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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Utterly wrong on so many levels. Natural selection is going along just fine and dandy, thank you very much. The human environment has simply changed. The hemophiliacs now are fit, because their environment no longer kills them. Evolution is only ever relative to a species' environment, and many traits formerly selected against due to lethality are no longer relevant in this brave new world.
There's a blog post from PZ Myers on Pharyngula that addresses this statement from Steve Jones fairly well I think. Read it in full here
This[the idea that older men have more mutations in their sperm] is true, but it makes no sense. It's not as if younger fathers produce no mutations -- they generate plenty. It's a difference in degree, nothing more, so we still have plenty of new mutations percolating into the population. And of course, over most of human history parents have been relatively young, since you couldn't count on living to the age of 35.
And then there's this odd argument.
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."
That makes even less sense. Natural selection is going to eliminate variants; by reducing its effects, we permit more mutations to persist in the population. One moment he's complaining that fewer mutations are being produced, the next he's complaining that the mutants are thriving. Which is it?
tl;dr = Steve Jones is full of wacky.
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.
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
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.
Oh my. Someone on the Internet understands evolution through natural selection, and the definition of fitness in relation to environment. The world's about to end.
It's so frustrating to see so many other comments that treat "fitness" as something that exists outside of any context, as if what they value as fitness is what the selection process used.
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.
Actually, I have this theory:
Most of us nerds are terribly low regarding competition to get females. However, we are more apt at improving society as a whole (or gaining power from society a-la-Billy-Gates).
So what if... mankind has evolved to develop a classes system - you know, like ants, bees and other social insects?
We have the kings and queens (leaders, apt for government)
We have soldiers - very strong and apt for defending us against other dangerous species (even ourselves).
Nerds go here, in the "research and development" class. Let's call ourselves the "pathfinders".
We also have workers. Not very intelligent people, but who can provide goods for everyone. Let's call them "sheeple".
Together, we fight as a whole, for the survival of the species.
Of course, this isn't a valid scientific theory. Just a thought.
One moment he's complaining that fewer mutations are being produced, the next he's complaining that the mutants are thriving. Which is it?
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.
Evolution can't work if "survival of the fittest" really means "survival of everyone". It looks like we'll either stagnate or evolve completely randomly, in all directions that don't outright kill us. Probably some combination -- all these random mutations won't get really exaggerated, because they'll just be absorbed back into the population.
Of course, that's not really the end of human evolution, it's more the end of meaningful human evolution. Idiocracy is an example of how humanity could (or already has) evolved in a direction we probably don't want, and don't think of as "progress" -- but Darwinian evolution does not necessarily equal progress.
I'm not really sure what the endgame is. I really only see three outcomes: Idiocracy (we stop caring about real science, and fall back on Darwinian evolution); MAD (we blow ourselves up (selecting ourselves out), and science dies with us); or posthumanism (science continues at roughly the pace it has, which means we'll use technology to enhance ourselves).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Natural Selection is interesting in that there's not really anything we can do to stop it -- by definition, it is always happening.
And it's not just about individuals. Our altruism is a selected quality, as is our technology. It means we get to survive, instead of some other species. It is apparently working, as we are still here -- and it makes sense that it should work.
After all, if you think back to a time when there was a lot more pressure from natural selection, if a person is wounded by a tiger, we could leave them to die. Then we'd evolve into uncaring fucks, who may have some advantage against tiger attacks -- or are just lucky.
Instead, we drag them off and heal their wounds. That means there's one more of us, if we decide to hunt down the tiger and kill it.
The same is just as true today -- maybe that person lying facedown in the street will develop a cure for AIDS.
If we truly do "stop evolving", and this eventually puts us in danger of dying out -- like the Asgard, from Stargate SG-1 -- then we'll be an evolutionary dead-end. We'll be selected out, just like the Dodo.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
The way I see it, problem is not a matter of fitness---it's a matter of desirability of the outcome.
In today's society, we have highly educated people in developed cultures (hence "successful" and "desirable" to some degree) producing fewer and fewer children, while the less educated in under-developed world continue to grow in population.
By definition, this would make those who are less educated "fit". Not that there is a problem with that, but if we are to assume that human evolution should point in the direction of higher intelligence, this is definitely not a desirable outcome.
we are looking, within a few generations at the ability to edit our own DNA. We will start selecting ourselves.
+++ATH0
You just invented the feudal system, basically.
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!!
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.
"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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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/ :)
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."