Speaking evolutionary-wise, are we getting smarter or dumber as time goes by? I know we have been testing intelligence for some time now. So there must be some data to compare.
Actually, the thing that inspired this thread, is the fact penises are apparently getting smaller (at least 10%, from what I heard). In reality, environmental factors, like pollution, may be responsible for this. And so, that is part of my question too: how are environmental factors affecting human intelligence?
Also, there is a certain conventional wisdom that goes with this, historically at least. In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the super-advanced Martians are basically all brain, with useless limbs. Will we end up like that some day?
In his book The Dumbest Generation, Dr. Mark Bauerlein musters an array of evidence to prove that Americans have gotten dumber over the past fifty years or so.
Over the last 80 years, IQ test results in America and elsewhere have shown a consistent and signficant rise - this is known as The Flynn Effect Flynn effect - Wikipedia
So I don’t have to buy and read the whole book, can you pull out some useful arguments?
I read the introduction and the anecdotes about overachieving rich kids vs. kids who spend more time on XBox than homework seemed more like “Get offa my lawn!!” than something I would expect from an actual university professor. Well, maybe a professor of English, but not like a real professor.
Well, we’re certainly getting smarter in that nutritional defencies that negatively impact cognitive abilities are much less common now than they were in the past.
Evolutionarywise, has there been enough time since we started administerint IQ tests for evolution to have an effect?
I don’t think penises have gotten smaller, I think people are more comfortable with having an average size penis. Whatever the average reported penis size happens to be, I bet the real average is smaller.
A minor nitpick. IQ tests are normalized to a mean and standard deviation of the population of test takers. IOW, they always show the average IQ as 100 over time. But yes, they have been adjusting upwards over the years.
It makes for an interesting theory. I mean dumb kids have always been dumb. But these days they have a lot more mindless distractions these days to keep them busy. OTOH, more achievement oriented kids have a lot more information and educational oportunities at their disposal. There is also a lot more pressure to get into the top schools so they can get a good job working with a top company working 80 hours a week.
I would think diet and education would play greater role.
Also better prenatal care, and recognition that drinking and smoking while pregnant might not be good things to do.
I don’t think you can draw many conclusions from colleges. Good colleges haven’t gotten much bigger in 40 years, but there are a lot more people competing to get in. Where I live a large part of the immigrant population is self-selected for high academic achievement. Neither of these things say anything about the population as a whole.
My guess would be a larger percentage of bright young people are being paired up in college or in the work place and a form of selective breeding for higher intelligence may be at work.
Not over a couple of generations. On the other hand, the advantages these kids get in the form of nutrition, opportunities, examples, and extra education might make them look naturally smarter.
One problem is that if bright people choose each other the non-bright people are forced to choose each other too, and the mean intelligence won’t change though there will be greater variation. But I doubt that this is a factor in only a few generations either.
I thought about that, possibly not. Unsuccesful people will not be so choosy even if they carry good genetics for intelligence. It may not have much effect on the lower end.
But with a limited population of whatever you call “good” genes, if the good marry each other what is left is not so good. In the old days, to use a cliche, if ugly rich or smart guy marries beautiful but dumb woman, they might get ugly dumb children (as Shaw warned) but on the average they’d get children somewhere in the middle. And there appears to be more marriages those in the same intellectual levels as opportunities open up. But I think it would be a long while before we see this in the genome.
In the movie Idiocracy, we are getting dumber because smart people are breeding fewer, if any, children, opting to adopt children due to concerns about planetary overpopulation, while dumb people have a mass of children.
Over historical time scales, evolutionary factors are going to be dwarfed into insignificance by social and environmental factors. People never really seem to manage to grasp just how LONG evolution takes.
