Human Intelligence Has Declined

[Ravi]

If you actually read the study it is about reaction time--how fast someone pushes a button. To conclude that this proves people are now less intelligent is, well, stupid.

 

[Politico]

You need to take a trip to Walmart. Hell take a trip outside.

 

[editec]

I suspect there is something to this.

WE KNOW that modern men were weak compared to our pre-industrial age forefathers.

Now as machines are starting to do our thinking (memory, computations, etc) for us?

I do not doubt that the human genome is responding to that development, too.

to soon in the evolutionary time frame imho, BUT we are 'thinking' less and when you don't exercise the brain, yes, it will come...those parts of our brain that require it for higher processes will result in atrophy....

Evolutionary effects on the human genome happen every generation, Traj.

It does not take millions of years for some aspects of the genome to change.

Changing into a radically difference species, maybe, but changing that species' genome is a constant event.

We can go back a few hundred years and see how stresses have changed the genome.

For example, tuberculosis changed the genome of western man in about three generations.

The genome of Western man was high susceptible to tuberculosis in 1850.

By 1900 the incidence of tuberculosis evident in the number of people susceptible to TB was dropping like a stone.

Long before we ever understood what caused Tuberculosis, the incidence of it was falling.

Why?

Because the human genome is effected by the reproductive outcomes of every generation.


Now how can thinking machies act like tuberculosis in rapidly changing the human genome?

Well, formerly intelligent people, people who did the work of thinking were rewarded by society and therefore prone to higher rates of reproduction.

But as those skills are no longer needed (thanks to thinking machines) those people are not rewarded by society and their rate of reproduction is effected.

The way society works directly effect the human genome and it does so rather rapidly.

That is perhaps why the savage headhunters of the Pacific are on average much more intelligent than the average Western men.


Their (intergenerational birthrate) genome is working to make them more aware of their surroundings because failure to be alert means early death usually by assassination.

Modern Westerners genome is more effected by to our ability to fight off diseases, so Western intelligence isn't as important in reproduction outcomes over generations as the genomes ability to fight off infectious diseases.