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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.
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
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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
*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!"
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
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 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
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.
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.
That's kind of a loaded comparison right there. Just by using the term "Greek citizen" you are likely excluding all of the riffraff that would bring the numbers down. So this is a sampling problem more than anything else.
The modern definition of "citizen" is much more inclusive.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
First, note I said "unearth and/or create". I put in "unearth" to address precisely what you are arguing.
Second, you're lamenting various education systems and their methods, not lack-of-education vs. education. I never said any one system perfect, but I certainly think that having a system at all is better than having 98% of people shovel cow shit and de-tassle corn for 50 years like in the middle ages. Feel free to disagree but I'll probably never buy it.
Third, your point is valid as an argument for mass-education vs. selective education if the selection method is perfect and occurs across the entire population. I'd argue it's much more feasible to just provide education for everyone. The intelligent people should mostly show up that way. With your way, if your selection method is imperfect, you might miss out.
Education does not improve intelligence.
You sure about that? I've seen plenty of studies that demonstrate that learning changes connections between neurons. Literally, the very act of learning creates new pathways in the brain, and the number of connections in the brain are highly correlated to intelligence.
A case can be made that increasing your knowledge also increases your intelligence.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Maybe they just don't want to talk to a self-righteous prick, relative or not.
I don't know, but Archimedes came awfully damned close to inventing it, despite his culture's lack of essential background concepts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In terms of physical fitness, the average Spartan (man or woman) would put 95% of Americans to shame.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
First up -- the further back you go, the less material you're going to find. Secondly -- I work in a university on a Mediterranean island. In the foyer, we have a fossil (well probably a cast -- I didn't ask) dating back thousands of years. It's an adult woman with severe mental and physical disabilities, and the forensic archaeologists reckon she was about 30. Clearly humanity has a long history of compassion for the disabled within the community. Modern bigotry against disabled people would therefore have to be due to the breakdown of "community" in favour of "society". Society is too big -- it breaches Dunbar's number by multiple orders of magnitude. This means that we aren't mentally capable of considering every member of society as a "person". We start to think of people in terms of labels, and disabled people are labelled by their "condition". We show compassion to "people", not to "conditions", and thus the disabled are viewed as a "problem" in modern society. I don't like this.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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