Our Brains Are Shrinking. Are We Getting Dumber?
npr.org
npr.org
Brain size might or might not be related to intelligence. In any case, this is what Wikipedia has to say "In general, these studies have reported that East Asians have on average a larger brain size than whites who have on average a larger brain size than blacks."[1]
If you ignore who is having children among whites (successful people or not), you still have the white population rapidly declining with a birth rate below replacement levels, I believe that this coupled with mass immigration and the high birth rates of immigrants, specially in Europe, in addition to race mixing in other places like the US, will ensure that brain size in these places decreases at a fast rate. Unless we have mass immigration from East Asian countries, like Vietnam.
In the "racist" comment above, I didn't lie, I didn't insult anybody and I didn't say that one race is more intelligent than the other. I agree that my opinion might not be politically correct.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Brain_siz...
CHICAGO-In a report with dire implications for the intellectual future of America, a University of Chicago study revealed Monday that the nation's uneducated are breeding twice as fast and twice as often as its educated. "The average member of the American underclass spawns at age 15, compared to age 30 for the average college-educated professional," study leader Kenneth Stalls said. "America's intellectual elite, as a result, are badly losing the genetic marathon, with two generations of dullards born for every one generation of cultured literates." Added Stalls: "At this rate, by the year 2100 there will be five smart people on Earth, swallowed whole by more than 12 billion mouth-breathers incapable of understanding the binary exponentiation that swamped the Earth with their like." High-school dropout Mandi Drucker, 16, said of the findings, "All I know is, we're in love."
May 14, 1997 | ISSUE 31•18
http://www.theonion.com/articles/study-uneducated-outbreedin...
Anyway, humans managed to survive back when we lived in caves and got our food by throwing sticks at animals. The threshold of intelligence needed for the race to survive would seem to be far below what we have today.
On the other hand, it could be that we have developed advanced, user-friendly, self-maintaining robotics/AI to 'take care of us' by then. The added advantage of human intelligence might be very low in that case and the trend can continue indefinitely.
In just a few generations, we will certainly get designer kids, where the parents mix and match genes. The world will then get really pretty people which are awesome singers -- and intelligent.
More seriously:
Body sizes were larger during the ice age which tfa talked about (not only for Neanderthals). I'd like to see data for how much that influences brain size?
"At least in most western countries and Japan where successful people have less children. It's almost like an anti survival of the fittest, if you are successful, less people in the next generation will carry your genes."
One interesting scenario you should consider are situations where a researcher comes up with a game theory scenario that they would like to do research with, but the people who play the scenario are smarter than the researcher. The question then arises - can the researcher correctly analyze the strategies pursued by the players? It's an interesting problem for game theorists - the researcher might conclude that the players are making the "wrong" decision, but in fact, since the players are more intelligent than the researcher, they've actually seen nuances in the various options that the researcher did not see when the researcher first designed the scenario.
For a point of comparison, imagine 2 grand masters play a game of chess. One of them wins and one of them loses. Now give a recording of the game to a chess novice. The novice can obviously repeat what moves that happened, but can the novice correctly analyze the game and determine what the losing decision was? Does the novice have the skill to correctly understand whatever gambit the losing master was trying to pursue? Can the novice correctly figure out what the decisive move (or moves) was?
I do not mean to insult your intelligence, but you should consider whether the successful, intelligent couples "in most western countries and Japan" are in fact paying attention to nuances that you have overlooked? Just to throw out some random possibilities (I am not arguing for any of these, only pointing them out):
1.) the path to reproductive success is to make greater investment in less children (more resources per child, given less children)
2.) less children per parent leads to greater health for the child
3.) successful men who marry successful women are secretly (or openly) promiscuous when they are young and have more children than are recognized
Again, I'm not saying any of these 3 options are true, I'm just saying there may be game moves that the very intelligent are considering, which maybe you have overlooked. I'd be cautious about assuming that the most intelligent members of the species are making all of the wrong moves in the game of life.
In my opinion, 1) doesn't make sense in our current society. Nor did it make sense any time before it if having less children but more successful ones didn't translate in those children themselves having more offspring than if they had had brothers. The path to reproductive success is to make sure your children reach adulthood and can have children of their own..., ideally so your descendants grow exponentially. I don't know how making sure my kid has a Playstation 3 and an HD TV guarantees that he will have more reproductive success. College you say? Any lower-middle class person can go to college, you'll just get into debt like everybody else. Besides you don't need a college degree to reproduce, how are immigrants doing it then?
2) I know that you weren't arguing for any of this, but I'd really like to see citation for this one. Maybe during a time of famine it would be true, but how exactly would I be less healthy if I had 10 siblings?
3) I don't know if they are more promiscuous or not, but they are definitely not having more children, that's the whole point of these ideas about idiocracy.
I didn't cover the successful couples that don't have kids at all, which are a lot of them. Please, explain to me how that makes sense, not having children will help your reproductive success because...? How is that not a wrong move?
You might think that it's the right move if having only one well provided child made sure that he went to the top of society, i.e. become a millionaire, which is very unlikely anyway for most people. If your line of descendants has just one child over a few generations, your original DNA that is in that person will be a small part of him. I think the person whose descendants had at least 3 children each generation will have a greater chance of having his genetic legacy survive even if those descendants are a little less well off, which doesn't need to be true.
I would really like to believe that you are right and in fact there is something we are not seeing. But there aren't even any statistics that show that an only child will be richer or healthier in the future.
I suppose you think want us to think you're being honest. It's interesting the way white supremacists treat others with contempt. Perhaps someone less stupid would write more sensible things.
Having read that paragraph, you might want to note that I didn't insult you or call you stupid -- in exactly the same sense as you didn't insult anyone or say that one race is more intelligent than another. In other words, I took care to make sure that the literal sense of my words contains no such claims, so that it's only what you need to add in order to make them make any sense that's insulting and unpleasant.
Just like your own comments which were, yes, racist even though you can chop them into fragments none of which explicitly makes racist statements.
I don't care though, you are angry because it wasn't politically correct and I know that.
I'm not a white supremacist, I'm not promoting the superiority of the white race, you can actually interpret what I wrote as saying that Asian people are superior to whites. If you don't like what Wikipedia has to say about brain size, you can change it yourself if you have evidence to back it up.
Aside from this ad hominem, do you have anything to say against my points?
1. It is possible to interpret everything I said in such a way that it doesn't insult you at all: "I suppose you want us to think you are being honest (which is fair enough since you are being). It's interesting the way white supremacists treat others with contempt (though of course this is just an irrelevant aside and not a comment on you). Perhaps someone less stupid (than the white supremacists) would write more sensible things (than they do)."
2. Of course that would be a rather strained interpretation of what I wrote. That's because the insulting bits of it are implicit, not explicit: the only problem with the non-insulting interpretation is that it doesn't make any sense as a whole.
3. Exactly the same applies to your comments. Sure, you didn't say that black people are less intelligent than white people; you merely said that they have smaller brains and OH NOES some of them are moving to the USA, immediately after claiming that an unprecedentedly-severe "idiocracy-like event" is happening right now. Sure, you didn't say that one race is inferior to another; you just said a whole lot of other things that don't make much sense unless they are.
4. That (points 1-3 above) was the whole point of my paragraph to which you took such exception, as the paragraph that followed was intended to make clear. I'm sorry (though not very) that you were offended by it; I thought that was a risk worth taking in order to make sure you understood how it's possible for something to be insulting even when it can be decomposed into fragments that aren't unambiguously insulting.
5. I am not, as it happens, angry, no matter how much anger on my part would suit your preferred narrative about foaming-at-the-mouth politically-correct liberals. Neither does my opinion that your claim not to be being racist is pure bullshit have anything to do with "political correctness". But of course there's little use in my saying that, since you "know" what I actually think and why -- and I strongly suspect that you had decided firmly ahead of time that any possible objection to what you wrote would be a matter of being angry about a lack of "political correctness".
6. Being a white supremacist is perfectly compatible with thinking that Asian people are more intelligent than white people. (Although, as it happens, I was not in fact accusing you of being a white supremacist; see point 4 above.)
7. I have made no objection whatever to what Wikipedia has to say about brain size.
8. Your points? You've carefully left the most important ones implicit. But here's one. You say that "mass immigration" will lead to rapidly shrinking brain sizes in the US and Europe, because (supposedly) black people have smaller brains and (implicitly claimed) the causes of this are genetic. But there is not in fact a great deal of immigration of black people to the US, and black immigrants to the US turn out to be (as a population) extremely intelligent and well educated. For instance, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_Unit... which indicates that about half of all African immigrants to the US have an undergraduate degree and about 1/5 have graduate degrees, both figures considerably higher than those for the US population as a whole. So, with fewer than a million African immigrants in the US in total (so presumably at most, say, 50k/year), and these being apparently smarter on average than the population they're migrating into, we're supposed to be worried about a drastic loss of brain size in the US population as a result? Pull the other one, it's got bells on. (There is more migration from Africa to Europe than to the US, unsurprisingly; statistics seem harder to come by.)
It would stand to reason that since the cerebral cortex is the home of our higher-thinking abilities, an overall reduction in brain size might not equate to a reduction in intelligence, were there an increase in the number and depth of the "folds" on the surface of the brain.
> It would stand to reason that since the cerebral cortex
> is the home of our higher-thinking abilities ...
1. Even if the effect it claims is true, it wouldn't result in an "everyone's stupid" society, it would result in a split society with an even more distinct intellectual upper and lower class. Not desirable, to be sure, but not necessarily dangerous to the human race as a whole.
2. What we arrogantly see as the "stupidity" of the lower classes is almost entirely caused by social and environmental factors. Genetically, they're not necessarily inferior at all. Even if genetic drift COULD occur within just a few generations, which I doubt, genetic effects would be entirely dominated by environmental factors such as education, nutrition, and socialization.
If you pulled a healthy baby from the worst white trash family at birth, raised it well and gave it an education, there's no reason to think it would be any less intelligent than you.
The catch is that you need the proper life experience to unlock your potential.
Evolution works by selection. Darwin, not Lamark.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
I find the fact that your genes don't get a fresh start with your children pretty sobering. Kind of makes you want to go exercise :)
Edit: had a hash tag in the wikipedia link I didnt mean to put there
If this actually happens, you're likely to see an intellectual upper class that is more intelligent than the current average. Selection works both ways, and even if the intelligentsia reproduce more slowly, they still reproduce (mostly) within their own group, leading to ever-smarter offspring.
Assuming genetic factors dominate intelligence anyway.
You mean that everyone was sub-average by todays normal standards. But what was normal in the year 1435 is very different from what is normal in the year 2011, and again very different from what the norm will be in the year 2505.
Had Trevor and Carol been able to produce offspring, they (and the rest of their class) might have been able to bolster the norm. Alas, Trevor tragically met his demise with a heart attack whilst masturbating to produce sperm to artificially inseminate her.
Meanwhile, Clevon kept cleaving on, appreciably moving the needle on what 'norm' means.
Edit: We didn't get to see much inside of the Brawndo corporation, where all of the power was concentrated, so we can't be sure that President Camacho was the brightest around. All we got to see was the CEO, who may not have been the brightest bulb in the drawer. The descendants of the medical researchers bent on curing hair-loss and prolonging erections probably work in the bowels of that - or some other - corporation.
Brain volume contributes to a lot of things. It might be that we're getting clumsier, or that we're less visually perceptive than our ancestors were. But we can be sure that IQs aren't going down.
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.881,y.0,no.,conte...
If we continue to extrapolate, we can conclude that 300 years ago people had an IQ of 10. Not very bright, but a significant improvement over their great-grandparents, who would have had an IQ of -20.
Granted that the bigger the brain, the more energy it needs, but if the brain uses 25% of our energy, 0.25*0.1= 2.5%. Even if that's wrong by a few percent, it doesn't sound like such a big advantage to cause that decrease in so little time and as it's been pointed out, it actually started happening when more food/energy was available from agriculture or whatever.
There seems to be no agreement about what the word "cro-magnon" refers to. Possibly the phrase should be disused? I have frequently read that cro-magnon refers to the first homo sapiens who arrived in Europe. With that usage, "cro-magnon" is just a way of referring to us, a synonym for homo sapiens. But the phrase has other uses. Some writers continue to refer to "cro-magnon" as if it refers to some distinct species, different from us. But then, the question arises, which species are we talking about? Who is it related to? Why does it need a unique name?
As far as I know, the most exhaustive coverage of the various human species is in Ian Tattersall's book, Extinct Humans:
http://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/08133...
Tattersall is among those who refer to cro-magnon as homo sapiens, and therefore makes the phrase "cro-magnon" largely meaningless. One might say, with greater clarity, "Early homo sapiens in Europe."
Having said that, I should add, there is no doubt that Neanderthals (I'm using the spelling suggested by the Google Chrome auto-suggest, which may be out of date) were a distinct species, and that they had larger brain cases that homo sapiens. There is no evidence they were smarter than us. They never showed much advance toward abstract thought, which gives us reason to assume they were dumber than us, at least using traditional (habitual) notions of "smart" and "dumb".
Elephants have a much larger brain than us, but smaller when compared to their body mass. (Side note: they are one of the few species that can recognize itself in the mirror)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canis
They are related. That does not mean they are the same species.
According to one of the theories on the shrinking of brain, “The big heads were necessary to survive Upper Paleolithic life, which involved cold, outdoor activities.”
Another theory said, “The skulls developed to cope with a chewy diet of rabbits, reindeer, foxes and horses. As our food has become easier to eat, so our heads have stopped growing.”
http://www.themedguru.com/20110102/newsfeature/shrinking-bra...
(2) WRT problem-solving ability, bonobo populations are shrinking much faster than chimps (which are increasing in some places). Perhaps that politically correct behavior has consequences....