Something I find myself thinking about every now and again is the concept of psychic unity. I took Anthropology 300: Anthropological Theory a couple of years ago as part of my Anthropology minor and one of the concepts we touched on was that of psychic unity. The theory of psychic unity basically states that all human beings, past, present, and future, are all linked through the same cognitive capability. If you were to, say, travel back in time to, I dunno, 3000 BCE, abduct a newborn, bring it to our current time, and raise it the same you would any other child, he or she would have absolutely no trouble in adapting to and learning from our complex culture and would develop like anyone else from our time period. This is predicated on the belief that all human beings, since we first split off from Homo erectus hundreds of thousands of years ago, are physiologically and cognitively the same, whether they be the Homo sapiens of 100,000 BCE, 3000 BCE, 1500 CE, 2013 CE, or whatever other time period from the past or future you may so choose at random, just so long as they are Homo sapiens. Evolution is an excruciatingly slow and gradual process, taking place over hundreds of thousands to millions of years. But this idea gets me thinking about whether or not all humans from all time periods are really just the same. I mean, people, on average, are much taller today than they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. Is that a product of human evolution? If we're taller than our ancestors, who's to say we're not more intelligent than them as well? Then you bring up the notion that measuring intelligence is a culturally specific and extremely biased process. Intelligence really depends on how successful you are within your own cultural context, with the more "intelligent" of us generally performing better than others in activities or tasks that are deemed important within said culture. If you were move from Canada to Papua New Guinea, intelligence would mean something completely different. Sure, you could have a PhD in Theoretical Physics from McGill (or wherever you can get a degree in that in Canada), but I dare say you'd look quite the fool in a tribal society that values the ability to hunt, coordinate, and manage resources when you demonstrate your complete lack of outdoorsy skills.
Of course, even thinking about general human intelligence throughout history is exceedingly complicated and almost a fruitless endeavour. Each generation of humans builds upon the discoveries made the previous one. Culture, society, technology, it's all just a building process. How can we accurately infer the intelligence of past peoples and cultures when they are so vastly different from what we have now? Because they are further back in human history with important discoveries yet to have been made and built, are they any less intelligent? Have we "evolved" into an organism that greatly resembles yet is fundamentally different from past people? Maybe, maybe not. I suppose if society were to collapse due to a zombie apocalypse, we'd likely revert to our pre-industrial ways. In a way, pre-industrial societies would seem more "intelligent" at first in that scenario, as the the first generation of survivors would be unlikely to function well if left to their own devices without the aid of the technology and government that the gifted among us have devised. Drop a group of First Nations people from before the European conquest of North America into a zombie apocalypse and I'd be willing to bet that they would higher rates of survival than people from our time. At least once guns and ammunition run out. I wonder, though, if education will advance to a point where even specific areas such as agriculture and survivalist material will be known by the common person? ... Probably not, given that it's not deemed important to the common man and that all those things are taken care of by a select few who keep society running smoothly. We're moving further away from education for raw survival into education for society and culture; a type of socially-based education. Not having to worry about meeting your own survival needs but being able to engage in higher levels of thinking because all those needs are already met. Kinda like Maslow's hierarchy of needs in a way, I suppose. But are we changing our genes by simply engaging in higher cognition? If so, then we may conclude that perhaps we have evolved past the baseline of intelligence of our ancestors. It's just hard to tell; there are just too many variables to consider.
Well, that'll about do it for tonight. Next time on Culture Grumps: totally gonna discuss the culture of education, or whatever (I've been watching a lot of Game Grumps lately, so I felt compelled to make a reference. It's super good. Like, you should totally watch it right now. http://www.youtube.com/user/GameGrumps. JonTron and Egoraptor are boss).
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