Posts by Jose Palmer2

Out of all those questions nobody can seem to answer, I actually know the solution to just three of them.

7. Born in Banja Luka
24. Cyclops
38. Because she was a Polish woman (if she’d been a Jewish woman, they would've taken both her kids)

Sure, the human genome is basically the same across the board, which means we all carry the same genetic predispositions—though honestly, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. I mean, let's face it, massive plagues, diseases, and wars have always acted as a sort of natural selection process—like how the population in Europe plummeted by something like 66% after the Hundred Years' War. But people aren't identical clones. Take height, for instance. Taller people generally have larger skulls, which translates to more brain volume. And whether actual brain size correlates directly with intelligence is a debate we've been having on the old forums for ages...

lighting Blue Eyes said:Look, I never said evolution had stopped or that human intelligence is definitely climbing—I’m not even claiming it is or isn't... I just hit what felt like a logical hole in your argument based on how I see things... I’d rather question an answer than just swallow it whole...

That bodybuilding analogy? It’s kind of stupid, if you want the plain truth.
Let me break it down for you:
You're arguing that with every generation, intelligence rises and we get more neurons and synapses... which means higher IQ... and if we follow that logic, humans will evolve into some kind of super-genius species in a few thousand years... because since we live in such a politically correct society... we'll probably end up with someone like Reiner running programs and documentaries about how coddling kids is actually good for their neurons and synapses... people are gullible enough to swallow those PC agendas, and it'll all result in one big collective cuddle session that produces "super-intelligent and happy" brats with massive amounts of neurons and synapses. 😁
Unless you have some theory that spanking kids during childhood triggers a desire to hit the gym so every generation ends up more jacked...🙄

As for evolution... I know you can't just look up a word in a dictionary and think you understand a concept... but anyway, the claim that human evolution is dead... is just one theory held by certain scientists that others don't even agree with.

Now you're just contradicting me for the sake of contradicting me. I never claimed humans would evolve into some super-being. In fact, I wrote:

And at the end of the day, I still stand by my belief that humanity is moving toward a sociological optimum for achieving intellectual maximums, and that social conditions—especially during childhood and adolescence—absolutely impact brain development.

Talking about a "maximum" isn't a huge deal; it's estimated that intelligence might only increase by 10-20% this way. But listen, the crucial part here is that we're talking about changes that happen within an individual's lifetime—specifically during childhood when the brain is forming. If a kid lives under the same conditions as an average child from 2,000 years ago, it doesn't matter that they were born in the 21st century.

The bodybuilding analogy actually works perfectly, because it's also about physical changes that aren't driven by genome shifts, but by changes occurring during a lifetime. Imagine if we all hit the weights. We’d be 50% stronger than our ancestors. But again, that would be a change triggered by lifestyle, not evolution, because our genome stays exactly the same. The social environment today—where kids' brains are constantly stimulated and fed a non-stop stream of data they spontaneously process—is basically a form of "brain building." But the fact that they might grow up with slightly more developed brains than peers from 20 centuries ago isn't due to evolutionary shifts; it's due to changed social conditions.

First off, you're being incredibly patronizing...

My bad... guess I've just got those unfulfilled parental instincts kicking in... I'm working on it...


Darwinism is the idea that groups of organisms adapt over time, making descendants look and function differently than their ancestors. This whole thing relies on organisms fighting for the essentials they need to survive and pass on their genes. It’s an ongoing process that's been grinding away for millions of years—not some one-and-done event—though people still argue about how much humans are actually evolving today.

That definition is super vague. Honestly, you can't wrap your head around evolution in just three sentences. For example, trying to cram differences in digestive enzyme chemistry under "morphological" or "physiological" changes is a stretch. The real key is the shift in genetic material.


If you were implying that the human brain is still changing... and then I pointed out how contradictory that is to the definition above if you claim human evolution is somehow "finished" while we're clearly still changing... what's that supposed to mean?

By that logic, bodybuilding would basically count as evolution.

Look, Blijedooka, biological evolution is just genetic shifts driven by natural selection—it’s simple math. It used to be that only the strongest survived long enough to pass anything on, but nowadays? People are kicking the bucket well after they've had kids, and practically anyone can have them (Hemingway once joked that making a kid is easy—just build an umbrella if you know how). Sociological evolution is about changing living conditions, mostly just cranking up the standard of living. Those conditions actually shape the brain because, while the brain has genetic predispositions like any other organ, it's basically a massive lump of highly moldable clay—well, lipoproteins, technically—and unlike, say, your liver, the social environment a kid grows up in is going to have a massive impact on their brain.

Look, plants don't have ears—comparing them to Mozart or weeds is just nonsense. It’s honestly stupid. But the human body? Because our neural networks are so interconnected, we’re basically one giant tactile receptor. If you stimulate it, you get a spike in neurological activity. And more activity means more good stuff flowing straight to the brain. Sit down, Jose Palmer2, just listen for once. We've known forever that physical affection is huge for developing mammal offspring, but we're finally getting the hard facts to back it up. I'm in a rush right now, but I promise I'll send over some sources so you can actually read up on this.

P. S. I added a few extra points to my last post.

swiftcobra15 said:😉 You made a great point about how knowledge grows, but intelligence is a whole different beast—basically, the ability to handle new situations on the fly. These tests get tweaked all the time just so women can hit averages similar to men, or so Black Americans reach equal scores, etc. Look, I’m not trying to insult anyone, I'm just saying the measuring stick is incredibly biased—if not totally flexible.
There’s no such thing as an objective way to measure intelligence. Even if you tortured the test subjects for months on end, the results would still be totally unreliable.
Plus, there's the fundamental issue: the more someone knows, the fewer "unknown" situations they face, which leaves you wondering what the hell these tests are actually measuring in the first place.
Honestly, obsessing over IQ tests is stupid—they’re just as "unfair" as the questions on a Millionaire game show. 😉

I don't know where you're getting your data, because everything I've read from various sources says the exact opposite, so I'll go out on a limb and assume yours are wrong. I don't have the hard numbers for Black Americans specifically, other than they have the lowest average IQ in the US population, but I do know that Japanese Americans score about 10% higher than white Americans on the standard Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, and Chinese Americans are up by 20%. The exception within the white race is Jews, who crush it across all five main categories—verbal, logical, math, spatial, and symbolic—except for spatial perception, where the Chinese take the lead. That said, the white race seems to have much more variance on the scale compared to Asians—meaning a higher standard deviation—which basically means there are more idiots among whites, but also more geniuses (you see a similar gap between men and women). So, the idea that tests are rigged for racial equality is wrong, and the same goes for gender equality—just look at the math: for every one highly talented female mathematician, you’ve got 14 talented males. On verbal tests, though, it’s almost the reverse—for every talented male linguist, there are 9 talented females. Also, women perform noticeably worse on spatial perception tests. The reason the average IQ for women is nearly identical to men's is simply because there are way more total idiots among the male population who fail every single type of test. You can easily explain these differences through experimentally proven brain functions. The left hemisphere handles verbal info; it's way more active in women due to higher estrogen levels—that's why women excel at languages. The right hemisphere handles visual and especially stereoscopic info, and it's much more active in men due to steroid hormones. That’s why men dominate spatial perception. Since spatial perception is a massive helping tool in advanced math, that’s where the male advantage comes from. And yeah, Asians have better spatial perception than other races because their average steroid levels are slightly lower. Studies show that spatial ability climbs sharply with steroid levels up to an optimal point, but once you push past that, it actually starts to dip.

So, get this—among all the geniuses they’ve ever tested, there’s always this massive imbalance in brain activity between the left and right hemispheres. The right side is just cranking way harder. It turns out a ton of guys who pull off insane IQ scores actually learned to read visually when they were tiny kids—like, they recognized the whole shape of a word before they even knew what individual letters were. It used to cause so much confusion that people would misdiagnose these gifted kids as having dyslexia—kind of like how folks used to look at Einstein. Most of them didn't even start breaking words down phonetically until they were practically grown.

Quote : Originally posted by Richard Howard2

Maybe you'd see some density shift due to evolutionary gaps—but honestly? It’s a non-issue. Evolution isn't exactly sprinting along—it's a slow burn. In my book, you'd need at least 100,000 years before you'd even notice a measurable difference. A 2,000-year gap is basically nothing.

Human evolution is officially dead. It’s done. Evolution relies entirely on genetic mutations within sperm—that’s the data from Dr. Jones, one of those top-tier geneticists who wrote "In the Blood" (the one they made that documentary about on PBS—he even hosted it himself). Given how massive the population has become and the fact that natural selection is basically non-existent now thanks to modern medicine, natural evolution, as far as the human race is concerned, is over.

When you’re dealing with a small population, evolutionary shifts can actually happen way faster than people think—it's just basic math. Humans are the perfect example here. We have skeletons from early Homo sapiens dating back about 100,000 years, and if you track our evolution from 4 million years ago down to that 100,000-year mark, the lineage is pretty much seamless—just a few tiny gaps here and there. But then—and this is where it gets infuriating—there is this massive, gaping hole between 8 million and 4 million years ago. We have absolutely zero remains from that era. The theory is that our ancestors were living in areas prone to heavy erosion—probably along a coastline or near a massive lake—and were basically scavenging whatever washed up or grew near the water. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing toward this, but we’re still missing the actual smoking gun. Here’s what we know:
So, apparently humans have this "diving reflex" where our heart rate just drops to half its normal speed the second we hit the water—and get this—we’re actually the only primates that pull this off. Just wild how weird our bodies are sometimes.
We’re literally the only primates out there with webbed skin between our fingers—it's wild when you actually think about it.
We’re the only primates out there with hair that lays flat against the skin—supposedly because it helped us slice through water more easily back in the day. Honestly, sounds like just another one of those half-baked evolutionary excuses to me.

I don't even know why I bothered rambling about that above—it’s barely even related to the topic—but my point is this: humans have evolved massively over the last 4 million years from some chimp-like creature. If you assume evolution moves at a linear pace, then 100,000 years is a massive chunk of that timeline—we're talking 1/40th of the whole period! That's plenty of time for evolutionary shifts to become obvious—if they were actually happening. Any seasoned paleoanthropologist could probably rattle off way more than 40 distinct differences between a chimp and a human, and don't even get me started on the genetic gaps. So, if evolution was still moving at that same speed today, we’d be seeing major, noticeable differences between early humans and us... but we aren't.

Look, if we’re actually going to have a serious debate here, we need to stop bickering over semantics—Richard Howard, for instance, using terms like "social misfit" isn't an insult in a clinical sense; it’s just a medical descriptor for the socially inept groups you listed. It's not some playground slur. And honestly? Talking about intelligence in the abstract without accounting for biological facts is totally pointless—I've already laid out plenty of those points. IQ is just an abstract, somewhat imprecise metric, sure, but it measures something tangible: internal brain structure. An absolute IQ score doesn't mean squat on its own—it only works as a comparative tool. If we see that people today crush spatial perception tests better than they did a century ago, that points to actual neurological shifts. That’s just a fact. You can philosophize about the *nature* of those changes all you want, but don't ignore them. Trying to discuss IQ without knowing what it's actually measuring is like arguing about dimensions without knowing if you're talking about an ocean liner or a high-rise apartment building.

Look, I’m sticking to my guns here—humans are still trending toward some kind of sociological sweet spot to hit their peak intellectual potential. Social environments, especially during those formative childhood years, absolutely hammer away at how the brain develops.

Oh, and I totally blanked on one super important little detail. Back in the day, Rob Reiner—yeah, the guy who directed "When Harry Met Sally"—actually made a documentary about this. And what am I talking about? It’s a scientifically proven fact that kids who get tons of love and attention early on end up with more neurons and synapses. And I mean actual, physical affection here. Kids need to be cuddled—just like any other mammal, unlike those cold-blooded reptiles—and believe it or not, that physical touch is massive for brain development.

So, given everything I just laid out, it’s a total no-brainer: some spoiled kid growing up in the comfort of modern American society is going to have a way more advanced neural network than anyone living back in the days of Eratosthenes.

Quote : Originally posted by Richard Howard2
There’s more than one way to be smart. What you’re talking about is social intelligence—which is totally different from actual, classic IQ—so don't go mixing them up.

No, no, and no... I never even mentioned social IQ. 😕 I’m telling you—if we cloned Eratosthenes today, his brain would be built totally differently. We’re talking higher synaptic density per volume unit, almost certainly. There’d probably be other structural differences, too. Look, IQ is just a metric—it's an indicator of how complex that internal brain structure actually is. That rise in scores? It’s just proof of biological shifts in the neurological system triggered by changing social conditions. The brain is like a lump of Play-Doh—just this highly formable little ball.

Quote : Originally posted by Richard Howard2
The "classic" IQ everyone keeps yapping about basically just boils down to how fast you can navigate space and time—you know, that ability to tackle brand-new mental puzzles on the fly without having some pre-made template to lean on.

Look, an IQ profile isn't just some single number—it’s basically an accumulation of all different types of intelligence, not just that one classic metric everyone obsesses over.

It’s a known fact—people with insane IQ levels usually end up getting totally screwed over compared to everyone else.

I’ve seen it enough times to know—people with massive IQs are usually either total introverts, complete social outcasts, or just emotionally unstable messes—mostly because they're basically lacking any kind of social intelligence.

Jesus... if that were actually true, then intellectual evolution would just be stuck depending on a handful of social idiots. 😁
That’s just how people comfort themselves when they don't have a single shred of actual talent—it's pathetic. Calling it "simplification" is honestly just childish nonsense, but hey, Richard Howard2 is still a kid anyway.

People calling geniuses "socially awkward" is just what losers say to feel better about themselves—it’s pure subjectivity. Look at Flaubert—everyone wrote him off as some hermit freak because he kept to himself, but his work proves he was actually incredibly tuned in to the subtle nuances of how people actually interact. He wasn't an idiot; he just saw things others missed.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe—the ultimate Renaissance man—was a poet, novelist, philosopher, and scientist all rolled into one. He’s easily ranked among the smartest people to ever walk the earth. The guy was a total social butterfly too, loved by everyone from high society to the common folk, and he had this insane, almost supernatural knack for reading people instantly.

Johann Gottlieb Leibniz—the absolute king of polymaths. Some people actually claim he’s the greatest genius to ever walk the earth. I mean, the guy was a mathematician, inventor, philosopher, historian, AND a lawyer. Talk about a powerhouse. He could charm anyone with his silver tongue, especially those high-society ladies in old-school Prussian circles. Word is, there wasn't an aristocratic bedroom in the whole country he didn't manage to slide into.

I could go on forever listing people who actually had both massive brains and enough social grace to be respected leaders in their era—not just some isolated geniuses, but actual icons.

Quote : Originally posted by Richard Howard2
The only reason we’re seeing even a slight bump in average IQ compared to back in the day is because life keeps getting harder—we're constantly being thrown these massive, complex puzzles that make ancient problems look like child's play. It's all just one long chain reaction of us building on top of everything everyone else learned before us.

That’s a massive oversimplification—way too vague. The whole reason for a higher IQ comes down to structural differences in the neurological system. That was my entire point in the last post. But hey, if you want to sit around and philosophize about the social conditions that led us here, be my guest.

Richard Howard2 said:
Back in the day, people actually had to build their intellect from the ground up—starting from scratch. Nowadays? People are basically spoon-fed everything by civilization before they even hit their intellectual stride during childhood.

Yeah... yeah, totally. Childhood is everything—basically everything up until you're 20 since that’s when the brain is still growing. Sure, structural changes can happen later—just look at people recovering from strokes where the brain has to rewire itself to pick up the slack from dead tissue—but the foundation is set early.

The whole learning process is really just carving out new paths between neurons—sometimes building actual synapses, but mostly just opening up traffic through pathways that used to be totally blocked or barely used.

Think of neurons like little lightbulbs, and a thought as a specific pattern of those lights flashing. Two different thoughts aren't just about which bulbs are lit, but the sequence of them turning on and off. Chemical shifts in the synapses create these unique patterns. But here's the kicker—the most important thing about the cerebral cortex (which, unlike animals, we actually have) is this principle of energy minimization. Learning burns through massive amounts of fuel. When you first try to memorize something, your brain is working overtime. By the tenth time you repeat it, the energy spike is so tiny even high-end medical equipment couldn't detect it. That’s when the knowledge becomes part of you. Without this biological shortcut, learning more would be impossible because we'd eventually run out of juice—our chemical processes just can't provide infinite power. Still, that limit is high enough that our neurological system hogs about 33% of all the oxygen in our blood, even though the brain is only 2% of our body weight. That crazy disproportion is just one more thing that separates us from the animal kingdom.

Eratosthenes definitely wasn't smarter than the top-tier scientists we have today—he just had the same genetic baseline. To put it bluntly, if Eratosthenes had been born in a modern US tech hub instead of ancient times, he’d probably be even sharper than his 2,000-year-old self. Not like a massive leap or anything, but still—a little bit smarter.

Hell no!!!

Intelligence isn't just about your DNA—it’s heavily tied to sociological factors too. That whole thing about brain density and synaptic complexity being the ultimate biological marker? Yeah, that depends on things like:

1) How much info you're pumped with as a kid
2) The actual quality and variety of that info
3) Whether you actually use what you learn
4) Your diet

Those are at least four massive social variables that shape how smart someone becomes—variables that look nothing like they did in the old days. Look at IQ scores; they show a steady climb over the last century. It’s a small bump, sure, but it’s measurable. If we had solid data from 2,000 years ago, I bet we'd see an even more insane gap.

Then there's collective intelligence—this massive web of social connections and shared knowledge. It's lightyears ahead of anything people dealt with in the past.

And here’s the kicker: now that we're basically standing on the doorstep of using genetic engineering to redesign the human race, intellectual performance is going to be one of the first things targeted. Mark my words—ethical debates will eventually crumble once the pressure to engineer a "superior" species kicks in. Once we trigger artificial evolution, there's no telling where this rabbit hole ends.