Wherein I give props to xkcd

[brynndragon]

Thank you xkcd for talking about an idea which I was willing to suspend disbelief for in order to have a laugh but have heard people actually spout as if it reflected reality. You see, in order to believe that premise you have to sincerely believe that smart people never ever do stupid things when it comes to sex. If you have such a belief, you clearly don't know any smart people (at least, you don't know them well enough ;P).

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

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.

[siderea]

I would argue that the movie implies that the bell curve is shifted downward so the median IQ or better yet the median of intelligence

The single most famous and well-established unexplained phenomenon in the field of IQ testing is the Flynn Effect: that the bell-curve has been shifting upward by about 3 points per decade, continuously, linearly over time, since IQ testing began, everywhere.

For the record, that amounts to a standard deviation in 50 years. The definitions of the lower edge of "gifted" and the upper edge of "mentally retarded" are 2 standard deviations.

So this entire discussion has been utterly bizarre to me. The single most famous trend in IQ is that it's going up. Why would anyone base even a bogus argument on the idea it's going down??

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

OMG actual information! Thank you for throwing expertise onto the flames of speculation before they burned way the hell out of control. I was in this awkward space between having a sufficient understanding of evolution to know that devolution doesn't actually happen and not having the specific information that would both contextualize that knowledge and give it some credibility with people who aren't biologists/psychologists (humanologists ;P).

Re: From the article you pointed out...

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I'm speaking outside my area of expertise, but I feel like I've heard these ideas before: "Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. . ." That road leads directly to Social Darwinism, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Please stop running headlong down that road in a misguided attempt to play devil's advocate - the term is just way too appropriate in this case. . .

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'd never heard of the Flynn Effect, that's fascinating!