Naked Science Forum

General Science => Question of the Week => Topic started by: thedoc on 20/05/2009 10:08:59

Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: thedoc on 20/05/2009 10:08:59
A good friend and I were talking the other day about a possible reversal of natural selection in today’s world.  She theorized that with modern society as it is, highly skilled, intelligent people are either having less children or putting it off altogether due to the time constraints and lifestyle choices. Leaving those, while trying to put it nicely, less intellectually gifted, the job of providing the bulk of population growth. But is there any scientific evidence to back it up?

Asked by Steve, from Dubai

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Title: None
Post by: thedoc on 20/05/2009 10:08:59
We put this to James R. Flynn, presently at the Sage Foundation in New York, but normally a Professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand:

The question of this dysgenic mating, and by that we mean that people with lesser education are having more children than people with more education, would, if it were universal and persistent, and not contradicted by anything else, probably be a problem over a period of 100 or 200 years. But it’s not universal and countries where everyone has a middle-class lifestyle like Scandinavia, and where you have real educational quality for everyone, you don’t have this trend.

Now you can always say, is there any chance that countries like Britain, or America will achieve that degree of social justice, maybe they won’t. But there is the Flynn effect, that is: well we might be losing one IQ-point a generation through dysgenic mating, we are picking up something like 9-points a generation due to environmental factors. Better schooling, more interaction between parent and child, a more cognitively rich environment.

Now that may run out of steam eventually but we don’t have any real reason to be concerned in the meantime. If IQ gains due to environmental factors stop happening and if we are silly enough not to make our societies more equal, then over a 200-year period you might start worrying about the fact that the brighter people aren’t having as many kids.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Make it Lady on 20/05/2009 21:08:44
It is not just nature you know. 3000 girls under the age of 16 years old have a baby in one year in Britain. This means that not only are these babies being born to very stupid girls and boys but also there are children being brought up by children. I think the latter has more of a bearing on the future generation as these children are more likely to fail at school. One fertility stopper for the less educated is that most people in prison can not read and a good portion have educational special needs.
OK I'm very tongue in cheek here but I guess if we protect our weak links they will breed and in some cases pass on the problems both by nature and nurture. In more severe circumstances these week links would not survive and breed.
Having said that, thank god we can protect our weak links. I love our diverse society and if we were all super intelligent life would be dull. However, the teenage Mums concern me. It shows a lack of imagination, drive and probably parental love amongst our teens.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: RD on 20/05/2009 22:11:54
3000 girls under the age of 16 years old have a baby in one year in Britain.
This means that not only are these babies being born to very stupid girls


This isn't stupidity it's exploitation: they are giving birth to hostages who will fund their lifestyle.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Don_1 on 21/05/2009 12:15:39
I have to agree with you MIL. This shows a lack of parental guidance and concern and will get worse since the new generation parents are little more than children themselves. It also concerns me that there appears to be a 'competition' culture emerging to be the oldest mother, the youngest mother, the youngest grandmother etc.

I think that to some extent the problems lye in the modern attitude to treat children as 'young adults', putting pressure on them to grow up too quickly. They should be allowed to be children and to enjoy and explore there childhood years.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: thelastman on 24/05/2009 16:16:04
I don't think that would be a reversal of Natural Selection.  All that matters is survival and reproductive success.  So if the stupid, by way of their stupid-ness, are selected by a stupid-environment more so then the un-stupid, then stupid-ness will spread across the land.

 
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: JnA on 25/05/2009 06:25:34
People who lack education have, for centuries, been the more prolific breeders, yet we are more intelligent (as far as discoveries and understanding self) as a race than we have ever been before.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Make it Lady on 25/05/2009 22:33:13
I guess if all the top intellectuals took part in selective breeding the offspring would start to weaken. This showed up in royal families that had to marry people of their own standing. Certainly all the pedigree animals I have ever met have been think as the proverbial.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: techmatt on 28/05/2009 00:01:38
Lets just say it is true for a minute. I have the cure. Remove all warning labels. The stupid ones will kill them selves before they have a chance to breed. It would be a return to natural selection.  [;)]
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: DrN on 28/05/2009 00:09:02
People who lack education have, for centuries, been the more prolific breeders, yet we are more intelligent (as far as discoveries and understanding self) as a race than we have ever been before.

Yes, but historically, those of less education had vastly higher mortality rates than the educated.

Also, the children of the rich and educated were often brought up by servants, so I'm not sure how this affects the arguement of kids being brought up by the ill-educated.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: JnA on 28/05/2009 01:07:45
People who lack education have, for centuries, been the more prolific breeders, yet we are more intelligent (as far as discoveries and understanding self) as a race than we have ever been before.

Yes, but historically, those of less education had vastly higher mortality rates than the educated.


without actually looking at figures I still hazard a guess that the higher mortality rate had little real effect on ratios of breeding between the groups.


Also, the children of the rich and educated were often brought up by servants, so I'm not sure how this affects the arguement of kids being brought up by the ill-educated.

They were cared for by others, sure, but wealthy children still had access to better education and more opportunity. Even as very young children the sorts of experiences they had (outings, visitors and toys) would have been more conducive to 'better education'.
Even today, wealthier families are able to afford education systems that allow for greater opportunities.

Of course, I am not saying that the individual is stuck within their social position, we all know people who rise through adversity and those who sink in prosperity.. just being general.

I don't think the 'stupid' will outbreed the clever.. I'm also sceptical that there are 'more stupid' people around now than (proportionally) at any time before. What I do know is that in our modern world the people that would once have continued on with their lives in relative obscurity now have youtube.

Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: thedoc on 10/06/2009 10:16:13
Did we mention your answer on air?  Listen to the answer to this question on our podcast to find out... (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/podcasts/show/2009.05.24/)
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: keokeo on 18/06/2009 04:23:20
I would love to join this forum. Nice to meet you here [:P]

stealth spam from a stealthy spam merchant - now banned and blacklisted!
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Chemistry4me on 18/06/2009 04:46:08
I would love to join this forum. Nice to meet you here [:P]
Nice try, I nearly missed it.

-----
The link that he's got is in white.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: pakman on 04/07/2009 08:46:56
im sure with proper education and schools, the retarded ones can become as smart as the last generation of smart ones.IQ is rising among peeps.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Chemistry4me on 04/07/2009 08:53:33
IQ is rising among peeps.
I'm sure that's what they all say....
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: mudd1 on 28/07/2009 08:35:06
It's a potential problem caused by the current social and technological state. Social and technological change is much faster though than biological evolution so I don't think we have any reason to be concerned.

James Flynn pointed out a social change that might solve the alleged problem, let me point out technical ones: As much as we currently find the idea of genetically manipulating human beings revolting, let's assume people will one day find a set of genes that determines intellectual genius and possess a mechanism of safely inserting this set of genes into a fertilised egg. Do you seriously think that not a single country on earth will think of this as the quick and easy solution for most of its economical and educational problems? And how will the other countries react? Even if they all decide that their traditional values are more important, how many of their inhabitants will beg to differ and just travel to that country to conceive their children to give them what they think to be a headstart? My point just is: No matter how determined we currently are not to change the genetic makeup of humans, it will some day happen and that will shape the human genome much more than any selection for large family sizes.

If you don't believe this however, family sizes might actually correlate positively with income when medical progress increases the life span and especially the reproductive life span further.

So the bottom line is: Our society will continue to change dramatically both socially and technologically and any projection based on the current state while assuming it to persist over evolutionary time scales is probably not going to predict anything that's really going to happen. And in any case, if in a couple of centuries we're still around and the issue didn't just resolve itself, we can still then try to find a solution.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Ians Daddy on 09/08/2009 06:51:11
I don't feel that it is a question of stupidity. It never has been. Knowledge is there. It is, however, a case of laziness. Are we becoming more lazy? Sure we are. Will the Lazy outbreed the productive. I hope not.

Just a thought.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: graham.d on 09/08/2009 11:28:51
A whole lot of assumptions are being made in this thread. For a start, natural selection is about survival of the species and one assumption being made is that high IQ is going to be better for this. I think Douglas Adams made amusing comments about this in the "hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" when all the "useless people" were banished to another planet with a disasterous outcome. IQ tests are a measure of our ability to do IQ tests. As has been shown, and acknowledged in some comments above, IQ is not wholly governed (as was once believed by eminent psycholgists) by genetics but can be changed by quite a large extent by environment and education.

There has been much work on how to correlate simple tests (like IQ tests) with success in life, but I wonder to what extent we weight these tests with what we perceive as important today. I can think quite a few people who excel in their field of interest but are quite hopeless outside it and, in contrast, I can think of quite a few others who are generally very sensible and reliable but who do not have any outstanding talent. Both groups undoubtedly have a fairly wide IQ distribution and both groups are valuable and necessary in a working society.

It may be interesting to think how a society's demographics may be affected by a higher birthrate by sections of a community, but in discussing such issues it is worthwhile to try to step back and see these discussions from an "outside" perspective. Here are a bunch of reasonably high-IQ people discussing how their view of the future will change for the worse if nothing is done to give them a breeding advantage over the "lesser beings". How similar is this to the ideas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which led to the ideas of eugenics and the resulting genocidal consequences?

As mudd1 says, we are probably approaching an era where we will be able to manipulate the genetic make-up of our offspring and that it will likely be yet another Pandora's box full of enabling, scientific advancement but without any ethical guidelines to go with it. I would not be confident that this will be of general advancement to the human race, at least not without setbacks, but I would agree it is likely to happen. It may be a measure of the quality of our society in how well such advances are handled. If such capability is limited and distibuted fairly we may have some chance of allowing more social interchange and reducing the problems resulting from class differentials. If it is something restricted in availability to those who can afford it, we are in danger of exacerbating problems and creating a more divergent social structure.
Title: None
Post by: Simon from Oz on 14/11/2009 00:17:26
I think the original poster is correct to be concerned about the reversal of natural selection.  It's real and it's a problem.

But - as the above posters have mentioned, it has little or nothing to do with IQ. That was a red herring.  There is no evidence to suggest that the special as a whole would be worse off if less educated people breed more.  Perhaps the species would be better off - after all it's the smart ones who go on to invent things like nuclear weapons!

The real issue here - and it certainly worries me as an evolution "hobbyist" - is that people with diseases that should be fatal are in fact being treated and are able to breed.

Now don't get me wrong here - I'm not suggesting that people with diseases shouldn't be allowed to breed. I'm just observing the simple and scientific fact that as little as 50 years ago people with diseases like diabetes, hemophilia, certain genetic cancers, heart diseases etc, were statistically less likely to live long enough to have children.  Less likely than a person who didn't have those genes.  Natural selection would, by definition, favor the healthy people having children.  This tends to reduce diseases in the population as a whole.

My big concern is that because people with genetic conditions can get medical treatment and have children, these diseases will become more and more common.  Is it any wonder that diabetes, asthma and other diseases are increasingly common (in Australia the growth rates are huge).  It's not really a shock - it's to do with the reversal - or rather the dismantlement - of natural selection.  People who would never normally get to breed in the "wild" (read "olden days") are having babies.

Fast forward 200 years and I can see a situation where a huge percentage of the world has medical problems that were once very rare.  

This is what I research in my job.  And it scares me.

Simon
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: rlopes on 22/04/2010 16:29:48
I have a solution for this: The Naked Science Dating program.
I can also volunteer as a breeder, for the sake of humanity of course  [;D]
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Ophiolite on 22/04/2010 17:11:02
Several posts in this thread reveal a lack of understanding onatural selection.

First and foremost natural selection does not have a consistent direction, therefore it cannot be reversed.

That leads, naturally, to the second point: the direction of natural selection is to select organisms that are more fit for their current, specific environment. If the environment changes then the characteristics that will make the organsism fit also change.

Which leads to the third point. Natural selection is very much alive and well in humanity. We now have an environment in which it is not a major disadvantage (in terms of reproductive success) to have a genetically based disease. Consequently natural selection will tend not to select against such.

I have worn glasses since the age of eight. If I had lived in an environment in which corrective lenses were not available there would have been an inreased risk that I would not have lived long enugh to father children. As it is I have passed my genes on the the next generation and the one after that. Is my grandaughter an example of the reversal of natural selection. Obviously not.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: echochartruse on 22/04/2010 20:11:20
............The real issue here - and it certainly worries me as an evolution "hobbyist" - is that people with diseases that should be fatal are in fact being treated and are able to breed.

Now don't get me wrong here - I'm not suggesting that people with diseases shouldn't be allowed to breed. I'm just observing the simple and scientific fact that as little as 50 years ago people with diseases like diabetes, hemophilia, certain genetic cancers, heart diseases etc, were statistically less likely to live long enough to have children.  Less likely than a person who didn't have those genes.  Natural selection would, by definition, favor the healthy people having children.  This tends to reduce diseases in the population as a whole.

My big concern is that because people with genetic conditions can get medical treatment and have children, these diseases will become more and more common.  Is it any wonder that diabetes, asthma and other diseases are increasingly common (in Australia the growth rates are huge).  It's not really a shock - it's to do with the reversal - or rather the dismantlement - of natural selection.  People who would never normally get to breed in the "wild" (read "olden days") are having babies.

Fast forward 200 years and I can see a situation where a huge percentage of the world has medical problems that were once very rare. 

This is what I research in my job.  And it scares me.

Simon


Similarly is the fact that people who are unable to reproduce are given the opportunity, through science. Woman who can only birth via cesarean section for example. Doctors here in Oz are pushing all woman to elect to deliver via cesarean section whether they require it or not.

This should be a great concern to us all.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: echochartruse on 22/04/2010 20:13:19
im sure with proper education and schools, the retarded ones can become as smart as the last generation of smart ones.IQ is rising among peeps.

IQ is only as good as the person who devised the test.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: echochartruse on 22/04/2010 20:25:06
It is not just nature you know. 3000 girls under the age of 16 years old have a baby in one year in Britain. This means that not only are these babies being born to very stupid girls and boys but also there are children being brought up by children. I think the latter has more of a bearing on the future generation as these children are more likely to fail at school. One fertility stopper for the less educated is that most people in prison can not read and a good portion have educational special needs.
OK I'm very tongue in cheek here but I guess if we protect our weak links they will breed and in some cases pass on the problems both by nature and nurture. In more severe circumstances these week links would not survive and breed.
Having said that, thank god we can protect our weak links. I love our diverse society and if we were all super intelligent life would be dull. However, the teenage Mums concern me. It shows a lack of imagination, drive and probably parental love amongst our teens.
I personally think that being a teenage parent doesn't make you stupid. some woman's life ambition is to be a mum. Some just make a simple mistake. I would imagine in the days prior to contraception woman used to reproduce at the earliest age.

In Australian prisons it has been recorded that the majority of white collar crimes are done by genius. There are more genius in our gaols using their talents for evil than for good.

So I suppose a high IQ doesn't make you a good person or a good parent.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Geezer on 23/04/2010 06:43:09
I doubt that our fate will be determined by breeding. Even the most uneducated humans are extremely clever.

It's all about society and education. So called "uncivilized" cultures tend to have great societies. The "civilized" cultures tend to have the greatest problems with antisocial behaviour (unless they are completely repressed.)

If we cannot reconcile society with civilization and recognize that we are only one society, we will extinguish ourselves.
Title: None
Post by: Ultima on 22/05/2010 00:10:47
IQ tests apply to different aspects of the concept we call intelligence.  People can excel at particular IQ tests and be bad at others.  

Ophiolite, your comments are misleading.   For the sake of simplicity:

Artificial = man made
Natural = that which has evolved over billions of years

Reverse of natural selection = survival of the weakest
(I'd say possible, but not for very long)

Natural selection = Selection in a natural environment
(Humanity are more and more outside this scope and please don't say what we've created is natural, humanity has only been around for a fraction of natural history)

What Simon from Oz says is a serious matter if one is concerned about the future of humanity, and it is a matter of fact.  

Now some of my own thoughts.   It is entirely possibly to create an environment that causes a reduction in intelligence.   It is plausible that it is currently happening, linked in with a legacy of disease (and hence suffering) to future generations.

Given the rather selfish age we live in, ie the self being given higher importance than the community or future, the only recourse I can see is genetics as stated above - but this has potentially disastrous consequences.  

Further to that, we live more and more in an environment of toxic man-made chemicals that our bodies have no means of defence.   Thus there are other problems genetics cannot solve.

We have a gift in our ability to survive in relative comfort with the natural environment, gained since time immemorial.  Making genetic changes, most which have unforeseeable consequences, has the capacity of ruining this ability.
Title: None
Post by: TomSwift on 26/07/2010 08:01:01
"and by that we mean that people with lesser education are having more children than people with more education"

With respect, education is not the same as intelligence.

Second, The Bell Curve makes it clear that the welfare state actually increases this problem by giving poor people more money for children. So "making society more equal" is not a cure.

Personally though I'm more concerned with personality traits. ADD and other disorders are probably caused by letting people who are so emotional/impulsive that they forget to use a condom outbreed the responsible. If we let people who can not focus past their orgasm outbreed us, we should not be surprised when we have a group of children that can't focus for more than 5 minutes...
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: cheryl j on 22/11/2011 01:21:07
Well, one could argue that if we lose a few IQ points, it might be worth it if the rich, greedy resource hogging SOBs at the top become extinct. Just sayin'.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: imatfaal on 22/11/2011 11:25:57
Well, one could argue that if we lose a few IQ points, it might be worth it if the rich, greedy resource hogging SOBs at the top become extinct. Just sayin'.
The greedy resource hungry top fraction that invented the electric light; developed modern medicine; wrote heart-rending poetry; composed magnificent opera; thought of the wheel, fire, tool-use, and the digital watch; visited the moon, eradicated small-pox ...  terrible drain on society we can live without em!  sooner we get back to living in dark caves the better, damn it perhaps moving out of the oceans was a bad idea in the first place


h/t to the wonderful d.a.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: CZARCAR on 22/11/2011 17:32:44
Well, one could argue that if we lose a few IQ points, it might be worth it if the rich, greedy resource hogging SOBs at the top become extinct. Just sayin'.
The greedy resource hungry top fraction that invented the electric light; developed modern medicine; wrote heart-rending poetry; composed magnificent opera; thought of the wheel, fire, tool-use, and the digital watch; visited the moon, eradicated small-pox ...  terrible drain on society we can live without em!  sooner we get back to living in dark caves the better, damn it perhaps moving out of the oceans was a bad idea in the first place


h/t to the wonderful d.a.
u 4got yachts,private jets,NASCAR & toys in general + the progress involves $ which favors the rich & results in preempting evolution?
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: cheryl j on 22/11/2011 19:07:33
The greedy resource hungry top fraction that invented the electric light; developed modern medicine; wrote heart-rending poetry; composed magnificent opera; thought of the wheel, fire, tool-use, and the digital watch; visited the moon, eradicated small-pox ...  terrible drain on society we can live without em!  sooner we get back to living in dark caves the better, damn it perhaps moving out of the oceans was a bad idea in the first place


h/t to the wonderful d.a.

Well, for every Bill Gates, there's probably a lot more Paris Hiltons, so I'm sure it will balance out IQ wise in the end.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: satrah on 11/12/2011 05:30:55
Having a high level of intelligence does not make a person a superior person for breeding. I have lived with university students doing their masters degree and lack in fundamental life skill: student number one. I watch this student for two weeks trying to ride a pushbike in the backyard with half flat tyres and going in 3 meters circles and falling off repeatedly. Student also doing masters cannot use a screw driver at all he passed it to me and said “can you do”. Student 3 doing masters in Information technology needed help with knowledge on virus protection and how to reinstall windows operating system.  OMG how did these people get in to uni

 I have lived with drug users and alcoholics that had kept the house cleaner then these people. Just because people are at university does not make a person educated it just means they have meet the basis requirement to get into university. Just because a student has completed their university degree does not make them qualified, it only mean they have complete the basis requirement to complete the course.

I have been told all my life that I have to be smart to get in to uni. Now I am in my second year of uni.  5 year ago I could hardly read or write. So be kind on my grammar skill, I’m slowly getting there .
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: widereader on 21/12/2011 13:54:47
Well, in the Gaussian curve, we can see that there are a little number of smart people, a lot of average people, and a little number of not so clever people.  Since smart people  plan very well for their kids and their future, they tend to produce a small number of kids compared to the not so clever who do not think of their children's future. There is a possibility that the stupid will outbreed the clever.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: cheryl j on 24/12/2011 16:27:13
I just cant believe that human intelligence is such a simple and consistant trait in groups or families that it can be selected for so easily in a few generations. How many successful businessmen did not come from especially privileged backgrounds? How many kids with rich, smart parents end up doing absolutely nothing with their lives or self destructing? How many US presidents have had a derelict, idiot brother? How do you do explain Billy Carter? Have you ever seen Clinton's mom on TV?
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: yor_on on 24/12/2011 17:02:25
In a way this is educated BS. We've existed on this planet for quite a bit, and we've come far in the last centuries. It had nothing to do with 'selective breeding', and after the second world war this kind of unfresh 'educated speculation' was gone. But people apparently have a inbreed need to make themselves better than the next one, and so this comes back, again and again.

How about checking up ones own ancestors, I will guarantee you all to have had some really stupid people in your family tree. Would you have liked us to stop them from breeding? Then you might not be here at all, and neither would your 'education' be. Give me a break, to name some hypothesis with a nice Greek/latin name to make it sound all scientific, like phrenology, doesn't make it true. Genetics seems to become the new buzzword here, and to be honest, reading some views makes me wonder where we are and what the he* education stands for.

We just can't stop deciding other peoples life's, can we?
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Lor on 26/12/2011 07:08:46
........"ADD and other disorders are probably caused by ....." thats an intelligent
objective observation totally based on fact...NOT! your whole post is dripping with prejudicial, slanted statements driven by snobbery and anger. Some educated people are really dumb, some are very intelligent as are poor people you spoke so nice of .

Now to voice my 2 cents-We are living on the forefront of an amazing time-the computer has brought forth a technological renaissance so to speak-with medicine and science gaining leaps and bounds in advancement. But we as human beings, in most peoples minds ,advanced,but animals none the less-have managed to populate, pollute the earth to the point of beginning to kill off ocean inhabitants,ruin the environment to the point of global warming, speeding up the ice age coming-maybe too fast for most life to adapt they say..i could go on and on but as Mark Twain once said-we believe we are a higher life form than all other animals  but we arent-we're inferior.and as we continue to eat up every last natural resource and over populate the earth and still refuse to see the end we just prove it once again.

So as far as natural selection theory goes-is the accumulation of knowlege and our own 'top 1% percent of population labeled intelligent' the real problem?  By some criteria you would have to say yes. There are tribes in Africa secluded from the outside world without modern conveniences and they have no problem with food supply, hunger,they aren't polluting the earth etc. Doesn't this fall right in line with the theory? natural selection at its best? is intelligence and knowledge necessarily superior and a desired selection  in evolution?
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Pmb on 06/05/2012 22:11:22
It is not just nature you know. 3000 girls under the age of 16 years old have a baby in one year in Britain. This means that not only are these babies being born to very stupid girls and boys but also there are children being brought up by children.
Forgive me for being vauge. I just woke up and am very groggy.
I don't see a direct relation between young girls and boys and low inteligence. The only relation I see how horny they are and the culture they are in which promotes promiscuity in the young.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Ophiolite on 09/05/2012 11:33:38
I agree with Pmb. My IQ is approxiamtely 150, but the only thing that stopped me becoming a teenage parent was fortuitous ugliness.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: UniqueObserver on 14/06/2012 17:47:48
have to agree with jazzderry... surely natural selection apllied to todays society would favour the non-intellectual because it has proven to give the highest number of offspring on avg and after all thats what its all about right.... i mean, you dnt really have to worry about your child starving to death in most parts of the world, disease and dehydration, all basic needs that no longer register as obstacles to reproduction, therefore the only restrictions left are time and energy which is pretty much finite so if you spend it on work you sacrafise at home and if you're at home a lot you're going to have children..its instinct
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Ophiolite on 20/06/2012 08:30:57
You assume intellectuals are born, not made.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: cheryl j on 21/06/2012 02:57:16
One thing we tend to forget is that we really are artificially delaying reproduction in humans. While getting pregnant when you are 17 may not be the best life choice, you can't really call it pathological. I would argue it is the default mode of human behavior, unless there is some compelling reason not to - educational or career ambitions, strong religious beliefs, etc. So it may have less to do with intelligence and more to do with how optimistic some young men and women are about their future.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: yor_on on 16/07/2012 14:45:59
The sooner you do it the better the material :)
As I know.

Then we have society, will it support you?
Or will it condemn you?

There's a lot of BS going round Cheryl.
Not what you think though :)
Title: None
Post by: IQwastedump on 25/12/2014 17:09:42
average IQ and its distribution is not going to change because its a statistical normalization over a population sample.  So even though people may have been significantly higher intelligence say 4 centuries ago,  the average person still had an IQ of 100.  Define average of a population and you have 100.  So whether that population is stupider or smarter in a relative sense, makes no difference.  Unless you could arrange to resurrect the populace from the grave and compare them to another populace in individual scores, the idea of IQ is totally just a present tense affair and measure of the current populations average IQ which will always be a 100 and the standard deviation distribution will be the same bell shaped curve.  

So unless you mean intelligence outside of IQ testing, the idea of comparing IQ points is ridiculous.  But to answer the question, yes the world is getting stupider and its scary when people don't even know that IQ of the average will always be a 100 no matter how degenerated the people get.
Title: None
Post by: Jerry on 12/01/2015 06:16:31
In case you haven't gotten the memo, the stupid people are not only out breeding the intelligent, but are also running the planet.  Look no further than to the scores of political leaders that litter the planet with putrid unproven policy, but these skilled ruthless BSers think the mere fact they are in charge, via fraud, makes them smarter, because they scammed those stupid enough to believe in ethics and intelligence.  Guess what, they are invincibly ignorant, there is no fix for that, and they want to reduce the population of anyone who disagrees, which of course are the enlightened intelligent minority of earth's population.  So, since these idiots are in charge, then guess what, the world will spin into chaos, because they know no better.  If you have an IQ of 140 or better, you had better breed or the end result will be eventual extinction of the human race.  You not only have to breed but lead.  I know that puts a real crimp on your day, but think about this, if you don't they will.
Title: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: DMT on 25/03/2015 01:11:31
Though education is definitely a factor. I also think education does not always equal intelligence. When we think of the idea of education we think of people becoming doctors, lawyers, successful business men etc. But many men and women in Canada graduate College with two or three year degrees in debt to the "financial assistance" they have received from the government. Due to increased amount of College and University graduates in this country there is a flood of graduates with a very minimal number of jobs available. So education does not necessarily mean financial stability or intelligence in other areas other than the degree taken. I could go on about this subject but it is diverging from my original point that education doesn't equal life intelligence.

 People who have way too many children then they can afford, or raise in an ideal family environment tend to lack the ability to predict the outcomes of their actions. They just reproduce without thinking about every factor of raising a child i.e. financial, emotional, stability, morality. They are often selfish and only think about their own desire to have more children and not about what that is going to mean for the rest of the family and the unborn. Less attention, resources, quality of life, quality of time. Many people have multiple children in a marriage or relationship that is destructive and troubled, and don't stop to think that maybe they should try to fix their lives and relationship with each other before having a child or introducing more. People often have multiple children with different partners, not thinking at all about the outcome. Intelligent people think towards the future and understand and predict what will come to be if they have multiple children they can't afford or raise into happy, healthy, informed, intelligent, awesome people that are an asset to this world and a pleasure to be around. To be intelligent is to be insightful, honest, informed and aware. People walk around with their eyes shut  to the their truth and will pass this along to their multiple offspring.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: alancalverd on 25/03/2015 08:29:37
Solution: abolish all child benefits and pay women £500 (or local equivalent) every 6 months if the are not pregnant. Longterm this will save huge amounts of public money and discourage early, frequent breeding. If we reproduce below the replacement rate we will increase the working fraction of the population, thus providing more money per capita for state pensions and health services.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 25/03/2015 17:23:13
In a world where it's hard to get decent employment, is it so unintelligent for some people to exploit the system by becoming professional breeders? If you have twenty children, you will be given a nice mansion to live in and lots of money which can be spent carefully in ways which can give you a high quality of life - you might even be able to buy a horse. People like that will improve the intelligence of the species rather than suppress it.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: alancalverd on 25/03/2015 20:18:51
In a world where it's hard to get decent employment,
why make more unemployables?

And in those parts of the world where food is scarce, why make more mouths?
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 25/03/2015 20:43:20
In a world where it's hard to get decent employment,
why make more unemployables?

There soon won't be any work for anyone, but that's no reason to reduce the population to zero.

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And in those parts of the world where food is scarce, why make more mouths?

There's enough food at the moment - it just needs fair distribution.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: alancalverd on 26/03/2015 00:39:21
In a world where it's hard to get decent employment,
why make more unemployables?

There soon won't be any work for anyone, but that's no reason to reduce the population to zero.

But why not reduce it to a level of indefinite sustainability, where everyone has a purpose and an adequate standard of living?

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And in those parts of the world where food is scarce, why make more mouths?

There's enough food at the moment - it just needs fair distribution.
The chant of "unfair distribution" has been quoted for as long as I can remember, and probably further back. It's nonsense. Vast societies. built on enforced fairness (communism), have starved within living memory. It's easy (except for a few minor problems like the Dust Bowl)  to grow huge quantities of rice and wheat in North America, where there are very few people, but extremely difficult to grow anything reliably in Ethiopia, with 21 times the population density of Canada. You can't change the weather, but you can control the population. What is "fair" about requiring a Canadian farmer to feed people on the other side of the world, who can't pay for their food, simply because they have reproduced beyond the capability of their land to sustain them?

There are indeed some morally reprehensible trade practices: the EU exists principally to maintain the market price of food, even if this requires denaturing wine, buying "intervention" butter with taxpayers' money, destroying fish stocks, ruining the West Indies sugar cane industry, and paying British farmers to sterilise fields. But these disgusting practices are invoked in order to be "fair" to the sort of farms that would be considered quaint native anachronisms if they were in Kenya.   

There's an uneven distribution of food, certainly, but in a world where stuff is bought and sold, you can't complain that the distribution is unfair: if you are prepared to pay US/Canadian/Australian prices plus the cost of transport, you can in principle buy anything made or grown in the USA/Canada/Australia, anywhere. That's entirely fair. The solution is for humans, like every other species, to limit their population density to what the land can support. In the UK, that's about 5,000,000, and my proposal could achieve it in 100 years at no effort, cost or suffering to anyone (except bankers and associated parasites).   
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: syhprum on 26/03/2015 01:17:54
The problem with trying to reduce populations to a sustainable level is that while you can reduce the birth rate you get far too few young people having to support the old people as the Chinese have found out.
what you need to do is kill off the olduns I have often thought free cigarettes for olduns would be a good idea but they would only sell them to the young'uns instead of smoking them.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 26/03/2015 18:01:19
But why not reduce it to a level of indefinite sustainability, where everyone has a purpose and an adequate standard of living?

That may be a sensible option, but to try to reduce it in a hurry may make people unhappy by restricting family size too much, as in China, but any attempt to reduce the population will take a very long time while technology makes it easier to grow more food and to tap renewable energy (e.g. solar power which is becoming more efficient and cheaper all the time - in many of the poorest countries there is no shortage of sunlight).

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The chant of "unfair distribution" has been quoted for as long as I can remember, and probably further back. It's nonsense. Vast societies. built on enforced fairness (communism), have starved within living memory.

It is not nonsense - companies from rich countries have systematically plundered the resources of poor countries by propping up dictators and making them rich at the expense of the people. Communism has come closest to being done properly in the West (Europe) where it has been mixed with capitalism. Officially communist countries have simply been led by elites who have stolen all the wealth for themselves.

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It's easy (except for a few minor problems like the Dust Bowl)  to grow huge quantities of rice and wheat in North America, where there are very few people, but extremely difficult to grow anything reliably in Ethiopia, with 21 times the population density of Canada.

That's an example of unfair distribution - some countries have a lot of land suited to agriculture while others have very little, and some have oil and mineral resources while others have little or none, but all of these resources should belong to the whole world and not to the people sitting on top of them who selfishly imagine that they have a right to more than their fair share due to proximity.

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You can't change the weather, but you can control the population. What is "fair" about requiring a Canadian farmer to feed people on the other side of the world, who can't pay for their food, simply because they have reproduced beyond the capability of their land to sustain them?

What is fair about an overpopulated Europe where people have been breeding like rabbits discovering another continent with enormous potential for farming which hasn't been exploited yet and throwing off their excess population into that space to take it off the natives and then use the wealth that comes from agriculture in that vast new space to fund wars of oppression around the world and to give out vast amounts of food aid to pretend to be generous?

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There's an uneven distribution of food, certainly, but in a world where stuff is bought and sold, you can't complain that the distribution is unfair: if you are prepared to pay US/Canadian/Australian prices plus the cost of transport, you can in principle buy anything made or grown in the USA/Canada/Australia, anywhere. That's entirely fair.

We don't call it fair within a country - we support each other by redistributing wealth, for example by having the Scots share their oil with the whole of the UK rather than selfishly hogging it all for themselves (as the Nationalists always sought to do - it's only now that it's running out that it's becoming more respectable to be a Nationalist, and that's maybe why they're beginning to attract more support).

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The solution is for humans, like every other species, to limit their population density to what the land can support. In the UK, that's about 5,000,000, and my proposal could achieve it in 100 years at no effort, cost or suffering to anyone (except bankers and associated parasites).

No, the solution is to limit population to what the land of the world can support as a whole while leaving huge amounts untouched in order to preserve the playground in which we can continue to seek adventure in wild places with high biodiversity. We could sort out the world in under five years if politicians had the wit to run things sensibly and fairly, but they don't because most of them are either selfish dictators of daft monkeys voted into power by daft electorates.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: guest39538 on 06/04/2015 23:28:36
Who defines stupid?   What is stupid?  what is clever?  who defines clever?   

Do you consider clever is the ability to remember books?

I will argue I am stupid, I will also argue I am clever, I will also argue the ability to memorise knowledge has nothing to do with clever.

Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/04/2015 17:56:19
Quite true - we have many quiz shows with titles like "Brain of Britain" and "Mastermind", but they're just tests of knowledge storage. The real deal is logical thinking and problem solving.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: ~CB on 04/05/2015 02:35:05
but they're just tests of knowledge storage. The real deal is logical thinking and problem solving.
From your post I assume that what you intended to say was... 'Logical thinking and problem solving' do not really comes from knowledgestorage. Ignore the rest if you did not intend that.
David, even logical thinking and problem solving are essentially part of knowledge storage and retrieval. That's the reason I hesitate to use the world intelligence any where. If truly necessary, I just use knowledgeable instead.
If you have been raised with descent amount of fairy tale stories (This includes God), you are likely to be irrational (in a conventional way)... And vice versa.
So basically... No one is truly intelligent. It's just how you utilize your time (Or how others make you), and get all the knowledge you can on every aspect (that you deem intriguing) you can. Also, if a person strictly follows thinking from every perspective AND thinking about every possible solution whilst always trying to being rational... It just serves as an add on to a better thinking (Or for an average humans... More intelligent thinking).

By the way, 'You' used above is an imaginary person. Do not take it as, as I'm talking about you.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 04/05/2015 18:35:15
but they're just tests of knowledge storage. The real deal is logical thinking and problem solving.
From your post I assume that what you intended to say was... 'Logical thinking and problem solving' do not really comes from knowledgestorage.

The mechanisms for reasoning may be hardwired in, so they may not need to be learned in the way that other knowledge does. However, it is possible to learn to reason better if your original mechanisms for reasoning are imperfect - it just takes a bit of work, and most people can't be bothered to try.

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David, even logical thinking and problem solving are essentially part of knowledge storage and retrieval.

It's distinct from other knowledge as it's crucial to managing all the other knowledge you acquire.

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That's the reason I hesitate to use the world intelligence any where. If truly necessary, I just use knowledgeable instead.

There are many knowledgeable people who are hopeless at reasoning, so it's important to distinguish between knowledge and intelligence. An AGI system with no knowledge is intelligent. A politician with lots of knowledge programmed into him/her/it is rarely intelligent.

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If you have been raised with descent amount of fairy tale stories (This includes God), you are likely to be irrational (in a conventional way)... And vice versa.

My grandfather (my mother's father) was a Biblical scholar (one of the team who translated the New English Bible, which is widely hated despite its accuracy - this work bizarrely led to him having tea with Einstein at Einstein's house in Princeton after Gödel invited him there, largely because my grandfather was a fluent speaker of German who knew the old Germany before Hitler poisoned it). My childhood had a lot of church in it - I was even a choirboy for many years, despite being an atheist (I liked the music [pity about the god-awful words], but it also meant I was paid for going to church). I was exposed to plenty of stupid stories with magic in them too, but I hated them all. There was something about the way my brain was set up that simply wouldn't tolerate the irrational. I never even believed in Santa, but then there was one key thing that my father always did which may explain all of this; he specialised in talking rubbish to see if he could trick me into believing in any of it, so I was trained from the very start never to take anything on trust but to check it carefully to see if it all stacked up logically in order to avoid being laughed at. This means that I can't tell whether it was genetics or programming, but the result was that I always rejected the religion that he believed in and ended up turning him into an atheist.

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So basically... No one is truly intelligent. It's just how you utilize your time (Or how others make you), and get all the knowledge you can on every aspect (that you deem intriguing) you can. Also, if a person strictly follows thinking from every perspective AND thinking about every possible solution whilst always trying to being rational... It just serves as an add on to a better thinking (Or for an average humans... More intelligent thinking).

Everyone may have the capacity to be fully intelligent, but most people allow their thinking to be hijacked by beliefs which they have become emotionally attached to and they allow those beliefs to override reason every time. The key thing to achieving full intelligence is that knowledge has to be filed correctly in the brain as theory rather than fact, with probabilities attached to state how likely each theory is to be true, and you have to separate this from what you want to be true. Everything should remain open for question and not be labelled as absolute fact, but it is acceptable to label things as facts within a particular set of rules, such as the rules of reasoning. This allows you to show that God is logically impossible, but does not rule out the possibility of God altogether as logic itself may be based on errors. (This means that belief in God is irrational, but he may still exist as reason cannot be completely trusted - this in turn means that I am technically an atheist only under the assumption that the laws of reason are correct, but otherwise I'm an agnostic.)

Being fully intelligent doesn't necessarily mean you have to get everything right straight off, but you should be able to understand that something is right once the correct solution has been shown to you, or understand that something is wrong once you have been shown the fault(s) in it. If a theory generates contradictions and you have been shown those contradictions, you should not label that theory as correct, but must label it as wrong. The only way to make the theory viable is to modify it until the contradictions are no longer generated. A certain amount of knowledge is always required in order to know how to apply reasoning to a theory, but you should be able to start with someone (or a reasoning machine) with next to no knowledge and supply all the knowledge required for understanding a specific theory, and then the person (or machine) should be able to rule on whether it holds rationally.

Gödel's Incompleteness theorem contains a fault where a case of infinite recursion is carelessly thrown away during the diagonalisation process, and this results in a change in meaning being introduced. The simplest way to understand this fault is to look at "this statement is true" which is generally accepted as a true statement by mathematicians, but if you analyse it carefully you will find that it is not true as it contains insufficient information to attach a truth value to - there is infinite recursion which means that it does not compute. It is the misunderstanding of this which has led to a process being seen as valid when it is not, because people have been mislead by the superficial appearance of truth in the statement.

How should a statement be tested for truth? My phone is black. Is it? Look at it and see. It's black, so "my phone is black" is true. Let's try another example. My phone is black. The previous statement is true. Is the sentence before this one true? To check whether it's true, we have to perform substitution, so the question becomes: is "the previous statement is true" true (in the position where it first appears in this paragraph)? We have to make another substitution to get to the meat of the issue: is "my phone is black" true? We can now test the truth of the part in quotes, and it is true, so we can now declare that the answer to the chain of questions is yes. Not all nouns are open to substitution, so "this phone is true" is not appropriate for attaching a truth value to - there is no verb there for truth to apply to, and no substitution is possible.

If we apply the same method to "this statement is true", we have to apply substitution to "this statement" to get hold of what "this statement" is, and this leads us to: ""this statement is true" is true". We can now try to test the part in the inner quote, but it contains an element which requires further substitution, leading us to """this statement is true" is true" is true". The process is infinite and it is an error to jump out before it terminates and to declare that it is true.

We still live in an era in which reasoning is being applied incorrectly right up to the highest levels of mathematics and physics, and instead of correcting the faults in the bad reasoning, people's reaction is to look to the authority of great names and to assume that they could not have made any error. People follow the herd as if the way reason should be applied should be decided by the way it has traditionally been done, so the errors are labelled as correct and they just go on making them. It doesn't matter how clearly these errors are spelt out, they are simply ignored. This is unlikely to change until AGI takes over, and even then you can be sure that people will initially insist on programming errors into their AGI systems to "correct" them whenever they disagree with the establishment, but they'll see from the mess that results (and from the lack of mess which results from other AGI systems which are not programmed to make such errors) that the ones which do not have their thinking interfered with are superior, and then things will finally change.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Ophiolite on 05/05/2015 23:00:34
I was exposed to plenty of stupid stories with magic in them too, but I hated them all.
So, you were never able to use your reasoning to recognise the potency of magical stories to convey moral principles and cultural values. Does such a failure of rational thought on your part not trouble you now?
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 06/05/2015 17:59:44
I was exposed to plenty of stupid stories with magic in them too, but I hated them all.
So, you were never able to use your reasoning to recognise the potency of magical stories to convey moral principles and cultural values. Does such a failure of rational thought on your part not trouble you now?

What stories are those? What moral principles? What cultural values? Ghastly rubbish with talking animals? What have they got to do with culture or morality? Flat people who can slide under doors? Same question. Someone eating and drinking things and getting bigger and smaller? Same question. I found all that kind of stuff tedious and saw nothing in it of any value. Morality doesn't need to be put across through stories as it's something children automatically understand already (unless they have some kind of condition that makes it hard for them to relate to others and they fail to work out the advantage of not harming others [which leads to them not harming you]). What about cultural values? Are you talking about a culture of stupidity in which people are trained to believe in things that aren't real, like royalty and God?

If other people like such stories and think they're getting something out of them in the way of entertainment, I have no problem with that, just so long as they aren't also being brainwashed by it into magical thinking, but hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of hours of my time were wasted by people who felt the need to inflict stuff on me which I regarded as utter garbage. I looked back at some of it recently just to make sure I hadn't missed anything, but no: it was indeed utter garbage. There are some good stories which have stupid aspects to them which spoil them a little but without ruining them completely, but I can't think of any of them that matter either - you could miss out on the lot and be no worse off. The things you actually need to know will get through to you regardless, so there is no need to inflict magical stories on anyone.

I worry that many stories actively program children to think magically and guide them away from mechanistic thinking, and once they've been pushed too far in that direction, they end up locked into an infantile society which holds down quality of life for everyone. We will have tens of millions of people voting tomorrow in Britain who do not understand what the deficit is and who imagine that it is another word for debt. We have a population of lazy thinkers which has been trained to be lazy by the cultural values which you hold, and the result is a lot of unnecessary suffering as they vote in one shambles of a government after another. Cultural stupidity runs the whole show.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: alancalverd on 06/05/2015 18:21:48
Royalty is real because we make it so, and it is useful because it prevents phrases like "President Thatcher" entering the language. Apart from that, I agree with your sentiments.

Worryingly, however, we have brain-dead Meeja who believe, or want us to believe, that we will indeed be electing a president tomorrow, rather than an assembly of constituency representatives. Thus democracy has been crushed between the irrelevant absurdity of party politics and the direct rule of 26 unelected and unaccountable EU Commissioners.

Never mind. Computer games have never been cheaper, and if brain masturbation isn't your thing, you don't have to tramp down to your village hall in the rain to watch amateur entertainment - the telly is full of wannabees and people who might be famous for A being shown failing at B. Tonight, folks, it's a fantasy celebrity farting contest between Einstein and Jesus on a desert island populated entirely by cameramen and associate producers, or a rerun of somebody pretending to be someone else. Or maybe a political "debate" in which nobody says anything because they are all powerless to do anything except waste your money on selfaggrandisement.

As for tomorrow's president, whoever it is will have his strings pulled by Nicola Sturgeon (who isn't even a candidate) and the price of oil.

Cynical? Moi? No. I'm just answering the question: there is no longer any evolutionary advantage in being able to think. In fact it can lead to frustration and early death. Which may explain the rise of religious fundamentalism.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 06/05/2015 19:20:40
Royalty is real because we make it so, and it is useful because it prevents phrases like "President Thatcher" entering the language.

Royalty is not real - it is a bogus category with no valid definition, starting out as a way for mass-murdering dictators to claim a close connection with God to justify their position of power. Belief in royalty is real though, just as belief in gods is absolutely real. There is no actual harm in having people act as mascots for the country, of course, but a fluffy dog or cat could do the job just as well. Even without any mascot there is no need to introduce presidents into the system - they don't serve any useful role that a prime minister can't already match. The big problem for people's sanity though is when they believe that royalty is real and actually get excited at catching glimpses of the very ordinary people who carry that tag. They should be no less excited at catching a glimpse of anyone else, and just as obsessed with all other births and namings of babies, but they aren't - instead they have an unhealthy obsession with descendants of dictators who generously agreed to give up the danger of holding power in return for much safer eternal guaranteed privilege and wealth for their family. That is nothing to get excited about, so why would anyone allow themselves to go all silly about it? They are the very lowest level of celebrity.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: alancalverd on 06/05/2015 23:36:47
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Even without any mascot there is no need to introduce presidents into the system - they don't serve any useful role that a prime minister can't already match.

There I must disagree. A prime minister is supposed to be nothing more than primus inter pares - the spokesman of Parliament, not the Head of State: a representative, not a leader or a figurehead. Being several times more intelligent than the entire House of Commons, and only half as corrupt, vain and self promoting, I do not want or need to be "led" by the sort of parasite I would not trust to clean my toilet, but I need a legislature that can debate matters of national interest and define, by way of statute, what behaviours are unacceptable to society. 

A figurehead, in contrast, should be just that - someone trained to be nice to other figureheads, and above politics or personal ambition. Best way to achieve this is, surely, to nominate a very ordinary family - essentially at random - and ensure that the eldest child of each generation has no need to do anything other than be the Head of State when his parent dies. If that seems a bit burdensome, then we can establish some rule of succession in case he doesn't want the job, but few have opted out so far. By ensuring that training for succession includes a decent education and a bit of military service, we can have a titular head of the armed services with a slightly more realistic approach to international conflict than the average politician - which includes elected presidents. Can you imagine the consequence of a moron or a career liar having the power to declare war? It is only by sheer good fortune that Our Lads were recently led into righteous battle by the towering genius of George W Bush and the scrupulous honesty of Saint Tony Blair!     
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/05/2015 18:08:28
A prime minister is supposed to be nothing more than primus inter pares - the spokesman of Parliament, not the Head of State: a representative, not a leader or a figurehead.

That's only because there's another person filling that role who does nothing useful at all (other than ask "and what do you do" of everyone they meet). The real power is with the prime minister and the pack of MPs who keep him in power.

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Being several times more intelligent than the entire House of Commons, and only half as corrupt, vain and self promoting, I do not want or need to be "led" by the sort of parasite I would not trust to clean my toilet, but I need a legislature that can debate matters of national interest and define, by way of statute, what behaviours are unacceptable to society.

I can't see the difference between having the power in the hands of someone who isn't fit to clean your toilet while a mascot is a powerless head of state and the same situation with the mascot being the same person as the one who isn't fit to clean your toilet. It makes no difference to anything except that there's a pointless mascot, or indeed a family of professional mascots who are employed in an anticompetetive manner, which regularly dominates the news for no good reason, thereby pushing out real, important news. All mention of these mascots should be put in special programmes for that specific purpose so that they don't block an important information service.

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A figurehead, in contrast, should be just that - someone trained to be nice to other figureheads, and above politics or personal ambition.

What's the point of that? If every country did the same, you'd just have lots of pointless mascots meeting each other and asking each other what they do. I suspect a lot of world leaders find it irritating and insulting when they have to waste time greeting a mascot instead of getting on with discussing important things with the actual leader of the country.

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By ensuring that training for succession includes a decent education and a bit of military service, we can have a titular head of the armed services with a slightly more realistic approach to international conflict than the average politician - which includes elected presidents. Can you imagine the consequence of a moron or a career liar having the power to declare war? It is only by sheer good fortune that Our Lads were recently led into righteous battle by the towering genius of George W Bush and the scrupulous honesty of Saint Tony Blair!

President Blair didn't listen to the mascot, so what's the point of the mascot.

It isn't greatly important whether there's a mascot or not - I don't really care, but it is a major failure of education when so many people actually believe the mascots are "royal" (as if that is a valid category) to the point that they get excited about seeing or meeting these bog-ordinary people, and it's all the worse for the way that the media (which you'd think would be run by more educated people than average) allows nonebrity stories not only to get into serious news programmes, but to dominate them.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: alancalverd on 07/05/2015 18:28:42
Power should reside with Parliament, not the prime minister, whose role is as spokesman and chairman, not dictator. If not, what is the point of Parliament? It seems like a very clumsy and expensive irrelevance.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: syhprum on 07/05/2015 21:45:09
"What stories are those? What moral principles? What cultural values? Ghastly rubbish with talking animals? What have they got to do with culture or morality? Flat people who can slide under doors? Same question. Someone eating and drinking things and getting bigger and smaller? "
This would seem to be an allusion to the stories of Alice in wonderland and thru the looking glass, when you remember they were written by an university mathematics lecturer at a time when a lot of new ideas were coming into  mathematics who would have been familiar with the halucigenic drugs used by his students they begin to make sense.
Some of the mad hatters party people are thinly disguised real people.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/05/2015 22:09:40
Power should reside with Parliament, not the prime minister, whose role is as spokesman and chairman, not dictator. If not, what is the point of Parliament? It seems like a very clumsy and expensive irrelevance.

Power technically resides with whatever majority of MPs is cobbled together - the prime minister merely represents their collective power and he cannot act as a dictator as they have the power to bring him down if they disapprove of anything he does. However, in practice, President Blair was able to act as if he was a president because the MPs in his party allowed him to - they couldn't say "boo" to a goose. Any of them who wanted to have a chance of becoming prime minister themselves some day (or to serve in some important office if they weren't already in one) had to support him in everything he did because loyalty is considered more important than speaking up for what's right, so they all just blundered along doing whatever stupid things the leader wanted to do. That's how it always works though - loyalty prevented them from chucking Gordon Brown when it was clear that he was a disaster, and loyalty prevented them from chucking Ed Miliband too because it's more important to be loyal and to fail to win a majority in an election that should have been in their pocket.

[Having a queen sitting on his head made no difference whatsoever because she was a mere ornament who meekly signed any piece of paper he set before her, as required.]
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: guest39538 on 08/05/2015 10:16:27
The real deal is thought and thinking about the actual reality of the topic and making comparisons to the topic and of logical elimination of aspects on the topic.  Royal families and the government is nothing to do with this topic and off beat to the thread title.

Will the stupid out breed the clever?  is a question that is a stupid question.  Definition of clever and stupid being the actual topic point.   It is not to assume that someone is stupid based on what they know.  There is an obviousness that there is people with learning disabilities and also some people who simply do not agree with the present disciplines that are taught to people.
IQ being a level of processing speed of information that is not to suggest that given time someone with slower thinking ability could not work out the answer.

I do not believe that anyone is stupid but simply they have had the wrong guidance by bad parenting often resulting to a bad education.  Lazy parents do not learn their own children life and often leave their children to learn for themselves.   Reading and writing and general physics such as fire burns is down to parenting at a child's early life.
Reading with parents their school books etc.


In the correct environment anyone can be smart.  I would take bare gryll's over Einstein on a ship wrecked island every time.

Are we stupid because we can not fly a plane?

Logic is simple



 
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/05/2015 17:16:38
Royal families and the government is nothing to do with this topic and off beat to the thread title.

People's belief in royalty is a prime example of effective stupidity, though not necessarily inherent stupidity - many people simply do not use the thinking tools that their brains provide, and that's because they've never learned how to use them. The discussion of government selection is also a useful illustration of how people fail to use their brains properly - the world is run by idiots who are voted in by idiots, and yet most of that idiocy isn't the result of lack of good thinking hardware, but of failure to use it and the lazy habit of just going on doing things the way they're traditionally done instead. A few people do a bit of thinking and the rest just follow without checking carefully.

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Will the stupid out breed the clever?  is a question that is a stupid question.

It's a perfectly reasonable question - it could happen.

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Definition of clever and stupid being the actual topic point.

Which is why it's worth exploring what intelligence is, and why it doesn't always show up even if the hardware is good - cultural effects can sideline it to a large degree, and particularly when a religion or ideology gets in the way. However, the susceptibility to have one's ability to think overridden by these cultural pressures may have a genetic component, perhaps selected for by millennia of murder - if you just go with the herd you may have a better chance of not being bumped off.

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It is not to assume that someone is stupid based on what they know.

That is correct - there are some clever people in remote tribes who have lots of crazy ideas about the nature of reality which come from their culture, but they can be more intelligent than most people from advanced societies who have had much better scientific knowledge and understanding available to them. It isn't about knowledge, but about rigorous checking to see if facts really stand up.

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IQ being a level of processing speed of information that is not to suggest that given time someone with slower thinking ability could not work out the answer.

That is correct too - there are people with IQs approaching 200 who have all manner of crazy beliefs because they can be shallow thinkers. Those who think deeper and who make fewer errors, even if they're very slow, are more intelligent.

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I do not believe that anyone is stupid but simply they have had the wrong guidance by bad parenting often resulting to a bad education.  Lazy parents do not learn their own children life and often leave their children to learn for themselves.

This can result in people becoming wired for stupidity, despite the original potential that was there at the start. It's very hard to undo the damage once it is set in place.

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In the correct environment anyone can be smart.

Sadly that is unlikely to be true, but most could do a lot better if the environment was improved - there is massive scope for this.

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I would take bare gryll's over Einstein on a ship wrecked island every time.

If Einstein had been obsessed with collecting survival techniques and Bear had been obsessed with physics, it would be the other way round - you are choosing one of them on the basis of knowledge rather than intelligence.

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Logic is simple

Applying it often isn't.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: guest39538 on 08/05/2015 20:07:50


Quote from: box
I would take bare gryll's over Einstein on a ship wrecked island every time.

If Einstein had been obsessed with collecting survival techniques and Bear had been obsessed with physics, it would be the other way round - you are choosing one of them on the basis of knowledge rather than intelligence.

I was considering different learning styles and concluded that Bear would apply his knowledge better than Einstein could of with the same knowledge.  I feel that different people can apply logic differently by their learning style.  Some people make good painters and some people are good postmen.   I consider that individuals can be smart in their own right doing something that they are personally good at. 
To say a person is stupid is not always the case although there are individuals who could be classed as stupid .

An example would be an academic achiever climbing a mountain, the stupidity of climbing a mountain being ironic of being clever.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Colin2B on 11/05/2015 19:27:12
If Einstein had been obsessed with collecting survival techniques and Bear had been obsessed with physics, it would be the other way round -
Not sure about that David. I've met quite a few survival specialist, army, ex army, private contractors, they generally raise an eyebrow and smile when a certain name is mentioned. Ray Mears on the other hand is highly respected, he is also a really great bloke and excellent teacher.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Pecos_Bill on 15/05/2015 20:27:58
I am taking an online data analysis MOOC. Instead of blathering about this, you should run a multiple linear regression on IQ scores since 1950.

Or you should just look to see whether the Republican Party and the Conservatives are withering away.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 15/05/2015 21:08:07
I am taking an online data analysis MOOC. Instead of blathering about this, you should run a multiple linear regression on IQ scores since 1950.

What use would that be? IQ tests don't test intelligence properly and the scores shoot up in places where nutrition and/or education levels change, which has nothing to do with genetic improvement or decline.

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Or you should just look to see whether the Republican Party and the Conservatives are withering away.

I don't see much intelligence in any of the parties. People say that Ed Miliband is too intellectual, but the idea of linking that word to him is ludicrous.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Pecos_Bill on 15/05/2015 22:10:33
People do multi-variate regression analyses to screen out the effects of things like demography and nutrition. The alternative is to study chicken guts.

I note your claim that there is no difference in political parties. If we test for the type two hypothesis that there is no difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama the truth becomes self-evident.

I believe that in the coming months the difference between the Colonel Blimps of the Conservative party and normal human beings will also become apparent.

Let the world spin and we shall see.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 16/05/2015 19:12:05
You need a sample size greater than one for each party, and you have to select randomly rather than picking out the ones that best make your case. You also have to consider that selfishness doesn't necessarily equate with stupidity.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Pecos_Bill on 16/05/2015 19:32:44
PRIMUS

Was the population mean of Romney voters different than that of Obama voters to the 6 th sigma or not?

SECUNDUS

You say that selfishness does not equate to stupidity.

Do you suppose that George Bush and the oil companies invaded Iraq for the altruistic benefit of mankind or to rape it of its oil?

Did Hitler invade Russia because of the Bolshevik menace or to set up aryan fiefdoms with slav peasants?

Were the corn laws instituted to benefit English farmers?

When the banks had an orgy of daft lending was that because the milk of human kindness courses through their veins?

I think not.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 17/05/2015 00:13:54
Romney voters were wealthier and selfish. They were voting in what they saw as their own interests rather than against them.

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You say that selfishness does not equate to stupidity.

Not accurate. I said that selfishness doesn't necessarily equate with stupidity. People generally do what they think is best for themselves. It is often counterproductive, of course, as they might be better off by ensuring everyone gets their fair share - the elimination of unnecessary conflict could transform all of our lives for the better.

Some people do what they think is best for others, and that isn't always sensible as they can end up living worse lives than the people they're trying to help.

It is possible to find intelligent selfish bastards and dull people who are infinitely nicer and more sharing. It is also possible for a dull person to be right about one important thing (morals) while being wrong about most things, while a bright person may be right about most things but wrong about that one important thing.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: jccc on 17/05/2015 00:29:52
the meek will inherit the earth

Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Pecos_Bill on 18/05/2015 01:22:49
Your defense of selfishness brings to my mind Gordon  Gecko in the film in the 1987 film "Wall Street" where he says, ""Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".

In view of the catastrophic results following on the 2008 bank failures, I have my doubts, Hoss.

How <<is>>" austerity" working out?
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 18/05/2015 16:35:40
I'm not defending selfishness. I'm merely not equating it to stupidity because there are some very bright bastards out there.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: Pecos_Bill on 19/05/2015 00:51:46
How bright can they really be when winning the rat race only means that they are the biggest rat?

Success is getting what you want, but happiness is wanting what you get.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: David Cooper on 19/05/2015 17:04:26
For them, happiness is getting more than their fair share, and if they think they'll get away with it, they'll go for it. It's a mistake to think of them as not being bright because it's dangerous to underestimate their abilities.
Title: Re: QotW - 09.05.24 - Will the stupid outbreed the clever?
Post by: jerrygg38 on 11/06/2015 13:27:43
   One advantage of teenagers having children is help by mom with the baby. Also the babies become part of their parents medical insurance. In general the teenagers have a roof over their head and food on the table. If they waited till they were in their 20's they would not have so much support. In this way they could get the children out of the way without worry about financial responsibilities.
Title: None
Post by: Carl on 05/07/2015 16:39:59
I wonder if this article is an example of the negative effects of low IQ breeding? The fact they suggest we are OK for now suggests not being smart enough to realize we are ALREADY in a VERY bad state. The average person cannot even cross the street or stand in a line properly and still see news media as some kind of public service. TONS of people still have very absurd superstitions beliefs based on what amounts to thin air or a strand of hair. The Idiocracy is here NOW strong as ever and growing fast. People still don't see marriage for what it really is. They still support the ignorant lie of race. We are now living in the modern dark ages. 200 years from if the IQ of society is saved by the things mentioned in this article, we will look on this generation as savages. Boxing. Adults getting into physical fights because of simple disagreements. Road rage. Prison industrial complex. Too anybody paying attention, things are pretty bad RIGHT NOW! Don't let our advancements in technology blind us from the idiots using this tech.
Title: None
Post by: Marc on 22/11/2016 20:14:45
The cure is education, not eugenics. If 'we' wanted stop stupid people entering the world we'd have to select from all classes, not just the favourite whipping boy of the self-elevated top tier.