[BigTex]

In another thread the idea was put forth that human intelligence is good and more is better. It is geniuses in which mankind finds his highest expression. More intelligence is always better.

I'm not so sure. Here's why:

As the MQ crowd endlessly argues, sustainability is the only long term human survival strategy. How do you get sustainability? Through a stable population.

How do you get a stable population? Birth rates must more or less equal death rates, which typically only occurs in a system that is in harmony with the larger ecosystem. When any population grows too large there is a die off--a return to sustainability or an evolutionary re-set as nature tries a different approach to life.

I do not believe that it is within the capabilities of human rationality to engineer a sustainable population; thus, we will either become extinct or have some kind of die-off event from which we will again grow the population beyond carrying capacity, unless some predator or disease assists us by pulling us back into a balanced ecosystem. A nasty flu bug might do this.

The only way to fit into an ecosystem is if each member species is doing its best at survival and everything is more or less in balance. Thus, the cheetah needs to be fast enough to catch the slowest gazelle (or whatever deer-like animal he is chasing that day), but the cheetah needs to be small enough that the lion can take his prey away from him; the lion needs to be slow enough that he can't catch everything that the cheetah can, and the gazelles need to be cohesive enough that the herd doesn't lose too many members to the big cats. If there were one animal that could do everything, it would soon hunt the gazelles to extinction, and all of its competing predators would also die. Once the prey was hunted to extinction and all of the competing predators were gone, the "do everything" predator populaton would begin to expand in an uncontrolled manner. The higher intelligence of the "do everything" predator would now lead it to more and more clever ways to continue expanding its population and feeding itself. And so it would go until the expanding population bumped into an immovable barrier to its continued growth.

This appears to be the story of human evolution and civilization. Our higher intelligence has placed us on an evolutionary ladder on which we appear to be getting smarter and smarter, in addition to the magic of being able to pass knowledge and experience down to future generations, which facilitates all sorts of innovations as thought and ideas evolve. We are now at the point in history where we have a plume of feathers that extends from deep in the earth to deep in space. We imagine that we have simply conquered the animal ecosystem from which we evolved and we are now moving on to the frontiers of the mind, or seeing how many things we can buy.

But where has the higher intelligence really gotten us? What has been the marginal return on that last 20 points of IQ? Well, we have created a very large population and come up with interesting ways of depleting critical resources more and more quickly in the process of creating greater and greater comforts and distractions for our fellow humans. Kind of like a swarm of locusts with big brains and short attention spans.

We have been fierce in our rise to the top.

But what happens now? What is the next step in our intellectual evolution?

If we are lucky our remarkable intelligence will not lead to our extinction. How else would our relentless march be stopped? What stops a swarm of locusts? I imagine it is when they run out of fields to raid. Why will our fate be different? We don't like to admit it, but most of our solutions are probably ultimately far more complicated than the problem they are seeking to solve, which creates ever more complex problems requiring ever more complex solutions. An upward spiral of complexity should not be mistaken for evolution that truly enhances the chances of long term survival.

Our ability to look into the future has made it incredibly difficult to enjoy the present. Our ability to remember past trauma has created similar psychological problems with simply enjoying being alive.

Self-consciousness in humans has run completely amok. The prevalence of suicide is perhaps a warning sign that we are already in "intellectual evolution overshoot." We are too smart. Our cognitive ability is simply beyond our needs and our desire to have new challenges and new frontiers has changed us from a magnificent predator to a swarm of locusts. We will swarm until there are no more fields to devour. Then we will be screwed. We will realize that our only tool is mental horsepower, but the problem will not be solvable through an elaborate abstract analysis--it will simply be that we are too many locusts chasing too few fields.

We have mastered our environment to an unhealthy degree. Our ability to master our environment has set the stage for a re-set whereby nature simply starts over with another life-form that does a better job of staying within the ecological lines.

I'm not suggesting that we are doing anything wrong or that we should be doing anything differently. We are simply acting according to our nature, and doing it with a 1,000 horsepower mental engine trying to solve problems that are designed for 100 horsepower intellects. Stated differently, are the problems we are solving with the extra 900 horsepower really solutions that are enhancing the prospects of our long term survival?

Another model of integration of highly intelligent mammals with their environments is probably found with other primates, dolphins and whales. Those creatures are integrated with their environments, while still being highly intelligent. Our quantum leaps in brainpower and ability to impact our environment may ultimately be an evolutionary dead end, as nature defines the optimal upper limits of intelligence by overshooting that point in the form of our evolutionary development.

The ultimate elegance in a life form is how long it is able to survive. Thus, simple is probably better than complex, to a point (in the sense that entropy tends to hit the complex the hardest). The small brain of the roach or ant does not become disaffected or hopeless. It may not experience great heights of ecstasy or lows of despair, as we do, but there may be no long-term survival value in these mental states, so the ant and the roach may easily roll on for millions of years, long after we have imploded/exploded/died-off/pick you poison.

Maybe the vague feeling of human alienation that has plagued civilized man is the intuition that our civilization and surplus intellectual capacity is just wrong from a long-term survival perspective.

There are probably a few holes in my analysis. Feel free to point them out.

[I_Like_Plants]

I'm with it. Our intelligence is a raw, new, thing. The idea that we need more of it, the smarter the better, Oh your child's got an IQ of 130 well mine has an IQ of 140 etc., is a central theme in our culture.

In a scenario of ever-increasing resources, this weird period we've been in from say 1850-1950, or call it 1850-now, it makes sense. But not in a period of decreasing resources.

I've found this out, high tech is a very good field to make $10 an hour in, for the rest of your life. Pretend you never heard of Ohm's Law and be "real good" at lifting boxes though, and you'll make $12. And they'll teach you to drive a forklift! All this stuff calling for high intellect pays shit these days, while the stuff considered traditionally for the dumbasses, pays better and has better security. Often even a union. You know why? Because the dumbass work is actually NECESSARY.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

[Revi]

Check out the movie, Idiocracy. He explores this theme:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

I have always been smarter than my fellow humans (according to standardized tests). This hasn't lead to reproductive success. I am not particularly rich either. People who are dumber than rocks seem to succeed brilliantly.

We are a very adaptable species, but a hundred years of fossil fuel has made us too comfortable. We can figure out how to live without as much of it, but it takes planning.

In our household we managed to cut our fossil fuel use by half. It took some thinking and planning, but we live just as good a life, and in some ways much better with half the dinosaur juice.

Maybe there is some utility in being smart after all.

[I_Like_Plants]

Yes, frankly, the dumbasses are the smart ones. The ol' boy veterinarian I worked for, needed to drill a hole one day. No drill bits. He takes a nail, chucks it in there, and drills the damn hole. Was it pretty? No. Was it efficient? No. It smoked and wobbled a little but it worked. I'd have gone to Sears and bought a drill bit. The dumbass method was far superior, got 'er done and no drill bit to get borrowed by someone and lost.

This is why I'm very interested in music these days. Music, the anti-McCulture weapon. It's a way to channel all the high-IQ nonsense into something that's basically useless, and fun. A Potlatch given by those with high IQs to everyone, the more you give away, the more you are revered - Bird and Trane probably had IQs around 200, and they gave the most.

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'I')'m with it. Our intelligence is a raw, new, thing. The idea that we need more of it, the smarter the better, Oh your child's got an IQ of 130 well mine has an IQ of 140 etc., is a central theme in our culture.

***

I could go on, but you get the idea.

[I_Like_Plants]

That's my point. Read the rest of my post.

This is why I think music may be our salvation or at least keep a few of us sane. Beethoven and Mozart etc., could have ended up designing rockets, had they been alive in our time. Bach may have ended up working in a protein-folding lab, working on something to destroy all eukaryotic life on earth. Instead, he played organs.

I see music as a way to channel our intelligence into relatively harmless directions.

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'T')hat's my point. Read the rest of my post.

This is why I think music may be our salvation or at least keep a few of us sane. Beethoven and Mozart etc., could have ended up designing rockets, had they been alive in our time. Bach may have ended up working in a protein-folding lab, working on something to destroy all eukaryotic life on earth. Instead, he played organs.

I see music as a way to channel our intelligence into relatively harmless directions.

[I_Like_Plants]

Yep, cool, huh?

[Nicholai]

There's a flip side to the argument. What if we all had IQ's of 150 and we understood the nature of complex societies and long-term sustainability? What if this new intelligence gave us the ability to develop societies and communities among the most rational and sustainable grounds? What if this led us to simply understand our paramount and continuous relationship as mere cog of the natural environment?

Just looking at the flip side, see what you guys think...

[I_Like_Plants]

We'd probably come up with an even bigger clusterfuck.

Nazi Germany was pretty much an invention of the smart guys, so was Soviet Russia, and Communist China. Basically those were examples of what you get when an empire or some sort of aristocracy rots and you end up with the supersmart end up at loose ends. Yeah we can all point to idiots in all of those regimes, Ribbentrop and all that, but mainly they were Perfect Societies come up with by smart guys. Hitler while self-taught, was by no means stupid. Probably about an IQ of 150. Same goes for the others, Speer up there, Goebbels probably 170-odd, and even Goering, the fat slob, was an ace pilot and not a dummy.

Nope the Smart = Good thing just doesn't wash with me these days.

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Nicholai', 'T')here's a flip side to the argument. What if we all had IQ's of 150 and we understood the nature of complex societies and long-term sustainability? What if this new intelligence gave us the ability to develop societies and communities among the most rational and sustainable grounds? What if this led us to simply understand our paramount and continuous relationship as mere cog of the natural environment?

Just looking at the flip side, see what you guys think...

[Nicholai]

No, I'm saying if everyone is intelligent. There is no irrational mob, we are all equally intelligent with IQ's of 150. What then?

I don't really have a personal opinion on this one. It's hard to imagine since there is no bewildered mass. I guess from experience, I was in a high-IQ class in Junior High School which only let in students with a minimum IQ of 125. Everyone in the class was very intelligent but many were fools at the same time. Almost all of them weren't just content at being cogs in the system, they were cheerleaders for the system. Even the ones with the highest grades still believed in God or thought same-sex marriage was the most important political issue of this decade. Not to mention, when we went on field trips, we had to drag along a bag of Ritalin the size of a trash can because most of those in the top 2% have social/psychological problems.

It doesn't really fit since my experiences don't come close to the situation I'm hinting at, but just gives an idea of what the "ultra smart" really act like in a single group.

[I_Like_Plants]

For every super-smart in favor of sustainability I can point to 10 who are batshit crazy and want us uploading our minds into machines or colonizing the stars or preferably all of the above.

[lawnchair]

The really, really bright often do manage to amuse themselves through relatively low-material-impact means. Overeducation. Music. Dicking people around.

Yeah, ILP, I'm one of those dreamers, though it's too late to do anything but aim for deeply sustainable now. Sad that we're in such a backwater of the Universe. I do think we probably had the energy endowment to start on terraforming some of the marginal spots of the solar system and capture a lot of the Sun's energy. A big challenge, but one that might have been a good use for our smartest smarts. My guess is that lots of other critters in the Universe that went down the "smart" path didn't have the long-accumulated fossilized energy endowment we did, so didn't have much of an Industrial Revolution. But, we burned through it flinging poo at each other and being too lazy to walk. Such is life.

Thomas Jefferson got it righter than just about anyone else (he usually did) with Agrarian democracy, but even he couldn't really point to what to do at the end of the growth phase.

There is a whole, whole lot of stupid running around. Problem is, lots of what we stupid did, historically, can and has been automated. The smart have made machines that do a whole lot of things a whole lot better, with just a few halfway-bright folks operating them. And, rather than letting ourselves embrace some laziness, inefficiency, and non-growth (Illich's Useful Unemployment), we set ourselves to making, marketing, and buying crap (where crap is not only trinkets, but even a lot of the last 40 years of medical progress).

[MrBill]

Then again creeping normalization may mean that we have the resources and high living standards to start to worry about such concepts as sustainability.

There is no evidence that I have read that generations before us followed any other path than to hunt whatever was easily available into extinction before moving onto the next best alternative. Don't make me drag out the proof because I will!

We are perhaps one of the first - or few generations - that is actually looking forward at the sustainability of such actions, and asking ourselves in a non-abstract way, "okay, what comes next?"

Certainly, if the human race were willing to suffer mortality rates similiar to the animal kingdom - ants, cochroaches or locusts anyone - then many of our problems would like be solved through natural attrition.

We have dedicated a lot of resources actually to science, the environment and sustainability. Maybe it is too little too late, but since Malthus first put forward such theories to the limits of growth, we have steadily addressed our worse fears. If not always in a linear fashion. And we have learned from our mistakes whether they were ideological - such as a master race - or practical - such as the long-term costs of nuclear energy.

We may well be screwed as an ueber-predator species, but we have been hardwired as such for thousands of years of evolution. It is hard to change that trajectory and maybe our minds are not really equipped to deal with it in any case. We're born, we eat, we shit, we screw, we die! So what are we so proud of that we think we're different? Just another animal at that basic level. Anything more should be celebrated as a success and not cause us to commit suicide becase we do not have as many beads & trinkets as the next guy! ; - )

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', 'T')hen again creeping normalization may mean that we have the resources and high living standards to start to worry about such concepts as sustainability.

There is no evidence that I have read that generations before us followed any other path than to hunt whatever was easily available into extinction before moving onto the next best alternative. Don't make me drag out the proof because I will!

We are perhaps one of the first - or few generations - that is actually looking forward at the sustainability of such actions, and asking ourselves in a non-abstract way, "okay, what comes next?"

Certainly, if the human race were willing to suffer mortality rates similiar to the animal kingdom - ants, cochroaches or locusts anyone - then many of our problems would like be solved through natural attrition.

We have dedicated a lot of resources actually to science, the environment and sustainability. Maybe it is too little too late, but since Malthus first put forward such theories to the limits of growth, we have steadily addressed our worse fears. If not always in a linear fashion. And we have learned from our mistakes whether they were ideological - such as a master race - or practical - such as the long-term costs of nuclear energy.

We may well be screwed as an ueber-predator species, but we have been hardwired as such for thousands of years of evolution. It is hard to change that trajectory and maybe our minds are not really equipped to deal with it in any case. We're born, we eat, we shit, we screw, we die! So what are we so proud of that we think we're different? Just another animal at that basic level. Anything more should be celebrated as a success and not cause us to commit suicide becase we do not have as many beads & trinkets as the next guy! ; - )

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Nicholai', 'N')o, I'm saying if everyone is intelligent. There is no irrational mob, we are all equally intelligent with IQ's of 150. What then?

I don't really have a personal opinion on this one. It's hard to imagine since there is no bewildered mass. I guess from experience, I was in a high-IQ class in Junior High School which only let in students with a minimum IQ of 125. Everyone in the class was very intelligent but many were fools at the same time. Almost all of them weren't just content at being cogs in the system, they were cheerleaders for the system. Even the ones with the highest grades still believed in God or thought same-sex marriage was the most important political issue of this decade. Not to mention, when we went on field trips, we had to drag along a bag of Ritalin the size of a trash can because most of those in the top 2% have social/psychological problems.

It doesn't really fit since my experiences don't come close to the situation I'm hinting at, but just gives an idea of what the "ultra smart" really act like in a single group.

[jlw61]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Nicholai', 'N')o, I'm saying if everyone is intelligent. There is no irrational mob, we are all equally intelligent with IQ's of 150.

[TWilliam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jlw61', ' ')EQ (emotional quotient) is how you react and THAT is far more important.

[Kingcoal]

Intelligence is an interesting subject because we humans invented the concept so it's no wonder that we think we are so smart. We only know what we know; we don't have an objective perspective when it comes to human intelligence.

I used to work with a Physicist who used to say that human intelligence was probably over rated in the grand scheme of things, pointing out that alligators and crocodiles have miniscule brains, but are great survivors - they have us beat by over 150 million years. We've only been around for a couple hundred thousand years and we are full of ourselves. Many species of reptiles have seen global catastrophe more than once. You have to hand it to them, they are good at surviving.

While life is probably commonplace in the Universe, complex organisms are probably in the minority. I believe that scientists have discovered bacterial spores on recovered moon probes (Surveyor) which came back to life after sitting in a cold vacuum for a couple of decades. Collony organisms like ourselves are just to dependant on their cushy environment to survive long term.

Humans are fragile creatures, in fact that is why we developed intelligence to begin with - to make up for the fact that we are fragile. For us, intelligence was a survival strategy and it turned out to be a very good one . Because we are fragile, we need to control our immediate environment. Using fire, we can make inedible things edible. We can also keep ourselves warm in the winter; otherwise we'd freeze to death. Intelligence also gave us huge advantages as hunters which created a positive feedback loop. Better hunters eat more meat, which is full of vitamin B allowing more brain capacity.

The problem these days is that we don't live in an every man for himself, hunter gatherer society anymore. As a society, we take care of the weak and unmotivated, allowing them to reproduce greatly. Having special immunity to plagues is no advantage anymore due to medical science. In a lot of ways, we really haven't evolved in the proper sense since modern civilization began. This is a big problem because we are stuck from an intelligence evolutionary perspective. Intelligence just isn't sexy enough, to put it another way.

A British scientist wrote a paper about this predicting that humans will branch off between the beautiful and the ugly. Face it, sexy people have more sex and since they don't have to worry about their kids dying off, the numbers of sexy people should be rising. Turn the clock back to the Stone Age and things were different. An ugly man with a strong back and a big stick would do pretty well with women. Today, women control reproduction for the most part. They decide whose genes they want, generally in an irrational manor. Yes, women think with the crotch every bit as much as men do.

Assuming civilization continues, which it probably will, we are looking at a future full of Brad Pitt's and Jessica Simpson's. As long as large populations can be sustained, this is where we are going. However, there is the possibility of societal collapse, in which case traits such as frugality and natural disease resistance come back into play. Then there's just dumb luck, which is always one of the biggest variables.

To sum up, intelligence is overrated. We honestly are a bunch of sex crazed, violent, irrational creatures who like to pretend that we are calm, intelligent, caring creatures. One of the reasons why I don't believe in UFOs is because I think that aliens advanced enough to come here would probably just torch the place after reviewing the internet. I'd say at least 50% of internet traffic is made up of pictures of naked humans engaged in all sorts of bizarre and not so bizarre rituals. We dedicate MOST of our resources and time towards the task of getting laid, which is very inefficient by any measure. We are very inefficient reproducers.

The main difference between us and the rest of the mammals on this planet is that we have a lot more time to spend on mating. That's about all we've really accomplished because that's about all the females of our species really care about. Women are in charge in human society these days. The kinds of intelligence that are rewarded with courtship are directly reflected in what a woman cares about and desires. Fortunately, alcohol exists, otherwise average, run of the mill, good guys wouldn't have a chance. Average, boring, but otherwise intelligent guys need all the help they can get in their goal of reproduction these days. Remember, women are in charge. For the most part, arranged marriage is a thing of the past so for the time being, humankind is at the mercy of immature womanly desires.