i'm going to assume the original poster watched the movie "idiocracy", which is exactly this scenario. to sum it up, stupid people have babies, smart ones don't, eventually only stupid people are left and society stagnates. it's am interesting concept, but one I find myself having trouble to accept.

to "mynameismattgotmlgo", I am very impressed with your post, although I'm not sure what your point is. it's an interesting study, very informative. from what i read, they concluded "Today a commonly accepted view of intelligence is that heredity places a "ceiling," or upper limit, on an individual's IQ. An unstimulating environment, however, can prevent someone from reaching his upper limit. The individual's actual IQ, therefore, is determined by both his heredity and his environment." they seem to be saying that both have an influence, and can affect the intelligence.

you seem to be stretching that a bit too much by saying "nurture acts on nature", since the study had interesting results, but admits it is not 100% true, and can be caused by the environment.

i like this thread, because one of my personal beliefs is that we should be doing more open research into the field of "eugenics", seeing if it is indeed useful. I don't believe in killing mentally or physically ill people, but either a disincentive to have children or some other sort of program to encourage people with what could be called stronger genetic heritage to procreate more could benefit the human race.

since we have effectively eliminated natural selection in all but the "weakest" members of our species, I think we must start looking seriously at the possibility of artificial selection, and its' uses in continuing the evolution of the human race.

Who cares if the world is full of idiots? Let them destroy the earth. I couldn't stop their idiocy even if I wanted to, nor could I educate them to see their own self destruction ways. People only listen to violence, and its not my way. Violence is their way, they got armies and police and ignorance, what do I got? Death is inevitable, they are just making you die faster. Not like a zillion things won't kill you anyway. I stopped caring about a world which I won't be in. It's not my problem.

The definition of an idiot kinda varies, doesn't it? =S
An idealist might think a realist is an idiot, while the realist might think an idealist is an idiot. It's a never-ending debate!
We're so condescending and then we wonder why the word 'idiot' even exists, sigh.

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Environmental Studies & Resource Management, Earth Science
University of Waterloo '11

Personally, I think it's more nature via nurture... why? We are all born with some kind of DNA that usually ends up getting altered due to the environment.

And natural selection is a joke with modern medicine around. Because of asprins and such, we are now immune to alot of modern medicines because we use so much of them. And because we use so much of them we don't get really sick anymore. If we don't get sick anymore, a brand new virus will eventually break out and kill alot of people and modern medicine won't work... we used too much of it and are now immune to it.

I never understood why people are such neat freaks. Don't you know that without bacteria our immune system won't be able to do it's job or grow to help fend off new diseases and sicknesses? I'm not saying to live in filth either or to eat raw chicken hehe.
Let your kids eat dirt! If they get sick, then great! They are building immune systems

I'm not a parent and I know it sucks when people get sick and stuff but it has to happen. Vaccines are just of bunch of small doses of viruses they inject into you so your body can ward them off. If you get sick off a flu shot, it's not a bad thing. When that strain comes back to you it wouldn't be so bad the 2nd time around.

And I agree with stupid people having kids when they really have no business doing it lol. But it's not like we can say you can't have kids because your stupid. If you want that go to a communist country like China who says you can only have 1 boy or girl. Besides the stupid people will eventually die... the world is over populated as it is....

Lmao, I can imagine Princeton writing prep guides for that test.