Do humans get smarter "all the time"?

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Do you believe that the human race is constantly evolving and gets smarter and gets larger brains?

No. We are not really seeing any significant change in phenotype due to "evolution," because we as a society are largely freed from the pressures of natural selection. We are getting smarter (the well-known "Flynn effect") through more access to education and better nutrition. We are also getting taller largely due to better nutrition.

So the human race is not smarter now compared to when "we" where apes?

The human race has evolved from monkey animals, right?
So, of course we are getting smarter, right? How can you not agree with this statement? You know what an monkey-animal is right? They still live on this planet, you know.....

No, we did not. Humans are not descended from monkeys.

First, as stated above, we are not descended from monkeys. Second, while part of our evolutionary history has included an increase in intelligence, the pressures that led us to develop higher intelligence are now largely removed. When those pressures are no longer there, you can't expect the change they drove to continue on its own.

wow, are you serious? So, from where did the human race evolve then? Where did the humans come from?

And how do you know this?

Yes, I am serious. Pop science is not real science, and there is no serious evolutionary biologist who actually believes humans to be descended from monkeys. We share a common ancestor with monkeys, but we are not descended from them. To say we are is akin to addressing your cousin as "grandpa."

ok, so humans evolved from small bugs then.....great, that makes alot of sense.

Where are you getting that? That goes beyond strawman argument to just making crap up. Show me where I have claimed humans to be evolved from small bugs. You don't understand the topic you're attempting to debate, so now you're just being sarcastic.

All primates descended from a common ancestor. Monkey-like creatures are only the most recent ancestors. before that there were probably creatures somewhat like dinosaurs although I doubt dinosaurs were in the line of succession. I would be delighted to feel that perhaps a tyrannosaurus rex was somewhere back in my ancestry but I doubt it is possible.

Although we are doubtlessly cleverer than many of our ancestors and our gradual accretion of knowledge gives us a better base to judge the nature of the universe I don't think we are basically smarter. We still kill each other with much the same enthusiasm as other animals but with much more efficiency. And even though the understanding of the limits of Earth to sustain only a limited population is very well known we are very stupidly reproducing at an unsustainable rate and currently there are food riots by people who are not happy over starving. And it will get much worse. And nobody in power is doing anything sensible about it. If anything, at least in the sense that we have the information to do better, we are getting stupider.

I think people, on average, have gotten smarter over the past 300 years or so, but not for genetic reasons. As Orwell said, better nutrition and a childhood environment that is more intellectually stimulating then it was for the average peasant family way back when has improved the development of connections between brain cells. This, IMO, is the cause of what is called the Flynn Effect, the tendency of the IQ scores of a population to increase over time, requiring IQ tests to be recalibrated every so often so that an IQ of 100 stays at the middle of the bell curve.

In time, we will be largely freed from the constraints of genetics through either biomimetics or some effective equivalent, and then our whole species can take one long, much-needed vacation. And I will become a starship captain.

All I can say is that let's have a look at, say, the last few thousand years.

Ancient Egypt? Got too powerful and big for its boots, fell.

Rome? Got too powerful and big for its boots, fell.

America? Got too...

Yeah.


No, I don't think we're getting any smarter. If we were getting smarter we'd be learning from past mistakes rather than blindly repeating them.


Other examples; nuclear issues. Hiroshima? Chernobyl? The fact that uranium has less than a century till it runs out, and we still face the issue of what do we do with the waste, yet it's still touted as 'clean' energy?

Nope.

Sorry, but humans are NOT in any way getting smarter. Dumber, I would say, in fact.

Another example - why is it that in general the broadly-speaking 'smart' families (middle-class, educated, intelligent etc) are having their 2.1 children or whatever it is, yet the ones who slack off committing benefit fraud, doing drugs and drinking alcohol all day, and adding nothing to society have huge families? Yes, those are generalisations, but I'm sure you can see what I mean. That's not going to improve the gene-pool in any way, is it?

That's anti-nuclear misinformation. Nuclear waste can be recycled back into fuel as well (that's what France does, and they get most of their energy from nuclear). From the big picture point of view nuclear waste is far less dangerous then the CO2 emitted by coal and natural gas plants.

In a few decades everyone with be the masters of their own genome and be able to manipulate it any way they'd like.

Nuclear could be clean energy if people would stop being so paranoid and give it a chance! Chernobyl only blew up because it had a bad design and incompetent management decided to perform a dangerous experiment even though the engineers warned them what could happen. That doesn't mean nuclear power plants have to be inherently any more dangerous than any other kind of power plant.
This is simply not true! The old light water reactors don't burn their fuel completely, so we just bury their waste! They consume less than 1% of the energy in the uranium. Better designs like the Integral Fast Reactor burn their fuel much more completely (99.5%, or about ONE HUNDRED TIMES more), so it lasts much longer and in the end produces less and less dangerous waste. Better designs could also burn thorium which is THREE TIMES more abundant than uranium!

As for it being "touted as 'clean' energy", well it really could be! Coal-fired power plants (which are a major source of our power, because the fanatics won't allow any new nuclear plants to be built if they can help it ) release far more radiation into the air than sealed nuclear plants ever do, because of radioactive minerals embedded in the coal! That's not even the worst of it, because toxic heavy metals like lead and arsenic are also embedded in coal. At least radioactive waste HAS a half-life, heavy metals stay toxic forever. Once you dig them up they are hard to get rid of. The small amount of radioactive waste produced by an integral fast reactor has an effective half-live of only 30 years!

And that's not even mentioning the carbon dioxide released by all fossil fuels. At least the radioactive waste CAN be buried. It's just not practical to bury the CO2, one because it's a gas, and two because theres so much more of it! It takes FOUR TONS of coal to produce the same amount of power as ONE GRAM of U-235.

Clearly nuclear power is a very clean power source! Anyone who has bothered to actually study the issue could tell you this.

*teases Odin by doing the robot* Yay for bionics!! Woohoo! Yay! I wanna be a cyborg!

I feel like my body is turning into METAL!! !! !!

THUMP!::

Bong!:::

Clickitty:::::::::::::::clickclackclonk!

I actually agree, though, and genetics is one of my main interests. I really have a strong interest in producing new bacterial symbionts to go along with our mitochondria that can enhance the healing processes of our bodies, including our grey matter. I would want to start with something that does nothing at all but break down harmful free radicals by harvesting them for their energy content. I'd also be interested in engineering our mitochondria to stop functioning when our cells start engaging in precancerous behaviors, giving our immune systems a fighting chance at preventing them from going wild and having a party at the expense of the rest of our bodies. Prokaryotes are like wonderful, little robots, really. They're so fascinating, so potentially helpful in spite of some of the problems they can often cause.