germany. There is a limit to how much benefit you can get from a nice environment.
Genetic intelligence gets lost two ways. First there is drift, along with the inherently fragile nature of a trait that requires lots and lots of DNA to be in good condition. With out strong selection pressure in favor of intelligence, it goes away. Second there is the evolutionary requirement that humans defeat birth control. There is obviously massive selection pressure for this; from an evolutionary perspective birth control is like a predator or disease getting out of control. The most effective way to defeat birth control is a mental trait that causes people to want children, but a more expedient way (due to the pre-existing content of our gene pool) is to become less intelligent.
Zeno's Paradox is about 98% of what it takes to invent differential calculus.
Sure, but the problem is that last 2% can never be reached, because there are an infinite amount of half-ways in the way.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
What utter rubbish! The Flynn Effect suggests otherwise, and 'pressed education' among the masses, means people are evolving toward learning more and more. When I was a kid, nerds like me would read the encyclopedia. Now we have the internet, and the amounts of information are far more vast. People are much more educated and knowledgeable than they used to be. The guy who suggested otherwise is an idiot.
I agree entirely.Growth of an ethical consciousness--outside of religious constraint--needs to be taken into account.However this human development does not lend itself to simple explanation.
Look in the effin mirror.
So, human intelligence peaked 2-3 millinea ago, currently is declining.There is no fix, just read it and Carry on. Maybe, more people starts to matter on the paper 3 millinea from then.However, we probably should carry on.
Jane Jacobs makes a pretty strong case that cities predated agriculture.
...to hunger. Therefore, the old saw "fat, dumb and happy" should probably be: "happy, fat -- and dumb".
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Garbage in, garbage out? :P
Hey! Those were perfectly good rocks!
Why do people talk about intelligence, like it's a single thing? IQ tests are VERY approximate and really test people's comprehension ability and also some physics and maths... people that practice these tests get better at them.
Of course the ability to learn is a good measure of intelligence: but these are rarely part of any IQ test. So is the ability to create art. There are so many metrics involved in learning and the ability to comprehend new ideas.
All the senses go into the brain... so both are involved to make any sense of things. I know that it's common for people with a sensory deficiency to be considered (incorrectly) to be less intelligent but that normally stems from small minded people that don't really understand that the brain will focus on one area more if it can't receive input from another (e.g. blind may hear more and the deaf may notice more visually).
That means you included the word create, and asserted that education creates intelligence. Just to make sure we're speaking the same language, you agree with that?
First, I'm not sure if your history is correct.
Second, if they lack the ability to use it, isn't handing them tools to abuse a stupid idea?
My way hasn't been explained and so your claim there is off-base. For example, it could be a graduated method not unlike the first part of our current system.
Second, intelligent people are what we need most. Losing them is losing our best help.
Which brings us back to my point: providing education for everyone ensures that it conforms to the lowest common denominator, and leaves out the best, which defeats the point of education (to make sure the intelligent have the tools they need).
Please go ahead and post that evidence.
We're on the decline, but don't bother to change it? You might as well have just said APOCALYPSE and run away screaming.
that is all
Take a look at Imgur or Reddit, this is a proven statistic. Animal pictures and random pictures pleading for sympathy, along with made-up Iphone text messages are the highlight of both websites. Fucking sucks.
Ego, posturing, cheerleading and drama get in the way of data and analysis.
The Cloning of the American Mind and other books by B. K. Eakman (applicable to many countries), show how America's 'illiteracy cartel', unethical behavioral psychologists, and the psychographic consulting industry have manipulated moderns into a form of idiocy not possible thousand of years ago.
*looks at evidence of increasing IQs and increasingly complex scientific achievements*
...and is not convinced by a paper looking solely at genetics, not actual intelligence, which ends with the sentence 'But in the meantime I’m going to have another beer and watch my favorite rerun of “Miami CSI” (if I can figure out how to work the remote control).' While this does seem to offer evidence of decreasing professionalism in geneticists I'm not sure I would equate that to intelligence.
These types generally seem to me to have other problems.
My concern is for the large crop of bored but intelligent adolescents I see on a daily basis, and in my own class, the high number of promising people who simply zoned out.
As to the implicit accusation, I didn't end up that way. I even did well in school.
How is this "right wing"?
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
Casteism
That explains a lot.
Think him make this up.
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
This is just one guys theory and completely bogus according to other research which says that there has been a marked increase in intelligence in the last two decades.
We're not saying the 80 IQ man isn't happy. We're saying the 120 IQ men aren't happy having him around.
And aren't happy having politicians who pander to get the 80 IQ vote.
But due to the massive increase in world population since 1,000BC...the number of specific individuals who possess great intelligence has increased...and due to the nature of electronic distribution, communication, and manufacturing...these individuals can impact a much greater number of their fellow citizens than was possible back in the old days.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I don't know about you but that's strikes me as tripe.
That's disgusting.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Our society instead prefers to starve them with financial discrimination.
We pay more (... in theory ...) for intelligent workers, and discriminate against the people with IQs under 100.
Then we replace them with robots.
What you're left with is a giant gated community full of rich people, and a vast dystopian wasteland populated by the people that society left behind.
Maybe your option isn't the worst after all.
That's terrifying! I can feel the fear seize me up from within. It takes over my thoughts. That's why I push it back.
And yet, life is more complex than a poker table.
Much as in natural selection, which got us to this state, in life there are many options for success.
In nature, the predators tend to carry off the old, sick, and weak. These are not individuals near the middle of the curve, but very near to its extreme lows.
I think nature is more forgiving than you think. Poker, not so much, which is why in life the smartest players are often those who choose not to gamble.
He's talking about a steady decline in population through low IQs, and you started talking about retardation. There are more causes of low IQs than retardation; in fact, retardation is fairly rare.
Oh really? I've never seen that. Only studies which suggest that if you separate twins and raise them in different circumstances on other sides of the country, they tend to end up having the same prospects.
http://twins.wjh.harvard.edu/more_about_expt.html
Human intelligence is more of a group thing (via language) than it is an individual thing. If the ancient Athenian could learn English or Mandarin at the level of an intelligent citizen, then he or she would be 'equally' intelligent (I love that phrase ;-). Compare the _concepts_ contained in modern languages versus ancient languages. The languages we create together hold human intelligence over time.
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.
The 1st says "Pour me a beer"
The 2nd says "Pour me 1/2 of a beer"
The 3rd says "Pout me 1/4 of a beer"
The 4th says "Put me 1/8 of a beer"
The bartender, seeing the infinite number of mathematicians still waiting to order, says "OK, here you go everyone" and pours two beers.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
It doesn't alter that individual's genetic predisposition toward intelligence. By allowing the individual to more successfully reproduce, the makup of the population changes. Uh oh...
Two assumptions there.
One, that genetic predisposition towards anything is a fixed value. It's not. Stress and stress-relief have a genetic impact.
Two, you are assuming a "spherical" population.
There are many, MANY other factors to "successful breeding" of humans beyond our food intake or some other factor that might be primary if we were talking about worms or mice.
Cultural barriers, educational barriers, various social customs, mating rituals such as dancing...
We are FAR more than just our genes.
So imagine a society (culture, continent, race, species, country, whatever...) that has never had welfare. You add welfare. There is a sudden initial increase in intelligence, followed by a slow decline. Some ballpark estimates for the timescale would be 1 to 3 generations (15 to 150 years) for the increase, and 2 or more for the decrease.
Then, your timescale is messed up on several levels.
A generation is ~25 years, slowly moving towards 30. Again, we are not mice. The better off we are economically, the less babies we are likely to produce.
It's not paradoxical at all when you take into account that we are NOT merely machines for gene-reproduction.
Honest. We ARE more.
So, that 15-year lower limit is not valid for a society that is moving up in intelligence and economy.
And even in a mice-like model of "breeding" 150 years would be 10 generations, not 3.
So if we are actually talking ballparked 2-3 generations + 2 more - that's 125-150 years.
TODAY, not in the future, to-day - that means that the kids being born today will get to see their great-grandchildren being a little dumber than their respective parents.
That's not a trend - that's merely a fluctuation.
And that's IF there is a decrease.
Also, it again assumes a steady, measurable growth of economic factors and family's intelligence.
No one ever marries a dumb blond or a successful businessman or a Nobel prize winner or whatever...
Then, in general, you seem to be assuming that intelligence levels in a society are a permanently growing function and that there is some "greater gain" awaiting us later down the road.
Which simply is not true. At least from the genetic point of view.
Sooner or later we WILL hit that plateau where we, as a species, will reach the limits of our "genetic heritage".
Thing is, you can pretty much bet that the plateau will be reached looooong before that on the right side of the curve - while most of he population will be far below. Always. It has to.
Unless we start breeding and cloning only "the worthy specimens".
So, reaching our "genetic potential" gets us almost nowhere.
What society (you know... the majority of the curve) benefits the most from, is rising of the AVERAGE intelligence.
What is the most beneficial way to do that? Increase the lower, left, side of the curve. Make those millions and billions of "dumb" kids a little smarter and more productive.
Besides, those guys on the other side of the curve are useless anyway without a good education program - which you get from a society that has a good general education program - which you only get from a society that cares equally for all its members - which means social programs - which means "welfare".
Meanwhile, those 2-3 generations mentioned above would be happening in OUR future.
Future where we will reach a number of 9 billion humans around 2050 - in less than 2 generations.
Future of another century of technologi
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/religion/blgrk_aphrodite02.htm
And this woman would be in the lowest 20-25% of BMI in the USA today, even of her age group.
They file it under "family values":
Promotion of traditional marriage and opposition to sex outside of marriage
Support for a traditional role for women in the family.
Opposition to same-sex marriage
Support for complementarianism[6][7][8]
Opposition to legalized induced abortion
Support for abstinence education
Support for policies that are said to protect children from obscenity and exploitation
As for specifically being against it:
2004 Republican Party Platform: A Safer World and a More Hopeful America
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Sections/News/Politics/Conventions/RNC-2004platform.pdf
Page 25:
Any effort to address global social problems must be firmly placed within a context of respect for the fundamental social institutions of marriage and family. We reject any treaty or convention that would contradict these values. For that reason, we support protecting the rights of families in international programs and oppose funding organizations involved in abortion.
Page 81:
Abstinence from sexual activity is the only protection that is 100 percent effective against out-of-wedlock pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, including sexually transmitted HIV/AIDS. Therefore, we support doubling abstinence education funding. We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for contraception and abortion.
Page 84:
We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make it clear that the Fourteenth Amendmentâ(TM)s protections apply to unborn children. Our purpose is to have legislative and judicial protection of that right against those who perform abortions. We oppose using public revenues for abortion and will not fund organizations which advocate it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
that was good. wish I had some karma to share.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
low estimate: 1*15 is 15 years
high estimate: 3*50 is 150 years
I don't know where you get the idea that I think intelligence is growing, because I believe the opposite. (ignoring temporary changes to the standard of living during the previous century) I certainly don't see any "greater gain" anywhere.
We have apparently reached and passed a plateau, but only because we are no longer being selected for intelligence. We could keep going with the right selection pressure.
Clearly, this professor hasn't seen Windows 8 or ever watched anything on NBC. Both examples of human intelligence at its finest. Right up there with the cast of Jersey Shore.
Eugenics is not evil. It is percieved that way because it has been falsely associated with the Nazi regime. We need to bring it back because it is the only realistic solution for societies problems. People are not only becoming less intelligent but we are becoming more morally corrupt. If we regulated reproduction we would save hundreds of billions of dollars in entitlement spending and reduce poverty at the same time. It is a fallacy to play the Nazi card and an attempt to stifle any intellectual discussion on taking a proactive approach in addressing the root cause of poverty and violence. The reationaries and the politically correct crowd are more interested in winning the debate by using simplistic emotional arguments than being right.
1: Is higher IQ across the whole population really better for the species? Insects are perhaps to most well adapted species to this planet's environment, and the most adaptable to radical changes in the environment. Given that smarter humans tend to have fewer kids, it seems logical that IQ will reach a peak.
2: The advent of writing may have inadvertently lead to this peak in IQ. When people can do their thinking easier on paper instead of mostly in their own head, it seems natural that the cranial muscles won't be exercised to quite the same level as before, and bean counters with lower IQ can slip past Darwin's safeguards to perpetrate their traits deeper into the gene pool. If dependency on paper and pen limited intellectual capacity, then I hate to think what computers and smart phones are doing to us now.
If agriculture has removed our intelligence that we originally developed for hunting, how about we make a killer robot AI that hunts people. Solves over population and makes sure we regain that sense of danger that not having food used to be.
Mike Judge? The guy that created King Of The Hill?
I don't think the question should be whether or not an Athenian Philosopher or statesman or noble was smarter, but was the Athenian behind the plow smarter.
There are good reasons to ask this question:
1. in the days of the Ancient Greeks, it was possible to generalize, there were times in history when it was possible to learn everything because the number of books you could access was readable in one lifetime. Even given a full education (meaning here, that one had read everything written), would knowing what the Greeks knew have made you smarter? Sure, he might have known the whole works of Homer by memorization, but he would also have known what the Greeks knew about physics which was both a lot and scary little at the same time. Sure, Democrita's Atomic Hyphothesis was a great piece of understanding, but some of what the greeks knew was a ton of bogus (Heliocentric model of the solar system, anyone? Any takers for the idea that the fact that certain geometric relationships produce irrational numbers that require that the members of the scientific society be sworn to secrecy about them on pain of death?).
2. The question is not how the children of the ruling classes were taught that determines intelligence or how you should judge it, but what you get from the kind of people whose existence makes ideas like the one that started this thread possible: the simple fact that history is limited to those who write it and those who are mentioned in it. The common man (in the case of the Ancient Greeks, most probably someone who stood behind a plow, could have been a complete idiot or he might have been a diamond in the rough doomed by being limited in advancement by the needs of a society for manual labor (how many great Indian mathematicians died standing behind a plow, in mud, staring at a bufalo's ass?). Historically, people might have been smarter but how do you prove or disprove the theory? The only people who are written about in any detail back then are the people important enough to *be* written about.
Interesting questions are brought up here, but I think the theory or conjecture of the person who started all this was basically pulling it out of a warm, dark place.
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."