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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.
"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?
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.
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...
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
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...
Sadly, useless organs are not in quite the same hurry to go away as critical ones are to appear.
So the species will have to deal with having a pinky toe, hair in uncomfortable places and organs such as the appendix a while longer.
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 :)
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.
Well for starters we could get rid of those violent tendancies, they don't seem to help anyone. And whats with religion? If our brains could wire themselves not to need it we'd have it made in the shade.
How about better lungs to breath pollutants, or immunity to STD's... or bigger brains to suit our lifestyle, these days physical strength is less important, we could spend a little more energy on our brains don't you think.
We are far from perfect but thats not a bad thing, it just means we have room for improvement.
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.
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:[.]
Why make it a church issue? Is it so important to knock down those who believe something different?
Because every time I tell a conservative person that I want to live 500 years and have cat's eyes and coordination to run through the moon-lit forest, they look funny at me?
The majority of the kerfuffle about stem cell research revolves around DNA having a soul but there is also the undercurrent of "man in God's image" that is going to be a major issue in this or next century. And it will equally revolve around "moral values" as empirically groundless. Undoubtedly everyone except the Jehovah's Witnesses will be overjoyed to have genetic treatment for cancer -- but just try to enhance any capability above the "God-given" norm and we will have social unrest.
Recommend Bruce Sterling's early Schizmatrix on this. He was still getting up to speed on the writing thing but it is precisely about the species differentiating as groups become isolated populating the solar system.
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.
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.
I agree.
Another limitation is that humans in the industrialized nations have more or less driven out natural selection. For example, stupid people are protected, if anything, it is someone else's fault that a stupid person did something that could have killed them. Sometimes the brain dead are allowed to live for fifteen years.
The highly intellectual people become either smart enough to not reproduce (contraceptives), reproduce less by choice or don't reproduce often because of social factors. Stupid people reproduce like rabbits, some of them start before they leave highschool.
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
Perhaps because there are a whole lot of church going, very religious people who believe in evolution.
this absolutely fascinating book argues that biological evolution as a mechanism for change has been outstripped by technology, and that the next steps in our evolution will be steps we take ourselves.
I'm not doing it justice with this description, but it makes the case that biological evolution is slow and error-prone and has just barely managed to produce its only creatures capable of higher thought, and that the pace of all kinds of change has been accelerating constantly, and that this is the end game for the biological evolution of the human race.
Like I said, it's a fascinating book. I couldn't put it down, during exam week and while trying to play basketball.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Evolution will continue to happen - and it won't be the sci-fi kind. Just plain old Darwinism.
Between air pollution, climate changes, the continual population shift from rural to urban, other environmental factors, and even random error.
Evolution won't stop because it is a journey not a place. All the variables that effect are lives are not tightly controlled enough to even come close to an end.
Anytime someone says how a scientific phenomenom is going to halt, I raise an eyebrow. Maybe you should too.
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.***
Another limitation is that humans in the industrialized nations have more or less driven out natural selection.
You are confusing biological evolution with social systems. The removal of "natural" (what is that anyway, should we deny all medicines, housing, and civilisation to a few generations just to clear out the gene pool? And in this society, who do you think will triumph and propagate their genes, the brutes or the intellectuals?) selection does not harm humanity; if anything it broadens the gene pool and increases the chance of beneficial mutations which might lead to any one of a number of positive effects.
Also your sweeping characterisation of the stupid as being born that way smacks very much of a particularily nasty type of eugenics, as does your pinning of "highly intellectual" people. I am aware that there are more than a few people of low intelligence who are genetically built that way, but I would say these are in the vast minority. Much of this has to do with environment rather than their genes.
don't reproduce often because of social factors
And what is this? Did you ever stop to think that the same social factors might inversely apply to the less fortunate among us? It is well known that in times of war, plague, or other stressful times, the rate of population growth increases. By applying this on the micro- or individual scale, you can easily see why those who feel pressured or are in fact most pressured would "breed" first and faster.
Although it would make life very simple for a certain type of mindset to identify a "stupid" gene and assign lesser rights to these lesser beings, things just aren't that easy.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
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.
- 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.
As for the argument that having a more diverse popultion means more room for mutations -- I'm not arguing against diversity, so long as some kind of reasonable fitness function -- such as that provided by making food/housing/etc available strictly via a market economy -- is being applied. If a fitness function is so limiting as to substantially reduce the number of variations which don't directly impact one's ability to tend to one's own survival, that fitness function is broken. To put it bluntly: A society of six-foot, blonde-haired, blue-eyed caucasians is the last thing I would want -- and if relying on a pure market economy in our present society would cause a trend towards that norm, our society needs to be fixed.
That said, it wouldn't be a Good Thing to apply this whole pure-market-economy worldwide. Just doing it in some significant (reasonably diverse) region should cause it to succeed (inasmuch as that region, over the course of a few generations, generates individuals more fit than the population median) or fail (obviously, the inverse) without eliminating gene lines surviving elsewhere in the world which might be falsely targeted by the fitness function in question. In short: I might be wrong, and I don't want to take over the world; a US state or two (allowing folks who don't like it to easily leave, and folks who do like the idea to emigrate in) would be more than enough.
If having good genes is less important than having good memes (and the nature/nurture debate is far from decided), how does that actually change anything once we consider that memes are typically passed on through one's family? Yes, it does -- which isn't to say that it's wrong. (Devil's advocate aside, I honestly do think that voluntary, temporary sterilization as a precondition for accepting welfare funds makes quite a lot of sense. The moral argument against has always been presented as self-evident, which to me it isn't. Anything much beyond that [ie. anything that involves using force of government to compell actions which would not be taken voluntarily] I'm unlikely to support. As for my motivation for taking this view -- I grew up around far too many welfare mothers having more kids so they'd get a bigger check from the government each month. And just to go back to the race thing briefly -- said welfare mothers were almost execlusively caucasian).i think you made an interesting point about relative percentages of reproduction vs. perceived intelligence. Many have argued that it's in society's best interests to keep the number of "intelligent" low. The idea of intelligence as an advantage from an evolutionary standpoint comes from the fact that they are relatively few and far between.
the percentage of the population with perceived lower intellectual capacity - that's the societal workforce... the engine as it were. They tend not to be remarkable at anything, which in fact makes them highly adaptable to circumstance.
it's pretty much standard fare that intelligent people are overrepresented along all lines of deviant activity. For the most part they don't take orders well and are opposed to mindnumbing activity. You need ants for the colony - too many queens and nothing gets done. A friend of mine has an argument that the OSS movement is suffering from precisely this... TOO MUCH INTELLIGENCE. Endless distributions that don't speak to one another because too many smart people keep creating them insteading of just letting one smart person define the course and following his/her lead.
a couple of smart folks. They breed selectively, protect their caste and selectively introduce genetic material when it's to their advantage.
I also remember reading about left handers (I'm one - so naturally interested). Lefties are overrepresented in scientific and engineering circles, overrepresented in sports, overpresented in hollywood, but also overpresented in prisons. In fencing, and other close contact sports like boxing, lefties present a furious advantage. Anthro-biologists suspect that much of the advantage comes from relatively few numbers. In other words, evolution supports a system where a smaller subset is maintained at a critical mass (relatively 10 percent of the pop for lefties). Again, the idea is that the advantage that lefties present physically and/or intellectually are only worthwhile at this population ratio.
So the idea of intellectuals reproducing furiously seems disadvantageous for the system. You don't want a mugger with a 160 IQ.
I digress... ADHD.... sorry.
un burrito me trampeó.
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.
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.
Well for starters we could get rid of those violent tendancies, they don't seem to help anyone. And whats with religion? If our brains could wire themselves not to need it we'd have it made in the shade.
Until we got wiped out by a tribe of violent religious fanatics. That's natural selection, too.
It is, by and large, a fact. Acknowloging that doesn't mean we have to start sterilizing people.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Hell with sci fi... our history argues strongly that there will be eugenics wars. What do you think the Nazi's were about with the final solution ?
Hell for a long time it was accepted that white and black people could not live peacefully together.
As for augmentation. That will happen as soon as the technology is mature enough and there are advantages to be gained. Case in point. Cosmetic surgery. Next step, Cosmetic Genetics. It will happen. They are already looking into implanted eye sight. While nobody in their right mind would opt for that over natural eyesight right now what happens when you can have 20 megapixel resolution with low light capacity and 20X zoom as an implant?
On a side note about the vision implant thing... that is a very very very interesting tech if it ever really works at a useable level. Cause at that point you have a possible brain machine interface because you can put a processor in the loop. So say you see someone, the signal goes to you brain and a processor. Processor recognises the image (say a person) and then displays that information through the interface to the implant. Bingo you have terminator vision. Now lets go one step futher. Are you aware that you can subvocalize voice ? IE without talking you still make the signals to be encoded that can be picked up on by sensors. Voice reconition software is primitive but is farther along than machine vision implants. Advance them several generations down the road (incremental advance not revolutionary) and suddenly you have a real human/machine interface capacity.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Okay, let's give you a quick lesson in ethics and morality.
First, imagine that you will be reincarnated as a random individual in a society. You have no way of knowing what skill sets and ability you will wake up with. Now, what kind of social organisation would you want to apply given that there is a distinct risk that you will be 'reborn' without your current level of ability to take care of yourself? Do you really want an undiluted survival market to apply? Is your ability to survive in such a situation the only measure of the worth of your next life? If you were doomed from the start by the nature of that society, but that nature could be changed so as you would not be doomed, would you not want it changed?
Consider then whether humans have intrinsic worth or are just a means to some ends. Are you the means to someone else's ends, or do you make your own decisions? Are your decisions to be treated seriously as intrinsic to your being, or brushed aside as aberrations in the mass march to a predetermined or naturally selected ends?
It is an ethical imperative that humans be treated as ends in themselves, otherwise a mechanistic world view results, and all nature of opressions follow from this. What this means is that if we have the means to help each other survive, then we are compelled to make use of them, and cope with the consequences. If a man is born crippled, we give crutches, if he is stupid we teach him patiently, if he is diseased we search for a cure. That we have now begun to grasp genetics offers a way to ameliorate the consequences of a lack of natural selection, but even in its absence we are compelled to defy natural selection; the alternative being the death of humanity as a collection of sentient beings. Sentience is inefficient, you know.
For an easy example -- I have quite horrible vision (thanks Dad! I still love ya tho) -- Were I in the caveman days, I don't know if I would have lasted to have that many kids.
But since I can obviously get around with my vision fixed, I am around to reproduce and pass on my awful vision (which isn't even as bad as many others). Just one easy example... but physically, science is enabling us to live with some pretty stinkin bad traits.
Mental evolution? I duno. I see 2 different branches going - lately smart people generally mate with smart people. And then I see stupid people getting more booty and having more kids with each other than the smart people! If that social aspect keeps up, it will be interesting to see where it leads.
Berto
I agree. The problem with the parent's idea is that 1) he believes every single life is worth preserving, at all costs, and 2) the cost of "helping out" the highly disadvantaged is not that great to the rest of society.
In other less-individualistic cultures, the society is the most important thing, not the individual. If the society is functioning optimally, then most people will be fairly happy. Now this certainly doesn't mean the society should eliminate all but the top 5%; however, if society expends too many resources trying to support a very small minority that can't pull its own weight, and is in fact a parasite, it can doom the entire society.
The problem we have with this welfare mothers scenario is that society has allowed itself to be taken advantage of by these people, and the society is doing little or nothing to protect itself from this abuse of its social systems. Somehow, we've badly merged the idea of helping the underpriveleged with protecting individual liberties, such that people are provided help from the government, but that help isn't allowed to have any strings attached because this is somehow oppressive to them. This really needs to change. If someone wants help, they should have to meet certain requirements and conditions, designed so that these people can become productive members of society again eventually. This means no more extra children for welfare mothers; if this means they have to be sterilized if they choose to accept government assistance, then so be it (many of these procedures are reversible now, so it's not like they'd never be allowed to have children again).