Intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ...

[Humanity has often put forth the idea that our current generation is far more intelligent than those of previous centuries. Yet, it seems that with every new discovery of something done by ancient man, it is greeted with comments such as, “We can’t even figure out how ancient people did a lot of the brilliant things they did, such as the Egyptians building the pyramids, and other monumental architecture scattered around the world.” And that’s not the end of the search to answer the “how” of what was accomplished without power equipment equal to the task.]

Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since'

Is the human species doomed to intellectual decline? Will our intelligence ebb away in centuries to come leaving our descendants incapable of using the technology their ancestors invented? In short: will Homo be left without his sapiens?

This is the controversial hypothesis of a leading geneticist who believes that the immense capacity of the human brain to learn new tricks is under attack from an array of genetic mutations that have accumulated since people started living in cities a few thousand years ago.

Professor Gerald Crabtree, who heads a genetics laboratory at Stanford University in California, has put forward the iconoclastic idea that rather than getting cleverer, human intelligence peaked several thousand years ago and from then on there has been a slow decline in our intellectual and emotional abilities.

Although we are now surrounded by the technological and medical benefits of a scientific revolution, these have masked an underlying decline in brain power which is set to continue into the future leading to the ultimate dumbing-down of the human species, Professor Crabtree said.

His argument is based on the fact that for more than 99 per cent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities surviving on our wits, leading to big-brained humans. Since the invention of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effective stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical “intelligence” genes.

“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues,” Professor Crabtree says in a provocative paper published in the journal Trends in Genetics.

“Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,” Professor Crabtree says.

“The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile,” he says.

https://creation.com/why-christianity-not-atheism-is-the-only-rational-foundation-for-ethics

[TBC: It is instructive that Crabtree’s “wager” on those of “2,000 to 6,000 years ago” comes comfortably close to Scripture’s dating.]