Mutations in the human brain are making us stupider, new research theorizes - Page 3 - OG Myth-Weavers

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Mutations in the human brain are making us stupider, new research theorizes

 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bbender View Post
Perhaps we're headed to a time machine type split?

There are people with a university degree who marry someone who never
I'm aiming at people who lack the capabilities of getting a degree, not those that dropped out because of lack of interest and became successful self-made (wo)men
succeeded in getting any degree at all, but I'd say it is uncommon. So in general, "intelligent" people tend to breed with other "intelligent" people and "stupid" people tend to breed with other "stupid" people. The "intelligent" group becomes more intelligent, the "stupid" group more stupid. The intelligent group can make up for its lack in numbers with cunning and wealth. This could lead to a situation where an "intelligent" male is no longer able to fertilise a "stupid" female, and the human race splits in two: the homo super sapiens and the homo not so sapiens
George W. Bush has a BA in history and a MBA from Harvard. I think your entire argument is rendered invalid.

The problem with the 'idiocracy' argument is that objective evidence indicates we are, as a population, becoming more intelligent.
it seems to me the real issue is one of social disassociation, by which many people wind up dismissing large segments of the population as being stupid and reinforce the idea with anecdotal evidence.

Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak View Post
objective evidence indicates we are, as a population, becoming more intelligent.
Unfortunately, most of that evidence is not actually a measure of intelligence, but of education, which is an entirely different beast.
Intelligence is actually surprisingly difficult to measure directly.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tedronai View Post
Unfortunately, most of that evidence is not actually a measure of intelligence, but of education, which is an entirely different beast.
Intelligence is actually surprisingly difficult to measure directly.
Especially given increasing amounts of evidence for multiple types of intelligence, most of which are not directly comparable.

The studies I have read indicate increasing intelligence, not decreasing.

Isn't it also possible that our genetic potential for intelligence might be decreasing, but our brains are better developed because we get better nutrition as a child.
That and a larger amount of the population gets better training.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bbender View Post
That and a larger amount of the population gets better training.
And thus perform better on testing intended to measure intelligence but actually measuring education.

Are Humans Becoming Less Intelligent?
Quote:
But just because humans have more mutations in their intelligence genes doesn't mean we are becoming less brainy as a species, said psychologist Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick, who was not involved in the study. Instead, removing the pressure for everyone to be a superb hunter or gatherer may have allowed us to evolve a more diverse population with different types of smarts, he said.
"You don't get Stephen Hawking 200,000 years ago. He just doesn't exist," Hills told LiveScience. "But now we have people of his intellectual capacity doing things and making insights that we would never have achieved in our environment of evolutionary adaptation."

specialization.
ADHD for example, was an evolutionary variation which occurred thouands or millions of years ago to allow for tribal 'protectors' who might miss out on some social exchanges and be bored gathering fruit but which could readilly anticipate an attack by a stealthy predator and was equipped with faster reflexes. The same way vultures specialize in roles taking apart a carcass the human brain is specialized in ways to take apart our world- metaphorically.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MonkWren View Post
So again, anyone with an actual degree in genetics (OY, BOSSMAN MICHAEL) care to comment? I've heard many arguments about how and why people are getting stupider, and given that we have no data to actually make comparisons, making all of this postulating nothing but hot air (on my part too), I tend to disbelieve the claim that we're getting stupider.
I need to be at work to access the basic article before I could comment, but my first question would be how he defined "intelligence"




 

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