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

 
I skimmed through the thread, so apologies if this is restating something that another poster already said.

It's notoriously difficult to measure objective intelligence. We've gotten acceptably proficient at measuring relative intelligence for certain dimensions of that attribute among a given population, but even those measurements fail when placed side by side with another study done in a wildly different population, and all they are is comparative rankings of specific cognitive attributes, not actual rigorous measurements of some universally accepted definition of 'intelligence'.

In other words, I mistrust any study like this as anything but (potentially thought-provoking) speculation, because nobody can actually measure the thing they are talking about.

EDIT: Also, I find it interesting that people often assume that, once an attribute stops being selected for, it somehow rapidly falls into decay. Genetic drift tends to lead to the fixation of traits when selection isn't pulling too hard in one direction or the other, especially in large populations. To say it another way, if your not pushing up on it or pulling down, it tends to stay the same.

Sure you could argue that intelligent brains are expensive, but they are also very useful, and I don't think anyone is arguing that there is no competitive advantage at all to being very smart. So yeah, I've always been suspicious of the old argument that humanity is getting dumber, and this article doesn't change my mind.

Quote:
Originally Posted by SteelMirror View Post
Sure you could argue that intelligent brains are expensive, but they are also very useful, and I don't think anyone is arguing that there is no competitive advantage at all to being very smart.
I would argue that in today's western culture, there is very little competitive reproductive advantage to being very smart over being average or even somewhat below average. Setting aside any speculation on whether intelligence and fertility are correlated, dumb people are just as capable of having kids as smart people, and are more likely to do it by accident, as well.

Which also holds true for the past 600+ years as well. At the same time nobody goes to a sperm bank and asks for sperm from an idiot. Also a lot of intelligence is environmental over genetic, so the odds of "smart DNA" being in a dumb person and vice versa are pretty good. Finally keep in mind that when you are talking reproduction, evolution and IQ, teh scale is huma to chimpansee not IQ:45 to IQ:104. To the best of my understanding the reproductive of the opportunities of the low range of human innate intelligence primarilly result in charges being filed against the infant's father for raping a woman incapable of giving consent.

Also keep in mind that intelligent males are arguably more likely to outcompete less savvy males and engage in extramarital relations that lead to illegitimate offspring raised by another man, often unknowingly, as his own children. Even in "today's Western culture". It's very hard to tell how often that happens, but you can't dismiss out of hand the effect this has on selection pressure if you're willing to consider things like couples having kids 'by accident' as indications of lower genetic intelligence.

I'm not really interested in actually debating the ramifications of the above statement or its likely effect, I'm just pointing out that it's an incredibly complex topic, and off-hand speculation based on gut instinct is very likely to be misleading, and unlikely to be convincing.

Plus th etendancy to confuse "intelligent" with "intellectual", after all, a good strategic thinker who becomes head of the football team may well be more intelligent that the nerd with his head in a book whose obsesion with astronomy and math make him the teacher's favorite. Just because we associate one kind of mental activity with academics and intelligence compared to teh other doesn't mean it is actually more related to genetic intelligence.

Leading us, once again, to the old theory of multiple intelligences which has already been discussed in this thread.

Yes and no- the question isn't just whether there are mutliple forms of intelliegnce or what forms there are but also which aspects are determined by genetics if we are discussing evolution of intelligence. Are we lookig at issues of development, neurodiversity? Is neurodiversity increasing or decreasing? Intelligence is such a broad word and is largely a cultural construct in terms of what it describes rather than being rooted in a biological definition. You might as well declare the changes in teh English language to be evolutionary as to discuse short term shifts in relative intelligence of generations in terms of evolutionary drift. It's like trying to measure siesmic trends with a few seconds observation of a pot of water.

Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak View Post
Yes and no- the question isn't just whether there are mutliple forms of intelliegnce or what forms there are but also which aspects are determined by genetics if we are discussing evolution of intelligence. Are we lookig at issues of development, neurodiversity? Is neurodiversity increasing or decreasing? Intelligence is such a broad word and is largely a cultural construct in terms of what it describes rather than being rooted in a biological definition. You might as well declare the changes in teh English language to be evolutionary as to discuse short term shifts in relative intelligence of generations in terms of evolutionary drift. It's like trying to measure siesmic trends with a few seconds observation of a pot of water.
Hence why the original article is a bunch of bunk.

As to the whole we are selecting against intelligence :

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
-Charles Darwin

Food for thought : Are we selecting against intelligence ? Or simply selecting for another type of intelligence than cognitive ?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Laereth View Post
As to the whole we are selecting against intelligence :

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
-Charles Darwin

Food for thought : Are we selecting against intelligence ? Or simply selecting for another type of intelligence than cognitive ?
I would argue no, although I also think that soon it might be kinda irrelevant (Singularity and all that), simply because using a computer requires cognitive intelligence. I think what's being lost is kinetic and environmental (or natural, or green thumb, or whatever) intelligences are the big losses as we become more sedentary and citified.




 

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