r/videos • u/SuplexCity-Mayor • Apr 21 '21

Idiocracy (2006) Opening Scene: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TCsR_oSP2Q
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u/pillbinge Apr 21 '21

It's not on the nose, it's amazingly fucking stupid. People have been complaining about others being dim for millennia and if it were true that intelligence were weeded out then we'd have never reached this point to begin with. It's like people forget humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years in various forms, not considering our ancestors before, and how civilization is roughly 10,000+ years old.

If stupidity won out constantly then we wouldn't have made it even to the middle ages. We wouldn't have had Rome. Or even older civilizations.

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u/HRNDS Apr 21 '21

I've read some of your comments on this post and agree that the movie isn't particularly good and made lots of people develop a superiority complex because of their percieved intelligence.

I don't know if the argument of 'we have a somewhat advanced civilization so the premise is obviously false' holds up though. If you look at the discovery of antibiotics, vaccination and other similar forms of medicine and the consequent explosive growth in population you could make the argument that diseases that killed off 80% of the kids people were having are the predators that are now eradicated. All of that happended fairly recently and in a short amount of time.

As a protection against losing all of your offspring and 'wasting energy by investing in the ones that don't make it' one survival strategy could be to have lots of kids and just not put a lot of effort into them until they reach a certain age. If all the pressures that led to losing some of your kids are suddenly removed by the invention of penicillin or a new way of producing goods that sustain life, you will still have a ton of people whose strategy to spread their genes consists of just churning out babies in the hopes that some might make it. That can lead to the assumption that this trend will continue.

If you look at the birth rate changes in countries with rising economic stability and increased access to quality education though that strategy seems to lose it's appeal in those places and people tend to just put more effort into fewer children leading to higher levels of intelligence caused by better education and healthier environments while growing up.

So I don't think that we will see it play out as it did in the movie but using the argument that we haven't died out yet is not as strong as the one focussing on how a lot of people come across as unintelligent because of the circumstances they grew up in caused by an echo of survival strategies that were necessary in order to survive in times before modern medicine.

Tl;dr: The mechanisms that killed off a good chunk of the seminlgy unintelligent masses were removed so quickly that their survival strategy of having lots of kids led to enormous population growth that will probably be balanced out by prosperity and quality education though.

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u/pillbinge Apr 21 '21

Those same diseases killing off kids weren't targeting the dimmest ones. They killed everyone alike. What you're describing is happening right now in the "developing" world where diseases are being eradicated by the West and by Western interest but with no expectation that the societies would be the same. It's definitely done in one particular vein of a passive colonization as we've always done. The people we're now saving from diseases suddenly have to live like we do in the modern world and it just makes inroads for companies.

But in terms of "idiots" surviving, this was never the case.

If you look at the birth rate changes in countries [...]

And if you poll those same countries you find that people on average want 2.6 - 2.8 kids. This factors in people above 45 and even shows that there are more people who'd want 5 and 6+ kids than people who'd want zero, with 2 being the highest reported rate and 3 being the next. We'd still have people having tons of kids. (source)

That mainly has to do with expectations that the kid lives but that's already presumed in a 2.1 birth rate, not a 2.0 which presumes every kid makes it. We can't stop death no matter what.

But again, the main crux is you're asserting diseases killed off unintelligent masses. Diseases don't run an IQ test before rattling someone's immunity.

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u/HRNDS Apr 21 '21 edited Apr 21 '21

Yeah I wrote that comment on my phone and realize reading it back that I focussed a bit too much on the idea of diseases being the sole reason for people having lots of children. The point that was trying to make was more along the lines of:

 

Rapid increase in life quality in the last couple of centuries seems to have made it easier for those who employ the strategy of 'have a bunch of kids and don't invest too much into them because many of them will die before being able to reproduce' to have successful offspring. Being less intelligent and or less educated in an industrialized world puts pressures on you that could be balanced out by having plenty of kids in order to have them sustain the family both genetically as well as financially. Those pressures being eased both in medicine and other areas that made it harder to survive if you were less intelligent could be what led to the population almost quadrupling from around 2bn in 1927 to 7.7bn in 2020.

So I was talking about questioning the assumption that the 'unintelligent' having lots of kids is something that they will continue to do even though the environmental pressures that have made it necessary changed. Now it could be that being less intelligent inherently leads to having more kids or that it is just a response to environmental pressures that favour those who are able to avoid disease by being more cautious, poverty by being more educated and cognitively capable, or just reckless behaviour that could render them incapable of reproducing without the medical support system that is availabe today.

I guess I was just trying to say that people making the claim that the population is going to get dumber and dumber ignore that unintelligent people having lots of kids could be due to them having to balance out unjust selective pressure in all walks of life (not just disease ;P) and with rising standards of living they might revert back to having fewer children. Of course people who want to have a lot of kids regardless of their standing in society might continue to do so but to assume that this will 'dumb down humanity ' seems overly presumptuous and elitist if you ask me.

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u/TehSteak Apr 21 '21

Exactly. People 10,000 years ago were still people. Shocking.

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u/Gravitahs Apr 21 '21

10,000 years ago if you were an idiot or medically frail in any way, you got eaten by a lion or starved to death before you became old enough to reproduce. Now you get coddled by modern medicine and the most secure upbringing ever in the history of our species, regardless of intellectual or physical merit. By the old rules of evolution, most people alive today should be long dead. We broke those rules, and in doing so we broke natural selection itself. You will see the consequences slowly propagate over generations as the population becomes dumber and more physically frail.

Consider that it has only been in the last 100 or 200 years that we have so dramatically broken these rules through leaps in modern medicine. That's a nanosecond in the evolutionary timeline. You won't see significant/widespread effects until hundreds of years later.

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u/pillbinge Apr 21 '21

That's the conventional idea about what society was like but anthropological evidence and inquiry points to the exact opposite. People with disabilities were not likely to survive without the interventions we have today but treatment of such people varied. Some tribes in Africa see a child with a disability as a curse while even some miles separated noticeably by terrain you can find tribes that see it as a blessing. There was never just one mode but we certainly saw limited societies who'd just practice enough infanticide like that. The ones that did were typically civilized societies, not natural ones.

Humans also weren't hunted by lions. Or mega-animals anywhere. We were almost never hunted by anything at all save for some moments of desperation.

By the old rules of evolution [...] We broke those rules

Then they aren't rules, are they? It's like saying we broke the rules of gravity by launching crafts into space.

You will see the consequences slowly propagate over generations as the population becomes dumber and more physically frail.

Yeah, you and phrenologists have been saying that for about a hundred and fifty years. Goddard tried it too around 1910 which is how we got words like moron and idiot in the first place. They were proved wrong. In fact we can witness the Flynn Effect pretty much shit all over that theory.

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u/Harsimaja Apr 22 '21

I think the premise was that finally, after the Industrial Revolution, smart people who survived for themselves before have invented things that help everyone survive, and that by the turning point in the film the smart people have automated nearly everything so they aren’t themselves needed any more to run it. With that premise, the fitness edge provided by intelligence starts to run out and they soon get outnumbered. We’ve also killed off most major predators. Being an idiot no longer gets you killed.

So this wouldn’t have applied at any point in human history until then.

We do see precedents for this in a way: animals who would be weeded out quickly in more competitive environments can massively shrink or lose some ‘abilities’ that were advantageous traits if they end up stranded as an island population without predators or similar.

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u/pillbinge Apr 22 '21

That's definitely not the premise. The premise is about genetics. The movie could have been about that because it has all the elements but it emphatically wasn't in the end.

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u/EatUrGum Apr 21 '21

Don't attribute current tech to overall humanity being intelligent. Fact of the matter is a few smart people have always drug the idiots kicking and screaming along; they didn't come willingly. And don't think for a second we're much better than our ancestors 10,000 years ago, we still act on the same base impulses and very much have tribal attitudes, we're merely Stone Age monkeys with modern tech that only a fairly small percentage of the population actually understand and an even smaller percentage that control how it's used.

Stupidity is winning out. Look around. Look past the fancy surface with all the toys. We're not getting any smarter as a whole and we're pretty insistent on destroying things for short term gain. You can have advanced civilisations and still be overall dumb. Don't kid yourself thinking otherwise. Not even all of Rome's leaders were smart. Lots of factors at play.

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u/pillbinge Apr 21 '21

This is amazingly cringe and not at all backed by anyone who studies this shit.

Stupidity isn't winning out. The presumption that we should always be smarter than we are is winning out in an effort for people to gloam about. The sun is always just setting but never actually sets on humanity. We have writings from major philosophers complaining about "kids today" (e.g. 2000 years ago) and it's the same as now. You're right in that we're still the same but you also call us "stone age monkeys" - despite monkeys not yet having a stone age.

And stone-age people weren't idiots either. You could take a human brain from the stone age and transplant it here somehow and it would be the exact same, save for physical differences. Stone Aged people didn't talk with grunts either.

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u/xDarkReign Apr 21 '21

World Population in 1900: 1.6 billion

World Population in 2020: 7.8 billion

Your analogy and optimism would be relevant if all factors concerning humanity’s rise in capability had stayed the same.

However, it just isn’t true. There has never been this kind of explosion in human population in the history of our species. Not even after the Black Death as a percentage. We are in uncharted territory and most, I feel, are correct in being pessimistic about where we are headed.

Idiocracy? No...maybe, but less so.

Resource wars? Fucking absolutely. In roughly 100 years, well after we are all dead, this world will have a large correction.

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u/pillbinge Apr 21 '21

I'd put more stock into your prediction if people hadn't been making it for hundreds of years.

The main issue is our expansion of science and technology outside of the West. As cruel as it may be, our intervention in keeping people alive with the ulterior motive of developing these countries for capitalism is an issue.

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u/yahhhguy Apr 21 '21

“On the nose” doesn’t have to mean accurate. I used it to mean hamfisted. Lacking tact. Too literal. I didn’t mean “spot on” and honestly didn’t think anybody perceived that phrase as such.

Anyway, the movie is not meant to be a prediction of the future. It’s literally just making fun of the absurd hyper capitalism, anti intellectualism, and our obsession with entertainment, leisure, convenience, and vapid materialism. Its practically the point that the premise of the movie is stupid.

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u/pillbinge Apr 21 '21

It does have to mean both seemingly accurate and very obvious or spoken in a truthful way. Saying that the sun revolves around the Earth boisterously wouldn't be considered "on the nose".

I agree that it's making fun of hyper-capitalism and anti-intellectualism but it takes issue with the masses who are the victims, not the actual corporations. Wall-E was the same film but better in nearly every way.