MayorQuimby
Gold Member
- Feb 4, 2024
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I came across a person's blog, on which he talks about why geniuses seem to have disappeared. So below are my thoughts:
Geniuses are born, not made. This means whatever caused the genius to be a genius, it's almost certainly his genes. Now, humans came out of the ice age, an extremely harsh environment. What this environment did, was it selected for extremely high levels of intelligence, which is what genius is made of. Now, back then, because the environment was so harsh, people were too busy trying to survive, they did not have the time nor energy nor resources to develop art, science, civilization, or even society. But what we do know is that the human gene pool started out really "excellently". Which is why when we look at the antiquity period, there were so many notable thinkers and philosophers. And then, Christianity came. Christianity was good in the sense that it stabilized society, as it generally encouraged good, moral people to reproduce more than they otherwise would have. However, one drawback of Christianity was that it killed the advancement of human knowledge. Which is why after the golden era of the classical period, we see the Dark ages. And then, Renaissance came. If I were to guess (note this is a big guess), the reason Renaissance happened because by then, human populations had grown big enough that geniuses were born frequently enough, such that there were enough eminent thinkers and inventers whose breakthroughs caused Christianity to give way to Rationality. And then, these breakthroughs and discoveries built upon one another to allow populations to grow even bigger, to the point where they became "too big". Now, what do I mean by that? Well, remember we said earlier that genius is caused by genes. What this means, in order for someone to be a genius, he needs to have two copies of genes, one from each parent. When two parents are geniuses, it is likely that the child will be a genius, too. And when only one parent is a genius, the resultant child's level of intelligence will be "dragged down" a bit by the non-genius parent. In other words, his genius genes are diluted. When you have so many geniuses making so many discoveries that enabled populations to grow too big, what will happen is that geniuses will have a hard time finding and reproducing with one another. They will likely mate with someone who is merely intelligent, but not a genius. So, this results in a non-genius level child. And the bigger the population, the more severe this phenomenon gets. So, genius requires the population to be big enough for it to manifest, but the population must not be too big, otherwise it paradoxically kills off the phenomenon of genius. So here's my theory. Thank you.
Geniuses are born, not made. This means whatever caused the genius to be a genius, it's almost certainly his genes. Now, humans came out of the ice age, an extremely harsh environment. What this environment did, was it selected for extremely high levels of intelligence, which is what genius is made of. Now, back then, because the environment was so harsh, people were too busy trying to survive, they did not have the time nor energy nor resources to develop art, science, civilization, or even society. But what we do know is that the human gene pool started out really "excellently". Which is why when we look at the antiquity period, there were so many notable thinkers and philosophers. And then, Christianity came. Christianity was good in the sense that it stabilized society, as it generally encouraged good, moral people to reproduce more than they otherwise would have. However, one drawback of Christianity was that it killed the advancement of human knowledge. Which is why after the golden era of the classical period, we see the Dark ages. And then, Renaissance came. If I were to guess (note this is a big guess), the reason Renaissance happened because by then, human populations had grown big enough that geniuses were born frequently enough, such that there were enough eminent thinkers and inventers whose breakthroughs caused Christianity to give way to Rationality. And then, these breakthroughs and discoveries built upon one another to allow populations to grow even bigger, to the point where they became "too big". Now, what do I mean by that? Well, remember we said earlier that genius is caused by genes. What this means, in order for someone to be a genius, he needs to have two copies of genes, one from each parent. When two parents are geniuses, it is likely that the child will be a genius, too. And when only one parent is a genius, the resultant child's level of intelligence will be "dragged down" a bit by the non-genius parent. In other words, his genius genes are diluted. When you have so many geniuses making so many discoveries that enabled populations to grow too big, what will happen is that geniuses will have a hard time finding and reproducing with one another. They will likely mate with someone who is merely intelligent, but not a genius. So, this results in a non-genius level child. And the bigger the population, the more severe this phenomenon gets. So, genius requires the population to be big enough for it to manifest, but the population must not be too big, otherwise it paradoxically kills off the phenomenon of genius. So here's my theory. Thank you.
