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first, one must define stupid. (i suggest that it not be defined as uneducated or different.) then, one must consider the amount of stupid people dying out as compared to the number of intelligent people killed by war, general cruelty, deliberate neglect, or other human follies.
i say give it 100,000 years (plus or minus a few thousand) and check back then.
i say give it 100,000 years (plus or minus a few thousand) and check back then.
How did you come up with this after reading that post? I read it that he was saying somebody as intelligent as Hawking didn't add to his amusement as much as PH. I'm interested in where you got him focsuing on Hawking's disabilities; not trying to attack you or argue, just curious.
I think the assumption that our ancestors were dumber than us is not a given. Were Da Vinci, Aristotle, Pythagarus, Mozart and so many others dumb? Over time we have learned more but that’s not necessarily smarter. Don’t confuse education with intelligence. They are not the same thing.
I also would suggest that values are more important in some ways than intelligence. There are plenty of smart people in power right now that I think we could all do without.
I also discovered when my wife did her teaching degree years ago, that there are at least 7 defined types of intelligence (maybe more indentified by now). It’s a bunch of different characteristics we all have in lesser or greater quantities such as spacial, linguistic, numerical or mathematical, athletic, emotional, musical and mechanical. Some of us are blessed with a good balance, some not so blessed. Look at the orange man, cunning as a rat with the emotional responses of a 4 year old. Intelligence is not a single all encompassing quality.
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I think that it would depend on:
1. What traits we'd consider desirable for Homo Sapiens to have in the current (and foreseeably likely) future;
2. How we define "Stupid"; and
3. How #2 affects said people in regards to #1.
But, as things stand now? Provided they haven't bred, no, very little useful stuff ever comes out of the shallow end of the gene pool, IMO....
summing up.
It also aims to protect the sick which I'm not against but I was thinking earlier today that a lot of people are kept alive through modern medicine who would otherwise have died not even 100 years ago. Is it a good thing or a bad thing if they reproduce and pass "bad" genetics on to offspring?
I suspect they had poorer nutrition and more infectious diseases during childhood. Both of those things could have affected cognitive development. On the other hand, chances are "dumber" is subjective too.
We as a species have too many built in safety nets for natural selection to have any appreciable effect on innate intelligence levels. If we were still grubbing for every meal with a sharp stick, would those who realized a longer stick with a harder point far outnumber those who favored a shorter stick with a blunt business end? And would that preference be due to intelligence or learned behavior?
As one of the duller tools, I can speak from experience when I say plain blind luck plays heavily into survival, so simply being a dumbass is not in and of itself enough to insure elimination or i would have been gone long ago.
As one of the duller tools, I can speak from experience when I say plain blind luck plays heavily into survival, so simply being a dumbass is not in and of itself enough to insure elimination or i would have been gone long ago.
Small increments.
Very long timescale.
It's a bit like casino odds with astronomicaly smaller house advantage. Eventually you lose all but if it takes a millennium nobody notices none of Bob the Russian Roulette fan's descendants made it.
Pythagorus and Aristotle lived ~2,000 years ago; DaVinci and Mozart only several hundred years ago. How many exceptional thinkers of their ilk lived 5,000 years ago? How about 9,000 years ago?
And how many of the things that Pythagorus and Aristotle -- and DaVinci and Mozart -- believed about the world are disproven every day in elementary school science classes? Things that any semi-literate member of a first world society today takes as "common knowledge" were huge mysteries to almost everyone on the planet not too long ago. People as a whole are smarter about themselves and the world they live in now than they were at the dawn of civilization. Whether that's a result of an individual's actual academic education, or the availability of information in a way that contributes to one's informal education via cultural transmission is sorta moot.
That doesn't mean there aren't still stupid people now, or that there weren't (relatively) astute people back then. But the general elevation of knowledge over the millennia has had a demonstrative effect on how smart an individual can become these days...while affecting almost no change at the biological/genetic level.
I respectfully disagree with your assertion that we are smarter because we know more. You are still confusing knowledge with intelligence. We have access to a far greater repository of knowledge. A very good definition of intelligence is demonstrated by one’s ability to cope with one’s conditions/environment/external pressures. It does not take an education to adapt to whatever is around you, it takes brain power. The fact that you may not know that there is a thing called an atom - something primary school children would know today - does not mean you are less intelligent than that primary school child. We know so much more now because a great deal of knowledge has been gained along the way. Knowing about such things as gravity or electricity or nuclear energy does not make us smarter, it makes us more knowledgeable. Not the same thing.
There was a very well known eye surgeon from Australia who did great things with his gained knowledge and education. His name was Fred Hollows. He cured many people before he died. He said once that the most intelligent person he ever met was an indigenous Australian Aboriginal man who lived a tribal lifestyle in the bush without the benefit of a formal education. This illustrates my point. Intelligence is not gained by knowledge. It is something one posseses and can be enhanced by knowledge but not bestowed by it.
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I don't get this thread at all, if all the stupid people die how will that improve things?
I don't want to live on my own!
I don't want to live on my own!
Intelligence and knowledge are two separate things. Plato didn't know the Earth orbits the sun; every modern knuckle-dragger does. That doesn't make the knuckledragger SMARTER than Plato; it just means that he's been told a fact that no one was around to tell Plato.
When talking about witchcraft, I will sometimes ask my students if they believe in the existence of invisible beings that can take possession of their bodies, inflict diseases on them and maybe even kill them unless they take measures to cleanse and purify themselves of these dangerous beings' influence. Most give me dull stares, which should say something to the intelligence question right there; most of those who DO respond, say that of course they don't believe in such superstitious nonsense - until it occurs to someone that I'm talking about bacteria. Now, the existence of bacteria rests on much sounder evidence than the existence of witchcraft, of course - but most of us do not OURSELVES have mastery of that evidence. We believe in germs rather than witches not because we figured it out ourselves but because authorities we trust - scientists, doctors, teachers, parents - TOLD us so and we accept their say-so. Recognizing that should make us much humbler about how "smart" modern people really are.
Some aspects of what we call intelligence, perhaps most, are skills, not genetic givens. People often fail to understand something not because they're genetically inferior (whatever that means) but because they haven't cultivated the skill. Finals are coming up, and they usually demonstrate this.
I'm going to get heaps of undergraduate papers. I'll read a paper that says, "According to Jane Doe, 'feudalism was the central institution of medieval society,'" with (hopefully) a footnote to a reading that was assigned.
That will strike me as odd because I'm quite sure that was not Prof. Doe's view. Looking up the reference in Doe's book, I then find the following sentence, at the end of a long discussion of medieval life: "These considerations should make us cautious to embrace the view that feudalism was the central institution of medieval society."
These are college students, the theoretically more intelligent (at least more educated) sector of society, failing at very basic reading; getting the opposite of an author's meaning from a sentence because they're baffled by a subordinate clause, or by nuance and complexity in general. They have trained themselves, by their practices, to scan for keywords rather than read for meaning. That's not genetic capability, that's skill development. Their incapacity isn't going to prevent them getting jobs and mates and having kids, it isn't going to win them any Darwin awards. But it doesn't support any notion of people getting smarter over the ages.
I think the student misreading the passage has more to do with someone wanting to finish quick and still get a passing grade vs really taking the time to understand the subject 
