Human intelligence, so slowly evolving, is now irrelevant

Guesstimates about the most intelligent humans – the likes of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Einstein, Faraday, Shakespeare and Newton – abound. But IQ doesn’t really matter these days.

Human intelligence, so slowly evolving, is now irrelevant.

As of 6.45am today the population of our planet was 8.2 billion, plus or minus a few recent arrivals since breakfast. That’s out of an estimated 117 billion who’ve ever lived. Yep, that’s quite a few of us, despite family planning, the pill, the condom and the overturning of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court.

When talking about population I’m being bigoted. I mean the human population – not the total number of rabbits or microbes, the latter being somewhat more numerous. Humans only really count humans, which seems somewhat egocentric. But seeing as we organise any census, we get the say.

Early modern humans only began to appear about 300,000 years ago – and since then our population has inexorably increased, despite hiccups like wars, famines and plagues. For this we can blame, if you’ll excuse a three-letter word, sex. That’s not particularly Original Sin. Don’t blame yourself. God (or evolution) shouldn’t have made it so pleasurable, second only to eating.

And to make matters worse, many of us are living longer than nature (or the Bible) intended. We were allotted three score years plus ten by God, and some miscreants are lingering longer. (“Guilty m’lord,” confesses this octogenarian). A few will kick on until they get an official tweet from King William at Buckingham Palace.

This brings us to the importance of Guinness-type records. It is a statistical inevitability that someone has to be the world’s oldest, tallest, heaviest, richest or most obnoxious. Currently, the world’s richest person is, like so many billionaires, morally bankrupt. Sadly, this worthless man is worth $US270 billion – while his bestie, the world’s most obnoxious individual, is worth a measly $US4 billion tops. I refrain from naming them for fear of a defamation action.

The world’s oldest person was probably French woman Jeanne Calment, who fell off the perch in 1997 at the grand age of 122. The world’s tallest? Robert Wadlow from Illinois, who died in his early twenties, was 8 foot 11 inches tall in the old money (2.72m). The heaviest? Fellow American Jon Brower Minnoch broke the record – and the scales – by topping 100 stone, or 635kg. He married twice, had two kids and ran a taxi company before dying at the age of 41 in 1983. His huge coffin filled two graves to bursting.

As the creator of DENSA, the MENSA for dills, I’m interested in IQ ratings. Guesstimates about the most intelligent humans – the likes of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Einstein, Faraday, Shakespeare and Newton – abound. But sadly, this latter category is rendered redundant as human intelligence, so slowly evolving, is now irrelevant. As of 6.30am, AI has taken over. MENSA announced its surrender, although AI may keep some members as pets. As part of its inevitable triumph, AI will also take over the entire fortune of Elon Musk and become the next President of the United States. Plus the Extreme (oops, Supreme) Court, the Federal Reserve, the High Court of Australia and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. All elections everywhere will be cancelled forever. All problems solved. The world population is expected to collapse. Watch this space.