Slashdot Mirror
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."
*looks at the robot on Mars*
No. No it did not.
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As soon we form fixed civilizations, natural selection is no longer in effect.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.
Especially since the Flynn effect is likely not tied, or at least not exclusively tied, to genetics.
(Though mind you, with epigenticis trundling along, the distinction is dwindling.)
There's a difference between IQ and education.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Yes, and members of Congress!
I don't think you understand the difference between knowledge and intelligence.
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 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
And there is no objective way to test this. Let's remember here that the output of Classical Greek learning and thought was done by a relatively small number of people compared to the number of people living in Ancient Greece. Trying to determine how smart (by whatever metric you use) the average Greek was based upon how intelligent Socrates or Eratosthenes were is about as useful as trying to determine how smart the average Renaissance Italian was by looking at Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei, or the average Enlightenment Briton by John Locke or Isaac Newton.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Maybe they just don't want to talk to a self-righteous prick, relative or not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Things aren't quite the same though, as a society we prop up the lowest classes of people through various initiatives, from welfare, to homeless shelters, etc. The result is that the poorest people are still "rich" by the standards of cavemen. This leads to an interesting problem in society though, the poorest people, those with the least education, tend to breed far more than the richest people who are usually more career focused and have few, if any, children.
Intelligence is still required, and you are right that it is different things we must think about than thousands of years ago, but the consequences of both failure, and success are also quite different. Evolution is no longer picking the top tier of civilization to procreate the most, but instead we are concentrating more of the reproduction of the population in to lower economic groups.
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.
Look at that Archimedes palimpsest. There we have a book made of parchment, in which Archimedes philosophised himself towards calculus. Scraped out at a later stage and reused... to write a prayer book. From the conquest of knowledge to the submission of free thought, on one piece of parchment.
It puts in mind that lizard, sitting in the sun on top of the remains of a launch platform built by a civilisation now long gone, thinking (or at least doing the lizard-equivalent of it) 'what a nice basking spot someone made me here'.
--frank[at]unternet.org
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."
Look at that Archimedes palimpsest. There we have a book made of parchment, in which Archimedes philosophised himself towards calculus. Scraped out at a later stage and reused... to write a prayer book. From the conquest of knowledge to the submission of free thought, on one piece of parchment.
It puts in mind that lizard, sitting in the sun on top of the remains of a launch platform built by a civilisation now long gone, thinking (or at least doing the lizard-equivalent of it) 'what a nice basking spot someone made me here'.
The book may have been common at the time it was made (950) but by the time of the reuse (1229), the Byzantine Empire was pretty much kaput. The date is from a period when the empire had lost Constantinople itself, so to claim that a book like that should be preserved when the containing society was under violent attack and disintegrating seems culturally myopic.
More damning to our modern culture is the following:
Sometime after 1938, one owner of the manuscript forged four Byzantine-style religious images in the manuscript in an effort to increase its value.
The effort needed to recover the underlying text for these pages was much more heroic. I'd say that in this case, moden greed was much more destructive than some poor sod trying to make peace with mortality under circumstances that most of can't even begin to imagine.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates