You don't say.
Posted on 11/13/2012 5:09:22 PM PST by dennisw
Humans may be gradually losing intelligence, according to a new study.
The study, published today (Nov. 12) in the journal Trends in Genetics, argues that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to be smart once we started living in dense agricultural settlements several thousand years ago.
"The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples [living] before our ancestors emerged from Africa," said study author Gerald Crabtree, a researcher at Stanford University, in a statement.
Since then it's all been downhill, Crabtree contends.
The theory isn't without critics, with one scientist contacted by LiveScience suggesting that rather than losing our smarts, humans have just diversified them with various types of intelligence today.
Life or death situations
Early humans lived or died by their spatial abilities, such as quickly making a shelter or spearing a saber-toothed tiger. Nowadays, though almost everyone has the spatial ability to do ostensibly simple tasks like washing dishes or mowing the lawn, such tasks actually require a lot of brainpower, the researchers note.
"A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his/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. Clearly, extreme selection is a thing of the past," the researchers write in the journal article.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
There’s a lot of social selection, aka “sexual selection”. Who was the conservative pundit I read recently who commented on the irony that the liberal intelligentsia sustains itself by adherence to conservative family values ?
Remember HEAVY METAL magazine ? ( It was the basis for the cartoon feature movie. ) There was one running strip called, IIRC "1994", where all the characters talked a sort of mumble talk, artfully rendered in the speech balloons. Of course, they were all redneck types, wandering around shooting people and mumbling.
Beat me to it. Well said, and sad but true.
The 'rats, aided by the MSM, held out a few shiny objects in one hand "Look over here, birth control, abortion, iPhones, free healthcare..." and the sheeple gazed in wide wonder... Forgetting the important things like the economy, security, basic freedoms and liberties. Meanwhile, with their other hand the secular fascists and socialists were picking our pockets and putting a gun to our heads. And the self-centered, self-absorbed, uninformed, and willfully ignorant masses - well, 51%, looked up at the light (see "Cowboys and Aliens") and were led to slaughter...
Living in a city does some bad juju to the brain, so says this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jun/22/city-living-afffects-brain
And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Teens texting while crossing the street thins out a few.
So we should be devolving back to apehood soon.
That's the fate of the "Doasyoulikes" tribe in Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies.
*snort* GMTA! That was my very first thought after reading the headline!
A few years ago I tried reading an unabridged version of Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, not taking into account that it had been written in the 1700s. Oh my head...trying to follow the complex English that Gibbon used was rough!
Well, duh!
What you don’t use, you lose.
And, 47% of the populace doesn’t need to use their brains.
Sorry the facts don’t conform to your preconceptions. Now you kids get off my lawn!!!!
And I’m sorry you don’t know what a preconception is.
Or a fact, for that matter.
Gibbon's prose can be compared to a long draught of air, that having been drawn in a moment, and to a single purpose, is expelled with exceeding restraint, gently carrying the reader on its current, until it has dissipated insensibly into a swirl of verbiage, the object of which can neither be discerned nor recalled to mind.
Saw this thread and thought of you.
nonsense, of course. Because the most common cause of low intelligence is not genes but protein malnutrition. The same high protein high fat diet that makes us fat also allows our children’s brains to grow and their bodies to be taller than their ancestors.
you are a bit behind the times. The population growth is down in most countries, even in “religious” ones like Iran and the Philippines, and the obesity index is up.
Even Africa is getting cellphones, and the Chinese are teaching them to grow high tech food that the US/European “Greenies” opposed for being too complex for their little minds to figure out how to plant. You heard of the “Asian Tigers”? well, look up African “cheetah” index...
But the greenies in the US are still in the Erhlich Population bomb mindset, and they run the press, so you might not know about it (unless you live overseas).
NEA - mission accomplished.
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