It's not a coward who refuses to fight in an unjust war. Actually, the coward is the one who does everything he's told without even questioning it, for fear of punishment.
You've missed several points. Take the above:- generally, there were many patriotic people in both wars who willingly fought without coercion.As regards cowardice, generally speaking, a coward in the palaeolithic would soon have died due to being unable to successsfully hunt and kill animals much larger than him. It is only since the Neolithic era, that cowards are much more easily able to hide behind the brave, and thus avoid getting killed before being able to breed.
This could be the case, although this wouldn't indicate that the dysgenic effects are as terrible and as pressing as what you think.
The problem with dysgenics is that it does not necessarily have to show itself. All bad genes need is to be able to reproduce themselves. In an unhealthy society, that is possible, otherwise much less so.
That said, I remain highly skeptical of the theory that says that neanderthals and cro magnon were much smarter than us. I could accept that on average, they may have been slightly smarter, but they didn't have the raw numbers to produce unlikely geniuses like we have today, which are the ones who truly move civilization forward. If they were so smart, why did they all die out? And why didn't they produce technology like the kind we have today? Or are you saying that they did have such technology, built the pyramids, ruled over us, and when they got tired of playing god, left the planet and went for the stars?
All absurd claims. Take
1) It has been shown, despite various marxist pseudo-philosophers like Stephen Jay Gould etc., that having larger brains is usually linked to higher intelligence:-
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303385?via%3Dihub2)In actual fact, HG tribes in palaeo times have been shown to have demonstrated great genius among them, given their intricate knowledge of astronomy, refined hunting -strategies etc. The fact that they had to spend most of their time surviving rather than sitting down and reading/writing books does NOT mean they were less intelligent than us. It merely means that we developed better technology. We Neolithic types did so by encouraging greater cooperation between the various morons, thus enabling methods which advanced their civlisation. Take modern criminals, for example. Some modern criminals have much higher intelligence than police-officers, with the latter being known for being, on average, quite stupid people. However, despite the police having lower average intelligence than the higher strata of criminals, the more intelligent criminals are often caught because a) the police far outnumber them and b) the police often develop various simple patterns to make it much easier to detect and identify even the most intelligent criminals(such as using licence-plates or CCTV or burglar-alarms etc.) None of these methods really require intelligence per se.
If they were so smart, why did they all die out?
Intelligent people can die out despite or because of having higher intelligence. Possibilities exist such as a major famine. There is another issue. HGs, Neanderthals and the like demonstrate MORE intelligence since they controlled their population growth unlike settled populations. Settled populations were only ever able to be restricted in the past because of major plagues or because they ruined their agricultural lands through overuse. Now, that modern technology allows circumvention of those factors, the Earth is now in danger of being ruined as regards its environment. The main definition of intelligence, by the way, is planning for the future. The stupid are far more likely to not bother planning at all, and just seek out short-term goals, even if they lead to long-term disaster.
The Flynn Effect applies to subsequent generations. Yes you can teach yourself to do better at IQs, but like you said, as soon as the type of IQ test is changed drastically, your benefits are gone. The Flynn Effect applies to people who've never done IQ tests before, certainly not the ones used to test for it.
You completely missed the point. I showed links above which stated that the Flynn Effect disappeared once more rigorous IQ tests were done which did not mimic the usual IQ tests.I also showed that the Flynn Effect has recently vanished from western nations as migration from much lower-IQ regions happened.
Yes, of course, you could have a situation where every race is getting smarter on average, but the population as a whole is getting less smart on average because basically the only ones who are growing in numbers are africans, who on average are less smart. Notice that this applies worldwide too, so it's not simply about immigration/emmigration.
I can safely state, from watching my own relatives by blood or marriage, that, worldwide, not just in Africa, the stupid are fast outbreeding the more intelligent ever since the Neolithic era, but particularly more so in the last 100 years. In the past, even in Neolithic times, there were some instances where some eugenics was in place, such as the mass infanticide routinely practised prior to the Pill.
I'd doubt some of that. There might be less famine, but quality of foods has gone down substantially. And like you said, famines should have an eugenics effect, no?
Yet those with larger brains would be more damaged by famine due to having higher energy needs....
Likewise the formal education has gotten terribly worse, while informal education has gotten much better in very recent times due to the internet.
Agree on that, though it does not involve higher intelligence.Neither greater technology nor greater education can substitute for intelligence. I recall CK, in previous times, hysterically screaming "Hadron Collider" in order to supposedly "prove" that modern humans were, oh, so much more intelligent than in the past. He was dead wrong. Take calculators, for example. it is now simple for a human being to use an online calculator to figure out the simplest sums. Yet, a 100 years ago or more, in times without calculators, people actually had to work out maths in their heads, thus actually using their intelligence, unlike us moderns who can just let automated patterns work out the answer without us ever actually using our brains. There is an old saying which applies to intelligence as to many other things:- "if you don't use it, you lose it!".
