Science & Technology

Are humans getting less intelligent ?

By T.K. Randall
November 13, 2012 ·  105 comments

Image Credit: Andrew Mason The claim stems from the idea that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to be clever several thousand years ago when we started to live in larger settlements. Our ancestors would have relied on their abilities to hunt food, build shelters, make tools and a host of other tasks that are obsolete in the modern world. Since then, some scientists argue, our intelligence has had no need to evolve and has thus been in steady decline.

"The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples [living] before our ancestors emerged from Africa," said study author Gerald Crabtree.

Source: Daily Mail | Comments (105)

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