[Keith_McClary]

Is pampered humanity getting steadily less intelligent?

Humans reached a peak of intelligence more than 2,000 years ago and it's been downhill ever since, a scientist speculates
...
As Crabtree explains in the journal: "A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate. Clearly extreme selection is a thing of the past."
...
All of which leads to the conclusion that humans reached our intellectual height in the dim and distant past. "We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,"

I once came up with this theory myself - I figured a hunter-gatherer had to be smarter than a peasant farmer, and a peasant farmer smarter than an assembly line worker or a burger flipper.

(I didn't have the data on genetic mutation rates, so I could not publish my theory in the academic journal "Trends in Genetics" ).

Some doomers are predicting we will be back to the stone age in a few generations. Problem is, according to the above theory, our descendants may no longer have he smarts to be stone age hunter-gatherers.

[Narz]

We've gotten smarter & dumber at the same time. Different traits are selected for & certain abilities have severely atrophied. But 2000 years isn't much time by evolutionary standards. Humans are adapters so when times change people will too.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Some doomers are predicting we will be back to the stone age in a few generations. Problem is, according to the above theory, our descendants may no longer have he smarts to be stone age hunter-gatherers.

After fast extermination of all larger edible animal species in food shortages scenario H-G of the future will keep themselves busy with hunting for rats and gathering worms and cockroaches.

So even if hunting for rats will prove intellectually too challenging, they will still survive by means of *gathering*.

There will be plenty of roaches to gather and in any case if "harvests" are not sufficient to survive, there will be some hunting of fellow humans, also sufficiently unintelligent to flee.

[Newfie]

Jared Diamond makes a similar observation in Collapse. And, in a round about way I've been saying something similar in the Citier>burbs thread, cities can make you stupid.

If, when, we revert to more primitive life styles there will be a very sever selective cull. It will be interesting to see what traits survive. Will the ruthless be favored over the humanitarian or via versa?

But I can tell you two groups who will survive if any at all, commercial fisherman and dairy farmers. Those guys are using all their wits and flexible skills to survive now. They are hard and smart and good people.

[Lore]

According to Jamie Dimon, banks will always survive!

More seriously folks, if we revert to a primitive lifestyle, due to some kind of collapse, I'm uncertain that a lot of the old ways would work as successfully. We have a whole new set of problematic variables to deal with.

[vision-master]

lol - stone age............

[dinopello]

Personally, I think we peaked as single cell organisms that could asexually reproduce. There was a lot less to worry about back in those days and one could just enjoy life. Now people worry about everything and fight and complain - how smart is that ?

[vision-master]

Single cells mutiply to be exactly the same over and over, the only way they change into different forms is from their environments.

[sparky]

.
Unless I'm mistaken the photos are of the largest stone ever cut , it's in Baalbek
in Northern Lebanon ,and is left in the quarry next to the town
amongst many others structures ,there is the foundation of a Sargonide temple there ( 2000 BC)
the foundation stones are just a bit smaller but still huge
there is indication that the big stone broke or that they couldn't move it
now the area is under Hezbolla control , they run the local Hashish trade
they are pretty cool in an " armed to the teeth" sort of way as long as one is only interested in old stuff

[vision-master]

The largest cut stones all over the World are pre-history - we can only speculate who and how they were constructed?

[sparky]

.
One can only speculate how they were constructed

For the Baalbeck stone not much mystery , there are traces of chisel all over it
I saw them when I was visiting there
cutting stone is a no brainer , a lot of sweat and a bit of brain
the real killer is moving the stupid thing , that's where it get interesting

the Egyptians of the middle dynaties had this fetish about obelisque
a slim finger of granite , in one piece , as tall as it could be made
the record is 33 meters and 520 tonnes

To call the monoliths "prehistoric" is a bit of a misnomer as they all were erected by farming societies
in the case of the sargonites and Egyptians they were fully literate
it is conventional to classifie Historical period as having writting

[Outcast_Searcher]

Personally, I think we peaked as single cell organisms that could asexually reproduce. There was a lot less to worry about back in those days and one could just enjoy life. Now people worry about everything and fight and complain - how smart is that ?

Actually, philosophers have hit upon this concept for a long time. Examples I've seen used are for things like dogs (sages able to nap under nearly any conditions at any time), and nanny goats (contentedly chewing grass instead of worrying about social standing or mortgage payments).

I beleive the book I found this stuff in was "The Consolations of Philosophy" which summarized the musings of half a dozen or so popular philosophers.

So you have a great point. To me, this IS the meaning of the story of "The Garden of Eden". As soon as people rose above the hunter-gatherer society, then there had to be structure. Structure implies things like assets, soldiers to protect said assets, government to hire said soldiers, tax collectors to support said governments -- and the next thing you know, people are unemployed, lack health insurance, and dying at age 40 due to "stress" from forces beyond their comprehension.

OTOH, hunter-gatherers lived short brutish lives, and probably were old by age 30. MOST people died by age 25 prior to 1700 from the record's I've seen. So, no doubt there are trade-offs.

[SeaGypsy]

I have had the privilege of working with some folks in their 80's and 90's now who can remember seeing their first white man in their 20's, at which time they were living a primitive hunter gatherer lifestyle. Some facts about stone age aboriginals:

The estimated life expectancy of a central desert warrior in 1920 was 72. It took white folks many years to simultaneously surpass and demolish this figure.

The oldest living languages, thousands of years older than writing itself, are spoken by the direct decedents of these people.

Breeding control methodology was so advanced it appears to have been advised by genetic scientists to achieve continual improvement and limit population without need for brutal solutions (such as cannibalism, common in Melanesia/ Oceania until the eldest living now's childhood).

Ability to locate water by foot in desert where the closest wells can be many days walk apart. Technology with exactly the opposite configurality to ours- the simplest, most efficient, most replicable from the things around you; and only what you could carry (excepting dogs, which generally carried themselves).

There is a lot of variation to the meme, but the stereotyped view that stone age people were all dead by 50 and most by 30 is a generalized myth. Most of the history of low life expectancy is in the agricultural period, often due to overcrowding and poor sanitation.

The view that we may have bred ourselves into a trap, ie. bred out the 'wisdom genes' required to initiate the perpetuation of the species into a 'new stone age' is interesting but seriously flawed. Just as plant and animal variants become weeds in areas other than their origin, and just as we have scattered seeds of ourselves in every corner of the globe, the looming bottleneck will bring forth many new possibilities for our genome.

[Narz]

Nice post Gyp.

[sparky]

.
For those interested in those late encounters ,
there is a short movie made in the early 70ies about looking for the last wild abos
the tittle is " the last of the nomads" and tell how an Aborigine elder asked for help looking for his mate who had run away from the tribe for a woman long ago , the elder had a dream that they needed help in the terrible drought
They found them half dead , the last wild hunter gatherers of the continent

[sicophiliac]

Assuming society doesn't implode in the coming decades due to energy depletion and environmental problems, I think we will have the potential to increase our intelligence beyond what anybody can imagine today. Rapid advances in molecular biology and the understanding of genetics might very well make it possible to engineer future generations to be vastly smarter than people are today. If you factor in advances in microprocessor technology and augmenting human intelligence with microprocessors then the sky is the limit.

[vision-master]

lol - right brain or left brain, that is the question?

In general, the level of intelligence goes up for LSD takers; they become more than they were.
In most people there is such a deplorable disparity between the intelligent and marvelous order of their bodies and the trivial preoccupations of their consciousness.

Intelligence increase drugs like LSD enormously accelerate, extensify, intensify the human brain function.



http://www.lsdexperience.com/PDF/intelligence.pdf

[EnergyUnlimited]

Intelligence increase drugs like LSD enormously accelerate, extensify, intensify the human brain function.[/i]

You may need more.

[vision-master]

Have you heard of 'The Mozart Effect'?

[EnergyUnlimited]

Have you heard of 'The Mozart Effect'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_effect
Interesting.