Colin Blakemore is a neurobiologist and below he is talking about the capacity of the human brain, but the scenario he lays out quite aptly describes what awaits us after the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and Fox News (not dissimilar from Afghanistan after the Taliban, for approximately the same reasons)!

My argument stresses the plasticity that our brains were endowed with when this mutation occurred. Some scientists believe that skills like language have a strong genetic basis, but my theory stresses the opposite, that knowledge, picked up by our now powerful brains, is the crucial mental component. It means that we are uniquely gifted in our ability to learn from experience and to pass this on to future generations. That has a bad side: a single generation starved of knowledge, thanks to some global disaster, for example, would be cast back to the Stone Age.