trendlover,
one more comment, your biologist says something I find to be quite odd
I am a dog guy, people can breed intelligence in just a few generations. Every dog person knows border collies are the smartest breed, it didn't take long to get them there. There are also large differences in other breeds, so to say that intelligence is something that is difficult to evolve... I don't know about that.
Wolves are much smarter than ordinary dogs, even though they can breed with each other. It didn't take much to dumb them down apparently. It shows what happens when selective pressures dissappear... what does that say about us in the welfare state? Our DNA is supposedly 96% chimpanzee (another argument against the we 'are mostly the same')....look out below.
one more comment, your biologist says something I find to be quite odd
The argument against hypothesis 2 is not naive, however it is naive to think that the selective pressures on human populations are anywhere close to the highly engineered selective pressures you find in animal breeding....
....This is in contrast with intelligence: single genetic variants with large beneficial effects on intelligence are probably much, much harder to come by, because any large genetic change is likely to screw up something as complex as cognition. To get significant differences in intelligence between populations, my biological intuition is that you would need many small but non-negligible changes that together add up to something large enough to make a difference in the population distribution of intelligence.
I am a dog guy, people can breed intelligence in just a few generations. Every dog person knows border collies are the smartest breed, it didn't take long to get them there. There are also large differences in other breeds, so to say that intelligence is something that is difficult to evolve... I don't know about that.
Wolves are much smarter than ordinary dogs, even though they can breed with each other. It didn't take much to dumb them down apparently. It shows what happens when selective pressures dissappear... what does that say about us in the welfare state? Our DNA is supposedly 96% chimpanzee (another argument against the we 'are mostly the same')....look out below.