ACT I
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You down with the Theory of Evolution?
You down with Critical Race Theory?
Now what about the Critical Race Theory of Evolution?
What does human evolution tell us about the evolution of our intelligence? And how does the evolution of our intelligence relate to where our ancestors lived?
Does it relate to where our ancestors lived? Or are people just making that up?
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First, let’s talk about the theory of snowflakes.
How do we know that every snowflake is unique? Nobody takes a photo of every snowflake that forms to compare to each other. And there’s no way for anyone to see all the snowflakes that haven’t formed yet.
That’s the difference between a fact and a theory. If you compared photos of a thousand snowflakes to each other, you would be able to say, as a fact, that none of them were identical. The theory of snowflakes is the pattern of facts that tell us how they form.
Snowflakes form while they’re falling. Slight variations in atmospheric conditions, including temperature, air pressure, and humidity, affect how ice crystals form. Those variations are so slight that we don’t notice them. But they happen throughout the atmosphere. Any two points in the air an inch apart from each other never have identical atmospheric conditions. And they all change from one second to the next.
Let’s guess at some numbers here just to give ourselves an idea of how big of a number we’ll end up with. Let’s suppose that there are 100 possible combinations of temperature, air pressure, and humidity that snowflakes can form in. Even though that number is way too low.
If we say that snowflakes only form between 22 and 31 degrees Fahrenheit, and only between 91 and 100% humidity, and that temperature and humidity have to change by a whole point to affect how ice crystals form, we’ve already used up 10 x 10, and we haven’t even gotten to barometric pressure. If we say that snowflakes form between 2 and 31 degrees, and every tenth of a degree affects how they form, that’s 300 possibilities already.
On the other hand, the differences in atmospheric conditions aren’t completely random, because there isn’t going to be a 30 degree difference in air temperature at two points one inch apart.
So let’s just go with 100, because that’s a convenient number.
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Let’s suppose that snowflakes fall 1,000 inches while they’re forming. That’s only 83 feet and 4 inches, so that’s probably a low estimate again.
That means if two snowflakes form at the same time one inch apart from each other, there’s a 1 in 100 chance that they’ll have identical atmospheric conditions for the first inch that they fall. For the second inch, multiply 100 by 100. That gives them a 1 in 10,000 chance of falling through identical atmospheric conditions. Multiply that by 100 again for the third inch, and now it’s a 1 in 1,000,000 chance. After the fourth inch it’s a 1 in 100,000,000 chance.
By the time they’ve fallen 1,000 inches, I don’t know what the number is called anymore, but it’s a 1 with 2,000 zeroes after it. And remember, that’s just the number we got by multiplying very low estimates together. If there were 1,000 possible combinations of atmospheric conditions, and snowflakes fell 10,000 inches while they formed, which is about 860 feet, now we’re talking about a 1 with 30,000 zeroes after it.
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The sun is approximately 6 trillion inches from us. That’s a 6 with 12 zeroes after it.
The universe began about 400 quadrillion seconds ago. That’s a 4 with 17 zeroes after it.
Since the Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago, and it’s the center of a sphere, that means the universe is 28 billion light years in diameter. A light year is about 5.88 trillion miles. That means the diameter of the universe in inches is a 1 with 28 zeroes after it.
The number of snowflakes that fall on Earth every year is about a 2 with 27 zeroes after it. If you multiply that by 4 billion years, you get an 8 with 36 zeroes after it.
That means our extremely low estimate of a 1 with 2,000 zeroes after it is a number that doesn’t compare to anything that’s easy for us to visualize, or even to any numbers that are easy to relate to the science of the entire universe.
We can say that it’s impossible for two identical snowflakes to form because we can be certain that no two snowflakes are ever going to fall through identical sequences of atmospheric conditions while they’re forming.
ACT II
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Now what does the theory of snowflakes tell us about people? What do big patterns of facts tell us about how human intelligence evolved?
Many people have been so focused on trying to find a theory of the genetic evolution of human intelligence that explains the differences between people from different parts of the world that they’ve overlooked how much we have in common. There is an explanation that connects genetic evolution with human intelligence and all our diversity on all the continents. This is the reason scientists can say all those other arguments are never going to lead to anything.
Let’s use some numbers again to help us visualize a pattern. The time that it took for humanity to evolve from chimpanzees 7,000,000 years ago into people like us 50,000 years ago was more than 99% of human evolution. It took 6,950,000 years for our ancestors to go from peeking over the top of the grass to see if any lions were coming to hunting lions with spears and sewing their hides into clothes.
Why did it only take 50,000 years for us to get from there to surfing the internet and landing rovers on Mars?
Elsewhere on the grassland lions were chasing zebras. The lions evolved to run fast because the zebras evolved to run fast, and the zebras evolved to run fast because the lions evolved to run fast. Every generation the slowest lions got the least to eat, and the slowest zebras got eaten. Each species is part of the environment for the other species.
Our ancestors evolved to escape from lions by standing on their hind legs so they could see them over the grass. That freed up their hands to use tools. Their physical environment brought their evolution that far. But what were the environmental factors that made their intelligence evolve after that?
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The environment isn’t just the physical surroundings. It’s anything that exerts a selection pressure on the life or death of individual genes.
And how does the species interact with the environment? It’s not the whole species all at once. Species evolve because of the survival and reproduction of individual members, and of the genes that created them.
It wasn’t the competition with another species that made human intelligence evolve. If it was, there would be another species on Earth that was about as intelligent as we are, in the same way that lions and zebras run about as fast as each other. It was a competition within our species, where the most intelligent people tend to have the highest survival rates.
And I need to point out here that we’re not talking about intelligence the way it’s measured in school where people who get As would live longer and have more children than people who get Bs. What I mean is that people who were the best at recognizing how different things in the world affect each other, were able to make better decisions about surviving and reproducing than the people who understood the world less.
What we’re talking about now is a closed loop. Scientists call this kind of thing a positive feedback loop, where a thing becomes both a cause and an effect, and the more of it there is, the more it produces. That means a process that starts out slow can speed up a lot. (We hear about positive feedback loops in climate change too, but our story isn’t there yet.)
People kept evolving to be more intelligent because other people kept evolving to be more intelligent.
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When our ancestors spread out into the world, how did they do it? Everywhere they went, they went in groups, and they brought their tools.
Even if they spread out from their point of origin before we can really call them behaviorally modern humans, that doesn’t change the fact that they brought the environment that made human intelligence evolve with them everywhere they went.
Now let’s use some more numbers to visualize a couple more patterns.
There are about 25,000 genes in your body. You, and everyone else in the world, gets hit by radiation from outer space once in a while.
Sometimes it hits one of your genes and shifts the position of one of the atoms or knocks it out completely. That makes it a new gene, which changes the biochemical reactions it causes.
If that happens in one of your egg or sperm cells, you can pass the new gene on to a child. You probably got two genes that neither of your parents have that way. If you have children they’ll probably get two genes that neither you nor your partner have.
A few more of your genes stick together, break apart, or change places on the new chromosomes when you form your egg or sperm cells. Most of the genes in our bodies don’t do anything besides make copies of themselves anymore, because they’re left over from earlier stages of our evolution. Out of the genes that do contribute something to us, most of them don’t affect our intelligence because they’re genes for other parts of our bodies.
Out of the genes that do affect our intelligence, variations don’t automatically make people smarter. Many of them would make us dumber.
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Let’s say that every child gets new variations in 5 of their genes. That’s one new gene for every 5,000 genes.
Let’s say 1,000 out of our 25,000 genes affect the development of our brains. That means each child has a 1 in 5 chance of one of their new genes being a gene for their brain.
Let’s suppose half of the variations would make people smarter and half would make them dumber. That makes it a 1 in 10 chance for each child to get a new gene that makes them smarter.
Then it’s one brain gene out of 1,000. If that new gene doubles its contribution to the person’s intelligence, that makes them smarter by 1/1000.
Genes are passed down generation by generation. How long does it take people to be born, grow up, and have children? People have children at different ages, but let’s guess that 20 years old is the average.
That means that each child has a 10% chance of being genetically more intelligent than their parents by 0.1%. And then it will take about 20 years for them to give each of their children a 10% chance of being 0.1% more intelligent than they are.
That isn’t much from generation to generation. But if you divide 7,000,000 years by 20 years per generation, you get 350,000 generations.
If you multiply that by a 10% chance of getting a gene for more intelligence each generation, that’s a 3,500,000% chance of getting 0.1% smarter.
0.1% of 3,500,000% makes us 3,500% more intelligent than our chimpanzee ancestors, or 35 times more intelligent.
What does that mean, exactly?
If you want a job as an evolutionary neuro-biologist you’ll have to learn better numbers than that. We’re just using them here to visualize the pattern.
The point is, we have an extremely small probability of evolving genetically to be more intelligent each generation, but over an extremely large number of generations it adds up.
ACT III
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Now we’re back to people hunting lions with spears, and 50,000 years later, figuring out how to fly to Mars. How did genes get us from there to here?
It’s been 7,000,000 years since humans diverged from the chimpanzees. It’s been 50,000 years since behaviorally modern humans evolved.
If you divide 7,000,000 by 50,000, you get 140. Behaviorally modern humans have existed for 1/140 of the evolution of our species.
If we say we’re 35 times more intelligent than chimpanzees were 7,000,000 years ago, how much more intelligent are we than the first behaviorally modern humans 50,000 years ago?
35 divided by 140 is 1/4. According to these numbers, if we’re 35 times more intelligent than chimpanzees, the first behaviorally modern humans were 34 3/4 times more intelligent than chimpanzees.
We didn’t get from sewing lion hides into clothes to flying to Mars by being smarter than those people by just a quarter of a chimpanzee.
Let me ask you this: How many thoughts did you have yesterday? I’m talking about all the ideas you had, all the ideas you heard about, and all the decisions you made.
If you can’t answer that, try counting how many thoughts you have tomorrow. If you just drive a car or ride a bicycle on a busy street once you’re going to get a huge number.
Every sentence you read is a thought. Every sentence you hear is at least one thought. Every link you click is a decision. Every sentence you type is a decision. Every sentence you say is at least one decision, because you can also choose your tone of voice. Every time you move your body in any way at all it’s at least one decision.
90% of human mental activity is subconscious, so multiply whatever number you get by 10. Then multiply it by 365.25 days in a year. Then multiply that by 20.
Compare that number to your 10% chance of being genetically 0.1% more intelligent than your parents.
However crude these numbers are, they’re good enough to illustrate the point that the number of ideas you can think of and learn in 20 years do way more for your intelligence than your chance of getting a new gene for your brain.
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Evolution is the product of replication, variation, and selection. But that doesn’t say anything about genes.
Anything that replicates with variation and selection evolves. Changing your mind and making decisions are mental evolutions. But they’re not genetic evolutions. They’re evolutions of ideas.
The further our ancestors’ intelligence evolved genetically, the more their ideas began to evolve. Large scale abstract thinking is what made that possible. When our ancestors’ intelligence evolved to the point of making our level of abstract thinking possible, it made genetic evolution essentially obsolete.
Every time you think of two different choices that’s a replication and variation of ideas. When you pick the idea you like the best that’s a selection of ideas.
Every time you see two posts on Face Book and you pay attention to one of them because it seems like it’s relevant to something you care about, and you ignore the other one, ideas are evolving. The one you remembered got copied into your brain. That means it can help you think of more ideas. That means further replication and variation. The one you forgot reached a dead end.
Every new idea you learn changes how you think. Those are also ideas you can pass down your children without them needing new genes. Those are also ideas you can pass along to your friends, and your neighbors, and their children, and anyone else who cares what you think.
That’s the whole idea behind the education system, so ideas that make us more intelligent can be passed down from generation to generation. Genes can only spread from parent to child when the child is conceived. But ideas can spread between any two people any time.
Human intelligence evolving to the point that it made the evolution of ideas possible is what started in a corner of Africa, and that’s what people brought with them everywhere they went.
ACT IV
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The word meme came from the study of the evolution of ideas. A good introductory book about this is called The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore.
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If you want to have intelligent children, the first thing you have to do is to not kill yourself with stupidity before you have them. That’s the survival part of evolution. Not everyone makes it that far.
Then you can help give them intelligence at the genetic level by having them with an intelligent partner. That’s the reproduction part.
If you want to help them develop their intelligence, you can feed them healthy diets, make sure their bodies and minds get lots of exercise, and help them learn valuable lessons. People all over the world have been doing that for 50,000 years.
Ideas can create positive feedback loops also. Xenophobia is one of them. If you start with the idea that you better not trust another group of people, that’s going to lead you to think of reasons not to trust them and of ways to isolate yourself from them.
The story of Being Human on Planet Earth is a positive feedback loop in the other direction. If you start with ideas about how to recognize valuable ideas, you can keep learning valuable ideas your whole life and recognize how other people are using them.
We’re all unique individuals who are born with our own combinations of abilities and talents. Our mental abilities don’t come with visible indicators.
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If there’s a Critical Race Theory of Evolution, it says that evolution didn’t make us different from each other. It made us the same as each other. The part of the world a person’s ancestors lived in 600 years ago doesn’t tell you anything about the mental abilities they were born with.
Ironically, it’s what we all have in common that our ancestors brought with them from their point of origin 50,000 years ago that makes us seem so different now. What we all have in common is the abstract thinking that our ancestors used to adapt to life in all their different parts of the world, and that we all use to adapt to our different lives now.
