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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.
Half of us will be Swedish, and the other half will be British?
*Snort!* Ha ha ha ha ha ha....... heeeee ha ha ha ha ha! *sniff*.......
:-)
In all seriousness though, there is nothing new here as this certainly plays off any number of sci-fi subjects going back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. People have been obsessed with this sort of thing for years and in fact, was the basis of racial profiling, discrimination, murder and genocide by the Nazis in the 1930s through eugenics.
The funny thing though is that even though many folks are obsessed with image and "beauty", people will choose mates for a variety of different reasons, that sometimes boggle the mind in their complexity or pathology and as long as you have people that are..... less than attractive with large amounts of financial reserves, you will always have confounds in the system. Other confounds are simply human relationships. For instance, my wife and I decided to date and then marry only after we had been good friends for some period of time. The fact that she is physically attractive was only incidental which brings up a whole other category of people who meet and then fall in love over the Internet without ever having met in person.
Oh, and speaking of confounds, the increasing use of plastic surgery among those that 1) have real reason to use it (true disfigurement) and 2) are just vain enough to want it (lips, cheeks, chins, breasts) will have an effect on this as well, leading to a whole new aspect of relationships. What is false advertising when it comes to body modification? Breasts are pretty easy to detect, but what about that nose which might have been bobbed? Straightened? What about those cheekbones? Teeth? All of these mods and others will confound any selection pressure and likely will increase in their statistical impact the more important "beauty" becomes to societies.
But hey, you know..... The Clone Wars will take care of all of this sort of nonsense..... or will it be Skynet?
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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.
But when the all clear sounds, which side would you want to be on?
That he's got his use cases mixed. Intelligent, creative people are far less likely to pay attention to personal appearance, where beautiful people are far less likely to pay attention to mental pursuits.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I guess we should all be happy we came along now. Better to be dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures while it's still politically incorrect to call us such.
As a dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creature, I take offense to this!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
So... what kind of stats do the short goblin-like humans get? Want to make sure I don't inadvertadly lower any of my prime skills. ;P
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Mac users and PC users You work out which is which..
Hey, it's only Fox New's fault if Republicans and Democrats entirely stop cross-breeding!
:p)
(You can't call it a troll if I don't say which one becomes the upper class
"He carried out the report for men's satellite TV channel Bravo." Because I go to Bravo for all my evolutionary biology needs. This sounds like a joke, really. The guy in question got a cheque from a tabloid TV channel, nicked HG Well's idea, and laughed all the way to the bank. Nice work if you can get it.
"Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend." - Emil Michel Cioran
"However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology. Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals." I fail to see the similarities between relying on a human owner and using "gadgets designed to meet our every needs". Technology doesn't think for itself, but who knows where we'll be in such a long time? Apparently, we'll have less advertisements for penis enlargement.
How insightful of you considering the article itself mentions H. G. Wells.
The problem with this is that throughout history, the ruling class has changed many times. The rich and powerful tend to get beheaded from time-to-time, making way for a new rich and powerful set. Putin has little lineage from Catherine the Great, Chirac has little relation to Marie Antoinette...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
They're bigger, stronger, and faster than even just two generations ago.
That's not evolution - that's steroids.
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Musicians are proof of how untrue this theory is because they show time and again that the hottest of ladies will sleep with the ugliest of guys as long as they can play a guitar, normalizing the gene pool.
Sports stars are not it because they do not exclusively intermarry, and breast implants are not heritable. Instead, I think the fear is the "uncivilized" world. If we do not do something about it, Africans and the denizens of the Third World will fork into their own species. They do not get enough food, they do not get adequate health care, HIV/AIDS is killing everyone, and there is no selection for longevity because everyone dies young. This idea is horribly racist and insensitive, yes, but that's only because we have been acting in such a racist and insensitive manner. (Do you think we would let Caucasiasn starve to death?)
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
You just made me think of something ... if there was a split in our species, how many people would find it a novelty to try to "mate" with the other species, and eventually bring us back to 1 species? The only way it would seem like they'd stay split is if the new species had a different # of chromosomes ...
... sweet, can I have some more cheetos?
Troll 1: Hey Biff, I just banged a Homo Tallenperty
Troll 2: Unga bunga
Seems like this would be repeated on both sides until we'd all be back to our mildly ghoulish yet mildly attractive selves of today.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
it was the "ugly, squat goblin-like creatures" who were not "dim-witted", but intelligent and ran the world (not an underclass, but they did live underground). While the "tall, slim, healthy, attractive" ones were not at all "intelligent, and creative," but were utterly empty headed vapid frail cattle... literally. they were food. they were all vegetarians and they were regularly slaughtered for the meat eating underrulers
but why anyone would seek sustenance by eating a bag of antlers like lindsay lohan is beyond me. utter science fiction, on that point alone
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
It assumes that rich people will stop having sex with poor people. Anybody see any logic flaws here?
Is there any evidence at all to support these predictions? I didn't see any in the article. His credentials (London School of Economics) hardly convince me that he's an "expert" in the field of... what? Super-futuristic anthropological speculation, I guess.
No one alive today knows what the next 100,000 years hold for humanity. No one. It's just too complex a subject and too long a time period to make any reasonable predictions about. Heck, no one even knows what the next 10 or 100 years hold, let alone 100,000.
This is just a typical sensationalistic "news" story designed to attract eyeballs. It's not based in science or reality. You can make up your own long-term predictions with just as much authority.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Given that contraception is the real barrier to procreation these days, I guess women will evolve to be forgetful (namely in forgetting to their pill), and men will evolve to be impulsive or stupid (too impulsive to use a condom, or too stupid to use one properly).
Wait....
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
... ugly, squat goblin-like creatures
Yet another dire consequence of too much time playing MMORPG's. As if the recent South Park wasn't warning enough.
[Insert pithy quote here]
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)
What kind of idiocy is this "genetic theory" from Oliver Curry? Where is the evidence for humans abandoning at least hundreds of generations of "racial" mating exclusion in favor of thousands of generations of "class" inbreeding? Where's the selection criterion forcing that division of mating opportunity by work in much more extreme degree than the millenia-old class system that has failed to produce the results Curry predicts in the future?
Humans have been dependent on "technology" to reproduce for many thousands of generations. Tech is freeing us ever more from any selection criteria except infectious disease (just more unevenly). Current tech trends make genetics ever less important to using tech, which further decouples it from evolutionary mechanics.
Curry just wants smooth-skinned women with big eyes and "pert" breasts, who he thinks will prefer "graceful" nerds like him to the exclusion of the "robust" people who like tech less. So what? So he thinks HG Wells' The Time Machine is a prediction of our future more than a social satire on Wells' Victorian classist society. He should stick to hack SF rehashes, and leave the genetics to people who are realistic enough to actually get laid.
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Swedes love their bastu, it is us Finns that love SAUNA. Sweden is practically the only western country that wants to use their own word for sauna, bastu.
I just HAD to clarify this, since I love sauna and I am Finnish. And I am not even sure swedes love their bastu.
Other than that, yaaar!
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
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.
And IIRC, some of them (her) wasn't ugly at all!
Besides, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Each new race might find themselves quite attractive.
(Slashdot Rule #17: Any post mentioning Star Trek the original series is to automatically be modded Insightful.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"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.
Are you kidding.. The rich get their fashion from the poor..
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
George Bush Jr's grandfather Prescott Bush was a eugenicist, consistent with his work funding Hitler's Nazis. Prescott's law partner Tighe was the Connecticut (Bush family home state) director of the eugenics "Birth Control League". Prescott's boss Averell Harriman was one of the main promoters of American eugenics.
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make install -not war
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
In the "modern" system in the USA, economics imposes a different sort of evolution. As people become richer, they have fewer children. As people become poorer, they have more children. Those with the wits to become rich essentially become extinct, leaving a nation of teaming poor people.
In short, the socio-economics of free markets kills of the smart people by voluntary extinction.
Those who understand binary and those who don't.
:P
:)
*ahem*
Anyway, aren't there already 2... males and females... might as well be completely different species sometimes
Or, to take the controversial line, perhaps the two will be natives and immigrants
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But I would argue that the only impetus to become rich is poverty. When you have nothing, you have more drive to succede, and liberal capitalism allows that. If you are born rich, or already rich, what drive is there to create anything new? Some people obviously have it, and never are satisfied, but they are the very rare exception. The most innovative ideas come from the ranks of the "poor and stupid" as you call them. Think of the founders of Google, or Andrew Carnegie, or even Jim Carrey. At one point in his life, Jim Carrey lived in a station wagon with his family. Now he makes $20 million+ a movie. If Jim were rich, or even just upper middle class, would the drive been as strong?
I think history proves that the overall condition of society constantly improves, with a setback here and again. There may still be a huge gap between today's rich and poor when it comes to looks, money, talent, education, whatever. But compare today's poor with the poor of a hundred years ago, and things are marginally better (thinking in industrialized countries... Africa is another story). I think the socio-economics of free markets kill off the rich caste, because they become complacent. Is this a bad thing? I think not. Look at the Forbes 400... not a lot of inherited wealth there. When it comes to being rich, ideas and drive count more than beauty and status.
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
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.
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make install -not war
The problems in Africa aren't our fault. We send plenty of aid, but it ends up lining the pockets of Robert Mugabe and his ilk more than the people who need it. It's not a racial issue; it's a cultural issue.
Do you have ESP?
Okay, first of all, he's an evolutionary theorist at the London School of Economics. I simply can't believe the BBC is printing such garbage. I mean, I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but this is pure fantasy.
But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.
Well, first of all, in 1000 years, humans won't evolve to be a foot taller. Even if we were to evolve to those average heights, it'd take a lot longer than 1000 years. I would think anyone knowledgeable about evolution and genetic would know that. Second of all, 120 years? Shit, in the next 1000 years, if the past 100 have been any indication, we'll either have wiped ourselves out, or we'll have virtually unlimited lifespans because of medical advances. Natural lifespan will be completely irrelevant.
Finally, his entire theory hinges on an upper and lower class being maintained and still existing 1000 years from now. I'm not saying 1000 years from now there won't be classes, but look who was in power 1000 years ago. You think their descendents are still in power?
This guy's living in a fantasy world and for the BBC to publish this as anything but fiction is simply wreckless.
Are you kidding me?
India has seen the end of a caste system and has moved into a knowledge-based economy. Their poor are becoming literate, and taking "our" IT jobs. The prospects for the average Indian are getting better as the days go on.
Ditto for China. The front page article of the Oct. 17 Investor's Business Daily is "Chinese Wage Growth Surging, But Hasn't Fueled Higher Prices." Although the focus of the article is on urban China (where unskilled/semiskilled workers have been seeing wage increases between 5 and 20 percent each year since 2000), it also mentions how efforts to "exploit" rural farmers for labor have also driven up their wages.
Although the "Cultural Revolution" was definitely a setback for the Chinese economy, things have been going wonderfully for them since. Consider that in the 80s, Proctor and Gamble researched expanding into the Chinese shampoo market - only to realize that there wasn't any. The average peasant could only afford a bottle the size you find complimentary with your hotel room; and even then, only once a year, for a special occaision. McDonalds and other fast food places ha da little more success, but mostly with the wealthy and tourists - as in Russia, peasants would make pilgrimages of sorts to a fast-food restaurant that they could only afford to eat at once a year.
Now, the standard of living in China is rising rapidly - people can not only feed themselves, but they have cars and consumer electronics! They have computers and internet - remember that big firewall China has? Their standard of living is rapidly approaching western standards - a far cry from when Mao Zedung encouraged peasants to smelt steel in their backyards.
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My 2 year old son has been bitten by other humans 10 times in the last 12 weeks. This would indicate he is Eloi, yet, I am far to unattractive to be anything other than a Morlok. Can Morloks produce Eloi offspring? Or do the Morloks get eaten too, and Wells forgot to mention that?
The Chinese will survive us all without any doubt.
I like Chinese, yes I like Chinese.
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
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, I think it's quite important: I grew up in a very rich suburb where my schoolmates were uncommonly pretty. I realized that the people rich enough to live in that neighborhood attracted uncommonly pretty partners. No mystery why, and no surprise that the children turned out pretty. Now when you consider how little class-mixing there is in the US, and how little social mobility there is (that's right, look it up!) This means that money, and the extra attractiveness it brings, stays in families. 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. This means the upper classes poach the best lookers from below, making themselves even prettier. Because in each generation, the best looking people marry out of their lower class, this leaves the people of lower class with a increasingly uglier partner pool (on average, of course).
As this trend advances, the increasingly pretty rich will find fewer eligible partners among the increasingly ugly lower classes. Now that you have two non-interbreeding groups, each with different selection pressures, it's not hard to imagine a further divergence. It's not a pleasant thing to picture, but it's not really so crazy!
1913 just called. It wants its historically inevitable utopianism back.
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This is the official explanation. But the cast system is alive and well in India. Just not officially. I just had to look at the mariage of our outsourcing coworker, where they explained us who can marry whom, and why one could not marry another. They never mentionned cast, only stutbornly said "no he can't marry her, because of what he is and what she is." If this not caste, well that smell and looks like it. Taste like it too.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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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!
I grew up in a poor area, and my family made less than $25k take-home per year, with both my parents working full-time, living in a state with one of the highest COL's in the US. I made it to Harvard on a scholarship by studying so much in HS that I only slept around 4 hours each weekday (and most weekends) from the beginning of my sophomore year up until graduation. People with backgrounds like mine were the vast minority there, and they tended to be far less ambitious than kids born into power.
Given that I went to a high school where over 85% children came from families who were below the poverty level, you would expect them to be the most motivated people in the state. Instead, that school is among the worst in the state by all metrics (from graduation rates and standardized test scores to teen pregnancies).
While poverty can be a strong motivator for a vanishingly small minority, all measurable data indicates that the exact opposite is true for the majority. The poor are far less likely to pursue higher education, more likely to struggle economically throughout the entirety of their lives, and their children are more likely to maintain or drop below their parents' economic status.
When was the last time that you saw news coverage about a millionaire's son being accepted to Harvard? How about a homeless man getting drunk and saying stupid things? Rags-to-riches success stories (e.g., Liz Murray) and lurid pieces on the boorish behavior of the wealthy (e.g., Mel Gibson) are newsworthy because they're exceptional, unlike those two everyday scenarios. Unfortunately, because the exceptions to the norm get a disproportionate amount of media coverage—including in school textbooks—many people tend to get the two terribly confused.
Being poor is, statistically speaking, a massive demotivator, while starting rich has the opposite effect.
The assertion that capitalism must be eliminating the 'rich caste' because the standard of living has been improving assumes a false dichotomy. Even a casual analysis of the economic trends in, say, the US, will show a steadily increasing stratification of society between the rich and everyone else, even as the standard of living has been improving.
The change that capitalism brings is that intelligence becomes the strongest correlation to potential wealth. This actually increases the selection pressure towards divergence of the species along social lines because the social division correlates to a genetically heritable trait and reinforces the tendency for that trait's 'carriers' (for lack of a better term) to select other 'carriers' as mates. In other words, given that, in a western capitalist society:
- People tend to marry people within the same socioeconomic class.
- People tend to marry people with similar educational backgrounds and levels of intelligence.
- Wealthy people tend to be smart.
- Smart people tend to be educated.
- Educated people tend to be relatively wealthy.
You have a perfect recipe for the eventual divergence of a subspecies of smart rich humans.I find it odd that you're arguing that people have all kinds of opportunities, but admit that "Africa is another story". You do realise that africans that are denied the opportunites that you have are people too, right?
You seem pretty quick to gloss over this, but its a major point. Most of the time speciation occurs when there is a geographic isolation. What you have to do to survive, reproduce, and care for your young is a hell of a lot different in Africa than it is in an affluent western city. Add in the geographic isolation and it will also be very rare for a person from the west to breed with a person in Africa.
We really are at a cross roads now. We can accept that with globalisation we are required to share wealth and encourage education around the world (a rising tide raises all boats). Or we can build higher walls so we can protect our hoarded wealth from people in other nations ("those mexicans are trying to take our jobs" or "those ragheads are terrorists"). It seems that right now the powers that be are working hard to build walls and restrict travel all without giving up the cheap labour available to them.
sleazebag elitists. nuff said.
Speak for yourself, shorty.
Bugger. I hit the submit button by mistake instead of preview.
Sigh. Humans are primarily K-selection strategy (fewer children, greater parental investment) based, not r-selection based (many offspring, little parental involvement).
To continue, a lot of the pseudo eugenics crowd likes to glom on to the rich vs. poor and quantity of children concept, and play the race card in new and interesting ways. Yes, the poor do usually have more children. They also experience greater childhood mortality, lack of access to birth control and host of other reasons why they have more children than the wealthier classes. Go talk to a sociologist for greater insight into this problem. The rich generally maximize the K factor, in terms of investing in their offspring (this should come as no surprise). If we were to roll back the clock to before modern medicine, you would find the rich would try to have as many children as they could afford, just to counter childhood mortality and other factors which contribute to premature death.
If you must memorize one thing how genetics works, here it is: tendency towards the mean. The average IQ is 100. The average height is approximately 178 cm for males in the USA. The average level of physical attractiveness is probably staring back at you when you look in the mirror. Why? Because these are the best, default values that nature has selected for over millions of years. Pretty much everything genetic can be put on a bell curve. The interaction of genes does not guarantee that super-tall, super-intelligent, earthshatteringly-attractive couples will produce the same. Chances are, they will produce an child with average intelligence, average height and average looks more often than not. Until we have genetic engineering to custom fab our children, Mother Nature is the one driving the car.