The average human brain has shrunk by 20% in size since the last 10 000 years. Thats the size of a tennis ball, or the size of an australopithecus afarensis brain.
> The average human brain has shrunk by 20% in size since the last 10 000 years. Thats the size of a tennis ball, or the size of an australopithecus afarensis brain.
That sounds both crackpot and irrelevant. I suggest citing sources and elaborating how this has anything to do with the article.
But yeah, I don't see the number 10,000 or 20% and I don't see what that would have to do with increasing maths intake in Universities by devaluing degrees...
I see there is a recent press release about that ridiculous and poorly evidenced claim. (The haphazard survival of fossils means the confidence interval around such an estimate must be quite large.)
A more nuanced view of the relationship between brain size and brain capability can be found in a Scientific American article that quotes some of the leading researchers on the issue.
is an empirical observation that IQ scores in large, pan-national data sets that have been gathered by standardized methodologies have been rising all over the world for most of the last century.
Cite that it has happened, and cite that it matters, please: Brain size is only very loosely correlated with intelligence, and that doesn't sound like it's something that actually occurred anyway. As per the Flynn Effect, in fact, IQ has been trending upwards for quite a while.
》Cite that it has happened, and cite that it matters, please: Brain size is only very loosely correlated with intelligence
Maybe you should share some of your own citations before making claims like that.
The correlation between raw volume performance on general mental ability assessments is about .4, which is very significant. For a comparison, siblings' intelligence has a correlation of about .47. Considering that siblings share both a great deal of the same genes and have a similar environment, the fact that brain volume has nearly the same correlation is huge.
That sounds both crackpot and irrelevant. I suggest citing sources and elaborating how this has anything to do with the article.