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from the appealing-to-a-community-of-loners dept.
A story at Inverse, covers research that concludes that Evolution Made Really Smart People Long to Be Loners:
Psychologists have a pretty good idea of what typically makes a human happy. Dancing delights us. Being in nature brings us joy. And, for most people, frequent contact with good friends makes us feel content.
That is, unless you're really, really smart.
In a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology , researchers Norman Li and Satoshi Kanazawa report that highly intelligent people experience lower life satisfaction when they socialize with friends more frequently. These are the Sherlocks and the Newt Scamanders of the world — the very intelligent few who would be happier if they were left alone.
[...] To come to this conclusion, the researchers analyzed the survey responses of 15,197 individuals between the ages of 18 and 28. Their data was a part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health — a survey that measures life satisfaction, intelligence, and health...
Intelligence is believed to have evolved as a psychological mechanism to solve novel problems — the sort of challenges that weren't a regular part of life. For our ancestors, frequent contact with friends and allies was a necessity that allowed them to survive. Being highly intelligent, however, meant an individual was more likely to be able to solve problems without another person's help, which in turn diminished the importance of their friendships.
[...] That certainly doesn't mean that if you enjoy being around your friends that you're unintelligent. But it does mean that the really smart person you know who spends much of their time alone isn't a sad loner — they probably just like it that way.
In my estimation, the community here is above-average in intelligence so I am curious: How many of you are loners? Do you prefer the company of yourself to the company of others?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 19 2016, @10:05PM
Also, as far as I know, there is no "intelligence gene"...
There's a whole wikipedia article on the topic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ [wikipedia.org]
There's lots of creationist theory masquerading as progressive political values that only environment matters, but the numbers don't lie.
However its transmitted, genes or star wars midichlorians, statistics seem to show intelligence can be measured in multiple different ways and they all kind fall in between heritability of depression (pretty darn high like 0.4) and heritability of height (like 0.8 fraction). With a lot of hand waving about multiple studies its around 3/4.
Your claim that there's no gene for it is spurious in that no one has run a study implying anywhere near zero as a factor. Some political theories require that, sure. Is it merely half or over 0.8 is where the debate seems to lie.
So there's a non-constructive mathematical proof that an intelligence gene exists or more likely there's a great cluster of genes that taken together as a set cooperate to make a smart person. But the non-constructive aspect means it obviously exists but we have no idea what specific chromosomes are involved. Either that or the math has proven there's some kind of mass creationism going on with every fetus being intelligently designed to merely almost mimic its parents performance however high or low that might be. Or space aliens, etc. Eh I'd put my money on genetics being more likely.
Its actually kinda similar to race. There's no single "white" or "black" gene and albino black folk don't look white any more than white folk with sun tans look black. Big ole cluster of genes relating to all manner of things from vit D processing to melanin production to sickle cell anemia danger to lactose tolerance.
(Score: 1) by dvader on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:51AM
There's a whole wikipedia article on the topic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ [wikipedia.org]
Thanks! I learnt something today. Statistical heritability was new to me and it is an interesting topic. I'm obviously new to this topic and there's a lot of surprising things, like, how the heritability increases with age (0.2 as kids and 0.8 as adults) and how the heritability for some traits like memory is much lower (0.4) than the heritability of general cognitive ability (0.8).
Actually, my (sloppy) argument was that there is no single intelligence gene but rather a bunch of genes controlling various traits which together make up or cognitive abilities. Even comparatively simple cognitive abilities like memory does not seem not to be controlled by a single gene. It is likely that intelligence is like a finely tuned piano where "more string tension" is not always better. Each trait must be tuned in relation to the others to produce a good result. This tuning would of course be inheritable but it would be very hard to "read" the final result.
For there to be evolutionary selection pressure, there must be an optimal level of social activity which maximizes your chance of reproducing and depends on your intelligence. If intelligence is not controlled by a single gene, you can't just "read" that gene and then up or down regulate the social activity based on the result. Intelligence and social activity could co-evolve but then we would have ethnic groups of intelligent loners and others of stupid socialites (which there is little evidence of).