Our "domestication" has historically been more that we've gone from a generalist species to a specialist society. With that, things that were previously probably a boon for survival and reproduction become less so (For example, quick reaction times don't matter so much when you have a city wall to keep out predators and a backup hunting party).
My assumption is that what we've lost is more our brain matter used to sleep in trees and wake up/run from predators at all hours of the night. Stuff that's less important when you have night watchman, fires, and shelter.
It's similar to how dolphins have huge brains, but most of that is dedicated to sound processing. If dolphins learned how to make huts, farm fish, and fight off predators I'd imagine the part of their brain dedicated to processing sound would start to shrink as there isn't the evolutionary pressure to keep it around.
Sort of like how humans might be evolving towards color blindness because being able to tell the difference between red and green doesn't necessarily increase our ability to have children. That might lead to weird changes in our eyes and brains that could shrink them but wouldn't necessarily mean those humans are any dumber than their predecessors.
I don't understand what you mean by "generalist" vs "specialist". I think intelligence is related to why, for example, human beings lack armor, fur, and all sorts of specialized features, functions, and excellences that other species have. Human intelligence can dream up an indefinite if not infinite number of functions which are "offloaded" to technology. We wear clothing and can adjust it depending on the climate which allow us to adapt to environments more than any other species. We have optical instruments which can extend our vision beyond that of any other species depending on need. We have all sorts of communication instruments which allow us a greater range of communication than any other species. We can harvest food in ways that put all other species to shame. We can outrun, fly, and swim any other animal. I could go on. Any capacity other species have we can (at least in principle) exceed with the help of technology, all thanks to human intelligence.
Assuming selection as an explanatory model, I don't see why we should expect to see that basic feature going away. Even with greater specialization in one direction or another, you still need much of that basic underlying generality.
Later, we domesticated dogs and other species, then made more and more advanced technologies. But at it's core? Our niche was that.
Even fat modern lazy humans have it in them - kick in survival mode brain chemistry and enough luck to keep chasing a deer's trail for days, the deer will die of exhaustion before the human.
Or it could be that my small brain is incapable of seeing how small brain can mean dumber
Let's assume there even is a global optimum. Why do we think this global optimum would be invariant on environment? We have clear examples of species that fail to adapt to their changing environment quickly enough dying off. If you took the survivors of a change and then changed things back, those survivors might die again. That means you are fit to the environment you find yourself in. As the environment changes, you're not "better" or "worse" than someone who's more fit to a different environment.
Humanity is not getting strictly better on all stats. It's like a video game. We might tweak improve some stats and have to give up others. We are a bit more unique in that we largely optimize for the environment we create for ourselves, but that doesn't mean humans are constantly "getting better" over time. You could maybe try arguing that the human condition has improved over time due to technology, medicine, etc, but even that's an imperfect analysis because our historical record is so inaccurate.
What if there's a level of intelligence above which humans decide not to reproduce?
To my eye we’ve simply unlocked medical science and have taken control of reproduction to the point where it’s not critical to the species for everyone to reproduce. I’d be more concerned about all the plastics and chemicals that are now circulating in our bodies slowly decreasing our ability to reproduce than us as a species being too dumb to reproduce. That position just doesn’t have an existence proof point (no pandas don’t count because while it’s a funny pop meme, all evidence suggests they just can’t/won’t mate in captivity and it’s environmental for them).
I'm not. I was replying to the following question:
> What if there's a level of intelligence above which humans decide not to reproduce?
It seems obvious to me that a species that drives itself to extinction cannot be considered intelligent. Doubly so if it does that due to lack of reproduction.
> it’s not critical to the species for everyone to reproduce
It is. Every couple must have a certain amount of children in order to simply maintain a stable population.
On average. That doesn't mean that every single couple needs to reproduce. In fact, historically, that's certainly not been the case because some couples are just incapable while others reproduce far more than the average.
This reminds me of a meta-system-transition where simplified versions of individual (previously independent) units can lead to a unified cooperative whole that works better at the meta-system level (similar to what led to eukaryotes or to multicellularity). It's like a sacrifice that the individuals make (of things that might have looked like intelligence in the previous context) in order to be able to work together better, and these kinds of transitions have worked out extremely well for life, so far! (I guess I am biased, being alive and everything!?)
Should humans resist the formation of human meta-systems? Human/robot meta-systems? Certainly seems like a good chance that an extremely successful meta-system could be dangerous to the rest of the regular humans!? But if it's actually better, then that's just normal (meta) evolution.
No. I'm saying humans should not lose abilities or features because of it. We should be able to live comfortable lives and still maintain peak physical and mental performance. Any changes in our nature should not go against that.
Also, assuming the conclusions of the article in any way prove a shift in intelligence (it doesn't), you'd still be looking at averages which tells you nothing about the effect it has on total number at population. Maybe there's an upper bound of "smart" people or "strong" people modern society demands. Certainly as a skill becomes more commoditized it becomes less valuable economically. Maybe we've got too many smart people now because a lot of people saw the explosion in value of such careers?
Also "better" and "worse" only mean something relative to an end. I do not deny ends (I take human nature to be teleological, for example), but many "evolutionists" (i.e., those who accept a basically materialistic worldview) do deny the reality of ends (and are wholly incapable of accounting for them even if reduced to mental phenomena by virtue of having painted themselves into a metaphysical corner).
We already have little bits of eugenics baked into law and culture. Why not a little bit more? It doesn't have to involve death camps.
I guess, like censorship, people only object to an arbitrary subset of it. People love censorship of "really bad" ideas just as they love eugenics of "really bad" genes.
Most people seem happy with asserting our authority of gene selection over animals though :P Conservationism is that. Not to mention actual selective breeding and killing of course. Perhaps we rightly believe humans truly are capable of being benevolent arbiters of who gets to reproduce and who doesn't in animals.
With animal breeding, there's almost always a set goal. Getting a fatter, tastier, more hardy, or in the extreme, aesthetically pleasing animal.
I doubt we'd really use eugenics for any of them. However, a pure eugenicist might say "Well, why not? Why not select for people less prone to cancer, more physically fit, with better immune systems?"
So then it comes into the question of what eugenics has historically been used for. The worst example would probably be the sterilization of gay people. We used it against mental illness in an age where lobotomy was considered a good treatment for mental illnesses such as hyperactivity.
And all of this, of course, sort of belays the fact that for humans there seems to be no reason why we couldn't use gene therapy in place of breeding programs. Why do we need eugenics when we can directly target the aspects we want in the future generation (and quite a few people would opt in for those changes).
We already seem some of this just in genetic testing of embryos and fetuses. When people know a fetus has downs syndrome, they get abortions and try again. I could see the same with a whole host of chronic illnesses.
It really is pretty similar to the kinds of things that are used to advocate against E2E encryption. An attempt to have the state encroach on territory that used to be private.
Doesn't this hold true for "dumbness" as well? Being dumb is no longer an obstacle in having a reproductive success.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a peak in the reproduction rate bell curve around IQ 80-90.
Outsourcing violence to the police is a huge step of domestication.
"Domestication" is just a word for a natural evolutionary processes in a symbiotic system. The concept that "domestication" is like, actually a thing apart from evolution is a vastly more difficult idea to parse than it appears on it's face.
>Domesticated animals are all dumber than their wild counterparts.
I mean... again... there are so many things to unpack here. What do we mean by "dumb" and which parts of the brain are being used, and how their size relates to their usefulness. I think it would be extremely difficult to argue any of these claims on their face beyond: small brain -> less brain function, which is extremely spurious.
Homo neanderthalensis had notably larger brains than us, yet they did not survive. Hardly an argument for the idea of greater intelligence -> greater brain size. AFAIK, specific areas in the prefrontal cortex is the primary point of interest when it comes to intelligence, and it's a relatively small section of the brain compared, say, to the visual cortex.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/neanderthal-br...
Finally... the most absurd of all the ideas packed in here is that natural selection for smaller brain size would even be a thing. Human mating is openly available for study, I see little-to-no argument for this being plausible beyond some sort of idiocracy world (is this the domestication thesis you hold? I see in the article they are treated separately), which is genuinely problematic. Possibly that certain types of brain sizes are predisposed to certain behavioral patterns. However, the idea that there is even a single evolutionary pattern for billions of humans is pretty ridiculous. We don't have evolutionary islands like other animals do.
In mammals, there is a well-established "domestication syndrome" with a specific proposed underlying mechanism and associated symptoms, including many observed in humans in comparison with other hominids (smaller jaws/muzzles, smaller teeth, smaller brain, greater docility). See https://www.genetics.org/content/197/3/795#skip-link for more information.
The idea that we have an idea of a thing we can readily point at, does not mean that thing is the driving force behind it. It's just a post hoc argument. We can't domesticate zebras, we can domesticate horses. The idea that 'domestication' is a force, rather than a result of evolutionary pressure of a symbiotic relationship shows that the domestication can't be the driving force. It's just evolution.
I'm not arguing the concept that domestication syndrome doesn't exist. I obviously defer to these experts, I'm just arguing that the concept that free, independent humans 'domesticate themselves' is effectively nonsensical on it's face, as domestication, as such, requires symbiosis and controlled breeding, and is simply not possible for many species.
This is not how evolution works! They are not in control of their breeding. Evolution is not some intelligent agent with goals. It is like a river, responding to to the path of least resistance in reproduction.
Intelligence and/or brain size not a dominant evolutionary factor unless they are specifically bread for intelligence and/or brain size. Domesticated animal's dominant evolutionary qualities have nothing to do with the animal preferences for mating, thus brain size in fairly arbitrary, and we should suspect it to be some sort of drift, rather than rationally getting smaller.
If you know of cases and studies where the opposite is true then I'd like to see the research.
- Floppy or reduced ears
- Smaller brain and teeth
- Docility
- Juvenile behavior
- Depigmentation
If anything that rate of processing has gone up, not down.
Computers are a big factor in generating all of that information, even if they help process some of it the net effect is a huge surplus.
Surely you mean required, meaning you could end up embarassing yourself in front of your coworkers if you aren't able to recall that particular bit of information.
It's very different from REQUIRED, meaning that if you take a left turn instead of a right turn while running away from a predator you end up in a canyon... or the predator eats you because you have no way to escape...or both.
1: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-athletes-way/2...
I'm not.
Pre-agriculture people had it worse, they needed to remember 100% of all pertinent informations by the hunting band, which had a max amount of 50-100 people. All the predictive abilities for preys in their lands, natural disasters, medicines, rituals, etc.
It's logical that adoption of technology and farming led to lesser pressure for memory recall, at least for the median human.
From the article. 2021 is very recent.
The article also discusses energy usage a little under the section "Fuel".
Less energy demand, I guess.
I don't want to turn this into a political commentary, but the modern age is an extreme example of this. You could be the kind of person who doesn't finish high school and can't keep a job, a deadbeat, but still manage to have multiple kids. Even if you don't take care of them, someone else will ensure that your kids survive. Long ago, not being able to are and provide for your kids probably meant that they died.
IMO, as we keep making the world increasingly more safe and comfortable, we might have to resort to genetic engineering. Otherwise, it might be inevitable that more and more genetic disorders will arise, just because we're able to keep people alive with all kinds of illnesses that would have been fatal before. People can argue about the ethics all they want, but it seems inevitable.
The same is true for humans. The process is obviously slightly more complicated because unlike wolves people have more influence on their environment but it's undeniable that humans are now domestic animals. No modern human can survive in the wilderness and this process is accelerating. We are now, for all intents and purposes, dependent on mechanical tools and technology for our continued existence. Feeding 8B people is impossible without industrial farming and agricultural techniques, e.g. Haber-Bosch. [1]
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/haber-bosch...
However, if wolves domesticated us as hunting partners, then this starts to make a lot more sense. We didn't need to first learn domestication on easier species, the danger was limited and our hunting would be so much more effective that it was worth the premium.
It also explains why we have the concept of werewolf and why some people have been charged with turning into wolves to be successful in hunting, but never any other animal (there are no cases of ware eagles/falcons). There is something primeval deep inside us that associates wolves with successful hunters.
I find the theory neat, I am not convinced it is true.
It is pretty comprehensive about a variety of going theories and doesn’t make the mistake of choosing any single one of them as the “because”.
1: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/genetic-bottleneck/
> The reduced amount of white matter suggests that domestic rabbits have a compromised information processing possibly explaining why they are more slow reacting and phlegmatic than their wild counterparts.
1: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-differences-brain-morphology-w...