I recently saw a summary of a movie called "Idiocracy". It came out in 2007 and its basic premise is a person from that year gets frozen and is thawed out in 2507. The world he finds is one where human intelligence has regressed to the point where starvation is rampant because farmers are watering their crops with Gatorade, because it is superior to water because it contains electrolytes. The 21st Century guy is not very bright in the movie but he is a freaking genius compared to the rest the population so he becomes a hero and saves the day.
It seems like a silly movie and I have no desire to actually watch it but it does raise the question contained in the title to this post.
Almost everything about humans indicate that we should not have survived, let alone thrived, in the Darwinian competition that is the natural world. We are smaller, weaker and slower than almost every other predator out there. As well, we have small teeth and claws, barely suitable for inflicting harm on our own species let alone inflicting harm on those creatures that provide us with the sustenance to stave off starvation.
Of course, evolution solved that problem by giving our species big brains and the cognitive abilities to go along with it. With those we overcame our physical limitations and conquered the world. We did not do this all at once. It took 10's of thousands of years and I would bet that along the way humans, both individuals and groups numbering in the hundreds or thousands, paid for lapses in intelligence by being denied the ability to pass their genes on to the next generation. In short the constant threat of death to our pre-historical ancestors made it necessary to continue developing their brains, their cognitive abilities and acquire the new skills that these allowed to happen.
So thousands of years later here we are at the top of the food chain. If one of us is eaten by another predator it is always the result of an accident as opposed to a successful hunt of that human by that predator. Our gaining control of many natural processes or our ability to predict many of those that we cannot control has reduced the dangers of large numbers of us being wiped out by some natural disaster. There are exceptions to that as the COVID pandemic indicates but things like that are becoming an exception as opposed to an every present threat. So without the constant threat to our lives will our species continue to make the necessary adaptations to survive and considering the only adaptation that our species perfected was to increase our intelligence and cognitive abilities the question becomes will our species continue to do that?
I do not know the answer to that question and although many would say yes because of what we are seeing in the world today I would remind then of one thing. If you take the intelligence of all humans and plotted it on a graph it would look like a bell curve. That is, in general, there there is the same proportion of people with below average intelligence as there are with above average intelligence. So, there have always been stupid people around the only change now is there are more avenues for stupid people to demonstrate their stupidity.
However, we cannot forget that a species only survives if it can continually adapt to the world around it. If it does not adapt it dies. The corollary to that is if the world around the species is no longer a threat to it then the need to adapt is reduced and the species may stagnate or regress. We do not know for certain if that is true because no species has ever accomplished that feat but it is a logical extension of the Theory of Evolution.
While it seems that we are getting dumber as a species that could just be a by-product of the information revolution we are currently experiencing giving the less intelligent among us equal access to the communications tools. It could be skewing our perceptions. However, we cannot discount the idea that our species is stagnating or even regressing as a price for our success at taking over the world.
2 comments:
Above average IQ people are often socially awkward introverts, so it's possible they're not intermingling enough to mate, and either pass on their genes (assuming intelligence is heritable, a controversial proposition) or at least an environment rich with intellectual stimuli to their children. I don't know about Canada, but the US has had a long tradition of visceral hostility to intellect, and it shapes a lot of the culture, which in turn has a political effect. Canada in turn is exposed to a lot of US media and culture (especially through the Internet), but at least for now, the worst effects don't seem to have taken root, at least not as severely. Although there are some concerning trends, like the respective elections of proudly oafish Conservative populist premiers. Also, the stubborn electoral resilience of Conservatives at all levels, who have made a selling point that PMJT is bad because he was a teacher, and Freeland is bad because she was a Rhodes scholar. Ford flunked out of high school but he gets a halo effect for being a man of the "folks."
On a global scale, it seems we're living in a weird time where the "revenge of the nerds" forecasted in the '80s with the rise of the computer age and the Internet, has led to and even enabled a counterinsurgency of the dunce caps in the fifth row of the classroom. The fuel for this is greed. Fostering the radicalization of incredibly stupid people has become an immensely profitable grift. So it could very well be that people on the average are not necessarily getting dumber, but that they have been given a disproportionate platform of influence by self-interested parties who are at least smart enough to know they've found a gold mine for a perpetual con.
@ Jackie
If Wiki is correct Dougie dropped out of Humber College (community college in Toronto) after two months so it is likely that he actually graduated from high school.
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