From: The Globe and Mail

Is this as smart as we get?

The Globe and Mail:

“A provocative new paper warns that our societal effort to do whatever it takes to improve intelligence may be misguided, as any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems,” reports Psych Central. “In a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, the authors looked to evolution to understand why humans are only as smart as we are and not any smarter. … To answer the question, the authors reviewed the evolutionary process and discovered that additional intelligence gains would most likely be offset by some other unintended consequence. … Just as there are evolutionary tradeoffs for physical traits, [says coauthor Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick, U.K.], there are tradeoffs for intelligence. A baby’s brain size is thought to be limited by, among other things, the size of the mother’s pelvis; bigger brains could mean more deaths in childbirth, and the pelvis can’t change substantially without changing the way we stand and walk.

Read the whole story: The Globe and Mail


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