| | | I don't see any evolution of intellectual functioning over history.
Comparative advantage and specialization has allowed far more people to have more wealth and specialize, earning more for knowing quite a whole lot about far less.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. What previous generations have discovered and made obvious, we can learn fairly easily - but that doesn't make us smarter.
Documenting people's lives in Ancestry I came to one of my 8th great-grandfathers born in the late 1500s. He graduated from Oxford in Law and became a magistrate in a small cozy seaside town in the south of England living in a small house that still stands.
Then at the age of 52 in 1638 he did something inexplicable to me. He took his wife, all of his children, their spouses and grandchildren and took a small ship to Boston where he became a chief magistrate and built a small timber lean-to sort of home to house, which still stands, for all of them to live in packed side by side. He founded the suburb where he built his house, selling surrounding lots to others.
I was always interested in doing what i could to get a promotion but I doubt I would have been up for a promotion to the back end of nowhere, taking my entire family with me to live a more primitive life in return for owning more land. Maybe you're right and that's the proof of his relative stupidity. But I doubt I would be up to that.
Another ancestor, a miller, made a similar move to Rhode Island with his family around the same age. He died only two years after arriving from a massive skin infection after getting scratched by a plant in one of his new fields. Today five days of antibiotics would have cured that skin infection, but that doesn't make me smarter.
A skilled miller trying to play farmer in his fifties in the wilds of America without a college education. That's just wild, but his family became successful. In what way is a person from the 1950s so much smarter or more capable? |
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