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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (15487)	1/3/2002 10:52:09 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 281500

<Humans are unnaturally, bizzarely intelligent. If you look at humans from an alien point of view to think that this band of savages would be able to crack the structure of the universe is very strange. Scientists believe that they understand all the basic physical forces that allow life to exist, but my guess is that they are missing some very big pieces, and it is possible that those pieces help explain the puzzle that average IQs continue to increase with time. In other words, is it really true that by the time you've bred an animal smart enough to make rocks into arrow heads, is it also necessarily true that you've bred an animal capable of cracking the atom?> Carl, that's a slight exaggeration about being bizarrely intelligent. Heck, lot's of them can't even spell bizarre and because a couple of people figured out relativity stuff and superstring Calabi-Yau equations doesn't mean the rest of the gene pool is up to that. Neither have 'we', meaning those supersonic scientists and mathematicians who purport to know wassup about the fundamental forces, figured out what the heck is going on. I'm with you that some big pieces are missing. So big that we are comparable with a pipi head down in the sand at a beach when it's asked to explain the workings of New York. Anytime people think they have figured out that the earth sits on a pile of turtles and God is in heaven [along with Allah, Buddah, and the rest of them] and that Newtonian mechanics keeps it on track, some smart aleck comes along and points out that there's a glitch in the system. On a scale of 0 to 100, with earthworms at 0.1000, we have fish at about 0.1001, pigeons at 0.1003, cats at 0.1004, dogs at 0.1004, chimps at 0.1007, people at 0.1009, me and you at 0.10091, stupid races at 0.10089, It [cyberspace] in 2010 at 0.101, in 2020 at 0.11, in 2030 at 0.2, in 2050 at 1, 2100 at 20. The biological world fits into a very narrow sector at the bottom of the smarts leader board. Yes, humans, especially readers of this SI discussion, are smarter than chimps and most other bizarrely clever humans, but we shouldn't be too boastful about that. Until we can spell and put apostrophe's in the right place. As you wrote, we should take it easy on our neighbours. We aren't that much better. So, come on Faultline, stop sleeping on the job! Mqurice PS: <It appears to me that having high intelligence makes it less likely that a person will succeed in most occupations. It's a matter of too much of a good thing. In addition, I've noticed that people who are obviously stupid have ways of compensating for the deficit. > That's right. What we do is avoid getting into situations we don't understand [as much as possible, though being born inside a Calabi-Yau equation is a problem]. That compensates nicely. It keeps me out of trouble and saves a furrowed brow. But I don't buy that 'being intelligent' correlates with failure. Most people want more intelligence and educate their children in the false hope that they'll be smarter than their parents. If you need a brain surgeon to cut out a tumour, would you really try for a stupid one to do it? How about a teacher for your children? You want a dullard? A mechanic for your car? Smart ones figure it out and do it right first go. Evolution has selected smart because it does a really good job for us. When people can select smart DNA for their children, I bet they check that box on the CDNA menu [along with 'get rid of diseases'].