Suddenly Ayn Rand makes much more sense

I’m having a thought and it goes a little something like this:

Good vision was once a genetically selectable trait. In other words, if you had bad vision, you died or had a greater chance of dying.
People that had good vision thus had a greater chance of living and humanity was culled.
Then some myopic jerk decided to invent glasses.
And suddenly vision wasn’t so important. Perhaps it mattered to the person who had the vision, but it didn’t decide his or her life expectancy.
So instead of each generation getting better and better vision, the general vision of the populace stayed the same.

A similar line of reasoning could go for body hair and clothing.
The conclusion, which should follow from these logical inferrences, is that inventions create a crutch for which humanity doesn’t bother leaving. In other words, once you invent something that does something we hadn’t done before but wanted to do, all of a sudden that trait isn’t selected for and humanity gradually evolves away from it.

Some people would conclude from this that we would start selecting for intelligence and for inventive minds.
That’s very optimistic, but wrong.
With all of modern technology and convenience, people that would have been too weak or stupid to fend for themselves in the wilderness are now able to eat, drink, live, and be educated for relatively no effort on their part. In other words, by making education easier and the learning curve more gradual and less deadly, the human race will steadily grow stupider and stupider.

(as to how we developed intelligence in the first place, that’s a matter for anthropologists. My hypothesis is that the intelligence curve was so steep for early man– what with not having any other natural defenses– that we became much more intelligent than we knew what to do with. Basically, for the weakest one of us to be smart enough to kill mastodons, he had to have an ungodly amount of intelligence at his disposal… seeing as there was no education to help them at the task)

Last Year: Ind e-Pen XXXIV (part 1), Ind e-Pen XXXIV (part 2)
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I’m having a hopping good time

Proof that I am truly in Australia is below the fold.. Continue reading I’m having a hopping good time…

Last Year: Ind e-Pen XXXIV (part 1), Ind e-Pen XXXIV (part 2)
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