The latest tome by Dr. E.W. Wylfan, professor of Exceptionalistic Reversalism at the University of Anterior in Missedout, Mississippi , Dept. of Advanced Anachronisms makes the point that history just hasn't worked out the way it should have. According to Dr. Wylfan's hypothesis, the human race was supposed to have colonized the solar system about six thousand years ago and discovered the secret of immortality shortly thereafter. According to his research, the history of humanity as we have it now is a fluke, an aberration, a series of profound failures punctuated by missed opportunities.
The academic community has rejected this hypothesis with extreme vigor. As Dr. Fenemor Tudberry, professor of Timeless Verities at the University of Cameloteries in Paris Texas, says, "Complete and utter balderdash!" While most scholars accept Dr. Tudberry's cutting critique, there remain a few skeptics willing to grant Dr. Wylfan's hypothesis a closer look.
The hypothesis asks, "Since all the raw materials required to develop the technologies we have now, have always existed, why did it take so long to develop them?". It then goes on to ask, "What were people thinking all those years that so distracted them from what we now see as so obvious?". Had people developed the level of technical mastery that is commonplace now, at the same time as they developed civilization, human history would have taken a completely different course. Humankind would have created a utopian world hundreds of generations sooner, the mishaps, dead ends and unconscionable waste would never have happened. We would now be living in a perfect world.
Since we didn't follow the obvious path to perfection, he wonders, why not? What kept us from what is clearly the most beneficial route to creating a world that is beneficial to everyone&? Why did these early humans embark on a history so destructive to their own interests? Why did so many subsequent generations continue in that same tradition? Why has history been such a waste of time?
One theory proposes that each generation is slightly less intellectually capable than the last. Over many generations the capacity for useful thought diminishes (see more on this, here). It seems that the current level of technological expertise argues against this theory but that view actually strengthens it. Since it now takes billions of people using millions of machines to accomplish even simple tasks, the intelligence required for any single individual is proportionally less. What we have gained through cooperation and machinery compensates for this loss of intelligence in the individual, to the extent that it now replaces it. Where once the intelligence of the individual was essential to progress, humanity now depends on a kind of hive intelligence. We have become a kind of collective brain
(consider this).
Dr. Wylfan's hypothesis assumes a greater intellectual capacity in the first generations of humans that enabled genuine originality and the immediate comprehension of natural relationships. In those ancient times there were far fewer people concentrated in very small areas yet they discovered metals such as copper and learned how to refine and manipulate them. They learned how to build with sun dried brick and how to cultivate the land for food crops and how to weave cloth. For thousands of years these technologies were merely improved but there was no real innovation. The originality of these developments was never equaled. It's as if there was a spurt of original invention at the very beginning of civilization and then, nothing. All that followed was just enhancement, not originality.
That the generations following this era of original invention were content with the innovations they inherited strongly supports Dr. Wylfan's hypothesis. Something went wrong, people either got lazy or they lost the capacity for original thought. Since all the evidence points to humans being hyper-active, it seems that laziness doesn't explain much about human history. Since it took over 7000 years for humans to figure out the sun was the center of the solar system or to devise a working clock or indoor plumbing or cell phones or toilet paper, it seems more likely that people really weren't too bright.
It was only after some critical mass of individual human minds were available that technological progress became possible. This apparently was around one billion people which coincides roughly with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Once there was this magic population number, humans could take advantage of a kind of hive intelligence. This hive intelligence means that the individual human requires far less intelligence than was necessary in previous ages. Extrapolating from that datum, it's obvious that the very first humans were many orders of magnitude more intelligent than those of us living now. Any who disagree prove that point.
It seems that after a few generations, this loss of intelligence began to affect subsequent history. People quit inventing stuff and just accepted what their ancestors had created with just small changes to the original. What we see now in this current generation is only a predictable consequence of this process of small incremental changes over many generations. Had the genuine originality of those first few generations been sustained, humans could have skipped the ugly history we've had to endure and jumped directly into a world we can barely imagine now. We should have been living in the future in the distant past.
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