I can’t access the article and I don’t have time for a podcast, but the obvious question is “Why wouldn’t all these same reasons apply to a chimp?”
There’s pretty good evidence that there are alternate brain designs which can at least gain us 10 or 20 IQ points. There’s a gene for promoting nerve growth (can’t remember the name) which is associated with a higher IQ and a higher rate of cancer; in most people it’s been selected against because of the cancer risk, but that suggests a very different reason why our brains are limited to their current power than Fox brings up. Gaucher’s Disease is another deadly condition linked to genes which can increase IQ in people who don’t have the disease (and increase it even more in people who have the disease but live with it).
So I would agree with him that there are probably biological reasons our IQ isn’t higher, but I think they’re more likely to involve disease than neural architecture, and that we can probably evolve ways around those diseases pretty quickly on an evolutionary scale.
I can’t access the article and I don’t have time for a podcast, but the obvious question is “Why wouldn’t all these same reasons apply to a chimp?”
There’s pretty good evidence that there are alternate brain designs which can at least gain us 10 or 20 IQ points. There’s a gene for promoting nerve growth (can’t remember the name) which is associated with a higher IQ and a higher rate of cancer; in most people it’s been selected against because of the cancer risk, but that suggests a very different reason why our brains are limited to their current power than Fox brings up. Gaucher’s Disease is another deadly condition linked to genes which can increase IQ in people who don’t have the disease (and increase it even more in people who have the disease but live with it).
So I would agree with him that there are probably biological reasons our IQ isn’t higher, but I think they’re more likely to involve disease than neural architecture, and that we can probably evolve ways around those diseases pretty quickly on an evolutionary scale.