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Humans Evolving 100 Times Faster Than Ever
John Hawks writes "A new genomics study in PNAS shows that humans have been evolving new adaptive genes during the past 10,000 years much faster than ever before. The study says that evolution has sped up because of population growth, making people adapt faster to new diseases, new diets, and social changes like cities. Oh, and I'm the lead author. I've been reading Slashdot for a long time, and let me just say that our study doesn't necessarily apply to trolls."
Is that implying evolution? 10,000 years!! I thought Earth is only 7,000 years old. I declare this article a heresy.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
you fear our mutation rate!
Rapid evolution in the past 10000 years - maybe. In the past 50 years - no way. Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
Where does it come from, this quest? This need to solve life's mysteries when the simplest of questions can never be answered? Why are we here? What is the soul? Why do we dream? Perhaps we'd be better off not looking at all. Not delving, not yearning. But that's not human nature. Not the human heart. That is not why we are here. Yet still we struggle to make a difference, to change the world, to dream of hope, never knowing for certain who we will meet along the way. Who among the world of strangers will hold our hand, touch our hearts, and share the pain of trying?
...welcome our new 100x evolving human... ZZZZTTTTTT WTF??? Why aren't you neanderthals welcoming me??
Evolution is bad... NOT.
:O)
Evolution of the first post is not good
From the article:
The researchers looked for the appearance of favorable gene mutations over the past 80,000 years of human history by analyzing voluminous DNA information on 270 people from different populations worldwide. (Emphasis mine)
This is what I can't stand about science by press release (and yes, I'm a scientist). Pretty sweeping conclusion drawn from a miniscule sample size.
I've been reading Slashdot for a long time, and let me just say that our study doesn't necessarily apply to trolls.
The irony of this statement is overwhelming.
Not only is human evolution speeding up, but so is self-promotion, apparently.
Maybe it's all that pollution...
;).
And maybe Chernobyl helped
OMFG! dat so kewl evolution is da r0xx0r! we r the 1337!!!11 LOLZ
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
A question for Professor Hawks:
An interesting result to be sure, and not far-fetched at all, considering things like Belyaev's silver fox research from the mid-20th century, where artificial selection was shown to greatly accelerate the evolutionary process in terms of behavior.
My question, though, concerns the time scale of accelerated human evolution over the past 10,000 years versus the apparently much faster rate of "evolution" of technology. Some have argued that technological advancements stunt evolutionary change by reducing the severity of natural selection pressures such as the ability to provide food for oneself or to make contact with a mate. (For example, my vision, while corrected to normal levels through the technology of lenses, would have made my chances of reproduction several hundred years ago even lower than they are now.)
Since technology progression has increased to such a fast rate in the past 100 to 200 years, has the rate of technological improvement outstripped the capability of evolutionary processes to keep up? Will we see a decrease in the rate of evolution during very recent history (and, er, future history) due to this increasing difference in time scales, i.e., was the accelerated evolution rate during the past 10,000 years due in part to technological advancement reaching a sort of "sweet spot" that has since been (or will be) surpassed?
Not that any of this will matter once our new robotic overlords take over the planet, but it's still academically interesting.
Are we really evolving faster, or are we, as a population experiencing a higher rate of mutations? Not all mutations are good, but with our advanced medicine, poor mutations are now survivable.
I thought evolution, didn't occur until selective environmental pressure, weeded out the non-favorable traits. I really don't *think* that happening at a higher rate. I suspect we just have a giant gene pool with a lot of variability.
So which is it John? Are we mutating faster or evolving faster?
P.S. Fascinating work. Kudos.
Really?
If people are evolving faster, then the youngsters should be the best examples .
when I talk to most people under 30 about Genes , they will quote price brand name snd desire to have that brand of jeans .
I think this more accurately shows how well we are evolving ?
You come down under my bridge and say that!
Blank until
I know, it only seems like yesterday that I was an AC.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
...after sniffing amphetamine :)
Evolution is most likely encouraged by viruses. The reason is that they will grab a snippet from one person (and other entity), and insert it into our genomes. Almost certainly we have only found a fraction of these viruses, and will find more once we start looking in the right places. The interesting thing is that as we get denser in terms of population, I believe it will increase even faster. Likewise, we will see interesting issues such as general increase in miscarriages (incompatable genes being spread around).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Here's a thought:
The characteristics of a species of having a high rate of mutations and propensity to genetic drift should be an evolutionary advantage.
Maybe this drastic change is as a result of external intervention by outsiders applying genetic modifications?
I mean, this study really support all those theories that suggest about aliens posing as gods in the biblical times..
Earth is dying 100 times faster than ever.
You have the concept of "backwards"... um... backwards. Backward evolution means that you become less adapted to your surroundings, and are less likely to survive. It doesn't aim for some lofty ideal of perfection, where anorexia will kill you, and all our survival mechanisms are aesthetically pleasing.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
PNAS? I guess that's one acronym that you pronounce the letters individually.
Isn't Cancer theoretically evolution? I mean, at least 1 cell is mutated...
Just goes to show that God hates evolution.
And that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
A rate of change of distance is velocity. A rate of change of velocity is acceleration.
Evolution is how many changes are occuring over a period of time. You can measure a rate of evolution, i.e. whether the number of changes over time is increasing or decreasing.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Since "evolution" is "change", your ignorant and ill-informed pedantry
will also outlaw the concept of "rate of change". So much for Newton,
the Calculus, and dynamics of any kind. Newton stood on the shoulders
of giants, what a pity he couldn't have waited for dwarves like you.
The simple fact is that a mutation is a jump in a sequence. Evolution is a mutation that is now part of the genome, though not necessarily good. For example, sicle cell anemia was a minor mutation. But it stayed as part of our genome because it confers immunity to malaria. For the sub tropics that is a NEEDED mutation. OTH, those who had it, might be struck by the gods as they ascended Kilimanjaro. This shows that mutation are not good/bad, just needed at the time.
As to the gene pool, I do not think that we started with a lot of variability. Instead, as I point out further down in this article, I believe that viruses are responsible for shaking up our gene pool. In fact, our body is rigged to handle the small amount of radiation that most are exposed to, but really little defense against a virus once it inserts itself into our DNA.
As to your final question, almost certainly the answer is yes. Since mutations are increasing, so will evolution.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I see no conflict between science and my religion.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Rate of change is quantifiable and meaningful in general. As is change, and rate of change of change. What are you talking about?
as soon as we get a pandemic disease, all the weak thin people will die, and the fat and strong will rule the earth. MWAHAHAHAHAAAA!! I do not share your confidence in the natural selection merits of pandemics. According to this blog, during the 1918 pandemic, the death rate for people aged between 25 and 34 was as high as that for people between 1 and 4 and between 70 and 80 (graph).
(...) the beauty canon. I, for one, welcome our new artillery wielding supermodel overlords. Oh wait.
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
To Prof. Hawks-
:) and didn't see if you tried specific differences in population groups, will you now do so? Is the state of genomic information such that you can determine what phenotypes have been most evolved for?
Did this study determine which geographic areas/racial-ethnic groups/environments (cities vs. farms) had the *most* amount of evolution? The article mentions that your samples came from all over the world, were some more different than others? Of course it would have to be measured against some sort of base reference I guess; did you come up with a reference?
I am sure you are aware of Dr. James Watson's recent controversial assertion that blacks are not as "endowed" intellectually as whites. While the few studies I have seen do not support this conclusion at all I am still curious as to know how evolution has made us different (obviously) in other ways.
I looked briefly at your website (how do you find so much time to put together such a nice site?
Posting as A/C because yes, I am afraid of being pilloried for making un-PC questions. But I still am curious to know what my evolutionary pressures my particular population group might have been exposed to. Using this technique to see what evolutionary pressures have effected various groups over history might prove to be another tool in which to understand our heritage.
Isn't it fortunate that this accelerated evolution didn't cause us to split off into different species? I assume that this is no longer a danger because we can travel so freely now and mate with one another. If we were of different species, the wars would probably be one's of total extermination.
Organisms don't evolve - they are rather fixed by the DNA they have. Species evolve over time, not individuals.
TFA: Human evolution has been moving at breakneck speed in the past several thousand years, far from plodding along as some scientists had thought, researchers said on Monday. (emphasis mine)
And how is this an advantage if the system has emerged to only comfortably allow for a moderate change rate?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I am friends with one of the researchers involved, and yes they are quite aware of the non-PC consequences of this paper (just look up the USATODAY article for a good quote). Come on, Cochran is the same guy who wrote the Ashkenzai paper that hit Slashdot a couple years back, about selection for intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews.
Successful copulation advances evolution. The more sex the better chances to have offspring, which seek adaptation. We should all have sex with every suitable body. The more diverse the better. Now. Forget about the thought systems and public codes, this is for the human race! Let's hyperseed!! Woohoo!!! oh yeah.
"Today's Troll has a much harder task.
Whereas before, in an age of highly restrictive religious environment, a Troll could be put to death for merely a casual remark about the authorities.
Today's Troll had to evolve a much more sophisticated repetoire because his former target is likely to laugh off the response, as shown above. Generating true resentment now requires a much more sustained attack."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I wonder how we can actually evolve into an energy-based being... hmmm...
There is no sequence as there is no "path" that human evolution is following. It's a random selection of those who adapt best to changes in the environment surviving to sexual maturity. Nothing more.
The really interesting question would be: what are we evolving into?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
What be happening mon?
You concept of evolution is slow compared to our daily respec.
It's not true! It's just that God has been intelligently re-designing us at a higher rate.
The fittest specimens will still get the best mates, and the losers will get to bonk only other losers. Someone with one or two serious defects might get to shag someone else with only one or two serious defects, but their offspring, with a cluster-fuck of defects, will be increasingly less likely to reproduce. We can still ensure they have a good quality of life, however, their patent genetic crappiness will make "being allowed to reproduce" moot. Fuck authoritarianism, we don't need it.
Software patents delenda est.
We're not evolving faster, the increased population size just means we can explore a larger portion of the evolutionary search space at one time than we were able to previously. There is still the minimal time between reproduction(s) which currently stands at about ~14 years (not taking into account morality) which is needed to introduce change(s) into the population. And Evolution is based on negative feedback, we don't evolve towards something - everything that isn't suitable dies.
Shh.
With "jump in a sequence" I think he ment DNA-sequence. That is, you change a base from one to another, this is a jump from one sequence to another.
A new trait might result from a mutation but most mutations are neutral (won't change the protein the gene codes for) and won't result in new traits.
And finally, as you said, there is no "path" that the human evolution is following so the question "what are we evolving into?" dosn't make any sense.
All of those big population expansions, with their requisite adaptations, are done and dusted. Epidemics and welfare states would seem to be the only remaining evolutionary/devolutionary pressures. How significant are they today?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
that selection pressure has decreased. People have *fewer* children since the invention of industry and medicine, not more. Virtually all industrialized nations including the US reproduce at or below replacement rate. Immigration is largely what keeps populations from dipping, and countries that lack significant immigration do see decreases in population.
It is true that people are dying young less, but that doesn't mean that selection pressure has decreased, it has just changed.
Think about what sort of basis people are allowed to reproduce on now, and ask yourself what the likely outcomes are. There are a number of factors. People who are too uneducated or dumb to practice birth control are reproducing at a significantly higher rate than the educated population. People who are more physically attractive are more likely to find mates in general. Now that second point isn't really a problem as attractiveness is connected to health. However, let's look at the things that are no longer selected for.
While in the past people with wealth and power tended to be selected for, and poor families tended to slowly die off, especially in feudal societies, this is no longer true as the wealthy tend to be educated and thus practice birth control. This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
The main question is now, is intelligence in any way still being selected for? If it isn't, then it seems likely that there will be a backwards slide in human intelligence until the situation changes.
For everyone's information, most people that believe in creation believe that evolution within a species is possible. It is impossible to deny that, however, a reptile changing into a bird is something most creationists do not believe... so to say humans are evolving faster is easy enough to accept for anyone, because we are not evolving into another species.
maybe someone has been eating too many mushrooms?
Sounds like McKenna's Novelty Theory
It's not "faster", it's "more quickly", as it's a comparative adverb...
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
where they seem to be going backwards unless you count obesity and an increased belief in imaginary people as a evolutionary sign
Actually, I seem to recall that religious fundamentalists tend to have more children than non-fundamentalists (who I presume you meant by "Sensible"), so ironically it seems that evolution is preferring those who do not believe in it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It makes sense to me that if a population grows rapidly so will the diversity of its gene pool. Technological advances in the form of agriculture and medicine obviously contribute to the population growth by allowing more people to survive for longer periods of time. I'm forced to wonder if this is for better or worse? Evolution has always progressed by survival of the fittest but we've enabled survival of all through technological advances. Is this good, bad, or indifferent for the human race?
Yeah, some politician who shares your ideas wrote a book about that. Oh, wait, it's Adolf Hitler, guess you already read it...
Believing that evolution is identical to advancement or progress is a fallacy. Evolution vectors change in exactly one way: Number of offspring.
..., they do not breed so very prodigiously.
..., they have lots and lots of children.
Today, the affluent, the educated, the talented,
The poor, the welfare mothers, the uneducated,
Evolution favors numbers.
Nothing else to see here. Move along.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Please, oh please, someone tell those scientists to enlighten the idiots at the Vatican City who already started to question evolution in favor of that Intelligent Design + Creationism bullshit. As if there weren't enough stupid things imported from the USA here in Italy.
Change is not evolution. Otherwise, it would just be called change.
Evolution has two major factors: changes, and selection of those changes based on fitness for whatever purpose --- usually for survival. Without that, you just have random noise, not progress toward anything. What's the use in one member of the species having the ability to survive a disease, when everyone else can get that same ability with a shot? What's the use in someone being able to make a living in a cut-throat business world, if everyone else is employed by that person and gets a living anyway?
We've made great progress, but evolution, it's not. No, I haven't RTFA, but I'm about to now. I'll be very interested to see if their article can possibly argue against that.
From your rambling, I'd guess that there's a bug in your genes.
Please report to Dolly the sheep for reprogramming.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Actually, that's a very good point. I think the probability of good mutations leading to actual disability are fairly low, but I have heard that the human genome is pretty much maxed out, in the sense that most genes are overloaded, and so changes to them will affect more than one thing. What's interesting to me is the smaller "disabilities" -- inability to socialise, inability to survive 9-5, but a contrasting ability to survive as a night-owl artist, etc.
Careful, now you've revealed the Secrets of Scientology. Raving cultists will come after you. :P
(Unless you're a raving cultist yourself. Er... I have somewhere else to be, quickly.)
... a new breed has been found, Homo Slashdotis. Apparently can repproduce without sex, survive unharmed to flamewars, and all the base belong to them. News at 11.
I love people who reference `dune` during serious scientific threads.
Way to ruin your own credability!
Central to the theory of evolution is speciation. Arguing that changes WITHIN a species is also evolution is a form of, ironically, extrapolation.
The only true measure of rate of evolution is rate of new speciation, like the fossil record shows after mass extinctions.
You might hate the ID argument that scientists haven't documented one species turning into another in real time, but that doesn't make it untrue.
No, that's wrong. It could be the same trait expressed differently.
In terms of number of selected variants, the three populations in the HapMap are quite similar -- each has around 3000 new selected variants by our measures. Few of these are shared, because these recent things haven't had time to spread. Of the things that aren't shared, some of them probably have parallel phenotypic effects.
For example, skin pigmentation genes causing lighter skin in Europeans are largely different from those in East Asians, even though they have the same general effect. Still, some specific effects, like hair pigmentation, may be quite different.
Other genes respond to selection pressures that have historically been very different. Malaria is a huge source of selection in African populations historically, but it was much less important in Europeans, for example.
As far as behavioral variations, the fact is that we don't know what most genetic changes may do. So we certainly can't say that some populations have undergone more or less behavioral change than others. Most of these changes are genetically very simple, so we're not looking at any kind of radically new changes in phenotype -- no growing antlers. The same would be true of any kind of behavioral changes under selection.
(note: the above is neither for or against evolution or intelligent design)
And you can estimate how fast they are mutating....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Every time this kind of discussion comes up, people tend to favor, mention, or joke about in frighteningly large numbers what is practically eugenics.
Also, in the last 10,000 years, people have generally not reproduced outside of their own race, due to long distance constraints. As such, some racist groups will obviously use this report to show that their group is "superior" in some fashion, with this "science" to prove it.
It's not that we should curtail research because of those problems, but it's something to think about a little more when we start having ideas that coincide with them.
Of course it is happening faster. Back in the day before basic hygiene when the average life span was in the 30s... sure some women especially peasants had tons of children (or at least gave birth to them), but also a lot of those same babies died... Nowadays, regardless of the complications during pregnancy a baby can usually be saved... So we have all these children that NATURALLY would have had 0 chance due to deformities or whatever, now we have them surviving and then going on to have children of their own... So there's that side of the rapid increase in genetic MUTATIONS. I fail to see however how hereditary disorders like Down Syndrome (probably? I'm not a geneticist so can someone correct me or not on this one) or 2 extra pairs of limbs could possibly have a positive side. As such some of these genetic changes worry me, as does increased dependence on external medicines for even the slightest ailments. I scanned the comments hoping for a creationist to flame, or a proponent of the "humans emerged and then stopped evolving because to say otherwise is racist" group, but unfortunately for me none seems to. Just in case the latter does pop up let me preempt them by saying "it might be politically correct to say that humans stopped evolving, but it's scientifically and logically a complete and utter load of crap." Thankyou.
While I am sure that some will want to attribute this to global warming, we don't need to invent any fancy causes for this phenomenon. The underlying cause is simple:
The global human population has exploded compared to Neanderthal times. More births means more opportunities for mutation, hence faster evolution.
Occam's razor prevails once again!
I agree -- remember a couple years back how the discovery of a single fossilized skull lead to global headlines about a long lost race of hobbits being discovered? But that's what people buy newspapers for, apparently. Quid pro quo - money for sensationalism.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
Or at least they did. Something that is fast is moving at a high speed; something that is quick has a high rate of change of speed (originally, its meaning was closer to lively, and this is the origin of the medical-religious term quickening). The proper adverbial form of fast is fast; not every adjective adds the suffix -ly when it becomes an adverb.
You were lying when you chose your user id.
{closes eyes real tight, concentrates}
{opens eyes, clock on wall stopped}
"YATT---"
Oh wait. Darn. The batteries are dead.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
It's not that I'd gas cripples, but there should be coupons for reproduction. People who have genetic conditions widely-recognized as problems that don't allow them to live as well as others (e.g. missing legs, liver failures, etc.; NOT Asperger Syndrome and rare conditions which take some things but give or improve some other skills),
...which by amazing coincidence, would spare the author of the post having to beg for a coupon, I'd guess.
I suppose I'm not a member of the "Most" Christian movement, as I wasn't consulted :( You know, some are going to read the Bible and accept it word for word, some are going to interpret it in various ways, some will say, "neat story," and others will burn it.
Be happy with how *you* feel with faith, religion, etc, and allow others to do the same.
(PS I just introduced my horses to each other last Thursday.)
One theory I've read postulated that ADD/ADHD is increasing due to the impulsive risk-seeking behaviors leading to greater rates of unprotected sexual intercourse, pregnancy, etc. Out of curiosity, did you find anything along these lines, possibly involving the dopamine receptors, transporters, PEA, tyrosine hydroxylase etc that might underlie dysfunctions of the dopamine system?
I think it's safe to say that this has come to a crashing halt over the last 50 years.
Unfortunately many people are only willing to accept differing racial traits when it benefits them.
Many black men will gladly boast that they have on average larger penises than men of other races yet the same people are all too often unwilling to accept that they're also less intelligent as a result of a racial trait.
It's sad because university professors have been sacked over such claims related to racial differences in intelligence even having demonstrated as such to be fact with proper scientific method.
You can't generalise and say that all black people are less intelligent that white people but likewise you also can't generalise and say all black men have larger penises than white men but there has to be acceptance that on average across total populations these points are actually fact.
Whilst there's a vested interest in keeping these facts hidden to avoid situations where an employer may select a white person over a black person in the hope they get a more intelligent person for the job there also has to be a realisation that to make disclosure of such facts taboo will only cause further resentment and escalation of racism towards those who benefit from the hiding of such facts.
If we really want to prevent racism and other forms of discrimination we need to start accepting ourselves and others for what we are and realise that different people have different strengths and weaknesses. Do you really think there can ever not be resentment when for example one person gets the job over the other simply for sake of political correctness?
A lot of people, and I mean a lot of people are genetic dead ends. They are happy and fine with producing no children. Simply because we live in time when everybody can have some amazingly high number of children and have all of the survive to adulthood doesn't mean we actually do that. Frankly, I would be astounded if the last fifty years didn't see a large amount of adaptation. If any genes control long life and reproduction in long life, non-obesity, many forms of cancer, or any of the vast array of things we now die from which could not have had any selection pressure in the past, they are getting that pressure now. Culture is changing faster than we can adapt. Which isn't to say we fall short, rather, we have a lot to adapt to, and more is coming all the time. Sure, we might be letting myopia genes escape the general give and take of nearly blind death in the wilderness, but our genes to provide us with the ingenuity to build glasses or dodge all the exotic forms of cancer we might get cannot adapt fast enough.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Bullshit. There are other ways to measure the rate of evolution.
First of all, the sickle cell / malaria evolution happened many thousands of years ago so it has nothing to do with what happens today.
Secondly, there are things that have to happen for evolution to take place, both of which are equally important. The first is genetic diversity, which as you point out is very good with our large population. But the second is *competition* among that diversity - and this is where humanity now falls flat on it's face. Technology has progressed to the state that, given equal access to technology, no one person on the planet really has a genetic advantage over another. A person with the sickle-cell gene can live just as long as anyone else given proper treatment. Similarly, someone who contracts malaria will also survive given proper treatment.
If evolution was still allowed to take it's proper course, people who were born with congenital heart defects and brain defects would all die at a very early age. Instead, they are allowed to live full lives in modern society, possibly passing their defective genes along in the pool.
Hmmm... someone hasn't taken the Calculus yet.
If you have, think of it as a second-order differential... a differential of a differential... the slope of a slope... a rate of a rate... the rate of change... etc. -- In this sense they're all the same, and each is most certainly not redundant.
Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
/. personality and I have to waste good sperm on my lesbian pr0n collection. Friends - are you being selected against too?
I'm ready to mate with any female who'll have me. Unfortunatly none have got past my obnoxious
We are a dying breed.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"Not all mutations are good, but with our advanced medicine, poor mutations are now survivable."
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of humans. But human arrogance is what makes you think you can identify the difference between a 'poor' mutation and a 'good' one. Way back in the day, as the story goes, some proto-humans started walking upright, causing all sorts of back problems that persist until today. Good or bad?
Or that whole forebrain thing; and certainly the individual relative lack of strength and speed. Hairlessness; it certainly makes winters cold! But the thing is that every mutation has a cost and a benefit, and only the long term will tell whether that mutation is viable - which is a far cry yet from an objective determination of 'good' or 'bad'.
When you have a set of mutations that is viable, regardless of their qualitative comparisons to the status-quo niche of the parent species, that is called speciation. There is a natural division of species over time, as adaptive success leads to less selection pressure, which in turn leads to a wider range of mutations that can, over the short term survive in order to determine long term viability as the niche market shifts.
And the upshot is that there is no good or bad; just different. You can bet that humans will eventually evolve into different species, perhaps sooner than expected. We aren't going 'forward', we're going in all directions - behaving on a genetic level like a gases tend to behave in regards to their physical environment; by spreading out to fill it.
[Ego]out
As if "mutations" are simple binary digits turning randomly off and on, somehow mysteriously creating incredibly complex biochemical structures from nothing. Like a little flick here in our genome and zap I have Wolverine's healing factor or Cyclop's eyebeam. Or oh sorry, that is too complex too fast, so lets break it up into a hundred subcomponent binary switches spread over a million years, after all we have all the time in the world. Then all of a sudden it makes sense and if you disagree you must be a Christian in disguise.
If anyone is interested in reading a thoughtful critique of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis from a non-religious, non-biblical, purely secular perspective, they should really check out this book: Richard Milton's Shattering the Myths of Darwinism.
Evolution has TWO parts. Only one is taking place at a faster rate recently. Like TFA says genetic mutation may be on the increase. However for a species to evolve the species has to be put under stress. In other words lots of people have to die off, leaving only those of us with the adaptive gene to survive and reproduce. That's the natural selection part. We've gone through almost uninterrupted population growth for 10,000 years so we haven't really been evolving, just mutating.
-- QED
When there's so much VERY random small change (we humans are VERY interbred, especially outside Africa), there's no chance of anything visible expressing itself.
Rather like doing 10,000 dots around a point randomly, there's no pattern, just a blob. However, if the location of any blob is affected by where there are other blobs and there are places a blob cannot be put (e.g. a trait that would, without technology keeping them viable, lead to a dead end quickly) then you see a spreading pattern that covers a lot more ground. This is what random mutation in a competitive dynamic looks like: evolution.
We're insulated, so although we probably cover more *differences* (less clumping of genetic variation), we aren't differentiating (distance from the common source). If we don't differentiate, we're still a monoculture.
Noob question: Will this affect the way people look at punctuated equilibrium? I don't know if it was widely accepted before, but this seems to add quite a bit of weight to the theory.
SAT scores measure education, not intelligence. I'm sure if you looked at other statistics (like breakdown of SAT scores by income level) you'd find other trends (like rich kids do better than poor kids)... so then that would indicate that children of rich people are inherently more intelligent than children of poor people? no, it shows they're just better educated. You also need to look at culture -- which demographic do you think plays chess the most?
This comes close on the news that Brawndo is for sale. Coincidence? Maybe...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have a question in response to this (it's not rhetorical, I actually would like an answer):
From what I learned in school, evolution was mostly driven by the idea of survival of the fittest - i.e. the body doesn't mutate in order to "adapt" to a certain external stimulus, rather random mutations happen, and the ones that make an individual more likely to survive are the ones... well, more likely to survive (or more likely to give a reproductive advantage).
Nowadays, science and technology have brought us an edge which we wouldn't have as naked human beings. And people with disabilities or serious genetic diseases -who 100 years ago would not reach the age of 2- can now survive long enough to even reproduce. Survival of the fittest no longer seems to be as applicable here.
I can understand that we now have greater genetic diversity from this, and that certain genetic mutations (as mentioned in a comment above) may be beneficial in the long term but not the short term, but how exactly are we evolving given that no specific mutated allele has greater chances of reproduction than your common allele?
Are we really still "evolving" or are we just seeing much greater diversity? I wonder if our evolution is now more in our science and technology than in our physical bodies...
This space up for sale.
Here's the definition of evolution:
4b: a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations; also : the process described by this theory.
Note that is deals with ORIGINs. Like Darwins _The Origin of Species_.
The submitter would have been more correct, albeit less sensational, to say "Humans Mutating 100 Times Faster Than Ever"
According to this blog, during the 1918 pandemic, the death rate for people aged between 25 and 34 was as high as that for people between 1 and 4 and between 70 and 80
I believe the reason that pandemic killed the 25-34 age group deals with something called a Cytokine Storm. H1N1 (the 1918 flu virus) infects the lungs, and the body freaks out and starts attacking the lungs with abandon to get rid of the virus. Thus, those in the 25-34 range (with a strong immune system) were more likely than normal to die because that strong immune system turned against them.
:(){
Apparently this guy has been reading too many X-men comics, give me a break, you call this stuff a discovery?
"Even with these changes, however, human DNA remains more than 99 percent identical, the researchers noted."
I want to be a new super hero, ear wax man, watch out, I can wax you flat. I cant believe people buy into this crap.
It is not a constant march towards some mythical ideal of 'best.' It is adaptation. What does "fitness" mean to you? It means, that which passes its genes on to the next generation. If being fat gets your genes passed on to the next generation while being athletic doesn't, then being fat is fit. If being smart does it, smart is fit, but something could easily change, and if being dumb works better, then being is fit. Plenty of fairly dumb creatures like sharks and cockroaches have remained pretty much the same for millions of years, so obviously brains are not crucial for survival.
Saying 'Nowadays everyone can have children' is wrong on several levels. First, not everyone can. Plenty of people never have kids. The population is falling in some countries. And not everyone who forgoes children does so by choice. People still starve to death, so saying 'everyone can have kids' is pretty damn insensitive. And your genes don't care whether you chose not to have kids or you never got the opportunity, to them, it's all just failure.
Even having kids isn't the end of the picture. Some people have more kids than other. And some people have kids that have more kids, and so on. Consider a poor Appalachian family having five kids. Two die, one gets VD that destroys her fertility, one never gets the opportunity, what with the single tooth and all, and one goes on to have several kids he never even knows. Those kids of his, without the advantage of an involved father, have even less opportunity then he did, and the line dies out.
Then consider a rich family, with only two kids. The girl goes on to have a normal amount of children, but the guy is a dog, and a dog with money, so he spreads his genes around, having literally dozens of kids all around the world before settling down and having a big family. Now, the bastard kids might not have the opportunities the other kids do, but there are lots of them, and he usually does it with other rich people, so plenty of them will have opportunities even without a father.
All this provides a fertile field for evolution to work in. Evolution would still work even if every single individual survived to breed, as long as some bred more than others. Thinking that we have somehow stopped evolution because we've changed the rules of the game is nonsensical. All we've done is changed the rules, evolution still happens, it just happens according to different criteria.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It sounds like what this is saying is that survival of the fittest if only true for humans in the macro sense and not necessarily at the individual level.
Humannity as a whole is the fittest in that humans in general are able to survive even though the surviving individuals of our species are not well suited to our environment (ie surviving diseases that we would not normally without medical advances).
The ultimate ending of evolution is the creation of the Kwisatz Haderach. Once we find the spice melange, then we can jump ahead in this evolution thing.
Ok, so maybe we are mutating faster, or there are more of us around so there are more mutations, etc. But as I understand: evolution = random mutation + non-random selection. Right now it seems there is no selection at all. Even the impotent and infertile can reproduce now. Unless one gets killed before they become a teen they'll most likely reproduce.
Exactly where do you read that Genesis says that Adam and Eve were a subset of a human population?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Have new alleles actually come into existence, or were existing ones selected?
My bad. I'll slow down for the coming year.
I think it does indeed apply to trolls and prist fosters: evolution does not necessarily mean progress—it can simply indicate a species adapting to fill a niche.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
...if we keep on evolving at this rate, in a couple of hundred years we'll be falling out of the trees and flopping back into the water!
Excellent point and I'd like to hear more of your informed opinions! Which peer-reviewed journal is your related work published in?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The Spice Melange
1 part paprika, 1 part nutmeg, 12 parts cinnamon, 1 part garlic powder, 1 part cumin powder, 1 part pepper (habanero),
Mix well and run for your life.
Yeah, that's why rich black kids score so much higher on their SATs than poor white kids. Also I have a bridge to sell you.
Anyway, I'm sure that if I came up with 50 other examples, you'd be able to explain to me how there was some cultural explanation for every one of them. But I have one question: doesn't all that special pleading ever start to ring a little hollow when you hear yourself saying it?
Bow down to my extra dry ear wax!
ftfa: "In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax more dry"
Yeah, some politician who shares your ideas wrote a book about that. Oh, wait, it's Adolf Hitler, guess you already read it...
Actually, Eugenics was very popular with scientists around the world before WW2. When Hitler took it to the extreme, it became taboo.
The second can be done without the first.
If one were inclined to believe Adam was the first human, this could be taken to mean that he was all alone. If one were inclined to believe that there were many humans already, it could just mean there was no woman worthy of him. Eve is created out of Adam in Genesis 2:21-22.
The problem with inferring too much of this is that most people familiar with the Bible do not take it to be necessarily in chronological order. In fact, if one were to take it that way, you've got a problem, because there are two creation stories in Genesis, and they unfold in different orders. (The first creation story starts at Genesis 1:1, and the second creation story starts at Genesis 2:4. The second creation story discusses Adam, whereas the first just refers to "them".) It's unlikely this is an oversight that "disproves" the Bible as surely those who used to recite the Torah from memory were quite aware that both stories were in there. They're in the first two chapters, after all.
(Disclaimer: I'm a strong atheist, but I was raised a Christian.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Adaptation is NOT evolution. Evolution is a mutation associated with a new permutation of a species in which there is additional DNA information. In other words, not a rearranging or loss of current DNA imposed by some environmental factor as we see with adaption. Even Darwin understood this difference. Incidentally, there has never been in observable science an example of a gain of different DNA information within any species, let alone humans.
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution
As men age their germline DNA contains more mutation errors because of continued DNA replication to produce sperm. Therefore, the fertilisation by older men accelerates evolution!
Da Blog
And we all thought Heroes was a fiction TV show...
likes to tinker?
Interesting stuff. I recall once talking to some biology majors in college and they assured me that at this point in time humans were no longer evolving. Sounds like that's not the case.
I saw what Sylar does to people like us.
There is an interesting book by Richard Lynn called "dysgenics". He shows that in modern societies, we are actually selecting backwards in that the least smart people are having more children on average. I think it comes to about one IQ point per generation that we are losing.
The
Shall I assume that TotallyUnfunnyDickhead was already taken?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
not sure that you rated a troll for a true lack of knowledge on your part.
As the AC said earlier, I was referring to the change of a base sequence. The vast majority of DNA is assumed to code for nothing (though it does play a part on 3d spatial access). But a minor change in the right area COULD create new sequences that are valid from the POV of transcriptase. Everybody thinks in terms of sexual exchange or simple mutations, but few view viruses as being useful. The simple fact is that if they were all harmful, then our body would have created something to undo their insertions.
As to what we are evolving into, we will never know. Evolution is a truly slow process.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Many black men will gladly boast that they have on average larger penises than men of other races yet the same people are all too often unwilling to accept that they're also less intelligent as a result of a racial trait.
The most retarded part of that whole thing is, of course, the fact that it isn't even true. Blacks are typically "showers" and whites are typically "growers", but the average length is the same.
I see far too many references to the "weakening" of humanity via medicine. The short version goes: "People who would have died xx years ago live today. Thus we are being weakened." This is such a bass ackwards way of looking at things to border hilarity.
The above statement is based on the presumption that, say, jane's resistance to disease Y is her greatest contribution to the gene pool or her weakness to Y the greatest detriment. What if Jane has an IQ of 190 or is resistant to allergies? What if, aside from her susceptibility to a single disease, has a life expectancy of 110? However, in yesteryear she may have died at 9 from chicken pocks before passing on those genes
It's easy to sit back with armchair assessments of "the best of all possible worlds", but the reality is far more complex. Only one thing is guaranteed:
As time progresses, surviving populations will be suited enough for their particular environments . . . or they will die out.
Remember folks, Evolution isn't about Survival of the Fittest. It's about Survival of the Fit Enough.
When human Civilization started, Evolution stopped.
Of course the evolution of humans has accelerated, ever since the Kulthan Empire's psi damper in the Great Pyramid of Cheops was deactivated.
"The development of man hasn't just suddenly stopped. It's going on all the time. In the last hundred years, everything has speeded up. The world has changed out of all recognition, and human beings have changed with it."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
First, there are always going to be the people who will, say, fuck their own (ugly) cousin and have ten or twelve children. For that matter, the relative "pickiness" of women is, itself, a selectable trait -- a woman who is not picky at all may well have more children than a woman who is picky. If we had two sub-species, one which values intelligence in some form (humor, etc) and one which doesn't, seems to me, without some "survival of the fittest" going on, there's no way to select out the truly "easy" people of both sexes.
And it gets worse...
Morons are more likely to have huge numbers of children. Intelligent people know about birth control, and are more likely to actually ask questions like "Do I really want a child?" And without that "survival of the fittest", it's a problem where, although everyone would be better off if we all stopped breeding so much, if one person does continue to breed, they will be more successful. So, unless population control laws can work (China's trying), we are pretty much doomed, like the Moties of "The Mote in God's Eye", to overpopulate ridiculously until our civilization falls completely, and then, hopefully, we can start over.
And it gets worse...
Because many sociological traits are sort-of inherited, also -- parents influence their children, and the kissing cousins above are much more likely to have backwards attitudes like insulting their children for going to college or something ("You think you're smarter than me, boy?"), this is both a genetic and a sociological phenomenon. The intelligent will get more intelligent, but fewer in number, and the unintelligent will reproduce like rabbits. And they don't like the intelligent, simply because they are intelligent -- so we get people complaining about things like "intellectual elitism."
There's really only one solution.
Intelligent people need to not only use their sexual selection, as you say, but they need to breed as fast as they fucking can. (Literally.) If you can't raise them all, give them up for adoption. If you're sick of the marriage cycle (and if the woman is, understandably, sick of labor), start donating sperm/eggs.
As a pick-up line, it probably won't have a high success rate, but at least, if it ever works, I've likely found an intelligent woman!
Maybe after a couple generations of that, we can try the population control laws.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Rapid evolution in the past 10000 years - maybe. In the past 50 years - no way. Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
It appears you presume that the majority of the human race has access to modern medical care.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Thank you for the elementary lesson in evolution. I stated that the end point is reproduction, but death is indeed relevant as it places limits (sometimes prohibitive) on the opportunities for reproduction.
You also leave unanswered the dual contradiction in belief systems I raised. What is the motivation of atheists/evolutionists who seem to overwhelmingly support the drain on their resources caused by public charity? Is it aesthetic? Because it seems disproportionately costly versus the potential gain to an individual to be had by the otherwise lacking presence of a small percentage of other individuals. If, on the other hand, it is because they are afraid of their own inadequacy to compete and thrive in a free market, then it seems to be a negative sum game, i.e. a downward spiral for society.
Then there's the dual of this problem, which is Christians who are uncharitable. I have my own overly judgmental opinions as to the largest part of this problem, centering around and permutating from church as a social exercise.
But the points underlying those I made before is that the "cushy" environment is artificial, and in a mechanistic evolution such as you espouse would thus yield mutations that are unsustainable absent that cushy environment. If we evolved intelligence as a survival trait, we are certainly not putting it into service to see that our effects on our evolutionary process yield long term positive results, which ought to be part of the point of good adaptations (which we are led to believe our intellect is).
Also, many who have mutations that would never have allowed them to survive childhood to reproduce are today doing so, which means that the power of evolution to produce the utility in the environment at large is diminished. Again, this is purely mechanistic.
Personally, I look at evolutionary and genetic determinists in the same way as I do religions that endorse some form pre-destination, fate, or inevitability: with a great deal of skepticism.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Move along. Nothing to see here.
I, for one, do see evolution in action. Assortative mating can account for a lot, especially in a world where individuals have opportunity to mate with people in far-removed geographic regions. No, I don't mean silly things like "Gentlemen prefer blondes" or various affinities for certain skin colors. I mean issues of personality, temperament, and intellectual interest. Social reality today is enormously different from what it was just 3000 years ago.
Don't discount chemical changes in the environment either. We've certainly changed it a lot in the last few millenia.
If you enjoy reading quack theories for their amusement value, I posted my own thoughts about autism and evolution earlier today.
http://home.earthlink.net/~mellowtigger/evolution.html
Would you expect behavior changes to be dictated by genetics rather then culture on a level that was even noticeable? I'm not sure it would be possible, but it would be interesting to look at different cultural groups and see if you see similar levels of mutation. For example do populations that are still living in stone age cultures (Amazon tribes for example) show a similar increase in mutation. Could one then start to look at the cultural influences on evolution (or mutation depending on your semantics)? I would guess that the trick would be finding groups with different genetic backgrounds who share cultures (or major cultural traits). Different religious groups might be good to look at since it is a major cultural influence that is often spread without heavy genetic mixing (European Christians vs African Christians, Arab Muslims vs Asian Muslims, etc). Since I would guess that most sexual selection is more influenced by cultural then environmental factors it might turn up some very interesting results.
Glad your daughters are being brainwashed by your teaching to speed evolution for prevention of malaria by breeding with monkey type niggers.
There is an interesting book by Richard Lynn called "dysgenics". He shows that in modern societies, we are actually selecting backwards in that the least smart people are having more children on average. I think it comes to about one IQ point per generation that we are losing.
I think I read about the book, but if we're losing one IQ point per generation, then the world will be on average, retarded in 20-30 generations?
John, I was wondering what thought was given to using a Mormon gene pool to represent European genes. It was reported you did a post doc here, so I assume you know the unique culture. For one thing, basically only Northern Europe is represented (Hansen is the most common last name). Also, this place has maintained a third-world like population growth rate which Europe gave up some generations ago. Being non-LDS, I have two adult children. Of the LDS neighbors I have, not a single family had less than 4. Not one. Most had 6+. Additionally, would the cultural taboos Mormons have had in place for nearly two centuries have had time to affect things? Inquiring mind behind the Zion Curtain, A.Coward.
The fittest specimens will still get the best mates, and the losers will get to bonk only other losers. Someone with one or two serious defects might get to shag someone else with only one or two serious defects, but their offspring, with a cluster-fuck of defects, will be increasingly less likely to reproduce.
That depends on what you think 'serious defects' are. The fittest specimens, especially from the female side of the coin, won't be having children at least until their out of college (and graduate school?) which probably cuts down on the number of children they can have.
The unfit female, of course can start at 13.
We can still ensure they have a good quality of life, however, their patent genetic crappiness will make "being allowed to reproduce" moot. Fuck authoritarianism, we don't need it.
I don't support authoritarianism, especially when it comes down to reproduction. Of course, as a society, we could do more to encourage our smarter girls to reproduce earlier if we thought there was a problem. It does seem like having a system where our smartest women spend their first 25 years in school, then another 10 in the workforce to establish themselves before reproducing is a bad idea.
How exactly are those new genes being selected? I mean, lactose tolerant guys are more likely to have sex with a girl in Europe? Do japanese chicks dig guys with dry ear wax? Or do lactose intolerant people in Europe just die before having any children? All that seems unlikely to me.
From a more practical perspective, next time I'm on an English pub I'll just order a glass of milk. It's a good day when science helps you score.
Yes, certainly - the reason this hasn't happened yet is because modern medicine and the welfare state have only been invented in the past one or two generations. It will also be hard to see if there are further improvements in nutrition, education, etc. Dan
The
How was this not a troll?
By responding to the TAGS the article came with (to wit: IDIOCRACY)
OW MY BALLS was the TV show frequently featured in IDIOCRACY. the film's premise was that stupid people out-breed smart people, and this will lead to the human race breeding itself into retardation. The way I wrote the post was to directly mimic the characters in the movie.
To bring it into another context, I brought in Julian and Ricky from the TV show "Trailer Park Boys", a television show that illustrates much the same point as Idiocracy: that humans are losing their higher faculties, and contemporary culture rewards it.
If you read my post a bit more closely you will see references to other equally blatant examples of stupidity in popular culture and news (or, at least the drooling idiocy that passes for news these days).
That the post was modded TROLL only indicates the increasing stupidity of Slashdot mods, sadly and unironically mimicking the increasing stupidity of the stupid people the film and TV show I referenced are criticising. Nothing like living up to the lowest estimation.
Fucking Morons.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Germany Acts to Legally Ban Scientology
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20071210/30428_Germany_Acts_to_Legally_Ban_Scientology.htm
He died in his sister's house of pneumonia. Yes. He was in an psychiatric clinic for a while, but didn't die there.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
You know, I think it's important to keep in mind that the "Star Trek" conception of evolution (everything gets smarter and given enough time, even slugs will "evolve" intelligence) isn't quite the case. It's all about adapting to the current environment, which could mean developing social behaviors, or it could just mean developing horns instead of ears (or something...).
Humans continue to get more clever, but it's not clear to me they're getting any smarter (though they definitely are getting better at putting "beliefs" before facts, and attempting to eliminate anyone who says differently). Ever think about what a real space alien would see/experience if they came to Earth for a visit? It's not very impressive...
For some reason... and I can't yet explain why... something is /nagging/ at me that suggests that human evolution is not linear, but exponential. I'm not even sure what I mean yet...
Please feel free to comment and/or tear down my hypothesis.
Let's hope the ongoing expansion of pointlessly large breasts continues to lead.
So if you have unusually large, natural characteristics, you owe it to future generations to have as many babies as possible. Pass this meme around while you're at it.
These include: breasts, lips, araeolae, tight waists, shlongs, nutsacs, testicles, other lips, girls-kiss-girls, and "clitorati", to quote Stewie. Brainpower recommended but optional.
If you possess none of that, reduce number of babies by assiduous use of pr0n (made of those who do.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I agree with many of your points but I could not miss your assumption that Western civilizations and values are superior to others. You mentioned that we Muslims have no right to prevent free speech in non-Muslim countries. Fair enough. However, please go to Germany (a Western nation, last time I checked) and publish a cartoon in a mainstream newspaper, ridiculing Jews and denying the Holocaust. I frequent muslim online forums as well as Slashdot and substituting a few words, your comment above is identical to what I see there. I am not saying muslim culture is better than western culture. Each developed to fit its own environment. For example, while you might find the Hijab (veil) worn by muslim women a form of discrimination, I find the use of women's bodies to sell hamburgers (of all things) repulsive. I have lived for almost 5 years in several "Western" nations and from my observations, it is no better or worse that "Muslim" nations. So called secular nations have replaced the Church with Political Correctness, Environmentalism etc. and introduced laws that are as restrictive as those made by the Church. Politicians of what ever colours, religion and political leanings all still want the same thing: to stay in power. Normal people like you and I want the same things: to lead a happy and comfortable life and make a decent living. Bear in mind that the two greatest bloodshed ever committed in the history of the planet were started by Western nations. The first nations to use WMD were also Western nations. I fail to see how this translates to superiority of Western values over others.
C'mon....
'rate' implies fast, slow, stop. Discussing an increase in rate means such topics as how fast can it go?; how fast is too fast?; how slow can it go?: What happens when it stops?...have already been asked and answered, surely. If those have been asked & answered, please, please, please provide reliable links! I'm not holding my breath.
If evolution were to 'stop' it would simply be in a changed state. "What's it doing now Herb? No change...still moving." "Now? Changed! Stopped!" But if it changed it didn't stop...it just changed. If it actually did stop, by all definitions, then it would no longer be 'evolution' and the conversation about rate has no where to hang a hat.
Evolution can't stop and it can't go too fast. Claiming a rate is in effect is meaningless.
Three words: arrow of time
While I fully understand what you're saying, it's a bit cute. In essence, you are denying the validity of making value judgments about which mutations are 'better' and which are 'worse'. Setting aside total, universe-level objectivity for a second, surely it's not too much of a leap to say that by any reasonable human standards the following hold true in terms of which is 'better' or (if you will) 'more evolved':
physically stronger > physically weaker
assimilates information more quickly > assimilates information more slowly
less prone to morbid obesity > more prone to morbid obesity
capable of high level ethical/moral reasoning > incapable of high level ethical/moral reasoning
able to survive X dose of radiation > not able to survive X dose of radiation
requires Y units of food per day to survive > requires 2*Y units of food per day to survive
more resistant to disease > less resistant to disease
None of the traits I have identified as "positive" or "better" are currently necessary for survival to reproductive age in our current (western) society, and indeed the "negative" traits may in fact promote more reproduction than the positive ones as per Idiocracy. Nevertheless, I think we are entitled to have regard for the possibility that we are evolving "backward" with respect to those traits.
To support that argument, consider that the 'environment' you speak of has been radically altered such that the beneficial characteristics which have arisen from pre-civilisation evolution (particularly high levels of intelligence and problem solving) have been universally applied to eliminate many differentiating factors in the environment, most notably disease and the possibility of a violent death at the hands of some wild creature or other humans. The decision to supply healthcare and military/police protection even to the weak and stupid is one founded on the application of intelligence to social/ethical considerations; it is therefore valid and I would suggest essential to consider the potential resulting changes in evolution in the same social/ethical context.
Finally, don't overlook the possibility that we are going backwards even in an utterly objective sense - it's just that the homogeneity of our society and the halt to "traditional" evolution means that it might all hit in one big event (such as nuclear war, a plague of some sort, global warming, or electing another Republican President) and our lack of competitive differentiation might not be apparent until then at which point we die as a species because we 'broke' evolution.
That is, you can grow bacteria in a lab and observe its 'evolution' to the nice conditions in a petri dish, but how will it fare when you throw it back out into the real world? Perhaps early 21st century western civilisation is that petri dish.
Read Pynchon.
So, just like in World of Warcraft, we got ourselves another troll hater.
I don't see how you can say human evolution is only occurring 100 times faster than ever. My own observations suggest people are getting dumber by the minute, which I take as adaptation to excessive reliance on technology to do peoples' thinking for them and on stickers attached to every object under the Californian Sun saying "This ... may cause injury or death."
Nice study, I'll write about it on the news section of my wiki... but after reading the views of Steve Jones on BBC I really see no reason why the human genome should feel any urge to evolve at this point of history. I mean, we (at least here in the West) have food, have shelter, have political stability etc... Evolution usually happens for adapting to a dangerous environment, although mutation does occur at any time. It is a threatening environment that makes mutations become mainstream. The environment must actually cause people to die in order to make DNA mutations replicate on a massive scale. For example, in a global pandemic, only those with a "better" DNA would survive, causing the mutations that made the DNA "better" to become the new standard mainstream genome. While we currently may mutate at a faster rate (if we do), I see no motivation for a faster evolution. However, note that I haven't read the whole study yet, which I should do when I get some time.
You have to admit that this would be really cool.
Transplanting some DNA from an appropriate critter ought to do the job.
Like I said, I didn't read the article before I made the original post. now that I have and see it was 3 points scored for redundant, it only shows how smart I am.
The article is a lot shorter than what all I know that contributes to changing genetically.
I don't have sheep skins like he does...... I don't need them to know.
Apparently, that includes Muslims. See, if a nerd screams all the right shibboleths of the damn-right armchair general crowd, that makes him a badass too. Even if he doesn't get laid.
What you said sounds vaguely similar to a recent Slashdot post about retroviruses. Unfortunately, all you've demonstrated is poor reading comprehension. You have no idea what you're talking about, and throwing around jargon doesn't make you make sense.
Of course, it sounds brilliant to the Slashbot crowd.
That's quite possibly the most absurd head-in-the-sand bullshit I've ever heard.
I'll see your Lynn and raise you a Flynn. Of course, the rising IQ Flynn observed was rising far too fast for genetics to have been involved, which says a lot about the genetic aspect of IQ.
Holy shit, are you telling me that a group that is, on average, less affluent and has poorer education actually scores lower on tests that measure intelligence. Wow, you've got a deathgrip on the obvious! Hey, just for fun, lets through out the scientific method, ignore the fact that that, on average, blacks and whites have different environmental factors, and attribute the whole thing to genetics, despite the fact that there are a shitload of utterly brilliant black people out there. With a little fact twisting, data manipulation, and some fabricated numbers from a few decades ago, we can get science to fit centuries old and scientifically unfounded preconceptions! Yay!
Back in the real world, we'll call it what it is: racism. An archaic notion for the simpleminded who need some excuse to make themselves feel superior. Explain to me how it is that hundreds, I mean, thousands, check that, MILLIONS of blacks operate on the same level as whites if they're so dumb. Oh, never mind, I know that one: intelligence is a result of social factors, race has nothing to do with it..
According to my calculations humans are evolving only 87.6 times faster than originally thought
"...our study doesn't necessarily apply to trolls." Considering that humanity allowed the birth of http://www.vumit.com/ (Not safe for work) i'm sure that physical evolution might be speeding up, while social evolution is slowing down.
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
if we are evolving so bloody fast how come I have to shave every bloody morning?
TFA talks about evolution accelerating in the last few millennia *everywhere*. Now, evolution implies some sort of selection mechanism, be it natural (disease) or otherwise (war, genocide). For example, have you noticed that shortsightedness has accelerated in recent decades? Does that mean more mutation? No - these genes are hereditary. But it does mean lost selection against it. If you were shortsighted in 1600s or so, and your great leader raised an army and you got drafted, you would not do so well vs. normal sighted individual. That would be a selector against it.
Today, we do not have any selection mechanisms. No, malaria is not it. There are drugs that cure that selector. The mutations you talk about evolved LONG time ago. And hemophilia is a larger selector than malaria.
More mutations and so called "genetic diversity" without any natural selectors will simply result in overall quality of everyone's life to deteriorate until natural selectors kick-in again. Or people start to start being masters of their own evolution though genetic engineering. Since the former will take at least a few generations, the latter is most likely future of human evolution. More of creationist tale though with ourselves being the "mighty deity" (so creationists - does that mean we are gods?)
Also, inbreeding gives you more mutations, not the other way around. Current practices imply less mutations from sex.
TFA title is wrong. Evolution != more mutation. For evolution to happen you don't need much mutation. You need some sort of selector. We do not have that last bit anymore. Not since penicillin. And definitely not with modern medical technology. No selection == no evolution.
No selector means society is biologically *devolving*.
If anything the opposite is the case, it is bottlenecks in population that increase the rate of evolution. The smaller a population, the more chance that a person that experiences an evolutionary mutation will be able to affect the outcomes of the population. It makes sense that if a person experiences a genetic mutation that makes him more competitive within his environment then it requires individuals to be direct descendants of him to carry and spread that said mutation.
In a small population closed to migration, the mutation could be spread reasonably quickly since a single family might form half or more of the entire population. This is what happens in families that have a history of inbreeding and genetic abnormalities are more common.
In an interconnected population of 7 billion such as the human race, the direct descendants of ANY person currently alive (no matter how proliferous) are not likely to contribute a fraction of a percent of the world population even if multiple generations are considered and the mutation has a 100% chance of being passed on to the next generation. Speciation would be my main evidence to support my claims. Wasn't Darwin's first observation of evolution his experiences with the regional speciation of birds in the galapagos islands? If we were to assume that evolution was still happening in humans, we would expect more species of humans than simply homo sapiens, wouldn't we? And yet the only differences that are evident across the species are incredibly superficial, such as the darkness of a persons skin and hair, the shape of their nose and the size of their penis. Even then, the only speciation that did occur happened long before the population explosion of the last couple of hundred years, in a time when asians had their own place in the world, as did africans, europeans and miscellaneous (apologies for the racist undertones of that remark for all the polynesians, aboriginals, etc. out there in interweb land) To claim that an increased population accelerates evolution is specious and demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of the forces at play during natural selection
Yes, except that most scientists you're referring to were social scientists mis-interpreting / not-understanding Darwin's evolution theory.
First they came for the Jews, but I didn't speak out, because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists, but I didn't speak out, because I was not a Communist.
When they came for the Scientologists, I didn't speak out because, let's face it, they're a bunch of crackpots.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes - well, if we assume IQ has a genetic plus an environmental component, we still have to be worried about the genetic component going down even if the environmental component is going up. After all, we can change the environment but not so easily our genes.
The
"I mean, I know that it's "common knowledge" that only the stupid breed, but can you actually source it?" Yes - there is a book "Dysgenics" by Richard Lynn that goes into this in detail. He estimates we are losing 1 IQ point per generation.
The
It's common knowlege amonst scientsits, but deffinatley not amongst the general population.
Check out Biology 7th edition, by Campbell and Reece. This link might have it if you own the book (I haven't used the online portion of the text).
Read the sections on selection pressures and evolution. I don't have the book in front of me or I'd put up some quotes.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Whoever thinks this is "offtopic" is a bit confused as to what the purpose of reality is. It ain't your career or studies, buddy.
First argument for my hypothesis: VIAGRA! "Fitness" implies some purpose, but does not specify what that purpose is.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
"You might hate the ID argument that scientists haven't documented one species turning into another in real time, but that doesn't make it untrue."
Absolutely, hating it doesn't make it untrue. The fact that it's untrue makes it untrue.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html - There's a handful of documented cases at the end, and I recommend you read up on speciation, because you've got it wrong. There's not even a firm definition of 'species' because it's a human concept, not one intrinsic in nature. So, you want to define species as reproductive isolation? Tigers and Lions are different species, right? Except they can mate with each other. If the dad was a tiger, it's a tigon, if the dad was a lion, it's a liger, and tigons and ligers are physically quite different, and different from their parents. And the females of both are fertile! You can get as much tiger DNA into the lion's genetics as you want, and as much lions into the tigers. But they're still separate species, because it's useful to categorize them as such for us.
And on top of all that, you're utterly wrong in your first sentence. Speciation is a byproduct of some of the pathways of evolution, but nothing about evolution requires speciation. If all animals could reproduce with all others, attributes would still be selected for. As it stands, speciation is actually a terrible measure of anything other than reproductive isolation, because a lot of evolution happens inside a population. Speciation will generally only occur in a situation where a population is split by geography, evolves in different directions for a long period with no crossover until they are socially, physically, or genetically incapable of mating. Otherwise they'd blend back together and be indistinguishable, but still changed by evolution all-together.
So, as it it stands, the mutation in the human population IS evolution - random chance is filling the space of genes that are viable. If there happens to be some new selection pressure, the population will have more diversity with which to adapt.
And before you quote dictionary definitions, note that there are a lot of them. This one is apt: "Evolution: In biology, the genetic transformations of populations through time, resulting from genetic variation and the subsequent impact of the environment on rates of reproductive success." ( http://www.answers.com/evolution&r=67 )
Yea, "100 Times Faster Than Ever" is real great example of slashdot science...
What a brain fart.
I have sometimes wondered if our ability to technologically compensate for previously fatal traits - like type II diabetes, say - means that we will encourage the growth of such undesirable traits through increased proliferation (e.g., spawning of child processes).
Also consider the up-tick in dangerous or non-neurotypical conditions in the first world (i.e., US) versus the third world: lower fertility rate, peanut allergies (does ANYBODY over 30 remember not bringing peanut butter to school?), and Autism-spectrum reorders.
(Most importantly, ObB5:
Ambassador Londo Mollari: [wincing] You haven't changed.
Timov: You have. You've devolved.
)
the main pressure is sexual selection, and that's mediated by culture to an alarming degree.
Smart people! Breed! Follow your goddamn instincts for once in your life!
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
While in the past people with wealth and power tended to be selected for, and poor families tended to slowly die off, especially in feudal societies, this is no longer true as the wealthy tend to be educated and thus practice birth control. This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
The main question is now, is intelligence in any way still being selected for? If it isn't, then it seems likely that there will be a backwards slide in human intelligence until the situation changes.
Selection for a single trait is almost always contra-survival. If you select single-mindedly for mathematical intelligence, you'll probably end up with the higher incidence of autism that is displayed in and around San Jose. It's also possible to select for testing intelligence without selecting for emotional intelligence. The result isn't autism, but someone who has no gut instinct. See DesCartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio for why intelligence per se is not the single most important factor in evolution.
Selection, in a successful species, selects for a wide number of traits, all correlated to increased genetic survival. That's it. Further intelligence may or may not be one of those traits. Calmness in a crowded city might be one. Non-addictive personalities appear to be slowly selected for, given the rate of alcoholism in populations that were only exposed to strong drink in the nineteenth century, versus populations that were exposed to strong drink in the seventeenth century.
Who knows? If dating introductions take place over wireless in the future, an ability to text with thumbs may be selected for, over time.
But the assumption that it's a positive good for a population to use a single trait (a particular type of intelligence) for selection is erroneous.