Has the average level of intelligence went down?

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Callista, you make a good point. I took a class in college "History of Native American Women" and my professor was Native American and talked once about the diets our bodies are meant to have based on our ethnic origins. She was thin and lean and she said she ate a diet based on how the Native Am. once ate. She said lots of Native Am. eat an "American" diet and their bodies just can't handle it, nor can they handle alcohol as they were not exposed to it for thousands of years like the Europeans. She spoke of the feast or famine diets of some ethnic groups, especially the Africans. It's very interesting and yes, the never-ending food supply we have probably has a lot to do with obesity in the US as well as our dependence on cars. I think diabetes is higher among ethnic groups meant for a more feast or famine diet but I am not sure. I am not an expert on diabetes, I work as a nurse and just have had a lot of diabetic patients.

Type I diabetes, the juvenile sort, is more common in people with more northern ancestry. One odd but not entirely implausible theory is to--get this--blame the Ice Age! Mildly high blood sugar would protect you from freezing as quickly in the extreme cold of an ice age; and, if you were diabetic under those conditions, you wouldn't die of it until you had had several children because your diet would have been naturally low in sugar (many of the plants with fruit that has high sugar content would not have survived an ice age). Might sound like the opposite of what evolution is supposed to do; but think about the "choice": Kill the person when they're fifty and have already had kids; or let them die of cold when they're sixteen and pregnant with their first? Under such conditions, deadly compromises can be made, and when most people die by thirty the answer's pretty obvious. Sickle-cell anemia is another example that almost everybody knows about.

I'm betting, actually, that a lot of the widespread stuff we get nowadays isn't really a result of a modern "unhealthy" lifestyle but simply a side effect of the fact that we are no longer in an extreme environment and no longer benefit from those deadly evolutionary trade-offs. It's no surprise to anybody that the majority of the stuff that's killing people today--diabetes, cancer, and heart disease--tends to really kick in only past middle age. In a population that doesn't usually live to middle age, it doesn't matter if you're genetically predisposed to get something that'll kill you after fifty. But it matters very much in a population that tends to live closer to eighty years.

Sigh. Yes. I blame mid-terms. This is nearly as embarrassing as the time I called "nitrous oxide" a neurotransmitter.

Curious kid here...

What does your discussion about diabetes/obesity have to do with the topic?
Why is it that people tend to measure human evolution through television programming?
How does it relate to autism?

Thanks.

Okay, the first of the thread we talked aobut education going up or down. Then Grace mentioned how bad education leads to bad lifestyle choices which leads to diabetes. Then Callista objected by saying that obesity or diabetes are not due to lifestyle choice but due to genetics. Then, in order to back that up, she had to bring up evolutionary explanations regarding genetics behind obesity/diabetes. So that is how we switched from the debate about education to the one about evolution of obesity/diabetes.

I'll add my 2 cents, It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice little thought was put into the discussion, hence people switch to Iraq/Viet-Nam, television programming, weight loss etc.

Last edited by AlienVisitor on 27 Sep 2009, 5:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

Back to the topic of intelligence, are there aspies in favor of genetic engineering?
It seems that many consider that humans have become a degenerative form of life, so what's your opinion on upgrading humans?

Check out this BBC episode:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/program ... ngularity/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 4239891699

Please disregard my negative comments. WP is an enjoyable community to discuss autism/Asperger's but I can't relate to most members on other topics. Will do my best to stay out of such discussions. Sorry guys.

I don't think the average IQ rate is going down, since IQ measures pretty 'modern' competences that can be easily trained by computer games and such. Rotation scores within IQ tests are bound to go up since every western child plays a lot more racing games now than we did back in 1990. As for competences that would matter in a life threatening situation... I don't know... I'm not too positive about our survival knowledge to be honest.

Other than that the people rate is rising exponentially so it's totally logical the smartness range is growing wider. Logically there must be many smarter and dumber people than 20 years ago, simply because there are a lot more people now.

Callista, I just wanted to say, you mentioned genetics and disease and sickle cell anemia. Sickle Cell Anemia is prevalent in African countries and there is a reason. One copy of the sickle cell gene will make a person immune to malaria. Unfortunately if they get 2 copies, they will have full blown sickle cell anemia. I guess the key is, if you have sickle cell, to only have kids with another person who doesn't carry the gene but it is interesting how some of these things are merely genetic mutations which serve an evolutionary function which is what I think you are saying.

But yeah, I've forgotten the original topic. I go with the poster who said we have gotten more intelligent but also more lazy. I would agree with that.

Don't know why it makes me think of this but last night I went to a restaurant and as we were waiting for a table, I saw a group of teens walking down the street, most were on cell phones. Then we get seated, and it's a nice restaurant, with pristine white tablecloths, and I see people on their cell phones and showing pictures of people on their cells to other people. I do think it's sad that people can't just talk to the people they are with. I wasn't allowed to even answer the phone if we were having dinner growing up. But I know I sound 80 when I talk like this, I'm not certain at what point I became my grandmother!

But how is intelligence being measured and are the methods truly effective?

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Gesundheit!

I recently read an article on the correlation between spanking and iq in children, and it stated children who are spanked have lower iq and concluded a rise in childhood iq can be partially attributed to our society's growing lack of tolerance toward corporal punishment for children. I found it interesting.

This is obvious - stupidity is being selected for. Idiocracy's premise is difficult to argue against. Given the abundance of lifeforms with no nervous systems compared to that of those with them, or of cockroaches to humans, intelligence doesn't seem to be an evolutionary advantage.


Rising IQ scores reflect that the scores on standardised tests tend to rise with time, and that people take more standardised tests than ever before, therefore get more practice.



Not sure about that, in classical Athens even the slaves were literate, and it's perfectly possible to be in school but be functionally illiterate. But yes, in the West literacy rates are probably higher than at any time since the descent into barbarism after the fall of Rome.

Harvard´s economist George J. Borjas claim on his book "Labor Economics" (based on hard evidence from previous research) that since the 1980´s in the US it is required more spending in secondary education (teachers, equipment, etc...) in order to achieve the same academic results that were obtained in the previous decades with less spending.

No, the bulk of helots and other manual laborers in ancient Greece would never have been literate. Probably most of those considered citizens would have been at least somewhat literate, but that was a small minority of the population.

Although there is no doubt a cultural contribution to intellect there is also a component that has to do with the efficiency of the nervous system and I doubt that has changed to any degree. Americans seem to act more stupidly for several reasons. Perhaps one of the most outstanding one is the almost total loss of confidence in the government. Of course crooked politics has been a large feature of Government for generations but beneath it was a sense that somehow integrity and hard work and ingenuity was a core feature of the culture and that would always sustain you. But since the fall of Nixon and many subsequent scandals all that seems to have decayed alarmingly and the obvious super rich scamming the average guy seems to be completely embedded in current culture so, along with Reagan's drumming into the people that government was inherently evil, the spirit of the country seems to have been largely lost.