We were tallking about intelligence, not some rare genetic
decease. It is not even an accepted fact that intelligence
is inheritable. So - you are saying, that most of humanity
is less intelligent than used to be? I'd like to see your
evidence, please. And I don't like the "concern"
neither. It's like Stalin or Pinochet looking at
infants they need punish at times, purely out of concern
for orderliness.
I dispare. If you represent today's intelligentia,
I start to understand people being deeply suspicious -
they show more intelligence than I had so far in this respect.
Eva
>
> > Not informed , yes. But not intelligent?? I wasn't aware of
> > any decline in public intelligence. Any data?
> > Voting and tv vieing habits are not valid - they belong to
> > the "not informed" bit.
> >
> > I am seriously concerned now. How many of this list have
> > this total contempt for most of humanity???
> >
>
> Not contempt, Eva. Concern. The decline isn't limited to mental
> (brain/nervous system). No species is composed of exact replicas/equals.
> Adaptive fitness is a reality. Humans are the only species known that
> attempts to make differences disappear - a physical impossibility. For
> those dealing in 'souls' or 'spirits', I have nothing to say, and you have
> nothing to show us.
>
> This doesn't make deep democracy impossible; recall Garrett Harden's
> "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" as the rational way forward. (see
> Jay's site: dieoff.org)
>
> Steve
>
>
> See this report from yesterday's BBC:
>
>
> Humans may be collecting bad genes
> January 27, BBC Net
> <http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_264000/264191.stm>
>
> Better health care might be causing humans to become weaker.
> Humans could be getting weaker and sicker with each new generation
> because of a build up of bad genes.
> Most animals weed out harmful genetic mutations by natural
> selection -- only the fittest survive long enough to reproduce. But in
> humans the weak have been prevented from dying out by improvements in
> standards of living and health care.
> Commenting on the research published in Nature, James Crow, from the
> University of Wisconsin in Madison, said it was likely that in this
> situation natural selection would "weed out mutations more slowly than they
> accumulate".
> He said: "Are some of our headaches, stomach upsets, weak eyesight
> and other ailments the result of mutation accumulation? Probably, but in
> our
> present state of knowledge we can only speculate."
> Geneticists Adam Eyre-Walker, from the University of Sussex in
> Brighton, and Peter Keightley, from the University of Edinburgh carried out
> the new research. They calculated the rate at which human genes have
> mutated
> since our ancestors split from chimpanzees six million years ago.
> Keightley told the BBC: "We estimate that about 4.2 new mutations
> have occurred on average every generation in the human lineage since we
> diverged from the chimpanzees, and that 1.6 of those are deleterious."
> That rate is so high that without other factors intervening the
> human
> race should be extinct by now.
> One possible reason that humans have survived is that in the past
> natural selection eliminated handfuls of harmful genes because individuals
> with lots of mutations died early, before reproducing.
> But it is also likely that genes which were only slightly harmful
> became "fixed" in successive generations. Over time these would accumulate,
> especially if improving living standards and health care meant that the
> harmful genes were less of a handicap for survival.
>
> (more links on the URL above)
>
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