Scientist says humans are becoming less intelligent
(Image source: Playback / PopSci)
"We were already smarter." This phrase may be attributed to a famous Brazilian journalist, but now it is also being spoken by a geneticist named Gerald R. Crabtree, who published the study "Our Fragile Intellect." For the scientist, there is a lot of evidence showing that the human race has undergone genetic mutations that have resulted in the loss of intellectual ability over the millennia.
The major focus of Crabtree's analysis (who is a researcher at Stanford, one of the most respected universities in the United States) is on human genes. He says the human brain needs thousands of genes to be formed and simple changes in one of them can cause major problems for the absorption of knowledge. He also says that this may have happened at least twice in the last millennia.
How did the scientific community receive the study?
Although Crabtree is a researcher at a major US university, the scientific community does not seem to welcome his studies. Not for failures in numbers or inconsistencies in arguments, but for the similarity of Crabtree's theory to other theories that became very famous in the early twentieth century: eugenic theories.
Eugenics is the basis of much of the argument of those who defend racial purity. Crabtree eventually rekindles similar discussions, as early eugenic theorists said that mixing races could make humans less intelligent. Despite all the criticism, Gerald Crabtree told PopSci magazine that his work has nothing to do with eugenics.
He also said that breeding could solve all problems in the future, if they become a problem. It is worth mentioning that Crabtree did not say that we are “dumber”, but that we currently have “less intellectual capacity”, but with more knowledge.
