Will People Continue to be Stupid?

[hippiedeath]

Will people continue to be stupid as mankind progresses? This is your call. Change or confirm our destiny with your vote. The time is now and now's the time. What time is it?

 

[TBONTB]

Of course. What would cause us to change?

 

[Dejected 55]

Someone the other day said something interesting about evolution that a lot of people get wrong. Most think of it as "survival of the fittest" but that isn't the whole truth. The whole truth is "survival of the fittest in a specific circumstance." Let me explain...

At some point way way way back in time... there some people who developed a natural immunity for a particular deadly disease. These people survived, others did not. Obviously those who didn't survive didn't pass on their genetics, so within a couple of generations you end up with pretty much all people being immune to that particular disease. Cool! But those people weren't necessarily the smartest. A lot of them may very well have been on average stupider than the people unfortunate enough to not have the natural immunity to that deadly disease... but being a genius didn't help them back then... so they died... leaving a mix of smart and dumb people.

Similarly... men whose children tended to survive the early years of childhood tended to produce boys who grew up to have more kids, since they actually survived the early childhood. These men, however, were not necessarily good fathers or even there at all. Hence, you can evolve a humanity where more kids survive on average over time BUT are less likely to be there and take care of their kids later. One evolutionary advantage doesn't not make you superior in all things.

The gist of the conversation was... you might possess a quality that made you more likely to survive early childhood BUT not necessarily live longer as an adult. These are two different things. Evolution tends to be about the best qualified to survive that moment. Now, these things can be additive over time of course... so surviving childhood means you have a better chance to be an adult... and then there's a chance for evolution to favor adults that survive those scenarios, and so forth.

BUT... there are a lot of things that don't necessarily represent an inherent advantage. Being smart, above a point, doesn't necessarily make you more apt to survive. Our world provides all kinds of scenarios for all levels of intelligence to survive. Sure, you might need more genius' to explore space... but you don't need that to survive... so average and below average intelligence can get a lot of people through the day... and so the genepool is going to reflect that since there's really no evolutionary advantage.

Basically, to circle back to the original question of the thread... there's nothing about the world that favors intelligence to survive over stupidity. As long as that is true, there will continue to be a lot of stupid people. In fact, there is a natural tendency for stupid people to reproduce more than intelligent people who might put it off until later or try to have fewer kids and so forth... so evolutionarily speaking, nature almost favors more stupidity than it does intelligence.

Tangentially related... I was reading once about someone interviewing a Park Ranger during a rash of incidences of bears ransacking the garbage cans in parks. The interviewer asked why they didn't make the garbage cans harder to get into, to prevent the bears from being able to get them open to get to the trash. The Park Ranger replied... "There is a surprising overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human." Reading between the lines... they tried making the garbage cans bear-proof but found that if they did that, they had a significant amount of people who couldn't operate the garbage cans and just dumped their trash wherever. Something to think about.