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Sand
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31 May 2008, 4:39 am

A knowledge of an area is a matter of knowing the facts involved and how those facts have been inter-related into a discipline. Any discipline can be learned by a reasonably intelligent person with a mental bent towards that area. The inter-relationship of the facts is a matter of patterns which have been formalized and made explicit. These can be acts about the techniques of working materials, about social relationships, about how biological entities relate to their environment etc. which covers the broad extent of all human knowledge. It takes a certain minimum amount of intellect to grasp the underlying concepts of each discipline and it seems unlikely to me that a young child of normal intelligence taken from any era from the neolithic to the present could not eventually be processed to grasp and understand any current knowledge. Intelligence is the capability to retain large amounts of knowledge and to discern new and interesting relationships within the accepted knowledge that might, in the end, revise the total paradigm of comprehension.
This requires great discernment and mental flexibility, characteristics which are noteworthy in scientific and artistic endeavors and radically lacking in rigid disciplines such as formal religion which requires mere memorization of and absolute conformity to rigid traditions with little or no possibility of revision in the light of new understanding and discovery.



The_Chosen_One
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04 Jun 2008, 3:43 am

As far as I'm concerned, people are just as smart (or stupid) as they ever were. They just have more opportunities to do idiotic things these days.


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ManErg
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04 Jun 2008, 10:14 am

Sand wrote:
Grasshoppers, birds, beetles, moles each handle different environments. It seems unlikely that intellect plays much of a role in this capability.


Just because intellect doesn't play a role, doesn't diminish that capability.


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