5 ms·

> there is no evolutionary pressure Please take another look at my second link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology#Overall_mortality_and_morb

• lsd5you 9y ago
  Whatever the truth, that section is poorly and contradictory. 'A strong link between cognitive ability and the risk of death.' 'A 15-point increase in intelligence was associated with a decreased risk of mortality of 32%.' Wikipedia suffers a bit from not trying to be too neutral!! Local cases of intelligence not helping with mortality/reproduction in todays society are not contradictory. This is the (dysgenic) thesis that intelligence does not help. Although increased mortality is perhaps a little harder to explain, but again hardly irreconcilable - I could speculate many plausible explanations. To address your point, I feel it is intuitively true that we do not have positive evolutionary pressure. If indeed IQs are now falling despite the flynn effect then for intelligence at least here is the evidence for insufficient evolutionary pressure.
  • burkaman 9y ago
    I agree that it feels intuitively true, but intuition is often wrong, as that wikipedia section shows. Pay more attention to the sources than the wording of the article. All of the sources demonstrate an inverse correlation between intelligence and mortality, meaning that intelligence does help.