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The human brain is getting smaller due to evolution

Valiant

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Alright... I found this article in a newspaper I read...
It's in Swedish, so i'll translate it:

We are getting increasingly stupid.

Socrates. King Salomo. Buddha.
Humanity might never become better than that.
According to new discoveries, the human brain has been shrinking for the last 5000 years.
The scientist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin has data that indicates that the loss in brain mass is as much as ten percent, since the time we were hunter-gatherers, says livescience.com.
- We can trust others in more areas, we can specialize our behavior to a larger extent and maybe we don't need our brains as much, then, says John Hawks.


This is something I find pretty funny. I usually don't put an equal sign between brain size and intelligence...
But if you're going to be generally intelligent or even versatile, there has to be some size to it. I feel pretty good about my big head today, I must admit :)
And I am quite the generalist. Coincidence? :p

Anyway. Cooperation has made humanity less versatile individually.
I think this is type-related. If you go back to the stone age, maybe you would have found more of the now rare types?
A guess of mine would be that ENTPs, ENTJs, and ESTPs (generalists) would probably have been awfully common back then.

Today, other types who are more specialized are super-common, roughly in relation to what is needed in society.
We've got the scientist types. The worker types. The leader types.
Is human cooperation and dependency upon the larger society what's causing this?
Of course it would have been different when each man and woman depended almost solely upon himself. Then you would get a lot of the independent self-sufficient types.
Today these same types often have a hard time fitting into society, since the rules have changed, and ENTJ, ENTP and ESTPs are still hunters who needs to be at the top of the food chain or don't participate at all.

This thread will probably get two replies or something... But I just thought this might be interesting.
 

ajblaise

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Most evidence actually suggests that intelligence in developed countries has been rising. Mostly due to changing living conditions e.g. better nutrition, smaller families, more education, heterosis. The human environment today is also more complex and stimulating than during earlier times.
 

Xander

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INTP's developed your world. You owe us everything!!!!


(Oh and head size... yeah... only baseball caps work... seriously)
 

Magic Poriferan

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I don't care to enter MBTI into this. I will say that it seems to confirm suspicions I already had about the course of human evolution.
 

Polaris

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It isn't clear what the loss in brain mass means. Maybe we've been skimming off some of the dross, getting rid of things we no longer have use for and cutting out some mental detours. Maybe this doesn't even have anything to do with evolution; the difference in mass might be explained by our no longer having to spend as much time learning certain thought processes, for example.
 

Haphazard

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It just means the human brain is getting more efficient, not 'dumber'.
 

NewEra

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The human brain is shrinking... okay. So how does that make us dumber? You see a correlation between the shrinking brain and decreasing intelligence? I don't see it. If anything, we are getting more intelligent as a species.
 

Kra

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Circuits and CPUs have been getting smaller, more efficient, and more powerful since their inception. I see the human brain as developing in a similar fashion.
 

JAVO

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Smaller = more efficient... less brain cells to waste away while sitting in front of the television.
 

Billy

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Its not the size that matters! Oh shit wait yes it does when it comes to brains...
 

Edgar

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Granted, I don't exactly have a PhD in biology, but from little that I know about evolution is that it doesn't occur through repetitive motions (I.e. if you click your mouse a lot, doesn't mean your children will have long index fingers). It involves a mutation in a small, contained genetic pool, which then expands through reproduction. So I don't see any reason how humans would evolve in the last 5000 years (we were already dominant species then)

The reason for the smaller brain size could be the same reason for the decreased muscle mass. The capacity is there, we just don't use it as much. For example, I would guess that a lot of people who don't hunt for a living don't have an acute sense of smell, because they simply had no reason to train it.

And how does one measure the brain mass of people dead for thousands of years anyway... the whole thing has a whiff of "tabloid science"
 

Xenon

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Yes, unless these theorists can also show a decrease in certain mental abilities there is no reason to assume humans are getting stupider.

Scientists have compared brain size in different species several ways, trying to find something that makes humans stand out. They've looked at absolute size, they've looked at size relative to body weight, they've compared the sizes of specific "higher" brain regions, and they've come up with a measure called the "encephalization quotient" which compares the brain size of an animal with the expected brain size given the animal's overall size. The last one was the only one in which humans came out on top, and even then the difference wasn't exactly striking.

Now the thinking is intelligence of a species may have more to do with the density of neurons in brain tissue, or the speed at which neural impulses can travel.
 

Xenon

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Granted, I don't exactly have a PhD in biology, but from little that I know about evolution is that it doesn't occur through repetitive motions (I.e. if you click your mouse a lot, doesn't mean your children will have long index fingers). It involves a mutation in a small, contained genetic pool, which then expands through reproduction. So I don't see any reason how humans would evolve in the last 5000 years (we were already dominant species then)

Yeah, that too. So our capacity for intelligence won't decrease simply because people aren't fully using their brains; there has to actually be a reproductive advantage to decreased intelligence to allow those genes to spread. For intelligence to "devolve", high intelligence (or something related to it) would have to cause one to leave behind fewer offspring than the less intelligent, over a long period of time.
 

Billy

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Granted, I don't exactly have a PhD in biology, but from little that I know about evolution is that it doesn't occur through repetitive motions (I.e. if you click your mouse a lot, doesn't mean your children will have long index fingers). It involves a mutation in a small, contained genetic pool, which then expands through reproduction. So I don't see any reason how humans would evolve in the last 5000 years (we were already dominant species then)

The reason for the smaller brain size could be the same reason for the decreased muscle mass. The capacity is there, we just don't use it as much. For example, I would guess that a lot of people who don't hunt for a living don't have an acute sense of smell, because they simply had no reason to train it.

And how does one measure the brain mass of people dead for thousands of years anyway... the whole thing has a whiff of "tabloid science"

I dont think evolution stops... ever. I think its just how things change related to the environment people are in based on what is best suited for survival. If having long index fingers provides an advantage for a long enough time line because it gives people more economic power to raise a family effectively the persons with long index fingers will breed more children then those without.
 

Billy

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Yeah, that too. So our capacity for intelligence won't decrease simply because people aren't fully using their brains; there has to actually be a reproductive advantage to decreased intelligence to allow those genes to spread. For intelligence to "devolve", high intelligence (or something related to it) would have to cause one to leave behind fewer offspring than the less intelligent, over a long period of time.

I remember reading an article one time that said how the human spiecies is evolving in differnt directions.

The more intelligent and attractive will eventually evolve to be more intelligent and more attractive, while the less intelligent and less attractive will grow stronger and be able to do more grunt work.

Holy shit, TIME MACHINE!
 

ajblaise

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For intelligence to "devolve", high intelligence (or something related to it) would have to cause one to leave behind fewer offspring than the less intelligent, over a long period of time.

You ever see the beginning of Idiocracy?

Though I don't really agree that that's what's happening.
 

Oaky

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Human intelligence is declining. Find me a man who can design the pyramids like it's architect and I would consider thinking otherwise. We don't have that genius anymore.
Of course there is rocket science and all that but that can be learnt within a matter of years whereas no one has yet figured out how the pyramids were so accurately designed.
 

Xenon

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^ I haven't actually. Though I kinda figured someone would make a remark along those lines. ;)

(this was in response to ajblaise)
 

FDG

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Human intelligence is declining. Find me a man who can design the pyramids like it's architect and I would consider thinking otherwise. We don't have that genius anymore.
Of course there is rocket science and all that but that can be learnt within a matter of years whereas no one has yet figured out how the pyramids were so accurately designed.

Because the Egyptians had developed rocket science? Seriously, what kind of dumb comparison is that?
 
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