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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."
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.
I think thats highly unlikely as we are on the verge of obtaining the ability to write our own DNA as we see fit.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
So, we're talking about teleological choices, made by teleological beings, driving a non-teleological process?
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..and there was a down side: KHAAAAAN!
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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
that is if copyrights don't get applied to genes like they do anything else. we may have the ability to alter our genes at will technologically but politically we are absolutely screwed. companies are already filing patents on plant and animal genes, even breeds that contain these genes- I shudder to think of what would happen if any of this were applied to people.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Your inference that there has been intellectual evolution is rather disturbing, one look at US politics should tell you that not much intelligence evolution has really occurred. It might do to remind you that after the invention of the modern day food can, it took almost 50 years to invent the fscking can-opener.
There are a million things I could give as an example, but think about this, if you did not have modern tools, eating would still be a big part of your daily activity, or trying to eat. I think that early man was probably very intelligent also, just didn't have all the mod-cons that we enjoy today. Without electricity, there is little reason to invent a sit-com, and without petroleum, little reason to invent NASCAR. Technology is a progressive linear-like process, it did not simply happen one day. Intelligence, laboring under the burden of little technology, will seem as though it is less than what we have today. All that we really have today is more KNOWLEDGE, not more intelligence.
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... to tell us that to some degree, we are... intelligently designed.
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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
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.