[NikolaNovak]

If that's sarcastic, good one :)

If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?

[card_zero]

I guess I got downvoted for not supplying very persuasive examples. The point is, cleverness is having good ideas-about-ideas, and these have obviously improved over time, so people in the past were obviously not so clever.

I could point at all the self-help books that promise to improve the way you think, or Wikipedias list of fallacies, but I don't those are great examples either. It's frustrating that I can't make a simple point just because it needs more research. I hoped people would find better examples themselves.

I don't think your word "tremendous" works, I think superstition declined and values improved, but it's hard to nail this down for people who are keen to disagree. Does that include you? Why?

[NikolaNovak]

Atheists range from 4-6% in USA, I think less than 1% in India, to a nice round 0 percent in many other countries where they'd basically be beaten up for this. I think word "tremendous" is appropriate when we are talking about 95+%

Outside of the "so mainstream and prevalent we don't even consider it" superstitions (which, remember, were all the historical ones we may dismiss now, thousand years later), we have horoscope and astrology, psychics, and people who think wearing same socks will help them on a winning streak, and everybody hesitant to talk about good or bad outcomes less they "jinx it". Maybe you're from Germany or Scandinavia and your daily experience is different?

But again, the thread started about biological differences and I will agree that there are little to none between ancient Egyptians and modern humans.

In terms of cultural values, sanctity of life, freedoms and poverty and lifestyle, I do think some things have improved. We can debate numbers as to how much.

Understand that as a Canadian, and not knowing where you're from, you unfortunately find me at a cynical time as we watch our southern neighbour work so very very hard to dismantle much of the progress we are discussing here very every effectively, so it's just difficult to put one's mind in historically optimistic mindset :-/

Romans had educated intellectuals who had some progressive and scientific ideas, and the less educated masses who had less progressive and educated ideas. This seems to describe today's world well. And we still LOVE to attack the "intellectual elite" for having progressive, scientific ideas.

[hollerith]

>Atheists range from 4-6% in USA

Just because in polls only 4-6% will identity with "atheist" doesn't mean the rest are severely impaired by superstitious beliefs.

[NikolaNovak]

We can disagree on that. But I did list other common superstition forms to not get bogged on an emotionally charged item; everybody is used to their superstition, and nobody thinks it impairs them. Key point - Egyptians didn't either :)

I actually think "not impaired by superstitious beliefs" is somewhere between "less than 1%" and "zero", myself sadly included. For "severely" we have to set up some definitions and thresholds.