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The study, published today (Nov. 12) in the journal Trends in Genetics, argues that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to be smart once we started living in dense agricultural settlements several thousand years ago.
"The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples [living] before our ancestors emerged from Africa," said study author Gerald Crabtree, a researcher at Stanford University, in a statement.
Since then it's all been downhill, Crabtree contends.
The theory isn't without critics, with one scientist contacted by LiveScience suggesting that rather than losing our smarts, humans have just diversified them with various types of intelligence today.
When a study says something dumb like this I really question the study:
Quote:
Early humans lived or died by their spatial abilities, such as quickly making a shelter or spearing a saber-toothed tiger. Nowadays, though almost everyone has the spatial ability to do ostensibly simple tasks like washing dishes or mowing the lawn
It doesn't take much intelligence to make a shelter nor to kill an animal....
Washing dishes (decisions)
~ Hot or cold water
~ Teflon or steel pan(s)
~ Use Dobie pad or sponge
~ Air dry or towel dry
~ Use light pressure on glasses (crystal) or heavy (plastic dried milk)
It's not so much losing intelligence as being dumbed down by the school system....
When a study says something dumb like this I really question the study:
It doesn't take much intelligence to make a shelter nor to kill an animal....
Washing dishes (decisions)
~ Hot or cold water
~ Teflon or steel pan(s)
~ Use Dobie pad or sponge
~ Air dry or towel dry
~ Use light pressure on glasses (crystal) or heavy (plastic dried milk)
It's not so much losing intelligence as being dumbed down by the school system....
True, but it takes a little more brain size and so forth for higher thinking.
I can agree with the idea that -as a whole- humans are getting dumber, due to the pressures for particular types of intelligence becoming less... AND... the increasing survival of large numbers of the non-fittest. I'm not talking about eugenics, just current numbers.
In the past, the kid who ate a poisonous berry died. Today, the same kid will live, due to medical intervention. Take all the variations of that, add them up, and the chances are pretty good that if you took all people alive today, measured intelligence based on ability to survive in stress situations, and compared that to the humans alive during early attempts at civilization, the ancestors would win out.
I am not even going to read that as it is obvious that humans are becoming more intelligent. My smart phone gives me all the knowledge of the human race something that no one had before now and it will only advance exponentially in the future.
I am not even going to read that as it is obvious that humans are becoming more intelligent. My smart phone gives me all the knowledge of the human race something that no one had before now and it will only advance exponentially in the future.
Precisely. The smartphone is becoming more intelligent. It takes less brainpower for you to find a solution to a problem. The size of the brain has been shrinking in recent generations.
Precisely. The smartphone is becoming more intelligent. It takes less brainpower for you to find a solution to a problem. The size of the brain has been shrinking in recent generations.
No it makes me more intelligent and in the coming years when we merge with the technology we will even be more intelligent. At some point in the next 10-20 years we will all be as smart as Einstein hell we will actually be smarter then he was.
Could it be like we see here in America that our children are not challenged in school or at home, geeks are laughed at and societies intelligence standards are being lowered year by year so as not to disenfranchise and traumatise any American child...
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