Granted everything is much more complicated in real life with mixing populations and imigration and the fact that the west is not the future of the world at least population wise.

—

I like that our brains are changing to adapt to our high-tech environment. It makes me optimistic to think that we can each change and adapt to different ways of life. It reminds me of the keynote address by Clay Shirky at the web 2.0 conference that I heard through BoingBoing about the death of the sitcom and how when there are major changes in society it takes a couple generations for us to figure out what to do with ourselves.
here is the link to the bb post and transcript:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/27/death-of-the-sitcom.html
(my html is rusty so no fancy link for you)
and here is a link to a video (8 minutes) of the keynote.
http://blip.tv/file/855937

This is exactly what you are talking about. *Society* is evolving and sometimes this causes actual changes in the way our brains develop.

-AI

I was referring to evolution in a loose sense in that the brain structure is different than that in a non-digital society.

Although, along that line, one should consider how survival can be enhanced by the ability to deal with technology. Certainly, social ’survival’ is dependent on computer literacy — at least in the developed world. Computer skills will unlikely achieve the learn-or-die level needed to promote true evolution — if only because of the social programs that ensure survival whatever the literacy level of such skills.

Parent’s Quintile Your Quintile is:
Higher The Same Lower
Under $32K 58% 42% 0%
Under $52K 51% 26% 23%
Under $70K 36% 24% 44.5%
Under $98K 24% 25% 51%
Over $98K 0%(14.2%*) 42% 58%
Top 5% 0% 22% 78%(49%**)

* chance go go from top 20% to top 5%
** chance to go from top 5% to bottom four quintiles (below $98K)

And if there were no social mobility that would indeed produce an ever-shrinking elite class. But social mobility in the U.S. is very large, both as individuals age and across generations.

This is especially true of immigrants, who are one of our largest demographic sources of large families. Within just a few generations, most immigrant families move from scraping by to solidly middle class—often with a few members in the upper class.

But, for those concerned about children left behind by this process, and there will be some, especially in the underclasses where cultural norms prevent success, may I suggest supporting things like OLPC, library computing resources, and Wal*Mart (source of cheap consumer goods for the masses). That will ensure that even the children of the poor get the maximum exposure to the technologies that seem to train the brain for success.

Of course, if you really want to help, confronting those cultural norms that ensure failure would be an even better step, but that’s a rant for another day!

To put it simply, we will not see an effects of evolution (i.e. a fundamental change in the way that the brain operates that is passed down to our children) in this area unless a special ability to operate well in this environment translates into an increased number of children.

I think that what we will see is, in fact, the opposite.

I am going to assume that a facility of operating in our new society will translate generally into a higher level of education and a more successful career and more wealth. North American demographics tell us that these are the people who have *fewer* children.

In North America, I think we will see that generally the skills that make individuals successful in our (Western) society will be shared by a smaller and smaller percentage of the population as time goes on.

Sure sounds depressing to me, and while I strayed a little from the topic of the post, this has been on my mind for a while.