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Recent Human Evolution May Have Been Driven By Self-Selection
Slur writes "The New York Times reports an insightful theory of Human evolution that gives credit for our accelerated evolution to the evolving brain. By virtue of our aesthetic and utilitarian preferences we ourselves have been responsible for molding the present human form and consciousness. Applied to other species we call it 'artificial selection,' but the new theory implies we did it all quite naturally, unconsciously, and that the exponential evolutionary acceleration we have achieved as a species in recent time is just what you'd expect. It also suggests that the current lull in our physical evolution is by 'choice' as well."
Eugenics works, but is of course worse than the disease. I guess all you can do is buy some new clothes and get a car with a pussy magnet.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
In my next incarnation, I want six digits on both hands, a tail, and four nipples. So just grin and bear it, people!
It doesn't matter if we evolve, because we change the environment around us as opposed to adapting to it. Therefore evolution has been irrelevant as a factor of survival since humans learned to use tools.
...advanced to the point where really stupid people can safely breed with other really stupid people, the predicions of "The Marching Morons" and "Idiocracy" will come to pass.
We just have to feel special, don't we...
As if all of the sudden when you gain intelligence, the rules of evolution change to a new set. Perhaps the term evolution should always be prefaced with a qualifier, such as "biological" or "human" where the qualifier has distinct meaning, and can make it a subset of other qualifiers. It just seems to me that the increase in our intellectual evolution is no different than biological evolution. Not to say we shouldn't put our effort into researching cognitive science, it is a remarkable field. But I think looking at it in this way makes us feel special for no good reason and can muddy the waters more than clear them.
So, we're talking about teleological choices, made by teleological beings, driving a non-teleological process?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Yeah, dumb luck usually works most of the time.
..and there was a down side: KHAAAAAN!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
who comes from that classic heartless eugenics-oriented pov that we as a species are getting physically unfit as we allow the autistic, the downs symdrome, the epileptic, etc., to survive and breed. in classic trollish fashion, he insisted the cavemen had it right when they just left the old, infirm, etc. to die outside in the snow
;-)
my response was to question the supremacy of physical fitness. for example, the rise of humans in larger groups, cities, drives the emphasis on new genes: human empathy, for example, being a highly desirable survival advantage in large groups. and the less physically fit in large groups can still contribute to the survival of the group. such that a well-organized group of less physically fit humans can outcompete very fit physical specimens that unfortunately aren't as well wired for human empathy, and therefore are out there, loners, failng to coordinate with othwer humans for the successful passing on of their genes. the rise of cities changing the emphasis onto new genes for survival
which, ironically, given his utter lack of empathy for the less physically fit, put him on the lower end of the "fit" gene pool, where "fit" now means more empathetic, not bigger biceps
perhaps we should leave him out in the snow i wondered?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.
Ya, because its awful that we don't keep creating stupid and poor people.
hot asian and hispanic chicks around.
Oh.
Wait.
Never mind.
Yay, evolution!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Fertility rates are coming down everywhere, even in the developed world, where the exigencies of daily survival still tend to apply some selection pressure on intelligence.
Since H.G. Wells, there has been some speculation that the human species will split into two distinct gene pools (I wouldn;t say "species," since interbreeding remains a possibility). However, if one gene pool should find itself supporting the other, larger pool, the burden would eventually become too great and the two pools would either re-merge or one would become extinct.
"The impossible often has a certain integrity that the merely improbable lacks" - Dirk Gently
I read the first article and discussion; the impression I got was that by "accelerated evolution" the author meant "more diversity", typified by this comment:
The idea being that everyone gets to reproduce these days and that there is no longer a heavy selection process weeding out "unfit" characteristics. Now this article seems to indicate that selection is more intense than ever. I don't see how you can have, at the same time, a more intense selection process and higher than usual diversity.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've always advertised my geekiness when flirting with women. Works for me. Wellllll it didn't work in college. My theory is women just simply prefer 25-35 yr old males when it comes to looking for a mate.
... to tell us that to some degree, we are... intelligently designed.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I love the internet. A mutant allele of the chemokine receptor CCR5 gene (CCR5-Delta32), which confers resistance to HIV-1 infection, is believed to have originated from a single mutation event in historic times, and rapidly expanded in Caucasian populations, owing to an unknown selective advantage. Among other candidates, the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis was implicated as a potential source of strong selective pressure on European populations during medieval times. Here, we report amplifications of the CCR5-Delta32 DNA sequence from up to 2900-year-old skeletal remains from different burial sites in central Germany and southern Italy. Furthermore, the allele frequency of CCR5-Delta32 in victims of the 14th century plague pandemic in Lubeck/northern Germany was not different from a historic control group. Our findings indicate that this mutation was prevalent already among prehistoric Europeans. The results also argue against the possibility of plague representing a major selective force that caused rapid increase in CCR5-Delta32 gene frequencies within these populations. Linked here
The summary seems to have little relationship to the article. The article doesn't say a damn thing about choice, nor does it at all imply that humans intentionally directed their own evolution (as the summary implies.)
Prior to this, evolutionary scientists assumed that the power of culture was so strong that it swamped evolutionary effects by essentially keeping people alive where they otherwise couldn't have. What this says is that no, that is not true, and that the human race evolved to adapt to new environments just like every other species. Essentially what this means is that our brains let us survive in new environments (for example, the arctic, which without knowledge of clothing and shelter would kill a human quick) and then those that did so evolved to adapt to the environment (for example, the way the Inuit tend to deal better with high fat diets like you'd expect living on seals.) This wasn't by any sort of choice. This was because the ancient Inuit who had cholesterol problems all died off.
This is, of course, all something that happened in the past. We aren't entering any new environments, but even if we were, the death rate has become so amazingly low, that any sort of evolution is hard to imagine. Evolutionary works fastest when lots of people are dying.
The name for selection that depends on choice is "sexual selection" and it is found in many, many species and was recognized from the beginning. The extent this happened in humans is unknown. This article says nothing about that.
The cake is a pie
For demonstrating so succinctly the wilful ignorance that many religionists have with regard to evolution.
You could have wasted our time but all it took was a 7 word comment and a three word sig. Ten words.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
This is a pretty old theory. It's the basis of the 1970's book and TV show "The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski. His final chapter (as I recall it, it's been years since I read it) says that human evolution accelerated because of "cultural evolution." In other words, Man is the only species that can pass its knowledge to future generations by means of words. This allows each generation to evolve beyond the previous, without having to create everything from scratch. But Bronowski also said that alongside Cultural Evolution, there was also real biological evolution, because people tend to fall in love with people like themselves, and intelligent people marry intelligent people, a form of natural selection for intelligence.
So what if we change the environment? That doesn't stop evolution. There are always traits that will give an advantage, and those that will give a disadvantage, and there are always novel ways of combining previous traits that can lead to something new. Evolution has never been about survival, it is about passing on genes. And every organism out there changes the environment. Organisms define the environment: prey to some, predator to others, host to still others. To stop evolution in humanity, one would need to ensure that every human on the planet had exactly the same chance to pass on their genes as every other.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Eugenics might work in the short run, but I doubt it would be a very bad thing in the long run. First off, by selecting such traits, you decrease the amount of genetic difference between offspring. Sure, they might all live to be 120 and be able to bench press a truck, but that won't be much consolation when a single virus kills everyone. I find the commercial banana to be a good example. Years of breeding the best fruit and healthiest plants, and it is very possible that a single disease could ravage the population because of that lead to too much genetic similarity between plants. You can also look at the cheetah population to see the long term results of a small breeding pool. You stop the 'unfit' from breeding, you're going to have one hell of a mess on your hands in a few generations. Personally, I'll take cancer and obesity over crippling birth defects and constant fear of illness.
And besides, evolutionarly speaking, life evolves by trying new and weird things. Maybe fat and ugly is the next phase in human evolution. Do you know? Do you think anyone knows enough to direct human evolution? Then shut up.
Oh, and there's the fact that you'd have to be one immoral bastard to decide that certain groups arn't allowed to have kids.
Don't confuse evolution with speciation.
Nature determines that weak and premature infants should die, yet they are kept alive and become adults. Nature determines that some adults should not be breeding, yet fertility drugs override this. Nature determines that various people should die by heart failure etc, but drugs keep them alive.
Sure, these are all good from the emotional point of view of keeping people alive and making childless couples happy etc, but does it really help the human gene pool? Perhaps Mother Nature had a good reason to kill off a weak child or prevent that infertile couple from breeding. The long term impacts can only be known in a few generations.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's long been claimed that the development of human culture freed us from evolutionary pressures, by separating us from our prior, "natural" niches. Thus we may be "evolved from monkeys," but that's enough evolution, thank you. We've stopped doing that nasty stuff!
The current Ah ha!, backed up by analysis of genetic clues, is that of course evolution applies to creatures in any niche, and the rapid change of available niches forces relatively rapid evolution. Since a niche largely comprised of human culture will actually often change faster than an "merely natural" one, instead of "saving us" from biological evolution, it forces biological evolution to run faster - with the increased populations our cultures support providing more raw material to work the evolutionary process across.
So our cultures are part of the loop that forces biological evolution - both by defining many of the biases of "sexual selection," and also by defining the niches our fitness is for.
It also, of course, can work backwards: the "least evolved" of us work for their own benefit by trying to revert the culture to prior states, in which they used to have some genetic advantage. This is known as the "conservative" strategy.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
There has been plenty of writing inquiring whether cesarean section has contributed to evolution. Most think we are too early in the cycle to answer this question since modern c-section. There hasn't been a statistically significant number of c-sections that went well for both mother and child until recently(mothers, in general, exert environmental influence in the long term survival and well being of the child). The logic is that if the mutation that causes our brain to grow really large continues, it hits a natural physical constraint - the size of the birth canal. The head can only be as large as it can be reasonably pass through the female pelvis. Previously difficult pregnancies that resulted in emergency c-sections would mean brain damage for the child and high mortality rate for the mother. Modern c-sections are much more safe and most are even planned. In US around 30% of all births are through c-sections. I don't think I have read a study yet on what that means for modern human development - could all the increase in ADHD, asperger's and other developmental issues be a result? Maybe it hasn't shown up in the Flynn effect because of normalized curve is wider - ie there are more intelligent people but also people who are born with mental issues as a result of the increase in brain size?
Altruistic tendency is considered "fit" when dealing with social animals (anything with packs, herds, or tribes). Empathy helps with altruism. It means we make personal sacrifices in order to help the group as a whole (because the group shares many common genes with us).
Empathy so extreme that it hurts society, such as allocating resources away from growing our numbers to extending the lifespans of the severely disabled is NOT evolutionary altruistic.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Doofus: "I wonder if sticking my head in the fire would improve the human race?"
Smart person: "I wonder if sticking Doofus's head in the fire would improve the human race?"
The Doofuses selected themselves out. Evolution. The smart people helped them. Accelerated evolution.
Try it. Put your head into the fire and watch the results. Go on - it's for science.
I am anarch of all I survey.
If you really think evolution is limited to gross physical changes, you've got a really poor understanding. We may not be evolving hooves or fur, but resistance to diseases, resistance to certain types of chemicals that are now more abundant in our environments, ability to withstand a lifestyle that would have been utterly alien to our cave-dwelling ancestors...All these things represent tremendous environmental pressures.
Couple that with a vastly increased species population, representing a staggering amount of genetic diversity, I have no problem believing that we're still evolving, and indeed, that the rate may very well have increased.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
too much empathy is a bad thing
witness modern city dwellers who do not breed, but devote massive resources to the pampering of small yapping ratdogs
gene failure right there... for the humans, not the ratdogs
for the ratdogs, it's the genetic jackpot: what started with a virile wolf who decided to follow the humans around for scraps rather than hunt on its own, many moons ago, has now warped into a small retarded spastic defenseless ratdog. and yet it has a survival advantage like no wolf in the history of wolves ever did
but, like any parasite, it mustn't destroy it's host ability to reproduce
conclusion: small yapping ratdogs need to somehow evolve the ability to somehow convince their empathy immobilized hosts to reproduce, and make more empathetically addled humans who dote on small yapping ratdogs
maybe some sort of pheromone, hmmm
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
*Taken from the Best of Craig'slist*
Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.
I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.
Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.
When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."
This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.
There can be only one.
It IS evolutionary beneficial, however, if it means it broadens the diversity of our genepool.
What if the severely disabled (with the ability and the inclination to reproduce) have the genes for AIDs resistance? Bird-flu resistance?
You don't know a priori which genes are important until a selective pressure makes them important. Early optimization is a bad choice in that case. It is a question of degree; how disabled is too disabled?
GPL Deconstructed
Thing is, there are equal numbers for the sexes. Girls like tall guys, so attractive girls will get the tall ones. Unattractive ones will get the short ones. Since there are as many women as men, everyone finds someone to mate with even if they aren't ideal. Since everyone breeds successfully, we *won't* get taller, though you might see a flatting of the bell curve of men think tall women are attractive. There is no "survival of the fittest" as everyone, tall or otherwise, survives to breed.
As long as humans a serial monogamists, this is the way it would go. For animals that are polygamous, it would happen as you say.
The cake is a pie
Well, that's insightful, and probably how that evolution _really_ worked.
See, selection based on beauty, niceness, etc, are shiny-happy feel-good theories. They make us feel better about us as a species.
They also utterly fail to explain stuff like the ultra-fast evolution of, say, intelligence related alleles.
Now let's think about it for a bit. What's one situation which drives evolution like _hell_? What drove the early evolution of hominids? Having to survive in the face of a nasty predator. That's one _hell_ of an evolutionary pressure.
The early hominids, for example, faced the pressure of having to move out of the trees and compete with nasty carnivores for food. It was a monkey (ok, ape) too unfit to hunt (as late as the Neanderthals, they still couldn't do ballistics: Neanderthals were survival-spec melee hunters;), so it had to steal the food some carnivore had hunted. And it was even less fit to fight tigers barehanded. That's what drove the fast evolution of the brain. Stealth and cunning were the only things that worked.
Now move to the last 20,000 years or so, and humans faced an even nastier predator: other humans.
The history of mankind is, sadly, one of constant warfare, atrocities, etc. Tribes raided each other constantly, and then states fought each other like crazy. And let's remember that this was:
A) millenia before the Geneva convention. If you couldn't take a fortress, it was considered perfectly acceptable to kill or enslave the peasants instead.
B) millenia before logistics. As a peasant in those times, you'd get looted by both the enemy (whole campaigns got slowed down by waiting for the villages in their path to harvest the grain, so the army can loot it) and your own side (as levies.)
So, yeah, humans selected themselves all right. At spear point. Being able to, say, hide and hide your harvest when the next raid came, was already a hell of an evolutionary advantage.
Also let's remember that mortality was disproportionately higher among the lower classes until very very recently. As in, until 2 centuries ago or so. Famine, plagues, war atrocities, etc, took their toll starting from the bottom.
Even if you look at the renaissance era, let's just say we're almost all the descendants of the rich folks back then. The poor mostly died out over enough generations. Or IIRC in China they actually did some study and IIRC some 80% of a province's population carried the genes of one imperial family. That's how disproportionate a survival advantage that was.
So that's your other natural selection factor: those who figured out some way or another to claw their way up the social pyramid, had more chances to pass their genes on.
Some did that by just being smart and hard working. Learning enough of the alphabet would automatically qualify one for a scribe job in a lot of places, from ancient Egypt to China. That already made it a lot less likely that they'll starve during the next famine, plus ensured that they can afford to educate their children too.
Some did it by a lot less nice means.
But at any rate, that's another case of humans selecting themselves.
Etc.
Basically, yes, the ones who survived were the ones who went "And I pick... me!" And proceeded to gain some kind of advantage over the others.
Not a nice thought, but history or humanity weren't nice until the 20'th century. Stuff that we all now get horrified about, when we read about the Third Reich or Stalin, were the stuff human civilization was built upon.
So, yeah, let's instead believe bogus shiny-happy fairy-tales where surely the biggest advantage was being sexy. Heh.
Here's another not-nice thought: mortality among women was disproportionately higher than mortality among men. In the Old Kingdom period, for example, the peak of the mortality gauss curve was in the 20's for women, and in the 30's for men. (Of course, again, the rich tended to live longer.) And even primitive tribes raided each other to s
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
However, this is ridiculous, because in the theory of natural selection, fitness is defined by survival (more accurately, propagation of one's genes). So it doesn't have to be "enforced"--it happens automatically. So eugenics is actually an attempt to override evolution by applying principles of selective breeding (which of course long predate Darwin) in order to prevent those who are the fittest in an evolutionary sense from predominating. This is probably why the Nazi's banned "Darwinism."--because an understanding of evolution undermines the Nazi's entire "master race" doctrine.
How well aquainted are you with the facts? Have you ever lived in Africa etc, or is this just TV knowledge?
I lived in Africa for 30 years, mostly in rural or semi-rural areas and I could speak two African languages. I even helped out at mission hospitals a few times. Sure, there are still huge mortalities relative to first world countries, but there have been huge changes. Infant mortality has been reduced significantly and many diseases have been almost wiped out (relative to say 40 years ago). Even small mission hospitals are able to provide obstetric services (caesarian section & premature baby care). 50 years ago those babies would have died (and many of the mothers too). Now they live on to keep their genes going.
From an emotional/sentimental point of view I think it is great that we can be saving human lives, but genetically it is perhaps not the best practice.
I live in a rural sheep farming area. Keeping a flock of sheep is all about improving the genetics. If a ewe has a problem giving birth then the ewe and her lambs are marked for culling (ie not allowed to breed further, but get rendered to meat). This is done because the farmers know that the daughter of a problem ewe is likely to also have the same problems. Culling prevents passing on the gene to the rest of the flock.
At the natural level we are not really any different. When we interfere and artificially keep people alive and allow them to reproduce then we artificially introduce weaker genes to the human gene pool.
I'm not for a second suggesting some sort of forced human selection etc, but just raising the thought that medical technology does have a potential long-term genetic downside.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As an atheist, let me suggest you something...
Every person I've met encouraging eugenics in the one or other form has himself a genetic flaw which could result in his/her extermination/sterilisation. Having a need for glasses could be a reason, for example. Mild forms of Aspergers (which often is linked to geekdom) could qualify (and - in fact - are currently fought against with Ritalin). Maybe the society just does not like your hair color. Where do you draw the line?
We are all mutants, you know...
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
I just don't think you fully conceptualize either how large 6 billion really is, or the time spans over which evolution can work. And I think you are idealizing world conditions right now. Plenty of people never breed even if they survive to old age. Without immigration, many countries such as Italy would have negative population growth right now. Plenty of people breed more than others. The short and unattractive don't always meet up, and they don't always get it on when they do. We aren't as much serial monogamists as you seem to think. Do you know about the link between testicle size and promiscuity in the animal kingdom? By body mass, our testicles fall in between bonobos and chimpanzees amongst our closer relatives. Do you know that bonobos are kinky, promiscuous little beasts that are run by dominant lesbians? Even amongst chimps, who are mostly polygamous (where the dominant male gets the chicks) the ladies will get some outside the harem. And genetic surveys of humans show that upwards of 10% of children don't have their mother's husband's genes. Trust me, there is still plenty of wiggle room for evolution to work in.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My 27 years of life without sex or even a partner seems to show a flaw in your model. [...] I suppose I'm also just one case, and statistically insignificant, but you're using words like "everyone" and since I'm part of everyone... Trust me, you're not alone with this one. IMHO, the number of "unwilling" singles has increased quite a bit in the past few decades.
There are several social factors at work, here:
1) Less financial pressure to look for a mate, since people can afford living without a family. You don't necessarily need a partner or children to care for you when you're old. (Although it would probably be nice to have someone who'd visit you...) Also, women do not depend on marriage to survive anymore.
2) Less social pressure to seek a mate, since it's become socially acceptable to be single for both men and women.
Both #1 and #2 contribute to a shrinking market of potential mates, since people have less reason to look for one in the first place, and even if they do they'll be more discriminating, since their survival doesn't depend on finding a partner.
3) Less opportunities to meet people. Imagine the world before TV: If you didn't want books or crafts to be your only source of entertainment in your spare time, you had to go outside and meet living, breathing people. With TV, your home offers more entertainment than any theatre, but without the fellow audience. (Actually, the internet may lessen this effect, since it's obviously a very social medium, although without actual physical presence.)
4) More ways to spend your time alone. This is closely related to #3: With more solo activities available, shy people will have more ways to avoid human contact, thus they'll have less opportunities to develop their social skills and overcome their shyness. Again, social contacts via the internet might counter that effect to a certain extent.
With relationships being much more optional than ever before, the natural advantage of sociable people is amplified, and quieter, more reclusive people are less likely to find a mate. However IMHO, this state would need to stay like that for quite awhile in order to have any significant evulutionary impact, especially since all of this only applies to societys that are roughly similar to our western culture, of course. I have no idea how things work in other cultural regions.
It could be that the compassion we show to the old and infirm is just a by-product of the compassion we have for our own kids and even ourselves. In other words, a recognition that this, too, is our lot in time. That compassion, that working together to protect each other, just might improve the survivability of the set of genes that make up the individuals we're talking about. The evolution of compassion and altruism is a very hot topic. I wouldn't dismiss it, or the significance of compassion to our species, so readily.
After Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, people just took what they were doing before and rephrased it as pseudoscience. Now you have Hovind and other creationists saying that the eugenics crowd were motivated by evolutionary theory. The movement had much less to do with evolution than it did Mendelian genetics--does that mean genetics is a fraud? Does the idea of inheritance lead inexorably to Nazi eugenics experiments?
Or can we safely say that people have always been tempted, here and there, to wipe out anyone whose existence they found distasteful, and they'll tack their bigotry onto any pseudo-science they can just to lend their efforts a patina of legitimacy?
I don't like it when people see evolution as something that can be measured, or something that only happens genetically, etc. Isn't evolution simply a synonym for "things change, and some things change in a way that sucks for them"? What i mean to say is that yes, we are at a special moment in history, starting to have the power of genetics, and thus the basis of (a part of) biological evolution in reach of having it under our control. But genes are just the means to an end. So is the fashion-du-jour of what is sexually attractive, or what way of thinking is 'better' than others. In a certain way, evolution doesn't even have to be limited to biology (maybe it is by definition, but IMHO shouldn't be), since every physical and chemical reaction also strifes to equilibrium points, in accordance with their environment - just as animals and therefore humans do. Whether this happens because genes change, or because we decide consciously what we want our offspring to be like, is kind of irrelevant, since transhumanism (which i am a big fan of) wouldn't be the end of evolution, but just another form of it. Just as when fishes first started crawling on the land, it just changed some of the rules of the game, but the game is still the same.
I probably didn't explain it clearly enough. By self-selection, I didn't mean you evolved (or ever had) the occasion to select for yourself whether you want to live or die. I mean, blimey, then everyone would choose to live.
I meant in the sense where predator "selects" the prey. Rabbits evolve to be faster, because the fox kills the slow ones. Gazelles get to be fit and have a working immune system because even the slightest illness is disproportionately more fatal: you get to be eaten by a lion if you're under the weather enough to be slower. Etc.
What I'm saying here is that humans were both predator and prey lately. And inherently both predator and prey evolved at the same rate. The more fit humans who evolved as prey (e.g., the survivors of enemy raids), some of them were then the predators in the next cycle. That's one hell of an evolutionary pressure.
That said, you're probably right that culture played some part too. As I was saying, the ones that managed to climb up the social pyramid, did get a massive survival advantage. I can see how culture would play a part in that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No, you misunderstand my point. Probably I didn't explain it well enough.
I'm _not_ saying that altruism and arts are useless. God forbid.
I'm saying only that evolution was most often a matter of predator and prey trying to out-evolve each other. In this case, the humans were both predator and prey. That's really all I'm saying.
Maybe altruism played some role in being able to survive. Could be. Sticking together certainly did. But that's already a bit of a tangent. And I never intended to say that altruism was worthless, or anything. (Though I would bet that a lot of altruistic people got themselves out of the gene pool anyway.)
I'm just saying that humans _did_ kill other humans, regularly. There was much the same eco-system as between foxes and rabbits, or lions and gazelles, but this time with humans in both roles. And that seems to me like plenty of natural selection.
But I never meant that only the predators evolved. There's just as much pressure on the prey to evolve.
What I'm saying is that between the two factors
A) evolutionary pressure based on survival or death (as in, literally, if you don't think fast, someone will literally lop off your head and put it on a pike), and
B) the evolutionary pressure of picking the prettiest wives,
Dunno, the former seems to me like a much stronger pressure. In fact, for most of human history, the latter was probably rather weak.
Even if you look at selecting the guys or gals who look healthy, I'm betting there were more short time pressures to actually _be_ healthy. Looking healthy might have given you a little better chance of finding a good husband, but actually _being_ healthy meant you actually survived the next famine or epidemic. Not looking healthy might have had an effect in the decimals, but not _being_ healthy actually killed.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In my next incarnation, I want six digits on both hands, a tail, and four nipples. So just grin and bear it, people!
You may be more accurate than you think, and may even alter the DNA expression during this lifetime according to Bruce Lipton, which show some scientific results behind his assertion:
That our feelings and belief-systems actually alter how our DNA is decoded all the time!
Part 1: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8506668136396723343
Part 2: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6568107389365915765
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
There are people who are immune to HIV - they comprise approximately 1% of the general population - researchers have studied the ancestory of these people and concluded that these genes spread during the plague in the middle ages - since the plage attacks the immune system in a similiar way as HIV. Note you must have two copies of the gene to be completely resistant if you have only one you still die but it takes longer. No doubt the reason why everyone does not have two copies of this gene is because there is a cost associated with having it, such as incresed susceptibility to some other disease....