Slashdot Mirror
Is Evolution Over In Humans?
BrianGa writes: "Is evolution over? Are current humans the final version? This
article presents a number of interesting theories, including the theory that
'Our species has reached its biological pinnacle and is no longer capable
of changing.' Professor Steve Jones believes this, in part, because
'human populations are now being constantly mixed, again producing a
blending that blocks evolutionary change.'"
I think with modern medicine, only *really* bad gene combinations get selected out. The only way for humans to really evolve is through genetic engineering. It's the natural progression of evolution! It is our density!
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
That I've ever heard of.
Variation is the subject for Human Change and Progression. Why doesn't "Professor" Jones look at something like, say, Malaria in relation to Sickle-Cell genes, or other diseases or climates and how they effect populations?
Since the entire world doesn't operate on a level where we can completely control our environment, there's no way to be sure if evolution is truly over. Then again, in Biology and Psychology classes, it HAS been noted that we are the only species on the planet that currently effects its own evolutionary change.
I just hope we can all come to the better conclusion that evolution isn't nearly over. We're still a changing species - but we're looking at ourselves in a relatively small time window. Modern society in comparison to evolution is a silly idea. The window isn't large enough to fit 'evolution' in.
Evolution doesn't really take place in individuals. It takes place in populations. In small, isolated populations, beneficial mutations can spread quickly through the gene pool. In large populations, they tend to get lost in the noise.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
I read the article just becase I don't like to reply without giving the benefit of the doubt.. but in this case it was a waste of time.
QUOTE: 'Things have simply stopped getting better, or worse, for our species.'
Then the Atomic Scientists wouldn't have a Doomsday Clock. And we wouldn't be worried about destroying our coastal cities with rising tides.
The article is only saved by Stringer who says the obvious, that 'Evolution goes on all the time. You don't have to intervene. It is just that it is highly unpredictable.'
I'd say that any mind that thinks evolution is over, is destined to become roadkill due to 'evolutionary' causes.
In our near future we have the prospect of mutations spreading which fight against aids, tropical diseases spreading north, and resistance to biowarefare or radiation. Somewhere along the way we will likely have changes in populations due to great artificial genes which can be passed on. Robotics and other technologies will enhance humans at some pace or another, there seems little doubt of that or you can read Hans Moravec if you are still unsure about that. We will have plenty of stresses on our populations and our genes, no worries about that. Homo Sap's going to have to advance a heck of a lot more for that.
The problem with a guy like Jones is that when people start to base strategies or policies on such delusions, we all lose out. Do you think we are losing no great artistic or scientific minds in the African tragedy of AIDS? Does it really matter if the makeup of populations change by one outliving the other, or being more procreative, or eating better, or what if they just ethnically cleanse, water war, bomb, poison, or otherwise do each other in? And are we all so homogenous now? I'd rather not consider myself as the least common denominator.
I think the battles of evolution require a lot of creative thinking to elucidate if you are thinking about your own time, and even then all bets are off. If anything evolution will accelerate as we become able to modify/improve our genes more quickly than the natural rate. And lots more people in the world will gain the means to exterminate those with genes they dislike. Finally, Natural Selection is always in operation. You can't turn it off just because increased mobility makes it difficult to measure.
Evolution is sort of like a saying of Buckaroo Banzai's: Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.
According to Darwin himself, natural selection only occurs when there is a "struggle for existence." If there is a scarcity of resources (or other obstacle) that makes it impossible for every member of a species to survive, those with certain "fitter" genetic traits will have a distinct advantage. On the other hand, if nearly every member can survive and reproduce as it is, there is no reason for those traits to be favored.
Humans are not presently in a "struggle for existence" -- most people can survive and procreate without much trouble, irrespective of their genetics. (Those who do struggle mostly do so because of political, social, and economic factors, not genetic disadvantages.) However, this could change quite quickly if some massively disruptive event (drought, famine, epidemic, intergalactic war, etc.) were to make it difficult for humans to survive without superior genetics.
In fact, Stephen Jay Gould's theory of Punctuated Equilibrium suggests that most species evolve this way: long periods of stasis, occasionally "punctuated" by rapid change over a small number of generations.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Sex appeal is the only force left with respect to the evolution of human beings. We're far too smart to be influenced by anything less barring a catastrophic environmental change.
You need all of these things for evolution (defined as changing frequencies of alleles) to stop:
(an allele is one varient of a gene, like some people have the blue eye allele, some have brown eye allele, while almost all of us have the genes for eye).
1. random mating (i.e. people will randoming mate with any other person)
2. constant sized society (no one leaves or enter, everytime someone is born, someone dies)
3. large society (a group of 50 people, even isolated, will still evolve, while a group of 5000, if the rest of these condistions are met, wont)
4. No selective pressure (favoring one type of allele vs. another)
These were all learned in a basic biology class, btw.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
Evolution is alive, and it favors:
1. horny
2. too stupid to use birth control
3. likes to get drunk at parties
4. lazy (no job) -- more time to reproduce
5. likely to rape, or not resist rape
6. can't see consequences of actions
7. too passive, fearful, or religous to abort
8. physically attractive
9. those who can convince someone into bed
Social programs ensure that the offspring
survive. Bimbos and jocks will multiply,
while nerds and career-addicts will die out.
Look at the height records, for example. Humans today tend to be much taller than their fifteenth century counterparts. Even taller than just the 1950s generation, in fact.
Um. That's not evolution. That's *food*.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
A) It is beyond me how you find anything racist in this. Allow me to clarify: Something isn't racist just because it deals with racial issues - it must also discriminate. Stating the obvious facts that people mix more today than they used to, and that this will create a more homogenous world population is in no way racist.
B) Correct - but not enough. In addition to a lucky combination of genes, there is one more requirement for any evolutionary effect: selection. The point of the article is *not* that there is less chance of lucky combinations of genes - the point is that these fortunate new humans have no advantage to everybody else. Therefore the race as a whole will only benefit extremely marginally from this contribution to the gene-pool. And for every beneficial mutation, there's a thousand harmful. But without any selection each of these thousands of disadvantaged individuals will contribute as much to the next generation as the single lucky one. This adds up to a general degeneration.
Selection is not completely forgotten in the post though:
No, no, no. As is widely known - and described in an earlier post - succes does *not* result in more kids. Quite the opposite actually. Those who don't win the nobel-prize or run a multi-billion company tend to produce more offspring instead, put bruntly. So we actually have a selection towards the lower end of the spectre.
Next up: Common colds second wind:
C) Let me get this straight: In Shanghai or Calcutta, a vicious variation of the common cold is contained completely from the rest of the world, and if it ever leaks out 99% of us are doomed because we have weakened resistances?
I suppose it's just dumb luck that none of the thousands of europeans and americans who visit these places every year, haven't caught this deadly flu yet? Of course not. When we go abroad, we get a stomach ache, because the local set of diseases are so unfamiliar to what we're used to, but thats it. The concept of any part of the world being isolated in respect to diseases is ludicrous. There are plenty of scary bio-hazardous scenarios to ponder about - but this is definitely not one of them.
Really, it is apparent we haven't just ceased to evolve, we are now de-evolving. Our own medicine will make us frail, and be our downfall.
Things that kept the gene pool pure in the past are no longer problems. A man with a low sperm count and a woman who would be considered infertile thirty years ago are now able to have quituplets. A child who manifests cancer at the age of eight can receive treatment, then pass on his genes later in life.
Our own medicine - which we like to think makes us strong - is making us weak. The process of natural selection can no longer take place. We have, to a certain extent, defeated death.
But death has a surprise for us. It's still there, stronger than ever. It's just biding its time.
± 29 dB
on the bottom of
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-089.htm
you'll find the following text.
We believe God has raised up ICR to spearhead
Biblical Christianity's defense against the
godless dogma of evolutionary humanism. Only by
showing the scientific bankruptcy of evolution,
while exalting Christ and the Bible, will
Christians be successful in "the pulling down of
strongholds; casting down imaginations, and every
high thing that exalteth itself against the
knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity
every thought to the obedience of Christ" (II
Corinthians10:4,5).
I'm not saying this makes any of the text's claims
false, but I'll certainly reread with many grains
of salt.
b
What f*ing box!?!?
Of course, the problem with this guy's (the article) opinions is that it does smak of segregation and other asty thoughts, but he should be given a fair consideration
To be perfectly fair, I don't believe he stated his opinions on whether evolutionary theory not applying to western civilization was good or bad. He may have opinions on this, but they weren't in the article. All that was in there was an observation that Darwin's basic rules don't seem to apply any longer due to a variety of reasons.
I may not agree with the conclusions personally, but I can't assign anything more sinister than a difference of opinion to the notion that evolution has effectively been turned off.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
"This elephant though, like the one with the missing tail gene does not express it, and natural selection does not come into play. 5 generations down the track, two close relatives have a child with this super spit power. Unfortunately, because of the second fact I listed above, this child also has a missing tail, one leg that can't move properly, a reduced brain size, and a bad back meaning it has difficulty feeding in hard to reach places. The problem here is that along with the beneficial mutation there came a host of harmful mutations."
This is an interesting concept mind you but as usualy happens when people have a counter argument to something fairly complicated you sometimes miss fairly obvious mistakes. For one your concept of mutations is driving how you evaluate evolution. Elephants don't suddenly evolve the ability to spit acid and therefore have some sort of evolutionary advantage. In fact the reality is in this case unless the elephant was in a highly isolated enviroment the mutation would get blended into the gene pool as background noise and never remanifest EVER. That kind of mutation is far too severe to really take hold at all. The community would have to be so isolated that inbreeding would kill them off almost. To understand evolution you have to really really concentrate on the time scale involved. As we are short lived beings this is sometimes hard for us to concieve.
For example one of the favorite arguments against evolution is flying. How could anything ever evolve something so complex by just mere natural selection. They think "gee how could such a complext mutation happen no matter how much randomness was applied". The answer is quite simple. We in fact know now the highly likely reason why beings evolved the ability to fly. There is a bug (forget what its called sorry) that skates on water. It uses its extreme light weight (note how low weight is important to flying beings) to float ontop of water without breaking its surface. To move around it kind of hops and skates along the water with its long almost flight capable wings. Scientist took these bugs and did studies on them. They cut the wings smaller and smaller till they were practically nubs and the bugs could STILL jerk around quick as heck with them. They did a documentary on it even the video was quite interesting. Obviously the amount of time it takes for a water organism to evolve into something that floats on the water is astronomical and then who knows how long it goes from floating to skating to jumping and finally flying. It's almost inconceivable but when laid out its obvious to see how it works. Thats how evolution is though unless you know what happened its just almost impossible to imagine how BIG changes happened.
So in conclusion while I it's good to question scientific concepts I think your arguments are fairly uninformed here. "Macro-evolution" as you put it just dosn't even exist. It's a word created by people who can't comprehened that small changes are all that are required to reach huge differences in gentic diversity.
I dont want to ruffle religious feathers but perhaps evidence for your creation theories would be more proper? I've noticed religious people tend to try and discount other concepts instead of promoting their own. Usually they believe that if everything else is discounted then creation must simply be how things happened. This is a futile goal because if you did convince people that evolution isn't true they'd no sooner believe in "creation" than they did before. They'd just go searching for another solution with founding in the physical laws which they can observe. In something like this the observable laws of the universe are the status quo. You'd have to first determine exactly what every law of the universe is then point out how they don't explain EVERYTHING for you to have proof. Even then though the point of faith is to believe without proof though isnt it?
Jartan
You also need a "survival of the fittest" rule
I'd say they got it wrong due to poor spelling, since it's more like "survival of the fattest" from what I've seen in certain areas of the USA...
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
But this is also a problem. Educated and intelligent people have few children. Stupid people breed like mad. They not only pass along stupid in their genes, their environment sucks (no decent home fostering of learning so the kids have double strikes against them).
While I think there is some point to the article I think the conclusions reached by Prof. Jones are a bit off. The whole survival of the fittest concept comes from an uncivilized and untamed natural world. You survived because you ran fast or had poisonous fangs or defensive quills or the ability to hunt in groups. Civilization puts an end to much of the struggle of the human condition (as the article mentions by quoting Peter Ward). You don't need to run fast or be strong in order to eat. With developments in medicine you don't need to be particularly strong in order to survive illness, genetic or otherwise. I'd even say modern people have more immunities than all of our forebearers combined. I think in many ways we have stopped developing as a species. Maybe in a million years we'll have fewer toes and longer fingers (our fingers will tend towards dexterity and we don't need the number of toes we have to walk upright as we do) but we are pretty stagnant.
The conclusion doctor Jones comes up with is we are the best result of natural selection. That is complete crap. We've got far too many genetic problems to be considered the best result of natural selection. Pick any detrimental attribute you can think of and picture a hunter gatherer with that trait. Do you think he'd survive long enough to have kids? It is highly doubtful. All of us four eyed slashdotters would be a mid-afternoon snack if it weren't for a civilized society. Concluding we've reached evolutionary stagnation because there are less adolecent and pre-adolecent deaths in London is pretty dumb. Our kids haven't become any better since 1890, we just no longer put them in factories and actually have cures for childhood diseases besides heavy prayer sessions and burning incense. Monkeys carrying HIV and not being affected by it is a similarly bad conclusion drawn from a dumb case. Chimpanzees don't have an anti-HIV gene, they have enough genetic descrepancy not to be affect by the HUMAN imunodeficiency virus. Humans in Africa in a thousand years won't have a anti-HIV gene any more than Chimpanzees have one today. Anyone left alive in Africa will be those who learned from the mistakes of the peers and practiced safe sex even if their religion or tradition forbode it.
I think this also brings into question: where do biologists learn math? If you look at statistics or studies done by any number of biologists you see REALLY fuzzy conclusions based on some really fuzzy logic and even fuzzier math. To put it into slashdot perspective, imagine somebody does benchmarking of Linux and Windows. They run web server tests using Linux 2.0 on a single processor serving 100 client machines connected to the server with a second hand D-Link hub serving out dynamically generated pages while comparing it to a Windows2k Advanced Server box with four processors connected to 25 client machines connected to the server by a cost-equals-the-GNP-of-a-small-nation router using gold plated Cat-5 cabling serving static web pages. The Windows computer beats the shit out of the Linux system (like...Netcraft) and it is concluded that Windows is superior in every way to Linux. Slashdotters would blow a collective gasket. That is the accuracy with which most biological studies are conducted. If you think I'm full of shit, you can pass a sugar pill through clinical trials and sell it as a anti-anything pill.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Whatever qualification Prof. Steve Jones holds, he should probably take down his degree and wipe his arse with it, as it has turned out that is all it's good for.
/. shouting down the efforts of someone they disagree with with an infantile remark.
Yet another example of someone on
For your information Professor Steve Jones is arguably the world's top geneticist. He's spent practically his entire career on the subject and is perhaps to genetics what Albert Einstein is to
relativity.
To say that his opinions are highly respected in the scientific community is an understatement - you'd have more luck finding a kid that hates candy than you would a serious scientist that was as dismissive of Prof. Jones's arguments as you appear to be.
Perhaps you have a professional interest in genetics yourself? A doctorate then? A degree perhaps? No, I didn't think so.
Yours seems to be a typical knee-jerk reaction. "Hey, I don't understand/like the idea of what this guy is saying so I'll bash/ridicule him." Very mature.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Prof. Jones, being a sensible scientist - the kind that looks at all avenues and approaches, accepting of all ideas and dismissive of none - looks at all the arguments before reaching his conclusions, whatever they may be.
Who knows, perhaps he looked at all the evidence - even the stuff you've put forward - before commiting his ideas to the scrutiny of the scientific community via a paper or a journal.
Perhaps he's right. Perhaps he's wrong. Scientists aren't always as arrogant as you seem to be - they don't claim to have all the answers but they damn well try to look for some.
It seems to me that Prof. Jones isn't defining some set-in-stone law here. He's only putting forward a theory.
Perhaps you'd be more confortable if scientist's didn't theorise? If Newton hadn't thought about gravity, Darwin about evolution or Einstein about the speed of light?
Science (and mankind in general) is progressed as much by taking an idea, working with it and finding out that it's wrong, coming up with a new idea that matches new emperical data, working with that, etc, as it is by someone pulling the right answers out of a hat first time.
Prof. Jones might be wrong. He might be right. Or, he might be somewhere in between. But if we take your approach to science we'll never find out.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Evolution is due to things that kill us before we reproduce, so we're all evolving into better drivers.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
A Brief History of the Evolution and Creation Science Conflict
Many claims of evidence against evolution are in reality pseudo-science, and are easily refuted.
Six Flood Arguments Creationists Can't Answer
Is Creationism a viable scientific hypothesis ?
My theory is that human beings have evolved to a point where our purpose is to create new technologies. It is through these technologies that we then evolve by ways of integration and extention of our abilities. Let me elaborate.
/. about 2 years ago of a psychologist who believed we would eventually become fully mental beings, placing our bodies in containers that only supported life functions as a back up.
Human existence has been saturated with invention. We invent technologies for the purpose of accomplishing various tasks (as some other animals have evolved to do). From the very first drum to the human genome project, we have been dedicated to creating things to enhance our lives.
As technology increases, we will slowly integrate it more and more with ourselves. We've already begun to witness this trend. Computers, once placed in huge rooms are now held in our back pockets. Now we're looking towards wearable computers and systems that act as personal assistants. Our media looks to a future where technology is actually a part of a human being. Brain jacks? Cybernetic enhancements? These things are shown with cons, obviously, but also with pros (brain augmentation in GitS, mass storage in Johny Mnemonic, instantenous learning in the Matrix, etc...).
In light of this, I would not say that human evolution has ceased. On the contrary, I would say it is rapidly increasing. We've been slowly abandoning biological evolution in favor of something that we can control and manipulate. We have been evolving through our technology and this pace will only increase. Probably in a manor very similar to Clarke's vision in the 2001-3001 series (eventually evolving our minds away from physical bodies) and probably not unlike the Borg (note we already replace human parts with mechanical parts - hips, hearts...). I remember even a story posted on
Thoughts? Ideas? Disagreements?
Why bother.
There are many examples of how we are not perfectly adapted to our environment. We have changed it so much in the past 400 years that there is no way our genetics could have changed that much. The easiest example is diet. Humans crave fats and sugars because those sources of food used to be difficult to find and very valuable. Now they are plentiful, but we still crave them. This can be regulated by our brains just fine, but given a lot of time, our genetics would fall back in line too.
And. The fossil record shows that we've been evolving at a breakneck pace up until now. Eventually our population will stop expanding so fast, and selection will start again in earnest.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Before anyone takes the creationist ideas too seriously (I personally believe them to be nothing but pseudo-science) you should read up on some background.
Nothing disproves evolution more than the fact that creationists' arguments have not evolved with the times are are so weak they could not possibly have survived in a Darwinian world.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
You make the erroneous assumption - common in the 19th Century and among Christian findamentalists - that evolution is progressive and "going somewhere." This is an essential fallacy. Evolutionary processes are immediate, effecting birth rates among the carriers of traits effected by any of many selective processes. Evolution does not progress and the successful breeders in one generation may be the failures in a another genration as fitness landscapes alter through time. The giant panda is a good example of a species isolated on a fitness peak from which it is unlikely to move without becoming extinct. The presence of these "weaknesses" that you say modern medicine is causing means that selective effects have a broader canvas and more traits with which to work. Far from becoming "weak" this fact increases potential human evolutionary adaptibility.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Although I think your logic is flawed, I thank you for posting this. The moderation of your comment is disappointing -- comments like this are exactly the reason I try (unsuccessfully -- rock on, slash!) to turn off negative moderation. Even if your comment were a troll (which it isn't, if your previous posts are a guide), this would still be a worthwhile discussion to be had.
> Harmful mutations far outnumber beneficial
> mutations
No, relatively meaningless mutation far outnumber both of these. Look at the people around you. Most of their differences are minor -- different hair, different complection, some are a little stronger, some shorter, some smarter. Everyone has lots of little, largely meaningless variations. (These can be both recessive or dominant traits.) Relatively rare is the person with a deeply serious genetic variation, good or bad.
> Evolution is impossible as beneficial recessive
> mutations could never have arisen.
This isn't how evolution works. Keep in mind that every population has a good deal of variety in it. When that population is put under stress (say, there's a flood and all the short people die), individuals whose genetic traits give them an advantage for dealing with that specific stress have a better chance of survival.
> Natural selection requires a genetic mutation
> to express itself in order for the selection to
> work
No, no, no. Evolution doesn't take place when an organism inherits some magical mutation, which allows him to eat more, which is somehow magically linked with having more children. Evolution is the result of stress on a large and diverse population -- limited resources, predators, oil spills, et cetera. When that stress occurs, the various weird traits that had always been occuring (different hair, different skin, whatever) give some of those organisms a better chance.
> We have evidence that close relations have
> cumulatively worse of children than average
> partners.
Again, this is a too-shallow analysis of complex systems. Your model (that any one beneficial trait is virtually always accompanied by at least one harmful trait) ignores the way these systems actually behave. Traits are meaningless until stress is put on the population, thus there is little correllation between them.
Anyway, there's a counter-argument; post up what you think its flaws are. Hopefully the moderators will de-lodge their heads from their collective asses, shake their heads vigorously, and mod your post back up.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
This is common knowledge any more. Start with this one.
It focuses mainly on education, but my position is, anyone of reasonable intelligence will not be stupid due to lack of education. They are smart enough to figure out how to avail themselves of educational opportunities despite the socio-economic class of their parents. The reverse, however, is not true, as you point out. A stupid spoiled brat who has wealthy parents will most likely get plenty of the best education available, graduate, and still be stupid.
There is also this one too.We got this thing called the internet. Doesn't take much intelligence to plug in some good keywords and find a whole raft of information on this topic...
btw, why are you so anal about the word "stupid" anyway. Do you prefer a more P.C. term which basically says the same thing?
I used to be a strong proponent of individual responsibility as the answer to all things, until I saw somebody make some seemingly small changes at work that eliminated long-standing problems.
Suddenly I saw the same pattern everywhere. When "most people" have a problem adhering to some rule or behavior, it's almost always because there's something in the environment or the rules that make compliance difficult or impossible.
We definitely see this pattern here. It's easy to say that adults should eat better and get more exercise. It becomes a bit more problematic when you hit the fact that the amount of free time available is much less today than a generation ago - far more hours at work, more hours doing household chores (larger houses and more possessions more than offseting labor-saving devices), etc. It becomes impossible when you hit the practical difficulties of arranging childcare, etc.
The situation is even worse with kids. A generation ago schools offered nutritional, albeit instititutional, cooking. Soda and candy machines were rare. PE classes mandatory, extracurricular sports and scouting common. Today schools have junk food in and outside of cafeterias. Many are eliminating all sports, and even PE class.
Some kids have external resources available... but anyone who expects more than a handful of teenagers to get up 30 minutes early every day so they can run through a calesthenics program before school (assuming they can get time in the shower, etc.) is crazy. This is a program that has to be solved as a society, not wagging a finger at the individual.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken