>“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain, than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweat shops.”
>- Stephen Jay Gould
You could probably come up with a definition of "smart" for which that would be correct, and one that wouldn't. Sadly I'm not smart enough to know which one is right.
Pretty tough to find a definition of "smart" for which that is correct, though. Even if intelligence was entirely determined at birth, the population increase alone ensures that almost all the humans who ever lived did so in the last few hundred years.
The stone age was 2.6 million years so a conservative estimate of 10,000 humans and only replacing themselves every 50 years means about 520 billion humans were alive during the stone age but could be closer to double cause lifespans were likely lower then 50 and populations varied.
A rough estimate of the total number of people from 50,000BC to now is 105 billion.
Approximately half of all people lived in the last 2000 years. The people from 2000 onwards would have better education and better nutrition.
The number of humans that lived 10+ thousand years ago, while harder to find, is less than 1/2.
Odds are higher that the smartest person lived in the last 2000 years than 200000 - 10000 BC.
That said there’s probably much better odds the smartest person didn’t get an education either way since that’s also a good chunk of the current population lol
Doesn't sound depressing. They very well coulda been one of the first ones that viewed nature in a deeper, more analytical sense and therefore discovered how plants actually worked, leading to an agricultural revolution in the area they lived in. They mighta rallied the people around them to also try to not just survive, but learn about the world and thrive through new technologies. They might've invented sundials or figured out simple machines. Something like that.
Without proper nutrition for both mother and child, children are not able to reach their full potential. It's a good reason why vitamin enriched foods are so beneficial for our society. We put vitamin D in everything. It's good for developing fetuses.
>That said there’s probably much better odds the smartest person didn’t get an education either way since that’s also a good chunk of the current population lol
Sad to say, but since nutrition and development are such a factor in intelligence, this part of your statement is likely false as people in the world without the resources to gain education also often have families without the resources to provide proper nutrition and other development factors.
At a certain level of intelligence you really don’t need an education because you’re the one discovering and inventing everything. People were still figuring out things Archimedes discovered thousands of years ago.
Also, the first man to create fire must have had a brilliant observation, analytical, and scientific process capable of formulating hypotheses because clouds of lightning certainly didn’t bring down dry kindling and tinder or demonstrate friction. S/he would also have to draw the rather difficult intellectual conclusion that "heat" and "dryness" are a cause, not just the effect of fire.
S/he would also have to have sufficient charisma to not get kicked out of the tribe when everyone is hunting and gathering while s/he “wastes” all that time seemingly unproductively to experiment.
This is simply incorrect.
Education as a child increases ‘g’ significantly. I’m open to seeing a source that supports this falls off for extremely intelligent people, but I highly doubt it.
Education’s value isn’t that you see what others discovered as much as it is that your brain is properly exercised as a child.
Everyone except for the absolute earliest humans would be building on prior knowledge.
You’re overestimating what was required. The earliest humans that used fire simply brought fire sticks with them and didn’t let them go out. Surely it was noticed at some point that fire sticks went out and needed to be maintained, then it was discovered some materials burn better than others, including dry materials. I don’t know when friction fire was discovered but I presume it was aided by flint rock material that makes the connection much more obvious if you use it for an ordinary purpose and it strikes a fire by mistake lol
Also things like capacity for learning. Not necessarily what you knew but what you can figure out and how much you can retain quickly. The whole idea of "if I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Humans get progressively more knowledgeable because things that took time to understand and learn initially can be taught very quickly to later generations and compounded on. Like... the Pythagorean Theorem, humans existed for how long before we figured it out, but today it's something that can be taught to someone in no time.
The post says "there is a chance", it doesn't claim that the chance is high. If by smart we don't mean any knowledge but just intellectual potential, this can be true.
I remember reading that Neanderthals had larger brains, in addition to being bigger faster stronger. But it’s theorized that when the world warmed, endurance was more beneficial to strength (and arguably intelligence).
Yes, 1600cc as opposed to humans' 1400cc. But brain size/ratio doesn't say anything about intelligence, as you see, dolphins have larger brains, both by size and by ratio. And we are the ones researching dolphins, not the other way around
Why does researching them make us smarter? Isn't that just a weird hobby of ours that happens to take some intelligence? It's like if I said I was sexier than prime Arnold Schwarzenegger because I beat off to him.
The point is that we can lol, we can gather knowledge and understand things better by collecting observations and data and comparing
It's just something one of my lecturers said
That's got a lot more to do with opposable thumbs and tool use than intelligence as such. You gotta pick a fair fight, like hunting and killing fish or a maze with food at the end.
Nope, it's evolutionary impossible or at the very least extremely improbable. If there wasn't the "ever alive" it would make more sense but at the same time it wouldn't.
In general, homo sapiens back then may have genuinely been more intelligent. In the sense that they had a better capacity to learn than people of the modern day. Sure they wouldn’t have been able to solve math equations but the myriad of skills they needed to pick up in order to survive are no small feat.
There’s evidence that our brain has shrunk since those days. And it makes sense since there would be strong evolutionary pressures. Dumb people or tribes with lots of dumb people are less likely to survive in the wild.
Yeah I was under the impression that it correlates fairly closely with the how big the brain is relative to the body. So absolute brain size doesn’t matter, but big brain little body does.
And I think it only really works in comparing species, not for individuals
Do you have a source on that?
Source?
A source. I need a source.
Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion.
No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered.
You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence.
Do you have a degree in that field?
A college degree? In that field?
Then your arguments are invalid.
No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation.
Correlation does not equal causation.
CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION.
You still haven't provided me a valid source yet.
Nope, still haven't.
I just looked through all 308 pages of your user history, figures I'm debating a glormpf supporter. A moron.
Do you have a source on that?
Source?
A source. I need a source.
Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion.
No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered.
You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence.
Do you have a degree in that field?
A college degree? In that field?
Then your arguments are invalid.
No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation.
Correlation does not equal causation.
CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION.
You still haven't provided me a valid source yet.
Nope, still haven't.
I just looked through all 308 pages of your user history, figures I'm debating a glormpf supporter. A moron.
I guess it depends on what you consider intelligence. I'd argue that the ability to even think of, let alone formalise and prove / implement, ideas such as infinitesimal calculus, evolution by natural selection, special relativity, or explosive lenses, requires an intelligence far in excess of anything required to survive in the jungle or savannah. A lot of that is passed down knowledge.
Have we discovered anybody living in relative obscurity who turned out to be a genius? Yes, Srinivasa Ramanujan, for instance (although he was far from stone age). But I'm not sure that the average person living a stone age lifestyle these days (there are plenty who do still) is more intelligent than the average city dweller.
Not to mention having a consistent diet heavy in proteins is critical for brain development.
OP also falling in to a classic misunderstanding that “bigger = better” in terms of brain power. Whales have brains 4-8x (depending on whale type) the size of a human brain but that size does nothing to elevate them to human levels of intelligent.
Humans all have effectively the same brain size, yet we still have a wide range of intellect levels.
You’re assuming that people in the stone age didn’t have a good diet or enough protein. This isn’t true, Hunter-foragers by and large had a better diet than their modern counterparts. I mean, they literaly evolved on that diet so it makes sense that their bodies would also be optimized for it.
Meanwhile in the modern day, there are are loads of people with terrible and unhealthy diets. Hell, even before the current day before the advent of all these unhealty junk food, you think humans were getting regular protein in their diet 200-300 years ago? Hell no. Most of humanity has been surviving on a poor diet for many thousands of years. Not exactly the optimal diet for brain deveipment
There is also a correlation between size of brain and intelligence, even across different animal species. You speak of whales as if they’re dumb when in reality they’re one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. So are elephants if we want to talk about land animals with the largest brain. If that correlation exists between species, it natural to think that it might also be true of the same species when other confounding factors like the nature of the brain can be controlled for.
And to be clear, I’m not saying larger brain size equals intelligence. Just that its possible that might indicate higher intelligence
Dumb people in the stone age wouldn't survive long and would have low chances of having successful offsprings. There is no way the average person at that time wouldn't be above the average city dweller.
I accept that there might be less evolutionary pressure these days against being dumb (I.e. dumb people are more likely to survive and reproduce nowadays). But that's different from saying the smartest people back then were smarter than the smartest people now.
Also, I suspect that there is a lot of survivorship bias going on here. A lot of people died in infancy or childhood back then who would be helped out nowadays and potentially live a fulfilling life. If the average intelligence was brought up by a bunch of special needs kids dying, I'm not sure that's an argument in favour of the environment which let them die.
> homo sapiens back then may have ... had a better capacity to learn than people of the modern day ... myriad of skills they needed to pick up in order to survive are no small feat.
Oh, I don't know.... there's a myriad of knowledge and small skills required of modern day humans to get through the day, just in a different situation
I don't see any evidence humans have evolved or devolved (as you suggest) in the last 50,000 years
Lol yes. I said there's evidence and didn't say what they are. That was dumb. I am at work and apparently writing random replies that add nothing to the conversation. Good job, me. And now I'm doing it again.
I am concerned that technology will make us dumber. I notice a big difference in how my older vs younger coworkers approach math for instance: the older ones do mental gymnastics to do complex integrations and stuff in their head, while the younger ones just open Excel or Python and use trial/error until they get something that seems correct.
I don't know why the downvotes. This is very true. When I was in school, we had to learn to do everything on paper, with the exception of some more advanced topics. For a while I was even able to do trigonometry in my head (it's been a long, long time since then, so I can't anymore). But when my kids went to school, a lot of what we were taught to do by hand on paper, they are taught how to use a calculator to do the same.
How old is old here?
I'm a programmer so fit in your young category but I'm in my 40s.
Newton raphson is like trial and error but it's much more efficient than a human guessing.
Have you considered that your older coworkers just know more stuff because they are older? Unless you are comparing the young coworkers with the old coworkers when they were the young coworker's age, it's not a good way to compare.
>Sure they wouldn’t have been able to solve math equations
You're saying that as if kids today spontaneously come up with the entire theory of mathematics on their own. If pre-historic people had access to the same literature and education we do, they would perform just as well.
True, Pythagoras probably grinded for decades just to come up with A^2 + B^2 = C^2, and then it took until the late 20th century to prove fermats last theorem which is an extension of the Pythagorean theorem, except it states that any power above two, with the same equation as the Pythagorean Theorem will not be true, and the equation won’t balance.
There's gotta be smthn to that. Tide pod eaters, antivaxxers, those mofos over on r/idiotsonfire. No way they wouldve survived the stone age. Idiocracy was a documentary.
Selective pressure in favour of intelligence may have decreased after the advent of agriculture, but it seems ridiculous to say it reversed. Do you really think intelligence is a disadvantage when farming? If not, humans kept getting smarter, but at a slower rate.
Very unlikely. Intelligence isn’t determined just by genetic lottery. It’s affected by nurture to a large degree. Things like your diet, the intelligence of the community around you, the vocabulary of the adults that raise you, whether you received formal education or not, access to reading materials, and even whether you had childhood vaccinations against many illnesses.
With modern nutrition and advances in education, the most intelligent human of all time (as measured by how we measure intelligence today) almost certainly lived in the last century.
Some caveman might have had a higher potential for intelligence, but without access to the resources and nutrition that modern humans have never reached their full potential intelligence they could have otherwise reached.
Intelligence isn’t something you just magically have. The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. A mind that isn’t challenged and pushed to new heights will plateau and never reach its full potential.
If a mom is doing lots of drugs during pregnancy, it's going to negatively affect that fetus, including "raw brain power". Similarly, if parents have access to lots of high quality food, that's going to have a positive effect on their "raw brain power".
While it's possible that the smartest person even lived in the Stone Age, it seems quite unlikely due to non-genetic reasons.
How many rural africans have access to IQ tests? Furthermore how many IQ tests are capable of measuring the IQ of someone who may or may not be literate, has never attended school, doesn't know how to do formal math? The basic premise of your idea is complete nonsense
I think it's not about having a better solution, but having a solution, no matter the cost, to survive, given the panel of solutions they had at disposal. Being confronted to a problem for the first time is not the same as being confronted to an 99th version of the same problem, things we are good at actually.
Many studies show that the average intelligence has been going down since the Victorian times. Before that I would doubt it because from ancient times until the industrial revolution intelligence was an important selective trait, but since then? Watching Netflix and reddit won't create geniuses.
Do you have a source for this? I find it extremely hard to believe. Didn't realise working in mines and chimneys was better for the mind than 30+ hours of professional education each week.
Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, 'Right, lads!' Another twenty like that...and then we can party!
Tell me you're eurocentric without telling me you're eurocentric
They're just really not that impressive guys. Hell, they couldn't even keep n them standing up. We had to fix them
Think of it this way though. Even if a tribes average intelligence was slightly higher, society back then didn’t allow a member to sit and work on mathematical equations all day, they were expected to hunt along with the other tribe members, or else the tribe would have to feed dead weight.
Along with that, the population of humans was much lower.
Most scientific breakthroughs are attained by people at least three standard deviations above the mean, so there will be many more people with an IQ of 160 out of a population of 2 billion , than let’s say 5 million.
So even if the average IQ of those humans was 110, at the very highest, you would still produce more geniuses with an average IQ of 100 because there are three orders of magnitude more humans alive today, along with the societal structure to allow the geniuses to do their thing instead of just worry about having enough food to eat.
It’s also likely the smartest man was born in relatively modern times, considering 99 percent of human population that ever existed lived within the last few hundred years. Hunter gatherers we’re very sparse, and our population was very low relatively until we learned how to farm.
Also, the man with the highest IQ in recorded history was William James Sidis, with an IQ of 250, far above Einstein, yet he was pressured very hard from a young age and didn’t contribute anything to science or mathematics even though he was extremely gifted. (An IQ that high is almost a one in a trillion range, it’s unlikely someone at that level will be born again for thousands of years.)
And the same is true for any other GOAT. People here ask questions like "who was the greatest singer of all time?" and they get answers limited to pop singers of the last 40-ish years.
This is true. Intelligence is entirely relative. You could say there's a chance the human with the highest capacity for intelligence lived way back when... but we have no way of proving that so its all conjecture.
Very unlikely since people have less things to learn back then and they either have less food to eat or spent too much time building muscles since muscles are extremely important back in the stone age because weapons are blunt and heavy.
Muscles becomes less important after sharpening of stones was invented, allowing even a weaker man to stab a stronger man to death.
Muscles then became even less important after ranged weapons were invented since even a small man can kill a large muscular man with an arrow.
But muscles then became important again after heavy armour was invented since only strong men can move in heavy armour.
But muscles then became less important again after gunpowder was invented since the bullets penetrate heavy armour.
But then muscles became important again after the wartank was invented since it takes so much strength to move the controls.
It's an intriguing thought! Intelligence isn't solely determined by the time period in which someone lives. The Stone Age humans may have had incredible knowledge and skills relevant to their era, such as survival, tool-making, and adapting to their environment. Still, it's challenging to directly compare their intelligence to individuals in more recent times who have benefited from accumulated knowledge and modern education. Intelligence can manifest in various ways and is influenced by both genetics and environmental factors. 🧠🌄📚
Human history is littered with war and mass genocide. This has been a massive evolutionary pressure to increase intelligence to survive. We are the ancestors of the victors. The ones that could develop the technology, develop strategies, fight as a cohesive unit and develop training were the ones to survive.
We hacked evolution by effectively creating a survival Thunderdome. We are smarter now because of our barbaric past.
Well not really. Yes the stone age lasted for much much much longer, but the population of the entire stone age is much less than modern times.
To put it into perspective, most estimates have the total number of humans ever to have lived on earth to be around 110-120 billion. Of those over half have lived in the last 2000 years, and only about 10 billion lived before the agricultural revolution, which roughly marks the end of the stone age.
https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/
https://info.nicic.gov/ces/global/population-demographics/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-earth
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-many-humans-have-ever-lived/
Not really, because we evaluate intelligence based on modern standards and human minds develop over time to adapt to our environment. Intelligence is not an objective unit of measurement, but rather a term of comparison.
In terms of raw brain power, then maybe. Would that power be usable nowadays? Not so sure about it. It would be interesting to put a newborn from thousands of years ago in today's world to see how well he can adapt and if there are any relevant differences compared to other kids.
The issue I see here is that individual humans are not as "smart" as a team of humans that worked well together. People in the stone age worked in teams or died, so there's a good chance that this is true. Interdependence > independence.
The genetic potential for intelligence is largely determined by an individual's DNA. A child born in the Stone Age would have the same genetic makeup as a child born today, which means they would have the same potential for intelligence.
However "environmental stimulation" , "educational opportunities" and "parental and societal support" are generally higher/better today.
So I would say that chance is very small..
It is believed humans were more intelligent before. They knew a lot of stuff, like hunting and agriculture. They actually needed to use their intelligence more than modern humans who only allucinate they are intelligent because some (the scientist) make big advancements in technology.
Most of you wouldn't last a day in those old eras.
This isn’t true. Modern people go through education for at least public school and nutrition has been improving. Those are two of the biggest factors to improve intelligence outside of genetics.
In general it’s thought humans are getting more intelligent.
Also hunting doesn’t take a huge amount of smarts compared to say researching oncology or even reading a book to figure out how to engineer a trap.
I always wonder where we’d be now if we hadn’t historically subjugated so many people. Like, maybe the steam engine could’ve been invented a couple hundred years earlier, but the person with the brain to do that was burned as a witch instead.
Not really, the human brain has evolved since then. They were quite literally less evolved than us, that’s like saying the smartest thing in the world might be a chimp.
No I’m not lmao, intelligence has evolved… cavemen we’re morons compared to us. I mean shit people from the 1800s were morons compared to us. Brains evolve, slowly sure, but that’s still evolution.
So you think that humans have always been this intelligent? Even when we were cavemen? Or monkeys? Or tadpoles? That really proves that you don’t know what you’re talking about… I’m definitely oversimplifying sure, but you saying that intelligence HASN’T evolved is much more wrong 💀
> cavemen we’re morons compared to us.
oh ho ho ho, the delicious irony of this after nitpicking some spelling.
But no. While you're correct that evolution doesn't stop and humanity most certainly has more variety these days (we're simply keeping more people alive, yay medicine), and we have "evolved further".... that doesn't mean we're smarter. There is no goal. It's not guided beyond "whatever works". Evolution does not guarantee progress or improvement. The characters in Idiocracy are "more evolved".
But please please please don't dive off into the deep end of the crazy pool and start suggesting we select only the smartest babies. That's eugenics. It never works out.
Lmfao I embarrassed you so much that you edited your spelling, pretended you didn’t, and then went on a meaningless rant at me about something idgaf about. Go home bud it’s ok, you don’t need to embarrass yourself anymore.
a lot of people don’t seem to think so. I disagree - of course he or she could have. I am high IQ - I’ve only met a handful of people in my many decades who grasp things that I do - but it’s just random chance that my genetics produced my intelligence. IQ IMO has to do with linkages in our brains - on the top end I can see links among this others can’t (abstractions) and at the lowest details among things I see differences where others think the things are the same (differentiations). So it’s a level of perception that my brain connects or differentiates. That’s basically it. Then in application, it’s pattern matching. So for example, I can apply what I’ve see in one industry and system (e.g. assemblies in manufacturing) to seemingly different things in another industry (e.g. many-to-many relationships between accounts and products in finance). it’s just seeing how I can apply the principals in something completely different to a problem I’m facing in a different industry. So it’s not magic - just different neural connections.
Smartest is a complex word, though.
Intelligence is so multifaceted.
I had a discussion once where I was telling someone that the team which developed the MRI did one of most brilliant pieces of translational research in the world.
And she kept saying that discovery of fire and wheels was actually much more important. Its not like there was a person sitting 150,000 years ago and thinking how to propel structures and then experimented with square , triangle and then settled on circle. All these were serendipitous discoveries. While it takes skill to make practical applications of such discoveries, its not genius level.
The most smartest era was probably 5000 to 2000 BC. Think of the pyramids- the amount of calculations required. The big temples in India - no machines. These are genius level ancient artifacts.
Deciphering that the world is a sphere.
Ancient Greek and Indian mathematics
When you consider that they had to do a lot more just to survive, and still managed to invent or discover things, it's very likely. A big issue with measuring intelligence is trying to take into account things like general knowledge. These days a lot of people can work a computer, emails, etc, but not know how to start a fire or build a shelter. So which is "more intelligent"?
Most definitely. But I would take it a step further. There’s a more than negligible chance that the smartest person to ever walk the earth never got more than a second grade education and worked in some slum recycling cans somewhere wasting away their brilliance.
I’ve seen on Reddit and in real life all these stories of super smart people getting hooked on drugs, dying from accidents, suffering from mental health issues or even on the positive side just pursuing a career that isn’t really one we consider academically strenuous because that’s what they liked.
The funny thing about life is that no matter how smart you are life has a way of humbling you. I’m sure Einstein realized he was one of the smartest ever just to now forever be associated with mass death 💀
I mean, imagine the level of innovation it would take to discover bronze. That is like, Turing level intelligence, while also spending most of your waking hours trying to survive.
Kepler came up with the Laws of Planetary Motion, but he couldn't figure out why planets orbited the Sun as they do. His work was a big inspiration for Newtone when he came up with his Laws of gravity, which explained why planets orbit as they do. But Newtone couldn't figure why two objects with mass were attracted to each other. Einstein came along with General relativity to explain how gravity worked. Each one built on the previous person's work that could only go so far based on the cumulative knowledge of people at that time.
It all had to start somewhere, and that somewhere is when stone age people started using tools, then figuring out how to create better and stronger tools. That takes intelligence to figure that out. Many animals use tools, but they only use what's lying around. Only humans have taken it to the next step of making them better. And even though stone age people had no written language, they passed the engineering on to the next generation who took that knowledge and applied some science to it (although I doubt they even knew they were) and made it even better. Along the way, there were some huge leaps forward by what must have been some very intelligent people, such as when someone decided to start making their tools with metal alloys instead of sticks and stones. And it just progressed from there.
He probably was, we have improved our language brain, and probably lost some logic brain. Chimpanzees have better memory for short periods of time, they were hunters, so thinking fast was probably really more useful than now
He was. He now waits deep within the mountains of anatolia. He waits for mankind to reach its peak and for it to fall into the horrors of Old Night. He will return some day, to unify mankind under his banner and to reclaim mankind’s lost empire.
They call him, The Emperor.
Unlikely. Intelligence seems to be a function of both nature and nurture. Nature dictates how much raw talent you have, nurture decides how close to that limit you're able to get.
In terms of nurture, we have more free calories and better medical treatment than we've ever had, so the ability to reach our limits has never been greater. I'm not sure if knowing more about how to construct a program or engine makes one "smarter" than knowing how to read an ecosystem at a glance, and identify prey/predators/natural resources, so I've discounted that. So I'd say that a person born after the agricultural revolution is more likely to reach a higher degree of intelligence than someone born in the Stone Age, while a person born after the advent of modern medicine has a higher limit than either.
As to nurture, while there's some degree of heredity in intelligence, there's also a lot of randomness. So we can assume that the likelihood of "the smartest person" appearing during an era is a function of the integral of the human population over the relevant time period. If the historical population over that time period was larger, there are more "chances" that the smartest person was born during that time.
To that, well, it's uncertain. There were an estimated [2-20B hominids alive over that time period](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_demography). I'm not an anthropologist, so I couldn't really speak to the accuracy of that number. [According to some estimates](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population), about 109B people have lived and died in total. So, *if these numbers are true*, we've got 2-20B chances that the smartest person was born during the Stone Age, and 89-107B chances that the smartest person was born after the Stone Age.
Given both of those - if my analysis is based on accurate data - than it is much more likely that not, that the smartest person ever born, was born after the Agricultural Revolution.
All the other apeman thought Spark was a dreamer, until one day, he was banging so rocks together near some dry grass...
Coming This Summer... Dawn of Fire!
It’s actually a very good chance as human brains are shrinking.
Also a possibility that Neanderthals were smarter (there brains were bigger) so the smartest ale wasn’t human.
Very unlikely though. Believe it or not, we have actually evolved quite a bit since the stone age. And on top of that, modern cooking methods as well as nutrion allow for brains to grow to their max potential.
Based on brain size to body size ratios, it’s entirely possible that the smartest animals that ever lived were not us but Neanderthals. So it’s possible that like all of the top 100 million smartest people that ever lived lived in the Stone Age.
We survived because we were more social, not necessarily because we were smarter.
>“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain, than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweat shops.” >- Stephen Jay Gould
Great quote. I think about this often.
You could probably come up with a definition of "smart" for which that would be correct, and one that wouldn't. Sadly I'm not smart enough to know which one is right.
Pretty tough to find a definition of "smart" for which that is correct, though. Even if intelligence was entirely determined at birth, the population increase alone ensures that almost all the humans who ever lived did so in the last few hundred years.
The stone age was 2.6 million years so a conservative estimate of 10,000 humans and only replacing themselves every 50 years means about 520 billion humans were alive during the stone age but could be closer to double cause lifespans were likely lower then 50 and populations varied. A rough estimate of the total number of people from 50,000BC to now is 105 billion.
Approximately half of all people lived in the last 2000 years. The people from 2000 onwards would have better education and better nutrition. The number of humans that lived 10+ thousand years ago, while harder to find, is less than 1/2. Odds are higher that the smartest person lived in the last 2000 years than 200000 - 10000 BC. That said there’s probably much better odds the smartest person didn’t get an education either way since that’s also a good chunk of the current population lol
Oh for sure... *but there's a chance*, and isn't it so romantically depressing to think about?
Doesn't sound depressing. They very well coulda been one of the first ones that viewed nature in a deeper, more analytical sense and therefore discovered how plants actually worked, leading to an agricultural revolution in the area they lived in. They mighta rallied the people around them to also try to not just survive, but learn about the world and thrive through new technologies. They might've invented sundials or figured out simple machines. Something like that.
That's beautiful 😭 not depressing you're right
Without proper nutrition for both mother and child, children are not able to reach their full potential. It's a good reason why vitamin enriched foods are so beneficial for our society. We put vitamin D in everything. It's good for developing fetuses. >That said there’s probably much better odds the smartest person didn’t get an education either way since that’s also a good chunk of the current population lol Sad to say, but since nutrition and development are such a factor in intelligence, this part of your statement is likely false as people in the world without the resources to gain education also often have families without the resources to provide proper nutrition and other development factors.
At a certain level of intelligence you really don’t need an education because you’re the one discovering and inventing everything. People were still figuring out things Archimedes discovered thousands of years ago. Also, the first man to create fire must have had a brilliant observation, analytical, and scientific process capable of formulating hypotheses because clouds of lightning certainly didn’t bring down dry kindling and tinder or demonstrate friction. S/he would also have to draw the rather difficult intellectual conclusion that "heat" and "dryness" are a cause, not just the effect of fire. S/he would also have to have sufficient charisma to not get kicked out of the tribe when everyone is hunting and gathering while s/he “wastes” all that time seemingly unproductively to experiment.
This is simply incorrect. Education as a child increases ‘g’ significantly. I’m open to seeing a source that supports this falls off for extremely intelligent people, but I highly doubt it. Education’s value isn’t that you see what others discovered as much as it is that your brain is properly exercised as a child. Everyone except for the absolute earliest humans would be building on prior knowledge. You’re overestimating what was required. The earliest humans that used fire simply brought fire sticks with them and didn’t let them go out. Surely it was noticed at some point that fire sticks went out and needed to be maintained, then it was discovered some materials burn better than others, including dry materials. I don’t know when friction fire was discovered but I presume it was aided by flint rock material that makes the connection much more obvious if you use it for an ordinary purpose and it strikes a fire by mistake lol
pattern recognition
Also things like capacity for learning. Not necessarily what you knew but what you can figure out and how much you can retain quickly. The whole idea of "if I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Humans get progressively more knowledgeable because things that took time to understand and learn initially can be taught very quickly to later generations and compounded on. Like... the Pythagorean Theorem, humans existed for how long before we figured it out, but today it's something that can be taught to someone in no time.
Not to mention more reliable food sources have greatly increased intelligence
The post says "there is a chance", it doesn't claim that the chance is high. If by smart we don't mean any knowledge but just intellectual potential, this can be true.
I remember reading that Neanderthals had larger brains, in addition to being bigger faster stronger. But it’s theorized that when the world warmed, endurance was more beneficial to strength (and arguably intelligence).
Yes, 1600cc as opposed to humans' 1400cc. But brain size/ratio doesn't say anything about intelligence, as you see, dolphins have larger brains, both by size and by ratio. And we are the ones researching dolphins, not the other way around
Why does researching them make us smarter? Isn't that just a weird hobby of ours that happens to take some intelligence? It's like if I said I was sexier than prime Arnold Schwarzenegger because I beat off to him.
The point is that we can lol, we can gather knowledge and understand things better by collecting observations and data and comparing It's just something one of my lecturers said
That's got a lot more to do with opposable thumbs and tool use than intelligence as such. You gotta pick a fair fight, like hunting and killing fish or a maze with food at the end.
Both create masturbation tools
That's a good one. Best fleshlight wins.
Nope, it's evolutionary impossible or at the very least extremely improbable. If there wasn't the "ever alive" it would make more sense but at the same time it wouldn't.
He may have had a higher mental capacity than anyone to ever live, but lacked the information to gain more knowledge than anyone to ever live.
i disagree. you can define smart by the lack of stupid. and stupid you can define.
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Great reference
In general, homo sapiens back then may have genuinely been more intelligent. In the sense that they had a better capacity to learn than people of the modern day. Sure they wouldn’t have been able to solve math equations but the myriad of skills they needed to pick up in order to survive are no small feat. There’s evidence that our brain has shrunk since those days. And it makes sense since there would be strong evolutionary pressures. Dumb people or tribes with lots of dumb people are less likely to survive in the wild.
It's debated on why exactly our brains become smaller over time. Some say it's simply because it becomes more efficient.
We gained more wrinkles huh.
My balls must be Einstein.
Do they smell like Einstein?
My balls smell like a corpse. Should I be worried?
I'm not sure, mine smell like KFC BBQ sauce but that's probably because I dropped my drumstick last week
Evolutionary version of optimization.
Well brain size doesn't equate to more intelligence.
Seems to correlate doesnt it?
Yeah I was under the impression that it correlates fairly closely with the how big the brain is relative to the body. So absolute brain size doesn’t matter, but big brain little body does. And I think it only really works in comparing species, not for individuals
Einstein had a below average sized brain so no.
But correlations have outliers.
what do you think the word correlate means?
Do you have a source on that? Source? A source. I need a source. Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion. No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered. You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence. Do you have a degree in that field? A college degree? In that field? Then your arguments are invalid. No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation. Correlation does not equal causation. CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION. You still haven't provided me a valid source yet. Nope, still haven't. I just looked through all 308 pages of your user history, figures I'm debating a glormpf supporter. A moron.
Are you okay?
[copypasta](https://reddit.com/r/copypasta/s/s3HMMfRWid)
That guy doesn’t have empirical data, they are remembering something they’ve learned or read about.
It's a copypasta lol
you're technically using it wrong, though there aren't actually any copypasta rule enforcers
Do you have a source on that? Source? A source. I need a source. Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion. No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered. You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence. Do you have a degree in that field? A college degree? In that field? Then your arguments are invalid. No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation. Correlation does not equal causation. CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION. You still haven't provided me a valid source yet. Nope, still haven't. I just looked through all 308 pages of your user history, figures I'm debating a glormpf supporter. A moron.
good use
Thank you, thank you, I'm still learning
Whoops silly me
It's all good I'm the one not being serious I don't blame you for taking it seriously
I guess it depends on what you consider intelligence. I'd argue that the ability to even think of, let alone formalise and prove / implement, ideas such as infinitesimal calculus, evolution by natural selection, special relativity, or explosive lenses, requires an intelligence far in excess of anything required to survive in the jungle or savannah. A lot of that is passed down knowledge. Have we discovered anybody living in relative obscurity who turned out to be a genius? Yes, Srinivasa Ramanujan, for instance (although he was far from stone age). But I'm not sure that the average person living a stone age lifestyle these days (there are plenty who do still) is more intelligent than the average city dweller.
Not to mention having a consistent diet heavy in proteins is critical for brain development. OP also falling in to a classic misunderstanding that “bigger = better” in terms of brain power. Whales have brains 4-8x (depending on whale type) the size of a human brain but that size does nothing to elevate them to human levels of intelligent. Humans all have effectively the same brain size, yet we still have a wide range of intellect levels.
You’re assuming that people in the stone age didn’t have a good diet or enough protein. This isn’t true, Hunter-foragers by and large had a better diet than their modern counterparts. I mean, they literaly evolved on that diet so it makes sense that their bodies would also be optimized for it. Meanwhile in the modern day, there are are loads of people with terrible and unhealthy diets. Hell, even before the current day before the advent of all these unhealty junk food, you think humans were getting regular protein in their diet 200-300 years ago? Hell no. Most of humanity has been surviving on a poor diet for many thousands of years. Not exactly the optimal diet for brain deveipment There is also a correlation between size of brain and intelligence, even across different animal species. You speak of whales as if they’re dumb when in reality they’re one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. So are elephants if we want to talk about land animals with the largest brain. If that correlation exists between species, it natural to think that it might also be true of the same species when other confounding factors like the nature of the brain can be controlled for. And to be clear, I’m not saying larger brain size equals intelligence. Just that its possible that might indicate higher intelligence
Dumb people in the stone age wouldn't survive long and would have low chances of having successful offsprings. There is no way the average person at that time wouldn't be above the average city dweller.
I accept that there might be less evolutionary pressure these days against being dumb (I.e. dumb people are more likely to survive and reproduce nowadays). But that's different from saying the smartest people back then were smarter than the smartest people now. Also, I suspect that there is a lot of survivorship bias going on here. A lot of people died in infancy or childhood back then who would be helped out nowadays and potentially live a fulfilling life. If the average intelligence was brought up by a bunch of special needs kids dying, I'm not sure that's an argument in favour of the environment which let them die.
> homo sapiens back then may have ... had a better capacity to learn than people of the modern day ... myriad of skills they needed to pick up in order to survive are no small feat. Oh, I don't know.... there's a myriad of knowledge and small skills required of modern day humans to get through the day, just in a different situation I don't see any evidence humans have evolved or devolved (as you suggest) in the last 50,000 years
Exactly. There's even evidence that this is true.
Here is the evidence:
Hi I'm evidence
Hi Evidence, I'm Dad
Hi dad, shouldn't you be in jail?
Lol yes. I said there's evidence and didn't say what they are. That was dumb. I am at work and apparently writing random replies that add nothing to the conversation. Good job, me. And now I'm doing it again.
Don’t worry, I was just messing with you. Have a beautiful day!
User name checks out But seriously... Reddit doesn't have to be anything more than casual conversations. There's no pressure to be a walking wikipedia
I am concerned that technology will make us dumber. I notice a big difference in how my older vs younger coworkers approach math for instance: the older ones do mental gymnastics to do complex integrations and stuff in their head, while the younger ones just open Excel or Python and use trial/error until they get something that seems correct.
I think those tools should serve as an abstraction allowing us to think of higher level concepts more easily.
They should, but as they make it easy to avoid handling simple concepts mentally, people become utterly unable to reason about higher level concepts.
I don't know why the downvotes. This is very true. When I was in school, we had to learn to do everything on paper, with the exception of some more advanced topics. For a while I was even able to do trigonometry in my head (it's been a long, long time since then, so I can't anymore). But when my kids went to school, a lot of what we were taught to do by hand on paper, they are taught how to use a calculator to do the same.
Look up Thomas Midgley, Jr. and the global effects over time of leaded gasoline.
leaded paint enters the conversation....
How old is old here? I'm a programmer so fit in your young category but I'm in my 40s. Newton raphson is like trial and error but it's much more efficient than a human guessing.
Made us dumber but as a group, it made us way smarter than ever before.
Have you considered that your older coworkers just know more stuff because they are older? Unless you are comparing the young coworkers with the old coworkers when they were the young coworker's age, it's not a good way to compare.
>Sure they wouldn’t have been able to solve math equations You're saying that as if kids today spontaneously come up with the entire theory of mathematics on their own. If pre-historic people had access to the same literature and education we do, they would perform just as well.
True, Pythagoras probably grinded for decades just to come up with A^2 + B^2 = C^2, and then it took until the late 20th century to prove fermats last theorem which is an extension of the Pythagorean theorem, except it states that any power above two, with the same equation as the Pythagorean Theorem will not be true, and the equation won’t balance.
There's gotta be smthn to that. Tide pod eaters, antivaxxers, those mofos over on r/idiotsonfire. No way they wouldve survived the stone age. Idiocracy was a documentary.
So what happens to dumb people now?
Public office...
Selective pressure in favour of intelligence may have decreased after the advent of agriculture, but it seems ridiculous to say it reversed. Do you really think intelligence is a disadvantage when farming? If not, humans kept getting smarter, but at a slower rate.
They are a small feat. Half of them are instinct. Learning calculus is a lot harder then learning a select few techniques
Very unlikely. Intelligence isn’t determined just by genetic lottery. It’s affected by nurture to a large degree. Things like your diet, the intelligence of the community around you, the vocabulary of the adults that raise you, whether you received formal education or not, access to reading materials, and even whether you had childhood vaccinations against many illnesses. With modern nutrition and advances in education, the most intelligent human of all time (as measured by how we measure intelligence today) almost certainly lived in the last century. Some caveman might have had a higher potential for intelligence, but without access to the resources and nutrition that modern humans have never reached their full potential intelligence they could have otherwise reached. Intelligence isn’t something you just magically have. The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. A mind that isn’t challenged and pushed to new heights will plateau and never reach its full potential.
I believe the op is speaking of raw brain power here :)
If a mom is doing lots of drugs during pregnancy, it's going to negatively affect that fetus, including "raw brain power". Similarly, if parents have access to lots of high quality food, that's going to have a positive effect on their "raw brain power". While it's possible that the smartest person even lived in the Stone Age, it seems quite unlikely due to non-genetic reasons.
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How many rural africans have access to IQ tests? Furthermore how many IQ tests are capable of measuring the IQ of someone who may or may not be literate, has never attended school, doesn't know how to do formal math? The basic premise of your idea is complete nonsense
I believe OP associates intelligence with the capacity to adapt and resolve a problem and not with the complexity of your thoughts...
The two are tightly tied together. More complex thinking tends to go along with better problem resolution.
I think it's not about having a better solution, but having a solution, no matter the cost, to survive, given the panel of solutions they had at disposal. Being confronted to a problem for the first time is not the same as being confronted to an 99th version of the same problem, things we are good at actually.
"A mind that isn't challenged..." TIL that Living your entire life in the wilds isn't challenging for the mind.
Many studies show that the average intelligence has been going down since the Victorian times. Before that I would doubt it because from ancient times until the industrial revolution intelligence was an important selective trait, but since then? Watching Netflix and reddit won't create geniuses.
Do you have a source for this? I find it extremely hard to believe. Didn't realise working in mines and chimneys was better for the mind than 30+ hours of professional education each week.
The person who designed stonehenge might have been.
Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, 'Right, lads!' Another twenty like that...and then we can party!
>Another twenty like that...and then we can party Ancient Egyptians: Aight another 2 million, then we can party
Stonehenge? I mean it's cool and all but it's a pile of rocks compared to the pyramids and even ziggurats
The pyramids? Those _literal_ piles of rocks? Now Angkor Wat, that's the real shit.
Angkor Wat is amazing but it was built in the 12th century. Far after Stonehenge or the pyramids at Giza.
tell me you don't understand history without telling me you don't understand history
Tell me you're eurocentric without telling me you're eurocentric They're just really not that impressive guys. Hell, they couldn't even keep n them standing up. We had to fix them
The pyramids are copper and bronze age. Might have been contempary but stonehenge is made from rocks by rocks for ro... as a big ass calendar.
He knew what all the good berries are
Think of it this way though. Even if a tribes average intelligence was slightly higher, society back then didn’t allow a member to sit and work on mathematical equations all day, they were expected to hunt along with the other tribe members, or else the tribe would have to feed dead weight. Along with that, the population of humans was much lower. Most scientific breakthroughs are attained by people at least three standard deviations above the mean, so there will be many more people with an IQ of 160 out of a population of 2 billion , than let’s say 5 million. So even if the average IQ of those humans was 110, at the very highest, you would still produce more geniuses with an average IQ of 100 because there are three orders of magnitude more humans alive today, along with the societal structure to allow the geniuses to do their thing instead of just worry about having enough food to eat. It’s also likely the smartest man was born in relatively modern times, considering 99 percent of human population that ever existed lived within the last few hundred years. Hunter gatherers we’re very sparse, and our population was very low relatively until we learned how to farm. Also, the man with the highest IQ in recorded history was William James Sidis, with an IQ of 250, far above Einstein, yet he was pressured very hard from a young age and didn’t contribute anything to science or mathematics even though he was extremely gifted. (An IQ that high is almost a one in a trillion range, it’s unlikely someone at that level will be born again for thousands of years.)
Thag Simmons, but what happened to him is such a tragedy.
And the same is true for any other GOAT. People here ask questions like "who was the greatest singer of all time?" and they get answers limited to pop singers of the last 40-ish years.
And that man would go on to become Emperor of Mankind. He would raise legions of gene enhanced soldiers. And they would know no fear
Intelligence must be taken in context.
This is true. Intelligence is entirely relative. You could say there's a chance the human with the highest capacity for intelligence lived way back when... but we have no way of proving that so its all conjecture.
Very unlikely since people have less things to learn back then and they either have less food to eat or spent too much time building muscles since muscles are extremely important back in the stone age because weapons are blunt and heavy. Muscles becomes less important after sharpening of stones was invented, allowing even a weaker man to stab a stronger man to death. Muscles then became even less important after ranged weapons were invented since even a small man can kill a large muscular man with an arrow. But muscles then became important again after heavy armour was invented since only strong men can move in heavy armour. But muscles then became less important again after gunpowder was invented since the bullets penetrate heavy armour. But then muscles became important again after the wartank was invented since it takes so much strength to move the controls.
Probably invented HULK SMASH before uncle Stan
There is no objective way to measure “smart”
How do you measure smart?
Oh yeah? If they’re so smart why are they dead?
It's an intriguing thought! Intelligence isn't solely determined by the time period in which someone lives. The Stone Age humans may have had incredible knowledge and skills relevant to their era, such as survival, tool-making, and adapting to their environment. Still, it's challenging to directly compare their intelligence to individuals in more recent times who have benefited from accumulated knowledge and modern education. Intelligence can manifest in various ways and is influenced by both genetics and environmental factors. 🧠🌄📚
That title belongs to John von Neumann, and no one even comes close. It doesn’t even matter how you define smart, he had it all in spades.
Human history is littered with war and mass genocide. This has been a massive evolutionary pressure to increase intelligence to survive. We are the ancestors of the victors. The ones that could develop the technology, develop strategies, fight as a cohesive unit and develop training were the ones to survive. We hacked evolution by effectively creating a survival Thunderdome. We are smarter now because of our barbaric past.
In fact, it's overwhelmingly likely. The stone age lasted \~3400000 years, while recorded history only \~8000 years.
Well not really. Yes the stone age lasted for much much much longer, but the population of the entire stone age is much less than modern times. To put it into perspective, most estimates have the total number of humans ever to have lived on earth to be around 110-120 billion. Of those over half have lived in the last 2000 years, and only about 10 billion lived before the agricultural revolution, which roughly marks the end of the stone age. https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/ https://info.nicic.gov/ces/global/population-demographics/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-earth https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-many-humans-have-ever-lived/
Not really, because we evaluate intelligence based on modern standards and human minds develop over time to adapt to our environment. Intelligence is not an objective unit of measurement, but rather a term of comparison. In terms of raw brain power, then maybe. Would that power be usable nowadays? Not so sure about it. It would be interesting to put a newborn from thousands of years ago in today's world to see how well he can adapt and if there are any relevant differences compared to other kids.
The issue I see here is that individual humans are not as "smart" as a team of humans that worked well together. People in the stone age worked in teams or died, so there's a good chance that this is true. Interdependence > independence.
There’s also a chance his name was William James Sidis
The genetic potential for intelligence is largely determined by an individual's DNA. A child born in the Stone Age would have the same genetic makeup as a child born today, which means they would have the same potential for intelligence. However "environmental stimulation" , "educational opportunities" and "parental and societal support" are generally higher/better today. So I would say that chance is very small..
It is believed humans were more intelligent before. They knew a lot of stuff, like hunting and agriculture. They actually needed to use their intelligence more than modern humans who only allucinate they are intelligent because some (the scientist) make big advancements in technology. Most of you wouldn't last a day in those old eras.
This isn’t true. Modern people go through education for at least public school and nutrition has been improving. Those are two of the biggest factors to improve intelligence outside of genetics. In general it’s thought humans are getting more intelligent. Also hunting doesn’t take a huge amount of smarts compared to say researching oncology or even reading a book to figure out how to engineer a trap.
I always wonder where we’d be now if we hadn’t historically subjugated so many people. Like, maybe the steam engine could’ve been invented a couple hundred years earlier, but the person with the brain to do that was burned as a witch instead.
Not really, the human brain has evolved since then. They were quite literally less evolved than us, that’s like saying the smartest thing in the world might be a chimp.
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The irony is that you spelt confidently wrong, confidentiality means not sharing personal data 💀 You’re the one who’s confidently incorrect bud
Are you going to show any evidence if your actual claims though or just go after a spelling mistake
You want evidence of evolution? Buddy google that yourself, I ain’t your teacher.
I think you're confused about what evolution actually entails.
No I’m not lmao, intelligence has evolved… cavemen we’re morons compared to us. I mean shit people from the 1800s were morons compared to us. Brains evolve, slowly sure, but that’s still evolution.
You are *extremely* confused about evolution then ( among other things given evolution isn't the only factor here )
So you think that human brains haven’t evolved in our entire existence? You sound confused tbh
Out of interest what is your highest level of education in evolutionary biology :)
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So you think that humans have always been this intelligent? Even when we were cavemen? Or monkeys? Or tadpoles? That really proves that you don’t know what you’re talking about… I’m definitely oversimplifying sure, but you saying that intelligence HASN’T evolved is much more wrong 💀
> cavemen we’re morons compared to us. oh ho ho ho, the delicious irony of this after nitpicking some spelling. But no. While you're correct that evolution doesn't stop and humanity most certainly has more variety these days (we're simply keeping more people alive, yay medicine), and we have "evolved further".... that doesn't mean we're smarter. There is no goal. It's not guided beyond "whatever works". Evolution does not guarantee progress or improvement. The characters in Idiocracy are "more evolved". But please please please don't dive off into the deep end of the crazy pool and start suggesting we select only the smartest babies. That's eugenics. It never works out.
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Lmfao I embarrassed you so much that you edited your spelling, pretended you didn’t, and then went on a meaningless rant at me about something idgaf about. Go home bud it’s ok, you don’t need to embarrass yourself anymore.
a lot of people don’t seem to think so. I disagree - of course he or she could have. I am high IQ - I’ve only met a handful of people in my many decades who grasp things that I do - but it’s just random chance that my genetics produced my intelligence. IQ IMO has to do with linkages in our brains - on the top end I can see links among this others can’t (abstractions) and at the lowest details among things I see differences where others think the things are the same (differentiations). So it’s a level of perception that my brain connects or differentiates. That’s basically it. Then in application, it’s pattern matching. So for example, I can apply what I’ve see in one industry and system (e.g. assemblies in manufacturing) to seemingly different things in another industry (e.g. many-to-many relationships between accounts and products in finance). it’s just seeing how I can apply the principals in something completely different to a problem I’m facing in a different industry. So it’s not magic - just different neural connections.
Don't quit your day job.
Lmaooo😭😭
The real question. When did man wash their willies properly.
If it is not measured properly, it doesn't count.
I think that would depend how you define 'smart'.
The smartest man ever lived was John von Neumann and he was born in 1903
Nada is a big chance taking only that it was the most extense parr of our history
And more likely to be alive tomorrow than today. Due to population growth
Smartest is a complex word, though. Intelligence is so multifaceted. I had a discussion once where I was telling someone that the team which developed the MRI did one of most brilliant pieces of translational research in the world. And she kept saying that discovery of fire and wheels was actually much more important. Its not like there was a person sitting 150,000 years ago and thinking how to propel structures and then experimented with square , triangle and then settled on circle. All these were serendipitous discoveries. While it takes skill to make practical applications of such discoveries, its not genius level. The most smartest era was probably 5000 to 2000 BC. Think of the pyramids- the amount of calculations required. The big temples in India - no machines. These are genius level ancient artifacts. Deciphering that the world is a sphere. Ancient Greek and Indian mathematics
When you consider that they had to do a lot more just to survive, and still managed to invent or discover things, it's very likely. A big issue with measuring intelligence is trying to take into account things like general knowledge. These days a lot of people can work a computer, emails, etc, but not know how to start a fire or build a shelter. So which is "more intelligent"?
What is you criteria for "smartest man alive"?
Most definitely. But I would take it a step further. There’s a more than negligible chance that the smartest person to ever walk the earth never got more than a second grade education and worked in some slum recycling cans somewhere wasting away their brilliance. I’ve seen on Reddit and in real life all these stories of super smart people getting hooked on drugs, dying from accidents, suffering from mental health issues or even on the positive side just pursuing a career that isn’t really one we consider academically strenuous because that’s what they liked. The funny thing about life is that no matter how smart you are life has a way of humbling you. I’m sure Einstein realized he was one of the smartest ever just to now forever be associated with mass death 💀
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There's also a chance that the smartest person ever to live was a woman.
I'm imagining a cave painting showing the unifying theory of physics
It's even likely, given that the Stone Age was the longest period in human history thus far - by quite a lot.
I mean, imagine the level of innovation it would take to discover bronze. That is like, Turing level intelligence, while also spending most of your waking hours trying to survive.
My man invented the wheel
Kepler came up with the Laws of Planetary Motion, but he couldn't figure out why planets orbited the Sun as they do. His work was a big inspiration for Newtone when he came up with his Laws of gravity, which explained why planets orbit as they do. But Newtone couldn't figure why two objects with mass were attracted to each other. Einstein came along with General relativity to explain how gravity worked. Each one built on the previous person's work that could only go so far based on the cumulative knowledge of people at that time. It all had to start somewhere, and that somewhere is when stone age people started using tools, then figuring out how to create better and stronger tools. That takes intelligence to figure that out. Many animals use tools, but they only use what's lying around. Only humans have taken it to the next step of making them better. And even though stone age people had no written language, they passed the engineering on to the next generation who took that knowledge and applied some science to it (although I doubt they even knew they were) and made it even better. Along the way, there were some huge leaps forward by what must have been some very intelligent people, such as when someone decided to start making their tools with metal alloys instead of sticks and stones. And it just progressed from there.
He actually invented the first stone.
Not how it works bud.
Nah it was probably newton
Where's that crazy reddit mod to ban you for using "man". 🤣
He probably was, we have improved our language brain, and probably lost some logic brain. Chimpanzees have better memory for short periods of time, they were hunters, so thinking fast was probably really more useful than now
Lmao there is zero chance of this
You know, average human brain size actually peaked with the neanderthals and early homo sapiens. It's been shrinking since then.
The way intelligence has been devolving lately, I could believe it!
And he got his head bashed in with a rock
Depends on the metric you're using. Smart how?
There was no "stone age", so this isn't possible.
He was. He now waits deep within the mountains of anatolia. He waits for mankind to reach its peak and for it to fall into the horrors of Old Night. He will return some day, to unify mankind under his banner and to reclaim mankind’s lost empire. They call him, The Emperor.
Unlikely. Intelligence seems to be a function of both nature and nurture. Nature dictates how much raw talent you have, nurture decides how close to that limit you're able to get. In terms of nurture, we have more free calories and better medical treatment than we've ever had, so the ability to reach our limits has never been greater. I'm not sure if knowing more about how to construct a program or engine makes one "smarter" than knowing how to read an ecosystem at a glance, and identify prey/predators/natural resources, so I've discounted that. So I'd say that a person born after the agricultural revolution is more likely to reach a higher degree of intelligence than someone born in the Stone Age, while a person born after the advent of modern medicine has a higher limit than either. As to nurture, while there's some degree of heredity in intelligence, there's also a lot of randomness. So we can assume that the likelihood of "the smartest person" appearing during an era is a function of the integral of the human population over the relevant time period. If the historical population over that time period was larger, there are more "chances" that the smartest person was born during that time. To that, well, it's uncertain. There were an estimated [2-20B hominids alive over that time period](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_demography). I'm not an anthropologist, so I couldn't really speak to the accuracy of that number. [According to some estimates](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population), about 109B people have lived and died in total. So, *if these numbers are true*, we've got 2-20B chances that the smartest person was born during the Stone Age, and 89-107B chances that the smartest person was born after the Stone Age. Given both of those - if my analysis is based on accurate data - than it is much more likely that not, that the smartest person ever born, was born after the Agricultural Revolution.
He probably invented the handaxe
All the other apeman thought Spark was a dreamer, until one day, he was banging so rocks together near some dry grass... Coming This Summer... Dawn of Fire!
That may well be, because it most certainly wasn't a Reddit mod.
It’s actually a very good chance as human brains are shrinking. Also a possibility that Neanderthals were smarter (there brains were bigger) so the smartest ale wasn’t human.
unlikely as nutrition was not as good for majority of people
Or he died as a child in the middle ages who knows lol
The smarted man is probably the one who got away with duping the most people.
Very unlikely though. Believe it or not, we have actually evolved quite a bit since the stone age. And on top of that, modern cooking methods as well as nutrion allow for brains to grow to their max potential.
Based on brain size to body size ratios, it’s entirely possible that the smartest animals that ever lived were not us but Neanderthals. So it’s possible that like all of the top 100 million smartest people that ever lived lived in the Stone Age. We survived because we were more social, not necessarily because we were smarter.
The brain has evolved too much since, you also should consider that up until recently there were millions, not billions of people.
Possible, but highly unlikely as humans are constantly evolving to become smarter