Re: A Thread Concerning Human Understanding.
by pythicnome on June 20th, 2018, 12:50 am
Trying to come at this from a different angle:
One reference point to consider is the long duration of education that is required by human infants. Originally, in part an adaptation to the larger brain/larger head vs narrow hips for upright walking, which resulted in giving birth to still immature offspring, which required their learning to be completed by their mothers and others.
As this educational process is relatively unconstrained, it is subject to cultural and societal influences. And if society and culture change in the form of innovations and increasing complexity, then innate intelligence may be open to change over time. In this sense, you could say that intelligence is an adaptation to society. And arguably, as society today requires more skills to succeed in, our innate intelligence has been increasing to match the changes in society.
The above points also suggest that you cannot compare the intelligence of a person from one historical period with another from another period. The minds were educated to solve different types and degrees of problem. There is also a "survival bias" present, in that past individuals who could not adapt to increasing social complexity, probably got bred out of the population as they would not have made good mates.
One last factor is that although the time has been too short for much genetic change, we know there has been some but beyond genetic change there have been profound changes in the sensory mechanics of cognition, especially in the last 10,000 years or so and more so within the last 4-5,000 years with the transition from oral cultures to literate cultures. Oral cultures existed for perhaps 50,000 years and relied on and developed powerful memory devices to store and transmit information. The shift to the written word changed all of that, but in the meantime much of the mental infrastructure of orality still exists - for example our love of music and dance and story-telling. But the system was for the memorization task to be assigned to a small number of people, with the majority remaining as listeners (the first audience!, the start of politics and religion and receptivity for TV!).