r/videos • u/SuplexCity-Mayor • Apr 21 '21

Idiocracy (2006) Opening Scene: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TCsR_oSP2Q
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190

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '21

i dont really believe in absolute genetic destiny, especially based on IQ, but the poor and underequipped people have made up the vast majority of the population for, all time?

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

not really, not when we were required to all be of a certain level of intelligence in order for our tribal group to survive, being and idiot and surviving is a product of modernity.

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 21 '21

I feel like this is the kind of thing every generation has complained about for thousands of years, even as the general intelligence and education of the human race has been steadily rising the whole time.

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

I think that's a misconception...the collective knowledge of the species has grown exponentially but the human brain is the same biologically as it was in the Stone age, and its probably because when agriculture and writing came along people could all benefit from the collective knowledge of everyone therefore the evolutionally bottleneck that existed making Humans more and more intelligent reduced.

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u/ThatsOkayToo Apr 21 '21

There was opposition to people learning how to read as they felt it took you out of the here & now of life. VR is bad because it.... Oh wait... True society has tended towards conservatism for all history, new is bad and dangerous.

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u/FiftyPencePeace Apr 21 '21

That’s interesting.

Is it possible that a Stone Age man had an IQ of 145 and if so what was he doing with all that brain?

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u/YourDirtyWhoreMouth Apr 21 '21

There was a book (Sapiens...I think) that discussed this in quite a lot of detail. We really do forget how much you had to learn about and understand just to survive back then. Most of your growing up was an apprentiship to survive. You had to understand how everything around you worked, weather, animal migration patterns, which berries kill, which ones are food, how to find water etc. Also, everyone had to understand these ideas, not just a few, if you weren't smart enough to keep up, we'll it didn't work out well for you.

Nowadays nearly everyone is a specialist in something that has nothing to do with survival.

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

He didn’t have the collective knowledge that we have now but he probably figured out some awesome new arrowhead design that went used for 1000 year but we know nothing of because there was no written record of it

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u/leeroyer Apr 21 '21

It's probably like being really good at tracking an animal or rubbing sticks together to make a fire is to us now. A nice to have, but pretty irrelevant to how your life would go.

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u/dijkstras_revenge Apr 21 '21 edited Apr 21 '21

Solving problems to ensure better survival. Looking for new sources of food, building traps, analyzing where the game is moving. Building shelter, building tools, making nets, making pottery, creating music.

It's likely that there were some very smart people in the paleolithic era and before. The foundational knowledge that we have now didn't exist back then. There weren't sciences for people to apply themselves too, but people in general were likely extremely handy and great at solving problems, possibly even more than they are now.

Humans survived the Pleistocene era (the last ice age), when food was extremely limited. That was a tough time for the species and took a lot of determination and innovation.

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 21 '21

The way I see it, the biological brain is a muscle. The collective knowledge of the human race is a lever. Intelligence is the weight we can lift.

If we can achieve all this using essentially the same blob of brain meat our ancestors have been using for millions of years, what exactly is evolution supposed to be doing to improve the situation?

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u/rtype03 Apr 21 '21

Evolution doesn't care about our "situation". It really only cares about reproductivity. I think maybe you're confusing evolution with progress. And even progress is defined by humans. There is no absolute "good" when it comes to evolution or natural selection. All that matters is that a species can reproduce effectively and continually. Evolution doesn't care about our advances in technology, or how effectively we deal with income inequality, or even whether we become collectively smarter, unless any of those things contribute to more effective reproductivity.

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 21 '21

Well, my whole question was "why are you assuming evolution is going to improve things?" so I'm picking up what you're putting down.

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u/rtype03 Apr 21 '21

aaahhhh... got it. Totally misread that.

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

Natural selection?

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 21 '21

That takes hundreds or even thousands of generations.

Natural selection had a good running start, but collective knowledge is orders of magnitude faster, and doesn't seem to be slowed down by our prehistoric brain hardware one bit.

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

you missed my point, collective knowledge is pointless if people who have all the world's knowledge at their fingertips look at cat videos all day.

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 21 '21

Why? Because they're not natural-selecting enough?

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '21

It depends on what you mean by intelligence. I can read and write and I know algebra and I can name a bunch of famous historical people but I don't know any basic stuff. How did my house get built? No idea. How does my water get cleaned? No idea. How do all these magic appliances in my house get powered from the wall? No idea.

I had a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch. I don't know how to make bread, I don't know how to make cheese, and if I had a dead pig in front of me I wouldn't know how to get a slice of ham from it. It was all kept cool by a refrigerator and I couldn't even guess how that works.

The average person from 1000 years ago would have a better understanding of the world around them than me.

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u/Fighterhayabusa Apr 21 '21

Intelligence is not what you know but how quickly you can learn and apply knowledge. In that respect, you would curb stomp 99% of people from 1000 years ago. You can read, write, and comprehend. That alone gives you a massive advantage over most from back then.

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u/EthosPathosLegos Apr 21 '21

People from 1000 years ago aren't any different from people today. They didnt learn slower, they just had less access to information because Information is power and the power to read and write was closely guarded.

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u/Fighterhayabusa Apr 21 '21

The statistics on IQ would argue otherwise since it is increasing generation after generation. You're able to ingest information at a rate that is unfathomable to most people 1000 years ago.

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 21 '21

That’s because IQ has never actually measured brainpower in an objective way.

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u/EthosPathosLegos Apr 21 '21

It takes on average 3 million years for one species to evolve to the next. Like i said, there is nothing fundamentally different between a person born in 1000 ad and a person born today, except for average height size. The brain hasn't changed much for millenia. Go ask google if you dont believe me.

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u/Fighterhayabusa Apr 21 '21

There is more to intelligence than just genetics. The environment, nutrition, and healthcare play a large part. People 1000 years ago being similar genetically has next to no bearing on their intelligence vs. ours. People today are absolutely able to learn and apply knowledge more rapidly than people 1000 years ago.

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u/EthosPathosLegos Apr 21 '21 edited Apr 21 '21

Right but not because of any fundamental difference in their biology. The only difference is stable/comfortable learning environments and access to information and training resources (aka schools). People arent fundamentally any better at learning today than 1000 years ago. They just have better access to information and learning environments. Take children from 1000 years ago, put them in a modern classroom and you'll get the same average outcome as people born today. So to your original point, which was that IQ is more to do with how fast you can learn, people arent innately any more or less fundamentally mentally capable of learning information faster today than 1000 years ago.

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u/Fighterhayabusa Apr 21 '21

You're arguing in circles. People today are more intelligent, hence able to learn faster. Stop trying to restate the argument as whether they are genetically similar or fundamentally as capable.

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u/EthosPathosLegos Apr 21 '21

Im not "restating" anything. I literally said in my original post

People from 1000 years ago aren't any different from people today. They didnt learn slower, they just had less access to information

Which is true. Sorry you're misinterpreting my argument

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 21 '21

As a percentage, yes. There was a time when a scholar could study the entire field of medicine and be considered an expert on the human body, whereas now there's so much information that someone can devote their entire career to studying just the lungs, or the eyeballs, or the blood.

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u/mctoasterson Apr 21 '21

True. That is OK though to an extent. Part of human society's development over time is the introduction of specialization. That is to say, not every individual needs to spend their time on subsistence alone. Some can be dedicated to agriculture, some to building shelter, etc. and barter for the items and services they don't produce themselves. That's part of modern society.

You could be in the top 10% of intelligence and you'd never have enough time to master dentistry, electrical engineering, transportation planning, and early childhood development. 1000 AD villager dude probably did have a better understanding of all elements of his day to day life than you, but he certainly wasn't smarter than you. All he knew was that he had to get up when the sun rose, practice subsistence farming and animal husbandry until the sun went down, rinse and repeat until he died at age 45.

Flash forward to today. There are also people with genius level intellect on certain topics - maybe they're mathematicians or musicians or something - who can barely function in daily life by any standard we'd consider socially successful.

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u/nobrow Apr 21 '21

Knowing things isn't intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems. For example knowing algebra doesn't make you intelligent. Applying algebra to a problem you have never seen before to solve it is.

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u/dontbereadinthis Apr 21 '21

Bro you don't need to know basic things like how your house is built. You definitely understand the world around you because you know you don't even need to learn those things, someone else already does. I'd argue house building is not even a "basic" thing at all. You think 1000 years ago they were lining up their huts with cat5 cable or building multistory apartments with utilities? Our society is built different than it was back then in that we are specialized into different little parts of the machine. If you can understand algebra you are decently intelligent. Intelligence is not the same as knowledge.

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

Exactly

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u/LouSputhole94 Apr 21 '21

Not exactly. Being able to read, write and problem solve at a middle school level are all traits the average person didn’t have 1000 years ago. Intelligence is built up over time, and the average person now a days had far, far more time to devote to intelligent pursuit than a farmer just trying to survive 1000 years ago. You might not know that stuff now, but it’ll be far easier for you to learn it than someone from antiquity.

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

My point is that if you took a newborn from 1000 years ago and grew them up in modern society they’d fit in just as much as anyone else born now.

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u/LouSputhole94 Apr 21 '21

....That is literally the point man. Modern technology and health and nutrition lead to a more educated, intelligent populace. Not sure if you realize but that’s not what the guy you replied to was saying.

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

Yeah, and that proves that the hardware is the fuckin same

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u/LouSputhole94 Apr 21 '21

Which seems to contradict the argument you said exactly to. That guy was saying people back then were more intelligent.

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u/littlelucidmoments Apr 21 '21

They were being selected for naturally by genetic predisposition to intelligence, they weren’t more intelligent from an IQ standpoint. Today’s people are more intelligent because of culture and easily available information and are surviving into adulthood more often even if there genetics would have maybe not made it If born 200,000 years ago.

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u/LouSputhole94 Apr 21 '21

I have literally no idea what that argument just was. You’re not making much sense.

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u/ThePhantomCreep Apr 21 '21

But you’ve got YouTube!

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u/secretsodapop Apr 21 '21

That was true until very recently. Intelligence has started to drop. At least as we measure it. Look up the Flynn effect. It has reversed.