Maurice,
I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree since this this isn't really the right forum ... despite the pongid overtones.
People used to be chimps [near enough].
Not particularly near. A common fallacy have about evolution is that a modern species is descended from some other modern species. In fact, they are both descended from a common ancestor and may both have changed considerably since then. In the case of humans and apes it seems likely that point was about 10 million years ago so there is good reason to expect chimps not to have changed quite a bit since then too.
You can puzzle about what intelligence is, but mostly people don't have trouble seeing that chimps are not as intelligent as Irwin, any way you measure it, though the smartest chimps are not much less intelligent than the least intelligent people.
In fact, it is devilishly difficult to create a definition for "human" which would include all humans and not also include chimps and gorillas.
Of course knowledge and intelligence are different.
Yes, but you have missed my point that the kind of problems one can tackle and solve has a great deal to do with what you know prior to encountering the problem. Dr. J might be very bright indeed, but I rather imagine he did a lot of schooling and a lot of work before coming up with CDMA -- he didn't have to discover all of that foundation knowledge on his own first. Take him as a baby and put him somewhere on the Siberian steppes out of contact with all modern education and he might have been an usually clever yak herder, but he wouldn't have come up with CDMA.
Any ape could invent a hafted tool and chuck some sand, or ore on a fire.
If you care about the accuracy of your opinions, it might help to do some research. Apes do use tools, it's true, but they are all quite simple. None have developed hafted tools and humans didn't either until they had made are fairly large part of the change toward modern form, quite recent by evolutionary terms. Besides, these were not iron or bronze but stone with wooden handles. And, until very, very recently, the stone was never ground, but rather was flaked. That is one of the things that is so astounding about a Solutrean point since the first step requires taking off a flake that is 12-18" long, a couple of inches wide, a fraction of an inch thick, and is dead flat ... with a single blow. I've never managed as much as two inches in my own flintnapping and I'm not aware of any flintnapper alive who has ever been able to create a Solutrean point.
Those flint tools are only remembered as pivotal events because they invented almost nothing back then.
No, they are remembered because they changed the course of everything that came after. E.g., if one uses any one of several metrics for the ruggedness of the upper arm, how sturdy it is in relationship to the size of the animal, every primate including prosimians falls pretty close to the same curve ... except humans modern enough to have lived after the direction of hafted tools who are rather suddenly less rugged, presumably because they are utilizing the mechanical advantage of that shaft. Many of these early inventions profoundly shaped the cultural environment for our continuing evolution. No matter how clever, inventing a new way to modulate a signal when you already know about a whole set of different ways to modulate a signal, clever as it may be, is in no way a sign of an intelligence more profound than someone who can invent something like putting a stone on the end of a shaft when every tool every used by anyone anywhere in the world has never been any more than a stone held in the hand.
People are smarter than the humanoids of even 1000 years ago - not just in knowledge, but in actual intelligence! The Flynn effect is active over even shorter periods - like 100 years!
Actually, there is both good evidence and good reason to believe that human populations are actually less intelligent on the whole than they were. Consider for starters how many people of marginal intelligence are now sufficiently supported by society that they not only live, but breed, when hundreds or thousands of years ago they would simply have died. The geometric progression of technology has nothing to do with people getting smarter, but with standard network effects - everything new connects with everything else that already exists and creates new combinations. With our current technology there are so many combinations that we are hard put to even think of them all, much less test them all out. In earlier times one person could pretend to try to learn most of what was known by his or her culture within a single lifetime; today that is so far from possible that a person cannot even learn all of one sub-sub-discipline. |
