are people smarter than others?

yo. well, the main "religions" of this site are christianity and evolution idealism.

so, with those two in mind, lets take into effect the smartness of people

now, lets say that every generation gets dumber. now lets say we start with Adam and Eve, for instance. Adam and Eve are perfect, nothign wrong, the most brilliant people ever to live- can figure things out the human brain could never do today.
now, Adam's kids are SLIGHTLY dumber than Adam is, slightly less perfect. and his kids, his kids, his kids, all get dumber to present day dumbness
So Adam has Cane, and Seth. Cane and Seth both have the same IQ, or smartness. lets stick with Canes lineage (made up figures)

Cane's lineage has kids every 500 years (as it wasnt uncommon for peeps to live to 1K years old back then) so it goes Bob, Larry, and Junior. thats only 3 generations
Seth's lineage has kids every 20 years. so thats a WHOLE lot more generations. thus, Junior would be a whole lot smarter than Seth's youngest son. infact, Seth's youngest son would be just downright stupid, and his genes would be awful.

Evolutionist view point- the more generations, the smarter, better, better genes and all. so in evolution, the MORE generations, the smarter, the less generations the dumber.

and that would explain, and answer the question of why/if people are truly dumber/smarter today.

Unfortunately the evolutionary path for the species might be favoring things other than smarts. Maybe you could classify some of the "socially desirable" characteristics (that are purportedly screened for these days in "natural" selection) as "street smarts":

* the ability to lie with a straight face
* so-called "emotional" intelligence or the ability to get inside people's lower order motivations and manipulate them
* the consumer gene (that is definitely one leading to more dumbf*cks generation after generation).

Adam and Eve were not perfect, if they existed other than in a myth, they were supposedly created in the image of a Creator. They had little knowledge except what they learned for themselves. Knowledge improved them (except for forbidden knowledge, in the myth) and knowledge is part of smarts. Knowledge is on the increase and the rate of increase in the past 100 years has been exponential.

Nice thoughts yermom.

First of all I will say it was Cain and ABLE. Second I will say Adam and Eve werent perfect. Far from it. Only God is perfect.

Nicely said MaskedAvatar.
It seems that we're getting smarter and dumber at the same time.
We've come a far away as far as space exploration etc goes.
And yet as MaskedAvatar mentioned, the consumer gene seems to be dominating the majority. People have become a lot more gullible!
Imagine this scenario( Its an exaggeration)
There are two species living on this planet. One evolved, advanced human who makes teh decisions.
THen there's the other DUMB species. A whole buncha apes. Hey they might as well grow their tails back. They'll probably serve as slaves convinced about a story that has been fed to them. Their goal: To serve the higher species.

Everybody is smart in their own way...

Imagine the world we would live in if everybody was the same. How boring.

My husband's dad used to say that some men were meant to be garbagemen, some men were meant to fix cars, and others were meant to be the ceo of a company...

Everybody has their talents, and everybody has their flaws. But if you judged everybody on their flaws I just couldn't imagine the kind of world we would have. It wouldn't be nice though.

ehhh... u guys missed the point- never mind. geez. im sending 2-3 of you guys private IM's, as you have stated false information that would contradict what I said, when indeed I did not give any false information, this is only a theory on smartness of people, and a bit of a good one thrui the generations idea I think

Im sorry, Im having a hard time understanding. Evolution has no end goal, it doesnt pick and choose what it wants, so species dont exactly get "smarter", or "dumber" as they evolve, merely the individuals better adapted for their environments reproduce, spreading their mutations to the rest of the population. "Smart" and "dumb" are also subjective, so answering this question is hard, if not impossible.

It seems like nowadays that evolution favors the average to dumb. How many guys do you know of who don't go after intelligent women because of a feeling of inadequacy, or women that don't choose intelligent guys because of the primal desire for the physically alpha male? Nice post Masked Avatar, you raise a good point about what's driving evolution today. It's sad really but it seems to be what works.

Knowledge is on the increase and the rate of increase in the past 100 years has been exponential.

Knowledge is definitely on the increase like you said, but it seems like the ability to use it effectively is on the decline

[edit on 30-1-2005 by zhangmaster]