Tuesday 13 November 2012

civilization ended humanity's smarts.


Civilization, its cities and the settled farming  that founded it all may actually be the  beginning of The End for Humanity.   
This would explain  our suicidal rush to end life on earth.

Has our cognitive ability risen steadily since our forebears knapped the first stone tools? Or are our smartest days behind us?
Since modern humans emerged from the evolutionary brambles of our ancient ancestry, our bodies and minds have been transforming under the pressures of natural and sexual selection. But what of human intelligence? Has our cognitive ability risen steadily since our forebears knapped the first stone tools? Or are our smartest days behind us
Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford University in California, bets on the latter. He believes that if an average Greek from 1,000 BC were transported to modern times, he or she would be one of the brightest among us. Our intellectual prowess has probably been sliding south since the invention of farming and the rise of high-density living that it allowed, he claims.


At the heart of Crabtree's thinking is a simple idea. In the past, when our ancestors (and those who failed to become our ancestors) faced the harsh realities of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the punishment for stupidity was more often than not death. And so, Crabtree argues, enormous evolutionary pressure bore down on early humans, selecting out the dimwits, and raising the intellect of the survivors' descendants. But not so today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/nov/12/pampered-humanity-less-intelligent

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