Inquisitus
Don Juan
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2008
- Messages
- 134
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It's not a question whether people are individually dumber. The majority of people could be as dumb as bricks but still function in a high-tech society. You only need a fairly small proportion to figure things out and then teach to everybody else.Quiksilver said:It also doesn't seem practical that another species would be tooo much smarter than humans. All humans needed to get intelligent was (from my view) lions and tigers chasing us across the Serengeti in Africa. Need facilitates growth in intelligence. Since higher intelligence has stopped becoming an evolutionary trait, humans have theoretically been getting dumber and less intelligent.
This would seem likely on other planets as well. Unless they genetically engineer their own to be smarter (which is a definite possibility) then they would be getting dumber too.
Or there are other concepts of life altogether and we've only scratched the surface of existence/matter/dimensions/etc. where the rules that define our logic and reason could be thrown out the window. Again, another possibility![]()
Take cellphones for example. Technically, all you need to teach someone with basic literacy skills to use it would be an instruction manual. Even putting them together does not require more than a high school education and training. All the brain work in developing and producing the cellphone was done by relatively few people.
Are people nowadays inherently smarter or dumber than before? Probably not. But the body of knowledge that people have easy access to improves all the time.