Dear David f,

The nature and rate of inventions in a particular society depend on its existing store of knowledge.

The cave dweller had little knowledge to work with, and merely to produce a bow and arrow was a considerable intellectual achievment.
We are no cleverer than our "primitive" ancestors; we simply have more knowledge to build on.

As Ralph Linton (1936) remarked,

"If Einstein had been born into a primitive tribe which was unable to count beyond three, lifelong application to mathematics probably would not have carried him beyond the development of a decimal system based on fingers and toes."

A fundamental insight of sociology is that once people no longer take their world for granted, but instead understand the social authorship of their lives and futures, they can become an irresistable force in history.

Whether we choose to destroy our civilization or save it is a collective decision - and hopefully one that may well be made during our lifetimes. If more and more nuclear weapons are built, and if more sophisticated means of delivering them are devised, and if more and more nations get control of these vile devices, then surely we risk our own destruction.

If ways are found to reverse that process, then we can divert unprecedented energy and resources to the real problems that face us, including poverty, disease, overpopulation, injustice, oppression, and the devastation of our natural environment.

It is our choice (as I wrote in another post).

We may hope and trust that our ultimate choice will be to enhance the life on this bright and lovely planet on which we all share our adventure.

Foxy wrote:

"Whether we choose to destroy our civilization or save it is a collective decision - and hopefully one that may well be made during our lifetimes. If more and more nuclear weapons are built, and if more sophisticated means of delivering them are devised, and if more and more nations get control of these vile devices, then surely we risk our own destruction."

It is not a collective decision. In most modern states the decision to build and to loose the weapons are in control of one person. I was circulating a petition that the Australian Prime Minister be obliged to have an open debate in parliament with public input before committing Australian forces to combat unless Australia was under attack or facing domestic insurrection. Most people I talked wanted that power left to the discretion of the Prime Minister. Even if most states are led by leaders who are conservative in the use of weaponry one monomaniac can upset things.

There is one important drawback we have not addressed.Genetically we are not evolving fast enough to cope with the change.In fact in the West we are saving babies with serious genetic faults.We are weakening the species.

There is so much information now,that people cannot grasp general trends and thus let Govts intrude more in our lives and slowly remove our freedoms.

The problem is that not enough have the great intelligence to see the future consequences of present trends.Many have just given up and elect to live in their own insular world.

It is not the presence of particularly intelligent individuals that is important. All they have done is present new scientific breakthroughs slightly quicker than they would have been presented in their absence.

Everything that Einstein, Newton, Darwin, da Vinci, etc have brought us would have been brought to us by others a very short time later. They just happened to get in first.

We should be asking whether the evolution of human intelligence and scientific/technological capability is good, bad or indifferent, not whether individuals of apparent great intelligence (or just ordinary people in the right place at the right time and with the right focus to discover something significant) are good or bad.

It is all pretty neutral. As we develop more complex lives, the quality of our lives doesn’t on average really increase. Are we any happier or healthier than the Aborigines were before European contact?

The same applies across the natural world. The bush stone-curlews and masked lapwings on my property have very simple lives. They spend a huge amount of time just standing around. Whereas the great bowerbirds spend a lot of time building a bower, decorating it and wooing a mate, and mimicking/mocking the neighbour’s cat. The brush turkeys build huge mounds of leaves and tend them religiously, spending a lot of time chasing other chooks off.

But is there any increase in quality of life with an increase in complexity of the amount of effort that a species is compelled by its genetics, instincts or intellect to go to? There doesn’t seem to be.

continued

I don’t think there is much of a social cost attached to great intelligence. Rather, there is an enormous social cost attached to the lack of great intelligence.

Many apparently great innovations have had huge negative aspects to them. We can hardly say that some significant innovation is the result of great intelligence if it results in enormous disadvantage for some or all of the people that it is purported to help or for others that become disadvantaged. Part of great intelligence should surely be to use the innovation in the most positive manner possible.

For example; many medical breakthroughs, that have resulted in the reduction of the infant mortality rate around the world and improved the quality of life for millions in the first instance, but which have also contributed greatly to a massive increase in the population growth rate, great stress on basic resources and environment, and interminable deep poverty for many millions.

Ludwig wrote:

"Everything that Einstein, Newton, Darwin, da Vinci, etc have brought us would have been brought to us by others a very short time later. They just happened to get in first."

I almost agree. They would have been brought to us later. Whether a short time later or not is moot.

Note that my original post had the sentence: "The brains of those like Einstein, Newton and Darwin spawn those developments."

'The brains of those like' acknowledges that others would have done it.

Wallace had some of the same insights as Darwin. Leibniz thought of the calculus at roughly the same time as Newton.

I was commenting on the pace of these developments. I agree that they were inevitable. I merely contend that a slower pace would make them easier to deal with.