http://benndragon.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] benndragon.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] brynndragon 2009-06-29 01:44 pm (UTC)

A few things:
1. Smart people have always been on a short end of the bell curve, we've always been a minority. It's the folks in the middle, neither smart nor stupid, who make up the majority and will keep doing so into the future.
2. Intelligence doesn't govern things like access to birth control and/or education. Especially when you look beyond our borders.
3. Rabbits aren't taking over the world for a reason (Austrailia notwithstanding). There's more to long-term survival than breeding and stupid people tend to self-correct for "accidental" breeding through accidental death.
4. It's really hard for us to see human evolution because a human lifetime is *our* lifetime. This leads to errors of extrapolation - we make up a pattern because we can't observe them very well. Hell, our current theory of IQ is what, one generation old, maybe two? We haven't been measuring intelligence long enough to make predictions about human evolution based on it.
5. Compared to the upheavals and changes in human existance over the millenia, birth control and sex education are drops in the bucket. They seem huge to us because they're happening to us but compared to a real bottleneck even the Black Plague didn't make much of a difference in something as basic as intelligence ratios.

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