Huck Turner  wrote or quoted:
> William Morse  wrote in message
news:...
> > huckturner{at}hotmail.com (Huck Turner) wrote in

> > > I doubt he intended this in such literal terms. He is expressing DOUBT
> > > that intelligence should be regarded as a blessing. He is challenging
> > > a view that many people hold dear, something that makes humans feel
> > > special. Given that Hawking is held up as a modern genius (often
> > > compared with Einstein), I can appreciate why he might feel he needs
> > > to downplay the value of intelligence. And I would agree that the
> > > different levels of intelligence within the human population don't
> > > seem to be particularly well correlated with selective advantage. You
> > > don't have to be a particularly smart person to make a living and lead
> > > a happy life. And in terms of genetic propagation, the more educated
> > > you are, the fewer children you are likely to have (something that
> > > Darwin himself noticed).
> > 
> > The correct statement is "the fewer children you are likely
to raise", at 
> > least until we have done considerably more research on who are the real 
> > genetic fathers of children. For women,  obviously, this objection does 
> > not hold.  
> 
> I'm not really sure what your point is. Conceiving and raising
> children are different matters and it's the former that is relevant
> here because Hawking was presumably making a comment about the
> heritable aspect of intelligence. If you are a more educated man or
> woman, you are likely to have fewer progeny and later in life. This IS
> correct and is independent of whether your statement is also correct.

Tracking down the number of offspring men have is notoriously difficult.

Also - while these are times of relative prosperity, and many of those
born survive - conventionally, having lots of children is a sort of 
defense against their high mortality.  Having kids is not enough to 
increase your chances of becoming an ancestor - the kids themselves
have to be viable, and themselves reproduce.

As far as I am aware there's no evidence that education and/or brains
is a handicap - evolutionarily speaking.

IMO, the best evidence we have about the adaptive value of intelligence
in humans is the steady and fairly continuous increase in skull size
over the last 5 million years.

We may not know about the long-term fate of the trait - but one thing
we can say with some confidence is that bigger-brained humans have 
systematically out-reproduced their smaller-brained cousins for 
practically all of the last 5 million years.
-- 
__________
 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 7/19/04 6:06:05 AM