Slashdot Mirror
Geneticist Claims Human Evolution Is Over
GogglesPisano writes "UK geneticist Steve Jones gave a presentation entitled Human Evolution Is Over. He asserts that human beings have stopped evolving because modern social customs have lowered the age at which human males have offspring, which results in fewer of the mutations necessary to drive evolutionary change. Apparently the fate of our species now depends upon older guys hooking up with younger woman. I, for one, welcome this development."
Imagine that. Old guy scientist claims that old guys should bag young women. "But, baby, it's scientific!"
I immediately thought of this:
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
"I for one welcome our old men banging young women overlords."
Keep on dreaming buddy.
Even if this guy turns out to be wrong for the reasons he gave, I wouldn't be surprised if modern society is messing with the evolution of humans compared to most other species in the past. Modern medicine may SAVE people that "should have" died and not passed on their genes. For better or worse, this is different than what happens outside of human society.
Women are definitely having children later. So late in many cases that there is a significant chance of genetic abnormalities like Down's Syndrome.
Are males really having children younger? Enough to offset women having children later?
At least we're not devolving...
Otherwise, we'd all be so Devo we wouldn't know what to do.
I accept my fate. I will propagate with younger women, if for nothing else than to save our species. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Apparently the fate of our species now depends upon older guys hooking up with younger woman. I, for one, welcome this development
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't there laws against that?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
I disagree with this.
Our genes are constantly mutating due to effects from medicines, microwave radiation etc. Despite this being a positive or negative effect, it is still an evolution of our genetic code.
Also, the eventual blending of organic and synthetic elements will be a type of evolution all in its own. It is already happening, with things like implants...
Go Ashton Kutcher!
Although I am seeing more fat ladies taking singing lessons...
Task Mangler
I am a young guy. Unfortunately, all I get hit on is by gay guys and old women.
This seems... odd.
We're not evolving because we're reproducing earlier. So what happened back in the day, when you'd be lucky to live past 30, and it was a good thing to produce offspring as early as possible?
Anyway, why does evolution need to be based on death? I would certainly prefer an evolving species based on mate selection, resulting in people with the preferred aspects (intelligence, humour, etc.) becoming more common in the population. Death is so last millenium.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
At the point society started protecting those who should be at a natural disadvantage, evolution stopped. Eyeglasses were an early contributor, but certainly not the first. Why should we let hemophiliacs breed? To breed more hemophiliacs? If a man is laying face down in the street, apparently the street has beaten him. By preserving these people and allowing them to breed, we have effectively short-circuited survival of the fittest.
Clearly, since rabbits breed at a much earlier age than humans, they don't evolve at all? Please. Evolution occurs when you have an imperfectly reproducing population with finite resources. Modern social customs have an effect on evolution, to be sure, but they absolutely do not stop it completely. Any attribute which increases the expected number of successful offspring will be selected for, just as it has been for the past few billion years with every single species on the planet. It's one thing to assert that a couple factors may slow it down, but "stopping" evolution by breeding earlier is right up there with "stopping" gravity by building a floor. It all becomes part of the system.
If human evolution is slowing, it isn't because of old dudes having mutated sperm.
* Historically most people and any animal I've heard of reproduced as soon as possible, old fart mating doesn't really make sense. People are actually reproducing at an older age(TRUE)...we get autism(*WILD SPECULATION*).
* Stupid people have more kids, raise them to be stupid.
* Smart people have fewer kids, raise them to reproduce responsibly(less).
* Health care, safety measures, and social medicine keep stupid people alive to the age of reproduction.
This guy is waaaay off. We're devolving...at least mentally, has nothing to do with saggy old balls.
... how come I can fly, heal myself and time travel... and my brother can slice people's skulls open like grapefruits to see how they work? Phhht scientists... next thing they'll be telling us is that you can't just take an injection and mutate.
I agree with the thesis, but not the cause. The problem is that modern welfare programs protect the stupid, lazy, and generally incompetent; and allows them to breed without regard for the fact that the parents are not capable of providing for their children. The most basic and immutable law of economics is that you get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you tax. In America, and other first-world countries, we subsidize illegitimacy and tax work. I am not suggesting we do away with welfare, but we shouldn't ignore the consequences of a welfare system that doesn't either encourage birth-control, or discourage unrestricted breeding. Let the hating begin.
Which completely ignores Chromosomal crossover, changes to the environment, food supply, etc., and ignores the notion that most big jumps occur in small, isolated populations. Yes, with the world population and density at what it's at, with intercontinental travel so easy, we're at a reasonably homogenous genetic plateau just now. Wait until small groups of us move off to the asteroids and wait a few generations, then we'll talk again about how human evolution is "over".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
All I have to do is to convince my wife to allow me to quit my job. She can provide the income for the family. I will do my duty to save our species by opening a non profit impregnation clinic.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Humans also defy darwinism. It is no longer a survival of the fittest, since the benefits of our sociological and technological society provides comfort to unintelligent beings, disabled people, ill people and so forth. Maybe they won't be living the American dream, but it doesn't stop them from reproducing.
And at the same time, we are less than 200 years away from being able to genetically customize our own children. I exaggerated the time frame, because I think it is bound to happen within 50-70 years.
Full Tilt
Disclaimer: I didn't read TFA.
I suppose a lower number of mutations might reduce the rate of evolution, but wouldn't the lower mortality rate of modern be a bigger factor in side-stepping natural selection?
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
It's not like evolution just stops because of technological advances. We're just evolving within a different environment, with different selective pressures. Remember, evolution isn't driving us towards a "best," it's driving us towards a "works for now."
Besides, society and technology have only been around for a few thousand years. If you're an optimist, the future of the human race looks really hot, and is fairly promiscuous. If you're a pessimist, society collapses, and we're back to the good ol' fashioned try-not-to-die for a while.
Biological evolution is for chimps; real men are all about memetic evolution!
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
The author makes two additional points that the summary doesn't mention. Firstly, children born in the west are dramatically more likely to survive. They experience significantly less natural selection. Secondly, our large populations make any genetic fluke less likely to survive. Think of inbreeding here; with a small population, otherwise rare genes can become common. We're experiencing the reverse trend.
[Fuller] Do to a recent scientific breakthrough on human evolution, it seems we have to do our part and have some offspring!
[Younger woman*] OMG! So you're like some scientist or something!?
[Fuller] Something like that. Back to the matter at hand...
[Younger woman*] I'm willing to go through with it for the sake of science and human evolution, but WTF are those things hanging!?!
[Fuller] Those are just my bucky balls extremely magnified!
* = 18+ of course..
Bacteria, for example, reproduce at age 1 hour, say, and have no trouble evolving. This thesis is just another example of denying we are animals,
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yeah, were under no evolutionary pressure. The world is in stasis. There will be no more pandemics like Spanish Flu that wiped out tens of millions of us a couple of generations ago.
What a fucking tool.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"UK geneticist Steve Jones gave a presentation entitled Human Evolution Is Over" This should be renamed "UK geneticist Steve Jones gave a presentation entitled I am an Idiot." The simple fact that travel is easier now is have an effect on the genome. How many people here are of "mixed race"?
Oh, I need to think of a better reproductive line
--exa--
...tends to change everything. Any natural evolution would be insignificant compared to the genetically-engineered self-evolution that is becoming increasingly possible.
Okay, firstly, the average adult male at birth of last child is now well above the average *life expectancy* for much of human history.
Secondly, evolution is not driven by mutations - it's driven by *natural selection*. The already existing genetic diversity could continue to allow evolution for some time without any mutations at all.
Our new environment, in which reproduction is largely unlinked from sexual activity, means that genes associated with child bonding and child rearing will be favored in future generations, and genes associated with fucking like bunnies will probably be selected *against*. Or you could come up with some other plausible scenario.
As new mutations arise in the population - and let's pretend we buy his argument that such mutations are less frequent now than they were 250,000 yrs ago - they will confer fitness (in a biological sense) not because they confer better survival; in industrial societies, few people literally die before reaching childbearing age. They will confer biological fitness if they are associated with a strong reproductive drive.
Obviously this could change drastically in the event of some major shift in our society or the environment.
Anyway, these claims are rubbish.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
How can we be having children earlier when men used to live to the age of 30, back when we were scared of our own shadow?
\x72\x6D\x20\x2D\x72\x66
This is absolute garbage science of the highest order and I'm surprised it is even mentioned here.
Evolution of a species only stops with extinction. Period.
Are they sure about that? In these modern days, IMO there are many more mutation sources for human than the old days, like pollution, dioxin etc...
Dude... a couple of decades is about one generation. You'd need a LOT more generations of isolation to become genetically incompatible. IIRC, the amount of gene flow needed to indefinitely stave off speciation is on the order of one or two individuals every five generations. Considering that the length of time Native American populations had been geographically isolated from European populations wasn't enough to cause speciation, this is no something you are going to see in your lifetime. It would take a MASSIVE gap of time with essentially zero gene flow between populations to get anywhere near the point where offspring are non-viable. If there is a set of humans found that is genetically incompatible with normal people, it would most likely be in some newly discovered isolated tribe rather than an Eloi/Morlock type split.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
wy do people give these low iq ideas a soap box?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Doesn't younger people reproducing mean there are more generations? When people think of mutations, they generally think of the number of generations it takes to proliferate a trait, right?
Well, I just have to wonder, though.
I mean, cats on the average live 14 to 20 years if kept indoors and well taken care of, or a _lot_ less out in the wild. Most humans don't have children at the age at which cats die. I don't think it stopped cat evolution.
Squirrels have a life expectancy of a couple of years. Humans would still be a toddler by the age when a squirrel dies, and thus stops reproducing. I don't think that was a big problem for evolution.
Mayflies live between 30 minutes and a whole day as an adult, though, to be fair, we must add 1 year worth of larva and nymph stage to that. Does that prevent mutations and natural selection. I don't think so.
Basically _most_ species out there have a life expectancy lower than the age at which humans reproduce. If that stopped evolution, then we wouldn't be here in the first place.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Plenty of eugenicists come out of the woodwork at night, it appears.
Here's a hint, kids: human society and civilization IS PART OF OUR EVOLUTION.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Yes modern medicine changes the rules a little. However it does not stop young males (in particular) from engaging in various hi risk activitites like base jumping street racing etc. which do serve to remove some individuals from the gene pool. It is also a very western perspective. Sure in OECD countries we have gernally low child mortality rates but this isn't true everywhere in the world. Evolution is still going on in less advanaged parts of the world. Evolution is till going on in 3rd world countries, particularly the industrialized ones where pollution goes unchecked and people who can't handle contaminated air and water have a good chance of dieing in childhood. If I recall correctly Communities which have engaged perpetuated the model of older fathers having many children (ie the Mormans) have an increased incidence of some congenital conditions due to their genetic makeup being dominated by a dozen or so of the religions founding fathers. Heck even they have moved away from polygamy for the most part. Humans have a complex social life and the definition of fitness in a complex society is different to what it is among other mammals. having greater physical strength is not necessarily a deciding factor. And we still have a lot of social groups which self select to remain isolated from the broader human population. PS short sightedness has been shown to be largly caused by environmental factors and not genetics. If you live in a city, and very rarly get to look at anything further away then accross the street, you have much higher changes of needing glasses than your twin, who is brought up in the country. and gets to look out to the horizon every day. K
read my mind at http://the-willows.blogspot.com/
With most of the 'Great Apes' this is the norm. The younger males have to drive off or kill the older males to get access to the females.
The only exceptions I can think of are humans and the solitary orangutan. And for humans, jail is a good incentive for suppressing animal desires.
I wish I could think of a witty Sig. Sigh!
I haven't RTFA but I assume it's just a title to stir up controversy and the guy is not an actual idiot.
The point is, sure our current environment may reduce the survival pressure for biological evolution, but now that we have this brain with its various capabilities to play around with we have evolution on a different level, we'll probably even use it to modify ourselves genetically in the future.
I think it's about time biologists stopped hogging the concept of evolution and realized it's a general principle with much wider application.
The truth is that the majority of the planet has access to the necessities, food, water, and shelter. With those three things almost everybody can survive long enough to have children. Even enormous genetic benefits do not necessarily constitute an increase in the likelihood of survival.
It would appear to be the opposite in fact, dumb people have more children faster than smart people.
Clearly the only solution is for all the intelligent people of the world to unite and have numerous children.
Evolution is a slow process, taking many generations. To claim that evolution is "over" based on the behavior of a single generation (ours) is remarkably shortsighted. Jones cites as an example an 18th century man (10 to 15 generations back) who fathered 888 children. This example is supposed to demonstrate how men in his generation fathered children later in life than men of our generation. But how does the example compare with men 2500 to 5000 generations back (50000 to 10000 years ago), a period when humans were rapidly evolving? Those men rarely lived into their 50s. I doubt they were fathering many children at that age.
No "evolution affecting" behavior pattern that we see today has been constant for even the last 20 generations, or is likely to continue for the next 20.
http://xkcd.com/756//
What does the guitarist for the Sex Pistols know about evolution!? Well, old dude hook up with young chick ... I guess he knows loads about that ...
to prove how awesome jailbaits are :D
--exa--
He ain't evolvin'!
Human evolution is grinding to a halt because of a shortage of older fathers in the West, according to a leading genetics expert.
I read the first paragraph of TFA, and I thought, either the so-called leading geneticist is smoking something funny and speak through his behind, or the so-called reporter should be hanged for doing such a terrible job.
This is as if only the western hemisphere has human beings, or only the beings in the western hemisphere do evolve. Either way, at least one of these two is a dipshit, or both.
Secondly, people are bearing offspring more and more at a later age, males and females alike. It used to be that, by the age of 25, most people were done with their procreation job, as they get married in their teenage or early 20's and the first thing after marriage was to get as many children as possible. Now, procreation job has been delayed further and further. It's not uncommon that people have their child in their late 30s or early 40s. And this is pretty much a general trend all over the world. So, I wonder under which rock had these two been hiding all these times?
Disclaimer: IANAEB
This has nothing to do with older men and younger women.
I say we will stop evolving any significant changes fairly soon because:
A) We have interracial mixing on all continents and in almost all genetic populations due to advances in human transportation.
B) Our other technological advances mean that we are highly capable of surviving due to the nature of our innovations as opposed to radical changes in our bodies (that in other species' histories may have been the major factor of eliminatig the unsuitable). This includes fighting natural disaster, possible predators, and food supply/type changes (industrialized production of food).
C) Welfare. We have organised the distribution of our resources. The weak will not flourish, but they won't die.
D) We are highly selective physically (males at least, females to a much lesser extent) due this time to communications technology and the entertainment industry broadcasting good genes everywhere, so we are less forgiving in terms of physical absurdity that may occur in our corner of the world.
E) He just wants to bang young girls. The hypothetical secretary in his office, to be exact. Slashdot is being used. Again.
1) Mutations can happen before you're born. There's no need to worry about anyone running out of mutations any time soon.
2) Plenty of animals with similar genetic systems reproduce before the age of 20... before the age of 10... etc. and they're having no trouble evolving.
3) In the ever-so-referenced and poorly conceived "plastic period" when we were "evolving on the savannah," anyone over the age of thirty-five would have been a grandfather, or nearly one. So old-age as he's talking about it is really just a construct of the last few thousand years.
He talks about periods where powerful men would have hundreds of children, well into old age (60), and how now fathers are younger now, and can carry fewer mutations. But given the above points, that's no reason to think that humans have stopped evolving. Some dynamics may have changed, but that's it.
flaimbait indeed.
I had this same thought a few months ago, except it has very little to do with men's age. Think about it: if a caveman is born with seven arms, he can kill a lot more woolly mammoths than a two-armed caveman can. This leads to his kills impressing the cave-ladies as well as him living longer, giving him more opportunity to breed, and eventually all humans have seven arms. But if a seven-armed person were born today, our perceptions of beauty would prevent us from breeding with them, no matter how many woolly mammoths they can take down. They'd probably get thrown in a circus for life, and they'd only breed if the guy running it wants a replacement for when The Amazing Seven-Armed Man dies. "Necessity is the mother of invention" - nowadays, our necessity is beauty, not strength, and so the invention of a better human is stalled.
I think you'll find a large contributor to the slowdown/halt of human evolution is that natural selection now plays very little part. Viruses and diseases are by design killers of the weak. Progressions in science and medicine have allowed us to cure these viruses/diseases, such that those most susceptible (ie. weaker genes) are permitted to contribute to the gene pool.
The alternatives of course are to let diseases to run rampant, allowing only the highly resistant to be "naturally selected", or to sterilise the weak. This renders progress in medicine useless, and raises all kinds of moral issues.
In my opinion, Mankind's only real hope of continuing the evolution trail is by gene manipulation and/or augmentation.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
And when we kill them, the neocon menace will finally be over. Too bad we'll have just killed the last Neanderthals.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Isn't male pattern balding evolution?
Sorry if this has been asked before. I'm kind of surprised that the article claims that the age has been lowered.
I mean, when did say, cavemen, have kids? Probably not after they've settled down into a home and job.
I would have thought that modern luxuries, as well as increased lifespan, has RAISED the age when people have kids.
Recombinant DNA (sexual mixing) of genes is also a large source of variation. This happens without mutation. And selection of "good" existing but relatively rare mutations is still taking place. Mutation rate is only one of multiple factors of evolution.
But I think its all moot anyhow. Our technology and society changes too fast for evolution to keep up. 120 years ago most of our ancestors worked on farms. We may be manually tweaking our own DNA within a century or so anyhow. We will become the source of "mutations".
Table-ized A.I.
What does the six finger polydactyl hand say to the face? SLAP !!
Isn't this the part where some alien race comes down and forces the smartest amongst to pair off with beautiful young women of breeding age to save the human race?
............... Oh, I can dream can't I? Back to my internet porn now. Hey you, Slashdot reader, look away, this is me time now...
I don't know about you suckers, however, though I might be fat, hairy, and socially inept, my powerful mind will ensure that the aliens pair me off with a gorgeous, albeit revolted, young college girl. She will be forced to bear many children for me. She will also be forced to suffer many horrific nights of my fat, sweaty butt writhing on top of her. Though, luckily for her, thanks to premature ejaculation, she won't have to suffer long each time.
Being the big dumb jock or the rock star that all the girls flocked around never looked so glum! Viva La Geniuses!
The Mind Is Speculative and Interpretive. So speculate all you want and interpret this 00101101 01001110!
I call shenanigans. The process of evolution has not stopped in the least.
What has happened is that the criteria for fitness in our population has changed. No longer do we select for the strongest, cleverest, fittest individuals.
The criteria for selection is now much less genetically determined. Those who survive to adulthood, elect to have children, and raise their children to grow up to be adults who have children are more likely to pass on their genes.
Those who live in safer areas with better access to healthcare are more likely to survive to have children will experience some benefits to selection, but those who live in areas with pro-breeding cultures (where children are more desired or birth control is not present) will be vastly more selected for.
In short, we're experiencing artificial selection to a much greater degree than that of natural selection. But so long as human beings are reproduce and are born with mutations, we will continue to undergo evolution in some form.
Mie spailing errers our ay sors uv nu tekstwul innevashun. Sew stop moddeen mi doun!
Table-ized A.I.
Human evolution has practically stopped, but not because men are having children younger. In fact, with the huge increase in the life expectancy in the last few decades, the average age at which both males and females have offsprings is much *higher* than, say, a few centuries ago.
The reason that evolution in humans has almost stopped is that we screwed up natural selection. Nowadays, people with bad eyesight get glasses or even LASIK; people survive illnesses that were fatal just decades ago, including cancer in many cases, but due to the advances in medicine, not to a genetic advantage; even people with severe genetic diseases frequently survive and start families.
In the past, natural selection would give the fittest a bigger chance to pass on their genes, and that was the mechanism that powered evolution. Nowadays, "the fittest" has lost all its meaning.
Who are the fittest now? The most intelligent people? The most athletic? The most "charming"? The most "beautiful"? The "healthiest"? Any particular race? The wealthiest? Well, the answer is "none of the above". Nowadays, a person of any race can be a borderline retard that is totally un-fit, repulsive, ugly, sick and poor, and still reproduce. Look around you, it's happening all the time. Yes, they may not be mating with the people they want to, but they are still passing one their genes.
Now, I'm in no way advocating any form of eugenics, just commenting why, in my opinion, humans won't evolve into a new species.
we are looking, within a few generations at the ability to edit our own DNA. We will start selecting ourselves.
+++ATH0
Anyone that makes a claim like that is just trying to get media attention.
Bad science is great at making money. Evolution is never over. If we aren't evolving, then that's because we are currently in the best state for our current environment.
But then there is the study that says we've evolving more rapidly now than ever.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
You mean we need to come up with another justification for having sex with younger women?
Correct me if I am wrong, but one definition of evolution is gene change of a species over generations. If this is the case, we have evolution changing depending on social elements and geography. America is a good example of that. It is known as the melting pot because people with different genetic background all migrated to it. Because of this idea alone, we should know that humans will continue to evolve because of wild factors. I mean, what happens when if we get permanent space colonies and something like a warp drive or hyperspace isn't invented? What if nuclear war happens and only pockets of humans survive? It isn't something where we're gaining new mutations and new genes, but gene change definitely occurs.
God spoke to me.
more of those "Live On..." videos, I'm all for it. But then I believe those guys are jail now. As Forest would say "Jailbait is, as jailbait does."
Steven Novella deconstructs this nonsense with his usual thoroughness. The executive summary is that Jones got a lot of facts wrong, and that mutation is overrated as a factor in evolution anyway.
That means I'll never get to evolve a pair of X-Ray eyes :(
Nor am I, but even I can tell that you're typing out your ass.
A - so what? Are you assuming people from different races are also members of different species? This is part of evolution, not some kind of end to it.
B - How can you separate our technological advances from our evolution? Do you think neanderthals had the internet? (They may exist on slashdot, but that's another issue entirely). Part of evolution involves the ability (both physical and mental) to make tools that let us do things like survive in environments that may have been unsuitable for our predecessors. This shows evolution advancing, not retreating. That you can't imagine that we would develop more tools in the future to adapt to further environmental changes (eg global warming; space exploration; AIDS; nuclear winter, whatever) shows only the limits of your imagination.
C - this is an idiotic claim. The fact that we have organized our distribution of resources is as much an aspect of our evolving as the fact that earlier generations organized the growing of corn.
D - even more idiotic. Are you saying that people who don't look like models don't breed? Get a grip.
E - Probably true, but this counts against your point, not in favor of it.
Evolution is not just about growing lungs or opposable thumbs, IMHO. To claim that we are reaching the end of evolution just means you aren't looking far enough ahead. Lots of things could change in our environment, and even if our current environment stayed the same for the next 10 millennia, there are a lot of adaptations to our current environment that future human bodies and minds may make.
One of the "new" pressures on humans is the change from clans to towns to cities. Humans that adapt to crowds better will have more children, in general, than those who don't. Other traits that were selected against are now not. How many women that would have died in their first child birth, possibly with the baby, are now having C-sections and passing along what used to be a genetic failure? Simple prosthetics like glasses allow many of us who could not have successfully hunted, gathered, or fought to mate.
There's a gene that controls the relationship of our body clock to the sun. Some of us are later than "norm" and some earlier. As a clan on the veldt, it might have been useful for some members to stay up a bit later and watch for leopards and some to get up earlier and watch for lions (or whatever), but modern industrial society (and the idiocy of "daylight savings/summer" time) are killing some of us significantly outside the norm with stress and accidents, slowly reducing those alleles.
Evolution is still happening, whether we like where it goes, or not.
evolution is like a car trip man! it's like driving from des moines to calgary, got it? and like, the car has broken down in bismark don't you see?
don't you get it man? evolution has STOPPED dude. the carburetor is blown, the tires are flat, mens' testicles aren't mutated enough!
the implications are HUGE! i'm going to go post this on slashdot, this is an EARTHQUAKE!
maybe we should all have HIGH RADON in our homes to make up for massive changes in the mating rituals!
this is FAR OUT
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Pure ignorance, not to mention idiocy. There's so much wrong with what he's saying that it would make me look ridiculous just to debunk it. PZ Myers did a good job with a number of the claims, but really the basics are just so obvious with a bit of education. Men are having kids at a younger age? By what measure? Most have pointed out that men had a tough enough time living to 35 a lot of the time for a huge amount of our species' history, let alone reproducing then. It's painfully obvious that he wants to affirm some kind of patriarchy that makes him feel comfortable - didn't he make some kind of misogynistic joke?
Now go find your first dick to suck, go on your first is always the best.
Let's not get hasty. Let us not discredit the role of a cellphone near your testicles. That should give you the sperm of a 50 year old!
> * Stupid people have more kids, raise them to be stupid.
If they didn't end up smarter than their parents on average in spite of this, we'd all still be as dumb as apes.
That guy's stupid argument? No.
It' sstopping because medical science has done everything to make the mating process gene-appreciation-proof. Any disability, any flaw in appearance, just about anything that can be a result of your genes can be altered thanks to medical science. For you dumb-dumb's (like the guy who wants to bang younger women) it's not the same as fixing the bad genes. It's just hiding the bad genes by making them look good but their offspring would still be thrown off a cliff by the Spartans. Yeah, I said it, people don't like retards.
By short circuiting natural selection, we are breeding a society of sickly humans. Infirmities are extended, and these less fit people are breeding even sicker offspring. One day everyone human will be born with a major infirmity from the get go. Like a pile of rotten food, the only thing we'll be fit for is fodder for the scavengers. And then we will die out, we will be too sick to fix.
Think of humankind as a house built with soggy cardboard, on sand. Eventually the thing is too weak to hold itself up, and it falls and tears apart. Instead of concerning ourselves with a good foundation, we keep applying useless fixes.
I'm not at all sure that that's the case - we certainly have exposure to more novel toxic compounds, which has consequences that are difficult to predict, but the ancient human environment was in fact quite toxic - probably more so on average than the modern environment. One major cause of this would have been the use of fire, often in poorly-ventilated spaces; this is well-known to produce numerous toxic and mutagenic chemical oxides (And that's not even including CO and CO2 which can be suffocating in confined spaces). Additionally there are many "natural" compounds - both biologic and non-biologic - which are quite hazardous, and which early man did not understand well enough to avoid.
Even most of the population of "second world" and even "third world" countries aren't living in the extremely primitive conditions of 250,000 years ago, though in many areas the pollution problems in third world countries do produce very hazardous living conditions which may justify your characterization.
It's not so much that individuals in modern industrialized "First World" countries are exposed to so much more toxic material, it's more that we're more aware of it than was early man - but we're also more aware of how to protect ourselves from it.
Find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your illustrated journal, newsgroup, or mailing list. Also, please find enclosed, payment for a lifetime subscription to 'Gigantic Asses' magazine. I eagerly await the arrival of next month's issue.
Sig this!
I don't believe that human evolution is over because I think that the evolution is still continuing with the mutations that are still happening. I will like to say that mutations take previously took place more naturally but, now not only to old men are marrying to the younger women but also the new trend is that many white women are marrying to black guys, black women are marrying to white guys. Many other examples where mutation can take place are a short women marrying the tall guy, tall women marrying the short guy, fat women marrying the thin guy, and thin women marrying the fat guy. I think that society is becoming more open and we will get more and more evolutions in the humans.
Evolution is generally not continuous.
Evolution is driven most strongly when there are cycles: Times are good, times are bad.
In the good times there is plenty of everything to multiply like mad, in the bad times, all the inferior products die.
Humanity is in a "multiply like mad" phase. Even the individuals with "something wrong" are surviving and reproducing. We currently live in an environment where certain medical problems are not fatal. It's simply a matter of the environment where you happen to live.
Certain fish are in a "bad times" period: Due to too much fishing by humans, only the smaller ones survive. So they have evolved to be smaller over the course of the last 20 years.
The theoretical case where hunters and prey-animals are in a constant arms-race and improve all the time is theoretical. Nothing much happens. Most of evolution happens when there is suddenly a period of fierce competition.
That's why a planet like mercury that doesn't turn on its axis, and doesn't have a moon will not have life. Too little cycles to drive evolution. (Astronomers decided that mercury would be lifeless because it's too hot before they found bacteria on earth that survive those temperatures....)
Human evolution hasn't stopped, it just happens at a pace that is hard for humans to observe.
So DEVO was right about everything.
Besides, last I heard, that people were having children at a later age, not earlier... I mean a couple hundred years ago, wasn't it normal to have kids by the age of 16? Now, at least in the US, there is more of a social stigma to having kids before the age of 18.
"because modern social customs have lowered the age at which human males have offspring"
What? Average life expectancy 10K years ago was near 30 or even less ages! How many guys here already becomes a father? I am 25 and we are planning to make a child only next year.
The average mother's age now increasing. And all mutation in ovum summarizing from woman's birth (instead of sperm mutation).
+ we have about 25-50% of spontanous abortion at the earliest stade - when embryo fails to implant into uterus wall. Its a kind of selection - many 'failed' embryos have genetic alterations.
PS: sorry for poor English (its not my home language)
My knowledge of genetics is almost as distorted as it's portrayal in the Metal Gear series of games, but that's not what I'm getting at. I think one of his founding assumptions is wrong: He claims people are reproducing earlier. Most animals reproduce at a happy medium between sexual maturity and the physical strength to bludgeon the alpha male. That can be quite early, and older animals can't hold their position as alpha male indefinitely. Today, thanks to contraception, and the desire to have a better financial position are probably causing people to reproduce later. Of course, there are exceptions, but there seem to be a lot of 40 or 50 somethings having their first children these days. If anything, the number of people reproducing later must have risen, and the number reproducing early could have fallen. I did RTFA, but I have a pretty bad headache at the moment so maybe I'm not remembering this clearly, but he cites marriage patterns! Can someone remind me when marriage became a physically necessary part of reproduction?
Sounds to me like just another scientist posing a questionable (questionable in the sense it will get people talking, not that it's outright shaky) theory to get his name spread further out of his immediate academic circle.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
That may be true but consider the likelihood of those predisposed to certain genetic disorders to reproduce - some of them will be committed to hospitals for the rest of their life, some will die young, some will simply be shunned by members of the opposite sex as having baggage or something. Many members of the given population may end up reproducing, but if the net rate is lower than average, the trait will eventually become more rare regardless.
I would submit that in fact more attractive people do end up having more children on average, for example. As long as that continues to happen, "natural selection" is still in play. It's just shifted from the unfit dying to the unfit not having as many children.
And the 'selection' bit may have been on a bit of a hold, now, for about two generations, in certain parts of the world. The 'mutation' bit, however, has been thriving in those self same parts.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
This is exactly right.
For anyone interested in examining the topic of stupidity, I highly suggest looking up, and obtaining in whichever way you choose, a recent CBC documentary on stupdity.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
"Another factor is the weakening of natural selection. "In ancient times half our children would have died by the age of 20. Now, in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to 21."
I think that we, as modern humans, have 'almost' completely (but justly) done away with Darwinian natural selection.
I don't think human evolution is done though. I think we are just stagnant right now. Perhaps the next phase will be, for the first time in all history, [we] the organism, will purposefully, consciously, dictate our own evolutionary future. Perhaps we are on the verge of the beginning of 'un-natural' selection.
people "with low IQ" are breeding more than smart people
...Oh, I don't know, I think there's also alot to be said about occupied having less children than unnocupied people.
Human evolution is at least at a standstill, or an incredibly slow crawl, but not because of a lack of mutation. Any theories about age of participants in reproduction are going to be offset by the fact that, at the moment, the human race is almost certainly the most populous large mammal in its weight class on the planet. Smaller mammals like mice and so forth might possibly have us beaten, and that may only be the case because the spillover from our food supply sustains their numbers. It's quite possible we may be the most populous mid-sized mammals that have ever inhabited this planet. Regardless, human evolution is at a standstill or slow crawl for different reasons.
The main reason it's at a standstill is because evolution is a natural process. In other words, it's generally horrifying and completely uncaring. Natural selection happens at the fringes. Disease wipes out most of the population except those who are resistant. Food on the island runs out and the only survivors are those that can swim 300 miles to the next island. Weather patterns change and those who can survive with little water survive while the rest die off. Sometimes a massive die-off of the original species isn't necessary; in that second example, the ones that can swim 300 miles to the next island might simply travel away from the main population, not come back and speciate, or maybe they'll just become completely aquatic over time (of course, moving into a new niche, they'll probably annihilate some other species already occupying it).
Essentially, natural selection, the main driving force of evolution, happens due to survival challenges. It moves in fits and bursts and only seems smooth over the long term. Somehow the playing field changes and the species is forced to adapt. This isn't happening to humans at the moment. If it were, we'd either be shoveling corpses out of the street and doing a lot of praying, or we'd need people somewhere on earth trying to move into a new environment without adapting the environment to themselves. Because that's how humans do their adaptation - we don't adapt as a species, we adapt the environment to suit us. In the past, some natural selection that hasn't gone as far as speciation has obviously happened to the human race: some people have light skin naturally and some people have dark skin naturally, for example. And the dark skinned people tend to come from environments where dark skin helps to protect them from skin cancer, etc. and the light skinned people tend to come from areas where there's less risk of skin cancer and more risk of vitamin D deficiency. These days, we have protective clothing, sun block, treatments for skin cancer (and hopefully some day, cures for cancer) and we can get from one side of the earth to the other in a day. So, that kind of natural selection just doesn't happen anymore. No more selection pressure, no more natural selection.
That last example is, of course, a tradeoff, if it weren't, we'd simply all have dark skin for protection from the sun, but then, since humans generate vitamin D in their skin from sunlight, people in northern climates wouldn't be able to survive as easily with a limited diet, plus there's probably a small metabolic cost associated with producing the melanin (those nutrition concerns are thankfully being reduced by modern farming technology and food distribution, so there goes another selection pressure). So, tradeoff mutations are going away due to technological adaptation, the fact that the same pressure won't necessarily affect a population for generations because the individuals in the population are more mobile, and because children are more likely to have parents from diverse geographic locations. However, what about beneficial mutations that aren't tradeoffs, but are pretty much entirely advantageous? Well, for the most part, those are lost in the sea of humanity. If one human develops a mutation that vastly increases resistance to heavy metal poisoning, for example, it won't really help because heavy metal poisoning isn't a ma
people "with low IQ" are breeding more than smart people
...Oh, I don't know, I think there's also a lot to be said about occupied people having less children than unoccupied people.
he problem is that modern welfare programs protect the stupid, lazy, and generally incompetent
yep, the stupid, lazy, and generally incompetent, like stephen hawking.
Just because you got sick and lost functionality in one area, doesn't mean you are suddenly worthless to human development.
Please go back to your neo-nazi propaganda sites.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
the brief article its self only prove prehaps a delay in evolution, 300 hundred cell splits over a thousand. you add to that that most people had children at a young age because they didn't live as long. The argument that certain people had 888 children is not as convincing as the thousand other people in the community who had two children. cross mix of genes from different parts of the world is definatly more prominent. though unless you argue for selective evolution, society at the moment in an intresting faze as there is little quality conrol in our breeding. intelligence or strong bussiness personality, marring with qood looking people for status. actor marring idiots and diluting there gene pool. so do we encourage an apartheit type state to get the best genes for our decendants or ope for the best. so far good luck got us this far. i personally thing old scientest bagging young women is a bad idea... why must i share???
"You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people." by notnAP (846325)
If human evolution is over, it's because we've sabotaged natural selection. Thanks to modern technology and social organization, millions of people are walking around alive who by all rights of nature should be dead. And they're reproducing! I'm one of them. I can't see six inches in front of my face without my glasses. I wouldn't last five minutes in the jungle.
Scary as it sounds, the solution may be eugenics. And the alternative may be extinction...
do you honestly believe that a man capable of stimulating every erogenic zone of a woman *at the same time* wouldn't get the opportunity to breed? ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
It's not that the mutants survive, it's that everyone survives, so there's no basis for any one mutant having a better chance of survival. Which means we'll just have a lot of mutants.
This is a good thing. Mutants mean diversity, and diversity means a higher likely hood of some type of humans surviving hard times.
Idiocracy is an example of how humanity could (or already has) evolved in a direction we probably don't want
The premise of Idiocracy is not any kind of diversity trend, but a selection trend: widespread effective birth control which only stupid lazy people wouldn't use.
The MAD scenario is a major selection event.
At the top of your post you lament the lack of selection among humans, suggesting this leads to aimlessness of human evolution (a nonsense notion anyway), then derive from this three possible futures, two of which are nightmare scenarios, the same two that posit heavy selection among humans.
I blame the Darwin awards for glorifying selection as a process to remove genetic chaff. Selection doesn't do any good for the species as a whole. People selected against by one selection process, like smart people through birth control, might be useful to have around for some other future challenge.
Medicine, which increases diversity, should be applauded. Eugenics, which would decrease diversity through selection, should be fought.
Play Command HQ online
Or maybe Slashdot published this article as part of a long term plot to get us all spending more time at work. Becuase we all know what we do at work, don't we?
As has already been said, sex is the major innovator in genetic diversity, so mutation - as measured separately from the DNA-swapping that goes on during sex - is less relevant to our future.
And considering that the current theory of why sex exists - to counter diseases that come to exploit our genome - it's interesting to note that disease itself will always play a major role in our shifting genome. Climate change is already making diseases spread more rapidly - because lack of overnight freeze leaves more vectors thriving.
Even though we medicate our sick, diseases will always evolve. In fact, they evolve faster *because* of this, which means that those members of the human race who can't get medication will have to evolve to survive.
Just consider the 'natural' evolutionary response to malaria: it's sickle-cell anemia.
As though we can gauge the rapidity of evolution within a mere blink of it.
LOL. Nothing more to say.
How stupid.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Well, I still have to wonder.
1. Even leaving squirrels out, even for humans it never worked that way.
E.g., during Old Kingdom era in ancient egypt, if you passed the peak of infant mortality, the 50-50 point of deaths was in the low 30's for human males and low _20's_ for human females. They married and started making kids at _14_ years old for males, and _12_ years old for females. When you had puberty, that's it, you were good to reproduce.
So even for humans, you can't say that the age for making kids dropped. Compared to some 99% of the existence of humanity, we're now starting making kids at around _twice_ the age they did. Why would that stop evolution _now_ when it didn't before?
And, yes, it didn't stop evolution before. By the genetic data we have, aleles relating to, say, intelligence actually underwent a period of accelerated evolution in humans in the last few thousand years.
So making kids at 12 was plenty of chance for mutations, as little as some hundreds of years ago. Why is making kids at 24 not enough nowadays? Something doesn't add up, IMHO.
2. The length of DNA is also not that dramatically different between humans and some other species. E.g., chimps and generally apes have about the same number of nucleotid pairs as the humans. Yet they have a lot shorter life, and become fertile at a much earlier age.
So if it was true that you must make kids at 40 years old for humans, or evolution stops... then wouldn't the same apply to apes? Yet the chimp, which is pretty much a cousin to humans, rarely lives more than 40 years in the wild, with the median being much lower. Most of the chimp cubs are born at a much lower age of their parents. Chimps reach puberty at the age of _9_ and start reproducing relatively soon afterwards.
A) As I was saying, if that stopped evolution, we wouldn't be here in the first place. There is no indication that the common ancestor of human and chimps waited until old age to reproduce.
B) The chimp did evolve. The split between normal chimps and Bonobos is as recent as 1.5-2 million years ago, and they jolly well evolved into different species. And (highly) debatably the Bonobo just reached sentience.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sorry guys, but this is obvious and a lame observation in and of itself. Who cares if evolution has stopped? It takes way too damn long anyway. Natural evolution of humans is done. The next step is genetic engineering.
This will come and it will be a good thing. The human race will evolve by change their own DNA. It will start slowly at first... changing genetics to remove abnormalities or genetic diseases. It'll then slowly move into genetic alterations for intelligence and then into the cosmetic. Think about what people are willing to spend for a better school... now imagine they can spend that on child intelligence upgrades. "Ok sir, you'd like the 115 IQ package... would you like blue eyes with that?"
It'll then become the next arms race. Some prudish countries will be squeamish about this as they were about stem cells... but some countries will embrace it. In less than a generation they will have smarter and better children and will dominate economically. All other countries will drop their objections and agree with the idea to an extent. There will probably be lots of push back by the genetically disadvantaged, but eventually agreed upon limits will exist where people will get smarter through genetic engineering.
So fear not, the human race will keep evolving... it just won't be the painful 100,000 year, kill off the slightly weaker type of evolution. It'll be the kind you pull out your credit card for and tell the nice man behind the counter how much you're willing to pay today to make your child a "better person" tomorrow.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
i don't see the reasoning behind "all populations are becoming connected and the opportunity for random change is dwindling." random changes will continue (perhaps with varying rate due to trends in the mean age of parents), and they'll have more opportunity to link up with other beneficial changes (via the larger interbreeding population).
isolation is not necessary for evolution, it just makes evolution more visible because one can directly compare different populations rather than having to compare the current population to the population long ago.
but i think (though it's not evident in this article) Prof Jones understands the more important reasons that evolution is slowing down (also discussed in some posts above). i see this excerpt of his on the UCL website:
"Plenty of people are surviving who once did not, or are having children when once they would have stayed celibate, and medicine can now offer treatment for many with damaged genes that can then be passed on."
make macro-evolution proponents look all the stupider.
1) The idea is based on genes being switched on and off by conditions in the environment. For example a group of genes associated with resistance to mutations caused by radiation are switched on by exposure to radiation.
2) genetic mutations accumulated in males, at least up to the age of puberty, are passed onto the sperm. The theory is that this includes which genes are switched on or off. Hence environmental factors affect the genes passed on by males.
3) eggs are fully formed when the female is in the womb, so no mutations are passed on. Hence environmental factors do not affect the genes passed on by females.
4) Natural selection only works if you have a fitness criteria. Just having lots of variants is no different from having few variants unless there is a fitness criteria by which successful variants are selected.
I travel by train to work each morning, and observation of the younger generations clearly shows that the human race is devolving. So I concur with Mr.Steve Jones - although my prognosis is much more scientific.
I had an appendectomy a while back. If I had not had it, I would now be dead. So the next time you have a common ailment that was life threatening nary a century ago, maybe you should think twice before heading to the hospital? Think of the good of the species!
Duh. Humans have evolved brains making them capable of advanced thought and self awareness. This makes us as a species less bound by those frailties that follow dogs, insects, cows, rats, sheep and even whales (who, even if they do have great brains, have no hands to allow them to build stuff).
Of course we are evolving - just like all the other species. Part of our evolution is technology. This is both a genetic weakness and a strength - no different than similar strengths and weaknesses found in dogs, insects, cows, rats, whales and flowers.
"Soon-to-be-unemployed geneticist claims human evolution is over".
If the genes aren't doing anything, there's no need to study them ;-)
This article here: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/10/how_we_evolve_1.php argues the EXACT opposite and is much more convincing too!
Conformism is the new nonconformism.
As an acredited Spore aficionado, I must say that: More than half of humans on planet Earth live on the Civilization Phase, and most of the rest is still on the Tribal phase [see this UN population report] We have some few people working on the Space phase, but they're vestigial. But the Creature phase is over. We can't grow horns, wings or an extra pair of legs any more. Bummer.
Hmmm.... Old men are still having sex with young women, IE Tony Randal, 80+, had 2 children with a sweet young thing. The percentage may have gone done because of social morals, but the global population has increased sooo much that I predict it is moving at a faster rate. :')
"I, for one, believe kids (and adults) should play outdoors and get dirty to help boost their immune systems and reduce the likelihood of allergies.
Eat more dirt"
I happen to agree 100% with you, but I could not resist...Sorry!
If you want to grow a strong, healthy child, you need a lot of dirt, fresh air, and sunshine to allow for strong roots.
It also was way cool to grow up on a farm with room to explore and discover my world on my own.
Sadly, this is becoming a rarity for kids now.
I guess times change though, and before I start a 'Get off my lawn!' rant...
I have always kept in mind something my grandfather used to tell me:
(rough paraphrase)' Life is like a river- water and life are connected for a reason- a river has falls, slow pools, eddies, whirlpools, boulders, sandbars, rapids, all of those things and more. Remember, stagnant water breeds mosquitoes. Who wants that?'
That wisdom he passed to me has enabled me to keep faith in the good overall fate of the human race lately.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Steve Jones was on a segment of the science program Quirks & Quarks on CBC Radio. Needless to say, the other experts interviewed had opposing viewpoints. Evolution doesn't stop, it just heads in different directions. Even if fathers aren't as old as they used to be, as Prof. Jones claims. But that itself seems to be an implausible statement -- I keep hearing that modern couples are delaying childbirth past the natural age of peak fertility.
We are about to witness a faster evolution, not slower. The reason is that many assume most mutations occur due to age. It is far more likely that Virus play a much bigger portion of this than is realized. In the past, the older guy simply had a longer time to be exposed to virus. Now, It is likely that we will see more virus strike us as we grow in populations and travel. IOW, we are going to substitute time with quantity.
In addition, we are seeing segmentation in our world DUE to knowledge about disease. For example, HIV is forcing segmentation in our world. How many ppl on this site would KNOWINGLY have a child with someone who is HIV+ (I assume that you are HIV-)?
My guess is that we will split into multiple species sooner,rather than later due to virtual segmentation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6057734.stm
we are also apparently splitting into two sub-races.. I call them the morlocs and the eloi
(as I tend to represent the morloc heritage more closely)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"Natural" selecting. Survival of the "fittest".
This genetic prof, needs to go back to school to understand WTF "evolution" means.
Humans making medicines, is ALSO "nature". If a human wipes our planet with a Big Red Button, than we do not "fit".
Europe is the first (old) world and US is the second!!!
That claim sounds pretty b/w to me.
"Humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be, according to the rules of the animal kingdom."
It says he's a professor, I hope it's not of biology.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
We don't have to anymore. We simply adapt our environment to our own needs, meaning we end up with a more diverse gene pool, but no survival of the fittest. It's survival of everyone.
So let me get this straight.. being the young buck that I am, if i were to wave my magic wand and start spawn juniors, I would effectively be stunting evolution? What if I have some now and then have some more say.. later. Is there some kind of rule that states I have to cluster my babies together? What if I want a baby for every decade? Did you ever think about that Steve Jones?? I agree with some of the previous posters, evolution has stopped because over the last century or so we have rapidly adapted our environment to suit us.. negating the need for us to adapt to the environment. According to my imagination (and 60% of the time it's right everytime) any changes that occur now will be within our brains and internal body systems.. We're more likely to turn into super awesome brains on skateboards than super awesome skateboards with like glow in the dark foot grips and those wicked things under the wheels that make the other thing go wooosh.. n stuff. savvy? my2c
Evolution in humans has stopped because there are no fathers over 35? I'm pretty sure, back in the day, like the BC days, 35 years was bloody old. When you hit puberty, you became a man, you got married and went straight in to making babies before your short life ended.
Thanks for the good laugh, mate! :-D
It focussed on three parts:
Mutation is going down because the window of reproduction in society is narrowing - men tend have children in a narrow 5-year band at around age 35-40. It's older men who engender more mutation through genetic drift (which increases through age).
Natural selection - people are living to reproduce more than ever before. In Darwin's time, 33% of people survived to breed. Now it's 99% in the West. It doesn't matter if you have a advantageous OR disadvantageous mutation now, you still breed.
Isolation - more isolated populations allow a trait to spread. The world is clearly one big melting pot when it comes to human breeding, so isolated populations can't develop.
His final point: this means that evolution is not really happening any more.
Someone who has survived till 40 or past and is in excellent health should be passing on those genes.
Not that I would mind "pairing" wiht a younger woman or using such a story as an excuse:), but this is just plain bullshit!
In the ancient times the halfapes and ancient representatives of our species had the same problem as any other animal on earth. It was a wonder if anyone survived for 25 (or so) years of age (remember to have seen statistics which said an average of 15 years). It was either the diseases or the predators which made it so. At that point the evolution was pushed forward by the high birth and death rates. Only the stronger survived in means of fast, intelligent, strong, good immune system and so on. That was the time with the highest evolution rate. The pairing took place at very young ages (as soon as reproduction was possible). I tend to beleive that at that evoultion was based on these facts and not because older people have mutating sperm. Yeah, mutating sperms do contribute to mutations which also was part of our evolution, but to say that mutation alone is responsible for evolution is plain bull. Mutation as means to adaption to an aggresive world is the only kind of mutation which would count as evolution. Mutating sperm because of old age of a person produces a lot more random mutation (most of them lead to defects rather than evolving characteristics) which do not get compensated through the aggresiveness of the environment (as many already stated, we live in ages where life and reproduction are also guaranteed for genetically challanged people through medicine). Of course, more mutations could eventually lead to evolution in some other way, but a scientist to explain this phenomenon through to small of agegap between sex partners is plain dumb.
Actually, the reason most human evolution has stopped progressing forward is medical science. We are able to keep people alive who "should" have died before reproducing. Before you attack me, consider this: I am one of those people. If it were not for medical science, I would have died at least twice before becoming an adult. And both times were due to my genetically poor medical conditions. 100 years ago I would have died. Instead, I am able to pass on my genetic defects to the next generation. Now take hundreds of thousands of people like me. Over time, these conditions will accumulate and amplify through the human genome, making physically poorer and poorer offspring.
Yes, I might have something genetically good to offer (brainpower, work ethic, whatever), but I still think that the accumulated negatives will ultimately outweigh the positives.
Michael Phelps, a man-fish!
...scientist proposes whacky, counterintuitive theory to drum up publicity/attention/funding dollars.
News at 11!
-Styopa
The reason that evolution in humans has almost stopped is that we screwed up natural selection.
No we didn't, we just changed the selection criteria. And only in some parts of the world. One third of Africa is malnourished, and there are conflicts and diseases. Cyclones and tidal waves kill lots of people in the east. Appalling, but how's that for selection pressure?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
It has electrolytes.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
The population of only Mongolian nomads reached that size and exceeded it.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
UK geneticist Steve Jones was persecuted of thousand of ugly looking young women crying something about save the human evolution..
It's disappointing that a professor who doesn't understand evolution is getting Time articles. Evolution, as we should all know, is a composite of two factors: the mutation caused by breeding and the environmental pressures that limit that mutation. What is mutation but a variation on the form of the previous generation? This is achieved simply by means of the crossing of genetic lineages involved in ordinary reproduction with no need for extraneous mutation within the individual. Species are either evolving or extinct.
I'll turn 40 in Feb and my wife is due in May, plus, I was exposed to all sorts of mutagenic agents in Iraq back in '91. My first two kids were normal, here's hoping #3 can fly, turn invisible, or at least change it's own diaper.
What isn't happening is speciation.
We are evolving humans that have anaemia or Down's. What is not happening is a creation of a species of "Homo Avoiding-Anaemius".
Here's a blog that picked this story up a couple days ago. It's quite a different perspective.
http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=2598
How old were Romeo and Juliet? Seriously, I've read that the average life expectancy in classical Greece was something like 19, something like 23 for Imperial Rome, and, for that matter, something like 45 for 19th century America. When does this guy think people in tribal societies started breeding when an impacted wisdom tooth could kill you?
Sounds more like _somebody_ is having way too many thoughts about his grad assistants blended in with fantasies about the good old days when the chief got _all_ the action.
Well, I'm not sure evolution is limited/driven by mutations. I thought the natural selection (multi-generational differential reproductivity) matters more. But no matter -- even if mutations are the key step, we're in good shape:
For any reduced fecundity of older men reducing degenerate mutations, we have a VAST increase in chemical mutagens present in both males and females. Modern inductrial chemicals are everywhere. Far more variety than the pre-industrial smoke & soot.
Wrong!
It'd be nice if a few more Slashdotters actually read the article so they'd know the primary point of this article:
There are three components of evolution: natural selection, mutation, and random change [of the environment?]. He's saying that mutation has decreased since males mate younger now than before. A 29-year-old has 300 mutations in his sperm, a 50-year-old over 1,000. All your arguments about interruption or continuation of natural selection are off topic.
Back to mutations, is there a chance that our polluted environment induces more mutations than a prehistoric one? Maybe 300 mutations at age 29 is still high compared to what an older male would accumulate in a healthier environment. And anyways, I don't buy that 29 years is young compared to the prehistoric reproduction age.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faRlFsYmkeY
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
Uh, sex is only half the equation here... Killing humans who have a very different set of genes from your own works too. It increases the "weight" of your genes in the human genome, thus bringing long term evolution.
Like it or not, the killing of jews during world war II has changed the human species. Some genes are much more rare now than they used to be, not that I (or anyone) know what those genes might be. Perhaps the nuclear attacks in japan killed enough closely related people to give that effect as well, I don't know.
A world with 7 billion people in which you can kill 7 million people in one strike is the same as a world with 1000 people in which you can only kill one human with one strike. With that in mind, I think there's a good chance evolution is happening very fast right now.
Actually, birth control and paternity testing have changed selective pressures. For example, with abortion and the morning after pill, there is now much less evolutionary advantage to rape. 10,000 years ago, if a man rapes a women, he has a reasonable chance of getting her pregnant. Now, she can take the morning after pill or get an abortion, and the dna can be used to throw him in jail (and being in jail with a bunch of men is not a good way to get children (for that matter, being stoned to death is not good for getting children either but without dna testing it is harder to figure out who did it)). In the US, the way to get lots of children is to get married, and have lots with your wife. With genetic paternity testing, you can know that all of them are yours. Of course, say you have identical twins, one of whom believes in NPG and the other who is LDS. They are going to have quite different numbers of children, but any underlying genetic tendencies for having children as opposed to just having sex will be amplified over time. In a thousand years, genetic tendencies toward rape could quite possibly be much lower if abortion and birth control are widely available. Stop rape, be pro choice.
Prenatal tests (amniocentesis), test tube babies, and sperm and egg banks already provide more than enough genetic material to radically change the gene pool. Once we allow commonplace genetic engineering of human offspring, evolution will occur rapidly. Don't assume that human whims not under the control of natural selection; the difference is that the genes that survive will serve humanity more than themselves, since humans can now impose their own fitness functions. All it will do is speed up evolution with a new set of pressures, and with luck let us avoid a little bit of our own genes' selfishness along the way. Hopefully our new basic elements of natural selection will be human comfort and enjoyment and not merely allele frequencies.
In the last millennia, we've seen huge changes in the environment. Not surprisingly, evolution is currently very fast.
For some reason people often forget evolution is not only about survival, it's about procreation. And that's about many many details. One strong driving factor in evolution is who we choose to breed with - today, we have more options than ever in all possible ways. Why are many people so beautiful today? Because of evolution from choosing companions. We choose whom we breed with, and not nearly everyone ever has (or ever has had) kids, no matter if they die young or not.
More and more, people choose to not have kids. If you trust their capability of not having kids (and the technological means are unforeseen), that's going to drive evolution and rather strongly. I personally think people from happy families are more likely to want families of their own, which keeps evolution going the right way too.
The net result of evolution is the shifting of the statistical makeup of the genepool, so to say that evolution is dead is to say that the genepool is no longer changing, which implicity claims that all segments of the global population are reproducing at the same rate, which is trivially false. Birthrates in all societies/genetic sub-populations are in fact very much different, ergo evolution continues.
One could get more abstract and note that the dymanical equations affecting the makeup of the genepool are no doubt decidely non-linear (contain all sorts of feedback paths), and that the solution to these equations, just like the weather, consistes of complex attractors rather than simple fixed solutions. The equations themselves are of course also changing as the nature of the environment and the feedback paths also change. What this means is that the genepool will forever be changing and as always the prime driver of evolution will the environmental changes which effect genetic fitness of those genes that happen to be around at the time... Unless the environment (including things like weather, epidemics, tectonic plate movements, asteroid impacts) stops changing, the result will be not only that the genepool keeps changing, but that it's course also keeps changing.
No, I believe the GP means the ones that have just come into a large inheritance and need you to give them some money to help them get the inheritance out of Africa and into your bank account.
Humans are more analogous to the Protoss than the Zerg. We do not naturally evolve biologically anymore because we develop advanced technology to do our bidding when we require it. If we need something biological, we'll eventually be able to genetically manipulate it into existence in a lab.
P.S. Yes I realize we are most analogous to Terrans than to the Protoss, but Carriers are cooler than Battlecruisers.
I don't think it's possible to actually stop evolution. Even if you were somehow able to freeze-frame biological processes, there is still the entire realm of social and mental evolution.
There will always be new ways of thinking and interacting with our fellow humans.
If the human race were to stop evolving, we would become stagnant and die off. Without evolution, we cannot combat entropy.
So his claim is that unless we have older fathers with more mutations, evolution will slow down or stop...
So, what happened when people we only living to be 35?
I dunno, but in my own family tree, it seems like they were having kids at much younger ages than people I see today...
My Grandfather was in his early 20's, my Dad in his early 30's and I didn't have a kid until I was in my late 30's...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
I know I look old, but we must think of our duty to evolution. Just think of the mutant offspring we could make together.
Greed is the root of all evil.
All sorts of species evolve in spite of any particular start or length of reproductive capacity. Since the vast majority of what diversity between members of a population happens during conception, the evolutionary engine is largely fueled at that point.
I agree, either there's something big I'm missing or this guy's a moron. On face, this fails even basic math. If DNA gets mutations at X/year, and the reproductive cycle is Y years, then the total number of mutations per generation is XY. At that level, it looks like he's right, since as Y goes down with younger males reproducing, the total number of mutations per generation goes down. Except he forgot that as reproductive age goes down, *you get more generations per unit time*. Since there are (1/Y) reproductive cycles per year, you multiply that back through and you get (X/year)*Y*(1/Y) = X mutations/year, which is exactly where you started. Duh.
You might even be able to argue that, assuming a constant number of mutations/year in a gene pool, having shorter generations allows for more opportunities to roll the genetic dice, and actually speed up evolution. I'd defer to an actual geneticist on that, though.
Seems to me that, as personal development happens the most during your early years of life, then having children at around 20-25 would probably mean you've done the bigger share of "evolving" already. Even if you account 17-year-olds making babies, they've still passed the heavily formative years of infanthood and early puberty.
And to add to that... what we consider "old" these days would be considered pretty much "ancient" by many of our ancestors. Wasn't 40-50 considered a pretty ripe old age a few centuries back?
This is actually something I've always worried about, if we're breeding "weak genes." However, this may be offset by the fact that many human deficiencies may now be compensated for, various illnesses may be all but eradicated, and genetic research - for good or bad - has been developing steadily. You can already take tests which assess the chances of having a baby for various developmental issues, I'd imagine one day you could also prevent them.
I've always felt that evolution has or or is near ending for a different reason: Medicine.
We are coming closer and closer to ending most terminal medical conditions.
We can fix virtually any appearance abnormality.
Fatal injuries are less and less common.
Being physically infirm is usually treatable.
Even those people who do get sick and die can usually have their life extended well past their reproductive years, meaning they still ended up in the gene pool.
We probably do continue to evolve our mental capacities, as it is increasingly important for mates to be seen as intelligent and able to cope with modern technology. And mental traits are obvious at a much younger age than most terminal illness, so that will continue to be a factor even in younger parenthood.
But physically we're hitting a dead end. At least for -natural- evolution. We will probably hit a span of artificial evolution (and may already have).
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
UK geneticist Steve Jones rumored to be having a tryst with 20-year-old co-ed and former student Jenny Grabowski. Jenny is currently an employee at the local Hooters, having failed out of Oxford.
Oh, and a pre-emptive strike for all of you humorless literalists:
A) There may or may not be a Hooters in the UK. I don't know, and I don't care to look it up.
B) Jenny Grabowski is a fictitious person plucked cleanly out of the ether.
C) For the purposes of this discussion, if there is any cognitive dissonance regarding a person getting into Oxford, taking a class in genetics, and failing out, suffice it to say that she thought she was taking a course to study "jeans", not "genes", and drop/add was over already. The reason why it was over prior to her knowledge is because she had missed the first 9 classes due to oversleeping and generally not giving a shit.
D) For the purposes of this discussion, if there is any cognitive dissonance between a person like this getting into Oxford in the first place, suffice it to say she was a legacy; her mother was world-renowned biochemist Adele Hart-Grabowsky, Oxford alum, graduated summa cum laude.
E) Adele Hart-Grabowsky (nee Adele Hart) married George Philip Grabowski, a fine arts dealer from Richmond, VA in 1987 in a wonderful ceremony on Oahu with 150 friends and relatives in attendance. Their first child, Jennifer Keeley Grabowski, was born in 1988. Keeley was Adele's mother's maiden name.
F) Adele Hart-Grabowsky (nee Adele Hart) and George Philip Grabowski are also fictitious individuals plucked cleanly out of the ether. However, there really is an Oahu and a Richmond, as well as an Oxford University, and as I said before, there actually is a chain of sports-pub style restaurants called Hooters, but it is unclear to me at this time if there is a Hooters in the UK. And based upon probability alone, I'm sure there must have been, at one point, a wedding ceremony in Oahu consisting of approximately 150 friends and relatives that was, indeed, wonderful.
Yes, the age at which males are having offspring has increased. I think the geneticist is talking about the average age, rather than starting age.
As the article mentions, in previous centuries, relatively few offspring would survive to adulthood. This required adults to have numerous offspring, having children starting at an early age and continuing into late adulthood. Today, most people have a few children and stop. So even though they're starting later, they're not continuing to have kids at the age of 50 anymore.
I think he has a point, but the article is incomplete. This narrower time frame in which adults are procreating also contributes to the reduction in natural selection (one of the more obvious contributors to this is modern medicine). For instance, if a male starts having offspring at the age of 16, and continues until the age of 60, he could not have had any life-threatening maladaptive traits. Compare two such males, and the one with more adaptive traits will have a higher chance of continuing to breed over that sort of time scale, and will thus be more genetically successful.
In modern society, people can die at the age of 32 from something that they were genetically predisposed to, and it probably won't affect their contribution to the genepool since they've already stopped reproducing.
I have not lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere!
See the documentary "Idiocracy" for ample evidence our civilization is declining.
What complete nonsense.
First off, evolution doesn't depend on mutation, only certain kinds of macroevolution do.
Secondly, there are plenty of ways for young men's sperm to mutate, particularly in light of "modern social customs" like ingesting carcinogens day-in/day-out and carrying cell phones in front jeans pockets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons/
You might be more familiar with the Hugo award-winning prequel that author wrote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Black_Bag/ and its TV adaptation by Rod Serling (oddly the wikipedia page doesn't mention that).
Or perhaps you'd better recognize the mythical in-movie TV show catchphrase that was coined in Marching Morons "I'd buy THAT for a dollar!" (of course since this story was written in 1951 the author actually used "Would you buy that for a quarter?" and later authors had to up it to a dollar due to inflation)
Seems like the body of a human being is being bombarded with more radiation than ever before...cell phones, anyone?
Thank you Dave Raggett
We can always stand in front of the microwave.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Hmmm...
he's looking at things relative to one individual and when and for how long he has children and the error rate of the genetic code in those children.
If you're looking at human evolution in general, you would rather want to look at a bigger picture.
For instance the same values that increase a persons desirability are around. Incredibly rich people will bear offspring, incredibly beautiful people will bear offspring, and incredibly socially intelligent people will bear offspring.
The same values that decrease a persons desirability are also around.
The only thing that's changed is that there's a 90% chance of a healthy baby popping out which can survive to 21 instead of a 20% chance (percentages roughly guessed).
The fact that we have automatically adapted to this increased survival rate just means that it's most likely never been usual to have a big family, 2-3 kids is normal and the only reason that more children were born is that more children died.
Plus, I don't really think that guy is "getting" evolution.. you want as FEW errors in the code as possible, not more errors as almost 99.99999999% of errors are bad errors.
This is a classic case of someone sympathizing with the subject he's studying, because he's studying evolution, and for evolution to happen you need mistakes in genetic code which develop into sustainable "new" kind of life, so more mistakes means more evolution and so mistakes in the genetic code is good for the future as his takls clearly speaks and you should listen, right?
The answer is a resounding "No!". Evolution is a neutral subject, neither good or bad. For every happy accident, there's a million unhappy offspring who will die from the mistake in genetic code. Understanding evolution does not mean we want more of it, or even less. We just want to understand the process, and then leave it the f**k alone.
So he's putting his own interpretation on his findings that older fathers have more genetic mistakes, he's interpreting that as a good thing, when in fact it is neither good or bad, it's a personal opinion of his.
This data is really for women, understanding that older men have more genetic mistakes in their code is important for them to decide on if age is a factor when choosing a mate. It's not the only decision as alot of other factors are at work.
You were also likely to breed with family members which might make such genetic trends stronger.
Or perhaps the guy is a moron and evolution is completely unstoppable.
Evolution will continue.
Right now you can see the subsets who breed fast and those who breed slow.
Those who breed fast will come to dominate the species.
One fast rising group- the promiscuous and irresponsible. I have had three stripper friends in my life. All had lots of sex and lots of kids (4 each). In each case they gave up 2-3 for adoption and then kept the rest.
Another fast rising group- the hispanics. Large families - strong support network- less materialism- more religious.
The islamics (currently on the way to outbreeding the europeans) and palestinians (who will out breed the jews for isreal).
And there are selection pressures on being good looking (pretty people get to breed more- up to 10% of children in some areas turn out to be parented by a handsome n'ere do well- not the husband). Easier DNA checking is probably going to reign that in.
Movie stars (a lot of movie stars have multiple families with multiple kids-- pretty and successful).
Being a successful athelete.
---
Now-- who is not reproducing?
I only had one kid.
Several of my friends have never even married. So geeky- D&D types, computer types, engineer types. However, I think in asia those types are still popular (give it a generation tho).
---
And then there is the bad food, tainted food, substance abusing types that have kids. They make the species slightly more resistant to bad food, tainted food, and substance abuse.
And if that swimmer guy from the olympics gets married and has lots of kids- that would spread the weird mutant genes he has (non-tiring muscles).
Wrestlers who do not freak out on steroids and kill their families.
And so on.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
np
I was under the impression that Humans were reproducing later and later in life with respect to the past.
I'll extend the argument to say that we _know_ that intelligence isn't determined by a single gene. Not only would we have figured it out a long time ago if it was based on a single gene (via a simple application of Mendelian genetics) but we've already found multiple genes relates to multiple different learning disabilities.
On top of that, the GP assumes that not only is intelligence based on a single gene, but it's also a recessive gene. Yes, it's pretty simple to find examples of "smart" people having "stupid" kids so we know it's not a single dominant gene, but it's also pretty simple to find examples of "stupid" people having "smart" kids so it also can't be a single recessive gene either. See paragraph one.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Apparently the fate of our species now depends upon older guys hooking up with younger woman.
:)
There's an old proverb (can't remember where I've heard it) which said something like: "Your woman's ideal age should be half of your age + 7"
So if f = x/2 + 7
f(14) = 14
f(16) = 15
f(30) = 22
f(40) = 27
f(60) = 37
Of course you would have to change your partner every year
Natural selection is still at work, it's just that modern medicine and population size have lowered the bar to the floor in developed places.
Even if you barely make it through birth and infancy with the aid of doctors and incubators, you still might make it to breed. Even if, on top of that you're mildly retarded, and end up unattractive, unhealthy, and malformed, chances are pretty good that there's still someone out there you can reproduce with. And for an additional twist, if you're rich, or your daddy is, you can probably pay some woman to have your offspring, if you don't necessarily get to plant the seed yourself.
Now this is mostly first world nations I'm speaking of. In third world countries I would contend that evolution is alive and well. Parts of Africa are the perfect example. If I were to place a bet on where the cure for AIDS will come from it's not some multi billion dollar pharma lab. It's some podunk village in Africa. Not because some researcher there was working with them, but because AIDS is so rampant down there that sooner or later, some lucky human being will be born with, or develop immunity, or just be unaffected entirely. For precisely the same reasons we're starting to see tricolsan resistant bacteria - antibacterial soap is all the rage.
The bar in some places is still pretty high, and thus evolution continues, but I think it's slowed for a lot of us.
Question everything
Gotta love that last line in TFA 'and the future is brown'. I think it is funny because even though I am considered caucasian, I have skin that is just as dark as many asians.
Some segments of the population produce more children than others. Evolution by dilution.
I read somewhere we are going to evolve into Morlocks and Eloi. We can see their progenitors in the proto-morlock Republicans and the proto-eloi Democrats.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I find it hard to believe that the mutation rate on humans will somehow be lower with todays heavy use of wireless technologies.
And survival of the fittest is still true altough the criteria for fittest may have changed.
Premise 1: When society starts, natural-selection stops.
Premise 2: When society starts, natural-selection needs to meet different requirements, and it continues.
Unfortunately, evolutionary changes that provide an advantage to an individual in a society are often orthogonal to changes promoting lone survival outside of society. There's the big question. Are Meta-evolutionary changes (to adapt to social conditions) truly natural-selection? I would suggest that accepting societal natural selection and survival natural selection are 2 different concepts that often blur in discussion (like the question: what is electricity?).
Natural-Selection: A process causing heritable traits that are helpful for survival and reproduction to become more common in a population, and harmful traits to become more rare. This occurs because individuals with advantageous traits are more likely to reproduce, so that more individuals in the next generation inherit these traits.
In a society, the traits that are helpful for survival AND reproduction don't become more common while harmful traits become more rare. Is natural-selection broken? It's a crap shoot, really. We may be able to correct or cure negative traits and helpful traits may be supressed in the interest of (pick your atrocity). A good analog is the mighty Zebra. How handy is it to be black and white striped on your own in the savannah, as opposed to being in a herd of black and white? I think that there should either be a refinement to the definition of NS or preferably multiple definitions to describe the how it applies in relation to a group of similar individuals.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
and live on a farm, you insensitive clod!
Thanks to evolution, my butt is growing to provide more padding for my digital lifestyle.
Damn you, sir, for being an Interesting, Insightful, and Informative, Anonymous Coward, and me for using his last Mod point yesterday.
I actually just watched that movie last night!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Basically a SciFi comedy where two losers are frozen and 500 years pass. They come out to discover that everyone has become very stupid due to smart people having few babies and dumb people having many babies. They are now the smartest people on the earth!
While it is a silly movie, I did get some laughs out of it.
I love how everyone talks in a combination of Urban Slang/Hillbilly/Redneck
TV shows are named "Ow my balls", the best movie was a picture of an Ass, the President of the United states is a Wrestler/Porn Star, and Justice is done with Monster Trucks...
This is the reason that taxonomists now use genetic information rather than morphology, as the latter can lead to erroneous classifications (something that's happened quite a lot in the past).
No kidding.
I find the whole concept of "species" to be flawed in this respect. The only practical way to describe relationships between populations (*not* species) is the genetic differential between those populations.
The whole concept of "species" is part of what drives the creation science crowd. "Oh, but you've never witnessed speciation!" Yeah, that's because there's no such thing as speciation. It's an artificial term that represents the false concept of species!
All we have is variance of alleles within different populations. We don't have "species." Evolution is nothing more than the changes in allele occurrence in a populations over time.
And to get back to the stupid-head article, that is still happening in humanity. As for all of you folks saying that medicine has stopped evolution in humans, that's ridiculous. We still have selection pressures, though those selection pressures may be minimal. All we're doing is allowing a massive amount of genetic diversity within our populations. The next time selection pressure shifts (and it will -- it always does), we'll have a *lot* of genetic variation ready to meet the challenge.
This is all simple evolution. Most of you probably studied the exact same thing in junior high, with the decrease in wolves leading to an increase in rabbits, and then the wolves ramping up again to kill off the rabbits, and so on. This cycle (which is highly simplified) is what we're experiencing now. At some point, our environment will change, and we'll be glad to have all the genetic diversity we're building up now.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Although not quite the same thing, I have often wondered what our current culture is doing to us through natural selection. Now I know it takes many generations to make a difference. However one has to think that those with certain genetic problems may not have had a chance to propagate as they would likely die.
For instance, do you think 500 years ago as many people has bad eyes, or asthma or, other conditions or mental problems? It kind of makes me think what we well all be like in a 1000 years from now, 5000 years.
Also as an extension of that principle it isn't the number of years that matter, but rather the number of generations. So in the distance past when life expectancy was like 40 and people normally had kids when they were like 14 generations were short. Now with people living till 80 and having kids in their 30's, the generations are longer... would this mean that by default we would be less effected by the Darwin's principle? Again expand that out a couple hundred years from now, and things start to get interesting. We start to stagnate, change slower over time, but that change is generally negative. So unless selective breeding and/or we gain the technology and the will to genetically alter our offspring, we are headed down a downward spiral abet a slow one. (Tho I suppose we could become cyborgs of a sort replacing defective parts, however this would seem a negative sum system, however who knows what technology will bring)
Not to even mention:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ :)
Evolution is nothing more than the changes in allele density in a population over time. Genetic diversity is part of that process.
The only way for evolution to stop is if the environment becomes homeostatic. As our environment is constantly changing, even with our attempts to regulate it, evolution in humanity has not stopped.
The concept of punctuated equilibrium is based on the idea that environments remain fairly stable over long periods of time, allowing genetic diversity within various populations. Then, the environment shifts suddenly, and those populations are selected for various traits, often bifurcating the population with respect to allele distribution.
Thinking humans are somehow beyond or outside evolution is just another case where humans think we're special in some way. Except in our specialized ability for abstract thought (which is not unique, any more than a cheetah is unique in running), humans are not special.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Look, I really don't like Palin, but to call the AIP "terroristic" is just stupid. The Alaska Independence Party is a peaceful organization, and have never condoned violent secession. They simply believe that Alaska should vote itself out of the union, as is its state right.
Their goals are unrealistic, of course. Alaska relies too much on federal money. Alaskans pay about $5k/year federal income tax per capita, but the state receives about $16k/year per capita in federal money. So the idea that Alaska is better off outside the union is currently the wish of a bunch of ignorant yahoos.
But they are not "terroristic" in any way.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Evolution of an animal is caused by external forces molding the present animal to better meet the demands of the environment so they can improve their survival chances.
There is no evolution when modern medicine props up humans that have genetic weaknesses and allows to further propagate. Additionally social customs call for protection of the weak and diseased and allow them to propagate as well.
Guess why there are no short necked giraffes. It's because no doctor artificially lengthened their neck or fed them so they wouldn't starve so they died off and left the long necks.
The end of *natural* evolution, he means.
Evolution doesn't give a cr*p (metaphorically speaking) whether you survive, only whether your genes survive. Primary method for that is reproduction (if you're old enough to spell and use sentence structure it can't come as a surprise that the "talking sh!t and lying out your ass" trait is exceptionally helpful for that), secondary by a long shot (more so for males than females because of the gestational period) is surviving long enough (e.g. through being rich or smart) to help your progency reproduce too.
Doesn't puncuated equilibrium say that once a species has achieved equilibrium with the environment, evolution slows down? The human species is thriving in terms of reproduction, so it would make sense that evolution will "slow down" or "stop". We also have invented ways of beating the effects of climate change, by constructing houses and clothes, and shipping food, so that humans can thrive in pretty much any climate. I'm currently reading The Blind Watchmaker and I just got to the chapter on punctuated equilibrium so I wish I could elaborate further on it.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
"Stupid people have more kids, raise them to be stupid."
Raising kids to be stupid has nothing to do with evolution. The kids are already born so how you raise them has no effect. Of course this ignores other causes that drive evolution but it does not DIRECTLY affect evolution.
This is hardly news. It's been obvious for many years. But it's interesting to see someone famous talking about it.
It's still not quite right--there are selective pressures. For example, in 1000 years the genes associated with the ability to use contraceptives will have been purged from the population. For example, all of humanity might have an innate terror of taking a pill every day. And then they'll release the new horror movie, "Condoms On Planes"!
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Who you choose to breed with determines what your children will be like. Why you choose a particular partner over another one makes a huge difference for evolution. Prefer a more intellectual partner? A more adventurous one? God forbid, a geek? etc etc.
Also there's a tendency for the social classes not to mix. Middle class with middle class, rich with rich, poor with poor. If you want your genes to jump these boundaries you most likely need to lift yourself across the boundary first. If this goes on, the different social classes could evolve in different directions, as certain traits help you stay rich, some help you stay poor.
Quagmire: Hey there sweetie, how old are you?
Connie: 16.
Quagmire: 18? You're first.
Connie: Mom!
Quagmire: I like where this is goin'! Giggidy, giggidy, gig-gi-dy!
And when we kill them, the neocon menace will finally be over. Too bad we'll have just killed the last Neanderthals.
Me Neanderthal. Me have gun. Me use gun on you!. You dead! ha ha
When medical science got good. It's not just mutation, it's the strong vs weak that does it
that you are begging the question defn: "A logical fallacy in which a premise of an argument contains a direct or indirect assumption that the conclusion is true; propounding a circular argument; circular reasoning " with regard to whether genetic factors are involved in the predisposition of people to get into certain situation types. and with regard to whether genetic variations may be involved in how well people do in those "nasty" environments. Regarding the distinction between natural and artificial. There is, at the darwinian level, no distinction between whether a situation/environment you have to adapt to was created artificially (i.e. indirectly naturally) or directly naturally. If you are a fly and you get caught in a spider's web, are you going to wax philosophical over whether it was a natural or artificial trap? No, you're going to die if you couldn't see or shake yourself out of the web.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You're right that evolution drives towards a "good enough for now" balance. But that is precisely why evolution has essentially stopped for humanity.
Consider:
1. Natural selection only works when there are pressures which can eliminate an organism before it can pass on its genes, or when a genetic advantage means something to the organism's ability to survive. This is no longer the case for modern society -- we have no predators, we do not directly compete for finite food or water supplies, we do not need to adapt to climate or environment because we make buildings and clothing. I can think of very, very few medical problems that would prevent someone from living long enough to reproduce, and the vast majority of people, from the most brilliant and good-looking to the most moronic and ugly, tend to find someone willing to breed with them.
2. We no longer operate in small, isolated colonies. In a group of a hundred people, isolated from others, with environmental pressures and competition, a tiny genetic advantage can propegate. In a group of a thousand people, it will take much longer, but it'll happen sooner or later. Now we live in cities with millions of other busy breeders, and our boundaries are not constrained by who we can meet within walking distance. Any mutation is just a drop in the ocean and no longer makes any difference to our species as a whole.
Even if you pulled a Star Trek and selectively bred the best, brightest, and strongest people into a line of a few dozen genetic superpeople, that would not change humanity, who would outnumber the "advantageous" gene carriers a billion to one.
In the above hypothetical scenario, maybe you could pull it off well enough that you'd have a seperate offshoot species, genetically distinct and reproductively incompatable with "normal" humans. But that's not going to happen naturally -- it would have to be directed, and while that is technically a form of evolution, it's not what we usually mean by the term. And even then, by the time anyone did it, technological advancements in body modification, computer interfaces, and genetics would likely bring everyone to the same level playing field.
Humanity is "good enough" for where it is and that is where evolution stops. And we're "good enough" because we can adapt our surroundings to our needs instead of vice versa. Barring some monumental climate change or rampant epidemic or population-decimating disaster, humanity has stopped evolving through natural means.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Just go to Walmart and look at some of the people working/shopping there. There is no doubt this guy is right and moreover, I think humanity is de-volving.
Making more money is just a symptom of being more resourceful (or luckier) than the next guy. Being resourceful is a valuable trait and is viewed by the society to be more valuable than being a lazy ass.
You can't handle the truth.
You'd love the movie Idio(t)cracy. It's worth watching in the background a couple times...
High or above average IQ is not a measure of "fitness" in the Darwinian model of evolution.
An NBA star with 15+ children is more fit than a Nobel prize winning physicist with just one or two children.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
You're looking far too much at the short-term. Evolution doesn't happen at a rate that's visible in the history books - it takes millions of years.
In first world nations (like where you and I live), sure, we're not seeing many people die off due to a lack of resources. However, we're still seeing certain people reproducing at a higher rate than others. If there is any genetic predisposition for this, than that is an evolutionary advantage, and will be propagated over the millions of years.
Evolution doesn't mean "everyone who isn't best dies, right now." Were that the case, you wouldn't have a population large enough to reproduce within. Evolution doesn't even mean "the best live longer." Evolution means, "those who reproduce more will reproduce more." This usually ends up producing organisms fit to survive in their environment. If you stick those organisms in an environment changing as rapidly as a human city, it gives you organisms fit to survive in a "meta-environment" - adapted to the things that invariably stay constant. If you want to say that the human race will always have enough to support it's most feeble of members, so be it. We're evolving towards a race of moochers. Your judgment of "better" and the evolutionary judgment of "better" don't need to have anything in common.
Please Contrast With:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/10/how_we_evolve_1.php
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.full
http://www.hapmap.org/
https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/
Thanks!
Evolution can only progress when those with unfit genes die without producing offspring. The moment that we started caring the weak and the sick, we put an end to evolution.
Who knew the master race was a bunch a pimple faced tally whacking slashdotters? lol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_race
Seatbelt & helmet laws messing with evolution the same way.
Evolution has not changed; it still continues to exert itself. The thing is that, as a species, we exert changes on our environment with a speed that natural evolution cannot keep up with. We have a problem when it comes to our own evolution; we are starting to control it more and more. Vain ideals are becoming more prevalent, straightening teeth, bigger boobs, smooth skin. Everyone in the western world at least seems to be trying to aspire to the more and more artificial ideals of looks. I remember having a conversation with a chap at work where I stated that teeth where a crap evolutionary design because they required care, rot and cause pain when doing so. I said it would be better if we had a hard chitin that constantly replenished rather than teeth. He said that it would look weird. Not if everyone had it I replied. My point is that we are increasingly in control of our own evolution and the human race is starting to have choice between random mutations brought about by natural selection & the environment and between starting to manipulate our own destinies. While I don't agree with feeding people with crap food or polluting the world with a legacy of poisons that affect future generations to come, what is the problem with starting to rectify inherent problems with human physic? For instance, allowing people to tolerate higher or lower temperatures. Better usage of body fats to combat obesity, becoming repellent to disease spreading insects, better adaptation to different pressures or tolerance to zero gravity. There are a huge amount of changes that could be made to the human body with no change to its looks. Even then, who would really care? Thirty thousand years ago, I bet our ancestors would have looked out of place with a shave and an Armani suit. Would it really matter to humans two thousand years from now if they did not look exactly as we do? As long as they survive, we are doing what all life on this planet does and ensuring the survival of the species. For the religious readers out there, I doubt a deity constructed us in their image. If they did, they gave us a really substandard chassis. If we are truly in their own image then I expect the deity has been suffering nearly an eternity with arthritis, cancer and dementia. Never mind praying to the deity, we should all be preying for it! If we are still around a few thousand years from now, I hope we have grown up.
Well, my iPhone certainly isn't slowing anything down!
No, I will not work for your startup
Actually, older men are more likely to pass on deformities and detrimental mutations than are younger men. Considering certain other factors, such as the fact that the average height of the entire human race has grown several inches in the last few hundred years, and the fact that evolution takes tens or hundreds of thousands of years to make even miniscule changes, I believe this scientist sniffed from the wrong beaker.
It is far more likely that the human race will split off into a number of very similar but distinctly different species. It has been suggested that those of Asian descent - Thais, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, and their neighbors - could very nearly qualify as a separate species when compared, to, say, Egyptians, or American Indians. Cultural and social interactions have led to -- pardon the terminology -- cross-breeding and is working to homogenize the human species, hopefully by combining the most favorable aspects of all regional differences.
The basic claim in the research, that males are to *young* when they become fathers these days sound unreasonable on the face of it.
The average age of parents have been growing steadily for many decades, today it's pretty average to have your first child at 30. It's not THAT long ago that 20 was more common.
The average living-age was much lower before too, you don't need to go back that many centuries before 50 start looking like very old, and most people would be dead before this.
So the main article contribution is something I knew was coming 20 years ago? => that men who have survived childhood diseases on his own and bucked the rapids without doctor care is now a High Value Commodity. That's great. Nothing like having more children who are inventors diagnosed by jealous quacks to be bipolar just so nobody uses his inventions. I'm sure they would really love me for a fate like that being passed on.
No Thanks. Let the scientists sew some chips on their scalp.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
IANEB, but this guy is full of crap.
There's been a lot of evolution in microbes caused by modern medicine - lots of resistance to different antibiotics.
Also, agriculture has allowed human populations to increase radically, and we've only had about 10000 years to catch up with the changes in diets and 100-200 years to catch up with industrialization and big cities. So there's a lot of opportunity for radical changes to hit us.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
(I get so tired of people who think they approve of evolution who don't have a clue what it's about - much more annoying than people who disapprove of it being clueless...)
"Survival of the fittest" doesn't mean that there's some Platonic ideal of "fitness" that evolution is pushing us toward, and the individuals who are closest to it survive. It's not a description of the future, it's a description of the past - it just means that at the time you're looking, the individuals with those characteristics are Not Dead Yet. It means that those whose characteristics matched the current environmental pressures tended to reproduce more successfully, and often but not always that means that they got to live longer or be healthier - sometimes that means that the whole population is larger, but sometimes a larger population is doomed whereas a smaller slower-growing population might have survived the next food supply crisis. You can't tell, and evolution doesn't care.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Brilliant bulldada!!! bob
(I'm not saying you're "biased" as in "you bad person!", I'm saying it as in "you're looking at it from the limited US perspective, and many other places are different.")
That's so variable across cultures - an older Arab friend of mine says that where he grew up, men typically didn't get married until they were old enough to be financially stable and secure enough to support a family, which typically meant 30-year-old men marrying 20-year-old women. And of course there's that whole South Asian arranged marriage thing, where parents often give their daughters to older men. On the other hand, I grew up in Delaware, where the legal minimum age for marriage and sex was 12 - if you were old enough to have kids, you were old enough to be barefoot and pregnant on the farm (you might not get to inherit your parents' farm for a long time, but you were at least respected as an adult.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's been long enough since I've seen that set of statistics, so I don't remember what the average marriage ages was at the time, but in the British Colonies in North America, there were still a range of religious and cultural practices, and about 1/3 of brides were pregnant, which was only somewhat influenced by how strict the culture was about premarital sex. The big cultural difference from today was that if that did happen, the couple were expected to get married and support their kids together, and of course the ability back then of a 15-year-old couple to make a living as farmers or workers without another 10 years of school.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Various articles linking the increases in autism and personalities to the age of the father support this position, and older men do have more sperm damage in general, to the point where many sperm are not viable, a driver for IVF.
Add the effects of all the mutagens in the environment and the larger population to increase the sample size, along with medical advances to permit marginally-viable children to survive and I find that the proposition is very unlikely to be correct.
Professor Jones added: "In the old days, you would find one powerful man having hundreds of children." He cites the fecund Moulay Ismail of Morocco, who died in the 18th century, and is reputed to have fathered 888 children.
So proving or disproving the speed of evolution has now come down to stories people tell about crazy people? I mean, even if that man really had 888 children (oh what a conveniently beautiful number), does Jones really believe that he represented a typical male in the 18th century world? It's been a while since my last history lesson, but I don't remember anything about the typical family size in 18c Western Europe to be anything near 800 people. 10 to 12 would be a good guess in the countryside, but half died before they reached adulthood. There is also one guy in China who is over 3m high, but that doesn't mean we're all evolving into giants.
Decreasing randomness is another contributing factor. "Humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be [...] Small populations which are isolated can evolve at random as genes are accidentally lost. World-wide, all populations are becoming connected and the opportunity for random change is dwindling."
Well, that just might prove that evolution slowed down, not that it stopped. Also, people commonly assume that we are less isolated than we were a hundred/a thousand/ten thousand years ago. And yet the Romans imported grain from Egypt a couple of thousands of years ago and they probably had illegal children with their African/European/Middle-Eastern slaves. Isolated communities only exist on islands or in mountains, and even there there is often interaction. There is proof for trade in the Pacific going back thousands of years to the late Neolithic. If those peoples were traveling to get some stone tools, they probably would have mixed and exchanged brides.