Well, more specifically the falling out was between God and several hundred of his minions around the same time humans started doing stuff besides being cavemonkeys. God saw fit to make some adjustments to the living arrangements for His monkeys after they welcomed the teachings from the fallen watchers, but He was really pissed at the watchers for teaching (and shagging!) the humans.
Now because of the religious component it is questionable whether this angle belongs in General Questions as opposed to Great Debates, but it is interesting nonetheless that even 2300 years ago (Book of Enoch) someone saw fit to write down something that addressed an apparently sudden explosion of human technology. Who knows how long the content of Enoch was oral tradition prior to that time. It kinda blows MY mind we’ve come so far in 10,000 or so years–temporally, the change was a lot closer (if less impressive) to whomever wrote Enoch, and even they thought it mind-blowing enough to believe we couldn’t have done it without help.
I am out of town with limited ability to create a comprehensive post but let me suggest you start here.
We did not school lunch our way to our advances and we are actively evolving.
The successes in the last 30k years are good evidence that new “intelligence” genes arose much more recently than 200k y a. As I mentioned earlier, we even have specific examples of many genes which cluster by population, suggesting positive selection pressure which in turn suggests an advantage for those genes.
Will try to revisit this and explain more when I get home in a couple days…
Evolution and the brain
Perhaps the most incendiary aspect of the fast-evolution research is evidence that the brain may be evolving just as quickly as the rest of the body
Some genes that appear to have been recently selected, Moyzis and his collaborators suggest, influence the function and development of the brain. Other fast-changing genes — roughly 100 — are associated with neurotransmitters, including serotonin (a mood regulator), glutamate (involved in general arousal), and dopamine (which regulates attention). According to estimates, fully 40 percent of these neurotransmitter genes seem to have been selected in the past 50,000 years, with the majority emerging in just the past 10,000 years.
Addressing the hot-potato question — What might these changes signify? — Moyzis and Wang theorize that natural selection probably favored different abilities and dispositions as modern groups adapted to the increasingly complex social order ushered in by the first human settlements."
Nobody (at least I’m not) is questioning the fact that humans are still evolving. That’s a silly debate to have.
And I have no clue how quickly our genes are changing relative to the past (though I guess Moyzis and Wang say it’s faster than it’s been in a while).
How are you concluding that this necessarily means human intelligence is increasing in aggregate? As I noted earlier, while there’s nothing necessarily selecting against intelligence, there’s not much selecting for intelligence, either. Genetic changes are just that - changes. You haven’t presented anything that links these changes to intelligence. As I noted, we know our brains are actually smaller than they’ve been in over 20000 years, so clearly there are genetic differences. How can that be conclusively linked to increased intelligence?
Also, I can see there’s a hook already into the quite tired (and tiring) debate on a genetic basis for racial intelligence based on where you are leading the discussion. If so, I have no interest in getting into that again, nor will I respond to anything resembling discussions on the Ashkenazim or Asians or their respective intelligences compared to a human “norm”.
Oh, and yes, we are school lunching ourselves to advances. You may not like that idea, but it’s pretty conclusive (I even provided a nice research study) that testing results are highly correlated with improved nutrition. You can question how much test results correlate with intelligence (which is a fair question) but our usual measures of testing intelligence involves, surprise, surprise, tests, on which students do better when they’re fed. So at the very least, our measuring tools can’t fully separate the effect of full tummies vs genetics.
Actually, while I’m on that kick, the last couple hundred years have a great example of how genetics isn’t always the best explanation for a physical change.
Certain groups of people are taller now than they have ever been and live longer to boot. Those people are the ones who have access to better nutrition and healthcare. The peoples who don’t have access to those things haven’t seen such an increase in height (see North Korea for a great example - actually, the refugees escaping from there could provide a good study in how certain measures of intelligence are also linked to nutrition/heathcare).
One might claim that improved nutrition doesn’t explain all the increase in height (it probably doesn’t), but one would be foolhardy to toss it out completely. Actually, one would be foolhardy to claim that the increase in height over the last 100 years is even primarily genetically based. Just as one would be foolhardy to simply toss out the idea that our measures of intelligence is linked at all to proper nutrition.
I keep wondering, what about civilizations during the Ice Ages? Sea level was a lot lower then, right? If they built cities in the same kind of coastal places as we do, those sites would now be under deep water, right? And if they had, say, a roughly Roman level of technology, there might not be a lot of mines or anything to find traces of, and most of what there is would have been drowned along with the cities as the seas rose.
As the world climate changed between ice ages there was undoubtably a tremendous amount of pressure being placed on individuals to adapt, yet human lifestyles remained pretty much the same. Why the rapid and ongoing change this time around? I don’t think there is sufficient evidence to suggest that substantial genetic change has occurred since the last ice, yet the modern world evolved at a pace completely inconsistent with the vast majority of human existence. If human evolution has been gradual, shouldn’t we see evidence of technological advances each time the climate changed and humans faced pressure? The rapid advance this time just doesn’t add up without some sort of outside interference or radical shift in human nature.
Let’s dispense first with the school-lunch-improves-intelligence bit. From your own study conclusion, on p 25: “The precision of the estimates is limited by the fact that the variation used to identify the effects of the NSLP occurs only at the level of state of birth and birth cohort. But taking the results at face value, there are at least two potential explanations for why I detect an effect on education but not on health. First, there may be beneficial effects of the NSLP on health in the short-term that have faded away by adulthood. Second, the program may have attracted children to school but displaced nutritional inputs coming from elsewhere, including school lunches that were not part of the federal program. But in either case, the NSLP appears to be ineffective in producing adults who are sufficiently healthy for military service, although the education results are encouraging for other reasons.”
So school lunches might have a short term effect on health and also encourage kids to go to school in the first place. I am underwhelmed at a conclusion school lunches are improving intelligence.
But back to the debate at hand: Why aren’t there pre ice age civilizations? Why did “anatomically modern humans” putter for 150K years and then in the last 30K years, take off?
The answer I advance is that we evolved more smarts. We aren’t that L0 guy in central or southern africa from 200 kya, even if we are roughly “anatomically” the same. Evolution is about “descent with modification” and not just the Creationist notion that genes muck about mutating aimlessly without any change in the organism over time. What happens instead is that the aimless mutations sometimes produce a positive result, and sometimes that new variation produces a reproductive advantage. When it does, the organism evolves.
We are evolving like mad. We are not just mutating like mad. I suppose it’s technically possible that getting stupider conferred a reproductive advantage over the last 30K years, but the evidence is all against that notion. Instead, the evidence is that we exploded culturally. We figured out all sorts of things that L0 apparently never thought of.
Look around you. All that you see is evidence of a highly intelligent brain operating in at least some subsets of some populations. And in larger populations, highly intelligent brains in enough numbers to create whole infrastructures dependent upon a large mass of the population being also highly intelligent.
What, exactly, would you advance as evidence we are spinning our wheels or getting stupider? Intracranial volume, as measured by some very limited representative samples without figuring out which parts of the brain got larger, better connected, or more “efficient”? By that measure, elephants are smarter than we are.
On the other hand, we have very good examples of genes that have become so prevalent in their populations, they were almost certainly positively selected because they conferred a reproductive advantage. These genes were driven to this degree of prevalence in a time period shorter than the last 50K years. Skin pigmentation and lactase persistence are a couple examples. And we know that if we look at populations, we’ll see gene clusters by SIRE groups. Those SIRE groups are in turn crude proxies for populations in relative isolation from one another, and the clusters are highly persuasive evidence that the genes confer a positive reproductive advantage. So if you want to argue that diminshed intelligence is the likely advantage for a species that got as far as it did by being smarter, you have to have some other evidence for their diminishing intelligence. I suggest that a look at the ascent of man yields evidence we got smarter, not dumber.
It has become a politically correct mantra that we more or less stopped evolving intelligence at L0. This is an article of faith for the egalitarian and creationist, devoid of any evidence whatsoever. The evidence suggests otherwise, and does so profoundly.
The reason no civilizations exist from beyond 50kya is that we weren’t smart enough to do civilization yet. Had we been, we woulda conquered the environmental factors back then, and multiplied our way to success a long time ago. Instead, like the rest of the species on the planet, we were at the mercy of mother nature, who doesn’t give a crap which species makes it and which does not. And only incredible luck kept as limping along until chance mutation provided the right gene pool to go big.
World population explodes after the younger dryas from about 1mm to 7000mm worldwide after staying relatively constant for 100s of millennia. World climate warmed for the first time in about 70,000 years during this period and presumably this might have lead to a population over-expansion requiring us to farm not hunt. This however doesn’t offer much evidence to me for going from Neolithic lifestyle right through the agricultural revolution to IPads and sending people to the moon. In western society right now, women with lower education levels (and presumably lower IQs) are having more offspring than their more educated counterparts. I do not know if this has been the case for all of the last 20,000 years but it wouldn’t surprise me. It is possible that new ways to share technology, population size and increased proximity to one another caused accelerated technological change. In this case an aggregate advance in human intelligence would not be needed to explain our advances. What bothers me is less the technological and population increases but rather human temperament differences. The concept of ownership and control over our environment that people developed sometime in the last 20,000 years. This current view of our role in nature seems very different from humans from 200,000 - 20,000 years ago. I.e. little evidence of hierarchy or individual material possession until relatively recently on the human evolutionary clock. This was more than just an intelligence shift, it was a phycological one as well.
The Flynn Effect is a well-known demonstration of the overal increase in certain kinds of intelligence.
There are a number of different explanations for this phenomenon; one of them is the undoubted improvement in nutrition over that last century or so.
see
If this is true then presumably improvements of this kind will not continue if and when the general nutrition and health of the population reaches some optimal level. This has not happened yet.
Debating the Flynn effect would probably take us too far afield from the OP. We have chewed on it a bit in other threads.
Let’s just say I’ll be more impressed with the effect when James Flynn explains:
The disparity between the upward trend for IQs in the 20th century and the downward trend in SAT scores, with adjustments for prior years being made in opposite directions for those two intelligence proxies,
How in the hell the average black US adult from 50 years ago could have even functioned in society with an average–average!–IQ of 70 or so (Flynn’s numbers) given that IQ is normalized to reflect the intellectual capacity to function on a daily basis and 70 is in the borderline retarded range, and
How in the hell you can popularize a theory that makes the current average black IQ a relatively immutable 85 (rising from an unknown nadir an unknown number of decades ago) because the effect is diminishing, and yet is extremely popular with academia–that is, until they find out that Flynn’s research is based upon black-white differences with which they profoundly disagree (not to mention his little digression into how to keep the low-IQ NZ women from breeding so as not to bring down the average population IQ).
There is no question that optimum nutrition, like any other environmental variable, will maximize the genetically-based underlying potential for intelligence. It’s not an explanation for what happened to the human population 30-50 kya, though. It’s an explanation for how a brain with an already-established maximum potential might be optimized. But you have to drive those genes to exist in the first place. I can’t get a short proto-giraffe species school-lunched to a height of 20 feet. I need genes.
To be fair to the OP, I won’t discuss the Flynn effect here further, having already vented outside the lines. In a different debate; perhaps.
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So school lunches might have a short term effect on health and also encourage kids to go to school in the first place. I am underwhelmed at a conclusion school lunches are improving intelligence.
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[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
]There is no question that optimum nutrition, like any other environmental variable, will maximize the genetically-based underlying potential for intelligence.
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Thanks for clearing that up.
Both the Flynn Effect and the apparent decline in SAT scores (which may not be a decline after all) are evidence that human behaviour can change quite significantly over a fairly short time. This sort of rapid shift in human behaviour could (and probably does) explain the strange alteration in human civilisation somewhere between 30kya and 10kya.
Colin Renfrew calls this the Sapient Paradox; why would people who were anatomically modern start to behave so differently after more than a hundred thousand years of lower palaeolithic existence. Humans 100,000 years ago might have had the potential to develop writing, metalwork and quantum mechanics, but they did not do so.
I think it was simply an example of the sort of change in human behaviour over a short period of time that our species is capable of, the sort of change which is happening right now. We are a species which can change radically without necessarily evolving in the genetic sense. I suspect that our species will change our behaviour significantly in the next ten thousand years, maybe several times, possibly sooner rather than later
The nutrition issue is simple - there’s a basic intelligence level that humans can reach, given sufficient nutrition. There’s no indication that more food = smarter beyond that (or our obesity epidemic would match up with crowded grad schools) but it is demonstrated that poor nutrition, especially early on, results in poorer intelligence.
The problem with the “everyone everywhere got smarter” hypothesis is that’s not how evolution works. Giraffes don’t grow longer necks because the leaves are higher. The ones with longer necks survive, and the others don’t; eventually only descendants of the longer necks are still around.
the logical inference, then, is that the genes that made us civilized (eventually) came at one point. The obvious point is the great bottleneck at 70ka ago, when supposedly we can trace a lot of our genetic matrial to one place and general group.
Ar we evolving? IIRC this was a thread a while ago. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle requires intelligence; agriculture thrives more in the presence of dullards of low ambition and less restiveness. Civilization takes care of its incapable, so they are more likely to survive and breed regardless of bad eyesight, gimpy leg, general dullardness, etc. - people that are in some way “unhealthy” but able to contribute in some role in a civilized society. Meanwhile, organized warfare will skim off the aggressive and adventurous, the ones not content to maintain a dull existnce tilling the land. (A trade-off; they may spread their genes far and wide, or may die early before having the requisite 10 children so 2 survive.)
I’m surprised that in this (very interesting!) debate about the role of genetics in the rise of intelligence, extelligence, and civilization, that the emphasis on evolution seems to be centered around the genes. This is outdated.
The important bit is not really (or not just) what genes you have, but how those genes are expressed. I’ve stumbled across several studies in the last year or so showing that some traits are selectable without any change in the genes themselves. The one that seems clear is how much taller we have become. This is not just a factor that a person who eats well gets taller, but that a mother who eats well passes on information to the baby in the forum of proteins, hormones, and other womb conditions, so that the baby is already geared up for eating well, and as such has a greater potential for growth. And all this without the genes themselves changing at all; merely how those genes are expressed gets modified.
I have not seen a similar study regarding intelligence, but considering how energy-hungry our brains are, I could easily see such expression modification occuring so that the intelligence / energy cost is optimized. If there’s plenty of food around, then being smarter is going to give you a major advantage. If there’s less food around, then maybe being an energy scrooge (and maybe a little duller) is the way to go. Because conditions can change drastically inside of one or two generations, the ability to adapt quickly would be important. Has anyone else run across studies that have looked at this?
The reference to the Sapient Paradox was helpful thank you. My layman’s takeaway from the Oxford publication is that something about our interactions with one another or some other non traceable change in our fundamental design shifted (and is still shifting potentially) sometime in the last 25,000 years. The neuroscience community, at the present time have only theories. The archeological community can find much evidence of gradual change before the end of the last ice age. The notion that genetic change could be an outdated way of looking at this issue is important to consider. Perhaps gradual non genetic changes could account for people moving out of caves and creating the modern world. Still, we have to account for the spark that started this new way of thinking and interacting. If it was climatic why didn’t we progress after the previous ice age or the one before that? These ice ages also ended post Toba. What was different this time around? The theological argument of supernatural change made in man around this time should not be disregarded.
Perhaps civilization is the final convergence of multiple capabilities that took a long time to fully emerge. The point is that some things work well for some actions - a wolf pack can cooperate to hunt without the need for explicit language. A human hunting group, the leader can push the other guy which eventually can be replaced by “you - go that way”. however, the more abstract thoughts can take longer to become part of the language. How does the first “botanist” explain the concept “hey, this is a seed. Everything that looks like a plant probably has a seed of some sort… Seeds grow… When you add water. Make clay jar, keep mice away from seeds…” That would require a higher degree of language development. Once it happened, though, suddenly learning goes from “watch me and do this” to telling someone about it and having them follow through on a task. This results in more efficient distribution of tasks, better production and storage of food, etc.
But to some extent, the proper vocabulary and conceptual thinking has to evolve in lock-step with the practical applications. Once all the pieces were in place, suddenly things take off. However, language concepts is something that can spread from tribe to tribe across a large continent fairly quickly (in evolutionary time) without needing genetic change, provided the basic brainpower already existed.
Look fellas I know that not many people interject religion into discussions like this, but let me shed a little light to get your thinking shifted. It was the same shift in thinking that I had to confront during my time in the military. I bet most do not know the real reason for the cold war. Let me shed a little light, first ask yourself this, why would Russia our WW2 ally suddenly contrive building a wall in Berlin as a response to Operation paper clip? the fact is the waffen SS had solid proof that there were technologically advanced civilizations before us. Openheimer himself alluded that he got the core of his scientific ideas from the Bagavad Vita which details the construction of unknown craft, this was a book of antiquity some entries made before the Bible. Openheimer also said a quote from the same book after the detonation of the first A bomb. “Behold I am the destroyer of worlds”. The book also describes in detail a war that raged above them that when javelins hit the earth they wiped our whole cities, and the survivors nails, teeth and hair fell out before dying. Sounds like radiation sickness to me. Back to the cold war, to my knowledge the Russians found technology and scientists, some like Josef Mengele sought refuge with Stalin. I mean it just takes a studious read to know the guys were 50 years ahead of us in aviation technology. The Russians in fear of a technologically superior western alliance, put up the Berlin wall to protect their finds, and continue looking in newly soviet occupied East Germany. It is also a known fact that the Luftwaffe had flying saucer shaped craft. A saucer shaped craft is ideal for hyper sonic speeds, How did they know this at nearly the dawn of aviation? Not long after WW2 we had a saucer shaped craft crash on U.S soil (Roswell New Mexico). Ironically it had runes that were etched on it and also the swastika,look up the (BELL) craft. It was produced in Bavaria as was the Habenu which was a true saucer shaped craft. The scientist that worked on this were hush hush, but the German Horton brothers alluded that they had knowledge that allowed them to design hyper sonic craft that was of antiquity. Just food for thought. I will close this with the Bible’s book of ecclesiastics the first chapter " There is nothing new under the sun, what can you look at and say that it is new? it all existed in former times. Just as we have no memory of former times, those after us shall have no memory of us".
Oh in response to the civilization, and diet debate, the brain needs cholesterol, and sugars to maintain all of which could have been found in the ambient environment. Farming did one thing to Human Learning, not to be confused with intelligence. Once larger populations were present on the Earth and people collected to form communities cities had to be built, and hence farming was the only feasible and obvious choice to sustain larger populations. With farming came mans ability to study and inquire about the natural world and form new ideas, we were freed from the yoke of hunting and foraging all day to sustain our calorie requirements. This is when you saw the first learning institutions some were called priesthoods, or mystery schools to learn the esoteric meaning of human existence, and the laws of the universe and natural world. Some were hidden in uncanny disciplines such as alchemy, which led to modern day chemistry, and the medical profession.
Wow…thanks!
These are the kinds of insights we never would have even researched! The thread just would have sat dormant and we would have remained ignorant.