With the dawn of agriculture and civilization, there came the ability to specialize. People who would ordinarily have died from stupidity were able to survive just by performing some repetitive menial task, whereas previously they would have been unable to outwit a wolf or died from starvation because the carrying capacity of the extended family was insufficient to provide sustenance to those who couldn't carry their weight.

As a result, since the time of cro magnon, human cranial capacity has shrunk.

While this is not a 100% correlative factor to intelligence because there are other factors such as the thickness of the myelin sheath and transmission speeds, it IS a factor.

We know it is a factor because that is the primary means scientists use of comparing intelligence between species.

Within a species or even genus, cranial capacity is not dispositive. For example, among corvids (crows, ravens, bluejays) with substantially similar cranial capacity, some have developed higher intellectual functions than others. But the cranial capacity does create a limit on the number of neurons available and thus an upper limit to intelligence.

And Cro Magnons had a greater upper limit than we do. That doesn't mean they utilized those neurons as efficiently as we might utilize our lower number of them; but it means that any who were as efficient as us would have been more intelligent.

Look at some of what cro magnons did. They created agriculture. They created art. They created language. They created religion.

How many people do we know that could create these things with so few examples?

Even look back just a few hundred years at what constituted an educated person. Such people were universally multilingual, mastered music, and had essentially absorbed all of the available knowledge of their era. Look at someone like Thomas Jefferson. While WE think of him as a genius, men like him who could create clocks, architecture, breed their own vegetable varieties yet be rhetorical geniuses weren't as rare per capita as they are today.

There was a time in this country when getting out of elementary school required passing exams in Latin.

So there's a good possibility you're more correct than you'd think.

However ... on the other side, keep in mind that to some extent you share genes with the people from whom you would steal if you could turn invisible and that the aggregate failure of genetic survival from the damage you would do could more than balance whatever success you would derive from those abilities.

So perhaps your lack of those abilities is a result of an evolutionary success that allows a community that shares many of your genes to survive by avoiding predation from its members.

(*grin*)

Evolution has created the ability to be invisible.

That ability has come from the human brain....that and a shit ton of research revenue coming from the Department of Defense.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/sci-tech/scientific_wizards_find_real_cloak_of_invisibility_1_737854

now that is going to make me grumpy John, lol. You do have a point though. One interesting thing though is how much cooperation plays a role, even among different species when it comes to survival. We'd all be shitting blood without a bunch of bacteria helping us out in our own digestive tracks. I've heard one theory that a lot of auto-immune disorders are the result of living in conditions that are overly sanitary. The idea is that we evolved with our immune systems functioning to fight far more bugs then we now have to deal with. I read somewhere once that there are no cases of crohn's disease or alergic reactions in places like Indonesia where people still are exposed to common bugs like tape worms. Guess that puts a damper on doing Greek, lol.

-- Modified on 1/1/2012 11:27:18 PM