Is Civilization making us (and our leaders) stupid?

I was most interested to see the article in The Atlantic with the title Is Goole making Students stupid? It suggests that the use of modern computer aids means that people are not having to be as imaginative as they would otherwise be . This would make their behaviour less intelligent when faced with unexpected and difficult problems.

But perhap the problem is far deeper that that, as there is some evidence that the human brain may have got smaller over the last few tens of thousands of years and I suspect that this is due to the similar effects cause by the whole process of civilization.

When all humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups everyone needed to learn a whole raft of skills to keep themselves, and their family group, alive and well. However people started to develop specilist skills and trade so that for example, a skilled maker of early metal tools of bronze or later iron would not have to learn to hunt because he could get the food he needed by trading. As civilization advanced more and more people have become specialist, to the point where everyone has some very specialised skills (which depend on a stable society to be useful) and few general survival skills. The overall effect is, of course, that the collective knowledge and intelligence of society has increased enormously but, particularly on the most highly developed countries, everyone is dependant on the skills of thousands of other people simply to survive. Using all one's brain to lean to survive is no longer important and we have plenty of "spare capacity" to enjoy activities which have no real survival value - such as enjoying the works of Shakespeare or Mendelson, or even writing blogs.

This could have an evolutionary toll as there is no loner any evolutionary pressure to weed out people with minor disadvantageous brain mutations, and there would be a tendency for the brain's capacity to shrink very slowly over the generation because it is now "more powerful"  than is necessary to simply survive in a modern civilized society. After all the world population has exploded because the natural thinning out pressures of "evolution in the raw" no longer apply. We are likely to become even more dependent on "climbing on the shoulders of giants" and ever less able to look outside the establishment boxes set by our society mores and our leaders dictats.

So as civilization advances its members become more "domesticated" and more prone to practice "follow my leader" behaviours. But in the long run society can only survive if we have leaders with enough imagination and intelligence to tackle any challenges that may emerge - such as the effects of climate change. If we look at our current leaders and prospective leaders (I am particularly thinking of the coming UK general election) we see only unimaginative self interest and unintelligent short-termism. With our choice being restricted to such uninspiring prospective leaders the future looks bleak indeed.

Google and the problem of personal information

Before I retired I was particularly interested in the problems of data protection and on-line communications long before the world wide web came into existence. In the 1980s I wrote a paper for a scientific conference about the problems of reconciling the Data Protection Act with the online task of organizing an international conference involving committee members scattered around the world - and I was delighted when it was republished by a legal journal.

The recent Court ruling that Google (and other search engines) should suppress links to "personal information" looks totally unworkable because in free text documents, such as old newspaper reports, drawing a clear distinction as to which links to suppress and which links, to the same news story, not to suppress is clearly unworkable. On my other blog/web site I am frequently researching local and family history in old newspapers and on Google (admittedly too old to be affected by this ruling) and know a lot of trips for digging out hard to find information. With this in mind I posted the following on the British Computer Societry Web site as a comment on the news about the proposed "censorship".

As someone who retired from IT many years ago and now is active doing historical research I find the idea of manipulating historical records, and the tools for accessing them very worrying and I can't seen how the approach the court has proposed could possibly work. 

I could think of hundreds of different scenarios - but I will mention just one. A footballer does not want anyone to know he might have been involved in match fixing and the record shows that he played in a game in which he played. There are a number of levels - the protesting player was (1) convicted of fixing (2) appeared in court but found not guilty (3) was named in the evidence given in court but not charged (4) named as a player in a game known to be fixed (5) not named in the report of fixing, but the game is identified as being fixed - and other reports name him as a member of the team. 

A search engine like Google will provide many pathways to find details to the match, the fact that it was fixed, and the players. Let us assume that  a request was made to remove all links which might indentify a individual because the facts about him were "time expired" personal information. As a historian (and I am sure investigative journalists are at least as good as me) I know lots of tricks for search free text documents. But how could Google realistically hide this information without preventing access to other information relating to the game and other players. For instance should all the members of the team be indexed apart from the complaining member? Should Google images suppress a picture of the whole team "involved in the fixing scandal" or should they have to block out the clearly recognisable face of the complainant. 

If I was particularly researching the fixing of football matches and I came across a case where some of the player's name were not findable using Google I would immediately be alerted to the fact that the unindexed players had something to hide ... which could encourage me to look specifically for what the complainant was trying to hide. 

Information held as free text, such as old newspaper reports, beings lots of problems - for instance Google does not distinguish whether "Tottenham" is the name of a person, a football team, or a place - and most texts will refer to many different people, events, etc., (some of which must continue to be indexed) and not just the subset of news complained of.