The Idiocracy Hypothesis: Are We Becoming Less Intelligent?
Are human beings becoming idiots? There are those who think so, although their explanations are very varied. We have those who say that it is because less smart people reproduce more, and we have those who indicate that this has been happening for a long time, because we live in increasingly advanced societies.
Next We are going to talk about the controversial hypothesis of idiocracy some of its explanations and reasons for this apparent reduction in our collective intelligence.
The famous Flynn effect is known to many. According to the person who proposed it, the New Zealander James Flynn, during the last 20th century there was a significant increase in the average intelligence of the population in Western countries.
Today, this same phenomenon is what can be seen in developing countries. As the main explanation, it has been proposed that better nutrition, more stimulating environments, better training and a lower incidence of infectious diseases have contributed to the increase in intelligence.
However, it seems that the opposite effect is also occurring. There are developed countries in which there appears to be a decline in the IQ of the population, such as Norway, Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is not known whether this downward trend will continue in the long term or there will come a time when it stabilizes in countries that have already reached their highest levels of population IQ
Some argue that this downward trend will continue, especially in developed countries. They believe that the average values of the population’s IQ are going to fall with special intensity in well-being countries, in which it is assumed that the limit of all possible social improvement has already been reached. In these societies, the population will be less intelligent on average, which has led to talk of a peculiar idea with a controversial name: the idiocracy hypothesis.
This hypothesis has its origin in a film, “Idiocracy” (2006) by Mike Judge that, despite not being a “blockbuster”, did not go unnoticed. It talks about a futuristic world, in the year 2500, in which because human beings have not been subject to evolutionary pressures for hundreds of years, having everything at his fingertips and without needing to use inventiveness to progress further, he has ended up becoming an idiot The idiocracy hypothesis basically suggests that this could happen, that it is not just a plot of film fiction.
Are we becoming idiots?
Although the idiocracy hypothesis is very controversial and highly debatable, in recent years there have been changes in the population’s IQ that have made it inevitable to bring it up for debate. One of the explanations behind the idiocracy hypothesis tells us that throughout the 20th century two different phenomena overlapped. On the one hand, the Flynn effect that we have talked about, and on the other, a reduction in the intellectual quotient on a hereditary basis, motivated by the accumulation of unfavorable intellectual traits in the population
Some defenders of the idiocracy hypothesis propose that society is seeing its IQ reduced because couples made up of less intelligent people are the ones that, as a general rule, have more children. There is the idea that less intelligence also implies less responsibility, less conscience and greater impulsivity, which would imply less care when it comes to pairing and maintaining relationships with other people. In other words, less intelligent people would be less likely to use prophylaxis or suppress their desire to have sex.
According to this interpretation, intelligence-enhancing effects, such as better nutrition, more stimulating environments, and good education, already would have exhausted any possibility of producing improvements in welfare societies At that point, only the dysgenic effects (negative genetic variables) of the increasing offspring of less intelligent people could manifest.
In Western countries, there has been a decline in birth rates in Western countries and, for a few decades, in almost all countries in the world. The improvement in living conditions and, especially, women’s access to education and incorporation into the world of work has caused a sharp reduction in fertility throughout the world.
On the other hand, in countries with lower birth rates, it is the couples with the least education who have the most offspring. Those who defend this explanation behind the hypothesis of idiocracy, defend that this lower educational level is a reflection, in one way or another, of a lower intellectual level of genetic basis (and it is assumed that it is hereditary), the average intellectual level of The population would decline over the next few decades. From this we can conclude that, since the most intelligent people do not reproduce as much and the less intelligent people do, it is expected that there will be more and more less intelligent people and the population IQ will drop.
This explanation behind the idiocracy hypothesis is highly debatable. It is very risky to affirm that the differences in educational level are a true reflection of lower hereditary intelligence It is known that the conditions in which one has grown up, environmental variables such as parental and school education or access to health services, are determinants of the level of academic performance and the number of years that a person will remain in the training system. And that also means better results on IQ tests.
The previous explanation related to the idiocracy hypothesis is controversial. Assuming that population intelligence in advanced countries will only decline because no more progress can be made and the less intelligent will reproduce more than the intelligent is a risky assumption. However… What if this phenomenon has nothing to do with how advanced a society is? What if we have been getting less intelligent for thousands of years?
Human beings have been overcoming the adversities that nature throws at them for thousands of years. It has been a long time since we have had to go hunting, fishing, gathering fruit and defending ourselves from wild beasts. Nowadays, each person specializes in a specific task, and if they require a specific service or product, they turn to another person who specializes in it. We live in societies, depending on each other, confined to the different knowledge and skills that each one has.
Studies in the last decade have pointed out that throughout human history, the human brain shrank critically. Until recently it was known that our brain had reduced its size, but this fact was pointed out to about 300,000 to 35,000 years ago However, it has now been seen that the phenomenon must have occurred only 3,000 years ago, when humans already knew writing, China and Mesopotamia already existed and the Roman civilization was about to be born.
So that, The reduction of our brain is, evolutionarily speaking, a very recent event However, what does this have to do with the idiocracy hypothesis? Does a smaller brain imply lower intelligence? Not really, but it could give us clues as to how the behavioral change of human beings also changed their constitution and their way of relating to others.
Our lineage has quadrupled in size in the last 6 million years During the first million years the initial growth, reaching Homo erectus (10 to 2.5 Ma), the increase in brain volume was due solely to the increase in body size. It was from Homo erectus in which the human brain began to increase at great speed. something that was attributed to the discovery of fire and its use for cooking. Cooking food was a social event, with the tribe gathering around the fire waiting for their turn to eat and socializing during the process.
From 1.5 Ma onwards, our brain growth slowed down, but remained stable during the Pleistocene. But, once we reach 3000 years of age, the size of our brain takes the opposite trend, shrinking. It began to lose size at a rate 50 times greater than that at which it had been growing. One of the explanations that have been considered for this considerable reduction in the size of our brain is domestication syndrome. It has been said that, in reality, human beings present many typical traits of domesticated animals
It has been proven that domesticated species, such as dogs, have a smaller brain than their wild counterparts, wolves, but without losing cognitive faculties. In fact, there are cases in which the domesticated species is more intelligent despite having a smaller brain size, as is the case of some dog breeds.
We have another explanation regarding the descent of the human brain with the emergence of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago This discovery caused the human population to grow exponentially due to better nutrition. But with agriculture also came an increase in infections and deterioration in diet and health.
Agriculture would prevent us from being victims of hunger due to the adversities of nature; With it we would have less selective pressures, we would not need to use our intelligence as much for new things and our brain size would reduce.
However, this same explanation has also been questioned, since today There are still communities of hunter-gatherers, ethnic groups whose brains have also been reduced They do not master agriculture, they hunt and gather fruit like our pre-agricultural ancestors, and their societies are extremely complex.
By focusing on insects, perhaps we will get the answer to why this phenomenon occurs. Thanks to these arthropods it has been seen that The more dependent one is on the group, the less dependent one is on one’s own behavior and, as a consequence, the brain tends to shrink. This would be the final explanation for this curious phenomenon of us becoming less intelligent individually.
The division of labor is making us “idiots.” As we said, living in a society, we do not need to master the art of hunting, farming, fishing, defense and breeding on our own, but we only need to specialize in a job and ask for services from others who master it. other specialties. The division of labor would be making us idiots individually, but collectively we would continue to function and, although the idiocracy hypothesis gives too much importance to IQ, it is still a value.
