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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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
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.
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
Din't do a very good job, now did he? As they say, eugenics starts at home.
George Bush Jr's grandfather Prescott Bush ... Prescott's law partner Tighe ... Connecticut (Bush family home state) ... Prescott's boss Averell Harriman
"I...am your father's...father's...law partner's...and home state's...and boss's...ad hominem."
"So what does that make us?"
"Absolutely nothing. Which is what your argument means!"
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.
DATABASE WOW WOW
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."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