Pete,Apr 22 2004, 11:52 AM Wrote:I was told that humans were selected for a big brain, for intelligence. Maybe once, but no longer.Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, makes the assertion that in any dense population (and defines "dense" pretty much as "supported by farming at higher densities than hunting and gathering allowed"), humans are selected for disease resistance so strongly that other factors may have little influence. He explicitly says that this primacy of selection for disease resistance, coupled with one other difference, makes modern mass-society humans not as likely to be smart as members of hunter-gatherer cultures.
That one other difference that works against our intelligence? Television. ;)
Sailboat