I agree that those are impressive skills that are becoming rare and make us compare unfavorably to old schoolers. But I am also impressed by trackers who can follow a trail in the bush by observing clues invisible to ordinary people. All kinds of skills fell into disuse when the problems they solved lost importance.

But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.

I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?

I would say learning to be successful in modern society would probably count as a new competency. Rather than know to hunt and forage like our ancestors have for what millions of years, within three generations that has been replaced with having a sense for grocery shopping. How to hold a job. How to manage modern social constructs.

However, three generations or so is not enough time to see the effects of this form of selection on our species. All the great things we see in life that we’ve built rest on the laurels of behavioral patterns and neuron networks established by millions of years of this hunter-gatherer paradigm. Now that is over for most of the breeding population. What is next for us is the interesting question. What are we selecting for today? What sort of person tends to be the most fecund? Where are our alleles heading? I mean, we aren’t even selecting for reproductive success anymore. For example, the people who need to rely on ivf to reproduce today perhaps would not have reproduced in the past, and whatever alleles that conferred that infertility might have been regularly lost in the population shortly after they emerged through mutation. Now, that ivf offspring survives, and might harbor these alleles instead to the next generation where they will also depend on ivf to reproduce.

Intelligence is also not being selected for. Intelligent people tend to have kids late in life when sperm and egg quality are already in decline harboring more mutations than gametes from younger humans. They tend to also have fewer kids. Lack of education on the other hand is correlated with having more kids younger in life. The poor and uneducated therefore have a higher fitness.

It does not seem to bode well that our present level of intelligence will even be around in 10,000 generations time given that the selective pressures that generated it in the first place are now lost.

Maybe that is the great filter: intelligent life is short lived as the changes to behavior that emerge from it being widespread and technologically capable lead to that very intelligence no longer being selected for.

Socrates was really ahead of the curve on this I guess…