Linda Gottfredson's reprint site never disappoints. She has her own 'just so' theory of the evolution of intelligence in the 2007 paper "Innovation, Fatal accidents, and the Evolution of General Intelligence".
Extending here research results that people with "low g" have more accidents than those with higher "g", she conjectures that this differential worked in pre-history weeding out the short bus riders. She claims that technological innovation is a double edged sword, lowering the over all age adjusted mortality but introducing "novel risks" (e.g., fire, automatic weapons, meth) that disproportionally affect the dimmer among us. For those worried about a future idocracy where the dims out breed the smarties, she assures us: "Fatal accidents are still a major cause of death in all societies, so they provide continuing opportunity for natural selection." Whew, what a relief.
Maybe the would be sterilizers over at half sigma need to change tactics. Instead of snipping the short bus riders they just need to litter their neighborhoods with hazards (e.g., down power lines, banana peels, refrigerator boxes, crack cocaine, cheap firearms) to provide an opportunity for natural selection.
6 comments:
Despite having many hazards, I don't foresee Africa lowering its' population through individual accidents.
Agreed. But are the people left after 20 generations of warfare and accidents going to be a little smarter?
Well, let's say that one generation in Africa is about 20 years.
20 generations*20 years= 400 years
The settlement of Africa began about 400 years ago around 1600, and since that time the African population has gone from almost nothing to 800 million. And that is not counting the Blacks here in the US or Brazil. With population growth like that, I don't foresee accidents having a big impact.
If you add up the African population (800 million) with US Blacks (46 million) and the population of Brazil (100 million), you get about 1 billion using fuzzy math. There are about 500 million Whites globally, which is about 8% of the world's population. So wee need to protect the least among us to ensure we survive.
The white man was the best thing to happen to black genes. Amerind genes not so much.
The white man was the best thing to happen to black genes.
It would be nice if we were the best thing to happen to ourselves, not others. What have we done for ourselves lately? Nothing.
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