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>Humans existed a long time before proper technology development, and those humans were just as intelligent as modern ones. The ability to create technology is

>Humans existed a long time before proper technology development, and those humans were just as intelligent as modern ones. The ability to create technology is not a requirement for higher intelligence. Is that actually true? In cases of feral or severely neglected children who lack any exposure to human language, isn't there an impediment that prevents them learning more complex language later in life that exceeds anything that could be attributed to reduced brain development due to nutrition? World wide hasn't intelligence been increasing, and while part of that is due to better nutrition, another part is due to better childhood conditions to enable intelligence? Exposures to the technology of language, written language, and similar at a young age seem to lead to an increased capacity for intelligence later in life.

bmitc 4y ago
Isn’t it true? Hominids and Homo sapiens were around millions and hundreds of thousands of years, respectively, before technology more advanced than basic tools showed up. And written history seems even shorter than that. I’m not for sure what feral or neglected children has to do with this. To address your later point, intelligence does not equal knowledge. Any increase in intelligence in a person’s life seems to be intralifetime and doesn’t spill over to further generations. Increasing intelligence through diet and behaviors and such are just mechanisms for exposing the underlying intelligence that’s already there.
- SkyBelow 4y ago
  >To address your later point, intelligence does not equal knowledge. This is just one of the many paths to the fundamental question that plagues this sort of topic, what is intelligence. Is intelligence the capacity for gaining knowledge or having actually gained knowledge? Or maybe not directly related to knowledge at all, though the previous question was more about the capacity to gain vs the gaining than it was about knowledge. It is known that the capacity a single individual changes based on what they were exposed to (feral/neglected children being the extreme negative cases, I'm not as well read on extreme positive cases). But perhaps we aren't talking about an individua's capacity and instead we are talking some baseline genetic average capacity for a larger group that doesn't take into account environmental cases pushing it to either extreme? But in such a case have we not defined intelligence so that technology's impact is excluded a priori?

bmitc 4y ago

Isn’t it true? Hominids and Homo sapiens were around millions and hundreds of thousands of years, respectively, before technology more advanced than basic tools showed up. And written history seems even shorter than that. I’m not for sure what feral or neglected children has to do with this. To address your later point, intelligence does not equal knowledge. Any increase in intelligence in a person’s life seems to be intralifetime and doesn’t spill over to further generations. Increasing intelligence through diet and behaviors and such are just mechanisms for exposing the underlying intelligence that’s already there.

SkyBelow 4y ago
>To address your later point, intelligence does not equal knowledge. This is just one of the many paths to the fundamental question that plagues this sort of topic, what is intelligence. Is intelligence the capacity for gaining knowledge or having actually gained knowledge? Or maybe not directly related to knowledge at all, though the previous question was more about the capacity to gain vs the gaining than it was about knowledge. It is known that the capacity a single individual changes based on what they were exposed to (feral/neglected children being the extreme negative cases, I'm not as well read on extreme positive cases). But perhaps we aren't talking about an individua's capacity and instead we are talking some baseline genetic average capacity for a larger group that doesn't take into account environmental cases pushing it to either extreme? But in such a case have we not defined intelligence so that technology's impact is excluded a priori?