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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (66227)	12/17/2004 6:58:23 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

I think I agree with you about the cavekid being capable of keeping up with a modernkid, although part of the Flynn conclusions/possible explanations was that environment and nurture may play a big part. Still, that seemed a rather Big Guess on the part of the author. By the time they realize they are in trouble, the newcomer has exponentialed their way into top-dog position. Made me think of another of the book's ideas that had me doing a doubletake. It is, I assume, the author's explanation of the missing links. We humans think we have run out of challenges. We perceive our world as having been tamed. Over hundreds of thousands of years we've carved out our biological niche. We widened it with incessant competition with, and ultimate destruction of, our closest natural competitors. Look at the primates. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, baboons-- all have varying degrees of intelligence arrayed along a spectrum. Each represents a point on that spectrum not very far from each other. But when you look down at the end of the spectrum, what lies next beyond the intelligence of the chimpanzee? There's nothing until you get to the standard by which intelligence is measured-- the human. We aren't the strongest, the fastest, or the greatest in number, but we are the smartest. Our forbears understood the threat posed by intelligence, so they extinguished our brighter competitors and left as our closest relative only the duller species that evolved into chimpanzees.