Dumb & Dumber?

Being an engineer, a researcher and a technologist, I am often surrounded by a multitude of people with the same type of background wherever I go. Some individuals from this group of sucessful people from my age-group (20s and 30s), most of whom have never had to struggle in their life (the way a substantial fraction of humanity is still struggling) like to reason that a large number of people who appear lower-class and "not-so-smart" (such as many of the low-education migrant workers in USA, or the poor and illiterate in India) are somehow denstined to grow up poor and disadvantaged. And I feel a larger fraction of them who don't actually talk about it, probably feel that way privately. I have come across this attitude in multiple places and countries I have worked at; some even hint that the plight of these poor workers or their lack of success might even have something to do with their genetics. I find this attitude almost on the verge of being facism or xenophobia; and such a patronizing attitude comes from people who have never had to struggle in their life- they pretty much got every oppurtunity they could get thanks to their parents/upbringing- all they had to do was play the game to success. These people also point out that for this reason humanity is doomed; its being overtaken by poorer and less smart people who leave more descendants behind.

Whenever I hear such stuff, it makes me feel incensed, and instead of going through a discussion with every such person I come across, I thought this blog might help express what I feel, and perhaps change the mindset of some; if I do succeed in doing so, perhaps that would help make our society a bit more caring, and a bit more united. After all- how can humanity graduate from its womb and expand beyond Earth, if we harbor such selfish and "tribal" viewpoints?

There is a vast amount of scientific, social and historical literature out there that would show that such a class phobia is completely unjustified, but I would try to summarize the point here in a few lines. The question is, is it a less rich (politically correct way of saying it) or a dumber environment which causes people to grow up having a lower standardized IQ and a lower skill job? Perhaps a small amount of brain-speed variation is there on taking an exam that someone is born with, and perhaps there are a few savants and prodigies who are outside the distribution of the general population, but in general, we know now that the environmental factor dominates and not genetics; most of the humans who survived the evolutionary squeeze and near-extinction (when at one time just a few thousand homo sampiens were left behind), were extremely smart, and all of the human beings in the World today are pretty much copies of this small group of super-smart ancestors.

Two things to point out: (1) the social factors for increased intelligence are still at work, and (2) these poor workers are genetically as smart as any of us. Now there is more evidence from orangutans supporting this hypothesis. This should allay any xenophobia less dumb people might have against more dumb people leaving more descendants behind, and at some basic level we are all much more like each other than it may appear superficially; it also points to the amazing plasticity of the human brain. The huge gaps in individuals today are mostly an artifiact of the huge gaps their respective societies historically contained, and which might take another few generations to slowly go away.

This also means that the days of antisocial relics such as N. Korea, Burma and others are numbered; they will either evolve into more socially tolerant (and consequently more intelligent) societies, or will slowly decline into oblivion. Being an optimist, I believe in the former; the most decadent societies of today are still progressive enough, and have enough external World-view filtering in (compared to say 12th century Europe) that their own people will force the countries out of the social (and consequently an intellectual and technological) stagnation they are currently in. This theory also explains why grafting open societies (such as the war in Iraq right now) can at best act as a catalyst (and at worst a failure)- most of the work of building a rich and open society out of a decadent one has to be done by the local people gradually, and would require at least one generation to become self-feeding and stable, even with massive external support (as a younger, smarter and more socially rich generation grows up and takes the reins of the society from their decadent ancestors).