An Interesting Thought

In my mind among the annals of obscurity resides a certain question which arose on a pleasant bike ride through the coastal country of the Bay Area. I share it here because it vexes me, and writing things down has a tendency to help work them out. Let me pose the thought. Humans have been selectively bred through evolution for intelligence, among other characteristics. This is a fact. If you don't believe it, get over it because you're wrong. Humans are remarkably underdeveloped in many characteristics: we have very little hair (there is a very interesting theory on human evolution that I have heard which explains this phenomenon), our body strength is not impressive, we are omnivorous but this habit grew mostly out of necessity when humans began to migrate far out of Africa and had to adapt, we have unimpressive defenses, but yet we are among the most sucessful of beings. This is of course because we have created artificial adaptations (tools, etc.) which have let us achieve natural sucess. Clearly the most intelligent individuals were the most sucessful because their intelligence let them adapt the best, and hence they reproduced the most offspring, and through natural selection the more intelligent percentiles on average tended to survive the best. (As a subnote, I have been made aware of a theory that explains the reletively low human physical development, which also suggests that the very most intelligent human individuals were not the most sucessful because of higher infant mortality rates related to enlarged head size. This factor of course implies that biological sucess is not dictated solely by intelligence (indeed this would be oversimplified), however my personal belief is that more intelligent individuals tended to be more sucessful, from a general standpoint.) Now what I wonder is if we are still evolutionarily selected today primarily by intelligence; that is, do the more intelligent individuals have a greater chance of living longer and producing offspring. It is my personal observation through a series of logical steps that natural selection in the sense of "survival of the fittest" has largely voided itself from human society: in the more developed world we have achieved a standard of living which makes survival hardly dependant on intelligence; if one is of nominal intelligence one can easily survive; that is, more intelligent individuals may have a higher average of becoming more wealthy in society yet differences in wealth in most common degrees have little correlation with life expectancy and fertility (indeed poorer classes tend to have higher fertility!). The issue that we are now dealing with is something that may best be characterized as "social selection", and which seems to bear more resemblance to sexual selection than pure selection based on survival-benefitting attributes. And now the question becomes: does this so-called "social selection" select intelligence as a primary characteristic? I would reckon the answer to be "no". Certainly the least intelligent people of society are weeded out, but I don't think that the general inherent intelligence of people is being selected by society in such a manner as to indicate a trend toward greater creative, analytic, or other capabilities. The overall amount of knowledge that people have may increase, but intelligence (the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, not aggregate knowledge) in my opinion is not being naturally selected for an increase. The intense (and growing I reckon... Brave New World --Aldous Huxley, my friends) superficiality of a large spectrum society seems to indicate a trend of sexual selection becoming a great determinent in my idea of so-called "social selection". Human society is one of the great frontiers of science, and no wonder because it is such a scary place sometimes. I have to go help find Dad who is locked out of his car in SF. Ciao!