Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.
Comparing within societies. This relationship holds true pretty much for any society too. Increasing education and wealth , particularly for women, leads to lower fertility rates. This has, since the 1990’s, been the major thrust of most development programs worldwide. And lower intelligence does correlate with lower wealth across the board. This isn’t an assumption at all. Even studies that try to refute the connection point only to a lack of a causal connection. That’s not very important here.
You seem to consider that there is no mobility between groups. A smart child born to dumb parents would, on average, become relatively richer and better educated and have fewer kids.
I would say that on an evolutionary time scale, we probably are more beautiful today than we used to be. The most handsome caveperson of yester-year would be less appealing to us than the least comely of our contemporary humans.
The tentative answers seem to be more or less the same for beauty as for intelligence:
College graduates overwhelmingly marry college grads. Within this population many other factors would no doubt influence who marries whom, but by and large the variation would be low.
Pretty good point
It’s absurd. Even in the richest country in the world, that isn’t true.
Is it your contention that the technology won’t exist by 2040? I didn’t claim the technology exists now. I said that it will be available in one generation.
Yeah, but a straight flush only helps in poker, and we don’t know what game we’ll be playing in the future. Suppose you gave australopithecus the ability to manipulate genes. Would they have selected for brains, or would we have ended up with thicker fur, sharper teeth, and a better sense of smell?
I’m always amazed at some people that consider people to be terrible for the planet and should be wiped out…but for some reason the person having this opinion is still walking around.
Assuming the poster will accept my apology, I’d like to address some of the points made before I hit the sack.
This isn’t pertinent unfortunately. Survival has only recently been guaranteed to people, even in developed countries. Even if we were to grant it a 100 or 200 years, you would not expect changes to show up. I was always referring to evolutionary timescales (Although I’m not entirely sure what this implies, but they’re definitely way more than 50 years. I believe fruit flies show significant evolutionary change in about 20 generations). This allows me to introduce another caveat - Will intelligence be selected against if current trends hold.
I was actually only using a very basic statistical term. I’m not sure how clinical terminology enters into it at all. Neither do confounding variables since I make no attempt at establishing causality. And actually, the correlations that I’ve mentioned do in fact establish a correlation between intelligence and fertility. As far as my knowledge of statistics goes, if A and B are correlated and B and C are correlated, A and C will be correlated. And the correlations here aren’t trivial either. Many researchers use education as a proxy for IQ. I actually looked it up since and realised that I didn’t even need to frame it as such. There is a direct inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility. (Apologies for the wiki link, but as it quotes specific research studies, I thought it’d be alright)
I contest the assertion that wealthy or powerful people are more likely to be extraordinarily intelligent. Sorry, but cite?
Actually, one of my points is precisely that there is such mobility between groups. In other words, the upwardly-mobile “smart child” would be mixing the genes of his/her “dumb” kin in with the genes of his/her adopted social class. When one of his/her kids takes after Uncle Derpy in being a few sandwiches short of a picnic, then the intelligence gene pool has been stirred up afresh with Nature’s big fuckstick, thus preventing genetic isolation of the different groups.
But increasing education and wealth for a society as a whole isn’t the same as genetically increasing intelligence of a sub-population within a society. So right there you’ve got a huge confounding factor in attempting to correlate intelligence with fertility rates.
Well, gee whillikers, if you’re going back tens or hundreds of thousands of years to Paleolithic hominids who weren’t even the same subspecies as us, naturally you’re going to find some aesthetic differences. I thought you were trying to put forth an argument for natural selection changing our average species characteristics over a much shorter timescale.
I don’t doubt that hundreds of thousands of years from now our human descendants will be quite different from us in many ways. But I seriously doubt that anyone will be able to pick out, in the huge mass of environmental and genetic factors causing those differences, the specific effects of particular late-20th-century social and cultural patterns in fertility choices.
But college graduates display huge variations in intelligence, so that information by itself doesn’t tell us whether a genetically isolated subpopulation of superior intelligence is developing.
And again, as with your remark about increasing education and wealth across the board in poor countries, college attendance rates can be changed by many factors other than innate intelligence. For example, a few decades ago only about 5% of US adults were college graduates, and now it’s about 25%. Are you suggesting that intelligence levels have increased that drastically in the US over just the past 60 years? :dubious: I don’t think you are.
If human sexual selection on average favors intelligence (as you seem to agree that it does), and if current fertility patterns are not producing reproductively isolated subpopulations with different intelligence levels, then ISTM that average intelligence levels are not likely to decline.
You seem to be trying to argue that the more numerous dumbos will just genetically overwhelm the less numerous smartasses. But if the dumbo/smartass populations are not reproductively isolated—and you’ve shown no convincing evidence that they are—and if there are selection pressures in favor of smartasses, then those smartass genes are just going to keep spreading through the species as a whole.
It will be* available for a few genetic diseases, but not all or even most. And it won’t be available for non-medical purposes to anyone but the relatively wealthy in even the richest of countries.
So, yes, I stand by my original comment.
*Actually, it is available now for some.
Apparently you aren’t familiar with the concept of an analogy. I am not taking about a literal straight flush and I’m not talking about what genetic characteristics we might need in 100,000 years. We are looking for characteristics they will need to compete in a couple of decades. We are going to look for characteristics that will push them to right end of the normal distribution curve. We want smart healthy children, not X-men.
You end up with a population where the stupid people start at an IQ of 120 and the normal people are 140 and the smart people from 160 up. Leave out the genes for hemophilia and schizophrenia and breast cancer.
Regardless of how old or politically incorrect this issue may be, I think it’s a valid and interesting question.
But “intelligence” is ambiguous. Better would be to talk about “brain traits”: symbolic thinking, language, social skills, personality… and more specific skill like mathematics, music, spacial thinking, empathy, mechanical ability, maternal/paternal instincts, charm, patience, charisma, hutzpa, …
And to argue the question you have to assume that these traits have a genetic basis and are thus “evolvable”. Many people would deny that they are. That’s fine, but personally I think that viewpoint is akin to religion. Consistent, complex skills and behaviors can’t just emerge from brains of a sufficient size; they have to be designed - either by natural selection or by some higher intelligence. If human behavior and intelligence-skills are not the product of evolution and are not subject to continuing selection pressures then the future of humanity is in the hands of the gods.
I believe that the skills we usually think of as belonging to “intelligent” people are not being selected for in modern society because people with these skills do not enhance reproduction. Other skills are still do enhance reproduction: maternal instincts, charisma, religious fervor, etc. Think Octo-mom, Warren Jeffs, and the guy who knocks up half the girls on his block.
Traditional intelligence will not be lost overnight. Those genes are still in the gene pool and they will continue to kick around for many generations. But there is nothing preventing them from being lost and, through entropy, they will continuously decline in frequency. Egghead geniuses will become rarer.
Future societies will not have our veneer of high technology and scholarly pursuits. But intelligence levels will not fall below that needed to sustain agriculture and to build weapons of war.
Genetic engineering could be the “out” from this scenario.
What do you mean? Are you claiming that traits we associate with intelligence do not appeal to potential mates?
AFAICT, you haven’t presented any evidence or any convincing argument that any of these predictions about the eventual decline of human intelligence are true.
And it’s not clear what you think “entropy” has to do with it. Human reproduction is not an isolated thermodynamic system, which AFAIK is the only context in which assumptions about inevitably increasing entropy make any sense.
Yeah, what I said was kind of awkwardly phrased.
Basically what I meant is that wealthy people are more intelligent because they are wealthy. Wealth provides better health, diet, education, etc. Because wealth is inherited, intelligence is also inherited, but not in a genetic or evolutionary sense.
Thus, there may be no genetic difference between rich and poor populations. A poor child elevated to wealth will be intelligent and a wealthy child reduced to poverty will be stupid. Wealth only changes the expression of the trait.
(Think of it just like the height example others have provided. I’m not taller than my great grandparents because I have “taller genes”. I’m taller because I grew up with a better diet.)
As far as I can tell traditional intelligence is not an especially powerful mate attractor. Some people may make it a priority in selecting a mate, but overall I don’t think it rates very high. Non-intelligent people seem to me to have no trouble finding mates. Besides, as someone mentioned above, mate-appeal is not the same thing as reproductive success. I’ve never heard of any evidence linking high-IQ with reproductive success, and I don’t believe there is a link.
It’s my humble opinion that studies WOULD find reproductive success linked with other, non-IQ forms of “intelligence” such as charm, charisma, a dominant personality, a risk-taking personality, etc.
True, I don’t have any evidence: I’m just extrapolating.
The genome is a complex, finely tuned state machine. If it codes for a complex survival trait, the probability is near zero that that trait arose by chance; we can assume is was derived over generations through natural select. Conversely, if the selection pressure is removed, the processes of entropy will eventually cause the trait to be lost. That is, mutations will accumulate in the relevant genes and the percentage of functional combinations will drop lower and lower.
I’m assuming here that such traits are under genetic control and are the products of evolution. If that is not true, then it’s up to the gods.
I think that for predicting future demographics of humanity, you first need to divide humanity into two groups: (1) people who think it’s a great idea to have lots of children and to teach their children that it’s a great idea to have a lot of children; and (2) everyone else.
Currently, the first group is a tiny percentage of the population, perhaps 1%. But if you do the math, you will see that they are on track to go from 1% to 90% over the next couple hundred years.
So if you want to extrapolate outwards, you need to focus on Group 1. Within that group, are more intelligent people reproducing relatively more? It’s quite possible although I doubt anyone has studied carefully. I would guess it’s more likely than not, given what’s involved in having and raising 8 or 9 children.
Finally, like other people point out, it’s likely that game-changing technologies will come on line over the next 50 to 100 years. So it’s probably pretty foolish to just extrapolate. Still, Idiocracy seems rather less likely than blackhatocracy.
Please provide a cite that intelligence is negatively correlated with reproductive success.
“Good” or “Bad” are irrelevant words.
You are implying that whatever you mean by the term “intelligence” is important and preferable and an indicator of a special quality some humans possess.
Intelligence may, or more likely is not important to the universe. From all we know already, it is not - but that may change in the future.
Cosmological Reality does not depend on the behavior of molecules. Such behavior, or "intelligence’ if you prefer that term, is a result, not a causal factor of the existence of the universe.
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