[spooky]

i disagree, William. i believe intellegence is doing just what its designed to do when we reach the point we have. its only the low borns that are still having lots and lots of babys, the already established are having fewer kids. if you think about it, its almost like the low borns are having kids like they are lotto tickets, maybe one will get lucky and make it, the rest will just repeat the cycle. the already established, however, have already made it, they know the offspring they have will succeed, theres no point in dividing up a family fortune among 5 kids when one or two will do, and greater individual power will be maintained.

people dont die trying to survive anymore, and i think nature has mechanisims in place to help stabalize a population if they become too alpha. if we just had physical evolution to contend with, maybe i would agree, but evolution also includes society, social structure, ideas, memes, whatever you want to call it, those are the mechanisms nature has put in place, and they are doing their job, in my opinion.

ideas have lineage too, and behave exactly like genes in nature, the good ones, even if false, tend to outlast the bad ones, and through societies, replicate themselves throughout a population. some ideas, like the monkeys that use straw to get termites out of mounds to eat, help aid the physical survival of a species. they are part of evolution, you cant have one without the other. you remove an information link and have disasterous results, take the condor, for instance. they were bordering on extinction, and scientists started stealing eggs and rearing them, and releasing them back into the wild. the ones they initially let go either wouldnt breed or wouldnt care for young. turns out, the scientists had to get condor puppets to feed the babies with, and they would learn the behavior, and go on later to survive. look also at blacks in america that are descendants from slaves. i believe that the family units were broken up, breaking they evolution of idea, effectively stopping the spread of learned behavior. clearly the weak were weeded out, the stronger were even bred by owners to produce a better stock, but once freed, the family unit and even the ability to pass down society based behavior had been disrupted, the link in the idea chain was broken, and we are still feeling the effects, with the black population have great difficulty meshing properly with the rest of society.