

Humans slowly but surely losing intellectual & emotional abilities? - brianl
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-humans-slowly-surely-intellectual-emotional.html

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thaumaturgy
I am going to commit the middlebrow dismissal sin here (and compound it by not
reading the actual paper; but, the abstract doesn't make this appear to be a
paper worth spending undue amount of time on).

Evolution is a process that occurs over vast amounts of time. Trying to draw
conclusions about the fate of human evolution based on developments of the
last hundred years would be remarkably foolhardy. You might as well try to
plot a bee's course based on the last microsecond of its movements.

Sure, people with genetic weaknesses that might have been quickly selected
against 10,000 years ago are now able to live long & full lives, naturally
leading -- for now -- to the continued spread of those genetic variations.
However, humans are also right now unique on the planet for our ability to
alter our own genetics; I have no doubt that within the next hundred years,
within the very next evolutionary microsecond, we will have the technological
ability to choose the course of our own evolution.

And I doubt very seriously that there will be much room for serious disease in
that future.

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betelnut
Neuroskeptic has a good response to these articles at
[http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2012/11/were-probably-
not-g...](http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2012/11/were-probably-not-getting-
dumber.html), essentially arguing against Crabtree's thesis for being too
speculative.

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kiba
_which may have weakened the power of selection to weed out mutations leading
to intellectual disabilities_

What the hell does it mean? Smart people aren't breeding? Intellectually
disabled people are breeding?

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firefoxman1
It means that in developed countries there is almost no natural selection, and
it's unethical to weed out weak genes synthetically because that's called a
holocaust.

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lostnet
Actually weeding out "weak" genes is eugenics, it is increasingly done without
genocide. This appears to be a larger ethical issue today (and certainly in
the 60s and 70s) than during the holocaust.

