Are people getting stupider?

If we really evolved out of fish-like creatures, can't we say we were really dumb at some point? In such case, maybe we are evolving and becoming smarter.

And Tom is OTM also.

If you put the average American in the wilderness with nothing and said "Okay, survive!", the American would be terrified and not have the first clue.

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.

Evolution does happen, but on a very slow scale. Palaeontologists guess changes in intelligence by measuring the increase in skull volume of our ancestor species. The maximal average brain size seems to have occurred with Neanderthal Man, about (I think) 10-12,000 years ago; only slightly larger than ours. Since then, we've always had roughly the same average brain size.

Then again, Fox News Channel is one of the most popular "news sources" in America, so there's evidence to the contrary.

It doesn't, except in the vaguest of terms. When you're dealing with extinct species known only from fossils, though, skull volume is the best thing you have to go on.

Good point. They see the difference, and some assume that this is intrinsically a bad thing.

Evolution does happen, but on a very slow scale.

I've read allegations that modern medicine and contemporary safety standards keep alive people who in previous centuries would have been weeded out of the gene pool; the implication is that society would be better off without these people living long enough to reproduce. But natural selection is extremely slow-acting and imprecise.

it exists because it is theorized. 2 types of people theorize the so-called « decline »
a. right-wind thinkers. conservatism is obviously their doxa (idem for left-wing readers of Strauss, Elias, Steiner...)
b. People who aren't even academics. kind of self-made crypto-intellectuals. their « distinction » is threatened by the massiveness of education. They know nothing about new type of knowledge, recents disciplines... to keep their « cultural capital » relevant they have to call the new one irrelevant.

Or possibly maybe a lot of these so-called "stupid young folk" aren't educated properly on the subject, and they're lack of knowledge with regards to birth control isn't because they're slack-jawed idiot children, but because *GASP* nobody ever told them.

it's the old take-a-test to have children idea?

I tend to think discussing intelligence is often .. pointless, because it so many aspects of life it's not what gets you ahead, even in academia as I've come to believe lately. Not that the people who *do* get ahead in academia are not intelligent, but that they're not necessarily the most intelligent, they are the best at playing the game. same for politics.

As for M. Wouldn't You Like to Know.. a few words in honor of today, Talk Like O'Reilly Day: SHUT UP! Shut up! You'd have to be a complete moron to not know that you're a complete moron! Shut UP! Cut his mic! SHUT UP!

hahahahaha "both"

Okay, "Wouldn't you like to know" has just proven that he/she/it is either joking or an incredible idiot. I now retract my offense at his/her/it's previous post and now laugh at it in a derisive manner.

what do i know tho

I'm dumbing down just reading this thread.

I feel stupid that I even know that, dude.

I guess so, Ally. Plus, Word says it's a word.

"the" = "they"

and teenagers built stonehenge, so there

You're sort of off. The original myth comes from a misunderstanding of brain anatomy, iirc, and people keep coming up with new explanations for it just because it's a compelling and vivid idea. But there's nothing to it. We use all of our brains, until they're damaged or we die.

(I've seen "there's all this empty space between things, right, like atoms and things ..." as one of the explanations before, and sure, yes, but then we'd only be using ten percent of our hands, too.)

so i could split a quark, but i might be sh*tting my pants while i do so. doesn't sound fair

(b.) Ok, you want to know the truth here? I was born not to two high school graduates in their mid 30s, but rather to a 20-year-old high school dropout who worked as a waitress and was described by the adoption agency as "slow" (but also "kind and compassionate"). If only "slow" children can be born to "slow" parents, then I should've found average high school classes challenging. Fact is, I didn't. SOME of what constitutes "intelligence" is based upon genetics, but a great deal of it can and often is reliant on environment, including having supportive parents, going to good schools, and being inwardly motivated. Plus, genetics can be weird sometimes. Ever see a baby born with blue eyes to parents who were both brown-eyed? Yeah, that can and does happen.

(c.) I totally agree with the people who are saying that it's not a case of people getting "stupider" or "smarter" as the years progress, it's just a case of people becoming adept at doing different things, no change in intellectual capacities or abilities. That makes a world of sense to me.

But I thought some of you guys might like this crap I got in the email today, from the Skeptic.com newsletter (a newsletter that sorta bugs me. This whole idea of "BRIGHTS" annoys the bork out of me):
sorry if the formatting (carriagereturns) look crappy, since I'm pasting it directly from Pegasus Mail:

---

Are People Getting Smarter or Dumber? by Robert Ehrlich
An excerpt from Eight Preposterous Propositions: From the Genetics of
Homosexuality to the Benefits of Global Warming by Robert Ehrlich. 2003. Princeton
University Press. 432 pp. $27.95.

In his dark moments (usually after grading a physics exam) this long-time

college professor sometimes wonders if there has been a general deterioration in
human reasoning ability. Fortunately, on most days this feeling is fleeting. On other
occasions when I am pleasantly surprised by a particularly insightful student comment
I ask myself the reverse question: might people actually be getting smarter? I'm unaware
of any polls on either the smarter or dumber question, but I imagine that when young and
old people look at one another across the generational divide each might more often tend to regard its group with greater favor in terms of intelligence.

Anyone looking for evidence that people are getting dumber can find many
examples of stupidity that seem to be on the rise in today's world. One of my
candidates would be the increasing number of people who choose to play the
lottery, but only when the jackpot reaches $20 million, believing that anything less
won't make a major change in their lives. One compilation of stupidity by
individuals that makes for quite interesting reading are The Darwin Awards, which
are simultaneously sad, cruel, and funny, commemorating those who have
improved the human gene pool by removing themselves from it.

Contrary to popular belief, however, Darwinian evolution says nothing about
whether intelligence should increase or decrease over time. There is little
doubt about the actual increase that has occurred when we compare the relative
intelligence of humans with that of the extinct species from which we have
descended. But, that development shows only that in the environments these species
found themselves greater intelligence had survival value. It is quite possible
to imagine a different planetary history and different environments, in which
intelligence would not have had great value. (One can easily imagine
post-apocalyptic futures in which keen senses, brute strength, ruthlessness, and
ability to withstand hardship or extreme heat would have much greater survival
value than intelligence.)

Any serious attempt to try to learn whether people are getting smarter or
dumber over time immediately runs into at least four difficult questions:

What do we mean by intelligence?
How can intelligence be measured?
Which people are we talking about?
What time interval are we considering?

Sometimes half-jokingly it is said that intelligence is what intelligence
tests test. While that circular definition is not particularly helpful in
clarifying the meaning of intelligence, it is not entirely useless either. If the
ability to score highly on intelligence tests correlates highly with real world
abilities that are normally thought of as representing examples of mental
ability, the tests do acquire a degree of credibility. After all, a similarly
circular definition of time as: "that which a clock measures" was instrumental in
leading Albert Einstein to his theory of Relativity.

Nowadays, it has become fashionable to note that there are many kinds of
intelligence, and that abstract reasoning ability no longer should be regarded as
the sole or even the primary measure. According to Howard Gardner's
theory of multiple intelligences there are seven types of intelligence:
verbal/linguistic, musical, logical/mathematical, spatial, body-kinesthetic, intrapersonal
(e.g., insight, metacognition) and interpersonal (e.g., social skills).

Only two of these seven forms (verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical) are tested
on conventional IQ tests. Given Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences,
one might regard a possible loss of reasoning ability and a corresponding gain
of "emotional intelligence" as simply a shift from one kind of intelligence to
another, rather than a dumbing down of society. Notwithstanding Gardner's
multiple intelligence theory, however, when we address the question of whether
people are getting smarter or dumber over time, the primary focus will be on
verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligence, which are measured by IQ tests.

in class my teacher was telling me how before the first world war (which would obv shatter this belief) there was a common belief shared by the artists of the day who felt that humans were getting smarter due to more education, science & technology etc, so that it was a logical progression to think that there couldnt possibly be any more wars due to this new, smarter, well educated people

Or is it possible that we're evolving in new ways so as to keep up with the world that we've created, which seems to be advancing more quickly than we can keep up with it? Even though, yeah, we're kinda responsible for the advancingly-advancing rate-of-growth of our techno-ecosystem, aren't we?

This bit about dumb people breeding more than the smart has been around for ages, and it always seems to lead to talk of eugenics. There is no way of comparing our IQs, even if we think IQ measures something useful, with those of previous generations with any accuracy.

On the other hand, I note that the person who I think is the cleverest here is also one of the very oldest...

His songs are devastating indictments of various forms of idiocy. A kind of singing Voltaire, he's witheringly scornful of the cautious, the untravelled, the mean, the pious. It's very unusual for people like that to become stars, because they make us uncomfortable with their mockery of our little habits, our little comforts, our little lies.

His intelligence is also physical. The way his face and body express the song he's written with expressions and gestures. The way he risks making a fool of himself, and yet never does. Charm is also a form of intelligence, and intelligence is a form of charm.

And fictious. The Darwin Awards are full of urban legends.

The explaination I've always heard for the "Humans only use 10% of their brain" thing is that it's a garbled version of the fact that only about 10% of all of the neurons in your brain are firing at the same time. You don't want to have all 100% of them firing at the same time, BTW--that's what happens during a grand mal seizure.