If by "peak intelligence" you mean collective total brainpower, no. <Considering the trends, one might well make a strong case for peak intelligence in the human race.. > But maybe you mean per capita average intelligence, but again the answer is no.
My prediction for Peak Oil is 2037, Peak People 2037, Reglaciation 2020.
Peak intelligence is a long way away and unlikely to happen.
One of the common ideas is that the educated [intelligent] don't have many children, but the uneducated [unintelligent] are breeding like bunnies.
But if we measure actual outcomes, in fact human average intelligence zoomed up in the 20th century. Ask Google about the Flynn Effect.
We can also see that intelligence zoomed up astronomically from when our ancestors were more like chimps than people, but that might have happened in a big rush in the last 100,000 years rather than evenly over a million years.
Most of it seems to have happened over the last 30,000 years since the father of all non-Africans left Africa.
There are 3 very powerful forces operating to kill off unintelligent DNA:
1.....Eugenics. Women prefer intelligent blokes. They don't select the knuckle-dragging guy who can barely learn to tie his shoe laces, let alone do Fourier transforms for orthogonal CDMA photonics powering mobile cyberspace.
2.....Genocide. Nature sees to it that there are too many people [and everything else]. Males have to fight in the Malthusian realm of jungle rules. Smart males beat dull ones. They conspire better with each other, make better weapons, learn fast and have good ideas. As human versus lion, polar bear, crocodile, great white shark shows, victory isn't to the tough but stupid. It's to the tough but smart.
3.....Environmental challenges. The smart people look after babies well, know how to get food, cope with bad weather and climate change, how to avoid a leaky house and dodge the swarms of ways in which nature tries to eliminate each person.
As Albert Einstein and others show, there's a lot of smart DNA out there. As a casual inspection of humans shows, not many people have the "right stuff". The average person can barely drive a car. Even if the human population dropped to 1 billion, if they all had Einstein brainpower, the total brainpower would zoom up and the average would soar.
The average brainpower is only about 100 IQ though lower in plenty of countries. If the average was raised to 150, even if the population dropped to 1 billion, we'd be doing just fine with total intelligence.
If we include the intelligence of cyberspace, we are entering another realm altogether and the sky is the limit. Google's memory is phenomenal, recall almost instant, and there's actual associative intelligence in the process.
Extrasomatic intelligence is obviously going to be vastly better than wet chemistry intelligence. So even if human brainpower does fizzle in absolute terms if it reaches a peak, that's not the limit of intelligence.
We are at the dawn of the era of intelligence, not the peak of it.
Mqurice
PS: Darwin Awards here: darwinawards.com That self-removed person was looking for gold. Be warned, those here who are in pursuit of gold for happiness. The pursuit of gold leads to misery and death, not happiness. Gold is a trap laid by the cosmos; the Devil's deal. |
