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Our Fragile Intellect
"Our Fragile Intellect" is a 2012 article by American biochemist Gerald Crabtree, published in the journal ''Trends in Genetics''. Crabtree's speculative and controversial thesis argues that human intelligence peaked sometime between 2,000 and 6,000 years ago and has been in steady decline since the advent of agriculture and increasing urbanization. Modern humans, according to Crabtree, have been losing their intellectual and emotional abilities due to accumulating gene mutations that are not being selected against as they once were in our hunter-gatherer past.Boyle, Rebecca. (2012, November 19).Are People Getting Dumber? One Geneticist Thinks So". ''PopSci''. Retrieved December 6, 2012. This theory is sometimes referred to as the Idiocracy hypothesis. Thesis Crabtree argues that advancements in modern science allow new predictions to be made about both the past and the future of humanity and we can predict "that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprising ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gerald Crabtree
Gerald R. Crabtree is the David Korn Professor at Stanford University and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is known for defining the Ca2+-calcineurin-NFAT signaling pathway, pioneering the development of synthetic ligands for regulation of biologic processes and discovering chromatin regulatory mechanisms involved in cancer and brain development. He is a founder of Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Amplyx Pharmaceuticals, and Foghorn Therapeutics. Education and training Crabtree grew up near Wellsburg, West Virginia, earned his B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics from West Liberty State College and his M.D. from Temple University. While at medical school, he became interested in laboratory research and started to work at Dartmouth College with Allan Munck on the biochemistry of steroid hormones. Key discoveries 1980s, 1990s and 2010s In the early 1980s Crabtree worked with Albert J. Fornace Jr. to use early bioinformatics approaches to identify remnants of transp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robin Dunbar
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947) is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour. He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". Education Dunbar, the son of an engineer, was educated at Magdalen College School, Brackley. He went on to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his teachers included Niko Tinbergen; he completed his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Philosophy in 1969. Dunbar then went on to the Department of Psychology of the University of Bristol and completed his PhD in 1974 on the social organisation of the gelada, ''Theropithecus gelada'', a monkey that is a close relative to baboons. He spent two years as a freel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academic Journal Articles
An academy ( Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 385 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and skill, north of Athens, Greece. Etymology The word comes from the ''Academy'' in ancient Greece, which derives from the Athenian hero, ''Akademos''. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning. The sacred space, dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, Athena, had formerly been an olive grove, hence the expression "the groves of Academe". In these gardens, the philosopher Plato conversed with followers. Plato developed his sessions into a method of teaching philosophy and in 387 BC, established what is known today as the Old Academy. By extension, ''academia'' has come to mean the accumulation, de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Eyres
Harry Eyres (born 1958) is a British journalist, writer and poet Biography and Career Eyres was educated as a King's Scholar at Eton College, where he won the Newcastle Scholarship in 1975, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied English language and literature. He holds a Diploma de Estudios Hispanicos from Barcelona University and an MSc in Environmental Assessment and Evaluation from the London School of Economics (LSE). Eyres was a theatre critic and arts writer for ''The Times'' from 1987 to 1993, the wine editor of '' Harpers & Queen'' from 1989 to 1996, and the wine columnist for ''The Spectator'' magazine from 1984 to 1989. He was Poetry Editor of '' The Daily Express'' from 1996 to 2001. Prior to his writing career, in the early 1980s, he was a junior expert at Christie's wine department, working under wine critic Michael Broadbent. From 2004 to 2015, Eyres wrote a weekly column for ''The Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a Bri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dysgenics
Dysgenics (also known as cacogenics) is the decrease in prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or well adapted to their environment due to selective pressure disfavoring the reproduction of those traits. The adjective "dysgenic" is the antonym of " eugenic". In 1915 the term was used by David Starr Jordan to describe the supposed deleterious effects of modern warfare on group-level genetic fitness because of its tendency to kill physically healthy men while preserving the disabled at home. Similar concerns had been raised by early eugenicists and social Darwinists during the 19th century, and continued to play a role in scientific and public policy debates throughout the 20th century. More recent concerns about supposed dysgenic effects in human populations have been advanced by the controversial psychologist Richard Lynn, notably in his 1996 book '' Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations'', which argued that a reduction in selection pressure ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Genetical Theory Of Natural Selection
''The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection'' is a book by Ronald Fisher which combines Mendelian genetics with Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, with Fisher being the first to argue that "Mendelism therefore validates Darwinism" and stating with regard to mutations that "The vast majority of large mutations are deleterious; small mutations are both far more frequent and more likely to be useful", thus refuting orthogenesis. First published in 1930 by The Clarendon Press, it is one of the most important books of the modern synthesis, and helped define population genetics. It is commonly cited in biology books, outlining many concepts that are still considered important such as Fisherian runaway, Fisher's principle, reproductive value, Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, Fisher's geometric model, the sexy son hypothesis, mimicry and the evolution of dominance. It was dictated to his wife in the evenings as he worked at Rothamsted Research in the day ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Fisher has been called "the greatest of Darwin’s successors". Fisher held strong views on race and eugenics, insisting on racial differences. Although he was clearly a eugenist and advocated for the legalization of voluntary sterilization of those with heritable mental disabilities, there is some debate as to whether Fisher support ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Scarlet Plague
''The Scarlet Plague'' is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel by American writer Jack London, originally published in '' London Magazine'' in 1912. The book was noted in 2020 as having been very similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially given London wrote it at a time when the world was not as quickly connected by travel as it is today. Plot summary The story takes place in 2073, sixty years after an uncontrollable epidemic, the Red Death, has depopulated the planet. James Smith is one of the survivors of the era before the scarlet plague hit and is still left alive in the San Francisco area, and he travels with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip. His grandsons are young and live as primeval hunter-gatherers in a heavily depopulated world. Their intellect is limited, as are their language abilities. Edwin asks Smith, whom they call "Granser", to tell them of the disease alternately referred to as scarlet plague, scarlet death, or red death. Smith recounts the story ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jack London
John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction. London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights and socialism.Swift, John N. "Jack London's ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’: Germ Warfare, Eugenics, and Cultural Hygiene." American Literary Realism, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 59–71. .Hensley, John R. "Eugenics and Social Darwinism in Stanley Waterloo's ‘The Story of Ab’ and Jack London's ‘Before Adam.’" Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 25, no. 1, 2002, pp. 23–37. . London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Machine Stops
"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in ''The Oxford and Cambridge Review'' (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's ''The Eternal Moment and Other Stories'' in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology ''Modern Short Stories''. In 1973 it was also included in '' The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two''. The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide its needs, predicted technologies similar to instant messaging and the Internet. Plot summary The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted, but is unpopular and rarel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Brown (writer)
Andrew Brown (born 1955 in London) is an English journalist, writer, and editor. He was one of the founding staff members of '' The Independent'', where he worked as a religious correspondent, parliamentary sketch writer, and a feature writer. He has written extensively on technology for ''Prospect'' and the '' New Statesman'' and been a feature writer on '' The Guardian''. He has worked as the editor for the ''Belief'' section of ''The Guardian''s Comment is Free, which won a Webby under his leadership, and is currently a leader writer and member of the paper's editorial board. He is also the press columnist of the '' Church Times''. ''In The Beginning was the Worm'' (2004) was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize. ''Fishing in Utopia'' (2008) won the Orwell Prize and was nominated for the Dolman Best Travel Book Award in 2009. Brown is the son of Bletchley Park codebreaker Patricia Bartley. Views Christianity and non-believers Brown has described himself as someone for wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world; it has buildings in every style of English architecture since late Anglo-Saxon. Oxford's industries include motor manufacturing, education, publishing, information technology and science. History The history of Oxford in England dates back to its original settlement in the Saxon period. Originally of strategic significance due to its controlling location on the upper reaches of the River Thames at its junction with the River Cherwell, the town grew in national importance during the early Norman period, and in the late 12th century became home to the fledgling University of Oxford. The city was besieged during The Anarchy in 1142. The university rose to domi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
