Comment by raincole
3 days ago
> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today
In other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary advantage?
3 days ago
> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today
In other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary advantage?
200k years just isn't much time for significant evolutionary changes considering the human population "reset" a couple times to very very small numbers.
Reich's lab actually found evidence of meaningful genetic changes that improved intelligence over the past 10,000 years, but not so much prior to that:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1
The advent of agriculture and civilization had many powerful selection effects.
If you read the papers and analyze the historical DNA, you can make case for significant PGS shifts in populations across a few centuries.
People really haven't processed this fact and its implications just yet.
Our big brains are a recent mutation and haven't been fully field tested. They seem like more of a liability than anything, they've created more existential risks for us than they've put to rest.
It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.
Yes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or 500-200k years ago for that matter.
With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's not take the achievements of our species for granted.
You wouldn't make that trade because you are part of the last generation (loosely speaking, a collection of generations) before it all comes crumbling down. We are living unbelievably privileged lives because we are burning all of the world's resources to the ground. In the process, we're destroying the ecosystem and driving a mass extinction event. Nothing about the way we live is sustainable long-term. We're literally consuming hundreds of millions of years worth of planet-wide resource buildup over a span of a couple of centuries. Even if we avoid the worst case scenario, humans 200 years from now will almost certainly not be able to live anywhere near as luxuriously as we do now, unless there's a culling of billions. In the actual worst case scenario, we may render the planet uninhabitable for anything we regard as intelligent life.
In that sense, we have just enough collective intelligence to be dangerous and not enough intelligence to moderate ourselves, which may very well result in an evolutionary deadend that will have caused untold damage to life on Earth.
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None of that matters if it's not sustainable. We're talking about the end of our species here or maybe you missed the memo.
Human population is at an all time (and growing) and the global mean life expectancy is double if not triple what it was in the time of cave men.
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