Human Intelligence vs Human evolution. Learning abilities

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

This is not about intelligent design vs evolution.

Do you think that as human beings, we are more intelligent than we were before. That is, we are progressively becomming more intelligent as time passes by.

I certainly think so and studies seem to suggest so as well. So, if we were to bring someone from 2000BC to modern day society and have him go through our lifestyles (from child to adult hood) then he should have problems catching up and comprehending a lot of things (i.e. he will suck at maths and science and language skills, or will not be as capable compared to a person of today’s genetic makeup). Hard to claim this I know, but that certainly should make sense, as cavemen vs today’s human beings can most certainly account for this claim that intelligence seems to grow with time.

However the other possibility is, what if our intelligence doesnt actually evolve that much? That is possible too. So maybe the intelligence of a person 2000 years ago will be fairly similar to people today? The only reason why we live in a better, more technologically advanced society today is because humans have laid down more foundations (due to time) that allows more knowledge to be aquired and implimented to make our better societies; but our actual intelligence is not far different? Possible.

What do you think?

Also that leads me to wonder, will we become more intelligent? What if our intelligence is not evolving that fast to comprehend future knowledge and advancements.

For example, it takes us say 25 years of acedemic dedication to be able to design an engine because an engineer will need to aquire all the foundations of knowledge before being fully capable of designing a working engine. Now say in the future we have more complexed engines or machinerly that needs more foundations before we can impliment and design such a system. What if it requires 80 years of todays dedication in order for an engineer to be able to make a time machine?

Now if our intelligence does increase with time (at a good rate) then that wouldnt be a problem, because we will be so intelligent that we will be able to aquire the knowledge to build the time machine in 25 years also, like it takes us 25 years to build todays engine. However is that really the case though?

What about the idea that humans are not evolving anymore due to numerous reasons. Reasons primarily being that society, moral ethics, etc are hindering the evolutionary cycle. That the genetically inferior are capable of mixing with genetically favorable and produce offsprings that may not be better than the previous generations. Also how moral ethics are defending the rights of the weak, etc etc etc. Basically halting of human evolution.

So will this mean that we will come to a stand still and that we will no longer be able to catch up to our futures, in the future? That it may come to a point where technological advancements come to a stand still because it takes humans too much time to aquire all the foundations of knowledge, that people may actually die or come to a point in time where their abilities start to deminish due to aging, before they can build new bridges of knowledge for future generations. This is because in order to build new knowledge you will have to know all the foundations built in the past. Now if this foundation of knowledge is so great in the future, and we take so much time to aquire it all, and by the time we may start to die due to aging, then wouldnt that affect our abilities to improve our society as humans?

Say if humans die at the age of 100 and it takes 90 years to learn all the foundations of knowledge for a particular subject. And in order to add new knowledge into our database of human knowledge, we have to first aquire this 90 years of knowledge and then realize where we can go from there. But 90 years is way too long because we may die at the age of 100, so technological advancements comes to a standstill. Also because it takes so long to aquire the knowledge, it reduces the population that can achieve this, and also the smart people that can actually contrbute furthur because someone who aquired all 90 years of knowledge will need to be smart and innovative above that to create and find new knowledge to benefit the world.

That is assuming of course we dont alter the course of aging through medicine (which will cause population and social problems as a result) and also assuming human intelligence do not increase at a good proportional rate with time.

2

Also I think there is a limit to how simplification can improve our learning abilities. For example, an engineer doesnt need to know how exactly certain mathmatical relationships are derived, but only needs to know that the foundations are made and are seemingly correct, and use these relationships as their new foundations to build new things. However ignorance can occur from over simplification. For example if in the future our education system tell you that a processor is just this one unit and you learn from there, then these future ‘pioneers’ may lack the teaching of the foundation of this processor and how it works i.e. it is actually the makeup of millions of transistors etc, and furthur more transistors work by controlling current flow through semiconductor materials, and futhur deeper, how electrons work, etc etc.

Maybe though humans can create a technology that helps with our learning abilities. For example something that transfers previous knowledge into your brain so you dont have to spend 20 years learning something and it can be done with a press of a button and a few minutes of your time. However the problem then comes with technological advancements reuslts in more knowledge. Since our brain is a fixed domain, with a fixed volume and fixed number of atoms, hense a fixed possible memory, there may lead to learning abilities to diminish. Maybe though, we can impliment technology in those fields again, i.e. integrating memory chips into our brains etc. Or maybe evolution will fix this by giving us bigger braings (ala the aliens).

3

There is a line between what you know and what you are capable of knowing. Capasity and current status are difforent things in my eyes.
Also technology can be “optimised” because we each dont have to re-descover inventions or break throughs, we can just take in breaf general explanations.
I heard people’s brains were getting heavier with time,
some1 said it at a sceince forum but didnt show me a report.

4

There must be a point on our evolutionary path where one generation surpassed the previous in intellectual capacity. To the specific question of the history of the evolution of the intellect, my favorite theory - detailed in a book called The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller - states that at some point, female homo sapiens would have begun to select their mates based on intellectual capacity, causing an evolutionary shift toward more intelligent offspring. A few generations of this kind of sexual selection and you’re certainly going to see a boom in intellectual capacity, and subsequently all other variables and consequences that come with it. Fast-forward a couple thousand years, and now you’re talking about females selecting their mates based on how nice thier clothing is (exemplifying craftsmenship, creativity), how well they lead a group, how well they perform the act of ‘courting’, etc. - all of which promote the same thing: smarter, more creative offspring. In short, there would have been a point where the more intelligent you were, the more likely you were to have offspring.

This is no longer the case, except in isolated instances. Moreover, people of lesser intelligence would seem to have more offspring than their smarter counterparts. This leads me to deduce all humans alive today have virtually the same intellectual capacity; the differences in intelligence we observe having more to do with cultural factors: do you have an actual desire to be an ‘intellectual’, or is what you know by way of ‘general consumption’ more or less good enough? Specifically, given we’re all offspring of this previous generation that ushered in this age of higher intelligence, we’ve all the same intellectual capacity, save some genetic variations (the peaks and valleys of natural selection) and issues relative to desire, devotion, rigor, etc. You’re not smarter than Plato just because you live 2500 years later, trust me, and he wasn’t any smarter than whoever engineered the great pyramids 2500 years before that.

To the questions of furture evolution, I’d say I don’t think you can have one without the other: technology and information exceeding our ability to understand it is an oxymoron. If and when you have a drastic change to the intellectual whole, you’re going to have a drastic change to the individuals who make up that whole. If it is true humans are not evolving in any drastic sense, it is because there is no need for this evolution. If such a need were to present itself, I think we can rest assured evolution would take the appropriate steps, especially if such a need were imposed in the realm of the intellect itself.

5

I don’t think our intelligence… as in, our raw ability to process information has really changed all that much. There is a very distinct separation between knowledge and exposure, to intelligence. Actual intelligence is determined very early on in life, and never really changes except for say by injury or something. You cannot simply become a genius by trying really hard.

Consider… that the intellectual separation between the average human, and someone like Neitzsche or Plato, is way more larger than that same human, and the average chimpanzee.

The human race is build to retain information, look at the internet if you need an example. We learn, and study, and absorb and absorb… and every once and a while an anomaly comes along in a field we consider ‘usefull’ (Like psychics, chem, coding, economics etc). These genius/anomalies rely on us for our capacity to remember and store information, and we require them for their unique ability to just ‘do’ very very complex physical operations. Most true top level genius’ (math serves as a good example) say that they do not even think about the operations really… they just seem to arrive at the answer in their heads.

Not to compare them directly persay… but the highest end of the math genius spectrum could be a person with servere autism, not always… but sometimes these people can perform seemingly impossible mathematical and pattern recognition in a split second. It seems like magic to the uninformed, which is funny because a magician would be another example of one of these anomalies. David Blane blows my mind when I watch him, and it is because he is so proficient at what he does… that it seems like it cannot be explained. It can… it’s just that we all reside in the middle of this skill scale… in a more complete way, and so cannot really see the extreme nature of the ends of the upper spectrums.

And then, there are those people who are unnaturally gifted at say… guessing a person’s last name, or… getting drunk girls to sleep with him. Most people have -something- which they are almost magically gifted at doing… but for alot, they don’t know what it is… or it is not something which society deems as useful in any sort of real way.

6

Would depend on what you have in mind when you use the word ‘genius’. If you mean what you talk about in your post - the genius of mathematicians, the genius of Beethoven - you’re probably right. But the genius of Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, among others, I’d say is nothing more than the geniune desire of gathering, categorizing, and implementing information.

It took Goethe nearly his entire life to write Faust; Nietzsche was consumed with the prospect of ‘worldy knowledge’ by the time he was twelve, not to mention he spent arguably three-quarters of his waking life thinking about and writing down his material; same with Freud. Hell, virtually anyone who has contributed something worthy of the term ‘genius’ in a literary or philosophical sense has done so by way of sheer devotion, rigor, integrity: work.

I don’t care what your IQ is, the sheer amount of time it takes to compose something like Plato’s The Republic means such a person has constructed their ‘genius’. Does that mean Jane Doe down the street can author a Critique of Pure Reason? Not necessarily. But I would say if Jane spent ten hours a day - drafting and re-drafting, meditating and re-meditating, for twenty years - she’d produce something quite worthy of the term ‘genius.’

Interesting case-in-point: you’re quoting this out of context. Recall the last line of this scene: ‘What is the most universal human trait: Fear, or laziness?’ The question relative to this observation is, Why so few Nietzsche’s and Plato’s? Why is humanity not a series of progressives, but instead an endless addition of zeros?

I believe I’ve answered precisely this question above.

7

The concept of ‘intelligence’ is ambiguous and ethereal at best, so working with it can be problematic. Intelligence is a human concept built around human behavior.
Anyway, the original post deals more with education and information than intelligence anyway. Yes, our knowledge base increases. You do not need to know ‘everything’ (ie- the full 90 years worth’) about a field to make advancements or discoveries within that field. I really don’t think people have gotten any ‘smarter’ though…That person from 2000bc could probably teach you as much as you could teach him, just older more obscure and irelivant (to us, in our present day society) information.

Basicly, same size bowl as before, just more types of cereal to put in it now.

8

By ‘the genius of Goethe, Neitzsche’ you mean philosophy. Let me preface this by saying i think philosophy borders on the art/science line so it’s sort of an exception.

Philosophy is different because (especially back when they were writing these things) to write such encopassing philosophies… as Neitzsche did, you needed alot of information, and it would take time to get such stuff. Do you believe that the poetic way in which Neitzsche writes is the result of re-editing… or a natural gift?

But perhaps you are right, perhaps everyone truly does have the ability to complete a task like writing faust, this still doesn’t take away from my original standpoint. Say Neitzsche was a slightly above average guy who simply took the time to get it done, if you can’t do it in your lifetime it doesn’t matter anyways. The real notion of genius I talk about are the ones who can do operations in a mannor that it is so fast… they don’t understand it, even though this lack of understanding does not take away from effectiveness - and I believe that to be everybody. For some it may be something inconsequential like… differentiating shades of red, but whatever it is - mathematic, social, reactionary, metaphoric, musical, rhymical, audio-spatial, biological, whatever. If it’s something you recognize, and is useful in today’s world… then that is where you become -productive- and viewed as a type of smart person or genius.

Your proficiency at doing all the other operations in your life will determine how fast you use your time to complete a project. Take Goethe, since he choose the play/fiction medium, perhaps for him metaphors were like an extension of his hand, but he was horribly inefficient at actually writing, or he had the attention span of a 4 year old.

Say you hit the jackpot in the lottery of sorts, say you a receive a body that enables you to… do computer programming very well, and also you have this mysterious genius ability to somehow just see true patterns in datastream - this could make you a very rich man.

Thus I equate Michael Jordan to Chomsky. Think of how much time this pro athlete has spent refining the ‘other stuff’ while relying on his uncanny ability to simply be the best winner there has ever been. Think of how much time Chomsky has spent gathering information while relying on his genius ability that lies somewhere in the realm of linguistics.

Think now… was Jesus the most proficient social manipulator we have ever seen? I dunno… you tell me

9

If you mean his style, then we’d have to ask, What is style? From my view, it’s merely that open-ended, almost whimsical sense of self-expression, manifested into ‘self-overcoming’ or ‘becoming’, to use the Nietzschean phrases. Should you put the inside of your mind onto paper or canvas in a way that dismisses trends, morals and traditions, whatever comes out is - necessarily - style.

Is that a ‘natural gift’ - to be able to do this? Maybe so. But by ‘natural gift’ do we mean ‘genetic’? Must it be this way? Or might it be possible this ‘gift’ is - in essence - the desire to manifest style? I think, in the end, this can go either way; that is, there’s certainly a bit of both.

Well, if you remember, this is what I initially said: it would depend on what you mean by genius. I’ve already conceded in the context of math, physics, photographic memory: indeed, that’s something different. That’s freakish (meant literally) mental ability, not ‘genius’ in the usual sense as I would have us discuss the topic.

Not to force you to maintain what you said almost a month ago, but the quote was:

No, you can’t ‘try’ to be the next Plato, Jesus, Newton, or Darwin (or Hitler, Napoleon, or Stalin for that matter) - but aside from the truly monumental figures in history, that potential for greatness is there in a great many of us.

How bad do you want it? Or would you rather go about the usual motions of daily modern life? I simply argue this is the choice facing us all.

I’m glad you bring up sports, because I agree it works very well in this context. However, your Jordan example is weak. It was not his genetic freakishness that made him the winner he was (Vince Carter has every bit the atheletic ability of Michael Jordan, as only one example); his ‘uncanny ability to simply be the best winner’, I would argue, was a product of his competitive spirit: his drive, devotion, his desire to outwork everyone else - all of which are to my point.

Great atheletes are a dime a dozen, especially at the professional level. It’s precisely everything else that determines greatness.

Full-circle: Really fuckin’ smart people are a dime a dozen, too. How many of them are going to achieve historical greatness? Is it really the case the great thinkers are just ‘that smart’ - i.e. that much smarter than the rest of us - or might it be the case that they constructed this distinction they now hold?

I should add, I don’t in any way dismiss the notion there are variants in IQ or genetically inherent intelligence. But I suppose, to summarize, I’m arguing the threshold for greatness might be a 120 IQ, and not necessarily a 200 IQ, ya know? A 120 IQ with a monster heart full of passion trumps a 200-IQ’ed lazy-ass every day of the week.

At least that’s my conviction.

I’d say my opinion of Jesus is immaterial. What are you driving at?

10

This part is the key. I agree Jordan’s best (genius) assest was his drive to win, but he wouldn’t have been able to achieve his status without his gifted athletic ability.

This is why I originally said ‘You can’t be a genius simply by trying really hard’ because you must have a) The (socially productive) genius quality, but also b) a careful assembly of the other peripheral parts to the psyche in a fairly ‘good’ manner.

True Genius’ are hard to come by… and that is why I refer to them as anomalies, … but the positive point to this is that we as information gatherers and sub ‘smart people’, as well as everyone else all have a genius trait… the trick is finding out what it is.

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Not bad. I get ya. We’re meeting somewhere in the middle, wouldn’t you say?

12

Definately.

We need some more input on this subject though.

13

From where? What do you mean?

14

From other people…

my brain is taxed… I don’t know where to go from here.