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olalonde comments on Intelligence as a bad - Less Wrong
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I think there's plenty of evidence that human societies are not near some evolutionary equilibrium. Can you name a human society that has lasted longer than a few hundred years? A few thousand years?
On the biological side, is there any evidence that we have reached an equilibrium? (I'm asking genuinely)
The consensus among biologists seems to be that social utility has zero to very little impact on evolution. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection
Higher levels of human intelligence result in a lower expected social utility for some other species (we are better at hunting them). It does not result in lower expected social utility for humans as we are generally good to other humans. Higher levels of individual intelligence have brought us the great achievements of human kind with very few downsides. The concern with AGI is that it might treat humans as humans treat some other species.
If anything, the reason we don't see a rapid rise of intelligence among human beings is that it does not provide much evolutionary benefit. In modern societies, people don't die for being dumb (usually) and sexual selection doesn't have much impact since most people only have child with a single partner.
Officially.
If intelligence correlates positively with social skills and popularity, smart males can spread their genes outside of their marriages. (Reading this, don't imagine a nerd with IQ 190, but rather a jock with IQ 120. If he impregnates his average neighbor's wife, he contributes to the global intelligence increase.)
I'd say the negative correlation between education and fertility has been established pretty firmly. As a simple demonstration: if you sort the information here by fertility rate in descending order, you'll find that the countries with <2 children per woman are mostly first-world countries. There are more than a few countries in Europe, for instance, where immigration is the only thing keeping the population growth positive, and let's not even get started on Japan. And it goes deeper than country-to-country comparisons; within a given country, the poor and less educated tend to have more children than the other guys. (China might be an exception to that, I'm not sure.) From what I know of population trends in recorded history, this has always been the case.
This doesn't look good from an evolutionary point of view, if one is concerned with the long term instead of immediate x-risks and bioengineering etc. On the surface at least high education doesn't seem to be an evolutionarily valid tactic. Whether this applies for raw, general intelligence... Dunno. But I wouldn't be surprised if we'd reached an evolutionary equilibrium or a downswing.
I can't find the quote now, but I distinctly remember reading that before recent times (20th century or so), the number of children surviving to reproductive age and lifetime expected reproductive value were much higher among the wealthy elite than the vast majority of the population. It was said there that wealthy women hired poor nursemaids to suckle their babies, enabling them to give birth every 12-18 months instead of every few years (after weaning) like the poor women did. And of course infant and general mortality was much higher among the poor, especially during epidemics.
Looking at it another way, world population multiplied during the last hundred years because average global wealth rose drastically. Poor means malthusian constraints on population size, so even if you have high birthrate, in the end most of them die without reproducing because the population growth rate is vastly below the birth rate.
On one hand, evolution appears to work in a punctuated manner, meaning that individual components of evolutionary systems are usually at equilibrium.
On the other hand, brain volume in our ancestors rose smoothly from 3 million years ago to the present.
On the other other hand, some Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans.
You can't simply assert that. It's an empirical question. How have you tried to measure the downsides?
It seems so obvious to me that I didn't bother... Here's some empirical data: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html . Anyways, if you really want to dispute the fact that we have progressed over the past few centuries, I believe the burden of proof rests on you.
What about the Flynn effect?
I also strongly doubt the claim that human intelligence has stopped increasing. I was just offering an alternative hypothesis in case that proposition were true. Also, OP was arguing that intelligence stopped increasing at an evolutionary level which the Flynn effect doesn't seem to contradict (after a quick skim of the Wikipedia page).