Intelligence is not naturally selected
Just a quick Mike thought for the day. Being an avowed evolutionist, this has always fascinated me as it runs counter to our "survival of the fittest" interpretation of Darwin's theory.
In modern America, intelligence is not a preferred trait.
Think I'm crazy? There's all sorts of data to support this assertion. Shorthanding the data, individuals with higher IQ scores or PHD's tend to reproduce at a far lower rate than those with low IQ's or a high school education or less. (The IQ correlation, I would imagine, has a lower boundary at some point, below 75 or 80, at which the relationship begins to trend the other way.)
As there is no broad historical data regarding correlations between IQ or educational levels and reproduction rates, there is no way to tell whether this is a temporary cultural distortion unique to modern societies or a longer trend. Or whether, in fact, it is some great evolutionary truth.
Personally, I would suspect that it is a cultural distortion, though I can't speculate on its historical depth. Also, on a population wide basis, it would take a significantly longer time than the era of modern societies to produce a real, significant evolutionary result.
But I find it fascinating that our society produces a result so counter to the majority understanding of the "survival of the fittest" interpretation of evolutionary theory.
(Another odd evolutionary distortion of our modern society is that cows are evolving to taste better to their main predator, man. It is in their reproductive interests to look like they taste the very best, and thus, they will be allowed to procreate at higher rates. Just very odd.)
Just trying to put something interesting up while we wait for the Iraqi Civil War to start.
In modern America, intelligence is not a preferred trait.
Think I'm crazy? There's all sorts of data to support this assertion. Shorthanding the data, individuals with higher IQ scores or PHD's tend to reproduce at a far lower rate than those with low IQ's or a high school education or less. (The IQ correlation, I would imagine, has a lower boundary at some point, below 75 or 80, at which the relationship begins to trend the other way.)
As there is no broad historical data regarding correlations between IQ or educational levels and reproduction rates, there is no way to tell whether this is a temporary cultural distortion unique to modern societies or a longer trend. Or whether, in fact, it is some great evolutionary truth.
Personally, I would suspect that it is a cultural distortion, though I can't speculate on its historical depth. Also, on a population wide basis, it would take a significantly longer time than the era of modern societies to produce a real, significant evolutionary result.
But I find it fascinating that our society produces a result so counter to the majority understanding of the "survival of the fittest" interpretation of evolutionary theory.
(Another odd evolutionary distortion of our modern society is that cows are evolving to taste better to their main predator, man. It is in their reproductive interests to look like they taste the very best, and thus, they will be allowed to procreate at higher rates. Just very odd.)
Just trying to put something interesting up while we wait for the Iraqi Civil War to start.
posted by mikevotes at
8:17 AM
10 Comments:
Survival of the "fittest" is in my opinion not the most helpful terminology. We need to be clear what we mean by "fittest". The characteristics to which we refer are those which enable genes to be passed onto the next generation (natural selection actually happens at the genetic level). This will usually be those which enable the host organism to survive and maximise its chances of procreating. Insofar as evolution is useful for one or both of those you would expect it to be passed on to the next generation. If society begins to consider intelligence to be a hindrance on those points (as you suggest it is presumably in the area of reproduction that this effect will be primarily felt as those people have other pressures on their time) then you would expect the genes which promote that characteristic to incresingly disappear from the gene pool.
IQ is a culturally and sexually relative test and educational levels have nothing to do with intelligence per se, but rather the educational system of a society (probably dictated in large part by economic considerations).
Happy 2006!
By
Disillusioned kid, at 9:06 AM
I concur with your points fully. You say better than I did that "survival of the fittest" is a cultural construction popularized for sociopolitical reasons as the main explanation of evolutionary theory. The popular terminology surrounding evolution largely still dates back to the early era of social darwinism when the theory was being wielded as a weapon to justify the superiority of the upper classes. Perhaps I should have been a bit more careful in my usage.
Also, good point about IQ tests. Because that could establish a tighter correlation between IQ and educational level than between IQ and intelligence.
I accept that what I'm stating in this post is a great oversimplification of a much more complicated argument. I didn't really think a massive essay was really in the charcter of my blog and was just trying to get a bit of a conversation started on this slow news day.
And, yes, I'm using reproductive rates as a measure of the success of genes.
Thanks, REALLY good comments.
Mike
By
mikevotes, at 10:14 AM
Interesting! This idea reminds me of listening to my old DEVO albums when I was a teenager.
Actually, I am leaning more and more toward believing in a form of "reverse evolution," at least in this country! As fundamentalist christians breed like bunnies while perverting the culture with a ridiculous world view, thinking people are probably less likely to choose to bring their own children into the world.
By
seenos, at 11:22 AM
Mike, here's a post I put up some time ago about the relationship between vocation and pay in America....kinda related:
http://greyhairsblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/how-valuable-are-you.html
By
greyhair, at 1:08 PM
I think you have to be very careful about using reproduction rates against intelligence as some measure of positive or negative selection. Consider that the human child is probably the most difficult to nurture into a productive and "species positive" creature in all of the animal kingdom. Critters requiring such high levels of support are probably prone to more success in family environments that are less competitive. High IQ parents realize that if they produce too many young they cannot provide the level of support necessary to produce an optimum individual. It is the quality over quantity gambit. We need to weight offspring according to their overall "species success" instead of their ability to take up space.
Just another idea to consider.
By
fallenmonk, at 8:49 PM
Very well said, Fallenmonk.
Good point about birthrates not necessarily indicating genomic success. Absolutely, the measure of success would have to be charted ten, a hundred, a thousand generations down the line. It would indeed have to take into account whether those children successfully reproduced as well. I didn't want to crunch the data to try to figure out the relative rates of each groups children having children having children having children with the added complications of figuring all their relative scores on the other correlative traits.
I was trying to stimulate a little interesting conversation today, and I did.
Mike
By
mikevotes, at 9:49 PM
Sweet comments thread, good points all around.
Two things worth adding:
1) Adaptability is the prime trait selected for in evolution of a species. This is particularly tricky because it is a meta-level trait. Not only do we select for traits that are immediately relevant to our immediate environment, but we also select for traits that indicate future ability to adapt to forseeable trends. That this has been happening from bacteria and algae on up makes things very confusing, especially as far as something culturally variable and multifaceted as "intelligence" is concerned.
2) "Survival of the Fittest" is a phrase that originated not with the thoery of evolution or even biologists, but with the junk science "Social Darwinism." Unfortunately it remains with us as a legacy of our culture's troubled relationship with science and long divorce from history.
That all being said, no shit there's a strong anti-intellectual trend in the U.S. We're the land of the popularity contest!
By
Anonymous, at 11:35 PM
I hesitate to get into this, because as you say we're debating the unknowable here, in the sense that since we don't know the things that are going to kill the most people over the next ten, hundred, or thousand years, we don't know what's going to be selected and what's not. For instance, in the time of Chin in China or most of the Soviet era in Russia, intelligence would have been selected against because those who were intelligent were a threat to their governments and were accordingly wiped out by those leaders. And if we talk about selection as a process that has nothing to do with how many survive or reproduce, we are getting away from the meaning of the word perhaps to the interest of defining ourselves as more fit in a Darwinian sense, even when the numbers don't bear that out.
Despite the adaptability that comes with a flexibility of mind, studies on happiness reveal that people with fixed belief systems tend to be happier. And with depression predicted to become one of the most prevalent medical complaints within the next two decades, I think it's wise to consider that the questioning that often comes with many flexible thinkers may keep them from progressing in life because those who have a fixed belief system don't do as much stopping in midstream as flexible thinkers do. As a for instance, think about a fixed belief system person who thinks marriage is for life because that's what the Bible says, so they get married and have a bunch of kids; a flexible thinker may question the Bible and their relationship and thus be more prone to leave that relationship without having as many children. As for an anti-intellectual trend being a product of American pop culture, I think it's important to remember that Zen Buddhists were anti-intellectuals a thousand years before we got here, so it's likely that this comes down to human personality differences (and differences in experience with the value of certain kinds of knowledge) rather than being the fault of Beavis and Butthead.
By
Anonymous, at 8:56 AM
Man, I was right. This did spark some pretty good conversations.
Thanks everybody.
By
mikevotes, at 12:38 PM
The premise also appears to confine, if we liberally use the phrase "Survival of The Fittest," to the "most fit" of the human race. Let's grant for a moment that reproductive rates are tied to survival 'fitness.' I don't think we can presume that the least intelligent, by whatever measures, of our own species (within U.S. culture) aren't, perhaps, indeed ensuring survival for "our kind" vs. any number of other competing life-forms on this planet. In this light, Mike, perhaps your original premise is right, even from an evolutionary standpoint. As disconcerting as it might seem, those posessing the "quality" of having higher reproductive rates may in fact be our species' long-term salvation from some raging virus or environmental catastrophe by virtue of sheer numbers. In such a view, the arguments that intelligence is relevant or that intelligence is strictly inhereted both become moot given the unknown survival challenges that may be faced.
To take one step further out onto a limb (and the prior sentence notwithstanding), perhaps too much intelligence, and the corresponding scientific advances such as antibiotics that are leading to tougher bacterial foes is, in fact, an evolutionary disadvantage. Collective intelligence, say, in the medical arena, in many ways would appear to circumvent natural selection.
By
Anonymous, at 2:45 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home