i believe that long ago, our brain capacity were much less evolved. It was very small that even child of today say 5 years is at least 100 times smarter then the apeman of say 6000 years ago. well, I think you get the picture. The reason for this post is because some folks think that we were smarter back then and are getting dumber due to defective gene since creation of man as what's being said in the bible. hmm, their is nothing to prove that is right, if so they would had robot,spaceship,nano technology,computers, since beginning of time and we should be apeman by now.
Human evolution
- Thread starter RobCur
- Start date
I never heard of that theory... where are you reading that we're getting dumber due to defective genes?
i believe i've heard that theory before, on some christian website, but i dont think it was saying exactly that.
lol, we didn't change THAT much in 6000 years!
5000 years ago we were developing theories about math and building pyramids, you don't see too many 5 year olds doing that.
DrPizza
Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Relatively speaking, we're getting dumber....
That's because aggregate human knowledge is growing at an exponential rate, while our brains still learn at the same old rate...
Nonetheless, we're wayyyyyyyyy smarter than people were even 100 years ago.
That's because aggregate human knowledge is growing at an exponential rate, while our brains still learn at the same old rate...
Nonetheless, we're wayyyyyyyyy smarter than people were even 100 years ago.
I wouldn't say that...
100 years ago people were self sufficient. Nowadays most people are helpless consumers.
I think that the majority of the population is getting dumber with a few bloodlines getting very smarter. So it averages out a little on the dumb side.
That's an interesting slant, and I see what you are getting at, but how are we dumber than people from 100 years ago?
Wasn't human knowledge growing at the same rate at that time?
Yes, brain capacity WAS smaller back then. However, not only has brain capacity (and the composition of the brain itself?) changed, but we also use our brains more efficiently. I believe that accounts more for the development of civilization than anything else.
Using our brain more efficiently allowed us to develop new technologies and such to simplify tasks, protect ourselves from the elements, etc. and thus provide more time to think? Just my opinion...
Using our brain more efficiently allowed us to develop new technologies and such to simplify tasks, protect ourselves from the elements, etc. and thus provide more time to think? Just my opinion...
I wouldn't think so, but I have no formal education, and would like to hear convincing arguments either way.
well, then thats saying that human knowledge is based solely on its ability to survive, which, by the survival of the human species itself, shows that that isn't true.
actually, the fact that we aren't self-sufficient shows that we are intelligent, since we have essentially created large groups that are specialized, much like the cells in our body. some make food, some protect, etc.
theres no way people 100 years ago were not as smart if not smarter than we are today...
how many people in their head can add multiply or even divide??? No calculators, no computers, it all had to be done on paper or in their heads.... Kids and even adults today are retards without modern equipment compared to people of past.
how many people in their head can add multiply or even divide??? No calculators, no computers, it all had to be done on paper or in their heads.... Kids and even adults today are retards without modern equipment compared to people of past.
i think what it all boils down to is what you consider "being smart" or intelligence to be. as some of you pointed out, if you consider it to be the ability to accomplish certain tasks (self-sufficiency, mathematics), than you could argue no, we aren't as advanced as we used to be in the past. however, if you look at the developments mankind has accomplished, and compare that to where we were, than yes, we are definitely far more advanced. i think the major difference between now and say, 500 years ago, is the sharing of knowledge. the physical differences in our brains may not be that different, if at all, but we have learning down to a science, so how we use our brains is much more efficient.
I think Berzerker has hit a profound point and perhaps doesn't realize not only how correct he is, but how significant whata he says is.
Consider this:
The human body consists of billions of distinct cells. Each of those cells forms a larger system with like cells; skin cells form the epidermal layer with other skin cells, heart cells form the heart, etc etc.
All of those parts work almost independently, with little to no feedback from the other internal systems - The brain certainly doesn't monitor the work of the white blood cells, the heart doesn't get involved with what the skin does, and so on.
Each of these billions of cells has a job to do, encoded in its DNA strands, and it does it without complaining and without being told what to do.
In a sense, our bodies are communists.
Society has evolved in much the same way. At first we were scattered across the globe, working independently. Now, technology has shrunk the world to a size where we're much more intertwined, our actions have repercussions that ripple out further than before, and we serve as the individual cells in sentient being we don't even know exists - The world. Really, you can think of humankind as one giant organism, in which the individual humans are like the cells.
We're not to the point where we're totally autonomous and capable of functioning without other inputs, and I have no delusions that we'll ever reach that point. I think the likelihood that a sentient machine intelligence emerges is a million times more probably than humankind ever working together completely and utterly coordinated; I blame our memes.
Regardless of how far we are from being like the human body, we nonetheless share some similarities.
Regarding the idea of "are we smarter than the people 100 years ago?" it depends.
Have our brains evolved or devolved in the last century? Certainly not. 100 years isn't enough time to experience any worthwhile mutations in biological organisms.
Nonetheless, thanks to the fact that human knowledge is cumulative, and technology makes it multiplicative, the amount we know about the universe is growing at an exponential rate. Human understanding about the fundementals of every facet of knowledge has grown a thousandfold in the last century, and will continue to do so.
Our brains may be incapable of absorbing the entirety of the human knowledge base, but our ability to sift the important information from the unimportant remains intact, and therefore due to the information at our disposal, we ARE smarter than those that came before.
Reading this thread makes me weep at the possibility we can no longer think at all. God save us.
OS
Lifer
- Oct 11, 1999
- 15,581
- 1
- 76
I'll vouch for this, every reputable source I have read says brain capacity/ability, people are the same now as they were six thousand years ago.
Obviously total human knowledge today is tremendously larger than it was at the birth of human civilization, but on an individual ability level, on average a person today has no more potential than someone had six thousand years ago.
If you time travelled back to the beginning of human civilization, took a newborn and placed him or her in a foster family today, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
sometimes when i read certain posts in ATOT (not this one) i feel stupider. I guess your theory is partly true.
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