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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.
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.
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.
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!"
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
There's a difference between IQ and education.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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
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 don't think you understand the difference between knowledge and intelligence.
...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.
This is a "no shit?" comment.
The point was if you transplant a guy from 1000BC as a child, and raise him today, he would be smarter than people today.
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
Well, no, he'd sound like somebody who spoke Ancient Greek, which I have not even the slightest passing familiarity with.
I'd almost be tempted to call him a barbarian.
But no, IQ scores aren't based on any objective measure, unlike thermometers, there's no direct principles involved. Instead it's what people think they need to test.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Which goes to show you that of course IQ tests are horrible at measuring intelligence.
Which tells us what? Every year evolution significantly increases intelligence? Ridiculous. Or maybe Teachers are getting better at teaching the test, or students better at cheating?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And yet, IQ scores continue to climb every year. The average person in 1880 would score 70 today. The brightest Greek mind would likely sound like an idiot today if you tried to talk to him. He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
You obviously have not studied the greeks. At the time of Aristotle they had quite a bit of information that we are only just figuring out. There are still many feats of the Ancient world that we still cannot figure out (e.g. construction of the pyramids).
As to the IQ scores, it is hard to compare them even over a 10 years period due to assumptions of what should be in the tests administered. The tests do not translate well across cultural or temporal boundaries.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
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.
In what respect? Over the last five hundred years we have seen technological, philosophical and scientific revolutions that not even the Classical Greeks, for all their gifts, could match. Part of that is of course that the Classical Greeks did not have the printing press and the other revolutions in communicating ideas that have made the permanent loss of knowledge much less likely.
Frankly, I think the conclusions the paper reaches are so subjective as to be daft. The Greeks, like us, reached their great heights by standing on the shoulders of giants. Why would you pick the Classical Greeks as a high water mark? Why not the Ancient Sumerians, Chinese and Egyptians, who invented writing, urban living and civilization itself? Frankly, I think picking the Classical Greeks indicates a not insubstantial cultural bias, one that has been present in Western (and Islamic) academia for centuries.
I don't buy it. I don't think there are any substantial cognitive differences between, say, some proto-Literate Sumerian from 6,000 years ago and your average big city dweller today. There may be small differences due to selection pressures, but I simply do not believe 6,000 years is long enough for the full genetic effects of changed environments to be that huge. The chief differences are going to be the advances that the culture as a whole have achieved.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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!
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.
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.
I just don't buy this. Have you read what people in the 1880s wrote? Their prose puts us to shame and I somehow doubt it was one genius in a news room writing all of that.
You might not be so impressed if you could read *everything* written in the 1880s, instead of just the best stuff that people felt was worth preserving.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Well, no, he'd sound like somebody who spoke Ancient Greek, which I have not even the slightest passing familiarity with.
I'd almost be tempted to call him a barbarian.
Oddly enough, the original meaning of barbarian was "someone who does not speak Greek". So, he would be very puzzled.
This is what popularity does: it selects what offends least, and what is shared in common (lowest common denominator), not what rises above.
No, the difference is knowledge vs. wisdom. While knowledge has increased, wisdom has not.
And yet, IQ scores continue to climb every year. The average person in 1880 would score 70 today. The brightest Greek mind would likely sound like an idiot today if you tried to talk to him. He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
Well, hold your horses. What about variance?
I think it's reasonable to assume that the variance in IQ:s would have been much greater in samples taken in Ancient Greece than it is in the US or Western Europe today. If you grew up in a wealthy family with a home in one of the cities odds are your IQ would be closer to 100 than to 70 and that some of your friends would have IQ:s in the 110+ range and some few would have IQ:s in the 120+ and 130+ ranges. If you grew up as a slave on a rural farm, odds are your IQ would be in the 50's or 60's (or just barely good enough to do your slave job) because of recurring malnutrition and disease and lack of education.
TFA/TFP makes a similar mistake in saying that a person brought from 1000 BC to today would be one of the most brilliant people alive today. I doubt that, again because of variance. I think there's a good chance he wouldn't even be able to get into Mensa, let alone be brilliant.
If we brought 1000 people back from 1000 BC and had all of them do an IQ test we would get a much more predictable result and maybe that's what the TFP was trying to say, but I really dislike when people neglect to think about variance.
There are still many feats of the Ancient world that we still cannot figure out (e.g. construction of the pyramids).
Actually, we could easily build the Pyramids today. There's no problem in figuring that out, we could even improve it. The trick is not the result, but figuring out what processes they used, since they didn't tend to leave records around that give us a complete picture, we're just trying to fill in the picture.
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.
We know how the pyramids were constructed. We know where the blocks came from, have a pretty good idea of how they moved the blocks to the site and how they raised the blocks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
No, it has been going up.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/10/26/1245231/are-we-getting-smarter-rising-iq-scores-in-the-twenty-first-century
Because after 50 years of listening to retards I hope Derp is our future.
There are still many feats of the Ancient world that we still cannot figure out (e.g. construction of the pyramids).
Actually, we could easily build the Pyramids today. There's no problem in figuring that out, we could even improve it. The trick is not the result, but figuring out what processes they used, since they didn't tend to leave records around that give us a complete picture, we're just trying to fill in the picture.
True, we could build them today using modern tools. But how they did it then and what tools they used is still a complete mystery. There have been a number of guesses, but nothing that has been decided or lives up to what was done.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
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.
There are still many feats of the Ancient world that we still cannot figure out (e.g. construction of the pyramids).
While ancient could have possibly been more intelligent, those feats you mentioned don't necessarily mean that ancient people were more intelligent than today. It can simply mean that ancient people had a greater incentive to figure out how to do those feats. Today, we have other things to worry about.
We know how the pyramids were constructed. We know where the blocks came from, have a pretty good idea of how they moved the blocks to the site and how they raised the blocks.
We really don't know how they were built. There have been a few guesses, but nothing definitive.
However, that was but one example. Others being the curvature of the columns in the various Roman and Greek constructions such that they would appear from the ground to be uniformly the same whilst still providing the structure support required.
Those are just a few of the things that have been observed. There are many, many others.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I read somewhere that the median I.Q. of the United States of America has declined two points to 98.
Since I.Q. 100 is defined as the medium I.Q. of a comparable population, the absolute number of I.Q. is meaningless for comparison between different times.
Where would one change their name to... say, oh, I dunno... Beef Supreme. :D
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.
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.
Which goes to show you that of course IQ tests are horrible at measuring intelligence.
It's even weirder, there is no generally accepted definition of intelligence. So IQ tests are really bad at measuring something undefined and the paper applies this to some unmeasurable (dead) entities. I'm going to read tea leaves to evaluate the significance of this ;-).
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.
I don't know, but Archimedes came awfully damned close to inventing it, despite his culture's lack of essential background concepts.
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.
Or, maybe prenatal and early childhood care is improving? A modern child's environment has less contamination from heavy metals? We no longer feed babies whiskey when they're teething?
Nah, those can't have any impact. Must be the tests that are wrong. You are right, though, that biological evolution is unlikely to be a significant factor, and the tests may in fact be crap, but there are plausible explanations that allow for the tests to stand as valid.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The brightest Greek mind would likely sound like an idiot today if you tried to talk to him. He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
You confuse knowledge with intelligence, and stupidity with ignorance. Ignorance means you don't have a clue about quantum mechanics, intelligence means you can learn.
Free Martian Whores!
How so? The mind is a muscle like any other, without stimulation of various sorts it will atrophy. http://www.iqtestexperts.com/iq-improve.php
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.
And yet, IQ scores continue to climb every year. The average person in 1880 would score 70 today. The brightest Greek mind would likely sound like an idiot today if you tried to talk to him. He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
He probably would know about ad nauseum.
The word is median. Medium is for printing and clairvoyants.
...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.
Everyone knows that knowledge is based on intelligence and is a trained-only skill, whereas wisdom is an ability. Knowledge may increase every time you level-up whereas wisdom may only increase at levels that are multiples of four. Jeez, what a n00b...
Oh, wait...
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
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
I believe I saw a documentary, maybe a NOVA episode, that was talking about the effort to restore the Parthenon. That part about the tapering of the columns was amazing.
Conceded, average is the word I should have used. IQ defined so that 100 is the average IQ. Median is a complete different thing, it is the middle value (50% percentile).
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.
"That column looks ugly. Now get out your chisels and keep at it until they look RIGHT!"
He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
Neither would anyone in the bible belt.
They're all Lies from the Pit of Hell. There's nothing more that needs to be known.
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.
The people who built the pyramids by popular accounts were paid in beer, rather like modern-day construction workers.
The people who designed the pyramids, on the other hand, obviously had some intelligence. And the accumulated knowledge of those who had built less-sophisticated earlier models, such as mastabas.
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."
Well, off the top, one would have to identify genetic factors, and the problem here is that criminal behavior likely has as many, or even more, cultural or economic roots as it does genetic. This is the same old conundrum that Social Darwinists keep running up against. They keep bringing up behaviors to actively breed against that often have nothing to do with genetics at all; ignoring the importance of developmental biology, early childhood development (including diet, which we now realize has a significant effect on intelligence) and the kind of culture the child is brought up in.
There may be certain groups tending towards criminal behavior that may have a genetic predisposition; but the interactions between genes and environment is incredibly complex. That's not even considering that what we may consider overly risky or violent behaviors may, in one context, be bad, but in another, be beneficial.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I wouldn't say they have peaked intelligence... all they did was do a study, they didn't invent DNA sequencing...
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
True, we could build them today using modern tools. But how they did it then and what tools they used is still a complete mystery. There have been a number of guesses, but nothing that has been decided or lives up to what was done.
There have been numerous attempts to recreate the building processes using innovative low tech solutions that have been more or less successful. Some of those attempts have been filmed and show up occasionally on the Discovery channel and such.
"Nothing has been decided" because after the amount of archaeology we've already done without finding anything yet we're unlikely to suddenly find a smoking gun describing the exact method used. We can come up with numerous ideas that _could_ have worked without being able to prove which, if any, was the method that was actually used.
And none of the modern attempts to recreate the process "lives up to what was done" because at the end of the day the teams who perform successful experiments say "well we've stacked a couple blocks on top of each other, so that method is totally viable," and then they go home. There are not thousands of researchers willing to sacrifice years (or more likely decades) of their lives refining the techniques and constructing a full pyramid. They could, but they just don't want to, and it's hard to blame them.
The pyramids were the result of a combination of skills at carving and moving stone developed over centuries and a plentiful supply of cheap labor. We can recreate the skills (and much more quickly than they were developed in the first place) but we can't recreate the cheap labor.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
ad nauseum is what caused me to buy a DVR
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.
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."
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.
...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.
Linguists say that Greek is a primitive language because it is over-complicated. Modern languages are simplified and it is easier to express complex ideas in them. An educated Greek might be familiar with perhaps 5 to 10 books. Roger Bacon spent the equivalent of half a million dollars on about 24 books for his college library. I have a few hundred books in 5 different languages, all of which I have read, and I'm just a typical educated modern European. I could go on, but you are wrong. Knowing one language with a messy grammar, a small vocabulary and a lot of ambiguity doesn't make you super-intelligent.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Caiss er'wuss nah kraamaaire een 1000... wat's bc?
Not to mention that conversational writing was practically nonexistent, only the educated classes wrote at all, and modern authors looking for an air of sophistication intentionally copy archaic styles, leading to a self-reinforcing association.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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!
Yes, and of course intelligence peaked 6000 years ago, that's when god created man isn't it? We're all the product of the incestuous relations between Adam, Eve and their children.
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
Sample size? What sample size? From the TFA, the guy said "hey, being a hunter-gatherer is harder. QED, Greeks were smarter." No sample of anything whatsoever involved.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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
I read somewhere that 99% of everything is bullshit.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis Carroll, 1872
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But we've seen similar effects elsewhere. The salons of Western Europe attracted all sorts of literary talent, and competition between writers, musicians and artists lead to ever greater achievements. In the world of science, the printing press allowed the relatively quick dissemination of learning of all kinds. It's not as if Greece was alone in that particular phenomenon.
Yes, the Greeks did some extraordinary things, but backing that, I think, was not some genetic innovation, but rather economic and social innovations. Greece, particularly the major city states, were incredibly wealthy and the networks of trade and empires they built created the conditions in which a learned class of scholars could be supported. The same likely applies to all the "high" civilizations; whether it be Sumeria or ancient China, the Indus civilizations, Ancient Egypt, the Mayans, and so forth.
I'm not trying to discount the achievements of the Classical Greeks. They were extraordinary, and even where they wrong, they were still light years ahead of many of their contemporaries. But I think what has been accomplished in the last couple of centuries has rivaled the achievements of the Greeks. We owe them a lot for that, but to claim we're the idiot children of the Classical thinkers is absurd.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Actually, I think Plato's writings are extremely instructive in this:
1. Athens was seen as the most educated and artistic city in Greece at the time. This makes sense: It was one of the dominent Greek states, and unlike its rival Sparta placed a high value on music, art, theater, and learning.
2. At the same time, most of the dialogues make it abundantly clear that Socrates thinks he's surrounded by idiots. In fact, the only people Socrates tends to credit with having the slight semblence of a clue are: philosophers, musicians, poets, craftsmen (but only about their crafts), and farmers (but only about their animals or crops). By contrast, he considers the politicians and intelligentsia (the sophists) to be mostly spewing lies and bogosity.
3. The Athenians voted to execute Socrates for 2 reasons: i. They didn't like the conclusions he was reaching, namely that they were idiots. ii. The accuser wanted to gain popular support so he could win political office. There were some charges involved, but Socrates spells out very clearly in the Apology that they were about as legitimate as the accusations in a Stalin show trial.
So if you use Socrates as your proof that ancient Greeks on average were smarter than modern people, you're wrong: He mostly proved that ancient Greeks were just like modern Americans: A few awesome geniuses, a lot of complete idiots. Also, as brilliant as much of the writings of some of the Greeks were, many Greek citizens were illiterate, which means those writings would have been completely inaccessible.
I am officially gone from
What percentage of the population was actually literate? Compare that to today.
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....
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
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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
Actually the letter indicates that we should keep calm and carry on because increasing knowledge over the next 100-200 years will furnish a scientifically and morally acceptable solution. Really, he says that right at the end.
.: Semper Absurda
I do not mean to imply something special about this time in history or the location, but would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago.
-TFA
.: Semper Absurda
The last time somebody tried Eugenics it turned into some of the cruelest and most liberty-destroying laws in world-history. In the USA it became Jim Crow laws, in Germany it caused the holocaust.
Hence the author's position - while a dysgenic slide of this nature is concerning, the only way one could even try to change it would involve something that is far, far worse.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
...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!
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
Ego, posturing, cheerleading and drama get in the way of data and analysis.
*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
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.
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.
And of course eugenics wasn't even effective, for basically the same reason that he's claiming human intelligence peaked - eugenicists actually forcibly sterilized and murdered people based on the colour of their skin, poverty, and in at least one important US case because she got pregnant as a result of being raped. I mean, do you honestly think any eugenics movement would affect the wealthy, CEOs and politicians? No it wouldn't, just like they aren't affected by their own screw-ups now.
He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
Neither would anyone in the bible belt.
I see what you did there. Nice troll. Now go play in the street.
Just another day in Paradise
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.