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Leading Geneticist: Human Intelligence is Slowly Declining...
DaltheJigsaw
Mountain View Veteran
I am not sure what to take from this. I do not agree, but I can see how a point can be made for it? Any thoughts?
http://naturalsociety.com/leading-geneticist-human-intelligence-slowly-declining/#ixzz2LOpmcFPF
http://naturalsociety.com/leading-geneticist-human-intelligence-slowly-declining/#ixzz2LOpmcFPF
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Junk Food for Thought???
colon:
http://naturalsociety.com/leading-geneticist-human-intelligence-slowly-declining/#ixzz2LOpmcFPF
First, people can't even pin down what individual "intelligence" is and we certainly have no way of testing for only innate or inherited intelligence which is what he's talking about. Since he can't tell us how much of our "problem solving" ability is due to inheritance and how much is learned and a response to enviroment, then any conclusions he makes across time and differing environments is bogus.
He makes the obsurd claim that dragging some ancient "average citizen" to our modern world would show how intelligent he was compared to our average citizen. That's just so stupid on so many levels I can't even begin to list the reasons. What is he basing this on? The writings from the great philosophers handed down are hardly from "average citizens" and historical evidence is, those average citizens were just as short-sighted and prone to really screwing themselves up as anyone today.
The average citizen of Rome happily watched gladiators slaughter each other while their society crumbled and their elected officials played their power games and assassinated each other left and right. Claiming these people were more intelligent than us only insults our own intelligence.
Also, recent studies are showing that the government mandated tests in the US (that also cost billions of tax dollars that are going to private testing companies) are actually having opposite effects than that which they were supposed to have. Students are not being taught in ways that produce higher thinking. This is fact. Teachers' livelihoods now rest on their abilities to "teach the test." There is no room for much else than producing the correct answers, which is rote learning. I feel like working in education and being in tune with my children's education have influenced my view, which I believe to be based on actual results of our system.
Don't be like me! Read the article. It's short and a quick read (It's no 2 hour documentary!).
Although the article is kinda hinged on theories such as genetic change happening on a global scale d/t junk food consumed and suchlike (which is pretty far-fetched meiner meinung nach), I agree with what you are saying about our modern educational emphases being misguided, @chela. So much time is wasted addressing the testing schemata that time for real investigation and learning is abbreviated. Add to that the fact that things like music and literature from earlier epochs are no longer being taught in many places and we are ending up with what my swami used to call a society of "guided missiles and misguided men."
We are the true primitives. Our ancestors were generalists who were almost entirely self reliant in small groups to procure everything they needed to survive; they handed down real skills to their children. We moderns are specialists who mostly just pass down our prejudices to our children. Remember, in evolutionary development, the human animal flourished due to the development of body parts (most notably the hands) that allowed for generalization of activity; that opened up a broad swath of avenues in which humankind could operate and flourish: So much different from the very specialized evolution of the bird with a precisely honed beak adapted to suck nectar from a specific species of jungle flower. I wonder whether we may be going backwards, in many ways. I do know, however, that all the religious teachers of humankind have lived as common people and not specialists. Food for thought?
Or junk food for thought, as the article maintains?
ooh... we had to go political didn't we.. * wont respond, wont respond*
:banghead:
I find it an irony that the only time I come into contact with political debate these days is on a Buddhism forum, not in real life hehe. I rarely get into my political rants anymore but some discussion on this forum has caused my ego to engage haha.
anyways I think the three of us just took this thread off topic, we should get back to discussing that great prophetic movie Idiocracy -
So that's why common sense is now uncommon.
When I think of what students know today -- and trust me, having been teaching and administering for 33 years -- compared to what we knew at each grade level...it blows me away. Today's late elementary school math used to be junior high's math, today's junior high math was yesterday's high school math, and today's high school math was yesterday's college math. In social studies, students no longer memorize dates and battle movements, they analyze historical trends. I could go on.
What you and I do on the computer wasn't even dreamed of when I was a kid.
But oops...some people like to read the article and say -- oh yeah, he's right, but I'm an exception. Baloney.
According to Crabtree, our cognitive and emotional capabilities are fueled and determined by the combined effort of thousands of genes. If a mutation occurred in any of of these genes, which is quite likely, then intelligence or emotional stability can be negatively impacted.
So? It could just as easily be positively impacted. That's what evolution and natural selection are primarily all about, right? Selecting for positive mutations?
Duh. :rolleyes:
What if increased intelligence is not a positive trait for our survival?
Our intelligence giving us the tools to short circuit natural selection. Is that possible?
It is this attitude that a superior or acceptable person is a matter of genetics that led to forced sterilization, because "we don't want defective people breeding and polluting the gene pool".
Stop and think about the implications of this Professor's statement.
His entire theory can be defined in normal language as such: "Since the stupid people are supported by our civilization and breeding more stupid people now instead of being allowed to die off for doing stupid things like in the past, the overall intelligence of the human race is dropping."
But since intelligence is variable among populations, there are still smart people and stupid people. I'd say the Professor puts himself and his family in the box with the smart people, don't you? He's upper income, highly educated, using his brain instead of his muscles to earn a living. He'd say that if one of those smart ancestors were dropped in his lap today, they'd be equals.
So that poor black woman who is hired by the cleaning service to come in and clean his office every night? Well, it's not her fault she's earning minimum wage. Those mutations in her population probably made her born stupid.
That's it. And it's a breathtakingly stupid statement on its own and insulting. On top of that, there are populations out there that never had it better than "ancient times" like Africa and South America. The nomads of the North Pole and Siberia still live the same way they did when Greece was a bunch of farmboys trying to keep lions from their flocks. Populations in Africa have survived in spite of many thousands of years of brutal struggle against the environment and invaders and war with each other. According to this man's theory, they should be much more intelligent than the rest of us because their environment did not allow "stupid people" to breed. Is this an accurate picture?
You see just how stupid this theory is, and how dangerous? It can be used to support forced sterilization of the poor and disadvantaged for the good of humanity. In fact, identical Eugenic theory WAS used to force the outcasts to be sterilized in recent history.
Did anyone ever see a BBC TV drama called 'The Year of the Sex Olympics' from about 1968? It was all about this very topic. Probably the most shocking and depressing drama I ever saw. It has never been shown again. The world it portrayed was uncannily like the one we are now in, just a few decades later. So similar, in fact, that I doubt anyone would have the courage to show it again.
As I touched on in my post above, the arts help keep us generalists, whereas the sciences and math tend to make specialists out of us. Of course we will always need specialists, but I'd argue that they also need to be well-rounded in their tastes and in other aspects of their private lives. Without the arts I'm afraid we might be headed to automatondom —and if that happens what difference will an individual's intelligence make?
But, you're right, the article is rubbish —but perhaps junkfood for thought?
We're clever but we're clueless - it seems at times.
I understand that kids can do a lot of things now-- they know a lot about computers and technology, specifically. They are also really involved in extra-curriculars (over-scheduled, in many experts' opinions). But from what I've seen and researched, these things are taking the place of other things that they aren't learning. I fear that emotional development is being overlooked in our kids and the consequences on society are not going to be pretty. I think we're already seeing some of it now.