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Pretty much everyone here either misunderstands how evolution works, or is willfully ignoring it to push their viewpoint.
Humans at this point have very little evolutionary pressure from natural selection. We aren’t getting weaker, shorter, taller, or anything like that from natural selection because those traits aren’t killing people.
The main driving factors for human evolution are sexual selection, random mutation, and genetic drift. There are still some poorer areas disease may still play a not insignificant part, but even that is fairly minimal since people largely live to reproductive age.
Human evolution has been fairly stagnant for quite a while. The differences most people would notice are from changes in diet, environment, and other external forces. For natural selection to pressure evolution we would need to have a significant portion of the population sure before they are able to reproduce.
In this age of contraception, it's more a matter of wanting to reproduce (and how often) rather than merely being able to. I can't shake off the impression that less educated people are reproducing at a way higher pace, producing many offspring of which in before times many would not have reached reproduction themselves, but now they do.
You should watch the movie Idiocraty.
I’ve seen it. And less educated/poor doesn’t mean genetically less intelligent. And even if it did, all that means is a change in the average gene distribution. A large enough portion of every population still reproduces that we are unlikely to dead end any major gene variations. So we still maintain a diverse gene pool, and if something happens to make natural selection play a role, we still have enough variation to adapt to changes.
I think the point Idiocracy was trying to convey had less to do with the genetics of the stupid people breeding, and more so the downward spiral of intelligence due to policy societal and governmental changes. Dumb people, make dumb policy choices, including with regard to education. To me, it stands to reason that the downward slope of intelligence is percitpitated on how effective governmental policy is and how well education is distributed.
Agreed. Plus it is a satire. It was making a point. It wasn’t required to be factually accurate through the entire movie.
My disagreement was that there was any evolutionary downward pressure on human capability. We can do increasingly dumber things without it being a genetic change. Propaganda, indoctrination, and selective access to information can play a huge role in how people develop and ultimately behave.