Mistaking intelligent people for "evolved" people

Contrary to what people seem to think, natural selection is not just about making the human race smarter. It's about making us, as a whole, more able to survive and adapt to change. That means not only that some of us need to be "smarter" (more effective communication, better manipulation of abstract symbols, quicker processing time, etc.), but that others of us need also to stay at a level that we don't mind doing tedious, but necessary, duties.

Let me clarify. I'll use humanity's current favorite toy, the computer, as an example because I'm reasonably familiar with it. That said, this illustration could be done with the loom, the sailing ship, the bow and arrow, the man-made dwelling, the knapped obsidian blade, or whatever other technological innovation you can think of. The computer took a lot of genius (over a lot of time) to finally make real, from pure mathematics and boolean logic, to the vacuum tube, to the transistor, and so forth. A great deal of terrifically bright people worked on ideas that would eventually make the computer possible. For each of their innovations, though, there had to be all kinds of societal infrastructure supporting them. People to make the paper that mathematicians would write on, to mine the raw materials to be made into vacuum tubes, to keep all the labs and offices clean and usable, etc. So many people completing tasks that the geniuses wouldn't have wanted to do themselves, while making it possible for those same geniuses to do their work.

Intelligence evolved to fall in a bell curve for a reason, as society doesn't need, and couldn't function properly with, an abundance of overly smart people. If everyone engineered their children to have IQs of 175, we'd die back just as surely -- though for different reasons -- as if epidemic disease made all of our children be born with 50s and 60s. It's a mistake to have things like The Darwin Awards trumpeting deaths caused by stupid mistakes and calling it evolution. Natural selection is a hell of a lot more complex than that, and its end goal (if that's what you want to call it) is more interesting than a race of super-smart beings that popped into existence when all the "dumb" ones were killed off.

On a macroscopic scale I think you are totally right, we do need a distribution of a range of skills and IQ points are obviously one of these. But I would point out that the Bell curve is a result of a natural process of lifestage selection and that even if we did bump up our kids' IQ's to 165 or something, the curve would remain intact, even if it ranged over a shorter period. I imagine that most of the social relations would also remain intact as well, although social change would speed up with a more fluid arena for cultural values.

Then there is the point about evolution itself, after all maybe intelligent people are more able to evolve in the timeframe of their lives, and be able to respond in a way that makes them more successful emotionally as well as intellectually. Perhaps that allows them to teach their children more fully and also of course to breed more successfully. Perhaps there are more strands to evolution than even the creator of this node foresaw.