Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

Are we really significantly less intelligent than our ancestors?

Francisco Miraval

Geneticist Gerald Cabtree, of Stanford University, recently published in Science & Society a paper in two parts and a response proposing that we are losing our “fragile intellect”, due perhaps to the fact that we seem to be losing the genes we need to keep our intellectual and emotional abilities.

In other words, humanity is less intelligent now than the level of intelligence our ancestors had millennia ago.

Not everybody agrees with Cabtree, of course. But reading those arguments trying to refute Cabtree’s conclusion I got the impression than, far from refuting anything, the superficiality of those arguments seems to confirm the idea we are actually losing our intellectual capabilities.

I know nothing about genetics, so I want to focus on the first paragraph of the first part of his paper, where he says, “If an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions.”

The reason, he says, is that people from 3000 years ago had “a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues.” In other words, human beings in the 21st century seem to be less intelligent than Greeks in the 10th century BC. Or, as Cabtree says, “We are slowly losing emotional and intellectual traits.”

According to this scientist, there are 2000 to 5000 genes related to intellectual abilities. All of those genes need to work properly for us to keep those abilities. However, in his opinion, because we do face the same level of problems our prehistorical ancestors faced to survive, we are not using many of those genes and, therefore, we are losing them. And, as a consequence, we are also losing our intelligence.

However, we look around and we see all kinds of technological and scientific advances. Perhaps we are more intelligent than people in the past. Perhaps we are even far more intelligent than our distant and recent ancestors, as argued by Nicholas Kristof in his recent (December 2012) opinion piece published by the New York Times

According to Cabtree, it only seems we are more intelligent because we have changed the definition of intelligence, making it more superficial. What we now call “intellectual activity” does not require the same level of innovation or creativity our ancestors needed millennia ago to create the bow and the arrow.

In addition, according to Cabtree, the alleged increase in people’s IQ during the past 100 years should be explained by “environmental influences” and not by assuming there has been a real increase in the IQ of people.

In other words, as Cabtree says, “Nearly all of us are compromised compared to our ancient ancestors of 3000–6000 years ago.”

Perhaps ancient poets and thinker were right when they (Ovid, for example) spoke about a Golden Age forever lost in the past, when human were more intelligent than people in the present. Will that trend continue into the future?

Go Back