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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (45378)	8/12/2001 3:50:03 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Your argument is that human intelligence peaked some time in the past. Not necessarily ... my argument was primarily against the idea that the accelerating rate of technology change was in any way indicative of an overall increase in human intelligence. Given the increased survival of those with genetic very low intelligence, it seems likely that the average planetwide is more likely to be trending down, but one can make an argument that intelligence is also trending to greater variability, i.e., there might be more smart people but population wide these are likely to also be balanced by more on the other extreme. Since measured intelligence has increased around the world over the past 100 years I have a great deal of trouble with any univariate measure of intelligence, particularly considering all we know about the ways in which such tests are contaminated by cultural and language biases. A community which had started out with a significant imigrant population which gradually homogenized would probably show a significant improvement in IQ scores simply because the people in later populations were more uniformly coming from the culture toward which the test was biased and were educated in that mold, but I sure wouldn't put much value in that conclusion. Some time ago, what became people was no smarter than chimps, gorillas etc or whatever you want to call the chimpoids which lived way back then [Lucy if you like]. FWIW, Lucy is generally considered a hominid, not an ape ancestor and she is no longer the oldest likely hominid by a good margin. Since then, intelligence has increased, non-stop more or less, to now. End point to end point, certainly, but there is no reason to think that the progression was uniform. Have you considered just how small an interval of 25,000 years is in a time span of 5 or 10 million? My real point, though, relative to the picture you painted, is not that peak average IQ occured N years in the past, but to counter the idea that there is simple and clear evidence for an increasing and accelerating growth in intelligence. Heck, we wear pants now! How smart is that?!! Not very unless you think that increasing the mutation rate is a good idea. I'm sorry that you have missed out on the smarts DNA when it was handed out Don't be sorry on my account... and can't chip a good Solutrean flint. You know someone who can?