andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2012-03-06 11:00 am
andrewducker) wrote2012-03-06 11:00 am
Entry tags:
Interesting Links for 06-03-2012
- Replacing Trident makes no sense
- New mortgage scheme gets go-ahead in Scotland.
I'm not convinced by this - the reason the banks want a large deposit is in case the prices fall. If this happens then the government will be left in debt.
- Did you ever read Goats? Would you like it to be finished? There's a Kickstarter...
- The terror inherent in explaining homosexuality to children
- The Politics of Star Wars
- Algernon's Law - can anyone spot the obvious flaw?
- More left-wing people need to be educated about economics
- Why do people leave their religion?
- The UK is planning on opening up a tax loophole.
- Jesus is a Rorscach blot - everyone sees what they want to.
- The New Networked Feminism: Limbaugh's Spectacular Social Media Defeat
- Teen rape tackled in Home Office advertising campaign
- 24bit 192kHz Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed
no subject
> 2) If you don't believe neanderthals had a lower IQ, consider a point where something like a chimpanzee (or of equivalent intelligence, I've no idea which hominid would be in that point on our evolutionary journey but there must have been one) was the most intelligent animal on earth. Now consider the argument "clearly being more intelligent than a chimpanzee will lead to a loss of evolutionary fitness or chimpanzees would be more intelligent".
Where are the Neanderthals now? Or chimpanzees? It's very possible that humans in the past were so evolutionary unfit that they almost went extinct ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans ). And it's not clear how well humans are doing now: the population takeoff only began a few thousand years ago, and there are serious issues about our collective fitness being harmed by increased intelligence (nukes, etc.).
(Depending on how you cut the timelines, Neanderthals lasted longer than humans have so far - stone tool culture remains from 300k years, apparent extinction 50k years ago, 250k lifespan; humans only began to appear 200k years ago, and are behavioristically like us 50k years ago...)
> 3) You have no evidence whatsoever that we have "hit the evolutionary ceiling". If you want to make the argument that evolution cannot make us more intelligent without a loss of evolutionary fitness you must first establish whether we are currently doing so. The best evidence available is that currently we are getting more intelligent at a startlingly rapid rate.
The Flynn effect has stopped in modern countries; dysgenics have been confirmed in many samples and surveys. Ceiling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression
The Flynn effect is not going to save you in this argument; you should stop appealing to it.
> 4) If we're to reason about whether surgery or other interventions can increase our intelligence without a decrease in fitness because evolution can't we must first establish that evolution can't. This is another attack on that hypothesis. It turns out a grey squirrel was a much better "fit" for the environment than a red squirrel but in some parts of the world a grey squirrel did not evolve. Similarly it may be that a much more intelligent person would be much more evolutionary fit and, if we reran the clock of evolution, we'd all be ten times as smart and sitting here reading articles about how it's impossible to make us a hundred times as smart.
So you're appealing to the possible existence of *entirely different species* to rescue the claim that small easy fitness-improving IQ gains are possible?
Seriously? What's next, you're going to tell me the existence of computers disproves the argument because they're so much better at arithmetic?
> 5) If we're reading the same thing (the first article) loophole 3 appears to be "the intervention may be simple, give major enhancements, but result in a net loss of fitness" -- I have no idea how that is relevant. If our task is "moving over flat terrain" a wheel is a simple intervention that increases fitness for task which evolution has not come up with. So I don't see how that is the same.
A wheel is not a simple intervention for evolution.
> 6) I think I must be looking at the wrong article loophole 2 here appears to be "the simple interventions may not lead to a major enhancement". I have no idea how that is relevant. What I'm talking about is that evolution is not optimising smartness. It could well be that evolution could make us ten times as smart but that has no gain or loss in evolutionary fitness. If that's the case then it probably won't happen through evolution.
How is that not relevant?
Besides, an increase in intelligence by 10 times being completely fitness neutral is about as likely as flipping a coin 10 times and it landing on edge each time...
('Sir, we've developed a new supersonic jet that goes 10 times as fast!' 'Excellent! How many billions will we profit or lose by deploying it immediately to all our biggest airline customers?' '$0 and 0 cents sir! Apparently the premium our customers are willing to pay *exactly* offsets the increased fuel consumption!')
no subject
Now, that red squirrel. The guy who wrote the essay "no simple changes to an animal could possibly make it more hippity-hoppity eat-ity-nutity than a red squirrel because otherwise nature would have evolved the red squirrel to be better" is looking pretty dumb now. Nature had evolved something much better for that ecological niche, it had just done it elsewhere. It turns out that there was a pretty similar animal which was much better at doing the things that red squirrels do but nature had not evolved it. Why not? Because evolution is not optimising what you think it is. It is not in the business of building the perfect creature to occupy a niche efficiently (despite what discovery channel documentaries say). Only a moderate knowledge of biology will find you huge numbers of examples of invasive species which turn out to be much better in the niche than the invasive species. Take home message: what on earth makes you think evolution is good for optimising "smarts"?
Besides, an increase in intelligence by 10 times being completely fitness neutral is about as likely as flipping a coin 10 times and it landing on edge each time
Why -- what is your evidence for this? And remember, fitness here is evolutionary fitness, not fitness for being smart, not fitness for earing money, not fitness for qualifying for Harvard. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that more intelligent people have more children? Unless that huge intelligence increase actually results in more propensity to succesfully rear children to breeding age it's not increasing evolutionary fitness. It may increase a lot of other types of fitness.
That's not necessary at all. The argument is simple: any increase to intelligence will have one of a few properties, or else evolution would already have increased it.
Intelligence could be increasing... as long as the increases had one of the properties.
> The Flynn effect (whatever it is) is certainly much larger than this. So before you begin your essay on "why evolution cannot increase our intelligence" you must first show it is not doing so. You really cannot -- if there were an underlying evolutionary change on an evolutionary timescale it would be so small it would be absolutely swamped by the astoundingly rapid changes in human IQ.
Already addressed Flynn. So your whole objection comes down to 'there might be some process operating now', which is just an argument from ignorance?
> Why -- what is your evidence for this? And remember, fitness here is evolutionary fitness, not fitness for being smart, not fitness for earing money, not fitness for qualifying for Harvard. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that more intelligent people have more children?
I don't. All my evidence points strongly in the other direction - exactly consistent with what I just said, about the fitness neutrality being extremely unlikely, and increases either being fit or unfit. If merely somewhat smart people *already* suffer big fitness penalties as evidenced by low fertility, then that makes it even *less* likely that being 10x smarter would be exactly fitness neutral!
Re:
I do not think we are going to agree on the other matter of the fitness neutrality of intelligence.