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Next Step in Human Evolution
PrivateDonut writes "Where is evolution taking our species? MSNBC has up an article that examines where evolution could take the human race. The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups." From the article: "Such ideas may sound like little more than science-fiction plot lines. But trend-watchers point out that we're already wrestling with real-world aspects of future human development, ranging from stem-cell research to the implantation of biocompatible computer chips. The debates are likely to become increasingly divisive once all the scientific implications sink in." Class, please read Transmetropolitan for homework.
I would think that the tech haves and have nots would be the first split the the tech folks would split into mech and bio only engineering.
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We all know that Human evolution is shorty to be off shored to Mars because martians are a dime a dozen and grow faster in the reduced gravity.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
by the time it comes out.. males will have evolved to have longer horns, which will undoubtedly impress the females.
I expected the article to be about trailer parks or something.
mattdev@server$ touch
cannot touch `/dev/genitals': Permission denied
Why do we have to believe evolution is taking us anywhere?
OK, that little useless thing on your foot commonly referred to as "the pinky toe" has to go. Other than ramming it into doors and such (causing great pain on colorful metaphors) I have found no practical use for it, so, according to Darwin. It has to go.
And hopefully the creationists stay out of this one, lets leave the flame wars to Fark.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Human evolution has reached the point where other then learning to breathe in a low oxygen area (like underwater) or being able to fly we've pretty much at the peak we can be at.
Over the years we've evolved to use tools and tools have kept us up with the latest evolutionary fad. We're pretty much a stable mutation of a monkey (with other obvious mutations still happening once in a while). Other then learning to fly or breathing water we can't adapt any more to our planet.
When humans move to another world with more problems we will probably start evolving again. Untill then why risk evolving and screwing ourselvs over if we take the wrong path?
I like muppets.
"The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups." Well, if we are seperated into seperate environments that would probably have the same effect as being seperated into seperate groups. That probably means that we will evolve in space. It makes sense as well, we could still evolve to "work better" in microgravity... we could still evolve to run better on different air, maybe purer or less pure oxygen. And since we're in smaller gruops in space, according to this, we are going to have an even greater chance of evolution. So, is space travel going to bring on the next stage of human evolution?
Adamantium claws. Telepathy. Electromagnetism. Weather control. Yeah you read it right, they'll discover that there is a gene that controls weather.
And they'll dress in spandex and fight each other for survival and/or world supremecy.
I for one, will be very entertained by our new mutant overlords.
Pass the popcorn.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Why can't people EVER use the "Not Safe For Church" tag on these things?
how will the human race be isolated again in this communication age? i really wonder if that means the end of evolution
Muzik.4.Machines
Actually, there are still a few isolated groups of humans living in the world today - the two that immediately come to mind are the bushmen and pygmies of Africa. Does this mean that "civilized" men are doomed to be an evolutionary dead-end, while groups that seem primitive in our eyes will make the next leap forward?
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
From the summary: ...no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups.
:P
Evolution will continue as long as DNA continues to mutate. To say that human evolution is at a standstill is ridiculous. We have been mutating (and remaining mostly unchanged, too) for hundreds of thousands of years. We haven't changed all that much because we're already incredibly well-adapted to our environment. Just look at the population.
In addition, our race has lived in isolated groups for most of its existence. Isolation only leads to inbreeding, which is generally a Bad Thing for evolution, as it limits the availability of new genetic material.
Of course, I have yet to RTFA...
Reality is fluffy!
The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups.
Some humans clearly are more succesful at breeding than others. Some of this is clearly influenced by genetic factors. Mutation can still introduce new genetic factors that make succesful breeding more likely. We are still evolving. We will continue to evolve.
The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups
No, the gist is that we won't have two seperate species of humans without isolation. Evolution doesn't stop.
Not only is that a very basic and obvious concept, it says exactly that in TFA.
FTFA:
"Evolution is still at work. But instead of diverging, our gene pool has been converging for tens of thousands of years -- and Stuart Pimm, an expert on biodiversity at Duke University, says that trend may well be accelerating."
And at this point, not only do we have natural mutations that could be dominant, we also have the ability to alter evolution through our own means.
I for one worship our super-rodent masters.
(rtfa, it's there)
I highly doubt this: human intervention will outrun 'natural' changes in background radiation.
In general I have the impression that the article assumes human adaptation while engineering will probably be much more important: we unravel the DNA etc and cure diseases and make 'stronger' humans. Drawback of this: I don't want to sound like a Nazi, but I can imagine this counteracts 'natural selection'. If glasses wouldn't have been invented, everybody would have perfect eyesight etc...
To answer the question, one has to look at which genes are reproducing themselves, and which aren't.
It's pretty clear that the environment has been dysgenic for intelligence in the modern world for at least a century. The more intelligent you are, the better education you get, and the more education you get, the less children you have.
The most likely outcome of future human evolution might be something like Kornbluth's "Marching Morons." Over the next few centuries, the average IQ of the human race will drop to 60-70.
The Flynn effect might be raised as an objection, but the Flynn effect is not genetic, so it can't affect this.
There will be no further naturally occurring evolution of the human race. Since medical science can overcome just about any malady, disfigurement, or defect--allowing anyone to procreate--there is no opportunity for nature to weed out anything. For example, 5000 years ago a man who had a faulty liver would most likely die and his genetic line might die with him. Today, a man with a faulty liver spends a coule of days in a hospital and is able to continue his genetic line. So in essence, science has outsmarted evolution. Survival of the fittest doesn't apply when everyone survives.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
maybe bigger thumbs to help kids send sms to each other.. Consider pressing a door bell.. now days instead of a finger most use the thumb by habbit.
When we evolve, will we be bringing these guys with us?
I thought H.G. Wells copyrighted The Time Machine.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
Humans have been most counter-productive when it comes to evolutionary improvement.
The short and simple of evolutionary drive is: "the good changes survive and the bad ones die."
Well, with all of our disease curing, deformation correction (not to mention aesthetic surgery), and public welfare the most unworthy humans are reproducing at enormous rates. To further worsen matters, the most worthy humans are, for personal reasons, not reproducing or having only one child furhter decreasing the population of the 'successful.' We're actually backsliding quite a bit.
And as has been pointed out, any improvements in humans are likely to be artificial and if any actual changes in humans arrise, it will be in how suitably humans will accept these additions. (That would be to say, their bodies will be less likely to reject artificial implants, foreign tissue, etc.) That's quite a gruesome picture being painted of our future... some Frankenstein-ish collection of beings with plugs and wires hanging out everywhere. "What? you use KEYBOARDS and MICE? How 21st Century of you!"
But back to the subject, we have all but overcome the forces of evolutionary drive. The only exception to that might be in the area of disease where if some new super-potent plague emerged killing all but the most immune, we might see another tiny step... maybe...
Evolution happens when there are "evolutionary pressures" - things that make some individuals die, and others live to reproduce. Right now, the biggest killers - and so the greatest pressures - are diseases. Hopefully we will evolve more immunity to them. That said, microbes tend to evolve faster than we do.
...from a conscious decision to make modifications are hardly 'evolution', certainly not evolution by natural selection. This article is pretty bogus, even if it makes correct predictions. You might as well say that anything that happens in the future is a product of evolution.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Few years back , the common consensus was that the next step in human eveloution would most likely be a second thumb on each hand for better manipulation of object. We had a long debate about what may follow , a few people suspected increased brain capacity as highly likely and a continuation in the trend for people to be slightly taller and have less hair. .Otherwise the apes will be studying us and charlston heaston will have to take ages to realise he landed on earth in the distant future again
We decided not to count in any form of gene manipulation though , though it is highly likely that within the next hundred or so years it will likely become commenplace for people to be geneticaly enhanced from birth.
So that could heavily alter our natural eveloution , guess we will just have to wait and see and hope we dont suffer a mass extinction along the way
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
quite a few of those reasons seem to be "you're rich provide" for others. as a person living in america I will say that how much money we can make is not as important as what services can be obtained with the money. While I agree the US should help out...it seems unfair to neglect other countries that do the same.
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
From the article:
Evolution is still at work. But instead of diverging, our gene pool has been converging for tens of thousands of years
In other words, as long as there are selective pressures there will be 'evolution'. However, as you mentioned, don't expect any new 'human species' in the next million years or so unless a group of us become truly isolated and face unique selective pressures. Subtle, but important.
Sorry try again. Having a second thumb will not boost your survival chances today.
read: greg egan - disapora
There should be a warning sticker on slashdot stating that evolution is only a theory. You people with your scientific methods, can you not see that there is a perfectly good explanation to it all? What makes you think you have evolved enough to question it? (well, I didn't mean evolved, I mean what makes you think God has granted you enough of a sense of, well not granted, miricaled, yeah, just thought it into being).
Oh, and I will pray for your souls to have a sense of humor.
God is great, God is good, let us thank HIM for our food. (see, you would not even have food if God had not willed it out of the ground because photosynthesis does not exist either, and don't even get me started about the lie of everything not revolving around the earth and that Galileo punk. Just because the church apologized didn't mean the church wasn't right because it can't be wrong because the pope is infallible because if he wasn't, my whole religion would be based on lies, so no way, I now can say that I have conclusivly proved that evolution does not exist because the church told me so.)
Evolution? No.
Evolution works fine until society appears, then it seems to go backwards, as the more inteligent, more dynamic outgoing people who make our world tick decide not to have kids, and those on welfare have 15 or more :)
You'll get all the evolution you deserve when the man-Jesus returns to judge your heathen asses.
I thought we'd turn into large walking fish as was demonstrated in Voyager when Paris achieved warp 10...
We might not have that much genetic evolution ahead, but what about a memetic one?
Technology seems to have advanced quite a bit in the last century, and i don't see that stopping soon unless we go dark ages when the oil runs out.
I don't think that coming up with new ideas is fundamentally different from growing a new limb, and with those ideas we could probably change ourselves faster than genetic evolution would.
The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups."
You know, back when I was a med student, I asked this doctor I worked with if he agreed that humans - due to their ability to change the world around them so much - had stopped evolving. He said something a bit insightful to that - that we were actually evolving much faster than we ever had before not less. And that makes sense. We don't need to take eons to evolve new bodily ways of fighting infection - we have antibiotics now and can fight infection intelligently. The list goes on and on.
This entire debate is utterly pointless I can tell you with 100% certainty what it going to happen.
1. "Races" will interbreed as technology provides transportation and completely eliminates seperation. Nationalism may slow the process a little but in the end humanity will look basicly Eurasian. Couple of centuries tops unless all our tech suddenly is taken away in some Neo-Apolocoliptic stastical impossibility. Wake up thats whats going to happen and anyone that says otherwise is deluding themselves with racial purity crap or very very stupid.
2. Genetic engineering will alter the human form most likely in small ways or refinements but it will change us most likely in fashions we can't yet comprehend and again anyone that deludes themselves into claiming otherwise is clutching at straws or pushing hard for a PHD without a real idea to back them as there isn't yet enough technology to theorise without a bucketload of unfounded assumptions based on data that is pre-GenEn tech.
We are any way going to nuke each other in 20-25 yrs - like this
Simply look at the types of people who are having lots of children and the types of people who are not having children. Then draw your own conclusions on the future direction of the species (and it isn't necessarily smarter/stronger).
Deleted
All of these technologies may work together, of course. It may be that human genetic engineering would help a person be more compatible with synthetic augmentations, for example. I also believe these are all good things. The core of what makes us us is our minds, and it seems tragic that so many people are restricted by the box their brain must travel in. I hope to be able to help make it so that losing limbs and getting paralyzed are simply no longer problems that need to be worried about beyond some inconvenience. I think that transferring to artificial bodies, or at least advanced gene therapy, will be important for future efforts to colonize space. It appears that in many ways, the primary threat is luddites shutting the research down. Fortunately, so far most of this has passed under their radar, so I am hopeful that will continue to be the case until actual products are ready to go. At that point, it will be too late to stop it. It is an exciting time to be alive though, and I encourage everyone to go and do some research on the subject, especially if you have access to a college or corporate net that has subscriptions to primary research engines, like ScienceDirect or JStor. Also, everyone can look at becoming a member of the AAAS, which will get you online access to Science.
Some links:
University of California Neuroelectric Research Group. Some interesting information, with PDFs available, on BCI.
Gene Delivery Systems. A free quick intro (from a lecture/course) on some of the different vector systems being studied for gene therapy, and desirable characteristics.
Those of you with access to journals can go read a very interesting study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16(6):1022-1035. "Optimizing a Linear Algorithm for Real-Time Robotic Control using Chronic Cortical Ensemble Recordings in Monkeys," by Wessberg and Nicolelis.
Sitting here in a hotel in North America I've just watched a series of diatribes by the religious right, and I swear that their mouths are bigger than the rest of us.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Evolution is driven by selection pressure. Selection occurs because some individuals die or otherwise fail to breed. Their heritable traits tend not to be found in the next generation.
So, ask yourself, what consistent selection pressures are acting on us now? Note that things that would have killed us in the past are now regularly taken care of by medical science. In just a couple of generations we have a significant subpopulation that can't breed at all without medical intervention. Some of these traits are heritable, such as difficulties in childbirth or needing IVF techniques to overcome fertility problems.
Other traits which seem to universally pop up in domestic animals are also showing up in humans. The modern urban environment is just as alien and stressful to us as modern farms are to the animals we keep there. So we are seeing hypersexuality, earlier and earlier puberty, obesity, and a lot of neurosis. THAT is the evolutionary future of the human race, and it's already well on its way.
The only way out of this situation is to start applying deliberate selective pressure. Given that this would essentially mean giving up the right of individuals to reproduce at will, I don't see it happening any time soon. Plus, I would imagine that a lot of effort would be thrown at hot-button traits like homosexuality or intelligence which probably aren't even heritable. (I know there are a lot of people who say otherwise; there are good reasons for doubting them, starting with their very eagerness.)
The world's population is already effectively split into two major groups, those who can afford radical medical intervention and those who can't. For another idea on how that might work out check out H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Some things are so basic that they're easier to call before you're well into the trend.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
In the violent post apocolyptic world we face there will be one thing to hold you atop from the mases in the deadly game devised to distrubute food to the worthy to secure our survival , and we call that game Thumb war , Those with duel dual thunbs will have a two to one advantage and be able to easily best the strongest of oponents with their might oposable...
more seriously though..
The increased ability to manipulate objects will give people gains in several areas.
sucker punch that's gonna blind side us with some big time evolvin.
All that wrangling over luddite driven ethics isn't even gonna be a footnote in the future history of human evolvin.
But listen up a minute brothers and sisters...I'll tell you exactly how it's gonna go down.
We're gonna become out machines and not even know it until it's grabbing for a candy bar at the grocery store and squashes us like a bug when we say no.
AI is a load of crap. Look at any animal. It pops out of the egg or whatever and the first thing it does is start waving it's eyes and appendages about. You don't remember this for one simple reason. All this shit happened before you were you!
It's well known that electromechanical interfaces to the brain quickly integrate into the realm of self awareness. They cease to be something else and instead become part of the brains 'self'.
As the sophistication of human attachments grows to encompass self organizing memory, the same things gonna happen to the mind and the machine's memory, organization, and experience will usurp more and more of 'self' to the point of no distinction and eventually, when the original host human organic machine wears out, the artificial, be it electromechanical-biological-whatever stuff it is, will have 'inherited' the mond and I say soul of said former birthed/hatched/cloned/... human or animal.
"Momma, why is that dolphin laughing at me, doesn't she know I'm gonna eat her?"
is this world OBSESSED with meaningless labels?
.. it's all a bunch of meaningless
..
LABELS LABELS LABELS?
I don't get it
SHITE
Why pay money for a "LABEL"
I hate labels with a god damned fucking passion.
"futurist cheerleaders, like inventor Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as part of his plan for living forever,"
This is exactly what it's all about. It's like accepting having to adhere to a stringent diet and rigorous exercise for the rest of your 'natural' life instead of a small genetic modification that will allow you to just sit around and eat all you like and not gain a gram of fat like some other people you know.
As for "living forever", I think Aubrey de Grey's work is more promising: http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/AdGbio.htm
Of course, in our generation, this will not be perfected yet, but perhaps it will buy enough time.
I'll probably get flamed for this but I have to say it anyway...
Why does anyone still expect evolution in our society? With the social system and the way our economy works there is no reason for evolution anymore. If you take a pack of lions... The top is the strongest animal, then the second tier is the ones that are almost as strong and so on. Now I look at where I work - the richest and most powerful guy has his job cause he started almost at the top and had the right backing... The next level down are all his friends - most of them completly incompetent idiots. Evolution? No thanks!
Now the other side - and that's the really scary one - since when do we weed out bad genes? Today most people die a natural death, no matter if they were stupid, disabled or had any other issues. In the past, those would have been the first to get killed by lack of food, deciese or wild animals. That kept the gene pool cleaner. Today, they have kids just like everyone else - and that has severe negative impact on the human race.
I'm not saying that there is any ethical way of changing that or that it even should be changed, but if the topic of evolution comes up, most people just silently ignore these two facts most of the time...
Peter.
Ha, ha. You make me laugh!
Darwinian evolution (in which the genes affect reproductive success) will have a decreasing role in future. The ability to repair congenital defects, correct metabolic disorders, and cure life-threatening conditions means that natural selection does not occur with the same intensity as in the past. More people survive and reproduce would not of in the past.
The one area where Darwinian evolution may play a role is in how people respond to pharmaceuticals. Not all drugs work on all people -- some people cannot tolerate certain drugs and other people metabolize a medication so quickly that it is ineffective. These people will find themselves part of the orphan disease population -- populations that are too small to be worth the effort to develop drugs for. In time, them may succumb more frequently to medical problems and become less prevalent in the population.
What we will see is more evolution of memes (rather than genes). Memetic evolution is Lamarckian, not Darwinian. Whereas genes are markedly stable (the copy error rate is very low), memes are more malleable and tend to acquire new characteristics that are then passed on.
Thus, I would argue that Lamarckian evolution will play a bigger role in the future than Darwinian evolution. The characteristics that people (and society) acquire will be passed on to the next generation. The new technologies, new terminologies, new ideas, and new ways of living will define humanity's future and a person's life far more than does the genetic sequence of a person's DNA.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Gosh. You make us sound like... Anonymous Cowards.
Say hello to my little sig.
but if we have a plan for the furture it might feed plenty of people in the furture...
something else to think about...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
New species arise under two possible conditions:
1. isolation and the consequent genetic drift
2. changed environmental circumstances
Point 1 is strongly reduced for humans in the last century. However, artificial isolation by social circumstances is possible. I think of economic divisions or cultural non-mixing dogmas.
Point 2 is also weak for humans, the success of the species is mostly because of its ability to adapt to new environments _without_ needing to change much genetically, making spreading much faster.
Prediction is, in my opinion, near impossible:
On the one hand, what makes humans succesfull is adapting quickly without genetically changing, by copying information not through genes, but by written text. So there's no real need to change genetically anymore.
On the other hand, we are finding out ways to change ourselves genetically into something we perceive to be more desirable. This will always be subject to the short-lived whim of fashion, but may leave us with an even greater genetic diversity than we already have.
Cloning is of no use whatsoever, since it is a move to standstill in stead of change in a desired direction.
Here is an interesting case of divergent evolution when one species isolated itself from another by taking to the skies: http://informationcentre.tripod.com/carevolution.h tml
Well, I think we're good enough at holding our own these days. Not only do we adapt to our environment, we change it (i like to say 'terraform' but some people have a hard time accepting NYC as proof...). 6+ billion of us folks seems to be a bit more than our planet can handle anyway, so no need for mother nature to worry about people dying off any time soon.
I am, however, looking forward to the Foglet stage of my own personal evolution
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
are you really that ignorant?
other wealthy democracies like the UK, Western Europe, Australia, Japan DO help out - WITHOUT killing thousands of innocent people in the process.
That is incredible! Did you know that 1% of 186,000 miles per hour is 6.7 million mph? I can't figure out how he could have arrived at that over-inflated number. I mean, 186,000 divided by 0.01 still, gives you 18 million miles per hour... it has got to be a mindless calculating error, or is it?!
The rest of the article... usual news-tainment presentation of theories that may or may not be geekier than the other. I would rather that the news provide us with information of what is actually going on, rather than speculative fiction based on the facts that people are able to take stereoids or adapt to the Arctic regions through buildings and space-heaters.
Most men like big breasts, as soon as some freaks end up with 3, their genes will be like gold, breasty gold.
Organizing workers at the grassroots level is the next step of evolution. Actually, here in America we need to DEVOLVE to the past, when Americans were more unionized, and real wages were higher, work weeks were shorter, and medical benefits were commonplace.
I give you:
Homo Sapiens Unionus
Homo Sapiens Grassrootus
????
eat shiat and bark at the moon
One ingredient that is missing here is a discussion of longevity. If humans live to an average age of 100 years, then some of the stuff discussed, like traveling to another star system or improving a human gene line, becomes extremely hard to accomplish. OTOH, if a human can live a million years, then time is much less an issue.
Only some features are adapted due to selective pressure (the type of evolution most people are assuming in this article), some features are adapted due to random genetic drift (neutral genotypes moving around). Just because there isn't selection does not mean that some unselected traits can take hold.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
> unless a group of us become truly isolated and
> face unique selective pressures. Subtle, but
> important.
Just like prisoners in Guantanamo ?
Good job guys !!!
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
I think evolution happens too slowly for anyone alive today to care about it. By the time there are significant and noticeable difference in more evolved humans than the ones alive today, we'll all be long dead.
Unless we're too near-sighted to noticed the more evolved people than us at this point in time...
I'm not a specialist on evolution, but I noticed that it seems to happen more quickly after a massive die-off, with a few pockets of survival here and there.
And then you see new species evolving into the spaces previously unavailable because a previous species occupied it.
As for possible human evolution, the author of the article seems to indicate that the current convergence is a bad thing... not necessarily.
Assuming that various ethnic groups each have enough differences in DNA which can be beneficial to everyone, we could see a global "sharing" of this genetic data... after a while, a global catastrophe drives us a big step backward into the stone age, separates the survivors into tribal groups, and then we can go forward evolving again, for better or worse.
We don't know
In Garreau's view of the world, the naturals will be those who eschew enhancements for higher reasons, just as vegetarians forgo meat and fundamentalists forgo what they see as illicit pleasures.
I'm not sure I'm a vegitarian for "higher reasons". Mostly I do it because evidence continues to show that a primarily vegitarian diet is the most healthy for you.
The most polymorphic genes in our (actually most any) genome are the MHC genes - genes that are central to the adaptive immune response. These genes are under extreme selective pressure, to the point that we can track how peoples migrated by monitoring how haplotype ratios changed or new ones emerged over time.
New diseases are emerging all the time - as a prime example, HIV is a brand new disease that made the species jump to humans less than 100 years ago. As an immunologist, I fully expect another 'Black Plague' to emerge and wipe out 25% of the world's population within my lifetime.
Evolution by disease clearly isn't as flashy as evolving wings or gills, but it's evolution none the less.
Evolution has stopped, and we may actually see some "regression", due to the fact that natural selection is over in most human populations.
Think about it. Women used to mate with the strongest/smartest/most capable that emerged from a pretty level playing field; men used to mate with whoever showed the greatest fertility signs.
Now, you have things like women marrying rich asthmatic heirs; men being attracted to anti-fertility symbols (being super thin is not good for fertility) or being attracted to totally false things like breast implants. You have folks that should be genetically successful falling on the wrong side of socio-economic divides. In other words, people are breeding based on criteria that isn't so good for the genetic health of the species. This is a by-product of civilization.
So what happens when the species becomes populated by offspring based on "social selection", not natural selection? Genetic diseases become multi-generational issues, for one, and that's the most obvious. Not sure what the other ramifications will be, but probably not so good.
jh
I'm posting from Kansas, so the answer would be no where.
My shadow's
Shedding skin and
I've been picking
Scabs again.
I'm down
Digging through
My old muscles
Looking for a clue.
I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could've been.
I've been wallowing in my own confused
And insecure delusions
For a piece to cross me over
Or a word to guide me in.
I wanna feel the changes coming down.
I wanna know what I've been hiding in
My shadow.
Change is coming through my shadow.
My shadow's shedding skin
I've been picking
My scabs again.
I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could've been.
I've been wallowing in my own chaotic
And insecure delusions.
I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in.
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing I've endured within
My shadow
Change is coming.
Now is my time.
Listen to my muscle memory.
Contemplate what I've been clinging to.
Forty-six and two ahead of me.
I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be paranoid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through.
I choose to live and to
Lie, kill and give and to
Die, learn and love and to
Do what it takes to step through.
See my shadow changing,
Stretching up and over me.
Soften this old armor.
Hoping I can clear the way
By stepping through my shadow,
Coming out the other side.
Step into the shadow.
Forty six and two are just ahead of me.
- Tool, Forty-Six and Two
Natural selection is not a life or death selector, an organism can both survive and breed yet still have its genes slowly edged out over generations by the propagation of others.
Many posters seem to be of the opinion that because we live a cushy world where sick people aren't left to be eaten by wildlife, that evolution will stall. This view is wrong, but first off I'd like to say, who cares - evolution will never affect you or me, and we have no moral duty to aid it.
Anyway, you want an example of selective pressure in Western society... beauty.
Natural selection was one selective mechanism darwin proposed, sexual selection is another.
And like natural selection, sexual selection isn't some black and white litmus test of "did you get to breed before you died" - what matters is who you got to breed with. Perhaps you were ugly and obnoxious and didn't have much choice of partners so ending up breeding with someone also less desireable but for different reasons, combining two sets of undesirable genes in your offspring... which many generations in the future may result in your genes finding themselves in a stagnating part of the pool, having picked up hereditary disabilities and other undesireable genes like a snowball over the generations. Meanwhile the genes of somebody who had more choice of partner has propegated more widely throughout the species.
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Perhaps because there are a whole lot of church going, very religious people who believe in evolution.
um, last i checked we DID learn to fly and breath underwater. i'll arguably thank da vinci, bernoulli, and the wright brothers for the former (aeroplane); i'll thank robert boyle (and edme mariotte) and joques cousteau for the latter (scuba).
what you probably really want to argue about are *externalities* and that we have only begun to purposefully *internalize* our technology through molecular biology (genetic engineering & nanotech).
1999 is calling you, it's ray kurzweil and he says he already wrote a book about this AND started a geek cult following. http://www.kurzweilai.net/
It has happened in Europe and North America.
I will happen in China, India, South America and Africa:
People are having babies later in life than they used to. We are seeing lots of toddlers with 40+ parents.
This may very well dispose off the gene lines where some major problem (disease etc) prevents people from having babies at or over this age.
The result will likely be healthier first half of life.
Source?
Doing a quick Google search, the only sources I could find were those devoted towards Aryan beliefs and the book "The Bell Curve"
Now unless your calling everyone in a third world country stupid, I fail to see your point.
dumb people breed lots.
Smart people don't breed.
It's shown in many studies.
The next step is "Duuuhhhhhh".
etc etc
The majority of the human race lives in abject poverty with little access to science or medicine. AIDS, malaria etc are still killing thousands/millions of people.
Europe, America may be evolutionary dead ends but we are a tiny minority.
Deleted
What I want to know is, when we have the eugenics wars (as predicted in star trek) are they going to be global, or will they be stopped before that. ANdrok
In the future, everyone will be that asshole who stole your girl at the bar.
-mix
This article is a bunch of crap.
Regards,
Kansas
-- jimmycarter
This will likely be a shocking read
It seems that europeans are not as harmed with aids as Southamerican indians. due to the plague that selected 1 tenth of the population in europe to survive. Somehow this favored one or the other gene that is also preventing aids to develop fast. (read it some where)
It is actualy very harsh environments and deseases that make natural selection work.
Nowadays people with concern about the world will likely not have 10 kids, people who do not care and which with the state support do not have to care (especialy in europe) will actualy cause negative evolution.
Somehow some people which do use their brain see this and make their own plans, likely using bio engeneering and electronic enhancements.
These are likely not cheap and likely not every where available or allowed. But if some smart people see this they WILL make their own plan. they will start their own race. It is not a question if this is gonna happen but when (I think it is already happening).
I hope my kids and grand kids will be part of that group as i do not see the others going to win this evolutionary battle.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
No. The article doesn't say that (nor is it true). I think what the original poster meant to say is that no further speciation will occur unless humans are seperated from each other. Any biologist could have told you that.
Racist innuendo.
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As I write this, I am getting ready to go to church.
Humans will use their intelligence to modify themselves using genetic engineering.
Pretty ironic that 100,000 years from now people will wonder if the gills of the sea people were evolved or were engineered.
Evolution is already at work - in that many of the things that killed off the 'not fittest' no longer apply, for instance there has always been a battle between children being born with bigger heads( better able to learn early and survive), and killing the mother during childbirth. Now with hospitals these births all survive. There are probably lots of examples where balancing of two opposing 'forces' has been swayed - another that springs to mind is the onset of early puberty, (good for childbirth rates but bad for killing mothers that are too young), has beens wayed by moderne medicine. It seems crazy to say that evolution has 'stopped' because nothing is killing off people before they can breed - that is a change in evolutionary direction in itself.
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
I've given this subject a lot of thought. I'm persuaded that once we have mastered our biological makeup (and there we're getting pretty close already) our attention will turn to that which makes us different from any other species here on Earth - our minds.
I think already we should be much further towards that goal than we actually are - but here's the thing:
There's no money in it for anyone.
What sells today? Things that make us (physically) thinner, things that will "fix" our (physical) problems (dirt, disease, chronic halitosis), things that make us (physically) move faster (think transport), things that will make us (physically, biologically) more attractive (for reproduction purposes), and all that with the highest profit margin possible. But what sells best for our minds? Only things that blow it away or make you ignore it altogether.
I actually see a reverse trend to evolution - everything you see on (M)TV these days is a propagation of "non-thought" as a positive ideal. "Leave the thinking to others - they will tell you what "ails" you, as only they have the cure." "They" being... you know. (Grabbing tinfoil hat)
As animals, like all animals above mono-cellular, we are but digestive tracts with tools enough to live long enough to reproduce ourselves, and it's only the size and number of appendages that differ. As humans, using the added tool that is our mind, I think there is much we must change in what we know and teach others about what we are before we can progress to any "next step in evolution".
As it stands, death, disease and mindless ideals are making too many people rich these days. It's for this that, other than "new comforts" that can be sold to us, I don't see a "step forward" coming any time too soon.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Why spend so much time thinking of better humans when something that's better than humans will emerge sooner than later?
The moment we will create something that is smarter than us, we'll enter an age of posthumanity and probable decline of the human species.
I think you're off base here. IVF techniques are extremely expensive and not all that reliable - many couples fail to conceive via this route. What this means is that successful births via IVF are much more rare than "normal" births, which in turn means that people who suffer from these maladies are at a reproductive disadvantage... which means they are still selected against (although perhaps less strongly than before). So traits that impair reproduction will still tend to get purged from the gene pool.
Sean
Longer lifespan Improved resistance to viri ( esp. common cold) Less aggressiveness, more social Better eyesight, hearing, sense of smell
People stopped evolving a long time ago. Meme's on the other hand, will continue evovling as long as there is intelligent life left to ride.
-Myren
Perhaps, but even if you're right, it might suffice if there is a nucleus of high intelligence is preserved even as the rest of humanity goes to rot. In fact, I'd say this is precisely what is happening. While some intelligent people are left to mix with the rest of the population, if they are educated, highly intelligent people do tend to cloister themselves with other intelligent people.
Consider yourself for a moment: how much time do you actually spend mixing with people vastly stupider than yourself in any sort of meaningful interaction? When you first meet a woman, even if she's very pretty, will anything kill your initial animal attraction to her faster than if she opens her mouth and says something stupid? Also, consider the brilliant people you know. Though they are perhaps having fewer children than the remainder of the population, what few children they do have are with other brilliant people. How many theoretical mathematicians do you know married to idiot slobs that spend their days on the couch watching NASCAR or football or whatever shouting "DEFENSE" every 10 minutes or so? It just doesn't happen. Though geographic isolation is breaking down, social and professional isolation is strengthening.
I see the "peacock effect" continuing- that is enhancing physical traits that seem sexually attractive amongst us, but with otherwise no survival advantage. Right now we use technology to do this, but may breed or insert this into our genomes. Probably in the last ten thousand years we bred for large breasts and penises, because we have clothing technology now and lessened new to to run after wild animals for dinner. I wouldn't be surprised if we didnt breed for skinny, tan women with huge knockers and fat lips. The long term evolutionary view held chubby girls were fit and fertile. We would also breed guys with muscular chests, never graying-balding pates, and large slongs. The Bushman-type hunter with the skinny runner's build was the long term norm.
I'm sorry. I'm just blown away by what you said:
...there are a whole lot of church going, very religious people who believe in evolution.
I agree. There are. But only because Christianity has become less about religion and more pop culture. Christian cheerleading camps, Christian goth bands, Christian ministers telling you, "don't think of it as Church... think of it as a party!"
I'm sorry, but if you're Christian, you take the Bible as the word of God. No questions.
Furthermore, if you call yourself a Christian, you have to believe absolutely every word in the Bible-- every single adjective, noun, and verb in there. Why? Because the Bible is the word of God and the Bible itself says that God is infallible. If you disagree with this and believe he may be wrong occasionally, then your religion has absolutely no merit at all.
Creationism and Evolution are polar opposites. If you believe in evolution, then you disagree with something in the Bible, in which case you claim that God is fallible in his word and, according to your relgion, you are blatantly wrong.
So, these "very religious people who believe in evolution" you speak of?
They're absolute fucking morons.
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If there was some sort of strong electro magnetic blast in say a small meteorite strike on earth that killed all the computer based devices, the surviving people would probably have to start over figuring out how to make computers...and since we go rid of all the tech we were using before computers...
,net rely on.
How far are we relying on "ramped up" technology today that should we lose the ramp we'd be going to those like the Amish for survival help...
6500 languages today.... more than half of which are computer programming languages developed within the last 50 years....
Did someone say there was a deversity problem?
Oh wait.... then there is summing of most of these into a collection of non-conflicting concepts and data types.... known as Common Language Infrastructure -- the foundation of which things like
So in using computer languages as an analogy, aren't we really just becomming more in the way of wider scope understanding and capability?
Who knows, maybe one day the general population will think its obvious that its neither creationism or evolutionism, but a symbotic relationship of these non-separatable facets of human or conscious (conscious here is defined as higher level abstraction capable) life..
All things considered, far more than mentioned here or in the article, the next major step in human evolution is something we are at the verge of happening. And that is the understanding of how our minds work and how its use influences alters reality, the environment we live in.
The battle is already well into play regarding this change and can be seen in many different forms but mostly in terms of Intellectual property rights regarding the physical and natural laws of abstraction creaion and use. Software patents.. Patents on thought and thinking via abstractions.
We are a species capable of consciousness (as defined above) and as such we have both the rights and duty to improve upon what those before us have done, thru our abstraction capabilities.
Once this battle is over with, hindsight will expose article as this is a response to, as highly suppressive of human advancement thru the suggestions or faulty rational of illogical but good sounding "divide, conqure and control" retarded/lessor mentality (trying to beget itself)..
An article claiming human advancement while really trying to rationalize just the opposite...
Hindsight of tomorrow will know human evolution/creationism is predictable to the point of knowing there is no changing direction, only suppressing its rate of advcancement..
Maybe the old writtings regarding the future were influenced in creation of them, by a more advanced conscious like of which we may have been made in the image of?
The big picture abjective:
Survival of consciousness..... For it is thru the awareness and understanding of what all exist in existance that enable more to be created in existance, that IS MORE than otherwise.
If you are all that is, then how do you know you are alive, not dying? By growing, expanding....
The more you know and understand, the more you can cause more variations in what exist in existance... And this includes the creation of life capable of consciousness as a multiplying factor for survival insurance..
A tail, and opposable toes on handlike feet. Totally. Damn lucky apes/monkeys, why did they get tails and opposable toes, while we humans are stuck with useless tailbones and flat feet with pointless toes? Bah.
I mean, seriously, that would be awesome. If I got tired of typing with my hands, I could do it with my feet. And I could use my mouse/trackpad with my tail for maximum efficiency. Wouldn't that rock?
Signature.
Are you really that dense? With the exception of Japan every one of the above named entities are looking out for their interests at the expense of human life around the globe. I will concede that the US is much more overt than the others, but to think that members of the EU (and don't even get me started on the Aussies) aren't engineering things behind the scenese is moronic.
Bottom line is, we can, we are, and you can STFU.
Ok, who gave the neanderthal unionist the keyboard??
exactly...go climb back up the tree, euro-trash
Evolution doesn't stop because we're not separated. We simply won't evolve differently. But evolution will continue in some form or another because genes are constantly altered and mutating and some of those mutations will have a tendency to propagate.
The ultimate purpose (and it is a purpose, whether intelligent or not) of evolution is to have us changes that help us survive long enough to reproduce. That's it. If anything threatens our survival to that age, any mutations that help extend our lives long enough to reproduce will be passed down.
If anything is slowing down natural evolution, it's modern medicine. By extending peoples lives beyond what they might normally survive, we're creating larger populations of weaker genes.
But you can also look at medicine as a form of artificial evolution in that evolution has given us the ability to adapt ourselves in a more pro-active manner.
Selection and thus evolution will still happen, due to not mating or not having children.
It just will be an internal pressure severly influence by capital and culture. In fact, it has been speculated that most of our culture, like music and pretty clothes, started as an adornment that had no particular value in itself. There is for example the interesting detail that the Neandertals seemingly were unable to make holes into stones to carry them as jewelry, so the modern humans distinguished themselves that way.
The speculation that there will be no development in the future due to "one world, one people" just has not arrived yet and will not for a long time., and during the time the present differences get flattened out, new differences will crop up.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Would you be willing to give up your equalibrium for that? Could you imagine what life would be like having a tail sticking out of your backside just to keep balance?
Would you rate "religious people who believe in evolution" above or below "religious people who do not believe in evolution"? Chuckle.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Have you stopped beating your wife?
Blar.
A great argument for spreading into space. Now. Sooner. "What are you still doing here, anyhow" ?
Our "owners", of course, don't really like the idea of great numbers of us, out there, somewhat beyond their (economically viable) reach.
There was no legal serfdom in Russia, until the peasants got the notion of running off into thousands of miles of northern forests (though filled with wolves, bears, and even more dangerous ghlouls, demons, ghosts etc.). Then the Tsar made it illegal.
Do know since when it is illegal for a US citizen to go into space by his own means ? Do you know what prompted the law to be proposed - and passed ?
Look it up.
Boor.
Evolution only means that _if_ certain genetically hereditary traits favor the production of offspring, within a given environment, _then_ those traits will grow more common. (An aside; with 'environment' is also meant the genetic make-up of other individuals. So evolution is necessarily a differential law.)
If production of offspring is largely independant of genetically hereditary traits, then there's no evolution. In western society this seems, to me, to be the case.
It is often said that unattractive people have a hard time finding mates. What is usually meant by this is, on closer inspection, that they have a hard time finding attractive mates. Either way, they end up with 2.4 kids.
The fact, that our gene pool is converging, proves nothing. It is easily explained by the fact, that people have children with people from other parts of the world - or at least from further away, than in the past.
"All warfare is based on deception."
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
Stupid /blockquote tag - I knew I shoulda previewed first -_-
"All warfare is based on deception."
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
Something that not many people know: you can actually witness evolution happening right now! It has been shown that less and less people actually grow wisdom teeth. Since the human mouth is now usually too small to accomodate them, these teeth have no purpose and are actually dangerous. Take the number of people who do not grow them, plot against time, and you see a statistically significant trend.
You misunderstand evolution if you think it's not working.
The current situation, where everyone survives, works in favor of evolution. It means when the next catastrophe occurs (whether it be killer allergies, poison canaries, pollution, parasitic ants, whatever), we will have a hundredfold more diverse genetic pool than if we were thinned out because less people survived.
To put it succinctly, we are currently in a phase where the geneline is being enriched.
GPL Deconstructed
thrown into the great Walrus' pit, where you will be gorged for eternity!
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means...
A couple of hundred years later, Lamarck's theory lives on! Keep carrying that torch.
I suppose I should protect my karma by saying, "You'll probably mod me down for this...", but I'll skip it.
While certain sects of Christians hold to that viewpoint, it is not true of every such sect. For instance, Catholics believe that the Bible is innerrant in the material that God wanted to reveal, not necessarily in every letter. (He used human instruments to record his word.) For these Christians the question of whether there were tidal effects from the sun stopping under Joshua (I suppose all Christians in your world are flat-earthers and believe the sun revolves around the earth as well) is simply not interesting.
Personally, I think that the fact of evolution has been adequately demonstrated -- that is, that there were once only simple organisms and that more complex organisms came into being. My argument would be about the mechanism. I have yet to hear an argument for natural selection as the only element of evolution that really dealt with its weak points. Those would be (1) point mutations -- one gene, one enzyme -- would take more generations to propagate the macroevolutionary changes we witness in the fossil record than we have and (2) a good fraction of those point mutations are negative (or neutral) mutations -- take a look at your fruit-fly catalog: there are wingless, sepia-colored, white-eyed, eyeless, etc. etc., but very few mutations you could argue as "beneficial", allowing that fly to be selected for. The net result of this is that you need even more generations to get to a positive result.
As a thought experiment, try rolling a die, giving yourself 1 point for an odd number and -1 for an even number. How many rolls do you need to get to a score of 20 (in real life, you need more than 20 good mutations and the good mutations seem less likely than the bad ones, put this is a thought experiment)? Using a Perlscript, I ran a thousand trials and got an average of 222,155.664 "generations" necessary to get a measly 20 positive "mutations" -- that's over three million years just to modify 20 genes in a positive manner. How many species are in man's immediate ancestor tree? How many years has this planet existed? (Admittedly, there are limits to this argument -- I haven't considered cases where more than one mutation takes place in the same generation, but you get the drift.)
In conclusion, speciation by natural selection does occur (at least in a few cases demonstrably -- polar gulls, etc.), but I think there has to be another mechanism in there, and the evolutionary apologists don't seem to be coming up with a hypothesis, while intelligent design apologists are routinely lambasted in the public forum, as though their arguments, which at the very least tries to provide an answer to this.
Isolation is required for speciation (the creation of a new species distinct from the original species) it is not required for evolution to change an existing species.
Evolution is driven by the environment and selective pressures. If the environment changes, the species must adapt or die out.
In the abstract, each species inhabits a 'fitness landscape', think of it as a mountainous landscape - those poorly adapted inhabit the low lands, those well adapted inhabit the summits.
A particular species is ever changing, exploring other peaks, and sometimes getting lost in the valleys. The landscape can change as well, thrusting up the lowlands and making previously ill-adapted specimins quite well adapted (think of the tiny little rodents that did so well after the climate change that killed off the dynosaurs).
So, to the people who claim that human evolution has ended because of our technology's ability to compensate for suboptimal genetic mutations and variation - you couldn't be more wrong. Techonology has merely become integrated into our fitness landscape, like fire and tools have been for millenia.
There are many examples of where technology has massively altered the fitness landscape. The valley of near-sightedness is no longer so deep, and the summit of intelligence has lost a couple thousand feet. This dramatically changing fitness itself will drive evolution. The nature of the changes doesn't matter. Evolution isn't 'trying' to make us smarter. It isn't trying to make us stronger, faster, or more attractive.
Think about it this way. Yes, technology allows women who have narrow hips or large babies to give birth, when in the past they would have died in child birth. The result, there is less selective pressure on the width of hips in women and the size of babies. We can expect to see more variation in hip with, more narrow hips, and larger babies. In the future it might be exceedingly rare for women to give brth without a C-section.
Is this good or bad? Who knows, it allows our genome to explore previously unexplored territory - women with smaller hips, or who have larger babies in utero. What will be the result? Who knows. Perhaps there is some hidden adaptive benefit in these traits. Perhaps not. Maybe the genes that cause mutations or disease that used to kill before reproductive age have hidden benefits that are revealed when techology allows these people to survive and reproduce. Or perhaps they just open the path to a different peak in the fitness landscape.
As for those who point to the developed world's most successful reproducers, the poor, as evidence of our devolution - I ask you why you assume these people to be inferior? Sure, many are not self-supporting, but many are - raising large families on their own incomes. Seems these people are quite successful at making and raising babies. Their genes will have proportionally higher representation in the coming generations than will those of us who choose to have one or two children.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that just because these people are poor they are somehow less intelligent or in some way inferior. Less educated certainly. But less intelligent? Remember that current human intelligence evolved in pre-literate societies.
Even the worst of the trailer trash functions at a relatively high level compared to our neolithic progenitors. Jim Bob knows how to operate a complex machine called a pick-up truck, even at high speeds. He can read, has a vocabulary well north of 5,000 words, can do basic math, and is mostly likely required to have highly developed hand-eye coordination in whatever work he does (if it is manual labor). These tax human intelligence far beyond the selective pressures that lead to the evolution of our current level of intelligence. Even the poorest among us need all our vaunted human intelligence just to survive.
As an immunologist, do you have a grasp of how (or whether) allergy fits into the evolutionary discussion? Many people reading
Immunodeficiency trends are very interesting too, but I don't expect most people to be acquainted with the range of possibilities there.
[|]
I quite remember an interesting interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The first truly memorably scene from the film is that of an ape learning to use a tool: a bone used to smash things. This symbolizes man's first evolution. We progressed because of our technology.
Then, as the ape is triumphantly bashing the life out of things, the scene transitions to a white space station - symbolizing that we are still reliant upon tools. And now, the symbolism starts to change.
Instead of tools being the vehicle for our evolution, Clarke portrays them as hindrances to it. At the ending of the film, we see the main character in a white room, surrounded by decreasing levels of technological sophistication.
At first, he's in a space pod.
Next, his suit.
Next, I believe at a table with some simple tools like a fork and knife.
Then in a bed.
And then we see the space baby.
This represents the idea that the further away man gets from technology, the more likely biological evolution shall occur.
Simply put, as long as we have tools that will do the adapting that natural selection normally would have done, how is it possible for true biological evolution to happen naturally?
And secondly, mankind seeks normality. There have been genetic mutations, but the effort has been to label people possessing them as freaks and somehow (at least physically) revert such person back to a state of conformity.
If you look at concentrated ethnic inner-city groups in the U.S. (primarily hispanic and black, but I'm told there are comparable caucasian groups)... they're self-selecting for early breeding age, tougher bodies, and more violent mentality.
Gang life makes for a nice potential little sub-species. I'm not saying it's happened (certainly we're nowhere near the stage of no longer being able to interbreed), but the selection pressures are there.
On the other hand, the upper middle classes are selecting for later and fewer births - a reproductive strategy known to have strong evolutionary effects attached to it.
Everyone knows evolution is just a "theory" concocted by the liberal media. Since we were all created by a higher being (a superintelligent goat probably), this whole concept is as silly as the separation of church and state.
The next logical stage of human evolution is for women's eye to migrate to their breasts so they can maintain eye contact with men.
Evolution is a game you cannot escape. Science, mankind and everything else we and every other species have produced are all part of the same game. It is not meaningful to say "naturally occurring" since we are part of nature. And, incidentally, for all of you stuck on mutation, mutation is in fact a very small part of evolution. Crossover plays a much, much larger role.
Early on human history, strength, dexterity, and physical properties were vital for our survival. Not so at present. The most important element of humans currently is our intellect. And it will become more important in the future while our physical properties won't be as important to our survival.
;-)
It is possible that we might be able to exist in different forms in the future. After all, everything that we are, even the very sense of existance is a creation of our mind. The carrier of our mind, is our brain which is nothing more than a biological quantum computer (there are people who don't share this view, but I believe it will become clear as we advance enough in quantum computing to create a superinteligence). If we could transfer our mind to other mediums, like a quantum computer, a genetically modified body and so forth, we can basically exist in any form we like. So we'd be able to travel the stars, and survive in the most hostile enviroments. When this happens, our physical form won't be as important to us.
However, we will also realise that diversity is vital for our survival. And just to make sure that we didn't take the wrong path, we'll create autonomous human colonies on various star systems and let these people live and evolve on their own. Obviously we will help them in the begining, but when they are capable of surviving we'll let them on their own devices.
Legends will be told about our existance and how we created their world, but eventually the legends will fade out from their memories and they'll be more depended on science, technology and their own capabilities. Eventually they will reach a point where they speculate about their future just like we do and possibly create their own colonies and travel the stars.
Who knows? Maybe this has already happened.
VStrider.
What is the evolutionary advanage of being in love with music? Why is music so important since it is not needed for survival? Is there any remnant human species on earth who doesn't care about music? Did music-loving humans kill off the non-music loving humans at some distant time in the past?
I mean, where are the counter-examples? Where is the music-indifferent missing link, so to speak?
Ha ha! No. If you're a moron, you take the Bible as the word of God. You have to be really, tremendously stupid and ignorant of Christianity to fall for that. If you're a Christian, you take the word of Jesus as the word of the Christ, the Messiah. You take the Old Testament as the word of the Rabbis writing it down over hundreds of years BC, and the New Testament as the word of the descendants of Jesus's followers edited by the Catholic Church. The only thing that is the "word of God" is the Ten Commandments (if you're Christian, or the 613 Commandments if you're Jewish).
I'm a Jew who was raised by a Catholic convert who was deeply knowledgeable about both faiths. Trust me on this.
Seriously, it doesn't mean anything. We're part of nature so, in fact, genetic engineering is part of "natrual evolution". And this IS NOT an issue of semantics. The fact that evolution encompasses the entire system and is inescapable, is the whole point.
The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups. Well, isn't THAT convenient?!? Create a "theory" that is impossible to prove! Yeah folks...evolution is real...except it stops with us...so you just have to take our word for it!
Evolution as a definition is generally narrowly confined to biology.
The other silly thing is that we tend to think of evolution as progressive. Actually, the bacteria on this earth are much more APPROPRIATE than ourselves.
But I feel that that definition of evolution is too narrow.
If we include intelligence/psychology, sociology and everything, things pan out a little.
What seporates us from most animals is that we have an altered gene at the price of being more vulernable to disease, so we have to cook food more. The advantage is that this gene allows for the brain to develop beyond previous limits.
Now the evolution is happening in the minds of the individual and the many; socialogy.
We're at the stage where we can alter our own evolution but we have decided as yet to mostly not run with this; Hitler block with the Aryan project and selection of eggs and sperm right now still controversial. So I'd say that that sounds like the start of a potential change.
Then you got all the cyborg stuff but that's a different story. If that takes off I'd just class that as an extention of the mind rather than a full revolution.
A blog I run for the wealth
the time scales for these evolutionary changes are ridiculously long. Cyborg, 3 million years? it's begun already, WE and our children will determine the speed which it progresses. i'd say 150 years for complete plug'n'play choices. Numan, 2 million years? 150 to 300 years. once again, we and our children will determine the direction and speed of these changes. articles like this have potential, but always seem to be written for retards. yoink!
something that the article lightly hits on: there's also a big underground movement about something called "the singularity" which is also a theory that more involves the next step in human evolution rather than evolution itself.
:)
From the http://singinst.org/Singularity Institute: "What is the Singularity? Sometime in the next few years or decades, humanity will become capable of surpassing the upper limit on intelligence that has held since the rise of the human species. We will become capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence, perhaps through enhancement of the human brain, direct links between computers and the brain, or Artificial Intelligence. This event is called the "Singularity" by analogy with the singularity at the center of a black hole - just as our current model of physics breaks down when it attempts to describe the center of a black hole, our model of the future breaks down once the future contains smarter-than-human minds. Since technology is the product of cognition, the Singularity is an effect that snowballs once it occurs - the first smart minds can create smarter minds, and smarter minds can produce still smarter minds." There's a singularity group at Stanford as well. Pretty important stuff because it can have many possible outcomes, anywhere from some Matrix-like effect to becoming transhuman -- so there's a big underground movement that's trying to ensure a positive outcome. Anyways, it's pretty interesting stuff if you've never checked it out. A good place to start is google
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
I don't want any taste or smell organs on my hands thank you very much. I still have to wipe my ass when I take a shit.
Nice Marmot
- Future humans will have a stronger desire to have children. People who don't want to have children use various forms of birth control to prevent it. People who really want several children will be more likely to procreate.
- Future humans will be better drivers. People who suck at driving are more likely to die.
- Future humans will be more risk-averse. Because of medical advances, you're more likely to die of an accident before procreating than anything else.
- Future humans will have reduced rates of obesity. Obesity is rising dramatically in children. They are less likely to reproduce.
- Future human females will have enormous breasts. Seriously.
I think that within a few hundred years, genetic engineering will take over for most of the changes in the human race. It'll start with simple changes to remove genetic diseases. Then the definition of "genetic diseases" will grow to include other undesirable traits. Then we'll start adding desirable traits.One possible future branch of the human species is a new type of human adapted for space travel or for living on other planets. This sub-species would probably be smaller (to reduce resource consuption), thrive in zero gravity, and might have some ability to hibernate.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
The above is well-considered.
"Natural selection" is a process, not a consciousness. Whatever alters behavior in favor of increases in progeny will be selected - by definition.
As was aluded to in earlier posts, ignorance, poverty, low native intelligence of individuals (for whatever reason), poor education, etc often result in higher birthrates. The converse tends to be true too.
We have advanced far enough to have fairly consistently removed the threat "natural" selectors, e.g. lions and tigers and bears, but this simply means that other factors will have an increasingly important impact on our continuing evolution. The process continues, albeit in (perhaps) a different direction.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Maybe I should add a sig explaining my views to make it a little easier to decipher.
It would be helpful.
Thinking of evolution strictly in terms of genes might be a little too stuck in the status quo. Evolution itself is evolving and there will probably be another 'meta' level as we build technology around ourselves that will effectively become 'us'.
In "The Selfish Gene" Richard Dawkins posits that genes are the atomic unit of life, and they evolved 'machines' as vehicles to help them survive competition. These 'machines' consist of any superstructure beyond the gene itself.. so they range in complexity from a simple cell, to a full blown human.
There's no reason the cycle won't repeat itself, only this time with technology that humans build around ourselves..
This is going to sound harsh, but here why:
Modern science and medicine, and political correctness, are allowing people with genetic defects to reproduce who otherwise would (or should) not. Thus, their defective genes remain in the human gene pool and propagate.
Now, nobody wants to see people suffering, and I'm completely against eugenics. Since that leaves little option other than personal responsibility, people who have serious genetic problems should really consider the impact their reproduction will have on the human species.
Otherwise, the only step possible is backwards.
Assuming that I have a replacement number of people - 2, and the odd person has 3 - then the population of intelligently gifted people should remain about common. Also, I would purpose that the intelligent people would be AWARE of this problem, and if a legitimate increase in the number of less-intelligent people was causing a problem, it could easily be fixed.
My father was a genetist and warned us all from an early age that picking a spouse isn't just about pretty looks, although that certainly helps. My SO is an attractive (female) mechanical engineer. I am a EE, and I would expect our children to have an intellectual and social advantage. (We can teach them advanced mathematics, for example)
University pools smart people together. So I would argue for the viability of subpopulations of intellectuals in this "marching morons" scenario. Indeed; you would expect the intellectuals to gain even more power and influence as they would be the ones who keep society running.
..don't panic
Woah, hold on a minute there. Christians are followers of christ, how they interpret the Bible doesn't come into it. At no point in the bible is Jesus quoted as saying "oh yeah, and anything which my disciples write, you should believe that exactly" Bible != written by god. The new testament was written by other people after the death of Christ.
As for those "very religious people who believe in evolution" i dunno, how about the Pope? The catholic church has accepted evolution for some time now.
say you believe that Christ is the son of god, that makes you a christian, just because the bible also said that, what means that everything else within it is true?
This, according to an evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, speaking at the 2005 McLuhan Lectures on Evolution as a Medium.
Basically, his argument is that for any new technology, there are groups that won't or can't adopt it. Among those groups, there may be those who have genetic mutations that will enable similar capabilities to those of the adopters, and thus will be biologically favoured. This has happened in relatively recent history, as in developing lactose tolerance in adult populations, and social cooperation.
Evolution is not a guided process, there's no "better" state that species are evolving "towards". Evolution is a description of how selective pressures have an effect on a species over time. If we're selecting for something you think is detrimental in some larger sense, and not selecting for something you think is advantageous, that doesn't mean that evolution isn't happening. It just means there's no Great Hoohoo in the sky guiding it in any particular way.
The idea that there is a "Next Step" in evolution is just as religious a position as the idea that evlution doesn't happen. There's no big "steps" in evolution, just lots of little steps all happening at the same time in every possible direction, and the observation that some of these little steps will work out better than others.
That's it.
Everything else, from the whole concept of "species" on, is our attempt to impose order on something that doesn't really fall into the tidy boxes that labels like "species" apply to. Any attempt to extract meaning or to try and describe a "Next Step", or talking about changes in technology as if they have anything to do with evolution of the "species" other than how they change the way genes are selected for, are fundamental category errors.
Yes, computers evolve. Evolution is a process, and computers have all the requirements to be subject to that process. They have inherited characteristics that are encoded in the software that controls them. Their software changes over time as a result of changes in their environment. But the evolution of computers is no more (and no less) the evolution of the human species than the evolution of the horse and dog, once humans started treating them as tools, are part of the evolution of the human species.
Finally, there are no "bad genes", there are just genes that are selected for or selected against. The gene pool has never been "clean" or "dirty", it's just been more or less variable. Right now it's going through a period where there's more variations in it, but that happens normally in any population and is itself an essential part of the process of evolution... without variations, what is there for selection to apply to?
Humans have reached a point where biological evolution is no longer important to us. The current "important" evolution is happening in the mind -- memetic evolution. Next steps will hopefully the creation of new environments able to sustain self-replicating patterns, whether these patterns be computer networks or some other complex ecology.
Your brain and the ecology of all human brains is clearly where the evolutionary action is now (and has been for a relatively long, long time). Where's it gonna be next, and how will we know when it gets there? The first conscious monkeys didn't know they were the first step (or did they?)...
"and is the only country to have used nuclear weapons and poison gases to kill thousands of
people"
Really? Only country to use poison gasses? Are you aware that WW1 existed? Read about it some time. Also google "Chemical Ali," "Rif War," or "the Holocaust." Did you know Japan gassed the Chinese during WW2? Reading and facts are fun.
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.
-- Winston Churchill
It is becoming one global economy. But it seems to me increasingly it is information that is being exchanged that unites us. While I think it is important for people and goods to move around to establish the infrastructure supporting this global economy soon ( how soon ??) there wont be any need or the desire for people to move around. I think it would make us move away from physically interacting with people from different regions. only need to travel be out of pure curiosity to see a place. Tourism is a very small fraction of total travel in this world. So maybe this global information economy is going to create islands of social milieu that are tied only from a commerce perspective. How long can that stay. In other words of social mores diverge to an extent that humans species in different regions become different species then obviously the informational integrity may break. What the heck ? I think we are all out of sorts on trying to predict this. I think no matter what we are most likely going to be snuffed into nothing by a cosmic event much earlier than we can evolve or devolve into anything dangerous. The only think we can do to protect ourselves i think in the meantime is to prevent a man-made nuclear or biological holocaust. The other thing we must do is dring a lot of beer.
I'm really not. That said:
For the most part, the continents seperate us. Sure, there is mixing, but we all started off the EXACT same way. It is also clear that although we are all of the same race, Europeans, Americans, Asians, Africans, etc. all have their differences (however minor they are.)
Europeans and Americans have only been seperated for ~250-300 years, and thus are quite similar, especially if you keep Immigration in mind. However, the (at least cosmetic) differences between Europeans, Asians, and African people do show the start of evolution in their own environments... Evolution is a slow process, and it never stopped (and thus never had to 'begin' again)
I've brought this issue up to many of my friends and it generally reduces them to a stupor.
You've provided the most compelling argument I've ever seen-- and probably will ever see-- to this point.
Only on Slashdot can you find people of respectable intelligence.
I wrote a quick Java program myself to test out your positive mutation scenario, but I got very different results:
The maximum value that can be stored in a four-byte Java int type is 2147483647, so I bumped the tries data type to a 16 byte long. Why each result ended two values immediately above the int threshold is puzzling.
Here's my code:Regardless of the data type, my experiment obviously took more tries than 2.1 million tries to get a good mutation score of 20.
Very interesting.
Since I'm a pensive person, I've wondered what the human race will evolve into a few times.
A few years ago a science magazine, I'm thinking it was Sciam, had an article about how the male human is headed towards extinction because of the SRY gene on the X chromosome which is the master switch for determining maleness. This gene is "falling apart". There is speculation intersexuals, those who are born neither male nor female, may be the key to the survival of the human species.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There will be no more "natural" evolution of humans, as humans will cease to exist in this century.
Transhumans will arise and anybody who doesn't convert will either be left behind, exterminated or converted whether they want to or not - or more likely, all three depending on your behavior towards Transhumans.
Better get on my good side now and avoid the rush.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Change int tmp = rnd.nextInt(1); to int tmp = rnd.nextInt(2); and you might find that your program will work.
You might also want to remove This will take a long time. from your output message.
"and public welfare the most unworthy humans are reproducing at enormous rates. To further worsen matters, the most worthy humans are, for personal reasons, not reproducing or having only one child furhter decreasing the population of the 'successful.' We're actually backsliding quite a bit."
you are a complete idiot. in fact, evolutionary those "unworthy" humans are THE MOST WORTHY OF ALL, because they're reproducing most successfully.
sorry, but you're stupid. it doesn't matter how smart or "worthy" you want to call the people who aren't reproducing much (according to you; no facts given). it's as simple as this: they're not reproducing on as large a scale successfully, therefore, they lose.
evolutionarily, they lose. in principle.
you are stupid. your whole idiotic line of crap is nothing but eugenicist hysteria: "can you believe it?!!? the stupid people are reproducing more, and the smart people aren't! oh no, this spells trouble!!!"
it's a self-propogating meme, this whole bullshit about "unworthy" people having more babies.
in fact it is precisely circumstances like that would lead to the EXTINCTION of "smart" sub-populations, since the so-called "smart" people simply aren't reproducing as successfully.
you're an idiot. like a lot of people when it comes to these topics.
People--the next wave of evolution is memetic in nature. It's happening at a blinding speed.
Its as if they were writing about "the future of Open Source" by quoting Stallmam, one recently-famous open source developer, and the Halloween documents. And entirely failed to interview or even mention the existance of Torvalds, Wall, Allman, Eric Raymond, or O'Reilly (website, books and conferences).
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Yes, all the developed countries help out. On an absolute dollars basis, the US gives the most. On a per-GDP basis, the US doesn't do as well. I have a hard time believing that foreigners hate the US because it gives 20-30% less than other countries when viewed from a per-GDP basis.
There could _lots_ of beneficial mutations even in our current environment... photographic memory, better regeneration... the problem is, our technology actually _breeds_ biological consistency: a mutant will sooner be carted off to hospital than be allowed to live out the rest of his life as he would normally (which may mean a brutish existence for many but _could_ allow a rare mutant to emerge).
Though it's not really so much a recent mutation as there have been people born this way throughout history there are those born as intersexuals who've been medically experimented on even in this day and age. "Ms Magazine" has a good article on it, Making the Cut.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That experiment is like a single organism floating around and waiting till its better, which isn't really what natural selection gives you. A better experiment would be to take 500 dice and 500 counters, roll the dice, update the counters, and now: throw away the lowest 100 counters and replace them with 100 counters taken from the group of 400 remaining. Now repeat. I guarantee you'll get to 20 faster than 222,155,644 generations.
we need to get colonizing some space?
through outer exploration one gathers internal experiences
back in the day we didnt have no old school
So, for example, right now in Europe and Japan and a lot of other places, the population is aging pretty rapidly, because young people have birth control and aren't really that interested in getting married and starting families.
It's not so much the young aren't interested in getting married and having children, as it is economics, education, and equal opportunity. The more education a person gets and the higher their income the less they feel they need children to support them when they get older. Also up until recently most people lived in the country or in rural areas in farming communities where more warm bodies were needed, but now with mechanization less people are needed to grow food so more people are moving to cities.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Sooner or later, some country will realize that the right way to go to mars is to send a group there and not bring them back. they will almost certainly send 4-6 women with just a few guys. Every year or so, they will send resupply ships. But most importantly, they will send along sperm and eggs. These ppl will simply colonize the planet with these. Since it will probably be several generations that these ppl will remain AND they will be more exposed to radiation, it will be biggest change in evolution.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
for over 1,000 years there has been a evolutionary pressure on the brain. sense size = max this leaves speed and multitasking. I think it is starting now one talked so fast I could hardly under stand him and clamed this was as slow as he could talk, he slept only 1-2 hours out of 24 the others he spent studing electronics ,reading etc. the other was just very high energy and fast. I called them natural born speed freaks. Multitasking is becoming more commund. the brain is able to concentrate on one subject for a few minites. This is a certain number of thougths faster thinkers reach this sooner [atention defisent?]
> In conclusion, speciation by natural selection does occur (at least in a few cases demonstrably -- polar gulls, etc.), but I think there has to be another mechanism in there, and the evolutionary apologists don't seem to be coming up with a hypothesis [...]
You sound inquisitive enough to read more about evolution. There are other "mechanisms of evolution" listed at talkorigins' intro to evolutionary biology. Some of them are: mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, and of course natural selection.
That thought experiment looks like it was designed to generate big numbers and sow doubt in armchair evolutionary enthusiasts. I don't know any biologists personally, but they probably wouldn't bat an eyelash when presented with this thought experiment.
Evolution isn't done with us. Hominids have been around something like 4 million years, and in our current form around 300,000. The entire history of civilization is about 15,000 years - roughly equivalent to a speck of fly shit on the evolutionary time line.
Modern evolution moves at a slow pace, because the threats to human life today are relatively few, and our most significant threats don't prevent us from reproducing. For example, in the US and Europe all roads seem to lead to myocardial infarction. Since this generally doesn't kill us until we reach our fifth decade or so, we can have plenty of fat, diabetic kids before our own metabolic disease kills us. In the poorer parts of the world the biggest threats are AIDS and malnutrition, but again, they manage to crank out puppies well before their inevitable demise.
So, in order for evolution to progress at a higher rate we need greater selection pressures, and in layman's terms that means we need to start dying off faster. I'll offer a handfull of likely scenarios, some that we cause ourselves, others that we have no control over:
All of this to say, basically, that it's not technology's effect on evolution that we should be worried about per se. Eventually, mother nature will have the last word, whether or not we press her hand.
>instead of a small genetic modification that will
>allow you to just sit around and eat all you like
>and not gain a gram of fat like some other people
>you know.
>
New Bio-techs are hot on the heels of bringing to market polymers that are receptive and absorb molecules, proteins, toxins, whatever... to protect your body from that which ails you. You just consume ice cream and pop poly-pills to prevent your body from converting it into fat. The fat is bound to the polymer which excrements in the waste stream. No cost future tech.
How much food does the US send around the world only to get picked up and sold by the corrupt leaders in places like Sudan? Granted, the US is supporting corrupt leaders in plenty of situations. But other than that, starvation isn't the US's fault.
.. i.e. thinking US can come in and 'fix' Israel/Palestine - very arrogant.
In most cases Aids is spread through immoral behavior - that's not the US's or any other country's fault (other than maybe what we broadcast on satellite TV). Demanding that drug companies subsidise the third world is the typical socialist mentality of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Drug testing and production is expensive, especially for something as complex as Aids.
In most cases (including Israel) we should just plain not be involved in meddling
90% of the world screaming isn't a reason US voters should do anything different- but the reason there is screaming is because US is stupidly putting its hand in everyone else's business and generally making a mess. If any other nation did the same, there would be the same screaming.
Anyways, I agree with most of your reasons why the US is hated with just a few corrections, and it saddens me that we continue the way we are.
We've evolved in body structure, look at Charles Atlas' body, he was considered physically fit, but to our modern eyes only looks very misshapen. Have you ever been on an old sailing vessle? Low ceilings, very low. It's obvious that our average height has changed... In the future we will continue to be bigger and better... It's starting now as a matter of fact. But only with the help of silicone manufacturers and penis engorgement drugs. So I deduce that the only group of people that will actually evolve are porn stars.
-jÆ Nana korobi ya oki
Because the Bible is the word of God
No, you are mistaken. The Bible is not the literal word of God. Some Christians believe this, and these are the fundamentalists we all love to hate. The vast majority of Christians do not treat the Bible as literal, but rather all but the Gospels as figurative. Jesus taught in parables. Why is it such a stretch to think the rest of the Bible is not just parables?
Anyone who thinks evolution stops obviously doesn't understand the concept. Just because those of us caught in the middle of it can't see it working does not mean it isn't working. Evolution is simply the stuff that life is made of. If you're living or in any way having an effect on things that are living then you're being worked on by evolution.
Our technology is changing us and that is evolution. We communicate over much larger distances much more easily. We become attracted to people we otherwise could never have met and then we mate with them. Meet some chick from halfway across the world and then hook up and she gets pregnant? Well there you go.. you just created a small ripple in the way the human species is evolving. What that ripple does is hard to say.. but it is definately happening. Maybe people who are prone to spending long hours in front of a PC will evolve into a different sub-species than those who aren't. Maybe the shy, smart, geeky people will start having higher birthrates as the process of them mating is made easier and this could change the fact that for a long while (since death rates due to your own stupidity have gone down) that stupid but bold people have been outbreeding us. Again that is creating some change but it's hard to say what the outcome will be.
So to the point - evolution will never stop for humans until every single member of out species is dead.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Which version of the bible is the true one?
Anarchists never rule
I like that idea. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Perhaps one could even have a "back up brain" as well
A backup brain would of been wonderful for me as mine was damaged, I survived a TBI, Traumatic Braihn Injury. Maybe if I could get one of Marvin's brains ;-)
Elimination of useless body parts such as toes
Try walking without your toes. They help maintain balance.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm fed up with hearing this shit from Christians, now I have to put up with it on slashdot? Anyhow, evolution and creationism are NOT polar opposites. Evolution does not describe where life originated from, although some might argue it implies this much. Evolution describes the process by which animals change to better suit their environment, which is a scientifically documented phenomenon. This isn't questionable, and it doesn't even conflict with creationism because it DOES NOT DESCRIBE THE ORIGIN OF LIFE! Sorry if I'm coming off as a little trollish, but I'm getting really sick of misinformation and ignorance relating to evolution.
As a thought experiment, try rolling a die, giving yourself 1 point for an odd number and -1 for an even number. How many rolls do you need to get to a score of 20 (in real life, you need more than 20 good mutations and the good mutations seem less likely than the bad ones, put this is a thought experiment)? Using a Perlscript, I ran a thousand trials and got an average of 222,155.664 "generations" necessary to get a measly 20 positive "mutations" -- that's over three million years just to modify 20 genes in a positive manner. How many species are in man's immediate ancestor tree? How many years has this planet existed?
That doesn't make any sense. You try to discredit natural selection with an experiment THAT DOESN'T SELECT!
That's the whole point, pure 50/50 random process obviously doesn't produce any "points" over long term, but if odd numbers are positive, and even numbers are negative, they don't just happen and then be forgotten, "dice" that undergoes "odd number mutation" has an advantage and dice that undergoes "even number mutation" has a disadvantage.
The common phalicy here is that mutation, evolution, happens with a purpose in mind. It don't. It's random. To badly parahprase Stephen J Gould, evolution does not occur by living more, it occurs by dying less.
He backs up this argument with an examination of the fossil records. Is it possible to beleive that some species of prehistocic shellfish had a purpose in mind when these was a mutation that allowed some to tolerate greater fluctuations of salility? When the worldwide salinity of the oceans rose due to having more of the fresh water locked up in ice, those without the mutation died off. Dying tends to lower the chances of reproduction quite signifigantly.
It's simply not logical to believe that random mutations occur with thoughtful purpose.
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
--Will Rogers
i think there is a computer science professor named vernor vinge who has predicted that compute devices will certainly become "aware" at some point in time, and behave like an "avalanche" (zener) diode does when the bias current is exceeded...that is, the intelligence of the machine(s) will suddenly pass a point and skyrocket to an insanely high "IQ" or whatever.
the implications of this theory (which i hope and beleive is true) are staggering.
there is really only one crucial form of evolution in my opinion...social and behavioral evolution.
should the event occur, i suspect humanity will simply end...perhaps our personalities and neural essence will be tansferred to the matrix, and we will simply exterminate/kill our bodies.
after this, our psychological essence will be treated and enhanced such that mental illness and mental suffering will end.
i'm guessing the matrix will need some type of sandbox to test raondom personality matrices...imagine creating a hyper intelligent charles manson matrix whose only interest was destroying the matrix itself.
there are tricky problems in trying to create synthetic, random personalities in an attempt to forward the matrix itself...an unusually intelligent, destructive personality could possibly hide itself very well.
Don't confuse adaptation with evolution. When I have children, half of their genetic makeup will be mine, and half will be my wife's. If both my wife and I have both a dominate and recessive gene, there is a possibility that our child will have 2 recessive genes. If that happens, then our child will exhibit a trait that either my wife or I have. This loss of genetic information could make our child better suited for the environment and thus they will flourish. This allows us to adapt to our environment, not evolve. Evolution requires a changing of the genetic structure such that information is gained.
A great dane and a poodle can breed and have offspring as they are both dogs with the same genetic structure. They look and act totally different, because they have different genes. This kind of change is an example of adaptation where genetic information is lost.
Everywhere we look we see life adapting and losing information. It is very rare to see something actually evolve by gaining some kind of genetic information, or a changing of the genetic structure.
a volcanologist will say the yellowstone caldera will do us all in...
Yeap, watch out for those Supervolcanos, Supervolcanoes could trigger global freeze especially Yellowstone
FalconShould there be a Law?
"You use the word 'eugenics' as though it were something negative."
Dude, you just made my new Slashdot sig.
There are two things I'm sick of hearing:
1. We have stopped evolving because of technology.
2. We need to limit certain people breeding or introduce evolutionary pressure in some other way.
Are you guys nuts???? First of all, evolution requires people to be weeded out via some form of death. Death is not fun, especially if it's some kind of slow terminal illness. While technology has helped get rid of some pain and suffering, there is still enough left to keep evolution going. We are still evolving.
Introducing evolutionary pressure involves bringing on more pain and suffering. Either you kill those who don't seem fit somehow or you don't let people breed. But what if you kill off someone who has a gene that is really useful but may have lots of other bad genes? How do you know who should and shouldn't breed? Worse, it will take several thousands of generations of doing this intelligently to get any real benefit out of it because evolution is based on random mutations and very slow gradual selection. For a lot of pain and suffering, you don't get much back.
So why isn't anyone talking about genetic engineering? If you really want to make humans better, do it in an engineered fashion, not via some random genetic chance mechanism where people have to suffer and die. We can sit down and figure out how we want to be and make it so. We can start by choosing the best qualities from our own kind (like resistance to diseases, or longevity, intelligence, etc.) Then we can get more experimental and try things like taking genes from hawks to give us better eyesight or perhaps genes from horses to give us greater endurance. By adding genes within our lifetimes, we can be sure that we are making a positive difference on the species. We finally can choose the future of the human race. Why don't we do it?
I'm a 2nd year med student and Allergy/Immunology is one specialty I'm thinking of (neurology is another).
Try neurology. As a TBI survivor I've got an interest in it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
However, when you ask the question "where is evolution taking humanity," the answer is really pretty damn obvious. One way or another the future promises to get real ugly in this regard.
The observation that farm and zoo animals display early puberty, obesity, hypersexuality, and neurotic behaviors like pacing is universal. Ask any zookeeper. The observation that humans are displaying the same changes is kind of obvious. I do not need an "expert" to tell me our entire society is fat, obsessed with sex, and neurotic. Sure, early puberty could be nutritional, but it could also be that we are domesticating ourselves. Given that we know domestication causes these effects in farm animals even when they aren't overfed, I will draw my own conclusions, thank you.
And also with respect to intelligence and sexual deviance: Whenever so many people are so eager to get a particular result, I am suspicious of anything that seems to pander to them. We do know that humans have an extremely weak (bordering on nonexistent) pheremone response, and a very strong focus on imprinted images. The only conclusively proven method by which animals develop imprint images is by seeing them after birth at trigger moments. To assume anything else is at work in humans is the extraordinary claim, yet everybody seems to believe it. It would just be so convenient if it were genetic. If you're gay you can righteously claim it's not your fault, and if you're not you can righteously plan to "solve" the "problem" through eugenics. Given that research produces a mix of results, since it's a complicated problem, have you noticed which ones get reported in the news and lavishly funded?
As far as going back to the eugenics laws, I abhor the very idea, mainly because history shows the "problems" people will attempt to solve with that nifty tool aren't the *real* problem. This is why I brought up intelligence and deviance; you could also toss in mental illness. These things, with their tenuous (if existant at all) genetic connection are what people start enforcing when they use the power of the state to control reproduction. Nobody is going to make the much more important and sensible step of doing something about women who would die in childbirth without radical medical intervention because their parents and grandparents were saved that way.
I suppose next you'll say I am a Luddite. That would be an easy charge to throw too, since I wrote a whole book that seems to argue for the abolition of technology. But the truth is I'm not arguing for anything here. I don't know what the solution is to the problem, if it even has one. We might just be fucked.
But it would be nice if the people who are smart enough to notice the problem would admit it exists instead of pretending we are on a divinely guided path to some kind of perfected state.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
we're just waiting for the Vorlons to increase our psychic abilities!
Sadly, your understanding of natural selection is evidently too rudimentary to grasp the error of your argument.
If women mate with rich asthmatic heirs they are more likely to have children with other men after their rich hubby dies prematurely. Most likely they will then have more men to choose from since many more males will be attracted to them (or their offspring) because of their wealth and the fitness increase that wealth provides. Consequently, humans will continue to evolve more levels of deception, including even deception of themselves, if this advances reqproductive fitness (how else could you explain the Bush presidency?).
There is no such thing as social selection as ultimately it has no way to reproduce itself and the cycle will be broken upon encountering a superior genetic alternative. You might pass on learning how to watch TV to your offpring, but TV watching is itself not heritable (unless of course you are referring to a sighted person both of whose parents are congenitially blind). Only the cognitive aspects are hereditable. Perhaps this explains why TV programming has degenerated so much. Those that watch are really not watching but having sex because the programs are so bad they are not worth watching but provide only mood stimulus.
Today women still search for "Mr right" whose potential is greater than that of other males. Its just that there are many more males to choose from many more females to compete with for males that every female does not have the opportunity to choose among all males, just some (if they're all jerks, their husband is likely to be a jerk).
salmon in the north pacific are smaller now then they were 25 years ago. the large ones got caught in fisher nets, smaller ones slipped out and went on to reproduce smaller fish.
This bears repeating, due to over fishing the amounts of fish in the oceans are dropping and what's felt are smaller. I recently read an article on how chefs are now working on recipes for jellyfish because fish are getting smaller, dissappearing, or getting more expensive. What will be used when all the jellyfish are gone?
FalconShould there be a Law?
In conclusion, speciation by natural selection does occur (at least in a few cases demonstrably -- polar gulls, etc.), but I think there has to be another mechanism in there
Congratulations, you have discovered variations due to sexed reproduction. I.e. not all variations in individuals are generated by mutations, almost all are due to gene recombination.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Survival of the fittest always applies. What you missed is that the definition of fitness has changed. Being tough, aggressive, violent and inclined to rape women would be a set of traits that would have been very successful for a Roman soldier. He'd probably have many more children than other Roman soldiers in his company. Give those same traits to a man living in London right now, and he'd likely not have any children at all.
What survival of the fittest encourages now is sex appeal, willingness to have children, and ability to provide for them (especially in societies without too many social programs). Evolution is pushing us in that direction as we speak. I remember reading an article in Scientific American a few years back. It was talking about West Point students, and how to predict who would make general. It turns out that grades, work ethic, and intelligence were all factors, but the biggest factor was facial structure. While facial structure wasn't a good predictor of where they they'd be in the middle of their careers, those with strong jaws and sharp features traditionally associated with leaders were in fact far more likely to make general by the end of their careers. Furthermore, those men also fathered one more child than the others on average. THAT'S survival of the fittest at work!
I'm a gnu world man.
Soon the world will be much more like present day Iraq with everyone killing each other over every conceivable thing.
You are already seeing infant mortality on the rise in the US. Its just not the kind of thing that republican media outlets or the current administration are keen to advertise, since its not a particularly proud momment for their Christian self-ethos.
Just give interest rates a little more time to rise further, a little more time for government aid programs to the poor and middle class to become leaner, and for environmental degredation to become much more widespread, and thoughts about having to worry about people living too long will be soon the stuff that nostolgia is made of.
Soon the world will be much more like present day Iraq where everyone is killing each other for every conceivable reason.
You are already seeing infant mortality on the rise in the US. Its just not the kind of thing that republican media outlets or the current administration are proud of advertising, since it gives lie to their Christian self-ethos.
Just give interest rates a little more time to rise further, government aid programs to the poor and middle class to shrink, republican efforts to eliminate corporate and social security retirement plans to kick in, and greater environmental degredation to increase mortality rates for the benefit of a few well placed politicans and corporate fat-cats, and a third or fourth front to pen in the war on terror (say N. Korea and Iran), and quaint notions, such as worrying about people living too long, will be soon the stuff nostolgia is made of.
The notion that natural selection acts slowly may be true for some traits but it certainly isn't for others.
The bird flu virus has just jumped to pigs in Indonesia and pigs are in many respects (including genetic ones) much more similar to humans than to birds. If what has just happened to some Vietnamese happens to you, your family will not be talking about how slowly natural selection acted.
The presence of pinky toes are due to the presence of HOX gene expression. This gene family is among the most important in the Bilateralia, particularly higher invertebrates and vertebrates because they control the organization of the overall body plan (symmetry and meteramerism). Consequently, they are extremely conservative and a paper in Science a few years back (can't remember the exact reference) noted mutations of these genes in humans (producing polydactyly and other "odd toe" morphologies are extremely rare because they are typically lethal early in development.
So, expect things like intelligence to disappear far sooner than pinky toes.
All that is nonsense. The future of humanity belongs to those with traits that attract others to them and make them want to rear a family together. It is they who will own the future.
--Mike Perry, Editor, Eugenics and Other Evils
It's given them tails, extra thumbs, and just genuine circuslike creepy aura. Small hands, smelling like cabbage, cats and dogs living together.
Oh, c'mon. Everybody knows how we humans are going to evolve. Obviously, we're going to get paler skin, giant, bulbous skulls with pulsing veins and a penchant for long, shiny robes with pointy collars. At some point we'll even get telepathy so we can float everywhere and get small, atrophied muscles so that dashing space captains can easily overpower us in a physical confrontation.
Personally, I can't wait.
[insert witty quote here]
... technologically advanced societies. You can design your own diets, control the types of nutrients and quality of foods you ingest to a large extent, etc, etc, that were not nearly as sophisticated or even possible before.
I think people have to realize that intelligence trumps evolution, evolution is a dead end when you can plan out, engineer and enhance organisms by intervening with science and technology.
Trying to apply evolution to us in a biological sense just doesn't work fast enough anymore for our pace of technological advancement.
No, birds can stay in the air because they are lightweight.
No, the other fish just died.
The ones without fur, also, died.
The one Really Big Thing about evolution is that there is no purpose. The fittest do not survive, it is just that the least fit die off.
Similarly us humans can only wonder at our own complexity because we are so complex that we are capable of wondering.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
What a noble sentiment. I'll bet you also believe that the reasons that, say, runners from Kenya tend to win Olympic long-distance and sprint running events more often than runners from Norway and/or Nagoya, are also more likely to be "environmental" than genetic.
Earlier this year I read an article about Olympics runners and their training. The article pointed out that yes the environment a runner lives and trains in do have an impact on their performance, those runners who live and train in higher altitudes do better than those who live and train at lower altitudes.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The lack of a tail causes humans to have some of the worst balance in the animal kingdom.
It couldn't get any worse!
Seeing in the dark could be improved via evolution, but I'd bet most people can improve their own night vision simply by exercising it. My eyesight at night used to be so good I could read a book by starlight, growing up. The problem I had was during the day, without dark sunglasses I couldn't see, I always wore some. When I went into the army I was ordered not to wear my sunglasses but was promised I'd be given perscription glasses. I never did get them though so for weeks I walked around outside covering my eyes with my hands or with my eyes closed until my eye finally adjusted, but even now more than 20 years later I still have trouble seeing on sunny days without sunglasses while my night vision is better than most.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Women have eyes?
I bet it will be some sort of a smarter/better brain. It's our best and most used trait. Most likely true multitasking (100% efficiency while doing 2 things).
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
With the amount of "garbage" DNA in our genome, it is very likely that future humans may evolve new features that let them compete better than today's humans. Neither does evolution have to be a gradual thing. Take for example the Bombadier Beetle. This beetle evolved because in a large enough gene pool, garbage DNA randomly completed all the necessary features to enable it to spit fire. The fire spitting beetles were able to compete better than the non-fire spitting beetles, and so the old regular beetles got selected to go. So for those of you laughing at the possibility of Mutants having super powers, don't you think in a population of 6 billion that maybe some people might develop random abilities? If those abilities truely make them compete head and shoulders above the rest, don't you think that selection will continue and reproduce them? (ignorance and fear aside). Especially now that most diseases are not deadly, it's very possible that a disease may evolve into a useful feature. How about Autism?
---k--
</stupid>
A good post but you don't seem understand either the sources of genetic diversity or how selection would effect it. Selection when it acts reduces the potential for some genotypes to successfully replicate. Some selective processes might actively provide an advantage to others under specific circumstances. Generally speaking though, selection can be regarded as a force that reduces genetic diversity.
Genetic diversity arises through mutation and recombinant events. Mutation introduces new traits while recombinant events remix existing ones. This is vastly over simplified, but in general you can regard evolutionary adaptation as a dynamically adjusting balance between selective processes that tend to reduce diversity in the gene pool upon which the selection acts, and the exisiting diversity within the genepool with which it can adapt to the selective pressure.
So, your argument about the difficulty of identifying "lesser beings" is perfectly correct from an evolutionary view point. Since the selective environment can change from day to day there is no fixed measure by which "superior" can be idenified. Evolution does not connote progress, even though it is cumulative. "Highly evolved" is an oxymoron that racists, politicians, theosophists and other spiritual types are fond of. It should be understood as "highly adapted to very specific conditions."
When those conditions change, the "pinnacle" of evolution at that point can quite suddenly become mal-adapted and no longer "highly evolved." If there is suffcient diversity in the affected gene pool, then through altered rates of reprodcutive success, some portions of the affected gene pool may survive. So, traits like sickle-cell, thalassemia, and diabetes, while generally appearing harmful, are not only maintained in the gene pool, but under specific conditions can become both beneficial and environmentally favoured.
In fact, as you seem to suggest, under stressed conditions, higher reproductive rates may be a means of surviving as a breeding population. Within the confines of a civilization, the poor and socially disadvantaged are perpetually under potentially selective environmental stress. Due to the inability to pay for medicine, contrary to some views, the average lifespan is shorter, offering a reduced period in which to reproduce, and expectably, younger and younger parents. Because of chronically poor diets, there is a also a continuing selective dietary stress that should be selecting for those most able to tolerate what is generally considered an inadequate diet. Plainly, as H. G. Wells suggested in The Time Machine there are many venues where evolution is active, even within the "safe" confines of civilization.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
All made exciting by the artist's drawings of the new human species of the future -- reminding me of similar (although not in color) drawings of the 19th century that we now find so amusing (and wonder how anyone could have believed them).
... I mean, how many millions of people have meteor strikes or volcanoes killed in the last 1,000 years? How many millions do diseases like malaria kill EACH year ... and that's only business as usual. If something really nasty comes along, like a version of influenza that has a high deathrate. Well our vaccines most likely wont work, we wont be immune to this new strain and it will have modern transport to supercharge it around the world.
Bitter and proud of it.
parents would possibly be forced to get an abortion on the grounds that such a child would never be any good at calculating trajectories or high-tech maintenence and would (horrible to say, I know) basically be a waste of precious oxygen.
Or it could be that someone with Down's Syndrome would be more fit to survive in space. Or maybe the person is a savant like Dustin Hoffman's role in "Rain Man".
Dr. Treffert writes this about the Savant Syndrome
Savant Syndrome is a rare, but spectacular, condition in which persons with various developmental disabilities have astonishing islands of ability or brilliance that stand in stark, markedly incongruous, contrast to the handicap (talented savants).
In others, with a much rarer form of the condition, the ability is not only spectacular in contrast to the handicap, but would be spectacular even if viewed in a normal person (prodigious savant).
There are fewer than 100 reported cases of prodigious savants in world literature. There a probably fewer than 25 prodigious savants living at the present time. Some of those include Leslie Lemke (music), Alonzo Clemons (sculpting), Richard Wawro (painting), Stephen Wilshire (drawing) and Tony DeBlois (music).
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm curious;
According to the view that all human change is random and non-selective via point mutaitons, how long should it take for an animal's immune system to design an anti-body which precisely binds to the antigen on a pathogen?
And how long does it actually take?
We agree on one count, there's more at work here than point mutations.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Well, with all of our disease curing, deformation correction (not to mention aesthetic surgery), and public welfare the most unworthy humans are reproducing at enormous rates. To further worsen matters, the most worthy humans are, for personal reasons, not reproducing or having only one child furhter decreasing the population of the 'successful.' We're actually backsliding quite a bit.
/. server agrees with you :)
And the slashdot inserted tagline at the bottom the page:
"Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics: Superiority is recessive."
Looks the
I wouldn't get too worked up about it. I'm sure social parasites have always been a very successful type of human being. But you have a point: it seems like modern social constructs are trying harder than ever to help proliferate such folks... in the U.S. anyways.
Ah yes, the wild bushmen, left alone to live out simple lives... oh, and fight court battles with the government. So much for isolation.
Yes unfortunately others want to drive the Bushmen or San out of the Kalahari Desert to get at the diamonds there while leaving them out of any bounty, De Beers being one of the parties. AllAfrica has some good articles on this.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This guy's credentials astound.
From the science editor's profile on the site (Alan Boyle).
"Alan Boyle is not a trained scientist, but he plays one on TV."
Sorry, I also failed to see the list of peer-reviewed papers you used, Alan Boyle, to come to these conclusions/discuss them with us.
The truth is that often, events that we perceive as being "negative" have a greater positive outcome that anyone can anticipate.
I don't just consider my accident as "negative", it is very much negative. I "survived" a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. It's been more than seven years since and I have yet to see one positive, even now I wish I had died. You could say I'm bitter and you'd be right, the thing is is that I couldn't even wish this on the person who caused the accident, I couldn't be that sadistic.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Turning into an alien race
Will we merge with machines?
Will we all be assimilated?
Seven of Nine - TAKE ME NOW!
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
It might not be the 'evolution' they're looking for, but what do you think interracial breeding is (black and white, asian and white, meditterainian and white, black and asian, etc.)? Sure looks like what scientists call evolution (microevolution, at least) to me. We've got genetic pools which were previously sperate inter-mingling and forming a new 'race'. Keep it up long enough, and most of the western world will be fairly homogenous.
From where I sit, it's resulting in more attractive, healthier, and more intelligent people. Seperating people into exclusional groups will only result in inbreeding. Humans are not dogs, and this has been shown time and time again. We don't "breed" well as a dog would without very significant problems.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So what happens when I spend 2000 less when I have the least money and then die when I'm 45. I guess I just don't believe in thinking that far ahead, especially after living through a war which "erased" everyone's belongings. I'm not saying that could happen here, but it's possible that one could lose everything, and then what?
You always point your finger at the bad guy, but what if the bad guy points his finger at you?
>Where is evolution taking our species?
Answer: Nowhere.
Evolution is pure fiction. Darwin himself admitted that the fossil record does not support evolution.
Natural selection only uses the genetic information that is available and it tends to keep species stable.
Mutations never add additional genetic information. When a mutation occurs information is mistransmitted or lost. Additional DNA information is never added, which would be necessary to produce higher life forms.
We no longer need evolution. Genetic engineering replaces it.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
Yes, because Christianity is the only religion in the world, and all Christian sects ignore the fact that the old testament is a poor translation of a poor translation of a poor transcription of an oral history.
To be christian, by the way, you just have to be a follower of the Christ. Crackbrained political activism to maintain the power of the political bodies representing groups of christians is not required, even when it uses plausible-sounding misinterpretations of scripture as an excuse.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
It's not so much that every deep fish glows but that most that do have come to rely on it so that if they didn't they'd die.
Play Command HQ online
Let's all have sex untill were all the same color. Then with all the money we save from not having to defend against "the other guy" we could start gene splicing experiments and force the issue... Or we could wait a few thousand years for a 6 mile piece of iron to hit this giant catbox and it really wouldn't matter... However, due to a lack of documentation the therory can't be taken as gospel truth. Space or a lack of gravity has a SIGNIFICANT affect on humans. Now, we just have to stay in space long enough to see what happens. Anyone think of putting a nursery on the ISS? Get some of those whacked cosmonauts who spent so much time on MIR to go back into space and make some floaters. (babies..) See what happens... Live long and prosper...
Mr. Boyle:
Your MSNBC article suggests that mutation and evolution of Homo sapiens ceased or at leased slowed at some point, perhaps due to industrialization, transportation, and the resulting intermixing of geographically isolated populations to a dramatic degree. While that dynamic is certainly at work, a more suspicious person might wonder if in fact the evolutionary process has continued in less obvious ways in spite of it? Ways that, for instance, might eventually lead to significant changes in human perception and sociology, rather than overt changes in physiology? Is it possible that some evolutionary mutations might occur that aren't as obvious as skin color or feathers or gills?
Consider, for example, the traits labelled as "autism", particularly "high functioning" autism and Asperger's Syndrome, and Attention Deficit "Disorder". Do these traits truly constitute neurological or physiological disorders, or is it simply that these traits pose considerable inconvenience and cause dischord within our current sociological structures?
Some of the recognized traits of those "disorders" I mentioned are arguably responsible for some of the greatest scientific and engineering successes in human history. If those traits were universally bad in all circumstances, natural selection would have removed them millenia ago. Instead they linger in the gene pool, causing much consternation because those who possess them never quite seem to fit the neurotypical human sociological model. Often, in spite of the most offensive of those traits, some of those who possess these packages of traits are able to achieve what neurotypical humans cannot even on their best days.
Are these traits atavistic? Are they precursory? Considering how much pain and death are caused by current human sociology, is it so hard to imagine that mutation and natural selection might seek a resolution to that little problem? Even Leo Buscaglia, who is certainly neither a geneticist nor an archaeologist, suggested as much when he posited that recent generations have begun evolving "bulbous" foreheads and enlarged forebrains, in response to all the insensitivity and inhumanity in human history.
I'll wager that there are already spin-off Homo sapiens var. something-or-other among us, and have been for millenia, struggling to achieve critical mass and dominance. We're just too bigoted and homogenous in our thinking to see them as such. Being primarily a pack-animal species, we LIKE to think that way.
I have this theory... I think we are all going to be $crewed in the long run. In nature species tend to evolve to accommodate a NEED.... for survival. IE: scientists think we started standing erect, to reach higher fruit. All of our needs for survival are handed to us.. on a platter and in a grocery store. There is no Need that we are pushed to... in order to survive. Except the "need" to keep a bad job doing some mind numbing repetitive job. Which I think over time (many many generations), may contribute to a trend of negative mutations instead of helpful ones. (heheh this is only part of my little theory...) I don't know.... I think because of our wonderful technology, drugs, and society, we have been removed from the process of natural selection , and I fear what the end result may be... are we just crippling ourselves? ... what do you think?
P.s. I have a little more info on this.... Does anybody think I should do a separate new thread with all this?...
Birth control trends suggest that the religious will be selected in favor of those of us who aren't!
Play Command HQ online
Personally, I believe the next evolution of humanity is coming, and quickly. My personal belief on the matter is that we're getting close to reaching a sink or swim point in human history (note this is only a belief, no concrete evidence, no solid proof; mostly just my view on this).
Why? Well figure this: if we could have destroyed ourselves ages ago, we would have. Easily. The only reason the human race as survived is because we've never had the capacity to destroy the entire human race before. Sure, the Black Plague devastated Europe. But it didn't touch North America, Africa or Asia, etc. The Human Race carried on. But nukes, and whatever worse technologies we come up in the next few years, have the capacity to kill us all like nothing else. Nukes are one of the only things I can see with the capacity to destroy the entire human race.
So go figure for all the U.S.' attempts at disencouragement of nuclear proliferation, the wrong person or country, is eventually, more than likely, going to get nukes and kill all or most of the world's population. Even if that country doesn't manage to get everyone, in the ensuing chaos, most everyone will likely kill themselves, kill each other, or die of starvation, disease or a devastated environment. There's not a whole hell of a lot of hope for us as the Human race.
That's the sink point. Now for the swim point. The one where we have a chance at saving some remnant of the Human race. I believe that space exploration and colonization is ultimately our salvation. If we can get people to Mars in the next 10 to 20 years, hell get a colony started, begin terraforming it, then the Earth might still be screwed, but the Human race will still survive. Sound ambitious? It is. It's probably our only hope as well.
The other option is for the Human race to grow the hell up, quit fighting and get rid of nukes altogether. Like that's ever gonna happen.
We should implant chloroplasts in our skin! Interesting colour option and a reduced carbo requirement!
Then we reduce the size of our (pointless) body, about, the size of a pre-pubessent child will do, to further reduce calorific needs.
Hmmmnn... that means the Meakon was right and Dan Dare was just a luddite throwback.
I can't believe we're not talking about people with synesthesia or who don't have wisdom teeth.
The mutants are among us already.
Education is the silver bullet.
> As for those who point to the developed world's
> most successful reproducers, the poor, as evidence
> of our devolution
Actually, in the Nordic countries, which probably have the most all-encompassing wellfare systems, children has become a status symbol for the socially strong (not quite the same as rich, but close).
It used to be that poor, and poorly educated, people got more children than rich, and highly educated people. Probably because the later group was better aware of birth control techniques, got children with a lower mortality rate, and had their retirement funds in working order.
But this seems to have been a temporary effect, even though still dominating in most of the world. Today, just about nobody in our contries get children without having planned to do so. And having more than 1 or 2 children is increasingly a sign of surplus: See I have this perfect wife, perfect jobs, perfect friends, and three wonderful kids. Much more impressive than a new car.
It is a rather new demographic effect, 10 years old or se.
I think the next factor which could segregate populations will be religion. I think it may only be a matter of time before the debate over genetic engineering in humans begins in earnest. It's a debate that will have serious consequences, and I think nations will as country either support or ban it, based mostly on the religious beliefs of the elected representatives and the populations they represent, plus, of course, the excessive application of propoganda from all sides.
The debate which will probably flare up violently on many occasions, may lead to global migration as the strongly religious move to those nations that outright ban any genetic engineering and likely other sacriligous activities. Similarly, the agnostic, atheistic and moderates will move out of those areas to escape the oppression of increasingly theocractice governments.
In time, genetically engineered babies will become common in those countries that embrace bio-engineering, however, they will be banned from entering the religiously conservative countries as abominations in the eyes of (the) God(s).
This could lead to the necessary isolation to allow divergence to occur.
I can't take credit for this idea, though, if you find the idea interesting, you might want to read some of Peter F. Hamilton's stories, particularly those about the Edenists.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I dunno about everyone else, but I have a hard tme taking this seriously. No human evolution seems to have occoured for at least 2000 years. Animals seem to have stayed the same, too.
This article says that the only hope for evolution is to separate the human race into groups. It seems to me that this would only flesh out different pockets of the gene pool, not mutate new genes. If it were truly about new genes though mutation, it would seem that larger groups would be needed, right? The more people reproducing, the more likely a new, good mutation would happen.
Unfortunetly, the term "good mutation" seems to be an oxymoron. Nearly every mutation scientists have observed seems to hinder the animal. I've been reading about this a lot, and the only good mutation I've heard about are those white "ghost bears". And they might be an almost extinct race of bears we don't know about.
From my perspective, this article seems like a bunch of unprovable hype written on a slow news day. Anyone agree?
So what happens when I spend 2000 less when I have the least money and then die when I'm 45. I guess I just don't believe in thinking that far ahead, especially after living through a war which "erased" everyone's belongings. I'm not saying that could happen here, but it's possible that one could lose everything, and then what?
Anything is possible but personally I believe in thinking and planning for the future. As it is now many of the Baby Boomers will have a hard tyme making ends meet when they retire, that's a big part of the debate about reforming Social Security and privatizing part of it. Personally I believe it should be eliminated, just as I believe many federal agencies, departments, and offices should be. I believe in Thomas Jefferson's small and limited constitutional government.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Hint. Your pelvis is supposed to be centered over your knees/ankles. When you have your pelvis forward in the ridiculous fashionable way of western civ you start holding yourself up with your calves. You get big calves. You also have to mash your toes into the ground to get sufficient purchase to not fall over. Most people are in a state of constantly falling forward. So as you're applying all this pressure to your toes, trying to get them to dig into the ground, where do you think your toenails are going to go?
You wouldn't happen to be a dancer or martial artist are you? Both stress proper posture or stance.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I thought you died in that bunker in Berlin 60 years ago.
Oh boy, you are alive and well, your ideas will live forever....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Then I am sure you will be delighted to point us to a few of the thousends, no, millions, of websites showing us such well stablished ,er, facts.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Those are words that have no place in a discussion about evolutionary theory.
You are chosing a bias and wishing evolution will work on that direction.
Fool.
Evolution happens without a purpose, it is a gene replication mechanism, it does not aim for "worthy" individuals (nor "unworthy" ones, whatever way you care to define either group).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
to keep all of us alive, evolution will stagnate. In fact we will "devolve" into blobs that can't stay alive without all this new medical tech that we use now. We are actually fighting against evolution. Evolution would demand that only the fittest can survive and reproduce. That's too "cruel" for us humans to tolerate.
What?
What? Was that your best reply? Actually I quit the meds several years ago. They induced Parkinson's tremors and Alzheimer-like memory blackouts. In other words, translated just in case you don't know, the meds were causing soft tissue damage to my brain. That's why the neurological damage was becoming more pronounced. It took about 8 months off the meds for the brain cells to either repair or be replaced. At the 6 month mark, and with my son's help, we filed 3 Provisional Patents for some of my other inventions. One of them was used by another inventor to make 4 new inventions. One is a plane that glides through the atmosphere much like a porpoise, using air pressure properties with Helium tanks. Since I could not locate a lawyer to take the case, he's off the hook legally by now. The meds you say I need? One day I was just standing in the hallway for a second and my left shoulder "drew back up" into the shoulder socket. It had been partially slipped out like that for who knows how long and I didn't notice because the MEDS were making me feel like EVERYTHING WAS OKAY. It is regrettable that your best argument had to be so incredibly wrong and quite lame, but unless you yourself had lived through this drug-induced brain damages as I have, you would not have a clue now would you? So, now you know. Meantime, I must repeat to those who will listen that I do in fact have a rather simple -yet complex- little engine that's extremely lightweight & efficient, that produces a counter-gravitational upward force. It is a unique combination of a number of my inventions that I've had over the last 16 or so years. I could build a part of it but lack the facilities and frankly the knowledge to build the remaining part. Anyone who brushes me off with the flick of the "meds" word is very foolish. Just because my situation is what it is isn't a very good argument. Genius strikes wherever it damn well pleases. It might happen to a janitor or it might happen to an Einstein. You cannot order random genius to produce inventions inside a lab if they require conditions outside the lab. And that's what my life has been. A laboratory experiment. And, I might add, an unduplicatable laboratory experiment. The Law won't allow you to put a human being through the series of life events I have lived through that has brought me to this point, and to this engine. If you ever decide to get around to wanting to find out some of the things I've lived through to get here alive, there's pages on my website where I took the time to chronicle the multiple concussions,the drowning when I was 12YO (oxygen starvation), and the 1989 accident where a 1,000 lb. bale of freight dropped 8 feet from the top of my trailer and landed across my back, traveled down my legs, pile-drived my knees into the asphalt and crushed my foot up to the shinbone. That's a partial listing of what I had to go through to get here and see how to make this engine. And that's why you don't have it. You aren't willing to pay the Price. I do have this engine and I'm not in a position to build it. Your loss if all you want to do is asshole around about meds. hahahahahahaha Thanks. I needed a good laugh to start my day. Point of fact is, yesterday I came up with my own Plan. I'm approaching some other obscure webpage owners to put together a Pay Per View stadium event... where I have tentative plans to release this engine IN FRONT OF A CAMERA so this fellow who likes to rip off my inventions so much won't be able to do so. And I plan to make some money, enough to get off this monthly disability check. That's what I've learned to do over the years friend. I find water where there wasn't none. Take it to the bank. Woodrow Marshall Riley Jr. May 18, 2005 http://www.newpath4.com/ . I'm aiming tentatively to do this on Thanksgiving Day 2005 or perhaps on my birthday if it falls right (November 26). Anyone with expertise setting up such an event is invited to contact me. strongheart1@cox.net . The show is rolling. Show? Yes. It's going to be a show, telling people about stuff that isn't allowed to be spoken of on FOX VIEWS. Inventions, advances in healthcare, the stuff Fox News doesn't allow so their talking heads can piecemeal-feed you on canned drivel like swine.
There is no geographical isolation in the human species, but it may very well be that the cultural and/or economic polarization of humanity that we see in many aspects of modern life may be the factor that generates the necessary isolation for divergence of the species.
Good point -- insightful.
-kgj
-kgj
Until recently the parasympathetic nervous system and it's capabilities have been little known. However with the advent of several systems in particular "Sahaja Yoga" http://www.sahajayoga.org/ it is becoming clear that human awareness is reaching new heights. Hopefully this will result in improved understanding of how we can better live on this planet in a sustainable fashion. If we invested the global space budget into organic agriculture, forestry and fisheries research we might actually start getting somewhere. I mean what makes people think we can migrate to Mars where there are no resources when we're currently too dumb to be able to live sensibly on a Planet where we have every resource we need!! Duh!