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No, but it is similar. A smart person with a burning desire to produce offspring will have the greatest advantage. A smart person who dislikes children will ha

by burfog 7y ago

No, but it is similar. A smart person with a burning desire to produce offspring will have the greatest advantage. A smart person who dislikes children will have the greatest disadvantage. In between those people are the people who screw up birth control. If the human population contains a million people with the trait for wanting lots of kids and a billion people who are just dumb about birth control, both will be selected by evolution. Once those traits are the norm, it would likely turn out that wanting kids is the more successful strategy. We could thus see intelligence go both directions, first dropping and then rising.

XorNot 7y ago
Assuming intelligence can only be the direct result of genes is not supported in the literature. The relevance of individual genes to the success of the human population disappeared when we became a tribal species hundreds of thousands of years ago. Since then the useful selective function for individual survival has been the ability to operate in a tribe and make the tribe successful. Who's to say what that has really been selecting for? Intelligence may very well have almost no correlation with individual genes, and simply be an emergent phenomenon optimized for by pro-social behaviors, or activated by being in the presence of people who are already fulfilling that role. Maybe what we regard as individual intellect is repressed pathways only chemically triggered in childhood after the development cycle casts around to try and figure out the status of the tribe and specialize into the optimum addition?
- hackinthebochs 7y ago
  It is long past reasonable to doubt that intelligence is at least 50% heritable.
  - XorNot 7y ago
    It really isn't, by the simple question of: what does "50% heritable" even mean? 50% of what? (which is to say, you picked that number because 50% genetics 50% environment feels like a good split, and how do you even measure that?)
    - concordDance 7y ago
      > what does "50% heritable" even mean? It means that if you plotted a graph of orphaned children IQs on the X axis and their biological parents IQs on the Y axis you'll get a messy and very bulgy line going up and to the right. And this kind of thing is discovered by noticing that the IQs of identical twins are much more similar than those of non-identical twins. Wikipedia has a fairly good overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
- concordDance 7y ago
  > Assuming intelligence can only be the direct result of genes is not supported in the literature. Huh, guess I missed the news that we'd discovered human level problem solving abilities in sheep.

by burfog 7y ago

XorNot 7y ago

Assuming intelligence can only be the direct result of genes is not supported in the literature. The relevance of individual genes to the success of the human population disappeared when we became a tribal species hundreds of thousands of years ago. Since then the useful selective function for individual survival has been the ability to operate in a tribe and make the tribe successful. Who's to say what that has really been selecting for? Intelligence may very well have almost no correlation with individual genes, and simply be an emergent phenomenon optimized for by pro-social behaviors, or activated by being in the presence of people who are already fulfilling that role. Maybe what we regard as individual intellect is repressed pathways only chemically triggered in childhood after the development cycle casts around to try and figure out the status of the tribe and specialize into the optimum addition?

hackinthebochs 7y ago
It is long past reasonable to doubt that intelligence is at least 50% heritable.
- XorNot 7y ago
  It really isn't, by the simple question of: what does "50% heritable" even mean? 50% of what? (which is to say, you picked that number because 50% genetics 50% environment feels like a good split, and how do you even measure that?)
  - concordDance 7y ago
    > what does "50% heritable" even mean? It means that if you plotted a graph of orphaned children IQs on the X axis and their biological parents IQs on the Y axis you'll get a messy and very bulgy line going up and to the right. And this kind of thing is discovered by noticing that the IQs of identical twins are much more similar than those of non-identical twins. Wikipedia has a fairly good overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
concordDance 7y ago
> Assuming intelligence can only be the direct result of genes is not supported in the literature. Huh, guess I missed the news that we'd discovered human level problem solving abilities in sheep.