Humans slowly but surely losing intellectual & emotional abilities?(medicalxpress.com)
medicalxpress.com
Humans slowly but surely losing intellectual & emotional abilities?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-humans-slowly-surely-intellectual-emotional.html
4 comments
Neuroskeptic has a good response to these articles at http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2012/11/were-probably-not-g..., essentially arguing against Crabtree's thesis for being too speculative.
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which may have weakened the power of selection to weed out mutations leading to intellectual disabilities
What the hell does it mean? Smart people aren't breeding? Intellectually disabled people are breeding?
What the hell does it mean? Smart people aren't breeding? Intellectually disabled people are breeding?
It means that in developed countries there is almost no natural selection, and it's unethical to weed out weak genes synthetically because that's called a holocaust.
Actually weeding out "weak" genes is eugenics, it is increasingly done without genocide. This appears to be a larger ethical issue today (and certainly in the 60s and 70s) than during the holocaust.
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It means that the amount by which smart people out breed less smart people has decreased.
For a detailed explanation, see the soon-to-be-reclassified-as-a-documentary film Idiocracy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Refer to the film "idiocracy" for a dystopian vision of why this is happening and what the outcome might likely be.
Evolution is a process that occurs over vast amounts of time. Trying to draw conclusions about the fate of human evolution based on developments of the last hundred years would be remarkably foolhardy. You might as well try to plot a bee's course based on the last microsecond of its movements.
Sure, people with genetic weaknesses that might have been quickly selected against 10,000 years ago are now able to live long & full lives, naturally leading -- for now -- to the continued spread of those genetic variations. However, humans are also right now unique on the planet for our ability to alter our own genetics; I have no doubt that within the next hundred years, within the very next evolutionary microsecond, we will have the technological ability to choose the course of our own evolution.
And I doubt very seriously that there will be much room for serious disease in that future.