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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crabbe who wrote (3233)	1/11/2006 4:22:31 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 219648

Keep in mind that the Flynn Effect is in relation to averages, not the smartest current human example. So going backwards doesn't get to a chimp being the smartest in Newton's time. And the Flynn Effect is a 20th century phenomenon, which doesn't mean that it can be extrapolated backwards at the same rate. Though if one goes from 100,000 years ago until now, there has been a very rapid increase in mental horsepower. So the Flynn Effect, at least to some extent, can be projected backwards. While intelligence isn't as simple to measure as the length of a piece of wood, it's definitely a thing which exists and is measurable, as we all know from our own experience. We know there are smarter and less smart beings. That's measurement, even without cunning tests. <Also why would female selection of intelligence in a mate be a greater selective agent in increasing human intelligence today than in the past. > With 6 billion people, the rate of evolution is faster than ever. Mutations are happening vastly more frequently than when there were only 1 million people. More people are dying than ever. Car accidents alone kill more young guys than wars did 1000 years ago [I just made that up]. Selection can ditch 10% of the population and leave a LOT of people to go on with, and that can happen even with the population dropping to 1 billion. Evolution is a numbers game and the more the merrier and the faster things change. Per capita, the sexual selection process wouldn't be faster now than back in the day. But women can clean out the bottom decile and still have vast numbers of males to contend with without humans fizzling out. The last man on Earth might not be attractive, but he would probably do. Mqurice