Intelligence is multifactorial and one gene would never dominate like that. At any rate, measuring a species by its intelligence is kind of an anthropocentric way to go about things. Intelligence isn’t everything and is not a measure of how evolved something is or how adapted it is. It is only a by-product of a number of different environmental stimuli.
It is far more likely that an energy-rich kind of atmosphere would lead to a less intelligent species – if you think about it, in an energy-poor kind of region, the more intelligent you are about getting and eating food, the better off you are. Have you ever read the steps necessary to prepare a cassava for eating? http://www.fao.org/docrep/T0207E/T0207E06.HTM
Anyways, evolution rarely if ever has selected for energy efficiency. If you look at the biochemical metabolic pathways behind any process in the body, it is clear that energy is wasted at every step. Groups move with food supply and therefore keep their caloric intake up always. They don’t reproduce when there is not enough calories.
Chimps are the nearest things. Nobody knows if chimps and humans could produce viable offspring. Before you laugh, there are plenty of other animals farther apart than chimps and humans that can produce offspring. To look how we treat Pongidae, and how we probably treated Neanderthal thousands of years ago, things would not go well for your hypothetical race.
That’s what I like about you-- you often think exactly as I do. I came back into this thread to post pretty much the same thing. So I’ll go ahead and expand a bit. In fact, the scenario described in the fictional work you mentioned actually did happen, just not in modern times. There were Neanderthals in Europe and Erectus in Asia when Modern Humans enterred both of those places. Unfortunately, we’ll never know exactly how that all played out. But damn if I wouldn’t give anything in the world to find out!
So, let’s take the hypthetical into something that we can actually deal with. Suppose it was found that gorillas and chimps could be hybridized in the lab. That through a simple technique like inserting the sperm’s genetic material direcly into the nucleus, that chimp/gorilla hybrids could be produced. Now, we know that humans have 1 less chromosome pair than chimps, but we also know that humans are more closely related, genetically, to chimps than chimps are to gorillas. Of course horses and donkeys have differing number of chromosomes, but they can produce (infertile) offspring. So, it would be reasonable to assume that we could likely produce human/chimp hybrids, too.
What would the moral implications be for that? Does the presumed sterility of the offspring really matter? If so, would you disallow two humans from reporducing if we knew they would produce sterile offspring? No, I don’t think we would or even should.
This kind of crap happens to me all the time. Its one of the negative aspect of the SDMB. People love to show off and put others down to show how intelligent they are when you were asking for leeway in the first place. What would be better that we don’t even have this discussion at all? The basic gist of what you are getting at, as I understand it, is how would we deal with severely inferior humans or something in between humans and apes. The means of how it occured doesn’t really even matter. Just because you gave some hypothetical to introduce it, people have to admit that you were trying to prove its actually likely or possible? As I understand it you are wondering what it would be like if we had some subhuman species, but still much more intelligent than anything out there now. Like the Neanderthal or erectus. These would clearly be inferior in intelligence to Homo sapiens. And we did coexist at the same time. But it appears there wasn’t much sympathy for them
People you have to realize when someone is being loose with the facts for philosophical reasons. Remember the thread about the ethics of a life ray? I can’t seem to find it now, but it discussed the possibility that you could suck the life from people and add it to yours. So if I used it on a baby I could more or less double my life. There was nobody in that thread complaining that it wasn’t possible. That was almost purely hypothetical and people were able to discuss it because it is so ludicrous that its not even worth debating the facts but it is intriguing. Then you also have philosophical discussions where the facts are very much there. Lets put it this way: If there were a scale where 0 were the most completely factual discussion or OP you could have and 10 were the most unbelievable (eg, Lets say that the earth is actually flat) I would put this OP at a 7 or 8. You can discuss the hypothetical flat earth because its obviously not true, and also the completely factual
arguments because they are based in fact. Why can’t we argue things that are pseudoscientific on purely philosophical grounds? I think its worth mentioning that it is good to correct flaws, but also don’t forget the main aim of someone’s post.
To answer the question, if it were possible for a certain group of people somewhere to be subhuman but still capable of showing signs of being indeed civilized then they would probably have been harshly treated in the earlier years. Wouldn’t they be the perfect slaves? Equal humans were enslaved, imagine if there were monkeys that were smart enough to work and follow instructions? I would have to bet that it would be something like Huxley’s Delta class in Brave New World.
And the idea that they would be able to achieve the upper echelons of society? The smarter ones at least? I doubt that. There is still discrimination against Black people in American and they aren’t inferior.
The OP does some interesting things that some people don’t see or don’t want to talk about. Its not about the science. Its about question our own sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. In our brains we have humans and animals. These two are distinct. But what if there was not clear difference? And why is that interesting? Well, you have seen what people have done when certain people are considered inferior. They are treated like Animals (like Hitler). Well I could keep going on, but I thik I have made my point.
I may have difficulty with language, but I’m not stupid, I invoked a very specific and very real mechinism of evolution. its called a “bottle neck” and I decided on that for the specific reason that it explains why a whole population would share a gene… the energy part I guess was just PC “hey they aren’t all bad” afterthought of how they could so rapidly take over a whole continent.
as for everyone’s comment that a gene could not do such a thing… stuff it, its irrelivent, you jumped on me at every oppertunity for being too specific, and that was a part I would rather leave to “thats just the way it is in this world” you add nothing to the descussion. and I see no reason why a gene could not do such a thing, I am sure that there is some sort of protien that could decrease some proccess enough to regularly lower inteligence but not enough to be fatal, there are many such real diseases, although many nongenetic… assume 20 points is just the rough average. assume it works along the lines of lead poisoning but from a diffrent mechinism (doing the same sorts of damage but from a naturally occuring protein instead of external lead)
I guess I am slightly sorry for useing a ‘realistic’ example. but I feel the question changes depending on how it is phrased.
if its a created in the lab race, of super monkeys or intentionally cripled humans it brings up bigger questions to do with our responciblity to our creations. and technological ethics.
if its simply ape men, or neanderthals, then they are clearly inhuman, and become something like chimps, where we probobly would treat it as an animal, like we do chimps.
thats why I wanted to describe a ‘race’ thats similar to the other ‘races’ this planet has, people that are otherwise identical to us. if you take a ‘white’ person and a ‘black’ person the number of really diffrent genes is really hardly any… just a very very slight change in the amount of one chemical (skin pigment). the other races are the same, they are so few differances that the word race is rediculus. and all the ‘races’ this planet has, the one or two gene differances between the ‘races’ are so minor and trivial they matter not one bit (skin color! pssh!!! thats nothing!) but there is no law of physics that says an alternitate earth couldn’t have the one or two gene differance happen to be a gene that did something… so that on THAT version of earth (not this one) the races mean something…
which would be a totally diffrent ethical problem than this earth has where all the races are only different in superficial ways. and I feel its important to talk about ethics under a wide spectrum of situations, even in ones that don’t exist, because you can learn alot about ethics in the real world by thinking about createing ethical systems for many situations.
The problem people have, to a large extent, is your hypothetica that there is one gene and that it is “dominant”. That’s pretty darn close to starting a debate about “what if 2+2=5”?
I didn’t mean to imply that you were stupid or anything along those lines. I was just pointing out an underappreciated piece of evolution.
A population bottleneck or genetic drift can cause a scenario approaching what you seem, but I really can’t think of any situation where that would account for 100% of the alleles in a population without extremely strong seletcion. Sacrificing the major evolutionary advantage of humanity, its intelligence, could in no scenario of which I can imagine be seen as a positive adaptation (especially without the energy bit you propose). This opens another hijack on evolutionary genetics. You would have to start with an extremely limited population – probably no more than two people, and you would have had to have restricted breeding after that. A more real-world situation is like what is seen in Australia (where there were perhaps fewer than 200 people to first reach Australia who went on to become the Aborigines) or the Americas (which had a group of perhaps as few as 20 come south after crossing the land bridge). In those situations, there is still a lot of genetic diversity in all kinds of traits.
Anyway, I tried to answer your question. The answer is that the more intelligent or different group would have killed them off. We have done it with chimps. We did it with Neanderthals. And we pretty much did it with all indigenous peoples around the world. They would be killed directly and those who lived would melt away into the greater genetic pool of the invaders. Even if the gene was dominant, only half of the progeny from any given mating would carry the mutation. Since the less intelligent people carry a real disadvantage in a social mixture with the other group, they would be selected against, and we would see the trait dwindle away.
dominant as opposed to recessive. a gene that codes for a protein (that in this case retards brain development), and expresses itself with one copy. its hardly an imaginary concept. things like brown eyes work that way, its not imaginary.
One problem owlofcheese is that your hypothetical example of racial inferiority is not hypothetical but it is very real, but sadly this can’t be openly discussed in western society because to do so is taboo- you know, political correctness and other such rot.
Second, your example of inferiority based upon the western culture measure of an I.Q. test is ludicrous. As others have pointed out, our I.Q. tests are culturally biased, as they well should be; for human beings the degree of acclimation to a particular culture is the only gage that can properly measure a negative or a positive result. To argue otherwise is nonsense.
Think a bit. Are not climatic adaptations real? The Indians in the Andes, the Eskimos in the Arctic? The Pygmy’s in the African jungle? Is there a thinking man in the house who thinks that physical evolution somehow stops when it involves the mechanisms of the brain?
No, differences exist between the races and the cultures of mankind, but only time and the continuing interactions of the dynamo that is physical and cultural evolution will determine which is better and which is worst.
But you can put this in your pipe and smoke it…
** It won’t be the culture that chooses taboos over a clear and true understanding of the world that is wrapped about it.**
Valid from an evolutionary point of view it may be, but very, very unlikely in this case.
My point that hardship has increased human intelligence is not a misunderstanding of evolution, or an analysis of what evolution inevitably does. It is an observation of the world as things stand. Hardship as an evolutionary pressure in the particular case of humans has increased intelligence. It is what has got us where we are. Your scenario suggests that for one particular sub-set of humans, for no particular reason, it works in exactly the opposite direction. This is unlikely.
I came back into this thread to post pretty much the same thing. So I’ll go ahead and expand a bit. In fact, the scenario described in the fictional work you mentioned actually did happen, just not in modern times. There were Neanderthals in Europe and Erectus in Asia when Modern Humans enterred both of those places. Unfortunately, we’ll never know exactly how that all played out. But damn if I wouldn’t give anything in the world to find out!