Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
"The children" is a war cry which will ensure the continuance of state funded negative evolutionary pressures.
In general, I would say that you are describing a remarkably simplistic view of evolution. Off the top, two things I think you are missing:
- first, you make the common mistake of assuming that evolution has a purpose somehow aligned with your moral view of things
No. Evolution is blind. Evolution is just a word to describe the fact that genes which result in an increased likelihood of death prior to breeding tend to not to be passed on. I was arguing that I think current evolutionary pressures tend to work against the criteria for increasing intelligence. This claim is complicated by the fact that intelligence is hard to measure. Lets say we choose IQ tests for the sake of argument. Then I'm not even sure how secure the claim that ability to pass IQ test has a large hereditary correlation, So I don't know whether children of parents who both had IQ measured at > 200 necessarily have children with higher IQ than where one parent was > 200 and the other < 200. There are also difficulties in isolating inherited factors from environmental factors. Modern medicine tends I think to work against the criteria of producing healthy specimens. (People who would have died as children due to hereditary defects, living on to have children thanks to medicine. Also people who can't breed, having medical assistance to have children. Caesarian sections for females with too narrow hips to easily give birth. Lots of other examples). Similarly difficult to influence medical evolutionary pressures -- what're you going to do? Give our breeding permits based on government decided criteria? Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`