I don't quite get it. Rapid population expansion increases the rate of evolution?
If anything the opposite is the case, it is bottlenecks in population that increase the rate of evolution. The smaller a population, the more chance that a person that experiences an evolutionary mutation will be able to affect the outcomes of the population. It makes sense that if a person experiences a genetic mutation that makes him more competitive within his environment then it requires individuals to be direct descendants of him to carry and spread that said mutation.
In a small population closed to migration, the mutation could be spread reasonably quickly since a single family might form half or more of the entire population. This is what happens in families that have a history of inbreeding and genetic abnormalities are more common.
In an interconnected population of 7 billion such as the human race, the direct descendants of ANY person currently alive (no matter how proliferous) are not likely to contribute a fraction of a percent of the world population even if multiple generations are considered and the mutation has a 100% chance of being passed on to the next generation.
Speciation would be my main evidence to support my claims. Wasn't Darwin's first observation of evolution his experiences with the regional speciation of birds in the galapagos islands? If we were to assume that evolution was still happening in humans, we would expect more species of humans than simply homo sapiens, wouldn't we? And yet the only differences that are evident across the species are incredibly superficial, such as the darkness of a persons skin and hair, the shape of their nose and the size of their penis.
Even then, the only speciation that did occur happened long before the population explosion of the last couple of hundred years, in a time when asians had their own place in the world, as did africans, europeans and miscellaneous (apologies for the racist undertones of that remark for all the polynesians, aboriginals, etc. out there in interweb land)
To claim that an increased population accelerates evolution is specious and demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of the forces at play during natural selection
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If anything the opposite is the case, it is bottlenecks in population that increase the rate of evolution. The smaller a population, the more chance that a person that experiences an evolutionary mutation will be able to affect the outcomes of the population. It makes sense that if a person experiences a genetic mutation that makes him more competitive within his environment then it requires individuals to be direct descendants of him to carry and spread that said mutation.
In a small population closed to migration, the mutation could be spread reasonably quickly since a single family might form half or more of the entire population. This is what happens in families that have a history of inbreeding and genetic abnormalities are more common.
In an interconnected population of 7 billion such as the human race, the direct descendants of ANY person currently alive (no matter how proliferous) are not likely to contribute a fraction of a percent of the world population even if multiple generations are considered and the mutation has a 100% chance of being passed on to the next generation. Speciation would be my main evidence to support my claims. Wasn't Darwin's first observation of evolution his experiences with the regional speciation of birds in the galapagos islands? If we were to assume that evolution was still happening in humans, we would expect more species of humans than simply homo sapiens, wouldn't we? And yet the only differences that are evident across the species are incredibly superficial, such as the darkness of a persons skin and hair, the shape of their nose and the size of their penis. Even then, the only speciation that did occur happened long before the population explosion of the last couple of hundred years, in a time when asians had their own place in the world, as did africans, europeans and miscellaneous (apologies for the racist undertones of that remark for all the polynesians, aboriginals, etc. out there in interweb land) To claim that an increased population accelerates evolution is specious and demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of the forces at play during natural selection
Why do people who don't get any assume it's because they're just too damn smart?