Posted on 11/22/2012 12:06:23 AM PST by LibWhacker
The Chinese intellectual classes appear to have done much the same thing unless their lives depended on it ~ which suggests we can all become quite a bit smarter if tortured every now and then!
Many years ago in a long flight I was studying a calculus textbook (strictly for my enjoyment) when a fellow passenger said to me that with the advent of the calculator that subject was obsolete. He never did tell me which button you push to improve your brain.
Not really a ‘new’ field, but becoming much more of a focus now that it has become apparent that sequencing the genome wasn't the holy grail some had hoped. I've recently seen genetically identical twins who, as adults, are not the same height. Clearly ‘nuture’, including likely epigenetic modifications (such as the methylation you mention), plays a big role.
Having said that, the fact that we don't feed people to the lions in this century isn't because our DNA changed - or our methylation patterns are different. It's because humanity learned lessons that were passed on from generation to generation. If we stop passing on that which we've learned, those lessons can be lost.
So maybe this is an upside of reelecting Obama?
Noticed he lost 6.5 million voters last time around!
I would say the causes are more cultural. Since the eighties I have noticed the “dumb is kewl” trend. Add to that the sad state of dumbing down of public schools, and the school administration enforcing the “crab bucket” mentality.
I have seen that movie, and concluded that we are 80% there.
Which is doubtless why Japan, Russia, and Europe are all demographically imploding, while the Muslims, Indians, and Chinese are all booming (female infanticide and China's one-child policy notwithstanding...)
Cheers!
Only at the top of American government and courts.
That would be a step up.
A friend in Germany can't understand my dislike of the usurper - "But, but he got a Nobel Prize!!!!"
Whenever an athiest calls into his show and says the only hope that man has is to progress as a species Dennis Prager always responds that he thinks humans are getting dumber and asks the caller to compare letters we have from Civil War Soldiers (who usually only had at most an 8th grade education) to writings today. Oh well, gotta go watch “Ow My Balls!!!”
Need to ask? Just check the election results.
Probably on purpose. If a certain group that is seeking power wanted more power in a representative republic, they need control of a large, unquestioning voting block who lack critical thinking.
The entire premise of the "family oriented" The Cosby Show is that dad is dumb (even though he's a Dr), the kids are dumb, mom is the only smart one because she's authoritative and thinks critically, so don't bother with your own agenda, just follow mom's directives. Scale that up - with a government official as "mom", and constituents as family members - then you have the democRat party.
I have no doubt that the average Athenian of the golden age of Greece was highly intelligent. The city at it’s height was only around 100,000 yet they produced a huge number of the world’s greatest playwrights, philosophers, mathematicians etc.
At 1000 BC Athens was probably less than 10,000 with most of them living on the acropolis which would have been walled in. The fact that the acropolis was a very protected location and was close enough to the harbor at Piraeus is why the city developed. Also the Provence of Attica was apparently a fertile farming area.
The coming Agenda 21-sponsored worldwide famine will sharpen up the wits of the survivors.
I don't believe this is true at all. The bell curve is real. The bottom 10% are way below the top 10%. But averages are misleading.
Let us say there are 100 people. The bottom 10% have an IQ of 65, the top 10% at 130 (I'm just making these up.)against an average of 100. Eliminating the bottom 10% ups the 'average' intelligence to 103, but the society is not really smarter - just fewer dumb ones.
The real question is, was Hawking smarter than Einstein? Davinci smarter than Hawking?
Idiocracy oz fine, but completely falls apart if you look too closely at the premise. Firstly it’s just plain wrong on evolution. Secondly I kept expecting it to turn out that a few smarties were secretly running the country. A nation if idiots could live off the accumulated capital of our cibilization for a while. It’s easier to maintain electricity or the combustion engine, for instance, once you’ve invented them. And the idiots in the movie weren’t doing we’ll.
Still, they seemed to be doing too well for their abilities. They have a crop crisis, buildings are falling, you can escape from prison by telling a guard today is your release day, etc. But I think they’d all have starved to death by then in the real world.
Thirdly and finally they associated idiocy with Big Business, which makes sense in the sense that Carl’s Jr., Starbucks, or whatever, cater to idiots. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can be an idiot and run a corporation. Perhaps the CEO and any number of executives can be idiots, but someone somewhere has to know what they’re doing. This is also why I expected hidden smart people.
Maybe there was no central management and each individual franchise outlet ran itself autonomously, sorta carried on by inertia. But no, it takes some intelligence to run small businesses, surely. Not much to offer a shelter within which you give sexual release, but something to keep feeding people for as long as the idiots have lived.
No, it’s not epigenetics that makes the difference intellectually. Nor is it a lack of sufficiently rigorous natural selection. It is not biological at all. My assumption is innate intelligence has not changed since the advent of civilization. What makes groups smarter or stupider since then is learning, or a lack thereof.
Evolutionary science is really bad at history, economics, anthropology, and sociology, though decent at psychology. A perfect example is the povetyy of sociobiology. It lacks the equipment to understand experience, ir the world of “nurture.” Though it does have a few things to say about biological changes after the advent of of the organism, it is largely helpless in the face of culture.
Because its disciplined line can only in a robust manner explain how wewe’ve been generally for 65,000 years or so. It cannot explain at all, for instance, baseball or Beethoven except in very, very extremely general terms.
“the less fit to survive”
That is a contradiction. Fitness is defined as what us fit fir suurvival. If something survives it is by definition fit.
What you or they mean is the less intelligent survive. But that is simply not true. Average human intelligence, so far as we know, has stayed about the same since there have been humans. What’s happened, if anything, is that already born humans have been miseducated.
“I don’t believe this is true at all. The bell curve is real.”
Yes, it is. I’m nit saying there is nothing but the average. My post clearly admits the existence of born geniuses and retards. However, most people are in the middle range, wherever that happens to fall, and whatever else changes that range never moves drastically left or right from generation to generation.
When I say intelligence doesn’t vary much from person to person, obviously if you line up a genius and a deranged person between two normals it does. But not amongst normals. And in any case the main point is that over time the distribution of geniuses, retards, and normals stays constant.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.