Darwin's children drew all over the “On the Origin of Species” manuscript (2014)

Intelligence vs education. On average, most humans have about the same baseline intelligence. Obviously some have more and some have less, but that's an inherent quality of our species, and the baseline is really only moved by evolution.

It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans.

We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence.

We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.

The difference between us and them is the accumulated knowledge. You and I had no better an idea of what a volcano is than an anyone from thousands of years ago until someone told us.

I think of certain types of knowledge as one way functions. In order to acquire the knowledge you have to search a huge key space or experience costly elimination of options. Once you know the answer it feels obvious and intuitive. We have accumulated so much of this knowledge now that we have a hard time intuitively understanding the gap between people without it and us.

It's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good thing by honoring the Pharoah.

Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.

Some people living in the 13th-14th century in Europe considered the people who lived prior to the fall of the Roman Empire to be more civilised and advanced, if not actually more intelligent than they were. From their perspective the world had gone through a a dark age of ignorance and sin, and was only starting to recover.

It wasn't until much later, in the 15th and 16th century onwards, that people began to think that they were more advanced and accomplished than the ancient Greeks and Romans.

We have some pretty interesting family records, and if I look back 200 and 500 (and sometimes longer..) years ago, the information we have about family members feels remarkably current. There were divorces, economic and political challenges, times of prosperity and times of struggle. Property changed hands, taxes were levied, sometimes family members quarreled and sometimes they started new ventures together. The particular skills one might need in any one era or the social and political environment might change, but the human condition is remarkably common throughout the ages.

>in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have considered the people living 800 years before them to be all that different from them

How do you know this?

And does the average person today really think someone living in the year 1200 to be all that different from them living in 2025? If so, in what way does this person think people 800 years ago are different from us? (I'm asking because I don't share your assumptions if this hypothetical person were to think on this matter for more than 5 seconds)

65% of humans have lactose intolerance, so depending on where exactly you teleport them to it might be a completely normal thing. I'd imagine the immune system will have the capacity to develop in the same way too, so really it should work out fine.

Lactose tolerance in Europeans likely arose with early PIE groups as they began domesticating horses and oxen. Perhaps several time independently in different groups.

Lactose tolerance in populations is linked with pastoralism, and if I am remembering correctly colder climates as well.

Most humans today are not lactose tolerant as adults - it’s actually the exception.

From the wiki article:

> Scholars believe that the Novgorod Republic had an unusually high level of literacy for the time, with literacy apparently widespread throughout different classes and among both sexes.

One of the drawings had the inscription 'I am a wild beast' -- that's 5-7 year old territory. Ofc it's possible that I'm missing some cultural nuance, but the picture is consistent with precocious-little-kid-with-visceral-imagination. He must have been a joy to parent!

An older lady friend used to say, "People like to spend their lives screaming around. When they don't want to wake others, they quietly fart around."

Vonnegut truly nailed it

Amen.

Yeah it's in the marriage pros section, so I assume it's the latter. And worker bees can't reproduce.

The Natural state of Man -- at least, according to Ben Franklin.

Another interesting cultural development here is that the scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating parents to pay for their child’s post-secondary education. By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age. This privileges those who invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children, since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their old age.

None of this applies to Darwin though, he was wealthy and didn't need to think about "working the farm".

You can see the consequences of this playing out in highly developed countries

> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard

consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.

To put it in words close to finance: it is not an early cash investment in daycare and food, but lifelong kin work, that is rewarded with emotional bonds and long term dividends.

Living together in multi-generational homes facilitates kin work, there i agree, but it is not a strictly necessary requirement.

There are also other effects at work, especially psychological. Many adults don't grasp that their elders have increased demands, because they are used to see them in a providing role. They understand it on a abstract and logical level, it is so obvious and well known, but to truly understand it on a personal level is far more difficult. In the same way people growing older often try to stay in this providing role as long as possible, as they for many years defined themselves through it.

There comes a time in life when easter invitations switch direction. If you live together on a farm, this changes gradually.

A farm, in the middle of 19th century London ?

> Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social security benefits around to everyone including people that didn't raise any children.

You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?

Everyone who marries marries their cousin, it's just a matter of degree. Before the advent of the automobile, people traveled a lot less. Even more so as you go further back. Combine that with families having a lot more kids (you might have 36-64 surviving first cousins), and you've got a situation where nearly everyone you interact with might well be only a couple degrees of separation by blood. Marriage between first cousins has historically been a bit taboo, but so called third and fourth degree (aunts and uncles, first cousins) marriages were still pretty common. It wasn't really until the rise of the eugenics movement that the modern taboos and legal prohibitions were established.

I've been doing a fair bit of genealogy lately, and you can see on the family tree pretty clearly when people moved from from smaller, insulated communities to larger cities. Above that point, the tree fans out a lot less.

> syndicated in realtime here: https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social

That really is wonderful! Reading how Pepys arranged for his diary to be preserved makes me think that he would have enjoyed this more modern presentation.

> Found out my uncle Wight and Mr. Rawlinson, and with them went to the latter’s house to dinner, and there had a good dinner of cold meat and good wine, but was troubled in my head after the little wine I drank.

"Troubled in the head" is a euphemism due a revival!