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Human Species May Split In Two
gEvil (beta) writes "According to an article at the BBC, an evolutionary theorist in London suggests that humanity may split into two sub-species within the next 100,000 years. From the article: 'The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.'" No missing link here, we already have the troll-like humans to prove it.
Direct quotes from Dr. Curry's article: ;-)
Men: "... bigger penises"
Women: "... pert breasts" (and presumably larger/fuller too)
I gotta wonder how valid this "research" truly is - sounds like something Dr. Frankenstein or Homer Simpson would have written - D'OH!
Well done ScuttleMonkey with the "Missing Link" addition.
Yeah, but where do the brains come in? Athletes are not exactly known for their creativity or intelligence.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Of course, we all know that the cockroaches will rule by then..
I, for one, welcome them..
The "evolutionist" didn't even point out that natural evolution for humans is over. It ended when Fire was state-of-the-art. But I'll go out on a limb and say that there will be distinct species of human in 200 years. Not through natural evolution but through genetic engineering. Even if we didn't alter the selection pressures on humans for 100,000 years there would still be enough genetic drift that we wouldn't recognize our decendants. But I guess we'd instinctively look both ways before crossing the street by then....
Trollin' trollin' trollin' keep those Morlocks trollin'...
Shh.
Lest people think that Eugenics could only happened under the Nazis, various mental health places in America and other countries were practicing forms of it until the 1960-70s with practices like sterilizing the mentally handicapped:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Eugenics_an
"Despite the changed postwar attitude towards eugenics in the U.S. and some European countries, a few nations, notably, Canada and Sweden, maintained large-scale eugenics programs, including forced sterilization of mentally handicapped individuals, as well as other practices, until the 1970s. In the United States, sterilizations capped off in the 1960s, though the eugenics movement had largely lost most popular and political support by the end of the 1930s.[27]"
If you ever watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", there seems to have been other practices (Lobotomy) that lived until recently as well that seem barbaric today....
Also, athletic bodies are often damaged or disfigured with massive hormone imbalances and other severe (and occasionally fatal) problems. Gymnasts, for example, do not mature correctly and often suffer from muscle and bone disorders. Body builders, weight-lifters, etc, can disfigure their hearts - I would not expect life-expectency to be nearly so high. Rugby players - well, I can see them evolving into a whole new species that has less to do with class and more to do with causing sheer terror when barreling down the playing field. Soccer players can suffer damage to hearing or their pre-frontal lobes, from a mixture of heading and smashing into the ground at high speed. It's usually not lethal, but if you look at the various team managers for the England squad, it's clearly harmful to thought processes.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think the species will probably split, but not in the way he thinks. (Assuming we don't wipe ourselves out of existance which is highly likley, but that is another thread)
Humans will evolve to live in the sea, and with the pressure and gravity difference of other worlds. We will adapt and evolve as our environments dictate, and if technology eventually permits we will actually rewrite our own genetic code to suit our whims.
My rights don't need management.
"They're bigger, stronger, and faster than even just two generations ago."
That is mostly due to better chemistry, primarily the use of steroids, not genetics. The benefits of steroids aren't propagated through reproduction. Better diet has also led to both taller, healthier, athletic people and overweight, unhealthy people. Abundant cheap, subsidized, high fructose corn syrup alone is creating millions of overweight diabetic Americans.
I doubt you will ever see dramatic genetic changes over the space of two generations especially when mating choices are fairly random in modern society. Slavery did produce dramatic physical improvement in the gene pool in American blacks but it was over the course of a number of generations, with brutal breeding constraints enforced by slave owners coupled with selectively in the harvesting of slaves from Africa by slavers.
An interesting paradox that will work against this proposed genetic "upper class" is the fact that there is a pronounced trend for highly educated, affluent, beautiful people to reproduce in relatively low numbers while the uneducated and poverty stricken are usually reproducing at a dramatically higher rate in this world. Now maybe the "upper class" can preserve well protected islands of affluence where they dominate and survive, but they could just as easily be swept under when someday the underclass figure out that the world order is concentrating the world's wealth and well being in the hands of a tiny often undeserving minority while the rest of the world lives in grinding misery. Maybe the "upper class" can hold power though economic, political, technological and military means but I wouldn't count on it.
To be honest I really don't expect the human race to survive in tact another thousand years, let alone a hundred thousand years. A few basic factors working against us:
- Our inability to control our population growth, religions in particular pour fuel on this fire by trying to maximize the growth of their flock by obstructing birth control
- Our dominant economic system, capitalism, simply isn't sustainable because its predicated on maximizing growth which is devastating our finite habitat and again its concentrating ever more wealth in ever fewer hands and that probably isn't sustainable, before there is revolt.
- Our technological advances are dramatically outstripping our wisdom in applying and controlling them. Biological manipulation and weapons alone are a grave threat to survival of our species, along with nuclear proliferation.
Another factor that works against the creation of a genetic upper class is that people raised in affluence and without adversity often end up being complete losers. People who succeed in the face of adversity and serious obstacles are much stronger people than those raised with a silver spoon in their mouths. You need to look no further than America's two biggest dynasties the Kennedy's and the Bush's to see the deficiencies that develop in generations raised on a silver spoon.
A thousand years out I imagine we will have rendered most species on the planet extinct including our own, through cataclysmic climate change and decimation of land and oceans alike in a vain attempt to feed billions more people. It took millions of years to sequester carbon dioxide in the ground and cool our climate, and we are going to unleash it all in the space of a couple hundred years and the results will be cataclysmic. It took hundreds of millions of years for earth to develop its diversity and abundance of life forms and again in hundreds of years we will have decimated all of them.
I wouldn't mind if the human race took itself out, but its unfortunate its going to take out the rest of the planet thanks to our rampant hubris and avarice.
@de_machina
Maybe more than two or three, but not as many as you might think. When doing studies on moths in England they were able to notice that before the industrial revolution the moths were white to blend with the birch tree bark. During the industrial revolution when the coal smoke pollution darkened the bark color, the moths changed to a darker grey color. After they stopped burning as much coal, the moths changed color back to white.
And more to the point, what is the evolutionary pressure? If everyone lives, then evolution stops. Evolution is a bunch of pointless changes that suddenly become important when the environment changes, wiping out everyone without the change. What you should expect from "evolution" without any "weeding out" is extreme divergence from the mean, but not much change to the mean. So you wouldn't have 2 races, you'd have 5 billion - and we would still mostly humans...
Really, who is this guy?
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
The article author downplayed the involvement, but the facts they cited speak for themselves. Not just the early investment helping Hitler's rise in the 1920s, but the much more serious "Trading with the Enemy" crimes during WWII:
"The central charge against Prescott Bush has a basis in fact. In 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act, the U.S. government seized several companies in which he had an interest."
Bush funding Thyssen's 1920s Nazis wasn't an accident - not when the Nazis were working on the same fascist and racist program as Bush. After the US was at war with the Nazis, after the Nazis had taken over most of Europe and their Japanese allies the other half of the planet, there was no pleading ignorance of what their earlier clients had become.
There is no benefit of the doubt left for these people. They are thugs.
--
make install -not war
As people become richer, they have fewer children. As people become poorer, they have more children.
The rich people are much more selective about the number of children that they have. They are willing and able to invest more into each child that they produce.
The poor have always had many children. For one thing, they don't have the access to birth control that allows the rich and middle classes to have unlimited sex (without barrier-style birth control methods like condoms, crevical caps, and diaphrams) without pregnancies. Two, historically about half of the children of the poor die before productive maturity in mid adult years. And, three, the poor have been indoctrinated by culture and religion to have as many babies as possible.
It has only been in the recent historical era, about the past hundred years, that most of the children that the poor have reach 'productive maturity'. By that I mean not only adulthood, but also get past the self-destructive cultural brainwashing like military 'service', reckless driving, and binge intoxications that kills so many young males.
This present era with so much population growth is directly dependent and resultant from massive amounts of cheap energy, primarily oil. As we pass through Peak Oil, when half of all the oil on Earth has been found, refined, and burned, we will find that it is increasingly difficult to keep the poor people alive and well, regardless of how much they breed. As the oil era passes and the price of oil climbs each year, more and more of the poor sections of the Earth will become like present-day Palestine. That is hopelessly overcrowded; with no resources or solid government; endlessly locked in a civil war that prevents the economic growth needed to sustain its population.
The rich are not engaged in an unforseen policy of extinction, they are enacting an understood but unspoken policy of population sustainablility at lower levels than at the present. It is the poor that are breeding themselves into unsustainable levels. Levels that will inevitably result in a massive 'die-off' in the not-too-distant future.
Education is not a genetically-passed trait
True, but isn't intelligence a genetically-passed trait? Having access to eduaction has nothing to do with the intelligence of the person or their parents.
On a serious note, Curry hasn't said anything that hasn't been proposed before by science fiction authors like Aldus Huxley or Issac Asimov. The future division and mutation of our species is something worth considering unless you subscribe to the theory that man kind was created in some magical and purposeful way, complete with all the creatures in their current (and permenant) form.
Assuming the species survives another ten thousand years, I hope there are a lot of tall, slim, intelligent, and creative boys and girls with green eyes ;)
HMMmmmmmm.... That depends on whether I interpret your reference
to "short people", as meaning "people lacking in height/stature"
or "people lacking intelligence". The first one of those makes it a
TWO variable equation, with associated preferences, and the second one created a ONE variable equasion, with preferences to associate with people of similar status (resulting in divergance/polarazation and fewer "average" people in the middle over time). Well, As-Far-As-I-Know:
If the smart people stop reproducing with the short people,
Then you will just wind up with progressively fewer tall short people.
(providing that those are the ONLY parameters you define)
If on the other hand, the "smart" people DO reproduce, but only with
the "tall" people, then...
-- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero
In 2002, 11.1% of American households were "food insecure" every single day of the year -- meaning basically they didn't have enough money to buy all food needed to sustain the household. In the same year 3.5% of households were "hungry" meaning that not only could they not healthily sustain, they couldn't meet their energy budgets.
So it's clear to me that not only am I willing to let Caucasians starve to death, I'm willing to let my figurative and perhaps indeed even literal ( I live in Manhattan ) *neighbors* starve to death, regardless of their color.
remember the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi: If enough peasants die horribly, someone will probably notice
Let's look at the facts.
When does a species begin to diverge? The answer is when separate populations of that species exist in different enviornments for a long enough period, typically hundreds of thousands of years. One gets two seperate species at the point where individuals from the disparate populations are no longer able to mate to produce fertile offsping. Clearly, dispite over 50,000 years of separation between some human groups, this has not occurred.
To be sure, there are regional difference in human populations. Our species, like any other, will adapt over time to the enviornment in its locality. As long as human populations remain separated in different enviornments, yes, we can eventually expcet to see divergence into seperate species.
Now, lets consider how seperated human populations are today. I can buy an airline ticket to take me to the other side of the globe for less than a months wages. In prior times, a months wage would barely have gotten me into the next country. With improved communications, separate populations of humans have more incentive, more oppertunity, and more motive to communicate, and ultimately interbreed with one another. In fact, such are the benefits of this increased communication, that human communities who choose to isolate themselves are far more likely to become extinct than diverge.
Once one follows the basic tenants to evolutionary theory, the future of humanity is writ clear. We are all destined to intermingle into one diverse population, with no real "racial" or "ethic" groups. The gene pool will be larger, healthier and disease resistant than our current homogenous populations, which are based more on skin colour than anything else. Incidently, most people in the future will have more or less the same skin tone, whos tint will depend on how degredated the ozone layer becomes.
This is so obvious and inevitable, it's barely worth mentioning. However, it of course involves something quite a lot of rich white folks do not approve of, that is people marrying outside their race. Hence they moan on again and again about "purity" of blood, even when we know that people who's parents are from different races are on average healthier, smarter and more attractive.
So give the eugenists the finger and do your future offspring a favour. Marry someone outside your "race", if there is such a thing,
May the Maths Be with you!
"Two, there is evolutionary pressure, caused by partner selection. This is the basis of TFA! Good looking people tend to find good looking partners and make good looking children, ditto for the not-good-looking. I would add to this the element of wealth" ...
"Families with money will typically marry pretty people - most likely from other rich/pretty families, but possibly someone from a lower class who happened to look good"
Not entirely accurate. You are leaving out a couple of factors.
First, if you observe more closely you will find that *Men* with money tend to marry beautiful *Women*.
This is becuase the mating preferences of men and women are obviously different. So wealthy men (whether they are ugly or handsome) will poach the best looking women from the not so wealthy classes, leading to them having (on average) better looking children.
However, the good looking man already in the lower class in very unlikely to be picked out of it by a wealthy woman. Infact, what is likely is that he will have more children, by more (lower class) women, than his upper class counter parts. Thereby, increasing the pool of poor but beautiful women to move upwards, and the pool of poor but beautiful men to move sideways.
Second, as much as social mobility may be low, if you think of it in terms of movement of genetic material between classes per generation it's huge.
For example, how many of the people on today's top 500 rich list had rich families just 5 generations ago, or even just 3?
And how many fifth generation decendants of say, the king of England (or any other royalty, or business mogul) are still considered very wealthy? And, on an evolutionary timescale, five generations is quite small.
Wealth tends to be cyclical. A rough approximation of it being - Rich Parent -> Lazy Child -> Poor Parent -> Desperate Child -> Rich Parent
TFA also ignores two other points:
1. The definition of beautiful changes every few decades. In some african countries as recently as ten years ago women used to go to fat camps, where the purpose was to put ON weight not take it off, becuase the rounded body was considered much more healthy/attractive (Not Hungry-looking = Healthy).
However, in the west now, where people are much more likely to die from over-feeding than under nutrition, stick thin is becoming the image of the perfect body (Not Morbidly Obese = Healthy).
2. With the amount of progress being made in the fields of complexion altering makeup and cheap plastic surgery, we will soon be reaching a point where the traits you are marrying into will no longer be genetically transferable. Perhaps that will even lead to a situation (when people can look like anything they want) where looks REALLY don't count and beauty begins to be judged by personality, capability or some other non-physical yardstick.
Basically , whenever anyone tries to predict the future based on the changing fads of today, they usually end up very wrong.
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics