Inverse Darwinism

One of the ideas behind Survival of the fittest is that the 'stronger' members of a species will reproduce more, so their stronger genes will appear more and help assist the survival of a species. The problem is however, what happens when you reach a point that the 'strong' properties aren't useful any more. Who needs a spear thrower these days? The importance of a fit, baby-carrying body is reduced substantially when modern medicine helps you stay alive. Either way, one would think that this could then lead to development of mental, rather than physical, abilities. Unfortunately, this is not the case - while it is socially expected that people will try to look their best (c.f: Shows like the Biggest Loser), it is not expected that people will think their best. In fact - thanks to our friends drugs and alcohol, it is socially expected that people will become LESS intelligent when interacting with others. Anyway, here's a maths interpretation of some possible reasons of this, including why it's not going to get any better:

1) Bottom-tier democracy

Consider the image above; it's a typical job hierarchy tree - each circle down the bottom is an employee, above that their immediate bosses, responsible for their two workers. Above that, the boss's bosses, etc, up the hierarchy tree, each layer usually with more dependencies and salary than the one below. Now, count the employees - you should get 8. Everyone else can be considered an employer, count them. 7, right? So, say there's a ficticious vote: "should more Y be given to layer X of the tree?" {e.g. should the CEO get more power? should the employees get more money?...}. If everyone above layer X votes one way, everyone below votes another, who will win? As you can see, 8 > 7, so whatever is decided, the bottom tier will always win in a democratic vote. No matter how high the hierarchy grows, if each employer has two or more people under them, the lowest level will always hold an outright majority. True, this isn't a complete flaw, as votes will benefit the majority. However, it does lead to many benefits being granted to the bottom level, reducing any incentive to try to work your way up the tree. This is leading into the second point:

2) Negative Positive-skew

Many things in life follow what's called a normal distribution - however, some things have natural bounds at zero - i.e. ages, incomes, ... which can't go zero, and cause the distribution to have what's called "positive skew". The values cluster more to the left as they can't go any lower, and to the right it flattens with some really high values. The result of this? Mode (most frequent) < Median (50% marker) < Mean (average) - so over 50% of people are below average...why is this a factor? Take industrial unions, for example. Workers group together, and as a group they collectively bargain, with the results going to everyone in the group. The result is that those above average get the same benefits as those in the middle, a disincentive for working hard. Moreover, the people at the bottom end of the distribution also get the same benefits of those in the middle - anyone maximising their work:outcomes ratio would then aim to BE below average.
Not much left except to relax and laugh while watching the Hilton generation reverse natural selection. /rant over