The Idiocracy Hypothesis: are we becoming less intelligent?

Is the human being becoming an idiot? There are those who think so, although their explanations are very varied. We have those who say it's because less smart people reproduce more, and we have those who indicate that this has been going on for some time, because we live in increasingly advanced.

Next Let's talk about the controversial hypothesis of idiocracy, some of its explanations and whys of this apparent reduction of our collective intelligence.

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What is the Idiocracy Hypothesis?

It is known by many the famous Flynn effect. According to the person who proposed it, the New Zealander James Flynn, during the last 20th century there was a significant increase in the average intelligence of the population in Western countries.

Today, this same phenomenon is what can be seen in developing countries. As the main explanation, it has been proposed that a better diet, more stimulating environments, a better training and a lower incidence of infectious diseases have contributed to the increase in intelligence.

However, it seems that the opposite effect is also taking place. There are developed countries in which there seems to be a decrease in the IQ of the population, as is the case in Norway, Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is not known whether this downward trend will continue in the long term or there will come a time when it will stabilize in countries that have already reached their highest population IQ levels..

Some argue that this downward trend will continue, especially in developed countries. They believe that the average values ​​of the population IQ are going to fall with special intensity in well-being countries, in which it is assumed that the limit of all possible social improvement has already been reached. In those societies, the population is going to be less intelligent on average, which has led to the talk of a peculiar idea with a controversial name: the idiocracy hypothesis.

This hypothesis has its origin in a film, "Idiocracy" (2006) by Mike Judge which, despite not being a "blockbuster", did not go unnoticed. It speaks of a futuristic world, in the year 2500, in which, because the human being has spent hundreds of years without being subject to evolutionary pressures, having everything within his reach and without the need to use inventiveness to progress further, he has ended up becoming an idiot. The idiocracy hypothesis basically posits that this could happen, that it's not just a plot of fictional film.

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Are we becoming idiots?

Although the idiocracy hypothesis is highly controversial and debatable, in recent years there have been changes in the population IQ that have made it inevitable to bring it up for debate. One of the explanations behind the idiocracy hypothesis tells us that throughout the 20th century two different phenomena overlapped. On the one hand, the Flynn effect that we have talked about, and on the other, a hereditary reduction in IQ, motivated by the accumulation of unfavorable intellectual traits in the population.

Some defenders of the idiocracy hypothesis argue that society is seeing its IQ reduced because the couples formed by less intelligent people are those that, as a general rule, have more children. There is the idea that less intelligence also implies less responsibility, less awareness and greater impulsiveness, which would imply less care when pairing up and maintaining relationships with other persons. In other words, less intelligent people would be less likely to use prophylaxis or suppress their urge to have sex.

According to this interpretation, intelligence-enhancing effects, such as better nutrition, more stimulating environments, and good education, already they would have exhausted all possibility of producing improvements in welfare societies. At that point, only the dysgenetic effects (negative genetic variables) of the increasing offspring of less intelligent people could manifest.

In Western countries there has been a decline in birth rates in Western countries and, for a few decades, in almost every country in the world. The improvement of living conditions and, especially, the access of women to education and incorporation into the world of work has caused a strong reduction in fertility throughout the world.

On the other hand, in countries with lower birth rates, couples with fewer studies are the ones who have more offspring. Those who defend this explanation behind the idiocracy hypothesis argue that this lower educational level is a reflection, in one way or another, of a genetically based inferior intellectual level (and it is assumed that it is hereditary), the average intellectual level of the population would decrease during the next decades. From this it follows that, since the most intelligent people do not reproduce as much and the less intelligent people do, it is expected that there will be more and more less intelligent people and the population IQ will drop.

This explanation behind the idiocracy hypothesis is highly debatable. It is very risky to affirm that the differences in the educational level are the faithful reflection of a lower hereditary intelligence. It is known that the conditions in which one has been raised, environmental variables such as parental and school education or access to health services, are determinants of the level of school performance and the number of years that a person will remain in the system formative. And that also implies better results in IQ tests.

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Idiocracy and history of evolution

The above explanation related to the idiocracy hypothesis is controversial. Assuming that population intelligence in advanced countries is only going to decline because it cannot be progress more and the less intelligent ones are going to reproduce more than the intelligent ones is a presupposition risky. Nevertheless... What if this phenomenon has nothing to do with how advanced a society is? What if we have been getting less intelligent for thousands of years?

The human being has been overcoming the adversities that nature has in store for thousands of years. It's been a long time since we have had to go hunting, fishing, gathering fruits and defending ourselves against wild beasts by ourselves. Nowadays, each person specializes in a specific task, and if they require a specific service or product, they turn to another person who specializes in it. We live in societies, depending on each other, confined to the different knowledge and skills that each one has.

Studies of the last decade have pointed out that throughout the history of humanity, the human brain was critically reduced. Until recently it was known that our brain had reduced its size, but this fact was pointed out some 300,000 to 35,000 years ago. However, it has now been seen that the phenomenon must have occurred only 3,000 years ago, when the being Humans already knew writing, China and Mesopotamia already existed, and the Roman civilization was about to born.

So that, the shrinking of our brain is, evolutionarily speaking, a very recent event. However, what does this have to do with the idiocracy hypothesis? Does a smaller brain imply less intelligence? Not really, but it could give us clues as to how the behavioral change of the human being also changed his constitution and his way of relating to others.

Our lineage has quadrupled in size in the last 6 million years. During the first million years of initial growth, reaching Homo erectus (10 to 2.5 Ma), the increase in brain volume was due solely to the increase in body size. It was from Homo erectus in which the human brain began to increase at great speed. something that was attributed to the discovery of fire and its use for cooking. Cooking food was a social event, with the tribe gathering around the fire waiting their turn to eat and socializing in the process.

From 1.5 Ma onwards, the growth of our brain slowed down, but remained stable during the Pleistocene. But, after 3000 years, the size of our brain takes the opposite trend, shrinking. He began to lose size at a rate 50 times greater than the rate at which he had been growing. One of the explanations that have been considered for this considerable reduction in the size of our brain is the domestication syndrome. It has been said that, in reality, human beings present many typical traits of domesticated animals.

It has been found that domesticated species, such as dogs, have a smaller brain than their wild counterparts, wolves, but without losing cognitive abilities. In fact, there are cases in which the domesticated species is more intelligent despite having a smaller brain size, as is the case with some dog breeds.

Another explanation regarding the descent of the human brain is with the appearance of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. This discovery caused the human population to grow exponentially due to better nutrition. But with agriculture also came a rise in infections and deterioration in diet and health.

Agriculture would prevent us from being victims of hunger due to the adversities of nature; with it we would have less selective pressure, we would not need to use our intelligence so much for new things and our brain size would be reduced.

However, this same explanation has also been questioned, since today there are still communities of hunter-gatherers, ethnic groups whose brain has also been reduced. They do not dominate agriculture, they hunt and gather fruits like our pre-agricultural ancestors, and their societies are highly complex.

Putting the spotlight on insects, we may get the answer to why this phenomenon. Thanks to these arthropods it has been seen that the more dependent one is on the group, the less dependent one is on one's behavior and, as a consequence, the brain tends to shrink. This would be the final explanation of this curious phenomenon that we became less intelligent individually.

The division of labor is making us "idiots." As we said, living in a society, we do not need to master the art of hunting, agriculture, fishing, defense and breeding on our own, but we only have to specialize in a job and ask for services from others who master other specialties. The division of labor would be making us idiots individually, but collectively we would continue to function and, despite the fact that the idiocracy hypothesis gives too much importance to IQ, it is still a value.