Timeline for How could a sapient species lose its intelligence?
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| Aug 7, 2023 at 23:39 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | as for genetic fitness, you are simply mistaken. You are making the common mistake of thinking individual fitness = genetic fitness which is perhaps the most basic and common mistake people have when talking about evolution. If you have fewer children, and thier they don't have a higher survival*procreation rate than a competing genetic line, they are genetically less fit. You've yet to cite a single fact that disputes this. All of your studies are based on mating preference which only matters if matting preference results in a lower survival*procreation rate for your competition. | |
| Aug 7, 2023 at 23:23 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @John Daniel R. Vining's work showed a faster decline in blacks (racist sure), but his data showed that everyone was getting dumber, not just blacks. If his study was pure racism, and no facts, then his white supremacist ass would have claimed whites were getting smarter. Also, every attempt there after to discredit his work showed similar IQ decline even though his racial bias was clearly messed up. | |
| Aug 7, 2023 at 22:20 | comment | added | John | I have explained this several times, number of offspring is not the only measure of evolutionary fitness, If you learn nothing else from this conversation please learn that, Gene transmition success cannot be measured solely by number of offspring. You have demonstrated nothing, you have claimed several things without backing it up, and when I provided sources showing the opposite of what you claim you simply ignore it. Now you try Daniel R. Vining, Jr, the bell curve guy, who's work was so flawed and racist no normal journal will touch it. Please learn biology newer than the 80's. I'm done | |
| Aug 7, 2023 at 16:15 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | K strategy only improves your reproductive fitness if a more r strategy is resulting in an increased death+celibacy rate. But as I demonstrate in section 1, The death rate of r selected people is dropping in developed countries and in section 3 I demonstrated that the celibacy rate of K selected individuals is increasing. Researchers like the Daniel R. Vining, Jr., Retherford, Richard Lynn, and Sewell all concluded that Americans have been losing 0.55 or more IQ points per generation over the past few decades. | |
| Aug 7, 2023 at 16:15 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @John Preference is not the same as offspring per generation. Even if women prefer smarter men, the average smart man is still having fewer children than the average dumb man. People don't compete for the best, they compete for the best they can get. They generally don't say, "if I can't have a guy with a 130 IQ, I just won't have sex", unless they have the health/beauty/intelligence factors to realistically achieve that goal, and if they fail to find Mr. 130 for long enough, they drop thier standards until they find what works. | |
| Aug 7, 2023 at 4:50 | comment | added | John | # sexual partners is not equal to number genes passed into the next generation, Again do you know what K strategy is? We know that on most measurable metrics intelligence if people is rising, (sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/…), so the data does not follow from your assumptions. Can the rest of us see these studies because as soon as I looked I found the opposite, a preference for intelligence sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513808000792 and link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/… | |
| Aug 7, 2023 at 4:21 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @John, you are over simplifying how sexual selection works. There have been several psychological studies showing that common people have the easiest time finding sexual partners. People who are exceptionally smart, rich, or beautiful typically have less sex and fewer sexual partners than common people. People generally partner up with people of similar "quality" to themselves, So, if there are fewer smart people born, being smart does not mean you have less competition because you are smart, it means you have fewer options because most people are too dumb for you. | |
| Aug 5, 2023 at 1:45 | comment | added | John | @Nosajimiki in such a society sexual selection matters even more, because mate selection are the primary limiting factor. Sorry the movie does not stand up to the science. | |
| Aug 5, 2023 at 1:44 | comment | added | John | @Nosajimiki the grandkid example was me giving an example of how complex evolutionary success is, If you want to dive into the details of how it works I will provide a link.. Also by your logic peacocks should not have large display tails because small tail peacocks can more easily find other peacocks. Sexual selection is not as straightforward as you think. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.2468 You can argue against it all you want but the effect is both observed and mathematically explained in humans. | |
| Aug 4, 2023 at 15:58 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | Also, I said "anything close to post-scarcity" for a reason. Not as in a society without scarcity, but a society that has little enough scarcity to keep its less productive members of society reasonably well taken care of. | |
| Aug 4, 2023 at 15:53 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @John Dumb people have no problem finding other dumb people to procreate with. It's actually easier than smart people finding smart people to procreate with because dumb people have more children; so, you have a bigger dating pool of willing partners. Also, smart people are both having fewer kids and a higher % of kids that choose not to procreate; so, the grandchild argument does not work. | |
| Aug 4, 2023 at 13:40 | comment | added | John | @Nosajimiki incorrect fitness is about how many genes you pass into the population over successive generations, having few children and lots of grandchildren for instance is more successful than the inverse. it is an aspect of r and K selection and explains demographic transition. Also failing to reproduce is not the same as having died, 10 children who can't find mates is much worse that 2 who find mates easily, this is not even a controversial aspect of evolution. Also there is no such thing as a post scarcity society, its just a thought experiment, mates will always be a limiting factor. | |
| Aug 4, 2023 at 13:20 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | So yes, technology evolved with minimal technology because when you have minimal technology, the dumb die off and the intelligent survive. But once technology reaches anything close to post-scarcity, the dumb stop dying off and it becomes a question of who CHOOSES to have more children. | |
| Aug 4, 2023 at 13:18 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @John Fitness is not dictated by how prosperous you are but by how many offspring you can successfully raise. Even if an intelligent mate is theoretically more desirable, if they produce less children in a society where technology ensures that nearly all children have an equal chance of reaching maturity, then they are selectively less fit. | |
| Aug 4, 2023 at 0:32 | comment | added | John | the problem with this is there is a very strong evolutionary pressure for mate selection, intelligence makes you better at resource acquisition and thus mating advantage regardless of technology. most selective pressures in within the species for mates. If anything technology makes the effect stronger since it allows less equality to persist. the movie is a fun idea but it is bad science. Also a loss of technology is not the same thing as a loss of intelligence, heck intelligence evolved with minimal technology. | |
| Aug 3, 2023 at 14:40 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | The 2020 insurrection happened literally the same day that the Democrats won the presidency recreating the same circumstance that triggered the Civil War in 1861. | |
| Aug 3, 2023 at 14:40 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @KeithS Yes, the US government is totalitarian resistant, but I would not describe it as totalitarian proof. It has a winner-takes-all electoral system which can become very unstable when just a little bit out of balance. The US Civil War was fought over the Northern Republicans gaining majority in the House of Reps, Senate, Presidency, and certain upcoming majority in the Supreme Court effectively leaving the South's interests entirely unrepresented in the Federal Government. | |
| Aug 2, 2023 at 22:24 | comment | added | KeithS | The U.S. is generally counted among the advanced economies with totalitarianism-proof government structure; indeed our Constitution requires our government to function with broad consensus or not at all. However, the gridlock caused by such polarized parties as we now have is being blamed on the system itself; "it would be so much easier if we could just X". Easy to say when you like the party in power. When the White House is occupied by a man you wouldn't put in charge of cleaning up dog crap at the park, the ability to do X can easily come back to haunt you. | |
| Aug 2, 2023 at 22:18 | comment | added | KeithS | This valley involves countries where the main source of State funding is an export requiring a relatively skilled/educated workforce, and the income from that export isn't enough to keep everyone happy. Your economic and military/security leaders are expecting a large share of that wealth in return for keeping you in power; fail to meet their expectations and they'll have you replaced. But, stiff the working class and they'll stop working, then stops the flow of money to those kingmakers, and see previous scenario. | |
| Aug 2, 2023 at 22:09 | comment | added | KeithS | @Nosajimiki I'm with you here. CGP Grey has an excellent video essay on "The Rules For Rulers", and a major takeaway is that modern governments are stable in two basic flavors; dictatorships funded by state-owned labor-independent wealth with a destitute populace (no means to revolt, at least not successfully), and advanced economies built on governments designed to resist one-party dominance (low motive to revolt). In between, you have a valley of revolution, where the common people have the means and motive to make their lives better by kicking the king off the hill. | |
| Aug 2, 2023 at 19:45 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @fredsbend Anti-Intellectualism is not the same as a political cleansing. It's not about taking out individual competitors or ideas, but about taking out entire classes of people from which competition is likely to arise. So they go after well educated groups like professors, lawyers, psychologists, scientists, engineers, etc. and leave alone or prop up any groups that show no particular inclination towards knowledge and understanding. | |
| Aug 2, 2023 at 16:24 | comment | added | user458 | @Nosajimiki I guess my point then is that you are mistaken. Leadership eliminating competitors is commonplace, and such competitors being intelligent or not doesn't really seem relevant to the leaders. "Burning heretics" and the like is about putting a stymie on influential people. Intelligence is irrelevant. Even the message is irrelevant. It's who is saying it that matters. | |
| Aug 2, 2023 at 16:15 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @fredsbend Anti-intellectualism is not what happens when commoners think leadership is dumber than them. It's what happens when leaders fear that commoners are smart enough to be a threat, and they push back by eliminating people who may be smart enough to replace them. You are right that it stems from elitism, but the outcome is the removal of intelligence from your society which was my point. | |
| Aug 2, 2023 at 15:56 | comment | added | user458 | I don't think "anti intellectualism" is a much about intelligence as you claim. It's more about believing in and belonging to a system of elitism. A lot of people at the top believe they earned though their cunning every step that led there, but that's clearly not true for anybody. Time and place matter more, and no one has earned those. "Common folk" have expressed this sentiment since the beginning, and literature shows this, while arrogant kings and emperors toot their own horns. | |
| Jun 14, 2023 at 14:32 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 13, 2023 at 14:30 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 12, 2023 at 22:39 | comment | added | user86462 | Let us continue this discussion in chat. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 22:29 | comment | added | user86462 | of East Asian high school students that move over here, and the gap in skill and knowledge between them and ours is staggering. It's 2 - 3 years equivalent by the end of high school; their average 17 year olds can blitz our first year uni courses with A's. But this detracts from my main challenge: find a single controlled large number study that justifies any of those things on the basis of actual results. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 22:27 | comment | added | user86462 | @Nosajimiki I'll bite. There's never been a single large number study that actually shows they work. They're all based on either pure theory/ideology, or on very small number, uncontrolled studies. Against them, you have hard data (in the case of phonics), reasonable theoretical objections (how does a teacher manage a lesson with 20 to 30 different centres), and the 'natural' experiment that is the increasing gap between East Asian countries that say no to all that BS, and the West (as well as a few Western counterexamples like Katharine Birbalsingh and co). My country has a very high number | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 21:09 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | All these things can mask a decrease in stock because a child who stays motivated will spend a lot more effort over his carrier learning, new phonics reduces the amount you need to memorize to learn to read, people with various handicaps that would have prevented them from learning math, can now get it, and even if you can only learn 3 concepts, you can still solve more problems than the guy who rote memorized 10 facts on 1 concept. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 21:03 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | Common core math takes more time to teach, but it allows a wider range of students to achieve a proficiency in math. Rote learning is practically useless in a modern context, in the age of the internet, if you can learn 10 concepts in the same time that someone else learns 10 facts about a single concept, you've learned how to solve 10 times as many problems, because knowing the concepts is enough to look up the facts. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 21:03 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @AncientGiantPottedPlant Child centering, abandoning phonics, eliminating rote learning, etc. are side effects of research based methods of improving learning that address our new understanding of developmental psychology. It looks like stupification to those of us who learned differently, but "child centering" prevents learning resistance; so, it may slows down early education a, bit but it vastly improves learning over the course of a student's entire academic career. Traditional phonics was replaced with things like the dibbles method which teaches general literacy faster. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 20:43 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 12, 2023 at 19:26 | comment | added | user86462 | There seems to be adequate evidence for decline in both our genetic stock and schooling. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 19:25 | comment | added | user86462 | @Nosajimiki In which country? In Angolophone countries, one has only to look at school curricula and exams to belie that. I'm not American but you can see what US kids are expected to have learned at ages 6,7,8,etc, and sorry, they must be morons. My own country has more or less gone from the top of the OECD to near the bottom in literacy and maths, so they aren't getting better here. As far as I can tell, not a single pedagogical development pushed by academia in 20 years has been based on evidence. Child centreing, abandoning phonics, eliminating rote learning, etc. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 18:05 | comment | added | TitaniumTurtle | @Nosajimiki I'm genuinely curious, what reproductive trends? If it is just the increase in mental illness diagnoses, then that is almost certainly correlation caused by improved diagnostic practices and social acceptance. Just a few decades ago, not talking about the "retarded" kid was the social norm. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 15:24 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @AncientGiantPottedPlant Yes, Randall Munroe is a respectably smart guy, but missed the fact that Ideocracy is not a social problem, it is a genetic one. Our methods and saturation of education are still getting better which continues to have a positive outcome, but the reproductive trends suggest that the average brain is about to get a whole lot worse. It's like if software design kept getting better, but we started making worse computer hardware, it would take a while to notice the hardware decline. | |
| Jun 12, 2023 at 14:19 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 12, 2023 at 9:54 | comment | added | user86462 | That was the worst XKCD I've ever seen. Just an ad hominem rant that didn't even attempt to confront the fact that the more education people have, the less children they have, and the recent reversal of the Flynn Effect. | |
| Jun 10, 2023 at 18:52 | comment | added | James K | Obligatory xkcd xkcd.com/603 - nice theory except everything it says is wrong, false, the opposite of true. | |
| Jun 9, 2023 at 17:01 | comment | added | Evorlor | Surprised I had to scroll down this far to find this answer. | |
| Jun 9, 2023 at 16:06 | comment | added | Sabre | As sad as it is, this is actually a very good answer. And not only is it good, it is pretty much proving itself more and more daily. Look at everything from our politics, entitlement programs, and average education level of the generations replacing us because the world demands no better anymore. The rise of torrents of information sources, most, largely inaccurate, at a the touch of an apathetic finger... map.barbarabush.org/overview/#intro so it is not as much "how can it happen?" as much as a model for "how is it happening?" | |
| Jun 9, 2023 at 14:28 | history | answered | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |