A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

I'd thought that by living indoors and in otherwise controlled environments that there's not really much evolutionary pressure in any particular direction. Higher intelligence isn't a specific requirement to have (many) children live healthy lives.

You don't have to die to be selected out of the gene pool, you just need to fail to reproduce. If intelligence contributes to wealth and wealth contributes to reproductive success, then there will be evolutionary pressure favouring intelligence (and any other genes that "come along for the ride" with it).

The reality is that wealth is inversely correlated with fertility. As are intelligence, education, secularity, and so on. IQ is a decent proxy for intelligence. What many people don't know is that it's not a raw score, but relative. The mean of a population is always set to 100 and a standard deviation is generally 15 points. So an IQ of 115 means you performed better than 84% of people, one positive standard deviation.

It was discovered some time back that the 'raw score' for IQs was increasing over time - meaning the mean kept going higher and higher. This is called the Flynn Effect. [1] People were getting smarter. The section I linked to is about the fact this trend reversed some time around 1990 in the developed world. Wiki uses weaker language 'possible end' but it's been tested and verified repeatedly at this point - we're getting dumber, and quite rapidly. This remains true even after controlling for obvious explanations like immigration.

This is yet another reason why fertility is, in my opinion, the issue of the century. The world is going to look so absurdly different, and not in a good way, in 50 years, owing to fertility rates alone. We're very likely living on the tail end of a societal golden age.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

For most of human history wealth was positively correlated with fertility and especially with next generation fertility. The trend has changed in the more recent centuries but it’s not enough to affect us too much evolutionarily (for now).