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Human Genes Still Evolving
MediumFormat writes "The New York Times is running an article that discusses the continuing evolution of human genes. From the article: 'The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.' Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
The PLOS biology article is available to everyone via Open Access.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
We'll it would have been if it wasn't for this damned webbing between my fingers.
its not that its stopped, its that 5,000 years is an insignificant spec of time.
-ashot
Does this mean that fishbelly white and absolute dependance on Jolt will create Morlocks? I always wondered where they came from....
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
Applying natural selection as a template, lets look at what it really is. Natural selection is the phenomena of being removed from the gene pool prior to reproduction. Anything else that happens will allow your genes to carry on, which is how evolution works. People probably assumed that evolution stopped because they assume that most people manage to successfully reproduce prior to their death.
Civilization.
(Not the Sid-Meier-game, actually.)
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Evolution involves the death of weaker individuals before they can breed. With soap (the yardstick of civilisation), surgery, rescue helicopters, dentistry, wheelchairs etc, weaker individuals aren't killed off so easily before they can breed.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
of course, this would never be workable, and would run against personal freedoms, but we could increase lifespans just by increasing the minimum age to procreate. see, once an organism has reproduced and passed on it's genes, it no longer has a genetic "need" to stay alive. after awhile of gradually forcing people to wait before reproducing, we would automatically see health being "bred" into older ages.
i disable sigs
Of course human genes are still evolving; you just have to examine what it is these days that limits people in reproductivity, and what encourages them. It's obvious that we, as a species, should ever so slightly more alcohol-resistant, because drunk driving kills a lot of young people before they can reproduce. Also, the males will become more resistant to female-hormone-like substances in their food. Then there's work-related stress (adrenaline), and last but not least war, which takes, and has been taking out a huge number of ill-fated or aggressive young men.
I think it will be really interesting to see what happens to humanity (genetically) over the next several thousand years. The article makes it sound like bioinformatics could really take off in an effort to better ourselves by artificial selection.
A number of things have changed that will greatly impact our evolution that hasn't been experienced by our species before:
1. Ease of migration allowing for extreme mixing of previously separated social groups (this has been in decline over the last few thousand years, but now that you can travel between continents relatively quickly and cheaply, the impact will be much much greater.)
2. Knowingly allowing, accepting, and encouraging reproduction of individuals, who...shouldn't (No, I don't mean Bush). There's some bad genes out there. Some that shouldn't be passed on. While we're at a point where we can curtail some of this through prescreening parents for likely inherited traits, we continue to become more accepting of people with, well, bad genes. Aren't we effectively letting people piss into the pool?
3. Will this spawn a new race (as in car) by parents to "maximize" the brain genes described in TFA? Do I have to listen to soccer mom's brag about their kids DNA now?
4. How will this impact governments? And more importantly, dating websites?
I guess only time will tell.
remains to be about zero...
Please! Go read one Gould's short essays about what Evolution is, and isn't, or google around for five minutes.
I can't imagine what it must be like to be an evolutionary biologist and have to see articles like this here on Slashdot.
I mean really? Come on...
You go to college, work your arse off, earn lots of money, die without kids, the race doesn't get your genes. You're a single parent living on state benefit with 12 kids... big contribution to the gene pool.
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Part of evolution is adaptation to the environment. We are changing the environment (civilization, medicine, technology, etc.) far faster than evolution can react to it, so to speak, given the length of a human generation. We are seriously adapting the environment to us, rather than the other way around.
That evolution doesn't give a toss about your concept of strength or of fitness, and guess what... poor people have more children than rich people do...
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Yesterday, I read this in the Guardian. It's a very interesting article about how, over the last 10.000 years, our DNA has been altered by what we eat and where we live.
42 + 1 = 42
[QUOTE]Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?[/QUOTE]
The confusion is over the lay usage and the scientific usage of evolution. Lay usage usually implys an 'improvement' in the genome, whereas scientific usage is 'a change in allelle frequency over time' which can be due to 'selective pressure' resulting in differential reproductive success (and hence likely an 'improvement') or due to genetic drift, etc.. Selective pressures resulting in 'differential reproductive success' are not much of a factor for many modern humans. So if you are using evolution in the lay sense it has 'largely stopped' (though not completely see for instance what is likely to happen in Korea or China where the male to female ratio is hugely out of balance; or in Africa with HIV), even if it will inevitably continue to 'evolve' in the scientific sense.
LetterRip
Genetically, we have a concept called races.
No, we don't. Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
We'll be beyond DNA quite soon. Kurzweil may have been a bit optimistic on timelines for brain-machine integration, but he's been quite right before. I give it 64 years or so.
I hate to see all these comments talking about how evolution mechanisms are failing in the modern world.
We can't escape natural selection, no matter how many pills and safety mechanisms we introduce into society.
Women just tend to become more and more picky with whom they mate. And while things like good eye sight become less important, other things take their place. Things like having lots of money, social skills/social network, an athletic body, cooking skills and so on.
Here in Europe, the number of babies born per adult keep falling. This means it is actually getting harder to reproduce than it was in a past, poorer Europe.
Will code a sig generator for food
- the humane genes are still evolving
- they are evolving at a rapid rate
- they are evolving in the wrong direction
Oh yeah, and:
- it's not 'designed'
- it's certainly not 'intelligent'
If we want to preferentialy breed inteligence into future generations we're going to have to do it intentionaly, either by a direct process of eugenics (possibly by giving financial benefits to inteligent people who have children and heavily taxing less inteligent people who do ... which runs into the problem of how you measure inteligence reliably) or by human genettic engineering.
One interesting possibility would be to have everybody sterilised with reproductive material kept on ice, and then when a woman wants to have children give her artificial insemination with an embryo who's biological parents are of "aproved stock". Yeah, somewhat abusable by whomever has control over the system - not to mention the unfortuante problem of monoculture if enough genetic diversity doesn't get into teh next generation as a result.
James P. Barrett
Very funny. :)
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A few generations are enough, particularly in areas with high mortality rates, high levels of disease. It just doesn't apply to the individual.
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I think that article isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
In fact, natural selection has clearly operated at a huge scale, when Europeans settled every corner of the globe, while indiginous populations have disappeared or mingled. Genes associated with those Europeans have spread, while many others have nearly disappeared.
This is an example of group selection, and it has selected many genes at once; some of them may have helped Europeans in their conquests, others may have just been along for the ride.
On the flipside, medical and environmental advances probably are causing us to lose functions at a massive rate: no need to deal with food-born pathogens if you don't encounter any.
Evolution isn't as neat and simple as "better mammal wins" or "better gene gets selected".
The Chinese are illustrative of another interesting development in evolution: limiting population growth in the absence of high child mortality and in the presence of modern medical technologies and genetic testing. Whatever policies nations adopt in that environment, they'll end up acting as "natural" selection as well.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your sentiment, but how does what you say contradict evolution? Evolution isn't about making humans smarter, stronger, or any other attribute that you think of as 'better'. To evolution the better person is whomever passes their genes on.
When speaking on the survival of a species, that welfare mom is a hell of alot more important than some wealthy smart person who keeps their genes to themselves.
Because all the evidence says that earning lots of money is an evolutionarily weak. When do you then have time to have the dozen genetic offspring? It isn't the few at the top of the heap who're having lots of children, they're busy paying for their lifestyle.
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That evolution doesn't give a toss about your concept of strength or of fitness, and guess what... poor people have more children than rich people do...
That's not really the point. The point is that we are now at a level of scientific knowledge where we can begin to influence evolution at a genetic level. That means will soon be able, if we want to, to conduct eugenics at a molecular level thus pre-programming the genome of a child rather than achieving canges by slow and clumsy selective breeding like the Nazis and other eugenics enthusiasts of the 1930s had in mind. In the forseeable future we will be able to modify genes to make our children smarter, stronger, better looking etc... If you are rich you will be more easily able to afford this kind of treatment than if you are poor. Some poor people will not be able to afford it at all, which might lead to them becoming 'indentured' (in the historical sense) to a corporation who sponsors the gene modifications of their children. Some scientists have advanced the hypothesis that such developments may lead to two genetically distinct... I hesitate to use the word 'species', lets call them 'groups' of humans emerging resulting in a 'genetc upperclass' and a 'genetic underclass' of untouchables. As genetic modifications become more extreme these groups might even become unable to cross breed. This sounds like science fiction but there is no reason why it could not happen althoug perhaps what actually happens will not be quite so extreme as what I described. Even so, think about it, how would you feel if you lived to discover that your great grandchild in 50 years time will have the words 'Encoded by Microsoft Genetics' genetically etched into the skin behind it's left ear?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
That's exactly the mistake that most people make when they talk about evolution. It's not just down to the ability to stay alive long enough, i.e. not all selectors involve organism death.
Some people lead long, healthy active lives and never reproduce through choice, lack of opportunity or possibly just inadequate social skills. Isaac Newton famously died a virgin.
People may also reproduce but choose the best partner to reproduce with, thus ensuring their line dies out in the future. Or social fashions may influence the reproductive choices of generations, i.e. big is beautiful, or slender, Blonde or brunette etc.
And lets not even start on the concept of nations and other communal groupings competing with each other...
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
If you want to evolve
Individuals don't evolve.
sudo ergo sum
Thats right, even devolution is evolution. The new path to enlightenment, greed?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Or European for that matter. I wasn't talking about Africa...
Once the basic killers are covered, food, water, shelter, disease. People can breed to their heart's content, and that's exactly what they do. Unless of course they are driven by archaic competitive genes to be the number 1, the big cheese. Then they compete themselves right out of the gene pool. I find that particular irony highly amusing.
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possibly by giving financial benefits to inteligent people who have children and heavily taxing less inteligent people who do ... which runs into the problem of how you measure inteligence reliably)
If that tax-form is normal state form, you have to be inteligent enough to be able to fill it.
...then we shall see some natural selection, as people without some kind of resistance to it die in their millions.
Anywhere outside of the US that's not much of an issue. Heck, in Britain the vast majority of people never have to fill out a tax-return, and those that do don't tend to find it too difficult -- the US just has a ridiculously complicated tax-system.
James P. Barrett
Hmmm, let's see:
Bill and Hillary -> Chelsea
Ronald and Nancy -> Ron Jr.
George and Barbara -> George Jr.
Conclusion: Evolutionary dead end was reached and we are reversing quickly out of a bad neighborhood. Don't make me cite Kennedys.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Lesson 1: The meaning of life.
Is life itself... To have children, to pass your genes on to the next and all succeeding generations. That is the sole meaning of life. You can tack all the extra personal gubbins you like on to it but that's it.
So if you start mucking around with the genetic code of your kids... Whos genetic code are you passing on? It certainly isn't yours... Then even if you do have lots of kids, you've missed the point of passing your genes on. Either way the rich lose.
Deleted
Just look at the average football player's chance to reproduce compared to the average /.er's chance...
I challenge everyone here to do their part in raising the IQ of humanity (go get yourself laid damnit!)
Science is bullshit.. Science could say anything
Right, you can use science to prove anything that's even remotely true. You've got a much freer hand wirth religion, hence it's not bullshit.
The concept of race will not go away just because science disproves of it. The concept of race will never go away just like Christianity will never go away.
Yeah, but don't we just wish that they would.
the only thing that passes on from generation to generation is culture.
Have we forgotten Einsteinian physics and Darwinian Evolution? Oh wait, you Americans almost have done that.
Cultural conservativism is the answer.
Must be the wrong question then.
Always follow the economy.
Make up your mind if you're a Christian or a capitalism. Morals or Money.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Evolution happens when those too weak/unable to adapt to their surroundings don't get to breed, so only the successful genes survive. Straightforward, and of course we aren't going to stop evolving just because Darwin was wrong and God is bored with the game after a few thousand years.
Now I know this is a short-term perspective, but who knows how long this will go on - look at women these days (and for the last century). If women want to work and have a career, then they'd do well to be smart enough not to have children. So essentially, modern society removes a good deal of good genes from the gene pool. Female academics have much fewer children, they're pickier about who they marry/have those children with. And there's very little sign that this is going to ease up anytime soon It's much easier for you guys - when you're an academic and successful, picking up a woman isn't that hard, so you'll get to pass on your genes. Just watch out you don't have daughters, because if they inherit your intelligence, your genes may be in a dead end there.
Actually, if you RT*A, you will see that this is solely talking about Natural Selection, which is a removal of genetic material. Us right-wing religious nuts believe in Natural Selection. The article gives zero evidence for molecules-to-man evolution, which was somehow missed by most of the respondents.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Oh, yeah, and of course that other thing called genes that TFA was all about. Didn't you get the memo?
The concept of race will not go away just because science disproves of it.
Probably true, as with most kinds of superstitions. That doesn't make it real any more than feng shui, crystals or healing is real. Somehow I'm not sure you understand the difference between something existing and the concept of that something haning on.
Race will always exist
No, this is patently false. See above.
Religiously, race will exist, just like capitalism will always exist.
Is this even supposed to mean anythig or is it just rambling?
Cultural conservativism is the answer.
What is the question? In science it is customary (actually, it's mandatory) to start with the question. However, since you don't believe in science, I can see why you would want to skip that part.
The point is, this is our culture, it will not go away, it's in our genetic code to be this way
What exactly do you mean by "this way"? Are you suggesting that society today has the same sets of mores and values we had 200 years ago? What about five thousand years ago? (Oh, I forgot. 5000 years ago was before we were created, so obviously we didn't have any values then. Silly me...)
An evolutionary advantage is whatever passes your genes on to the next generation. Hence it is the poor not the rich that have it. Quality of life doesn't make a difference. Evolution is a simple dumb process, it holds no moral judgements whatsoever.
James P. Barrett
Nah, devolution is the granting of independent law-making powers to local authorities. Evolution, kind of by definition, doesn't have an oposite (unless you count stagnation).
James P. Barrett
Bullshit. Culture has never been a static, unchanging entity. Culture is whatever we as a society wish it to be, and it changes all the time.
Indeed, science has had an amazing impact on culture in the last 100 years. We moved from a culture of travel by foot and horse to an automotive culture. We've gone from Uncle George playing a banjo to carrying whatever music we want wherever we want on portable music devices. We've gone from having to spend hours at the library to look up an obscure fact to having information at our fingertips 24 hours a day. We've gone from candles and oil lamps to electric lights. And perhaps most noticably, we've gone from getting together with friends and family, or reading a book, or playing a board game, to sitting in front of the TV set.
Sorry, but our culture is very heavily influenced by science. It wasn't that long ago in certain parts of the Western world where the area you were allowed to sit in on the bus was determined by the colour of your skin -- something which is no longer part of any Western culture (except in the minds of a few deluded racists who think that culture is static and unchanging, so long as they get to dictate what culture is).
Yes, some parts of culture are sufficiently ingrained that it is hard to overcome their momentum -- but it is hardly impossible to do so. Major events and new ideas and inventions are changing culture every day.
I'm sure 10+ years ago there were some old white guys in South Africa who were convinced that Apartheid would never end as well -- and yet here we are. Women are allowed to vote everywhere in the Westernized world as well, in case nobody had bothered to tell you.
Sorry, but you come across as an appologist for racists and bigots with a dumb comment like that. Culture changes. Get used to it. Discrimination is not a given -- it's a completely learned trait
Yaz.
[insert insightful comment about the ID joke here]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
When the economy collapses, a farmer has a much better chance on survival then the owner of a big company. A farmer can produce his own food.
If you look throughout history, most jobs exist for a limited amount of time and depend heavily on the economic and social development of a society. Farming has been there ever since it was invented, and while it depends to some level on peace so the lands don't get burned all the time, it has very little dependencies on either economic or social development.
Your answer however gives a hint at why at least some people don't realize that evolution is continuing. Many people cannot see that whatever state society has reached today is only temporary, and todays success can easily be tomorrows failure, esp. if that success has very little to do with forfilling the basic needs of survival.
I see you have found your god..
No monetary system survived for a relevant amount of time compared to how long humans have been roaming this planet. Money is usefull, but it is a means to obtain material things, and nothing more.
I think I may have an unfair advantage in this discussion over some, since I'm sitting here with Physical and Historical Geology courses (my major), Ahtropology, Paleontology, Botany and Zoology courses as well under my belt and forgive me, but I'm having a frustrated scientist moment. Please check out the writings of Stehen Jay Gould to learn what evolution really is http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library.html Please also understand the Hardy-Weinberg Principle when talking about population evolution (sorry about the spelling error before on that name) http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/H/Hardy_Weinberg.html
Lastly, on a seemingly offtopic note, but equally as frustrating: for those of you who keep bringing up gods, creationism, and intelligent design and may wish it in our schools or discussed, it already is at the college level. It is a philosophy course on the "Teleological Argument" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument
Sorry all. After reading all of these posts and making some of my own, I had to get that off my chest. I will probably suffer being moderated down for this, but I'm willing to take that. Kind of makes me feel like I'm a part of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" if it happens really. http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
Yes, science is a candle in the dark, please, don't hit it with your Bible.
Randimal: AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG-CG-AT-AT-CG-AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG-AT-CG-CG-AT-AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG
If you had to compare the ability to survive in difficult circumstances the welfare mother would win. If you manage to raise 12 kids you have to have lots of ingenuity, and the ability to solve lots of real-life problems. The rich, well-studied, working-his-ass-off guy probably never had any material problems and got it all served on a silver plate. (I'm talking material stuff here). And being poor has nothing to do with being not intelligent.
If you would put the rich guy in place of the welfare mother (without his money!) and vice-versa, I think the former-rich guy would not survive very long. So, evolution-wise, the contribution to the gene pool of a person able to solve real-life problems and survive is better then that of a selfish, rich person who never had to solve those and probably wouldn't be able to.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Well, actually you could take the Adam/Eve postulate to "prove" evolution: :-)
If in the beginning there were only Adam and Eve, then how could it be that people today are as different as they are? After all, the genetic pool of humanity is clearly larger than the one of just two persons. Thus if all people are descendents from Adam and Eve, they must have evolved, thus proving evolution.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Society is not designed to help the weak poor, society is designed to help the strong rich.
You are arguing that we did not manage to evolve our society beyond that of an ant nest or the typical herd it seems.
What sets humans apart from animals socially is our abbility to build a society that supports more then just the strongest individuals.
The quality of a society is measured by its abbility to care for the weak, and not by the success of the strongest.
If you follow your idea, you end up with the exact situation that many African countries face nowadays. A few very rich people, and a large poor majority.
When you don't evolutionary pressures (which we are working our best to get rid of) you're probably not going to get an entire population of evolution. Instead you will have a bell curve of any attribute where some fall significantly above and some fall significantly below the average. The below average will perhaps breed more, but they don't really matter as much as those above average.
What we are essentially going to do is widen the bell curve for any given trait (or combination of traits) and heighten it (since the population will go up). That means we will have a higher standard deviation, but our mean will probably remain around the same, unless some evoluationary pressure pushes us one direction or the other. Bell curves for all traits will widen, and extremes of almost any trait will limit breeding possibilities.
the only thing that passes on from generation to generation is culture.
And the only culture that we know about that actually has been passed on from generation to generation for a historically relevant amount of time is the bushman culture in southern Africa (uninterupted for approx 25000 years now). All other cultures are either gone or too young to say anything usefull about culture lasting.
The summary text asks, perhaps rhetorically, "What made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?" I think it's a hangover from obsolete religious thinking - the great chain of being, the lower and higher forms of life, with Man at the pinnacle, made in God's own image, the crowning achievement of Creation.
Most Christians seem to have managed to accept evolution as a historical fact, but still wish to give Man special status. Evolution is how God created us, eh? But that still makes us the aim and end purpose of evolution, the special species, the one beloved of God and made in his image. No wonder the idea is widespread that evolution has somehow stopped, or finished, having now produced us.
Of course evolution hasn't finished; we're still evolving, along with everything else that's alive. But that means that in time we'll be gone, perhaps replaced by one or more descendant species, perhaps merely extinct and forgotten save for a few relics in deep space and a thin layer of mildly radioactive isotopes to be discovered by future geologists. It means that there's nothing special about us, we're just a blink of an eye in the Earth's history... Not something most people are too happy to believe.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Actually, no. Farmers food production depends on controlling a certain land area permanently. He cannot flee when the rioting mobs loot his farm (as whey inevitably will with a serious enough collapse of economy that the big corporation leader is threatened), since that would mean losing his foodstore, tools and land. He is a sitting duck.
The people who have the best chance of survival are hunter-gatherers, since they can live off the land and have nothing to stop them from leaving when the going gets though.
If you want evidence, just look at Africa. There's constant starvation there since the farmers keep getting killed or driven off their land by the constant wars.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
This is a very good point that quite a lot of people don't seem to get. Anything that causes a person not to reproduce is (eventually) selected against. For example, being sensitive to the meme "there are too many people on this world" is an evolutionary disadvantage and will eventually be removed from the genepool. The same goes for high intelligence (being that intelligent people often don't reproduce).
:)
That's probably also why religion is so prevalent in human populations: the evolutionary advantage it gives should not be underestimated.
So if you consider people like you to be a good addition to the human gene pool, breed!
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
It looks to me like you missed this little part of my post:
and while it depends to some level on peace so the lands don't get burned all the time, it has very little dependencies on either economic or social development.
Probably the fact that, for most of human history, being 'poor' meant starving to death and begetting no kin, whereas now, in some countries at least, it means being more likely to become obese and begetting more kin (in the sense that poorer people tend to have more children than richer people: it's one of the main mechanisms by which social inequalities maintain themselves).
That means that, at a crude level, natural selection has ceased to be for most of the human race. (An exception might be Southern Africa and AIDS: It's more likely many people will develop AIDS immunities there than anywhere else, but it might still take hundreds of years for that to happen: Evolution isn't nice or pretty in any way - it's about widespread and systematic death and destruction for periods of time often lasting much longer than the whole of human recorded history - the 'end' of evolution is generally a good thing as far as human wellbeing is concerned)
The issue of 'cultural evolution' is more complicated and ambiguous, however, and - if it exists in any meaningful sense - is probably still 'alive'.
With genetically engineered plants, this may stop being true. It's not uncommon for such plants to be modified to produce sterile seeds. The idea is, of course, that farmers will have to buy their next seed from the producer as well. Of course this means that if you can't get new seeds from such a company (maybe because those companies all died due toeconomy collapse), and if the farmer doesn't happen to have traditional seed around (which is likely if GM food gets the norm), then the farmer will not be able to produce food anymore, neither for himself, nor for anyone else.
Ok, this could also be seen as an evolutionary force: Those who don't use such plants will have an evolutionary advantage. Most interestingly, many of them will, again, most probably be poorer farmers who just cannot afford to buy the GM seed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
The fact that through medical care and technology, we have almost eliminated "survival of the fittest" (better written as "survival of the best fit to their habitat")?
People now live and have children when they would previously have died, either through diseases, or harsh environmental conditions. The elimination of the process of natural selection should see to it that evolution in humans no longer occurs, at least not in any beneficial way. Bad genes that lead to people having chronic medical conditions are not removed from the gene pool by those people dying without producing offspring. Humankind needs to step in with more advanced medical care and gene therapy to replace what was once done by nature.
Just my $0.02 of course!
Most whites have a gene that gives partial resistance to Bubonic Plague, as those Europeans who didn't have it 600 years ago don't have living descendants now.
Will the next big evolutionary change be (partial?) resistance to Bird-flu or Ebola ?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
... it seems the water is still wet and it flows towards the ground.
Exactly. You can roughly say that there is a very direct relationship between depending on technology and society, and the chance of survival in case of society and the economy collapsing. As another reply to my post pointed out, hunter-gatherers have an even better chance on survival in that case.
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
The fact that modern science and medicine help people overcome many genetic problems that would normally be selected against, but now have no impact on natual selection.
Incorrect. Dolphins support the sick members of the herd by keeping it afloat so it can breath. The leader of the dogpack defends the weaker members against outside aggressors. Bees will attack an intruder and die to protect their nest and queen.
But then again, simply because the concept "protect the weak" is simple enough for a dog to understand is no reason to expect a Free Market Fundamentalist to get it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
While we're at a point where we can curtail some of this through prescreening parents for likely inherited traits, we continue to become more accepting of people with, well, bad genes. Aren't we effectively letting people piss into the pool?
No. No. No. Eugenics is not just wrong. It's painfully stupid.
Why does evolution work? What is the secret. The secret my friends is randomness.
Randomness is the process which drives evolution. The universe is a vast, unpredicable chaotic system. It is only by randomly searching through many possible solutions that a species can hope to adapt to any enviornment.
The minute you take out randomness, by taking away genes or introducing them, you've stopped evolving, and have started specialising. And guess what happens to specialist species when their enviornment changes? That's right. They die.
Evolve dolphins with bigger lungs so they can dive deeper, kill off all lesser lunged dolphins. Then earths 02 levels drop by 2%. Ooops. Specialised, deep sea feeding dolphins are dead meat. With a random system, there would still be some lower lung capacity dolphins around.
Think this doesn't apply to people? Ask yourself this? Can you say with certainty what genes will be beneficial or detrimental to humanities survival in 1 million years time? What about 10,00 years time? 100 years? 10 years? Who would have predicted even 20 years ago that "geek" traits would be in such demand? Can you say what genes are beneficial or detrimental right now!?
Yet you want to throw out the single most powerful aspect of evolution. Random chance. It's got us where we are today, and if you think anyone can engineer an entire planet and its ecosystem half as well as random evolution, I'd like to see you try.
For an example of the superiority of evolution over engineering, just check out evolved antennas. NASA seems to think random evolution is just fine.
May the Maths Be with you!
Lets put it this way, humans are not going to ever loose their pinky finger if modern society goes on the way it is.
I don't think you can expect any MAJOR changes in an evolutionary model that does not ELIMINATE unfavorable characterists. We live in society's in which pretty much everybody reproduces and most of those reproductions end up reproducing themself. For those who cannot cope with society, we have public assistance and jail.
If anything, I believe modern evolutionary pressure (the last three hundred years) is producing more of the genes from people who have poor family planning skills and just cannot grasp or accept birth control. I fear what this pattern may produce in 20,000 years where people with less cognitive skills have 3-4 times more children than those with more cognitive skills. That and the other pressure for religious fanatics to have more children than those who take rational views of the world. Those with deep intellect could be forced to create a "Zardoz" society to protect themselves.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
If we want to preferentialy breed inteligence into future generations we're going to have to do it intentionaly, either by a direct process of eugenics (possibly by giving financial benefits to inteligent people who have children and heavily taxing less inteligent people who do ...
Didn't you RTFA? The microcephaly genes responisble for larger brain size have independantly evolved in seperate populations. Evolution is already taking care of human intelligence.
May the Maths Be with you!
>>Genetically, we have a concept called races.
G enetics
e
>No, we don't. Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically.
Really? Explain that to my black friend in 8th grade as he suffered during a sickle-cell anemia crisis.
I'm sure he'd be happy to know that he can't have a disease that affects primarily African-Americans, because there are no genetic differences in races.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#
Or to my Chinese roommate who lacks alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes in his liver and so has one drink and turns bright red. Embarassing for a guy who was in a frat that prized heavy drinking skills very highly. The enzyme deficiency has a huge penetration in Asia, something like up to 70% in some countries, a couple percent in Germany, 0% in Ireland. Go figure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_dehydrogenas
Or the Jewish student organization that sponsored a free screening day for Tay-Sachs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay-Sachs_disease
The concept that race is solely a cultural construct is mere wishful thinking: "I wish there were no genetic differences in people, because then there'd be no racism, and we'd all live in a world filled with flowers and ponies." No, as we discover more about genetic diversity we learn which genes have greater tendencies in certain ethnic groups. This is NOT an excuse for racism -- the concept that one person can be somehow metaphysically superior than another due to skin pigmentation is absurd -- but denying uncontroversial science for political reasons is troubling as well.
"A farmer can produce his own food."
I wonder to what extent that's true in any industrialized country. Do you really think a person who relies on huge combines and irrigation systems to grow food for millions of people is going to be any better than average at maintaining a garden for his or her own family? Seems like two different skillsets, to me.
"Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
Because if it didn't suddenly stop after the major supergroups of humans started moving out of Africa in various directions, it would mean that it is likely that these groups would have evolved on somewhat separate paths (as dictated by the highly variant environments they were living in).
This would in turn go against the dominant western ideology of empirical egalitarianism, that dictates that the average innate skills and predispositions of all human populations (I.e. 'races') are (on average and in distributions) entirely equal. Therefore, clearly, evolution must have stopped with the modern era. After all, how could something ideologically uncomfortable be true?
"It is not the strongest who survive, but rather he who is most responsive to change."
~Charles Darwin
Incorrect. Dolphins support the sick members of the herd by keeping it afloat so it can breath. The leader of the dogpack defends the weaker members against outside aggressors. Bees will attack an intruder and die to protect their nest and queen.
You have a good point with regards to dolphins, the other 2 cases are protecting a society as a whole from an outside thread.
A dogpack has little trouble expelling the weaker members as soon as they become a burden for the pack but will protect those that can directly contribute to its survival. Its weaker members will only see food when there happens to be enough left after the alpha animal(s) are satisfied. If there is too little, the weak members are simply out of luck.
The queen of a bee nest is fundamental for the survival of the nest and species. Also, if you ever encountered a bee queen on her way to settling a new nest, you'll most likely stop regarding her as a 'weak member'.
Survival of the species is a big motivator for action, don't confuse it with caring for the weak.
We do regard dolphins as somewhat special specifically because of their intelligence and slightly unusual behavior and capabilities.
At any rate, you are of course correct that there are some animals that do in fact protect the weak beyond what is needed for basic survival of the group. Another animal that at least at times shows such behavior is the elephant.
Unfortunately a number of people in the 21st century seem determined to return to the 17th., when everything was simpler and you could be as ignorant as you liked and still be an opinion former. However, I fail to understand the reference to Plato. Plato's cave is not about geology, and it is certainly not about self-willed ignorance. The part of Plato you are thinking of is the trial of Sokrates where he is accused of corrupting youth by casting doubt in the reality of the gods. The modern analogy is a book by Doris Lessing, about a society which has developed to the point that no-one is allowed to look upwards, in case they notice the mountains.
Pining for the fjords
It would be FAR more surprising to me if results showed that evolution had stopped.
Humans aren't perfect. For example, I think there's still frequent deaths due to poor control of energy needs and overly high demand of sugar and fat that has its heritage waaay back when these things were scarce and vital for survival. Well, they still are, but today the quantities are near unlimited for any individual in an industrialized society. It's not exactly that obese people use to need all their fat in times of emergency for the body to use it as energy reserves. Maybe evolution will work against this, evolving safety guards and let some nutrients pass through our bodies better when detected we have more than enough of them. Just there is a reason for many premature deaths today anyway. Evolution takes a lot (= hundreds to thousands to millions of years) of time to happen though, so don't let that fool you.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
>>So if you start mucking around with the genetic code of your kids... Whos genetic code are you passing on?
Well, I'll give you two choices... or, rather, four.
We have two chromosomes to choose from, both for the father and for the mother.
And 16 if you want to allow reduplicated genes.
And they're 100% you.
BTW, posts like yours are exactly why science should stay out of the philosophy business. Eugenics and social darwinism was bad enough, K THX. Science is (and should be) only concerned with empirical knowledge.
We will always be evolving as long as our environment changes. Common misconceptions of evolution are that evolution is "bettering" us, no we're simply adapting to our environment.
And you miss the fact that, in the case of an economic collapse large enough to cause starvation in high society in the First World, the farmland will get burned there. The farmers can survive and grow their own food just as long as the surrounding civilization defends them against aggressors; if it collapses, they're dead, thus invalidating your claim that they're the ones most likely to survive.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I wonder to what extent that's true in any industrialized country. Do you really think a person who relies on huge combines and irrigation systems to grow food for millions of people is going to be any better than average at maintaining a garden for his or her own family? Seems like two different skillsets, to me.
I think the person having the garden and growing food in it has the better chance, but then, my argument was comparing a farmer to for example a CEO of some huge company.
As someone else pointed out in a reply to my post, a hunter-gatherer has a much better chance still in case of collapse of society and economy.
Bottomline, those who depend less on technology and society for forfilling their basic needs have a better chance on survival in case of such a collapse.
But what's in the DNA doesn't correlate particularly well with what we have culturally labelled 'races'. The genetic difference between a European, an Arab, an Indian, a Chinaman, an aboriginal, and a native American isn't all that much, compared to the genetic difference between African tribe A and African tribe B. And yet we consider David Smith and Tanaka Jiro to be of different 'races', while two Africans of far greater genetic diversity from each other we lump together as 'black'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
So our genes are evolving... how are we doing as people with personalities? Are humans any nicer or friendlier than they were 5,000 years ago? Or has that held constant?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
And you miss the fact that, in the case of an economic collapse large enough to cause starvation in high society in the First World, the farmland will get burned there.
Maybe, depending on how things go, even likely. That said, we have seen economic and social collapse without this happening (see the end of the former soviet union for a nice example)
Regardless, you are right that a hunter-gatherer has an even better chance, but that is only in line with the argument I was trying to make.
Less dependence on society + technology == better chance on survival when society collapses.
Exactly right.
Evolution doesn't necessarily mean "good"--or at least not in any sense that we'd usually use the word.
Common misconception.
Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically.
At the risk of sounding abrasive, that statement is a simplification. It is true that there is more genetic variability within a 'race' than between 'races', and that one cannot determine 'race' using a DNA test. However, there are very real medical conditions that are exhibited more frequently in specific 'races' because those conditions have a genetic basis. These differences are of interest genetically.
But who would you say is intelligent? It seems to me like you are confusing making a carreer for yourself with beeing genetically superior in terms of intelligence.
How many great minds are not being spent looking for food on garbage dumps in Africa? Or go their whole life without ever getting access to even basic education? If you examine the phd's of the world and compare their genes to the genes of the homeless, it would be very surprising if you found any regular difference.
Genetically, you are not in any way inferior because you spend your days trying to survive starvation, or flip burgers for minimum-wage at McDonalds.
You are giving examples of genetic dispositions in ethnic groups, but the term "races" applied to humans is still not defined in any meaningful way.
which brings another interesting question: is laziness hereditary, and if so, how does it contribute to the fitness function?
No idea bout the first, but yes, it does contribute to the fitness function.
Laziness promotes finding more efficient ways to accomplish things since that reduces the amount of efford required.
My guess would be that we're getting nastier. I meet somebody, I have to decide whether to be nice or nasty. My decision will be governed by whether I'm ever likely to meet him again. If I know I'll never see the guy again, I'll be nasty. If I know I'll be seeing him on a daily basis for years, I'll be nice.
5,000 years ago we lived in far smaller communities. Most people you met you'd be likely to meet again. So your assumption will be 'be nice' and that may well become a genetic predisposition over time. Nowadays, we live in huge communities of millions. I meet a stranger and I can have good odds that I'll never see him again. So I may as well be nasty...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
The problem evolution is having now is that in order for the primary mechanism of evolution to "work", a significant portion of the members of a population have to die. (not survive long enough to reproduce) In today's modern human socity, life is valued and society helps people to survive that without help would not have made it.
Some of the most extreme examples include people that have a genetic defect that would normally be fatal, but due to modern medical technology they are able to go on living. They have children, some of which inherit those different genes and also suffer from the same genetic condition. 500 years ago this would not have happened because the original defect would have been "weeded out of the gene pool" and there would have been no children with the same defect.
Evolution may still be occurring, but it is very likely going a lot slower than it was even a decade ago. It's also likely working a little different now than it did in the past - the other functional feature of evolution is natural selection, and the random attributes that people find attractive in finding a partner have probably changed over time and this also would affect evoltion - I'd expect this to now be the dominent influence on human evolution.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
People have not changed as much as you seem to think. Values don't change much, the form changes. Yesterdays values were todays values which will become tomorrows values. You'll have new names for these values, you'll have new technology, so these values might be in a different format, but cultural values are in our genes. People are not going to change their values because science says so. Just like you arent going to believe in god no matter how many bibles you read. Someone who believes in god or traditional culture is not going to believe in your science no matter what you say or how many facts you come with.
Tell that to this third eye growing on my forehead. Oh wait, it was just a zit, nevermind.
So, "race" is just a kind of superset of family line ?
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I don't see that society, look at the third world. I don't see how our society is so organized to help the third world. So I don't know what you are talking about. If you want to care for the weak, care for the weak, but it is not the federal governments job to care for the weak, it's the job of the church to care for the weak. It's a job for the individual. If you use tax dollars to care for the weak, and people are FORCED collectively to do it, you create anger and hatred towards the weak, ultimately harming the people you are trying to protect with your taxes. So I'm actually saying that smaller more efficient government is a good thing. I know that FDR created these social programs, and now people are addicted to the way things were, but it should be obvious even to you that things cannot stay that way forever. Social security just does not work, it is broken. It's broken because it does not work culturally. It is broken because it is not the traditional way to care for the poor. Before social security was invented, the church existed to do this. The church was made tax exempt to that people could care for the poor. The church does work. If you want to help people, join the church, just don't do it through tax dollars because A. It pisses people off who do not want to be forced to pay. B. It is not very efficient. C. It increases the size and bulk of the government. D. It is not the traditional way of doing this kind of work.
When speaking on the survival of a species, that welfare mom is a hell of alot more important than some wealthy smart person who keeps their genes to themselves.
Not necessarily. Evolution sometimes causes traits that are harmful to the survival and adaptability of the species, but helpful to reproduction, to become common and exaggerated.
Gould liked to use the peacock as an example: somewhere along the line, the females had started to favor males with large tailfeathers as mates, for whatever reason. The feathers evolved to their modern-day, absurd sizes, which can hinder the bird's ability to adapt and to get food, but not quite enough to kill it off (yet), and the females are still crazy for the big-feathered males, so it's not going away, and it's such an exaggerated feature that if there's a change in environment that causes the feathers to become a more serious hinderance, there won't be any with feathers small enough to survive the change and keep breeding. They'd all die in a generation. All it would take is one new predator, and poof, no more peacocks. I mean, not counting human interaction, like zoos and crap like that.
Harmful or limiting evolutionary tracks are one of the things that cause species to go extinct, sometimes from fairly minor environmental changes. Bad stuff. We'd better take this stuff in to our own hands before long, as there's no guarantee that nature will give us anything better than (or even as good as) what we have now, but we certainly can. It's still risky, but better than natural evolutionary forces by a long shot.
Born with a built in keyboard and mouse? :P
It's nice to know that a post composed primarily of logically flawed, inaccurate arguments still gets +5.
Without disagreeing with you, what part of your argument refutes the idea that the concept of race is not supported by genetics?
All you've done is give examples of genetic anomalies that are present in populations. Those genetice anomalies are a response to environment, and have nothing to do with the race of the individual.
To explain it to you so you understand, if you moved groups of different "races" around, they would eventually develop similar genetic anomalies.
I think you're trying to wedge a social argument into a discusiion of genetics, but none of what you say is supported by fact.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Just because the economy is bad does not mean there will be no economy. People will still trade. People who previously had a lot of property will have more to trade with.
What many people fail to realize is that it takes "evolution" on the order of tens to hundreds thousands of years to "invent" a gene.
Random mutations have to encode for a new protein that activates in the right cells and "does the right thing". From then on, this is likely to become a "gene": Almost any random mutation will invalidate the protein, and disable the "feature".
Suppose such a new "invention" is not always advantageous. Say, only during an ice age. During ice ages, those carrying the intact encoding for the protein (we say they "have the gene"), will survive best, those that don't have it will drop in numbers. Once such a condition is over (say ice age stops), natural selection suddely starts to favor those that "do not have the gene". Still, as they decend from a population where most had the gene to survive, they remain "genetically close", and the gene will easily activate and proliferate during the next ice age.
A real world example is Sicle Cell Anemia. It is a genetic disease: You're born with or without it. Advantage of HAVING the disease? You don't die of Malaria (you do die of the disease, but most have had children by then).
So depending on the amount of malaria mosquitos around, the percentage of people with the Sicle Cell Anemia gene varies a lot. Natural selection at work!
Now, if you look at 10000 to 15000 years, it is unlikely that "evolution" has "invented" a lot of new genes. That however genes have activated and deactivated is however very likely.
If the "running fast" gene was "mostly essential" 10000 years ago in africa, but now not any more, then natural selection would have ensured that 90-95% of the population had that gene 10000 years ago. Nowadays, there is no longer a selection for-or-against this gene. So, the percentage of the people having the gene will slowly drop (I don't work in the field, I have no idea how fast this goes).
Did you ever notice that different children "don't like" different foods? This is a genetic safeguard to preserve the species. Evolution apparently "invented" that a long time ago.
If five percent of your tribe "Simply doesn't like to eat chicken", and the H5N1 Chicken flue comes around, about 5% of the tribe is likely to survive to pass on a much elevated "don't like chicken" gene.
Most likely the "common knowledge" about what to eat and what not to eat has leveled out the "taste" genes: They no longer significantly influence survival.
Certain human genes may be evolving, but the rest of the world is overpopulating causing stress on our natural environment. No gene is going to be able to overcome that fact.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Not only this, up until recently race was a factor that was not able to be traced in a blood test. It was found that race can in fact be determined and traced, this is now become more practical and useful as it can help profile a criminal, as well as trace family lines, i believe Oprah had special in which the racial histories of different people were determined to help find ancestors/distant relatives, though i don't know if they used the same process.
A robot's ability to speak of Nazis grows by a factor of 2 every 18 months. -roman_mir
don't forget that sickle cell anemia, while debilitating in itself, confers a positive advantage in that the sufferers are less susceptible to malaria, the major killer in the region. So eventually, the affected population in malaria free areas, should lose the gene for sickle cell anemia because they will select against it, whilst it will remain in the population in those areas which do suffer from malaria because of the positive selection. We just haven't had enough time/generations in malaria free areas for the sickle cell anemia gene to reduce in frequency.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
A shame you posted as an anonymous coward and not a registered user. Its a great point.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Read Stephen Jay Goulds.
Evolution/mutation are instantaneous...Goulds theory of Punctuated Equilibrium explains why it looks like it takes millenia to occur.
Mutations that survive move off to other environments. They thrive and multiply, then overrun the original areas. This is why fossil records thousands, perhaps millions, of years apart show a drastic change in a single species.
FPO
The question of "race" is problematic, as the parent post itself shows. For examples of race, the poster gives "African-American," "Chinese," and "Jewish."
Which of these are "races"? Is race determined by continent of origin? Country? Region (Tay-Sachs affects the Ashkenazi Jews--are they a separate race from the Sephardic)?
Of course there are genetic differences between groups. But these variations do not match up very well with conventional (cultural) concepts of race, which are often based simply on skin color or other physical attributes, and sometimes on national origin.
There probably are a few people in Ireland who have this, and likely all of asiatic descent. Ireland (like England and indeed most of Europe) was traditionaly a brew culture - water was fermented in order to make it safe to drink - as a result a total innability to drink alcohol would have quickly resulted in death. It's unsuprising that the genes for this are simply not present in Irish people (and very rare in all of Europe).
In east asia, on the other hand, the traditional way to make water safe to drink is to boil it - so people with an innability to cope with alcohol have much less selection against them.
James P. Barrett
Remember - it isn't so much the idea of Eugenics that is teh problem as what criteria you set for selection. Adolf Hitler killed an awful lot of people based upon a selection criterion which was chosen to coincide with his pre-existing prejudices. The problem with his philosophy was not that he advocated Eugenics, but ratrher that he advocated killing people - and that his criteria for selection were based upon no scientific data whatsoever but rather upon some horrible racist stereotype of the Aryan master-race.
For a more sane less evil view on Eugenics you might want to take a look at some of Nietzsche's work - a lot of the same terms used (Ubermensch etc...) but they mean something quite different in context.
James P. Barrett
If you end Aparthied in South Africa you simply are creating a new form of Aparthied somewhere else.
Of course. I'd forgotten the law of conservation of Apartheid.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Two things...
... the average height and brawn of the american has demonstratably increased steadily since colonization (freaks like lincoln aside)... This is something known as contextual adaptation, and as been seen in the fossil record many a time (mini versions of various well known dinosaurs caught on new islands for milliions of years, etc and so on).
... but the enlargement of the american colonist over 200-400 years due to the bounty of the land shows that, well, in fact, our genome is more than simply an accident... it is code and capable of reactions to bounty, stresses, and environment. When we live in a place that can support larger bodies (again, no reference to fat), it will because a larger animal is less likely to be a target for predators... however, if yer stuck in no-man's-land or on tiny islands, well, you'll shrink because you want to remain viable even without enormous bounties of food to be had. That's a form of genetic adaptation that has been shown to occur very fast (in the greater scheme of things)
1) the evolving american: One very interesting and MEASURABLE transition in human genome has occurred right here in america, and in a geological/evolutionary blink of an eye... Our tallness (no, not fatness)
Some above have said that, 'well sure evolution exists, but it is purely accidental and could never adjust for overpopulation, etc'
2) the swimming primate: Has anyone noticed, that of all the primates in existance, humans are the best adapted to swimming? How many other primates concentrate their populations on shorelines? How many can swim at all? From what I hear, very few... As one who has faith in our internal programmings, I am very curious where we are headed and why...
No, it can only be selected if there is genetic differentiation in it. So if susceptibility levels to the "full world" meme vary for different alleles of the same gene, the less susceptible versions will be selected for. But if that genetic variation doesn't exist, it can't be selected for.
It works the other way round, too. Anything that has evolved has clearly been subject to inheritable differences in the past, and it probably still is, unless the selective pressure for it is so strong that the population is essentially homeogenous. This is the strongest argument for there being a genetic basis to intelligence level, since intelligence has clearly evolved in the fairly recent past.
Nothing can eliminate "survival of the fittest" - that's just a statement of the mechanics.
The definition of "fittest" of course changes as the evolutionary landscape does, and presumably cruder forms of competition for food and mates doesn't currently play as large a part in human "fitness" as it used to, but nonetheless there are segments of the human gene pool that are outbreeding others, and that is the direction we are therefore evolving towards.
There are of course also portions of the global gene pool that mostly breed within themselves, and are therefore liable to evolve in different directions from each other.
Better yet. Donate sperm to a sperm-bank. This way you will have a bunch of children at zero cost and tie up resources of someone else who would (from your selfish gene point of view) pollute the gene pool. Your offspring will also have a couple advantages:
- The more descendants you leave (the more your impact on the gene pool), the more likely for them to find compatible blood, bone marrow or organ donors.
- If you and your descendants share a common genetic trait that may cause a disease or other medical condition, making it more common will increase the odds of someone developing a treatment.
Plus a couple more.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
If you're looking for a massive plague that would have conferred resistance on survivors, that would suit the argument.
(And yet we're looking at the bird flu now. Also the pandemics of 1957 and 1968. The picture's muddied by modern vaccination practices, which were having some grab by '57.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The big house. The penthouse. The big office. The boat. The jet. The SUV... In short, money. It demonstrates an ability to provide resources for offspring to the female, it's why money turns women on and that in turn selects for males who exhibit those features. Thing is it really doesn't take that much to provide for children. However the competitive drive is there in the sex drive and the results can be seen in almost every aspect of society, to the point where the surrounding environment is destroyed for future generations.
Deleted
If widespread genetic engineering took place we would see a rapid acceleration in the influence of human preference selection on the gene pool, in that what humans consider advantageous traits would get a huge leg up over what the environment selects as well adapted traits.
The ramifications of this are similar to other widespread synthetic changes; disruption of the ecological balance between humans and the rest of the ecosystem (similar to agriculture, industrialisation) except this time i would imagine it would be an imbalance between humans and viruses/diseases, rather than wildlife/the atmosphere.
The trouble with a big clever brain is it can contrive modifications to its' surrounding environment a lot quicker than is safe to implement. Natural selection can't keep up with our tinkering and is about to be outcompeted. Then we truly have pissed in our own pond.
(of course, unless you believe in the supernatural, our brains and all their output are part of nature and therefore "synthetic" selection is just an arbitrary distinction so in reality natural selection killed the planet)
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
An object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted on by an external forces, and energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
OK. And who says that a corporate CEO doesn't know how to grow or harvest plansts? Who says that the director of human resources doesn't know how to set a snare of build a fish trap? Plus he can have money and other trade goods stockpiled that can be used to obtain items from the farmer. Sounds like a CEO with well rounded interests trumps a farmer or hunter-gatherer.
As in add some appropriate environmental stress such as toxins and radioactivity. Many man-made compounds that are highly unlikely to ever exist in any significant amounts through "natural" processes are now very common globally. Specifically things such as medecines, and household and industrial chemicals.
Oddly enough, we appear to have a drive to accelerate our won progress. X-men IV anyone?
While you are correct to note that there are identifiable statistical differences in gene distribution among the "races" of humanity, genetic variation between any two individuals, whether of the same race or not, is far, far higher than any race-level differences.
Bottom line: genetically you are almost certainly far more different from someone of the same race as you, than your general race is from another. The few differences you can ascribe to race are mostly down to survival characteristics that worked in a particular environment, with some random cosmetic ones thrown in.
The original scenario was that the economic cream starves. That implies total collapse of social structure (which did not happen when Soviet Union fell; that was just a change of masters). Given this scenario, it is certain that the farms get looted and burned by the mobs desperate to get food.
Absolutely. All I'm saying is that a farmer is totally dependant on society for protection - and fuel, too, since I doubt many of them know how to use horses instead of tractors.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It is a bad thing. We've lost the filter aspect of evolution. Sure, the genes are changing, but it's no longer survival of the fittest. Say 100 years ago disease X killed all carriers of the defective gene before they could breed. With modern medicine, they can live a full life. The side-effect is that if they then have children, the defective gene gets passed down. Given enough generations, every one will be carrying it eventually. This doesn't count for fatal diseases, for example I believe that in 100 years or so everyone will have poor eyesight. It's so easy to rectify, so the poorly-sighted hunter/gatherers no longer go hungry.
What's the solution? Give up medicine all together? Cull the weak? Ban genenicly deficient people from having children? Somehow, everything that might solve this is infinately worse than the problem itself. I guess we'll just need to get used to depending on medicine as a race in order to continue.
On the other hand, some people in poor communities spit out little miracles like their is no tomorrow. Thunk. Thunk. So this argument could go either way.
Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago.
Show me an evolutionary psychologist who claims evolution has been "completed" and I'll show you a journalist who has been hoodwinked by a homeless man with an identity crisis.
I'm off to evolve into something entirely unsuitable for drinking tea.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
But as long as there is no extreme drastic collapse, others will have the advantage, and those are the ones that will be selected for. When pressures change other traits will be selected for. That's why the first species that fit well into a niche didn't simply stay there forever with minor genetic drift. The niches move and change.
There are Jews in the world.
There are Buddhists.
There are Hindus and Mormons, and then
There are those that follow Mohammed, but
I've never been one of them.
I'm a Roman Catholic,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about Catholics is:
They'll take you as soon as you're warm.
You don't have to be a six-footer.
You don't have to have a great brain.
You don't have to have any clothes on. You're
A Catholic the moment Dad came,
Because
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
Let the heathen spill theirs
On the dusty ground.
God shall make them pay for
Each sperm that can't be found.
Every sperm is wanted.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.
Hindu, Taoist, Mormon,
Spill theirs just anywhere,
But God loves those who treat their
Semen with more care.
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood!
Every sperm is useful.
Every sperm is fine.
God needs everybody's.
Mine! And mine! And mine!
Let the Pagan spill theirs
O'er mountain, hill, and plain.
God shall strike them down for
Each sperm that's spilt in vain.
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite iraaaaate!
Ignore this signature. By order.
A change in peoples senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function. In gereral is not evolution but rather the mixing of the races and ethnic backgrounds. Look asians are usually short but if you were to mix an asian with a black person, who are usually taller, you end up with a mixed baby - half black half asian (skin diference) Taller asian or shorter black (bone structure) And half nappy hair and half asian hair will mess up his brain funtion. LOL -- but you see my point.
The length of a
"Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
Most of the people I've talked to who thought evolution had stopped with the arrival of homo sapiens were either too stupid to extrapolate and realize that if something had been going on for four billion years, it would probably keep on going.
IMHO the original poster wasn't passing judgment, just pointing out that in evolutionary terms the single parent with 12 kids is superiour to the childless millionarie couple.
The intelligence of the planet is a constant.
The population is increasing.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Is actually more like truth (science) versus belief (religion). Or, as Dawkins aptly wrote: Let's all stop beating Basil's car Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'. Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software. Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes? Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me). But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car? Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
OK. And who says that a corporate CEO doesn't know how to grow or harvest plansts?
Most of them have no time for such things whatsoever, so on average they don't. Some do, and those have a much better chance indeed.
Who says that the director of human resources doesn't know how to set a snare of build a fish trap?
Because both take practise and experience to do well, again, unlikely that this person has enough time for that. Some will, and again will have a better chance.
Plus he can have money and other trade goods stockpiled that can be used to obtain items from the farmer.
Maybe some will. Money will be of little use since it will not be worth anything when society collapses, trade goods may, but that is a very finite resource.
Sounds like a CEO with well rounded interests trumps a farmer or hunter-gatherer.
The fact that some of them may have the skills required does not say much, most won't, so on average they have a worse chance.
Evolution is of course a continuing process. Whenever nature "messes up" the genepool there is a small chance that something better comes out of it. This way the new organism has a better chance of survival. Nature adapts.
A common misunderstanding with evolution (and why it makes people doubt) is that people tend to look at the newest result of evolution. Take the eye for example. It is a marvelous piece of engineering. But it started out (apparently with 6 different organisms, so there are 6 families of eyes in the world) as a photo sensitive cell for a small organism that detected light and or dark. This particular organism survived and later families with better "eyes" did too. This grew out to be an eye as we know today.
The only group that is convinced that there is no evolution are certain religious groups, which I will not name here ^^. The common opinion about evolution is that it is simply proposturous for an animal to change...
I realy hope that evolution does not only count for biological organisms but for human organisations as well. It is time that some groups evolve into the next era...
Message from god, Please logoff, rebooting the Universe
Nah, the habitat has changed. There are many selective pressures that have been removed, but they are just replaced by others. Like charisma or likeability and social skills. Willingness to ignore social mores(dropping loads in anything and everything isn't real popular re society but propagates genes pretty well).
I would love to see a study that took a look at infertile couples and tracked down couples who are only infertile with each other, i.e. they are different species. Odds are there wouldn't be any, but who knows, the results might be surprising.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I guess we'll just need to get used to depending on medicine as a race in order to continue.
This differs only in scale from depending on fire and the wheel in order to continue. Besides, we're getting awfully good at medicine.
humans are not going to ever loose their pinky finger if modern society goes on the way it is.
I sure hope not!
You can't take the sky from me...
That implies total collapse of social structure (which did not happen when Soviet Union fell; that was just a change of masters).
Which did definitely happen when the former societ union collapsed.
The entire economic system they had had failed and was thrown away. Any social support that the state provided was gone, ownership of goods and means of production was disputed since the previous owner stopped existing alltogether, territory changed, any guarantees provided by the state changed. The state did organize virtually everything before the collapse, that completely fell away.
I suggest you go talk to people from Russia who were there when it happened.
- Quark
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Evolution by its very nature favors those with a selfish point of view.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You go to college, work your arse off, earn lots of money, die without kids, the race doesn't get your genes. You're a single parent living on state benefit with 12 kids... big contribution to the gene pool.
Except that you've offered no evidence that any of the traits that led to person A working hard or person B collecting welfare have any basis in their respective genes. Those traits might be purely psychological, in which case it doesn't matter how many children either of them have, there's no overall change to the genepool either way.
Just something to think about next time someone says that being poor is an evolutionary advantage. Without environmental pressures (many of which we've removed through society safety nets), there's no way to say what's an advantage and what isn't.
I'd also like to take a moment and encourage those of you who have worked hard and achieved a certain level of prosperity to consider adoption. You can't pass on your genes that way, but you can pass on your memes, and in today's society that's just as important.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Many species have two ways of dealing with this. Either having so many kids that it doesn't matter if a few are lost, or having a few kids and fighting to make make sure that those few do survive to reproduce
The difference in reproduction rate between 'poor' and 'rich' tends to be similar to the difference in thier mortality rate and thus reflects these two techniques of preservation.
I also wonder if anyone has examined the evolution of culture due to natural selection. For example, How do value systems and systems of morality change over the course of a few generations? A simple example, for instance, will be that a culture that believes in ritual suicide during an eclipse will quickly wipe itself from the gene pool. Of course, unlike genes, cultures can simply go into hiding, in history books or religous documents and such, to be reborn ages later. It's probably a bit off-topic but I think it'll be interesting to research.
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
Hunter gatherers have been around for a long long time, and they still are (oldest still existing hunter-gatherer 'culture' can be traced back for at least 25000, that is twenty five thousand years)
Farmers have been around for a long long time, and they still are.
Economic systems and societies have come and gone many times in the meantime.
If anything, I believe modern evolutionary pressure (the last three hundred years) is producing more of the genes from people who have poor family planning skills and just cannot grasp or accept birth control. I fear what this pattern may produce in 20,000 years where people with less cognitive skills have 3-4 times more children than those with more cognitive skills. That and the other pressure for religious fanatics to have more children than those who take rational views of the world. Those with deep intellect could be forced to create a "Zardoz" society to protect themselves.
There are so many things wrong with this. First, just because people have poor family planning skills or don't use birth control DOES NOT mean those genes will be more successful. More babies != survival. Second, you can't extrapolate this out 20,000 years to your 13-year-old's apocalyptic future where dumb and religious people are taking over the planet and "those with deep intellect" realize the error of their birth controlling, family planning ways too late. If 'deep intellect' provides enough of a survival benefit, then it will survive. If it's more beneficial to be 'less cognitive' or a 'religious fanatic' then those traits will survive. I don't appreciate you conflating dumb and religious either.
You are a bigot. You think you have 'deep intellect' and that people are dumb because they believe different things from you (religion, birth control, family planning) and that these people should not breed.
For the record, I am an atheist who supports abortion and birth control. I just don't think that people who believe otherwise are necessarily dumb and shouldn't breed. I hope that whatever genes (if any) code for enlightened thinking survive, but if they do not then they are worthless from a survival standpoint. Then enlightenment deserves to disappear. If anything your post should have been modded funny, but I don't think you were trying to be. If you were, I apologize and admire your subtlety.
steampunk web design
By this same criterion, I'm desperately afraid that within a short (evolutionary) time we're going to have Raccoons that either:
- are lightning quick
- are low to the ground and have a tough carapace that can withstand 2-ton impacts at 75 mph
- quickly become super-intelligent and drive SUVs because everyone "knows" they're safer on the highways.
I think in any of these possibilities, it's going to be nearly impossible to get them the hell out of your garbage cans anymore.
-Styopa
It is a conceit of the intelligent that intelligence drives human evolution. The skeletons of early hominids show evidence of the support of unproductive individuals within communities. Skeletons with broken but healed limbs, crippling arthritis, debilitating head wounds show that individuals that had been injured or were elderly were cared for by their peers/relations. The intelligent thing to do would be to ditch the dead weight and ease pressure on resources. Instead the human attributes demonstrated are compassion and co-operation. As for man getting less-healthy, no-one can tell which genes will be be favoured by the whims of nature and the wider the gene pool the better. In Europe sickle cell anaemia is an illness, in malarial zones it's an eveolutionary adaptation that aids survival. Who is to say what's healthy and what isn't. We have survived and prospered through our abilities to communicate and co-operate. Intelligence has followed on the coattails of our advancement and has not driven it. If a near-extinction meteor impact were to occur, would the species' best hope of survival lie with a select group of the Intelligensia or a select group of fertile people with excellent parenting skills? Think on this: You, dear reader, may regard yourself as intelligent and may pride yourself on your ability to read PERL or code in binary but that doesn't make babies. It is true that the "intelligent" breed less. The brutal fact is the geekier you are the less likely you are to reproduce and so when you have finished that algol compiler you've been working on and want to pat yourself on the back for being clever, remind yourself that you are not the pinnacle of human evolution and just an offshoot. The single mother successfully stretching out her budget raising four kids is more likely to leave an indelible imprint on the evolution of Man than you are.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
These lies about this "evolution" thing is getting out of control.
We need a "War against Evolution" to get rid of these evil-doers who keep spreading their evil lies about the origin of life! "Evolution"? No thanks, I got my bible.
Yes, they are. But why are these considered the relevant differerces? What about hair and eye color? There are hundreds if not thousands of genetic differences. Which ones count?
No, he's saying that biological evolution only works on genetics. Anything that is not genetically influenced can't be effectively passed to the next generation.
In short, it's not about *you* - it's about your future lineage.
For example, just because you were good at managing money and managed to get wealthy enough to have extremely high reproductive success does not guarantee that your children will be equally responsible with money. (In fact, it appears that the opposite tends to be true.)
If, however, you have a genetic trait that makes you resistant or immune to the Avian Flu virus, and a massive outbreak occurs, then you will have a definite reproductive advantage (eg: not getting sick and possibly dying). Your children have a very good chance to inherit this trait. If outbreak kills off a lot of people who are not immune, it will increase the percentage of people who are and thus the percentage born in the next generation that are immune as well. The emergence of the immunity in a population is a great example of evolution at work.
Making more babies in and of itself is not necessarily evolution. Social pressure and status to have more children does not make you more "fit" to have said children, and does not guarantee the next generation is more "fit" to do so either.
=Smidge=
what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
That would be mathematics. Given the size of the gene pool, the time it takes a mutation, even a favorable one, to become dominant is approximately forever.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I can think of two:
1) Better ethics, so people with bad genes simply don't reproduce voluntarily.
2) Genetic engineering to remove bad genes in vitro.
I'm betting on #2 myself.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Thank you!
I don't know what it is that causes so many people to misunderstand evolution so completely, but I end up fighting against it every single time a related story comes up.
I should really just relax.
And ceolocanths have been around for millions of years. That makes them much more succesful by your criteria. We should all be lobe finned fishfish to be successful.
I thought we outlawed genetic mutations after the Hoover administration!
...anyone? ...anyone?
(/Sarcasm)
Show of hands: how many people thought people (or any living organism) was done evolving.
OK, time to get cable TV in the nerd hut.
Honestly...studies never report any surprises...
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Most people tend to misunderstand the very few measurable quantities that determine evolutionary success.
1. Net ability to intake energy.
2. Net efficiently at processing energy.
3. Average number of offspring that reproduce.
These are the primary factors determining evolutionary success. Factors such as gestation time, defense against disease or predators, and energy expended finding food, all add up to general efficiency processing energy.
As a hypothetical oversimplified example:
Creature A is a plant eater and gets 100 calories from every 1kg of plant material consumed (numbers are completely fictitious and have no mathematical consistency). Creature B is a carnivore and gets 1k calories for every 1kg of meat consumed. Without factoring for the energy spent gathering or hunting, it looks like the carnivore is a better survivor. However if it takes a hundred times more energy for the carnivore to catch a meal it is now less likely to be a survivor.
Intelligence, size, and speed are important sub-factors. However, they are only contributors to the three measures of species survivability.
"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy
Does that mean, from an intelligent design point of view, we're still in beta? How do I get access to bugzilla for this project?
close but no sig
We were discussing chances on survival when society collapses weren't we?
I guess my point is that both hunter-gatherers and farmers have survived such things many times. Industry and trade however almost always collapse together with society.
>And yet we consider David Smith and Tanaka Jiro to be of different 'races', while two Africans of far greater genetic diversity from each other we lump together as 'black'.
That, then, is ignorance on the part of the lumper. i've read it described as there being three genetic "clans" (re: races) in the human family: the really big West Africans (like Nigerians), the really small Africans ("pygmies"/San peoples) and everyone else. The following map shows it, they are L1, L2, and the rest of us are L3. That doesn't change the fact that even with few, small changes to our DNA, there are vast differences among the human family.
http://www.mitomap.org/WorldMigrations.pdf
Some of my friends in college (at art school, natch) had this old German lady that taught history. She insisted that human evolution had stopped with the creation of society. This attitude seems to assume that if you aren't in the wilds eating twigs and grubs you aren't effected by breeding processes. Totally ridiculous. The idea that we are somehow 'frozen' comes from a combination of Christian dogma against sciences and the natural foreshortened view of existence that comes from only living a few decades. 5000 years of "civilization" is hardly a blip in the genetic record.
That evolutionary change shows up at all would, IMHO, indicate evolution is accelerating as we create new niches and new chemicals that directly influence our DNA and cells. The pseudo-hormonal effects of plastics, for instance, are going to have profound effects for thousands of years even if we stopped making them now.
Eh,
josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Eugenics is one of the worst ideas to come along. There is just no way to scientifically predict what tools (genes) we'll need in the future. Right now we have a lot of variation; which means evolution has a lot of choice when we need to squeeze into a new evolutionary niche.
But remember that evolution is a brainless process. It has no ultimate goal, no concept of morality, no concept of science. Speaking of evolution as anything other than a reaction is silly talk, like saying the equals sign in 2+2=4 caused the 4 to happen and that 4 is greater than 2+2.
When we start clunking around our genetic toolbox, and throwing away those that don't meet our personal concepts of "superior" (by they intelligence and strength, or wealth and success) then we risk throwing away a key tool that holds the key to survival when we need it.
Dunno, maybe it's the same thing that seemingly makes some people believe there were no extinctions until Man invented the chainsaw. It's hard to believe in something you can't see happening -- you need tools to help your senses. Some folks never pick up those tools.
Still it's good to have actual data to back up the reasonable assumption that evolution hasn't stopped since we see nothing that would have stopped it. (Tools again!) We get a kick out of scientists breathlessly announcing things that "everybody knows", but there's a long and growing list of things "everybody knew" that turned out to be wrong. When studying the obvious, occasionally you find useful things that nobody saw, because the truth was so "obvious".
I remember reading the story in Ishmael about the jellyfish's history of the world. Basically the jellyfish is the highest evolved creature in the story and it ends with "And then, there was the jellyfish!" And at the time I read it (13), it was an eye opener because I believe I had thought like a lot of people think still that we were just the top of the food chain and nothing better would ever come along. I guess from the tag of this article most people haven't read that book or had that thought, that perhaps we aren't the most evolved thing Earth has ever seen, and we'll probably be a more primal species like a monkey is to us in a matter of millions of years. I can't believe anyone actually thought evolution stopped.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Our evolution will soon be out of the hands of nature and firmly within our own hands. We are already taking the first steps. We are decodong the human genome. We've already mapped it. All we need to learn now is how to read it. Once we have the blurints to human life we will be able to alter it as we see fit.
Latex allergies mean - - no condoms (other materials are definately not as effective).
Therefore, more offspring.
Latex allergy is a genetic condition. So some of those offspring will also be allergic to latex.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
How you can call convincing people who were born with some kind of genetic disorder, which didn't prevent them from finding a mate, not to have children "better ethics" is beyond me.
Name a society that has colapsed where the entire cross section of population weren't almost equally affected from a reproductive standpoint. At no time since we started forming large social groups has the individual ability to grow food been an advantage from the standpoint of reproductive success. If you couldn't grow it you bought it. If you could't buy it you stole it. If you couldn't steal it you took it by force. A CEO can shove a gun in someones face and take their food as well as anyone else. Hell they do that metaphoricaly every day. Society goes to hell, they will still be on top living life well, and the farmers will still be breaking their back in the fields.
...is the selection criteria of the future, I believe. Future humans will be adapted to a higher level of background radiation than there is at the moment. Why? Because of the war that's coming... Those that survive and reproduce successfully in the new environment will create the population of the future. Those that don't, won't.
I remember an newspaper article about a polluted river somewhere in Russia which is full of the remains of the old Soviet nuclear industry. Almost everyone avoids the river because it is known to make people sick. But there is one man that swims in it every day with no ill effects... Unfortunately I don't have the article and I can't remember where it came from, but it did seem to suggest that a few people tolerate higher radiation levels much better than most...
I suggest looking at Europe after the collapse of the Roman empire for a nice example.
Then, there was once a highly developed society in what is now Zimbabwe (pre colonisation times), when it collapsed, society there was 'reduced' to hunter gatherers.
There are definitely more examples to be found when you care to look.
Of course everyone is affected by such a collapse, but some people have better chances then others.
That's not what he said, go back and re-read the post. He said that there is more to evolution than just genetics. When Dawin wrote of natural selection, genetics were unknown. His original theory did not make claims on the mechanism behind natural selection. Many years later, DNA is discovered, proving that you inherit traits from your parents. (which everyone already knew, it just need to be proven how). However, just because genetics are a part of natural selection, they are not the whole story.
For example, just because you were good at managing money and managed to get wealthy enough to have extremely high reproductive success does not guarantee that your children will be equally responsible with money. (In fact, it appears that the opposite tends to be true.)
Well, undoubtably you are getting the "poor with money" from some of the rich media-whore children that are always in the news. Real life is not like that; these guys are freaks. One rich family I know has their 12 year old kid running three buisnesses, selling CDs and the like to classmates. He was taught these skills by his family and as a positive skill it will assist his reproductive efforts. In other words, chicks dig rich guys. A crap parent is still a crap parent, even if they are rich. Having resources will make the good parents better and the children benefit from this.
Success in nature is often associated with behaviour passed down generations. Some animals have "evolved" the use of tools. This isn't purely a genetic trait, though obviously they need to have the mental and physical abilities to use tools. However, it's the passing down of the techniques that will ensure the future of that particular lineage. Apes and humans are incredably briliant at copying others; it's how we learn.
Social pressure and status to have more children does not make you more "fit" to have said children, and does not guarantee the next generation is more "fit" to do so either.
Of course. Being "fit" has nothing to do with it. At the end of the day, it's just numbers. If someone has 10 kids, it only takes one of them to have 10 kids of their own to continue the larger-than-normal family. Ultimately those genes will be the strongest.
One of the original posters points was that religion plays a factor. Take Catholism, where contraception is outlawed. Catholic families tend to be larger than other Christian religions, such as the Prodestant derivative that is popular here in the UK. And as religion is generally a passed-down trait, Catholism is almost a heritatory condition. Thinking of it another way; imagine a religion that bans sex outright, even for reproduction. Fast-forward 100 years; how many followers will be left? The ultimate irony here is that religion itself is an evolutionary process. The most "fit" religion will dominate as the other religions get pushed out.
I think though the more pertinent issue is that most of humanities survival is no longer totally dependent on the possession of physical attributes but the possesion of mental ones as well. The fact that some human beings have been able to remove some of the weaknesses inherent in certain genetic traits have been overcome means that we might be able to begin to see certain strentghs those traits have which we were unaware of.
For instance, anecdotal evidence would seem to indicate that a genetic disposition towards 'smartness' is accompanied by a disposition away from 'strentgh' (I'm not saying it's true just giving an example). In that case it's a good thing we have created an environment where physically weak people can still survive becuase that means we will have more smart people(e.g. Steven hawkings would never have survived as a hunter/gatherer). As we change our environment we also change the evolutionary pressures we subject ourselves to.
For this reason I am also quite hesitant about the use of gene therapy in fixing any conditions. Changing a persons genes to something we consider to be 'better' may actually in the end lead to huge losses for the human race as a whole. For example if all levels of autism could be cured genetically most parents would immediately go for it. However, many geniuses historically show signs of mild autism.
Basically, before we decide to make everyone 'better', we have to figure out if we have any idea exactly what 'better' is?
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
Don't know anything about the Zimbabwe culture you mention, but I know quite a bit about the Roman empire and the societies that cropped up as it declined. Which of those cultural transitions do you mean? The ones where imperial controls simply ceased functioning like in southern Briton, or areas where invaders took over by force? In none of them was the ability to grow your own food a reproductive advantage. None. Actually in many of them the skill of being good with a weapon outweighed the ability to grow food by a far margin when it came to reproductive success.
True, but I'm concerned that in some point in the future, everyone born will have genetic defects that need correction/medication. With the absence of a filter, natural selection is no longer doing it's job. With things like IVF treatments, we may even reach a point where it's impossible to reproduce naturally.
... that the emergence of a social health care system could be considered an evolutionary step? We create social systems and technological constructs to replace the natural evolutionary pressures that we have sidestepped. We create them _oursevles_. It's in our nature.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Excellent reply, your post should be modded up. Very succinct and precise.
;-)
Although I'm slightly wary of the "intelligence is culturally defined" argument. I think there's something to it, but I also think there's something idealogical about it.
Consider, tossing you out onto the Mongolian steppe might render you an evolutionary dead-end, if you can't ride a camel and your calculus goes to no use. But consider if you are able to figure out a way to apply your calculus towards building a better hunting weapon. Or a better way of cooling water. Or something. Suddenly your calculus isn't so useless.
Still, though, this doesn't necessarily have any bearing on evolution. You might build a refridgerator or a better rifle, but if that doesn't translate into greater reproduction for you, then your intelligence has nothing to do with evolution.
Especially if inventing those things keeps you down in your parents' basement being afraid of girls your whole life!
I think your embedded point that greater survival for all is better for the human species overall because it increases genetic diversity is the real insight of your post, something I've been reaching for lately but hasn't made it to the tip of my tongue. Thank you for crystallizing the idea for me.
If I may be absurdly reductionist for a moment (yeah, alert the media, syberghost is being reductionist again) this just means that being really good at medicine will continue to be a survival trait of our species, and evolutionary pressures will continue to make us smart in all the ways that lead to medical breakthroughs. At some point we'll be smart enough that we'll just fix all the damn gene problems and move on to the really serious issues of the day, such as worrying about who will be kicked off of American Idol Season 8 Bajillion.
Because we are no longer in a Darwinian environment. The change will continue, but "survival of the fittest" is no longer around to focus it in the same direction as before. Our evolution is now subject to a very different environment.
To reply to myself, in the Mongolian calculus example, a Mongolian who invents something great that makes life easier for everyone isn't necessarily a benefit to his own personal genes, but his improvement does benefit the overall gene pool by making it more diverse (more people surviving who wouldn't before) and increasing its viability and resilience into the future.
:P
Intelligence recurs even if the person with the intelligence and education doesn't directly reproduce because intelligence benefits the overall gene pool, and the genes for intelligence are out there in the pool.
Technology enhances the long-term viability of the species that uses it. If their own technology doesn't destroy them all first... Singularity, terminator, nuclear holocaust... we'll see
"The concept that race is solely a cultural construct is mere wishful thinking: "
I am interested to see your criteria for race that is based solely on genetics. What are the racial groups, and what genes denote membership to which group?
The diseases you mention occur everywhere in the world. If I show you a guy whose ancestors have lived in Mongolia for the last 5,000 years, are you going to tell me that he is African-American if he has sickle cell anemia?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Anything that causes a person not to reproduce is (eventually) selected against. For example, being sensitive to the meme "there are too many people on this world" is an evolutionary disadvantage and will eventually be removed from the genepool. The same goes for high intelligence (being that intelligent people often don't reproduce).
No, this is far too simplistic. Evolution is based on genes, not people. In some cases evolution can favour individuals not breeding as long as a significant fraction of their genes are passed on - which can involve assisting siblings or parents to help bring up children. This happens a lot in Nature - social insects, and in many mammal and bird species.
To put in more simply, what matters is whether the family as a whole (i.e. close relatives) reproduce. A sensitive or intelligent person may not have children themselves, but may bring assistance or income to help close relatives.
I take your point that geneic diseases and skin colour are strongly linked to ethnic groups. However this view that there are different "races" i.e. distinct gene-pools that interact only weakly with the gene-pools of other races has been shown to be false: the genetic difference between two members of the same tribe is greater than the genetic difference between one tribe and another. ie. The individuals vary more than the groups, and the groups overlap a lot. So the groups are not particuarlly meaningful.
Really? Explain that to my black friend in 8th grade as he suffered during a sickle-cell anemia crisis. I'm sure he'd be happy to know that he can't have a disease that affects primarily African-Americans, because there are no genetic differences in races.
Non sequitur. There are genetic differences between people. Some have sickle-cell anemia, some don't. True, that gene has a higher frequency in Africa. That doesn't define some concept called "race".
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I don't see why NOT having children is selfish. There are plenty of children in the world who don't get the love and attention they deserve right now.
Agreed. In fact, one could very well argue that those who have more children than that which is required to replace the parents is profoundly selfish. Having five, seven, ten children in a world of limited resources guarantees either (a) all said children will live at a lower standard of living than the generation that selfishly produced them, (b) those immediate kids will do fine, by even further impoverishing five, seven, or ten other children, or (c) both of the above.
There are those (mostly the religious right) who would argue the world is not overpopulated. This is particularly true in America, where vast swaths of empty wasteland in the west provide the illusion that there's plenty of room in the world, while neglecting the fact that the resources of 100 square miles of arid desert is doing well to support a single family, and in many cases can't even support a single human being without importing resources from elsewhere.
Finally, I find labelling the GP poster a "bigot" disingenuous and unfair. Do I agree that evolution is selecting for those with poor family planning and low congnative skills. No. I think the United States has set up an artifical situation that selects for that, but other nations have not: Europe has social welfare that puts America to shame, yet still clearly selects for intelligence and responsible family management (their immigration issues notwithstanding). Japan does the same. The United States is getting demonstrably dumber, but that has more to do with our own political correctness, and an educational system designed to not only not teach critical thinking skills to the majority of Americans, but to actively discourage critical thinking along more and more politically sensitive lines, often by labelling critical thinkers "bigots" if their conclusions don't mesh with popular groupthink.
Bullying an unpopular view into oblivion with labels of "bigot" because you don't like what the poster is saying doesn't serve to promote intelligent discourse, particularly when discussing evolution and natural selection in the context of human beings, where such cheap shots are made easy by an ugly history of right-wing abuse of such concepts (for Godwin fans, cf. Nazi Germany as the quintessential example).
As I said, I think the GP poster is wrong. He has confused a local phenomenon resulting from local political pressures with global human evolution, the latter of which shows no sign of dumbing down the broader species, and he has identified a couple of symptoms (bad family planning, religous hysteria) and assumed them to be the underlying cause, while almost certainly neglecting other factors that run both deeper and broader. This does not make him a bigot, it merely means he hasn't studied the problem and thought it through sufficiently.
As a final aside, if I were to personally hazard a guess on what has gone wrong in the United States (and it is only a guess), I'd say the problem stems from a lack of critical thinking skills in the broader population, skills that should have been taught at a young age, to be applied to everything, be it family planning, religion, or politics and popular groupthink de jour. In short, it is a massive, systemic, ongoing, and apparently perpetual failur of basic education that goes back a long time and shows no sign of letting up. Family planning, relgious hysteria, labelling people with unpopular opinions bigots, "love it or leave it" refusals to accept criticisms of one's country's imperfections, etc. are merely symptoms of this much deeper problem.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
No, this is false. Nature has clearly hidden the decision to procreate from us. Physical limitations to reproduction are always selected against in the long run.
However, for sensitivity to a 'meme' to be selected against it would have to cause the holder of that idea to have less sex or safer sex than they otherwise would have, since sex is the only part of reproduction our actions or ideas have any effect on. Now, take notice of those people who claim that 'the world is overpopulated'. They're screwing quite a lot (see the wikipedia article on 'Hippies'). If anything this meme seems to corrolate with lots of sex, and therefore will likely be selected for, to the extent that this sort of thing can be selected for in any case.
The ability to defend oneself is a very important one, I don't underestimate that. When society collapses, it is an essential one even.
Regardless, that was not the argument. The argument I dispute and replied to is that the rich and succesfull have a better chance then a farmer when society collapses, well, it took a few centuries after the collapse of the Roman empire before trade and industry became an important part of society again. Cities virtually dissapeared, roads got closed or were left unkept and travel became extremely dangerous. Farming was there before the Romans arrived, it was still there after they left, and it is still there in fact.
Please stop changing the argument all the time and come up with an actual counter argument or admit you are wrong.
Recent research has shown that the most advantageous traits evolving in our time are latex alergies and a tendency to binge drink.
Who makes the most copies of themselves in modern society? Mainly people who can't figure out how not to.
The future looks bright.
Current world affairs suggest contrary.
Most don't think about evolution.
Some believe evolution has never existed.
And the few other ones know evolution can't be measured in terms of tens or hundred tears.
Evolution was often a serie of long phases of genes random alteration and short phases of selection. Apparently, we are simply in the first phase waiting for [new plague/meteor/end of oil supply/WWIII/aliens/global warming].
This is not true. The natural selection does not require anybody to die. Only that this particular gene has smaller probability to be passed on further generation. I'd say that even now people with genetical diseases have less children and are less likely to survive than people without those deffects and it is enough for the natural selection to work. The modern medicine can only rise the equilibrium level of the faulty genes penetration but unless they are beneficial (and they are not), they would not become dominant.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Flamebait, huh?? I should have guessed there'd be at least one moderator with no sense of humour when it comes to religion...
My hypothesis is that we humans have become so good at manipulating our environment that there are few environmental pressures shaping our evolution. We adapt the environment to us rather than adapting us to the environment.
What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable gipsy obscenity?
The problem is that it is natural selection, not rational selection or ethical selection.
You run into serious ethical issues when you start to assign better/worse - or defective labels to genetic trats. Someone who is "normal" is no better, than someone with MS or Down's.
As far as evolution is concerned if you are able to find a mate there is no reason why you shouldn't procreate. When you start talking about better genes you imply that evolution has a goal or an endpoint, which it doesn't.
Evolution isn't an ethical beast, but attempting to control it based on our short-sighted values is unethical. Who knows what benefical trait will spring out of a genetic "defect?"
Gosh, talk about assuming the worst --- It was a compliment I was making, and when I read something that I consider worthwhile, it can be interesting to read other things the person has written and sometimes mark their posts as +1 for the future.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
What made people think evolution is separated from society, economics and absolutely everything?
That is, to see that sex is the universal link from psychology, sociology.
An example. Why do intelligent kids join the Army? -when they get back they get loads more sex. They are approved by society for serving society -paying taxes and getting themselves killed for us. Now apply this to your job.
Everything seems so simple these days. Look around your room and you can see everything in your world is sex.
A blog I run for the wealth
Dude, read some history. Real history, not historical novels which have little to nothing to do with reality.
Ok. Now to address your misguided concept of reproductive success. Yes, there were farmers before Rome. Yes, there were farmers after Rome fell. Here is the problem with your assumption. They are not the same people. They are not direct descendants of the farmers that were there before Rome existed. Being a farmer is not an advantage to reproductive success. Just because someone is a farmer now does not mean they always were, or that their ancestors were. Farming as a career does not increase your reproductive success. Not before a social collapse, not during a social collapse, and not after. You seem to think that someone that works in a trade or industry is too fucking stupid to figure out how to obtain food after a social collapse so only people that know how to grow food before a social collapse will be able to feed themselves. This is just absurd. Being a farmer or a skilled hunter-gatherer in no way confers some mythical survival benefit to your offspring.
Then again, it seems that their minds have NOT evolved beyond the level of apes, so from their perspective, I guess that makes sense.
Dude, read some history. Real history, not historical novels which have little to nothing to do with reality.
I do read history, and have some 10 years of history education behind me with very high marks.
Ok. Now to address your misguided concept of reproductive success. Yes, there were farmers before Rome. Yes, there were farmers after Rome fell. Here is the problem with your assumption. They are not the same people. They are not direct descendants of the farmers that were there before Rome existed.
Some were, some were not. That was not exactly the point. The point is that farming can exist and survive despite a collapse of society, whereas trade and industry cannot.
Being a farmer is not an advantage to reproductive success. Just because someone is a farmer now does not mean they always were, or that their ancestors were. Farming as a career does not increase your reproductive success.
No need to repeat yourself, I can read, thank you.
At any rate, my claim is that those involved in farming have a better chance of survival in case of economic and social collapse then those involved in trade or industry for the simple reason that they directly own the means to produce food and have the experience to use those means. Others with access to such means and experience will have better chances as well. Or more generally, those who depend less on technology and society will have better chances when those things are no longer there. The logic of that should really not be that hard to figure out.
You seem to think that someone that works in a trade or industry is too fucking stupid to figure out how to obtain food after a social collapse so only people that know how to grow food before a social collapse will be able to feed themselves. This is just absurd.
Not absurd at all. I never claimed that those involved in trade or industry are too stupid to figure it out, but on average they lack the experience and skills and means initially, giving them less of a chance. I never claimed none will survive or all farmers will survive or anything of that sort.
Being a farmer or a skilled hunter-gatherer in no way confers some mythical survival benefit to your offspring.
When it gives you a better chance to survive, it gives you a better chance on having offspring to begin with.
It is a bad thing. We've lost the filter aspect of evolution. Sure, the genes are changing, but it's no longer survival of the fittest. Say 100 years ago disease X killed all carriers of the defective gene before they could breed.
According to the Red Queen Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_queen), evolution within population groups is all about parasites anyway. You cannot get away from survival of the fittest (fitness = ability to procreate viable offspring), but the characteristics which determine fitness can change over time and generations due to the environment.
IANAEB, but my understanding from some who are is that evolution is not a constant process. If there is nothing driving change, stuff stays the same except for the random gene mutation. If an organism is adapted to its environment, why change? Introduce some kind of driver (new virus that kills 90% of the population but leaves 10% alone), and you get a change in the gene pool that can be considered an evolutionary change.
Speciation requires both environmental changes that modify populations and isolation. If genes flow freely between populations, you won't get new species, just new variations on the prevailing gene and not a new species.
Really. I thought God took a break after completing intelligent design. Oh I guess there are mysterious ways.
How else should it work? Having 12 kids ensures several different copies of genes from each parent and each set of grandparents is spread through the gene pool. Diversity is the key to adaptation in evolution.
Not having kids is just stupid. If you work hard, it's for yourself. If you have a lot of kids it's for your species. We need both to ensure the future success of mankind.
GPL Deconstructed
Just out of interest: of all you folks posting claims about evolution, anthropology, and intelligence, how many have read any of the following:
Bryson's Short History of Everything (not exact title)
Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
Gould's Panda's Thumb (or any of many collections)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
You did notice that the word "biological" was italicised in my post?
What you and SigILL are talking about is social evolution. mikeplokta and myself are talking about biological evolution. Social evolution does not effect populations in the level way as biological. By SigILL's logic, nobody should ever willingly decide to not have children since the "tendency" to not want to reproduce should have been "bred out" of the genepool by now. Clearly that is not the case.
You can't honestly think that there will come a time when everyone will want to have children because deciding not to is an evolutionary disadvantage that will be selected out. It is purely a social phenomena, not a genetic one, and that is what mikeplokta and myself are saying.
At least we agree that the two are not completely separate. While one's religious beliefs or bank account may effect how successful a breeder they are, it has absolutely no bearing on how "fit" (note the quotes) they or their offspring are in the physical environment. If that environment changes (such as the Avian Flu outbreak example) then it will only be their genetic fitness that will determine the future lineage.
You can spout B.S. about wealthy people being able to afford better medical treatment, but that is not a solution to whatever genetic trait is allowing the illness. At least not until "designer babies" are common practice... It is, however, a good example of how social (medical technology) evolution can effect biological evolution. Of course it works both ways, and that's why we have new strains of infections that are resistant to out medicine - we are not naturally immune to the bacteria, and medicine allowed otherwise "unfit" people to survive the infection and reproduce, and so we did not evolve and are still vulnerable to essentially the same threat.
You can have 10 kids and each of them have 10 kids, but if your genetics carry a high susceptibility to some form of cancer or infection (for example), having a thousand great-grandkids is a waste of resources from a biological evolution point of view.
=Smidge=
your knowledge is largely out-dated. Evolution may never "stop" but you don't see leaps occur without the equilibrium being punctuated. So with the exception of a few groups (like Native Americans) we haven't seen punctuations to the equalibrium in recent history.
Even then, evolution is not progressive, but rather adaptive, and beings evolve to fit their environments. When environmental stability exists, you see genes added to the gene pool but no real collective evolution.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If your genes are so messed up that you cannot survive by yourself and are permanently dependent on a welfare-system, all your offspring will die a horrible and painful death (most likely starvation) as soon as the welfare-system fails.
Given the fact that the state of most welfare systems is getting worse with each generation (just precicely because people procreate who cannot survive by themselves anymore and the number of welfare-dependents is growing, never sinking) it's just a matter of time until it fails.
Basically they take a swab and can tell you white or black you are with very high accuracy (actually, they can even tell you which province your ancestors came from)
And examples GP provided are most obvious ones, for others - you need to do genetic markers.
And plus, "races" are heavily correlated with "populations" so what you're saying has little sense.
"Race" is just a scale of diversity - you can go to a finer scale and tell the difference between (for example) Chinese and Japanese, or much larger and tell the difference between humans and gibbons (for example) - all supported by genetics
Boom! Collapse of society happens. The local magistrate and his constabulary are not farmers. The farmers are. By your logic the farmer and his offspring now have some reproductive advantage over the magistrate and other skilled labor because the otherscan not grow their own food due to lack of knowledge. Am I with your premise so far?
Ok. So the magistrate, the constabulary, the blacksmith, and all of the other skilled non-farm workers are now unable to feed themselves due to the collapse of society. They get together and grab some pointy items. They go to the farmer's farm. They ask for food. If the farmer refuses they attempt to purchase food with money or barter. If the farmer refuses they take out their pokey items and poke the farmer until he agrees or dies. I doubt it matters to them at this point. If the children of the farmer attempt to interfere with this the citizenry poke them also. At the end of the day a majority of the citizenry are still alive, fed, and able to reproduce, so they have been successful from the evolutionary point of view. The farmer and his offspring may or may not still be alive so his success was questionable. If they kill that farmer, they will simply go to the next farmer who will either submit or cease to be a player in reproduction roulette.
The farmer has no innate advantage over any other profession. The only way the farmer would have an advantage would be if individuals were dropped onto isolated areas with no interaction, and I can't conceive of a realistic societal collapse scenario where that would happen.
"It was proven already that sets of genetic differences correlate with "race".
Basically they take a swab and can tell you white or black you are with very high accuracy (actually, they can even tell you which province your ancestors came from) "
Every bit of information I've read indicates the contrary. I'll decide if you're a troll or not as soon as you post a link to what you believe has been proven.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Boom! Collapse of society happens. The local magistrate and his constabulary are not farmers. The farmers are. By your logic the farmer and his offspring now have some reproductive advantage over the magistrate and other skilled labor because the otherscan not grow their own food due to lack of knowledge. Am I with your premise so far?
Correct.
Ok. So the magistrate, the constabulary, the blacksmith, and all of the other skilled non-farm workers are now unable to feed themselves due to the collapse of society. They get together and grab some pointy items. They go to the farmer's farm. They ask for food. If the farmer refuses they attempt to purchase food with money or barter. If the farmer refuses they take out their pokey items and poke the farmer until he agrees or dies. I doubt it matters to them at this point. If the children of the farmer attempt to interfere with this the citizenry poke them also. At the end of the day a majority of the citizenry are still alive, fed, and able to reproduce, so they have been successful from the evolutionary point of view. The farmer and his offspring may or may not still be alive so his success was questionable. If they kill that farmer, they will simply go to the next farmer who will either submit or cease to be a player in reproduction roulette.
Ah yes, and the farmer is stupid enough to just stand there and get poked... Pointy items are readily available on farms you know... Or if you want to look at a more modern case, a farmer is pretty likely to have a gun around, and has the room, and even some need at times to be good at using it.
As argued already, being able to defend oneself is quite essential also in this situation, regardless of whom you are.
When overwhelmed by a too large group, the farmer is definitely going to lose, but the means to produce food will be gone as well with that, so this is not going to help the others to survive for long.
All it'll take is a major incurable epidemic, and the human race will be evolving before you know it. Well, that or going extinct.
I'm curious as to what genetic disorders would make someone totally dependent on a welfare system.
If a person is capable of finding a mate and engaging in the act of procreation they are almost certainly capable of engaging in menial labor.
What about the case where an ethnic minority is unable to support itself except on handouts because they are unable to find employment? Not that they couldn't do some work, but no one is willing to pay them for what they can do. Should they be banned from procreating? What is the difference between someone with Down's or a malformed leg who can do assembly line type stuff, but can't find employment and segregated ethnic population? Neither had any choice to be born as they were.
I'm not saying that everyone is equal in every regard; I'm just saying calling one genetic group "better" than another is dangerous.
The criteria you supplied, the ability to find work, depends on more than genetics. It depends on the supply of work, as well as the perceptions of those doing the hiring.
From Wikipedia: "Evolution consists of two basic types of processes: those that introduce new genetic variation into a population, and those that affect the frequencies of existing variation. 'Variation proposes and selection disposes.' "
There's no reason for the rate of mutation and variance to decline. But the only way for one of those mutations to become dominant is for it to have a significant effect on survivability and reproduction. Aside from birth defects and genetic susceptibility to disease, modern standards of living mean there are few variations in human genetic makeup that affect reproduction rates. Variations in economic conditions seem to have a more profound effect than genes.
One could argue physical beauty should come to dominate, but in case you haven't noticed, ugly people seem to have lots of ugly kids.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
When civilization starts, evolution stops.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
What selective pressure exists today? Poverty. Lack of money, education and marketabe skills seems to be a huge selective pressure. If you look around those people who are the poorest seem to be the ones most successfull at reproduction. Poor women in Africa with eight kids. So see it all over, always it's the same the most afluent and educated have the fewest kids. What is the birth rate in Japan? Below 2.0 per woman, I think. Here in the US the trend among the more afluent is to wait longer
About weathly treatment; I never said anything about healthcare. I'm more thinking education, life skills etc. There's a famous self improvement book whos title is something like "tricks the rich teach their children" that illustrates some simple things you can do to encourage your offspring into success. Personally, I don't agree with you on this, IMHO good healthcare does matter. There are many treatable problems people can have that will prevent them from reproducing (be it sterility or premature death). Access to healthcare is important in surving them. Access to things like IVF treatment is defiately a fact. But we'd probably agree that it has some influence, just not a whole lot, and only in special cases.
PS, I quoted "fit" myself, for the exact same reason. It's not "the best", but "the best suited for the current environment". Darwin himself said that evolution was more the ability to react to change.
The stupid out breeding the intelligent is scary.
But even worse is the rise of Arsperger's Syndrom.
It is most common when 2 highly intelligent people breed.
Is there some inherent cap on human intelligence?
Because of modern science, medicine, etc., "survival of the fittest" really isn't the issue it used to be. Not in developed nations, anyway. Not to say that we aren't evolving, but a strong case can be made that since our lives are being saved by medicine and not genetic mutation these days, the not-so-good genes won't necessarily be removed from the gene pool. It is fairly easy to make it to reproductive age with a low instinct and talent for survival in the wild.
"Of course life is bizarre. The more bizarre it gets, the more interesting it is. The only way to approach it is to make
I'm having fun imagining our bug-eyed, four-armed ancestors driving around circumventing the neighborhoods of the diverted human evolution of govertment-teat-sucking grunts with an occasionaly genetic spritz from the government aristocracy.
Imagining homogeneity from eugenics can be quite fun (Gattaca) but genetic diversity via random mutation is not the same as progression by natural selection. Could very well be we live the way we have to - not because we adapted physically but because we adapted our cultures and practices to our physical selves. Can a panda bear live off meat? Yes. Is lactose tolerance a result of genetic selection? Or do we consume so much milk products because we can?!
With so many humans then evolution should be apparent unless it is caused by some anamoly. We should start to see diverted human genomes if evolution is random. Maybe the real evolution will be in our social interactions.
Expect Freedom.
You don't state any context for this, so I won't try to guess your assumptions. When that concern comes up in the US, it's usually prefaced by the stated assumptions that 1) poorer people are cranking out children in greater quantities than rich folks, and 2) wealth is a primary indicator of intellegence. Hence the common retort in conversation: if you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?
Luke, help me take this mask off
Perhaps that's because a quantative description (X% of genes are different) is of little importans. Different arm length and different brain size are nowhere near being comparable, while the gene difference expressed in % can be roughly the same.
Well, actually you could take the Adam/Eve postulate to "prove" evolution:
If in the beginning there were only Adam and Eve, then how could it be that people today are as different as they are? After all, the genetic pool of humanity is clearly larger than the one of just two persons. Thus if all people are descendents from Adam and Eve, they must have evolved, thus proving evolution.
That would be closer to speciation (not exactly - we don't call different races different species), not evolution. All are still Homo Sapiens. Evolution would start with Adam and Eve and end up with Homo Sapiens, Homo Simpson, and Homo SpeciesNotYetFeaturedInThisFilm.
Micro-evolution. No argument.
Environmental Adaptation - no argument.
Macro-Evolution. Still not convinced. Belief in macro-evolution without a record of species becoming new species is as much "belief" as it is science.
I will grant that apparent gaps in the fossil record could be due to the idea that fossils only exist at times where a cataclysmic event killed and buried the species in a way that would preserve them for later find. Other species could have existed in between the cataclysmic events that left no fossils.
Faith has been defined as being sure of what one hopes for and certain of what one does not see.
Without proof of existence of the species in the gaps, you are left to "faith" to accept that they existed without leaving hard evidence.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
1) Because of a background assumption in most cultures that people were brought into being, without preamble, a few thousand years ago.
2) Within the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, the widespread belief that the Lord will be wrapping things up, shortly, so that there won't be time for further/any evolutionary activity.
3) The popular conception that evolutionary change is always macroscopic and immediately apparent to the casual observer (ie. X-men).
Luke, help me take this mask off
Of course this is one of the lessons learned from WW2. And clearly, this steps over all kinds of human rights. And I'm not trying to say that such a thing should be reimplemented or that any government should step in and start curtailing our reproductive habits. I didn't think I infered that we should sterilize the populations, I merely made an observation to instigate thoughtful discussion ;)
But I totally disagree with you on your second statement, that their unattractiveness will weed them out. Infact, I'd say the opposite is true, that their unattractiveness will keep them in the gene pool. There's groups of our population who have...strange tastes in mates. I think unless a gene specifically inhibits reproduction in individuals, while that gene might not become dominant in the gene pool, I seriously doubt it will ever be removed.
"What made people think that [human] evolution stopped with the modern era?"
The fact that humans no longer mate based on survival characteristics, that's what! People mate now because they shoot up together and accidentally get pregnant. They mate because the female is anorexic and the male has a lot of money. They mate to add another notch to the bedpost. They mate out of sympathy. They mate out of a fraternity initiation mandate. Some mate with the first available person out of a strong urge to reproduce, regardless of the mate used in the process.
Cosmetic surgery has provided individuals who have flawed genes to hide their defects and attract mates on the basis of that deception.
The strong social influence which urges that imperfections such as slight deformations and congenital disease must be ignored has caused those genes to remain in circulation, contrary to instincts portrayed in the animal kingdom.
The social habit of homosexuality has emerged as a distinctly non-darwinistic trait, preventing reproduction and thereby "killing" the participants from an evolutionary standpoint, removing their genes from circulation.
Medicine has caused those with severe defects to survive longer, providing them with more opportunity to reproduce. Even those who may have died shortly after birth see greatly extended lifespans - wonderful from a social perspective, but pollutant from a darwinistic standpoint.
The modern era has done much to derail the natural course of natural selection in humans.
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
Put Simply: The Jerry Springer Show.
Seriously though, I'd guess its because at least in the western world, most everybody seems to survive long enough to procreate now. Fewer and fewer of the serious genetic pre-dispositions to diseases are an immediate death sentence any more, so they're not being bred out of the gene pool.
re you of the Nazi philosophy? They also believed in the genteic supiriority of the aryan (european) race, and also thought such was a justification in the might is right sense.
I did not say that European genes were "superior", I said that they may have helped Europeans in their conquests. That's "superior" only if you attach a positive value to killing and maiming. Do you? Because if you do, you're the Nazi.
Most new genetic development is resultant of mating selection pressures and epidemic disease immunity's.
And that's one of the things that helped Europeans in their conquests: carrying a whole range of diseases and being resistant to them.
Dont confuse genetics with politics.... its a really bad idea... which has resulted in some really bad consequences.
So, why do you keep doing that? Why do YOU keep attaching value judgements to biological properties?
Actually in post-WW2 Europe, people were starving in the cities and many fled to the country to work or even beg.
While of course I don't have any detailed statistics or studies, I would think that people in the country had much better chances for survival.
But don't worry, Peak Oil is coming soon, together with land erosion, desertification of large areas and water shortages, I guess we will find out sooner than we want to who is best fitted for survival in an industrial society that is breaking up.
That is wrong.
During collapsing societies, there is not enough food to feed everybody. So when some bands form to steal food from farmers (which would eventually become a system of protection money), they would feed themselves first (being egoistic), feed the farmers second (because they are the basis of their own survival.) and let everybody else starve.
Because of this and of course because farmers will find ways to put secretly put away food for themselves and their families, farmers will have a pretty good chance to survive.
Everybody else has to get lucky enough to become part of a protection ring (and only a small percentage would be able to be part of that group and survive the fights between these groups.
The farmer has no innate advantage over any other profession.
Of course he has.
Smart farmers can hire gunmen with food which will give them not only survival but also some local political power.
Then why does homosexuality exist? Does anyone claim to be a "5th generation homosexual"?
No seriously, I'd like to see an honest discussion about homosexuality from a scientific viewpoint. If it's honestly some kind of problem then why is it so accepted instead of attempted to be cured?
Hard to find statistics on this... but is homosexuality growing or lessening?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
that eugenics is ok. It's definitely not the right direction to go in and I certainly didn't mean to suggest we should move in that direction. Some people have a bit too much of a knee jerk reaction ;) I was just pointing out one of the current problems we as a species face. You'll notice I never even suggested eugenics as an answer, just observing a potential problem.
;)
:)
Of course without randomness we'd genetically stagnate. The benefit of randomness is that it is genetic growth in every direction, so to speak. This is effectively brute force genetic survival - should something cataclysmic happen to the species, such as a particularly virulent virus, there's a good chance that at least some members of the population will survive and continue on. (This is the exact opposite of a specialized species, as you pointed out in your post.) I totally agree.
Since we can't predict the future we can't tell what genes will be beneficial. I don't know how you really went from my comment of "Aren't we effectively letting people piss into the pool?" to "Yet you want to throw out the single most powerful aspect of evolution. Random chance." Let's try not to put words into my mouth.
To counter your point of "which genes are good/bad at what time" (and to reaffirm what I meant in my first post) I don't think ALL genes are a shade of grey. Take for instance, a gene that inhibits the bodies ability to produce a key protein. This is detected at birth and the solution is a pill that must be taken for the rest of a child's life. Not only is this extremely dangerous, but it is arguably unethical to pass on such curse to your offspring. Is it wise to have portions of the population completely reliant on a drug?
I'd say a *lot* of research needs to be done in genetics and biochemistry before we can start deciding what genes really are good, bad, and/or absolutely necessary. Oh, and I love that evolved antenna example. Thanks for the link!
Is there some inherent cap on human intelligence?
Quite possible. Considering that brains are sort of our specialty as a species, we tend to think that smart is good. But as far as natural selection is concerned, we may just need to be smart enough. It could be that excessively intelligent people are more likely to get distracted into activities that compete with their real business (evolutionarily speaking) of spreading their genes as widely as possible.
No, it can only be selected if there is genetic differentiation in it. So if susceptibility levels to the "full world" meme vary for different alleles of the same gene, the less susceptible versions will be selected for. But if that genetic variation doesn't exist, it can't be selected for.
Actually, even if there was no genetic variation in susceptibility to the "full world" meme, there is almost certainly genetic variation in the ability to control one's own sexual behavior. So if there is no variation in susceptibility to the meme, then the meme would have a side effect of selecting for people who are highly sexually active (and poor at remembering to use contraception) despite their own best intentions.
>>>Genetically, we have a concept called races.
Yes, there is a genetic concept about race, it is about breeding: when X can reproduce with Y, they belong to the same race.
This is a very different concept from our cultural human races as 'black', 'white', etc.
>>No, we don't. Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically.
>Really? Explain that to my black friend in 8th grade as he suffered during a sickle-cell anemia crisis.
Studies have shown that there are very little genetic differences between men 'of different color': sometimes two black men can be more different than a black man or a white man.
Now of course 'different' is quite difficult to measure, how do you take into account all the parts of the ADN does all the parts have the same value, etc..
That said, yes our concept of 'black race' or 'white race' is quite cultural: how could it be otherwise when it started before you could do DNA analysis!!
So eventually, the affected population in malaria free areas, should lose the gene for sickle cell anemia because they will select against it, whilst it will remain in the population in those areas which do suffer from malaria because of the positive selection. We just haven't had enough time/generations in malaria free areas for the sickle cell anemia gene to reduce in frequency.
But I think that's one of the arguments about how evolution stops with civilazation. What happens if, at great expense, the disease "sickle cell anemia" can be treated to the point the suffers can and do reproduce? How can it be selected against when it can be treated? And it is recessive, so most people with the gene for it don't suffer from it, so it will persist longer, if it is ever eliminated. There are only two ways to eliminate the disease, prevent those with the recessive gene from reproducing (which would be quite objectionable to most) or treat the genes with gene therapy of some sort, which is above our technology level, and faces great opposition on moral grounds for getting to that technology level.
Learn to love Alaska
Just as important as failure to reproduce at all is differential reproductive rates. Merely being outbred by 5:4 is enough to ensure that the more slowly reproducing strain will be all but gone from the gene pool within a few hundred generations.
If you're going to play the history card, you should check your facts first.
The GP was absolutely correct that in Europe people would drink watered down beer instead of water to escape infections. If you've read the System of the World trilogy by Neal Stephenson, there's a scene in which this comes into play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer
Did you just say that anyone that couldn't drink alcohol in Europe would have died during the middle ages?
No, he didn't say that. He said that alcohol was more common, to the point where it would be rare that someone would live their life withough drinking a fermented drink. Also that the effects are clear and immediate, and not ever drinking alcohol would have meant drinking water all the time, which would greatly increase the chances of contracting disease. Perhaps you should keep your outrage in check until you finish understanding what is written.
Learn to love Alaska
Anyhow, correlation of DNA alone is of little importance for defining groups of biological entities in evolutionary terms. *Phenotype* is the thing being selected by evolution, and evolution does not care if a given phenotype is produced by the change of one nucleotide or a thousand in a DNA strand; since races are groups of different phenotypes clusters inside the same species, then yes, they may be relevant in evolutive terms. And the phenotypes of human races are, let be sincere, *drasticly* different: aside from "visual" distinctions like color, shape, size, there are pronounced biochemical differences (and imunological), like this or that race group being unable to digest this or that nutrient, this or that race being more resistant to HIV, and so on. Heck, there are even *medicines* with instructions saying "this medicine is known to not work effectively on people from race X" - for fortunately medicine doctors apparently did not surrender science to political correctness like many biologists did...
>>What is race?
Obviously a deep and complex question. You can split people into races using the method of your choice, or even construct hierarchies (Ethnic Jews are separate from the French, but Ashkenazi Jews have a different genetic composition than other Jewish people, etc.) The question becomes even more complicated when one considers offspring from two different races, and then consider a country like the Philippines.
Which is all well and good, but that is not the important question.
>>But these variations do not match up very well with conventional (cultural) concepts of race,which are
>>often based simply on skin color or other physical attributes, and sometimes on national origin.
Casual cultural definitions are not meaningless; while I might even be completely deluded as to my race (I could think I'm an Ashkenazi Jew while I'm actually a complete mixture of every race on Earth), there is definitely a statistically valid correlation between cultural definitions and genetic variability.
This has real practical value for people's lives. If I were an Ashkenazi Jew, I'd definitely get tested for Tay-Sachs even if maybe my genetic makeup is actually closer to a Sephartic. Or, consider the case of genetic diversity in pharmacology: some drugs are found to have severe ADEs in a small percentage of the population. The percentage is low enough the FDA approves it. However, as case studies come in, analysis reveals that the severe ADE is caused by a mutation that is very rare in the general population, but quite common in (~25%), say, the Navajo. You work as a pharmacist in Tuba City. A man comes in and asks for the drug. He's speaking Navajo. What do you do?
As much as it's politically correct to claim that all people are equal, and race is all an illusion, the pharmacist would be negligent (and rightly so) if he didn't at least warn the man about the ADE, and probably shouldn't dispense it at all (finding an alternative drug if possible).
Our body of knowledge of cases like this are only going to grow as we map out locuses of various genes and mutations.
In the survey, 0% of Irish tested for the deficiency. Claiming that thus there are 0% of people in the entire nation of Ireland has it is a logical fallacy, and besides the point as well. All tests have statistical errors. Pointing this out doesn't mean that the survey is erroneous.
It was from a lecture at UC San Francisco, which is regarded as one of the top medical schools in the world. I doubt they were spouting off racist nonsense to get a dig in on the Irish. You're another example of how people can apply wishful thinking to real life (race is all an illusion -> there are no genetic differences between races), and end up wrong. Differences exist. Get over it. It's still no excuse for racism.
I'm Irish. My fiancee is Chinese. Guess which one of us turns bright red and vomits after one drink?
(Hint: it's not the Irish man.)
And yet there is absolutely a statistically valid correlation between what people self-identify as their "Race" and significant genetic differences. I posted three. I'm Irish, I'm not planning on getting tested for Tay-Sachs. If I were Jewish (regardless of my sub-grouping), I'd get tested for it, just to be sure.
Someone else posted this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy
In addiction there is a strong genetic element, some people get addicted to alcohol/heroin/nicotine easily while the majority never gets addicted to these drugs despite being in contact with them.
An alcoholic is pretty likely to be dependent on the welfare system.
Of course there a numerous other genetically influenced properties, many of those genetic factors are of course a taboo (like stupidity, laziness, etc.), which may contribute to being partially or fully welfare dependent.
And of course if something so bad that it's called a "disorder" (today only really, really bad things are called "disorders", especially when it's genetic) - like mental retardiation, inability to move for example, are pretty likely to be fully dependent on the welfare system.
If a person is capable of finding a mate and engaging in the act of procreation they are almost certainly capable of engaging in menial labor.
Are you joking?
In my country (Austria) female mental retards are sterilized because they don't understand what sex is and what it will cause. Pressure groups calls that "eugenic" and therefore evil. If they are successful in banning that practice those will bear children, in some cases probably one per year until they reach menopause.
What about the case where an ethnic minority is unable to support itself except on handouts because they are unable to find employment? Not that they couldn't do some work, but no one is willing to pay them for what they can do. Should they be banned from procreating?
Why do ethnic minorities come into the picture?
If they can't support their children, they shouldn't procreate.
Otherwise it will lead to the creation of much misery because all those will starve to death when (not if) the welfare system fails. Which by the way will be in about 10-20 years, when Peak Oil really hits.
What is the difference between someone with Down's or a malformed leg who can do assembly line type stuff, but can't find employment and segregated ethnic population? Neither had any choice to be born as they were.
So?
It depends on what you prefer, the 2 possibilities are:
You can sure have your welfare system for a few more decades. But then millions (actually billions because those food donations to Africa will stop) will starve to death because no system, no matter how good it is, can support an ever growing population.
Of course you may call me evil eugenicist, but that won't change a thing. The welfare system as it exists in the West is doomed.
I'm not saying that everyone is equal in every regard; I'm just saying calling one genetic group "better" than another is dangerous.
I agree, if somebody needs the welfare-system (s)he should be sterilized, regardless of being part of whatever group.
The criteria you supplied, the ability to find work, depends on more than genetics. It depends on the supply of work, as well as the perceptions of those doing the hiring.
So?
You don't offer any solution. (You seem to be a fan of the status-quo, which just frankly isn't a solution)
It's a fact that every generation, there are more and more people on welfare.
Wether it's genetic is actually pretty irrelevant, because they will starve to death when the welfare system fails, regardless.
Also it's irrelevant wether it's genetic because if it's cultural, it doesn't really change the situation because cultural values are passed on the the next generation just like genetics and pretty much anything I said is equally true for cultural problems.
So devolution is evolution i.e. twisted english.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
While there is a strong statistical correlation in America between being African-American and sickle cell anemia, with any one gene there will necessarily be a largish amount of error.
However if you start considering more of their genes, you can pretty accurately tell where their ancestors came from. Read the other posts inside this thread for more information.
Evolution requires selection. Without selection all you have is mutation. I don't think we're experiencing natural selection at the moment. But we might be experiencing sexual selection. A hundred years from now the only people that will be left are strict Catholics.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
>>>>>Genetically, we have a concept called races.
>>Yes, there is a genetic concept about race, it is about breeding: when X can reproduce with Y, they
>>belong to the same race.
>>This is a very different concept from our cultural human races as 'black', 'white', etc.
If they can't interbreed they are considered different species (or sometimes subspecies).
>>Studies have shown that there are very little genetic differences between men 'of different color':
>>sometimes two black men can be more different than a black man or a white man.
There is 'very little' difference between us and a hippopatomus (it's, what, 2%? IIRC). Therefore I will claim it is simply an illusion that we are different, and is solely socially constructed.
On the contrary. Instead of listening to wishful thinking of how life should be, and thus is, we are beholden to statistics for the truth.
If the conditional probability that a self-identified Jewish person shows a statistically significant difference in the likelyhood the person will have Tay-Sachs, then our concepts of race are not simply social constructions, and are NOT useless, but rather useful, especially when it comes to ourselves knowing what diseases we might be at risk for due to genetic variations and diseases common to our ancestors.
they are two skill sets for the most part, but there is common skills in there as well. Most farmers I've met keep a very large family garden in addition to their commercial farming. Irrigation is much older than you suspect, I'm thinking minimum 4000 BC and a lot of our agricultural technology is a logic continuation of technics developed by the Amnish farmers. Now the Amish and the Mennonite are the people I would bet on durring a social-economic collapse.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
'More importantly, "intelligence" (whatever that is) doesn't seem to have any well-defined genetic basis.'
I suggest talking to dog breeders.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I hadn't thought of it like that. I have to admit, I believe a lot of the fundamentalists to be quite insincere, rather than ignorant and afraid. They are not opposing science because they are fearful; they are opposing it because they get paid money by rich, ignorant people to do it. In the same way, here in the UK, we have "right wing philosophers" who put up arguments that are dismissed or ignored by real philosophers, who despise them, but they do it because they get paid by rich people who want to see their way of life defended. They are able enough to know their arguments are poor, but they does very nicely out of it. The trial of Sokrates seems to have been political in this way.
Pining for the fjords
I'd say you're as full of shit as the southern dodos in the US who were too stupid and inflexible to adapt to change and are still trying to make a case for stupidity and interbreeding.
Oh, really? http://www.fixedearth.com/
(Yes, this nutcase is serious. I have a copy of his book, though I don't know why.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
Total human happiness is basically directly proportional to the number of people. Five billion people will be approximately half as happy as ten billion. There is no reason to believe that the current population (6.5 billion) or the predicted maximum population (8-9 billion) are unsustainable. Indeed, as technology grows, so does the number of people we can sustain.
Reducing birthrates in the first world, where most of the innovation will come from, will actually make the problem worse, not better. First world countries should be aiming for zero native population growth and a long-term equilibrium of their population as the poorer parts of the world head towards stabilization. Fortunately, they rapidly are. Except for Africa, there are few places in the world where birthrates are problematically high. Even there they are falling. On the contrary, in places like China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Iran, birthrates have been falling like rocks and are rapidly falling to or below replacement levels.
Also, there is a matter of cultural preservation. I think it is important to preserve western culture (as in liberal democracy, respect for human rights, etc). Doing so while having our populations fall like rocks is not necessarily a given.
There are those (mostly the religious right) who would argue the world is not overpopulated. This is particularly true in America, where vast swaths of empty wasteland in the west provide the illusion that there's plenty of room in the world, while neglecting the fact that the resources of 100 square miles of arid desert is doing well to support a single family, and in many cases can't even support a single human being without importing resources from elsewhere.
There are also vast swaths of land in north central Africa, Northern Canada and Russia as well as an entirety of Antarctica that are unpopulated. Just because the land is empty, it doesn't mean you want to build your homestead there. The America West suffers from a profound lack of WATER. Out west, "gimme your water" is shootin' words.
It's not a question of real estate, it's a question of resources.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
We'll grow a 6th finger as a species if future law determines all political and legal outcomes based on piano competitions.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I was lamenting a current trend of societies while being sarcastic at the same time. Lighten up.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
Modern medicine has allowed people to survive and reproduce with less than optimal genes where they otherwise would have perished.
We've violated the principle of natural selection.
Now, don't go assuming I think that it's all bad... obviously it is a noble goal to give everyone a reasonably normal and happy life.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
There seems to be some belief that the modern era has slowed or stifled human evolution.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
"Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
DUH ! Simply (and extreme) human Arrogance !! THAT is what generally makes us assume that evolution had stopped !! We are at our "pinnacle", NO ??
"...with any one gene there will necessarily be a largish amount of error."
Why would that be, and what are the ramifications of this fact for your theory of race? Again, where can I find the official genetic races, and each particular genetic profile of the races?
What scientific questions does this theory of race answer? How do I know that this theory is actually a scientific one, rather than an attempt to justify old, consistently discredited racial theories?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I've heard of a European, an Arab, an Indian, a Chinaman, an aboriginal, and a native American but I've never heard of African tribe A and African tribe B
Where can I find futher information on these tribes and their genetic differences?
If they are made up, how can someone have a reasonable discussion comparing them with you, as you can easily just change the parameters of your imagination?
I suspect your argument would be largely correct with some real tribes in there.
"what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
What makes you think that people think that?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You misunderstand evolution if you think "we've lost the filter aspect of evolution."
Before evolution can filter productively, there needs to be a large genepool. The lack of a large gene pool means the entire species is wiped out when a selection criteria is applied.
So by encouraging a wide variety of individuals to reproduce, we ensure that there is a greater likelihood that humanity will survive, via genetic diversity, the next big epidemic, temperature shift, solar radiation shift, or other selective pressure.
Evolution works fine.
GPL Deconstructed
For one thing, the interaction of sickle-cell anemia and malaria is more complex. You write:
. It is a genetic disease: You're born with or without it. Advantage of HAVING the disease? You don't die of Malaria (you do die of the disease, but most have had children by then).
Wrong. Carriers of the recessive allele are more resistant to malaria. They don't have the disease, but they do partially express it (i.e. they have some sickle-shaped cells). But they don't die of it. And they're more resistant to malaria. That's why the disease is passed on to unfortunate individuals who are the product of two carriers (25% chance of having both recessive alleles).
This is over the top: If five percent of your tribe "Simply doesn't like to eat chicken", and the H5N1 Chicken flue comes around, about 5% of the tribe is likely to survive to pass on a much elevated "don't like chicken" gene.
Whether or not you like chicken has little to do with your catching the "Chicken flue" [sic]. Living in close quarters with your poultry might make it more likely that you pick up the virus. But the emergence of a global H5N1 pandemic has more to do with the likelihood that the virus mutates or otherwise recombines with other bits of genetic material which afford it the capability to be transmitted from human to human.
Moderators, please don't mod up as "Informative" unless you're sure the posting is accurately so.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
How was this modded UP!? I feel so strongly about what you wrote I'm trying to make a rare comment which'll probably never see the light of day on /. Still, a fellas gotta take a swing when people get outright dangerous spreading the kind of crap you're spouting. I don't know where to start, your comments are so off the wall I can't tell if you get this stuff off of T.V. or not. Certainly not slashdot, which I read everyday, and I've not heard this kind of total crap before.
First of all NOBODY has done ANY survey of AFRICAN I.Q.s There are 54 countries and a plethora of territories in Africa, a BILLION+ people, and more than 5,000 tribes who are culturally, linguistically and genetically differentiated - and range from the absolutely languid to those who make the Swiss seem relaxed. The total number of languages and dialects is UNKNOWN. In Nigeria alone there are more than 470 distinctive languages and dialects. English is NOT the majority language on the continent as almost EVERYONE has a primary native tongue and may or may not ADDITIONALLY speak - from broken to fluent - English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Afrikaans, or German, as a second or third tongue, though most people speak at least two languages other than European ones because of the local variety. So give your CNN (which I watch a lot) viewpoint a rest.
I never cease to marvel at the rude comments people make about how badly "Africans" (which ones?) speak English on TV when interviewed. How many languages do you speak other than your native tongue? And how many of those, if any, do you speak fluently? The point is any of the IQ tests you might refer to - Raven's math matrices or not - are administered in European languages and anybody with an IQ over 12 who has looked at or read the extensive literature on the construction of those tests knows they are culturally loaded and biased in a lot of ways, including how the math questions are constructed (context not content). And No, they have not been fixed. (I took one for fun a few weeks ago and if that's fixed I think you mean "fixed".
When you say "Asians" are you making the same hand-waving racial and langauge generalization as before? Or do you differentiate between Asian-Americans (a complex category) and Asians outside of America? Does that include Turkmen, Mongolians, Burmese, and Malaysians - or did you have a well-picked few in mind? Give me a break pleeease! I'd like to see you take an IQ test in a second language you don't speak well and do as well. Set your time machine for the 21st century dude and bring your mind back from its comforting romantic and historical Victorian travels about Africans (or did you really mean "Blacks"?) having IQs lower than your own.
More relevantly, do you personally know anything about the University of Witwatersand? And its tests? (in Afrikaans) For that matter do you know anything about Afrikaans and how South Africans of non-European descent feel about it even though they're were required to learn it? Or about South Africa and its pre- and post-apartheid educational and ethnic research? These are the same kinds of folks who were researching how to build a genetic virus that would selectively eradicate the native Zulu and other native African tribal populations in South Africa so they could inherit the land. And despite all you've seen on American TV (Wow!) including 'Tsotsi' just winning an academy award, believe it or not, your argument went deep south in a blasted hurry the moment you put "University of the Witwatersrand" and "(a liberal college in South Africa)" in the same sentence. What planet do you live on?
On a personal level I'm from Nigeria and went to poor but good schools in Lagos. I've learnt English as a second language and was, as far as the results of intellectual efforts were concerned, a wee bit more than average with respect to my classmates - many of whom were and are seriously smarter than I was or presumably am. My IQ, when then tested, was 183. So give me some oxygen fella, unless you've been running some massive covert
Offtopic? Inconceivable!
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
The fact that through medical care and technology, we have almost eliminated "survival of the fittest" (better written as "survival of the best fit to their habitat")?
This is a fallacy. Leaving aside the fact that there are still huge populations in the world without access to such medical technology, all it does, if anything, is to change the "environment" a bit. The selection pressures don't go away, they merely shift so that other things become important selection factors. In fact medical advances are only one such change in our environment - there are hundreds of others. In fact we have vastly changed the way we live in a very short space of time, in evolutionary terms. Last tick of the evolutionary clock, we were still living in hunter-gatherer tribes. Given the huge changes we've brought upon ourselves in just 5000 years, I'd say that in fact we've probably kick-started a big evolutionary jump for ourselves and others. In what direction, it's impossible to say. In 10,000 more years we might be able to discern it, another 100,000 and it will be clear.
And, for my 2 centimes of a Euro, let me say this:-
He is serious perhaps, but he is quite wrong. Everybody knows that the earth is flat - this is the origin of the the expression "there is a downside to everything !"And here is my second centime's worth:-
You don't know why ? Well gosh, you could maybe read it - since I suppose you paid good money for it. Might be good for a laugh or two. If so, you could maybe share the laugh(s) with us (just a suggestion, of course). You could also use it for a door-stop, or for beating your wife and/or children with, or your pet goat might enjoy eating it (if you have a pet goat - which I think is a distinct possibility).How many beans make five, anyhow ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_counselingi a/DS00324/DSECTION=4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sickle-cell-anem
Will get you started. Yes databases of where genetic loci historically came from do exist, and are being expanded as we learn more.
What purpose does it serve? The most obvious is as an aid to diagnosis, much of which is sorting out the likely probabilities of symptoms from unlikely. Just because we all want to live in a colorblind society is no excuse to misdiagnose a black kid suffering from a sickle cell crisis because you want to give him the same diagnosis you'd give a white kid.
Secondly, an emerging field is to examine the effects of drugs on different genetic populations. Drugs can react differently in people depending on their genetic makeup. If you know that a rare mutation, one found mainly in Koreans, causes severe side effects with a certain drug, if you are Korean, you should probably not take the risk in taking the drug and use an alternative instead.
How do you know it's scientific? Statistics tells us what is scientific and what is not.
One in 12 (8.3%) African Americans (AA) is a carrier for sickle cell anemia (see the reference in my first post). Its percentage is much lower in whites (W) (let's say 0.1% to invent a number).
Let's say that the probability that someone has sickle cell anemia is P(S), and is perhaps 0.15% worldwide (again inventing numbers).
Thus, P(S) = 0.15%, but the conditional probabilities are P(S|AA) = 8.3% and P(S|W) = 0.1%
This numbers come from millions of samples. Are the differences statistically significant? Yes, unquestionably so. Therefore it is a scientifically valid statement to say that black people are more likely to have sickle cell anemia than white people. With one swoop, we can discard confounding questions of what exactly is a "Race" -- which is probably never going to be answered in a such a manner as to satisfy everyone. But if self-reported race is enough to show a very statistically meaningful difference, then it is scientifically legitimite to report the difference and keep it in mind during diagnosis and treatment.
Again, it's simply wishful thinking that we are all identical geneticly. It's even on the surface an absurd claim, almost by definition.
As I said in my original post, it's also absurd to claim one person superior to another because he has higher or lower levels of melanin. But I find it very suspicious when people try to deny incontrovertable science for their own agendas.
Arrogance?
Most people I deal with (especially the Americans :p) are already convinced that they are best versions of humanity that can ever be.
Think about it. We all deal with people that are convinced they're God's gift to mankind. This is especially true of attractive people. Dumb ones too. Hot and dumb are the worst. They're already convinced they're at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
Or at least they are until someone hotter and dumber comes along :)
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!
Source. On both counts. You could just as easily be blowing shit now as before.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Neal Stephenson
The world reknowned anthropologist and history professor. Oh wait he's not. Try do a little better next time you quote your dependable sources. Hint: sci fi writers don't count.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
which would greatly increase the chances of contracting disease.
Nah given even basic statistical gradients, your assumptions are wildly inaccurate. Wildly. Perhaps you should keep your outrage in check until you finish understanding what is written.
Are you saying all Irishmen are hot headed maniacs who fly off the handle at the least provocation? RaARAaaARRRR (head asplode)(joke).
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Evolution is based on genes, not people.
Well, there's quite a lot that's determined by genetics. Like a large part of your personality. This personality determines your outlook in life, and thus your susceptibility to certain memes. Things like ego and self-image probably play a role in this; that's clearly genetic (just look at your siblings, if any).
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
By SigILL's logic, nobody should ever willingly decide to not have children since the "tendency" to not want to reproduce should have been "bred out" of the genepool by now. Clearly that is not the case.
Perhaps I should have added "given a long enough time scale". Evolution is a long-term process. You can't seriously expect our 50 to 100 years of secular society to have influenced our genetics already (prior to that, having offspring was just the "done" thing, like going to church). Wait a couple of thousand years and I think you'll see marked differences based on memetic susceptibility.
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You went ahead and singled out addiction as dependent on welfare. Really? Someone with a genetic predisposition to addiction isn't an alcoholic, and shouldn't be treated as one. And of course no addict could contribute to society, like say Edger Allen Poe or Ernest Hemingway. Should we have bred them out? Please name one single disorder that renders the afflicted totally and unable to work and still able to bear children.
One should never judge someone based on what group they belong to. Each individual (and their progeny) should be judged only on his own merits. Whenever a decision is based on solely on genetics it is wrong; it relies on the assumption that all those people are the same.
For your "solution" consider the programmer who gets laid off and has to draw unemployment. He stops at the clinic, gets his genome scanned (a condition of drawing unemployment) and is found to have a genetic predisposition for developing Alzheimer's. *snip We can't have that gene in the general population.
Look at the population on welfare - it is disproportionately non-white. Is that because non-white people are genetically disabled?
ABILITY TO GAIN EMPLOYMENT IS NOT BASED SOLELY ON ABILITY TO WORK.
The reason ethnic minorities enters into the picture is because humanity has a long history of mistreating those different from the majority. When genetics and working status combine to determine breedability it is only a mater of time before Hispanicness or Arabness and so forth become genetic disorders (depending on where you live.) If an ethnic minority is unable to gain employment it does not mean that they should be removed from the gene pool.
Your right, I didn't pose any solutions, and I'm not a particularly a fan of the status quo. Any potential solution would take considerably more time and effort to even describe than I'm willing to put into a
Well, there's quite a lot that's determined by genetics. Like a large part of your personality. This personality determines your outlook in life, and thus your susceptibility to certain memes. Things like ego and self-image probably play a role in this; that's clearly genetic (just look at your siblings, if any).
True, but I can't see how this relates to the argument.
OK - here's the crux -- why do we need a theory of race in order to diagnose disease? Couldn't you do it more effectively by determinimng their ancestry? For instace, I have met African-Americans who look like Southern Europeans, Asians, or Hispanics.
The study you cited about sickle cell anemia has *already* decided that certian people are African-American before the results were in. What I am asking for is the objective criteria by which we can run an experiment with to determine which race a person belongs to.
What exactly is race? It seems like when you talk about race, you are using as another term for ancestry.
And, more to the point, you have yet to address the official races, and the criteria. If race is such a useful bit of knowledge for medicine, certainly doctors would have a lot of data on race (and race alone, not ancestry and disease), and have ways of determining race when, say, the person is injured so badly you can't tell the race.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Which is why 6000 years ago, as societies began forming very large social groups, the farmers became the dominant economic and political force.
Of course the groups become protection rackets. What in the world do you think a government is except a protection racket that most of the members of a society have agreed to join in with? Look at ancient history. Hell, look at farms on the U.S. frontiers in the 1780's where there were almost no societal controls. Farmers got the short end of the stick. They had worse survival rates than other groups. Farmers and food gatherers were nessicary, and would be nessicary in the future after a massive social colapse, but it's not an advantage to be one, they are actually at a disadvantage. They will be prey. Whether they are docile or dangerous prey isn't much of a concern, they will be prey for other groups.
"Heck, there are even *medicines* with instructions saying "this medicine is known to not work effectively on people from race X" - for fortunately medicine doctors apparently did not surrender science to political correctness like many biologists did..."
Please show me the medicine bottle that has the word race on it. I think what you are actually talking about is ancestry, which is different than old, consistently discredited theories of race.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
True, but I can't see how this relates to the argument.
:)
I'm so sorry. I wasn't paying attention. I really shouldn't post here when I'm tired
Your argument was of course that caring for people genetically related to you also confers an evolutionary advantage. That's certainly true.
However, I think that makes it important to look at the genetic differences. Consider for example someone who ends up caring for his brother's offspring and not procreating himself. He's basically a kind person, but due to some obscure genetic mutation his brother is a selfish prick.
Caring for his brother's offspring would confer an evolutionary advantage for most of his genes, but not all of them, since his brother's selfish personality traits get passed on instead of his kindness.
So regarding passing on genetic material, breeding is always preferrable I guess. Nature favours the selfish.
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You talk about the difference between different tribes and the differences between Asian-Americans and other Asians, but those are the exact distinctions that should for the most part be disregarded. No one is rating cultures, they are rating genetic differences in races. There is a world of difference between an African and European Caucasion; and the difference between two Nigerian tribes. It is like comparing Black Labrador Retrievers and Chocolate Labs, and then saying it is similar to the difference between a Labrador and a Dalmation.
Human races, as far as we can tell, are much more similar to each other than dog races are. But there are real genetic differences. That is why black families do not have white babies. To think that we have all of these physical differences but no other internal genetic differences is very naive. Different races broke off from eachother for tens of thousands of years, more than enough time for very minor differences in intelligence to evolve. And the difference between a 100 and 80 IQ is very minor when you consider just how intelligent humans are over other species.
More relevantly, do you personally know anything about the University of Witwatersand?
While I have never visited the university, you can find quite a bit about a college simply from the internet. I can find a listing of all of their facilities and faculty members. They have biographies, along with research that they have done. I can even read their University Press from the internet. And I have yet to even find a non-religious based university that is not liberal. Colleges produce pseudo-intellectuals faster than they print diplomas.
You do sound like a not much travelled, pseudo intellectual racist looking for heavy credentialled cover
While I am not well traveled, I do have many friends that were born in other countries (and some that still live overseas). My family has a military backround and is very well traveled, although I was born with asthma and was black balled when I tried to sign up for the Marines. But I am not trying to sell you on any research that I have done, so my past has nothing to do with this argument. In fact, just having an emotional attachment to this issue (such as being an African yourself) clouds any objective judgment. It is similar to why psychologists are not supposed to have emotional feelings for their patients.
Regardless of what you believe, I have no racist leanings at all. While I have to admit I am mostly only attracted to Caucasian women, my sexual preferences do not mean that I have any negative feelings towards different races. I have many Asian friends and had many African American friends when in college. I am willing to accept my faults, the faults of my country, and any possible faults of my race in general. You do not see me complaining about how these IQ tests unfairly give Asian Americans an edge.
I am not even saying that Africans are on dumb. As you said in your post, IQ tests are not conclusive and do not rate all forms of intelligence. What they can show, however, is that there are probably differences in intelligence among different races. There could be certain tests that Africans do better than Europeans, I have simply not seen or heard of any tests that show this.
Not once did I uses words such as "inferior" or "smarter" in my entire post. I was simply stating that based on almost ALL available data, there seams to be an inherent difference in how different human races think. And so far no one has been able to show that it is purely cultural, in fact all available research is showing the exact opposite.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It is a bit difficult to show a medicine bottle through the Internet, but you may take a look at this article. And no, the word used is "race" as opposed to "ancestry" - and by the way the two concepts are intertwined more often than not.
It's not a question of real estate, it's a question of resources.
EXACTLY my point! However, nowhere in the US do so many dismiss the entire notion of "overpopulation" (largely because their religious leaders tell them to) as in the "wide open west," despite mountains of evidence that we are in fact overfarming the planet beyond its ability to recouperate and maintain.
One of the things that allows people in the west to be in such denial is the vast empty land they see everytime they look out their window...forgetting, as we've both pointed out, that it is all about resources, not real estate.
America certainly has no monopoly on empty spaces (or on people living in denial of the basic facts of overpopulation), but it is one area I, as an American who has lived here much of my life, can speak of with some insight and personal experience. Europe would be the other area, whereas Africa and Asia are places I've only visited a short time, so I can offer no hard opinion beyond what anyone might glean from all-too-short vacations and whatever info they dig up on the web or have spoon fed them by the media.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Maybe I repeat the points in a clear and short manner, so they are not so easy to ignore:
For instance you initially seemed to believe that unproductive members of society can be genetically identified. Maybe you've changed your mind and now think that all poor people should be sterilized. In any case you originally said, "If your genes are so messed up that you cannot survive by yourself and are permanently dependent on a welfare-system." (emphasis mine)
I wholly disagree and gave examples.. You countered that addiction is partially genetic and inferring that we should sterilized potential addicts. I demonstrated that this was idiotic and asked that you should try to supply a different criteria for finding people who are unfit to breed. You ignored me.
So lets try this again point me to a gene that warrants the carrier being sterilized. Or do we just sterilize all poor people?
You keep asking why I think race is important when you see fit to ignore it. I keep answering. (so there is no confusion here I'm addressing point 2) Here it is again:
Race is an issue whether you care about it or not because there is more to poverty than ability to work. The fact that some people are poor because their parents were poor, because their grandparents weren't allowed to be part of society means that society is at least partially responsible for the well being of those people.
(here's point 1)
RACE AND SOCIAL DEMOGRAPHICS ARE LINKED. Any discussion of poverty ought to include a discussion of race. Maybe this won't be the case in the future, but it has been throughout history.
Case in point: in America the poor population is disproportionately black. This isn't because black people either are genetically deficient it is because wealth (or lack thereof) is inherited. Social mobility isn't what we pretend it to be, but a culture is poor now might not be poor for ever (see the Irish immegration to America.) I'm not sure how eliminating a large portion of a culture doesn't bother you.
Arguments that cultures deserve to be sterilized reduce to arguments that races ought to be sterilized. You might not care how systematic sterilization of poor people will affect cultures other than your own, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem. History is rife with examples of people carrying out your "(ultimate) solution." It's called genocide. You just advocate slow genocide as opposed to fast genocide. The reason genocide is occasionally politically viable is because the people being eliminated aren't considered productive members of society by those in power.
Because you don't care about the race of poor people doesn't mean it isn't an issue.
(here is point 3)
I agree that a collapse in the welfare system would be disastrous, but your argue that your "(ultimate) solution" is an even more troubling problem. The reason sterilization is such a terrible thig is because it divides the population into first class and second class citizens. First class citizens who have purchased their status by their inherited wealth gain freedom. Poor people are left to die out.
Now if you'd care to address a couple of concise bullet points instead of repeating that you don't care about the consequences of your "(ultimate) solution."
"It is a bit difficult to show a medicine bottle through the Internet"
The WWW does have a protocol for displaying images, you know. You can scan a label, or take a picture of it with your camera phone, and upload it somewhere.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Nature is telling us our definition of intelligence doesn't match hers.
Maybe that's why what we consider highly intelligent people look kind of unbalanced to the rest.
Maybe a race of highly cerebral people would be an evolutionary dead end, and maybe nature is looking for more balanced, intuitive people.
As I said, it was from notes at a lecture.
p ubmed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=7013 538
However, with a trivial amount of research I found 411 references on the subject:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=
Go ahead and read the abstracts for them if you don't believe me.
Agarwal DP is the man. He started the field back in 1981 studying the different levels of mutated alcohol dehydrogenase and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase levels by racial groups.
I did post a reliable source which you conveniently ignored:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer.
Neal Stephenson was by way of an interesting side note.
I did notice a significant drop off in the amount of vitriol in your posts though. Maybe you've actually learned something new? If so, I'm happy.
As I said in the GP, defining race is a terribly complex subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race), and since it's really a fuzzy classification problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_set) we'll never have an answer that satisfies everyone. However, as I said, if simply using self-reported race is good enough to show such statistically meaningful differences that have such large impacts on science and medicine, then it is good enough for our purposes, and we can discard all of the competing and confusing notions for "race".
= Search&db=pubmed&term=pharmacogenetics&tool=fuzzy& ot=pharmogenetics
= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1651658 7&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum
>>If race is such a useful bit of knowledge for medicine, certainly doctors would have a lot of data on race (and race alone, not ancestry and disease)
They do have a lot of data. And it's a hot field right now. The field, in terms of the different impacts of drugs on race and other factors (to continue with the example I gave) is called pharmacogenetics.
PubMed lets you read the abstracts, so clicking here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Will give you 3567 articles on pharmacogenetics.
Just picking one at random:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Whites were shown to get more of a response from statins (or anti-cholesterol drugs) than African Americans. Older people were shown to have a greater response than younger. Women more than men. Non-smokers more than smokers. People with high blood pressure more than those with low. Slimmer people had a better response than fat people.
And yes, I'm using race and ancestry as being loosely equivalent to each other. Again, I'm trying to disregard these classically confounding problems because you can get tied up so much in trying to precisely define that which cannot be precisely defined (as I said, it's a fuzzy classification problem), that you will miss out on the practical benefits of it because you're too worried about being politically correct.
You seem to believe that the only way to get by without welfare is to inherit wealth, which seems very, very far fetched.
Also, when we talk about inherited wealth: If the poor have many kids, those kids will inherit even less (because they have to share with many brothers/sisters). If a poor couple has just one kid, that kid has a much better chance of getting out of poverty.
So your own argument is in favor of sterilization, even if wealth were only inherited: It would break the ficious cycle of poverty, because poor kids would inherit more wealth because they wouldn't have to share.
Are unproductive members to be genetically screened before sterilization? If not are you ok with just sterilizing anyone who has happened along hard times? What if you lose your job?
I don't blow every money I have on a big car, cigarettes and alcohol (like many others do), so I could survive without welfare for at least a year, even though I still work only part-time.
If I don't find a job in that year, yes I would not have any more kids because I don't think I would do anything good for them. Isn't that what responsibility is all about? Only having children if you can support them yourself?
Another question: What moral right would I have to have others pay for my children?
Are there genes that should mark one for sterilization? What are they? Would you be ok with no person with that gene having ever existed?
No.
If you can take care of your children, feel free to have as many as you want.
Actually, the whole issue is about responsibility.
Do you care if a culture is actively eliminated? Has a poor culture ever produced anything that you would consider valuable? Are you ok with that culture having never existed?
No, why should I care?
Do you see reproduction as a human right? If choice over parenting isn't a right how does it fail? What other rights don't meet those criteria?
Reproduction is no human right. If it were, then human rights were fundamentally wrong and unstable because population growth would automatically destroy these human rights sooner or later.
Ah yes, the wikipedia, even more reliable sources of information. I can't be bothered to look up the article now, but I recall reading one worthy had written up an article about how european men had smaller willies than american men. Truly a rock of reliability. As for vitriol, sufficient unto the day, the evil thereof. I have learned a few things however, probably not what you think, though.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Maybe agarwal should have studied the effects of extended alcohol consupmtion on people before wobbling to his incorrect conclusions then. Still, you do seem to have a lot of research to back you up there, its understandable if you swallowed it whole.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
I don't think that the only way to not be on welfare is to inherit wealth, but I do believe that the easiest way to end up on it is to be boon poor.
If you are born into poverty inheritance is a non-issue, 100% of 0 or 12% of 0 are the same thing. Of course it is an issue is the parents are unable to provide for the children I agree. It is my personal opinion that one should not have children if one is not able to provide for them. It is, however, my personal belief that I have no right to enforce my views on others.
Yes welfare is publicly supported which means that I am paying for poor people and that gives me some right to control how my dollar is spent, but I should not be able to make my dollar conditional on surrender of basic human rights.
There are moral obligations attached to living in society. One of them is protection of the innocent. Poor people are by and large innocent, poor children doubly so. So societies obligation to other peoples children stems from the inability to strip someone of thier rights without an active breach of civil trust, and the requirement that we value life.
Now I hear you saying that bearing children into poverty is a breach of civil trust, but I would argue that one cannot break the public trust merely by exercising their human rights. For instance, in a society that values human rights I cannot be enslaved, tortured, or imprisoned without trial, society also cannot morally attempt to affect my right to hold a belief or opinion under any circumstance. These are basically rights of dignity, which cannot (morally) be removed from me by virtue of being a human. There are also rights which can be removed from me, but only by if I have not lived in accordance with social rules. These rights include freedom of movement, speech, expression, and association. Basically if I break a law society can punish me by striping away some of the second class of rights.
Having children arises as an extension of freedom of expression and association. It is my natural right, not a privilege awarded me by those in power - a right that cannot morally be removed unless I break a law. Existing in poverty is not a breach of any law, and as such my social status cannot (morally) be a condition of having children.
You say that reproduction cannot be a basic human right because growing populations would destabilize society. All of recorded history disagrees with you. Human population has been steadily growing and civilization has adapted. If something that destabilizes society cannot be a human right then freedom of speech, expression, and association also cannot be basic rights. After all freedom of expression leads to protests, which leads to revolution. Revolution destabilizes society unlike anything else, yet without it we would not be where we are today. So I ask, do you think there is any such thing as a basic human right, or should we be allowed only to do such things expressly permitted by those in power?
You disagree, I know, but why? Would you argue that rights are an extension of government? Can those in power grant and remove rights as they see fit? If so then I assume you have not problem with repression of any human right, and see no dignity in human life. Do you dispute my description and classification of human rights? In what way? Do you think the right to have children is substantially different from our rights to use our bodies as we see fit (i.e. speech, assebmly, association)? How so? Or do you think that being poor is in and of itself a violation of a just law? If so why not just build a walled ghetto to keep them separate from us? If your income drop below say ~$30k we can just toss you in and let you fend for yourself.
There are also other standards of worth than wealth. If a communist party seized power in Australia they might see your logic as insidious and make you disapear. Your own logic (essentially might makes right) could not offer any defense. You would become a social liability,
I'm so sorry. I wasn't paying attention. I really shouldn't post here when I'm tired :)
:)
It happens
Caring for his brother's offspring would confer an evolutionary advantage for most of his genes, but not all of them, since his brother's selfish personality traits get passed on instead of his kindness.
So regarding passing on genetic material, breeding is always preferrable I guess. Nature favours the selfish.
It really isn't that simple. This has been worked out in great mathematical detail, especially in the work of W. D. Hamilton. Nature favours the selfish gene, and not always passing on genetic material yourself. If you assist with the raising of offspring of more than one sibling (or the offspring of many, many cousins), or help your mother raise lots of offspring, the math gets very interesting.
But you think you have the right to force others to provide for children which are not theirs?
Where is the limit, I ask you?
Suppose you have a surplus of 100 dollars/month and you need 50 dollars/month to provide basic survival (in poverty) for your child.
On what moral ground can the state take away 50 dollars from you allow some unresponsible parent to have (another) child and force your child into poverty?
Yes welfare is publicly supported which means that I am paying for poor people and that gives me some right to control how my dollar is spent, but I should not be able to make my dollar conditional on surrender of basic human rights.
So you think that making babies on the cost of others is a basic human right? Can I see the article please?
There are moral obligations attached to living in society. One of them is protection of the innocent. Poor people are by and large innocent, poor children doubly so. So societies obligation to other peoples children stems from the inability to strip someone of thier rights without an active breach of civil trust, and the requirement that we value life.
Following that logic, we would end up with catholic dogma that all contraceptives are evil because they don't "value life".
The poor should be protected - Actually that's the point. Only a stable welfare system can really protect the poor, but as few children as possible should be born into poverty.
Now I hear you saying that bearing children into poverty is a breach of civil trust, but I would argue that one cannot break the public trust merely by exercising their human rights.
You are wrong twice: 1) Making babies on cost of others is no human right. 2) Human rights are no dogma but are made by humans - and they have to make sense. A human right that leads to it's own destruction doesn't make any sense.
Having children arises as an extension of freedom of expression and association. It is my natural right, not a privilege awarded me by those in power - a right that cannot morally be removed unless I break a law. Existing in poverty is not a breach of any law, and as such my social status cannot (morally) be a condition of having children.
This dogmatic argumentation leads nowhere. Similarily I could say that spending your own hard-earned money is an extension of freedom of expression, therefore the state is violating your rights when it robs you and gives the money to the poor.
Dogmas never solve problems.
The whole point is that you have to compromise. Both extremes (100% taxation would lead to communism, 0% taxation would lead to anarchy) are obviously wrong. To solve the problem you have to find a solution which almost by definition is a compromise. The solution won't be perfect, but it will be better than ignoring the problem and letting the welfare system break down.
You say that reproduction cannot be a basic human right because growing populations would destabilize society. All of recorded history disagrees with you.
Sorry, but there are many, many well documented events of destabilized societies because of too few ressources available for too few people:
- Human life is sacrosanct. Any action that can directly preserve human life is worth the cost, provided it does not cost other human life.
Yes, this gets sticky when extended to a number of situations, but ideals are important.I'm not pretending that poverty is something that could be easily solved, and I'm not saying that every ideal is enforceable, or that if an idealistic plan is put into place it won't be abused. I am saying that when we talk about freedom, morality, and various social issues it is useful to reflect on what is valuable. I think that the right to choose your spouse and your decision to have children is valuable. I also think there are times when the ends don't justify the means, sterilization is one of those cases.
You ask what I'm advocating, well as I said I have neither the time, will, nor expertise to solve the problem, so for now I'm advocating no sterilization. But how about less military spending, less beurocracy, more spending on drug education and rehab, less on drug enforcement, more spending on creating opportunities, not on giving handouts. Fixing the education system (just money won't do it). What the impoverished need (IMO) is broad-spectrum opportunity to become mildly successful, not scattered chances to become exceedingly successful. Creating the opportunities is the real challenge. Welfare doen't create oppprtunities (at least as currently structured), neither does sterilization (removing competition isn't creating opportunity.)
I still think that you are arguing for creating a tiered society with first and second-class citizens. This leaves the door wide open for someone to re-evaluate what is valuable to classify you as a second-class citizen. I think a tiered citizenry is wrong. No I'm not a communist, I'd much prefer a society structured on merit than either a flat society or one in which birthright is excessively weighted, but that is being hopelessly idealistic. Just because a tiered society can't (shouldn't?) be entirely avoided doesn't mean we should be helping it along..
We have created a tiered society though. One in which race is important. We should be trying to rectify our past mistakes, that is part of responsibility too. It is our responsibility that we have shoved some cultures to the outskirts - we should help them adapt.
As far as taxes go - they're nowhere near your idea of "optimized." They become less and less "optimize" the higher in the ranks of society you go.
I agree. Sterilization for welfare is a prerequesite to guarantee that, though.
The poor are by and large innocent, and should not be forced to do anything that is not required of the wealthier citizenry. We have a responsibility to protect the innocent, especially in cases where previous social structures forced distinct ethnic or cultural groups to compete on unequal grounds.
That is the core idea of communism. That everybody works the same things, that a doctor with a decade of education also has to clean toilets while "the innocent poor" can play doctor once in a while.
While it's appealing to many christians (because it's basically a secular version of Jesus' "all people are equal"-obsession), it's basically just stupid nonsense. And it has been tried out numerous times, too. It never worked.
I'm not pretending that poverty is something that could be easily solved, and I'm not saying that every ideal is enforceable, or that if an idealistic plan is put into place it won't be abused.
Maybe you should stop talking about what you are not saying and start talking about what you are saying?
I also think there are times when the ends don't justify the means, sterilization is one of those cases.
So you prefer starvation to sterilization? (Yet another question you will not have enough balls to answer)
But how about less military spending, less beurocracy, more spending on drug education and rehab, less on drug enforcement, more spending on creating opportunities, not on giving handouts.
Funny. Sterilization for welfare would acutally reduce buerocracy to a minimum: Want welfare? Get sterilized, end of story. No buerocracy needed.
"More spending on creating opportunities" is just an euphemism for "creating a huge buerocracy that decides and implements government projects".
Euphemisms won't solve anything either.
Fixing the education system (just money won't do it).
But what if some groups cannot cope with raised standards?
Welfare doen't create oppprtunities (at least as currently structured), neither does sterilization (removing competition isn't creating opportunity.)
Completely wrong. Of course reduced competition would lower unemployment - especially in the jobs that poor people need.
I still think that you are arguing for creating a tiered society with first and second-class citizens. This leaves the door wide open for someone to re-evaluate what is valuable to classify you as a second-class citizen.
Nonsense, nobody evaluates, that's the whole point.
No I'm not a communist, I'd much prefer a society structured on merit
I agree, I don't see how sterilization for welfare does contradict that, though. Quite to the contrary, because when rich have more children than the poor, the whole society tends to form a strong middle class with very few rich and very few poor. (which is EXACTLY what you would expect in a society structured on merit)
What you are advocating is what we see currently in many coutnries: Rich with moderate birth rates, poor with high birth rates, middle class with extremely low birth rates. The middle class is literally dying out. You are actually advocating a 2 class society, because that is exactly what we are going to get if trends continue.
We have created a tiered society though.
Maybe you should stop repeating communist slogans and start to look at facts?
Fact is that the western society after the 2nd world war was the society with the strongest middle-class than any other society that came before or after it.
Therefore we have created the society that was less tiered than any other, therefore according to your own standards it couldn't have been that bad.
Yes, I know sayi
>>Maybe agarwal should have studied the effects of extended alcohol consupmtion on people before wobbling
>>to his incorrect conclusions then. Still, you do seem to have a lot of research to back you up there, its
>> understandable if you swallowed it whole.
Ah, yes, Pubmed: the home of 20 years of total hogwash stored in one compleat archive. Right up there with the UC San Francisco Pharmacy School as the world's leading research center into ignorant and racist thought.
Or, wait, no.
"His incorrect conclusions"? You're an outstanding poster child for someone who is willing to disregard peer-reviewed research in order to continue believing ignorant thoughts. I'm honestly curious about how the mental process works in people like you. Just last week I was talking with a half-witted Indian Physicist who thought that Stalin was the greatest guy since sliced bread. He claimed that every fact ever about the atrocities of Stalin were lies. I.e., Ostrich-head syndrome. Is your sole counterclaim that you're Irish and have never heard of the study? I'm ethnically almost half Irish and have an Irish last name, but I'd never claim something isn't true just because I'd never heard of it. There's a huge corpus of knowledge in medicine. Nobody, not even doctors know all of it. Did you know that Selson Blue was used to treat tinea versicolor? It's a wide weird world.
Ah, hell, I'll answer your other post at the same time.
>Ah yes, the wikipedia, even more reliable sources of information. I can't be bothered to look up the
>article now, but I recall reading one worthy had written up an article about how european men had
>smaller willies than american men. Truly a rock of reliability. As for vitriol, sufficient unto the day,
> the evil thereof.
So you demand research and references, but then admit to not even looking at them? How curious.
I would reference my European History textbook, but it doesn't have the advantage of being online like Wikipedia does. Find a reference to prove me wrong (and to give you a hint, "I've never heard of it" doesn't count) and I'll admit my mistake. However, I'll hold you to the same standard. Be a man and admit you were wrong.
>>I have learned a few things however, probably not what you think, though.
It's always fun Europeans learn a little bit about their own history from Americans.
If the human race is still evolving, does this mean that in 1000s of years time, we'll have even more squiggly looking brains, hair that grows exactly as long as fast as we want it, glands that produce caffine, and no more republicans?
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
Ah, yes, Pubmed: the home of 20 years of total hogwash stored in one compleat archive. Right up there with the UC San Francisco Pharmacy School as the world's leading research center into ignorant and racist thought.
...blah blah blah... world.
Yes, highly skilled in both anthropology and history there too. Or wait, no. Don't get me wrong, I have no quarrel with their findings, which I am sure are accurate, or as much as they can be, which given the state of medicine generally, ain't that much. However you would not be the first to take good(?) science and turn it to a sly dig.
"His incorrect conclusions"? You're an outstanding poster child for someone who is willing to disregard peer-reviewed research
See above for details. Pharmacology does not an accurate picture of history make.
I would reference my European History textbook, but it doesn't have the advantage of being online like Wikipedia does.
European history textbook, hmmm... no, I've never heard of this hallowed tome. And I did European History.
I'm ethnically almost half Irish and have an Irish last name
Sigh. Just out of interest, rather than the many points I could raise here, why don't I just ask how one can be "almost half Irish". Was there surgery involved? Having been born and raised in Ireland, ethnically all Irish, and being able to trace my roots back a thousand years, I'm still calling bullshit on your argument. I might know, having been born and raised here and all. 0% my arse.
Find a reference to prove me wrong
You're the one asserting that the people of the republic of Ireland are alcohol dependants, and have been for thousands of years. The burden of proof lies with you.
It's always fun Europeans learn a little bit about their own history from Americans.
Indeed it is. That day, however, is not today.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
You are wrong.
>>Yes, highly skilled in both anthropology and history there too
The other posted his speculation about why Irish people would have a much lower rate of mutation in their alcohol dehydrogenase genes, not me. I simply agreed with him that drinking weak alcohol was common in the middle ages.
>>See above for details. Pharmacology does not an accurate picture of history make.
Ain't talking about history. Read my original post. I posted a purely scientific reference (that Irish have low rates, asians have high), and you came back with a "laugh at the drunk paddies" post, and that I was making it up. Now that you've seen that I wasn't, I note you still haven't retracted that statement.
>>Sigh. Just out of interest, rather than the many points
>> I could raise here, why don't I just ask how one can be
>> "almost half Irish".
Grandfather was a genealogist. I'm 3/8th Irish. That's how someone can be almost half Irish. I apologize if "higher order fractions" are a bit hard for you to understand.
> Having been born and raised in Ireland, ethnically all
>Irish, and being able to trace my roots back a thousand
>years, I'm still calling bullshit on your argument.
Consdering that we've seen before that your "I live in Ireland so I would have heard of it" argument before was false, I don't hold much credence in his newer argument from ignorance.
Genetic diversity is always a good thing. The fact that genes which were previously considered detrimental can now thrive means that those genes are no longer detrimantal in this environment, and gives a major boost to diversity. A wild example for instance: The sun someday might start giving of some wierd radiation that is dangerous to people with good eye sight. At that point having people with bad eyesight in the gene pool increases humanities chance of survival.
Wrong. Nature disagrees with you.
An animal, in the wild, with bad eyesight, would be killed off pretty quickly and would not be allowed to pass its defective genes on. So why would humans want to suffer with and propagate such genes?
There's a difference between small variations that don't negatively impact survival under current circumstances, and major defects that do negatively impact survival. Mosquitos that were naturally immune to DDT weren't suffering with some physical ailment giving them this immunity.
In the future, when people have the ability to correct defective genes, not correcting obvious defects like poor vision (caused by malformed eyeballs I believe; not something that "weird radiation" would affect differently) would be silly. Why would anyone want to suffer with poor eyesight when it could be easily corrected?
This doesn't mean that everyone is suddenly going to pick a few "superior" DNA profiles and just clone all new children from this limited number. Just that obvious genetic problems like poor eyesight, sickle-cell anemia, alzheimer's, hemophilia, etc. would be easily detected and repaired.
As I said the 'weird radiation' thing was a crazy example. A better example, for instance, is sickle cell anaemia.
This is a congenital 'disease' which causes a persons blood cells to commit suicide when under excessive stress. It also makes a person much more likely to survive a bout of malaria which still kills millions of people in west african countries.
Now this is a disease which is obviously dangerous to those who have it (some times so many cells die that the person body can't sustain thier metabolism) but how sure are we that it may not also be our major hope of survival against some yet undiscovered blood bourne pandemic.
I am not saying such things shouldn't be 'treated' just that removing an attribute from our gene pool forever, when we still don't understand the full ramifications of it, doesn't strike me as a great idea .
The truth is that the world we live in is no longer the one nature designed, so just becuase nature doesn't like something, doesn't mean we shouldn't.
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
I think your examples are a little lacking in reality.
For the "weird radiation" one, this is simple: just like we use corrective lenses to fix bad eyesight, in the future with bad eyesight genetically engineered out, we'd simply engineer some nice sunglasses or goggles to protect our eyes from the weird radiation.
For the sickle-cell anemia, however, anyone with the money to have themselves genetically modified to remove that problem isn't going to be dying of malaria since they'll also have the money to buy themselves an immunization shot. The problem with malaria is that places that have it don't have the resources to deal with the problem, either with medical means or with engineering means (like they did during the Panama Canal construction: eliminating swamps and other standing water where the mosquitos bred), so they just suffer and die. People who are at the mercy of the environment because they're so poor aren't going to be the ones modifying their genes.
My belief is that, like all things medical, any genetic modification will be quite expensive, so only the upper classes can afford them (or people in developed countries). Furthermore, they won't bother to pay for them unless they're obviously of benefit: eliminating alzheimer's, alcoholism, retardation, etc. No one wants to suffer with these things, or have a child suffer with them, despite warnings from some people that we should leave them alone because of some remotely possible benefit. So very few people will be getting any modifications done just for the heck of it. If any problems do arise, these people will also have the resources to come up with an alternative solution (e.g., special goggles for the weird solar radiation).
Somehow I think the genes that cause serious physical and mental diseases aren't going to be the ones we need in the future. e.g. spina bifida or Alzheimer's, both are genetic so both could be eradicated using eugenics.
cystic fibrosis is vaguely usefull since people with cystic fibrosis are more resistant to tuberculosis.
You could also keep a pool of people who's sole purpose was to provide genes just in case the eugenics cocked up as a safeguard, hopefully after a few tens of generations they wouldn't be needed because we would be smart enough to engineer our own genes in such emergencies.
Eugenics is great, you just haven't thought it through properly.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
However, In the case of sickle cell anaemia you are focusing on the problem we already know about (malaria). What about a possible future problem which we do not know about but which this same condition will act as a deterent for.
Diversity means that the likelyhood of the whole race being wiped out by a single change in the environment is highly unlikely (someone else has spoken more about this in reply to the original post).
However, when all of humanity has an 'ideal' genetic makeup, all it takes is one germ or virus that the designer genes don't cater for and the whole species will be ended.
You also seem to believe that only a small percentage of people will have gene therapy becuase it will be expensive. What you are neglecting is that once one person has it roughly 50% of his offspring will also have it (if it is a dominant trait, possible more). And since these people will be healthier and probably more attractive (who will want to code for an ugly child) they will be more likely to reproduce. Eventually, the 'negative' trait you are coding against may be wiped out from the gene pool FOREVER.
Plus as more people are born with the 'corrected' trait the treatment will become cheaper, and who will want to be the only short-sighted person in a world where glasses aren't even manufactured anymore. (For an example of a similar situation, just look at plastic surgery, which was once thought to be only affordable to the rich but is now within reach of anyone with a credit card)
It is similar to the main issue with GM crops. Since any genetic engineering will be obviously meant to adjust crops (or people) for the current environment. The new strain will quickly replace all the old ones becuase when it comes to competing for resources (again in the current environment) that strain is just sooo much better. Now at first this all seems great! However, when the environment does change (and eventually, it always does) all the old strains which would have been better suited for this new environment would have been wiped out and the single new strain that is left, which was so fantastic in the old environment, will now be unable to cope and will die.
So..., the more successful the new strain is..., the more likely it is that the whole species will die.
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
Usually in the disguise of making the "disabled" "normal". I think a good amount of focus is in actually getting ethics into place before the inevitable singularity. Are you just being pessemistic in the sense that you want it to happen? Just wait a few more decades.
You have some good points but I think you're still blowing things out of proportion.
First, I think (or at least I hope) all the initial research and engineering will be to rid people (who can pay, of course) of obviously defective genes; things that really do cause early death and/or suffering: things like Multiple Schlerosis, Muscular Dystrophy, early onset diabetes, etc. Things which, uncorrected, cause a life of suffering and very early deaths. And things which have no obvious benefit whatsoever. There's really no way that someone with MD is somehow going to gain a survival advantage; even if they did, they'll die too young anyway from the MD. Later, other things might be corrected because of profitability: poor eyesight, etc.
Now for therapy becoming affordable, you're looking at things from a US-centric POV. Sure, a lot of Americans can afford plastic surgery now (look at all the boob jobs!), but what percentage of the global population is the US? About 4.5%. And there's many millions of poor Americans who can't afford elective surgery too. Even if some rich people got some things "fixed", and it turned out to be a disadvantage, there will still be lots of poorer people who never got the therapy. This especially goes for your glasses comment; sure, we have LASIK today, but how many people worldwide can afford that? The glasses manufacturers will be in business for a long time, I assure you, unless some massive economic revolution occurs that raises all the billions in Third World poverty to upper middle-class status. I personally don't see anything like that happening until Warp Drive is invented and a Federation of Planets is created to facilitate peaceful trade among many different worlds, and humanity has many worlds available for colonization and mining of resources. And a limitless energy source such as a Quantum Fluctuation drive would probably be needed too.
As for all these rich peoples' children now having the corrected genes, that doesn't matter that much anyway because rich people have so few children, and poor people have so many.
Really, while there might be something to worry about here, I don't think we need to worry much about it for another century or three. By then, we'll understand a lot more about the things involved and can make better decisions.
As for crops, I do think this GM stuff is a bad idea, mostly because it's not open-source like Linux. This is one of the problems with the proprietary model: it makes you utterly dependent on the proprietor, and unable to make changes when it becomes necessary and the vendor isn't helping. Luckily, it is quite possible to store seeds and other biological material indefinitely, using cryogenics. It's done a lot with sperm for breeding animals. I really hope people are storing any plant strains that are being replaced by GM crops, so they can bring them back if necessary.
Uh no. This is a big deal, and sometimes I wonder why everyone in the world doesn't work together for it. It's nice to be enthusiastic, but this is a big project. If you do really want to help it along, start a transhumanist chapter of the World Transhumanist Organization. Oh, and the singularity institute (singinst.org) is hiring after netting $200k in fundraising.
I have the sickle cell trait (I'm originally from west Africa), only one of my gene pair (AS) has it so it isn't full blown(SS). What this means is that under stressful conditions my red blood cells have the tendency to commit suicide.
Five generations ago one of my Dad's ancestors (on his dad's side) was 'Oba' of Benin (i.e. He was the sole ruler of the largest empire in west africa). While my paternal grandmother was the daughter of a court advisor (the equivalent of a cabinet minister). And this was not one of those poor starving kingdom you see on tv (You can still see examples of Bini Bronzes in many museums).
However, in a relatively short time, the wealth they had has been greatly reduced as the economics and politics of the region has changed, and, while the royal family itself is still well off, even second generation descendants can sometimes be seen begging for money. Any wealth we have now we have had to work for seperate from our ancestors.
The symptoms of the sickle cell trait (at least the kind I have) means that I have very little toleration for cold temperatures. This wasn't such a bad problem in the tropics (except when people got carried away with air conditioners) but since I've moved to the Uk I've had to stop drinking cold water. A glass of ice water can sometimes send me into shivering fits which can last over an hour at times. It gets worse when I haven't been eating well.
For people with the full blown trait(SS) the attacks can be much worse if it's not well managed but the triggers are much the same, perhaps with lower thresholds. However, in thier case the attacks are so serious they can actually be fatal. In an environment where food is scarce children with the full blown trait don't survive long.
Now, in the 1950's WHO began an effort to wipe malaria from the planet. And from the successes that were seen in more temperate and wealthier regions there was no reason to believe they wouldn't suceed. In addition fantastic new drugs like chloroquine were being discovered/invented which could cure a malaria infection after just four doses!
So let's assume that it was possible to screen out (or remove) the sickle cell trait at that time. My ancestors would definitely have gone for it. Afterall every one knows how much people with the trait 'suffer' and no one wants to wish that on thier children.
Fast forward 50 years. DDT, the miracle insecticide, is now practically useless against mosquitoes, and turns out to be poisonous to humans. The malaria plasmodium keeps developing resistances to the new drugs they throw at it (some of the drugs being used now are so toxic you are advised not to take more than one dose a year).
Now malaria infections are a very common thing where i grew up (I used to get infected once or twice a year). I used to worry about the parasites resistance to drugs and was really scared about having to keep taking stronger and stronger drugs. However, after a while I realised that I never had a fever for more than a couple of hours a day and never more than two days in a row. I didn't like taking the pills anyway and by the time I was 13 I didn't even bother telling my parents when I started to feel sick.
I only realised this was different when a friend of mine was sick and I mentioned that all he needed to do was drink a lot of water wrap up warmly and go to bed (which was what I always did). He actually woke up feeling much worse!
Even today millions are spent trying to come up with a dependable treatment, and millions of people still die from it.
But I, and millions of others like me, never have to worry about it. And who knows what other advantages (or weaknesses may have come with it). Yes, when combined with malnutrition this condition can be fatal (but then even totally healthy people can die from hunger). Personally, I'm
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics