Just like how people are so damn stupid about the fact that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually saved lives, and that the Japanese were not going to surrender after the first but before the second.
Saved lives? not really. Thats controversial. The Japanese were preparing to surrender but where going to set terms. The soviets were also preparing to invade japan. To prevent the soviets from moving in the Americans dropped the bombs. After the first one japan was preparign to surrender unconditionally. This sped things up, it might have save a few thousand american lives/ a few dozen thousand japanese lives but it directly killed hundreds of thousands.
I think Japan deserved it and should have had more dropped on them. Almost all their neighbors hate them because they were truly evil conquers. Worse then the Nazi's were. Their neighbors still mostly hate them. While I did think Japan deserved it, I don't think the people that died did. It's a pretty strange idea I know, but the japanese collective psyche deserved the emotional pounding the bombs represented but the citizens of those two cities didn't deserve to go through that. Though if I was in charge in 1945 I'd dropped them too.
Science is complex. More often than not very well-trained and experienced scientists get it completely wrong. That said, somebody with a minimal scientific background (ie. a Journalism major) will very often screw up more complicated scientific articles. But likewise, many scientists dislike writing such articles. So we end up with a situation where those in the know would rather not write, and those not in the know are the ones who do write. And the result is lousy scientific articles.
The thing is, journalists get the vast majority of their facts from hear say/ second hand info. They are always wrong at least once in every article and most of the time their poorly paid and they are basically nimrods with good spelling and grammar. Their own view color their articles, and the fact that all journalists are arts majors shows you exactly why they get the science wrong.
Just nitpicking but few causes of death are not miniscule compared to car accidents. For instance, leukemia has a miniscule death toll every year compared to car accidents. So, should we not try to fight leukemia?
We have an entire department of the federal government dedicated to traffic safety while a few speacialized branches of the medical researchers put time into fighting leukemia, it seems proportionate. Fighting terrorism does not. Just imagine a 250 billion dollar Federal project dedicated to fighting Sudden Infant Death syndrome (3000 - 5000 deaths a year, more then terrorism in the states) and you will realize what this "war on terrorism" looks like in perspective.
That is why it must be interpretted because english is very ambiguious and plain english even more so, as well as linguistic change over tiem muddling things up.
I agree, and it's funny how people almost never think of this. How so many other dangers are more present and deadly than terrorism, but aren't seen as important. Where's our war on smog, bad driving, and gun proliferation?
Before the 2004 US elections I saw quotes by people saying things to the effect of 'who cares about the economy when we're at war with terrorism'. Yet far more children are going to die from poverty induced things like exposure and malnutrition than from any acts of terror.
I agree. Terrorism is a insignificant problem, 3000+ at the world trade center, a few hundred in london. Compared to car accidents this is a minicule death toll. Also compared to violent crime, pollution, heart disease, cancer, ect... The roots of these terrorism is as much about ideological differences as they are about foreign policy. The only thing you can do about it is to tighten security and make it hard.
A war on terrorism is stupid, because it's a war on a tactic. you can't have a war against flanking, you can't have a war on spying, so why is there a war on terrorism?
It's a threat they threw at the american public to justify their current impearlist ideas and to throw off of the fact that the current administration is incompetent from beuracrat to president.
As a financial conservative/social progressive I find Bushes policies compeletly offensive. He is not a financial conservative and he's pretty backwards on social policies. He's runnigng up debt and introducing regressive policies on science and religion.
The rights are granted by God or by birth. The Constitution gives our government very restricted enumerated powers. Government grants us no rights.
Technically yes, unfortunatly you can only keep those right which you claw back from the power that be. Because they want you to have less right because it makes their jobs easier. So unless you vocally protest (peacefully or otherwise) you right are trampled and diminished.
The constitution is a interpretted piece of paper, if you haven't notice one select group of homogenious individuals (lawyers) have control over this interpretation. The lawyers have created a legalist state with needless complication to re-enforce their niche and to entrench their power. Many of your senators and presidents in the past have been lawyers. They are one of the leats trusted professions so why do you let them run/ruin your country?
The racial differences in IQ are a whole other matter. Very policitally charged, unfortunately, which makes them difficult to talk about. Unfortunately, the evidence that at least some of the difference may actually be genetic is fairly strong. I dislike the fact that we cannot talk about this openly, but that is simply a reality in today's political climate.
It makes sense from a genetic standpoint, both ashkenazi jews and east asians have a history of valuing intelligence and education and have had some selection for it (chinese beuracratic tests and the restiction of jewish careers.). The stats do support it but other factors could be the cause aside from genetic but even the diaspora have unussually higher averages, so it is at least cultural.
I like human space travel however humans are inferior to robots in one important area: cleanliness. You simply can't sterilize a human you send onto another planet like you can a robot, unless they never leave their habitat/lander (if nothing else then because dragging such sterilization equipment to mars isn't feasible).
The only "fossils" we're likely to find on Mars are microbes, and even those are probably rare which means w need every advantage in finding them. Humans simply increase the risk of contamination orders of magnitude which makes finding such microbe remains a much greater challenge.
Thank about it as doubling the known number of planets with life. Scientifically it may be bad to do this but in the long view of things, it won't matter that much.
Robots do a better job. And they can stay and work there longer than humans.
I would only agree with it if it were permanent . That's right . Build a station with robots first and then send people to live there for 5 or 10 years.
Expendable and capable robots will require 20 to 50 years of reserach, but expendable people are here now! lets start shipping lawyers, and middle management to mars first.
They might be micro, but even microbes can still kill if the immune system that can stop them. Do you want to go first, be my guess.
They can onyl kill you if they have some way to itteract with you. The reason why most plant diseases don't harm people is because they have no significant way to interact with our biological systems.
I can see why a country would want to go to Mars. There is always the national honor, staking territorial claims, etc. for a Mars landing. I just can't see spending billions of dollars for no financial return at all.
How much money has a business made from the US landing on the Moon?
If you count the techonology the US had to invent to get ther,e billions upon billions.
and I think that "we see changes in gene frequency, therefore (since microevolution, by definition, is a change in gene frequencies over time), the brain appears to be evolving" isn't much of a stretch.
And I think that saying something isn't much of a stretch is funny when in the post you are responding too people with visible credentials (more visible and transparent then yours at least ) state : Another geneticist, David Goldstein of Duke University, said the new results were interesting but that "it is a real stretch to argue for example that microcephalin is under selection and that that selection must be related to brain size or cognitive function."
Let's see if we can microevolve your point out of here.
I understand what you are trying to say with the first quote I don't understand what you are trying to say after that?
Micro/macro evolution isn't a scintific idea. The theory of evolution does not distinguish between the two. The idea was added to the arguement by creationist/ID camp. This is a fact. There is no point in argueing it.
It's not my fault that you were never taught about macro and microevolution:) It's part of the regular curriculum in the parts of Canada where I've lived... and I have NEVER had a teacher or prof mention creationism or intelligent design except in passing. We're just not taught that kind of fake science.
Also, having the same mechanism does NOT mean we can't differentiate between large and small-scale changes. That kind of classification makes our lives a lot easier.
I live in alberta, the bible belt. I went to a catholic high school. Not one word about "micro evolution". I graduated 2 years ago. The idea is a red herring. It isn't a scientific idea.
Well, no. You wouldn't have to stop having children. There's no reason that both groups wouldn't still exist. However, there would definitely be more 'trailer park people' than 'middle-class asians'.
Ultimately in this scenario, you'd see speciation, I believe. You'd have 'trailer park people' and 'middle-class asian' people with different and incompatible genes.
Perhaps one day, there is soem social barriers keepign the two groups from breeding. But one will not win. The "middle class asian" and the "trailer park trash" will cohabitat until there is a reaso for one ot die. Winning is about # it's about the binary states of "alive" and "exstinct".
You had better ask all those tens of millions that starved just a couple of generations ago, and the hundreds of millions that are still impoverished today.
You can still see the effects of WWII in Japan tody, where I live. People born in that era are far shorter than people younger than them - a clear sign of poor nutrition. Young Japanese are close to the same height as Americans, as far as I can tell.
Also, the Flynn effect seems to be leveling off in advanced countries, which is perfectly consistent with the nutrition model, for reasons you noted. [ Reply to This ]
Temporally local and short. The starvation in china was due to gross incompetence of the administration and last a decade before the ruling party was disposed by another group.
The average height still differs because the genetics of the groups are different, nothern chinese are close to the average height of americans but southern chinese are not. Japanese people still seem shorter from the exchange students I've met but both our anicdotes needs some stats to back it up.
In either case IQ doesn't seem to correlate since the 2nd highest IQ ethnicity is east asian (chinese vietnamese japanese korean). They are close to the ashkenazi jews and signifigantly higher then caucasians who generally had better nutrition during the 50's and 60's.
I was a biology major for a year and a half. All through highschool biology, as well as first and second year biology classes (two of the second year classes being Ecology and Genetics), I was taught about microevolution. I think it's important to differentiate between things happening on a small scale vs. things happening on a large scale... at least in part because the former is much easier to reverse than the latter. For example, there were the moths that almost completely changed colour in response to pollution and then changed back when the pollution was cleaned up (I'm sure you know the example I'm thinking of) because the required genes had not been eliminated from the population and no speciation had occurred. With macroevolution, however... well, I suppose it's possible that a chickadee may someday evolve back into a dinosaur, but I suspect that it would require an awful lot of mutation rather than a simple gene shift within the population.
Can I assume yoru from america? I didn't hear anything about it until I started posting on slashdot 3 years ago. There is no difference, the mechanism is the same. A chicadee will never evolve into a dinosaur, but given a long regimen of selection you could make it a very large carnivore.
Average IQ is indeed rising world wide but it's not at all clear that it's due to the world being "so complicated now it selects against those who can't cope." There are multiple competing theories explaining the Flynn Effect of which by far the most credible, IMO, is that the largest cause has been improved early childhood nutrition due to the spread of modern farming techniques.
True enough, but the lack of a declining intelligence in the western world also support the fact that we're not getting dumber. We've had fair nutrition for about 5 generations now, IQ is still risin here. How about China, huge sampel size. IQ is also rising. Their agriculture has been fairly optimal for a long time.
As others mentioned, half of the evolution process is missing.. there is no selection of better traits. Everyone lives, thrives, and reproduces regardless of their genetic adaptations (or quality).
I've posted about this 6 times tonight, actually there are selective factors. Evolutuion trudges on.
Lower fatality does not equal lack of selection. It occurs, slowed a little but variation is great for long term survival. It means your successful and are more diverse. Diversity means you have a population has a higher chance of havign the "right gene" for a particular instance.
Evolution selects favorable traits and removes unfavorable ones from the gene pool. Modern medicine and science all people who would be weeded out by evolution to live fairly normal lives and remain a part of the gene pool.
If you surviev you are okay. Weeding out is undesirable. We want as much variation as possible so when a really bad selective factors comes along our chance to adapt to it is higher because we have more variety. Specialization is a locally opitmal but globally sub optimal strategy. Your idea of "fitness" is a certain type of specialization (ie. good looking, smart, athletic) however it is a local maxima and may not be what is most fit latter. (for instance a virilent parasite that feeds on mussle mass but is only fatal when you have X number of them.)
I wonder how long it would take us to devolve via natural selection. Since there is an inverse relationship between education level and child rearing, then if one assumes more intelligent people tend to have higher educations and that higher intelligence when breeding contributes to intellectual evolution, then we may well be devolving because stupid people disproportionately reproduce. Of course, we'll probably genetically engineer our own brainpower up before too long, and solve that problem while opening up a whole new can of worms.
This is untrue, more intelligent people have fewer children, but these children almost always survive to reproductive age. It's simply a diffeerent strategy. one economic echulon (my spelling sucks) goes for a many children, few survivors method. whiel another goes for few children, but immense resources put into each.
But... that's how evolution works. Microevolution anyway, and that's generally what we're talking about when we describe a change within a species. Ok, so technically, they just found a certain set of data, but based on the best theories we have (and the wealth of data that supports them), they can draw at least some conclusions based on their findings.... and I think that "we see changes in gene frequency, therefore (since microevolution, by definition, is a change in gene frequencies over time), the brain appears to be evolving" isn't much of a stretch.
this is what you are doing:
" Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, Chef's attorney would certainly want you to believe that his client wrote "Stinky Britches" ten years ago. And they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself!
But ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider: Ladies and gentlemen this [pointing to a picture of Chewbacca] is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. THAT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE! Why would a Wookiee--an eight foot tall Wookiee--want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!
But more important, you have to ask yourself, what does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!
Look at me, I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense!
And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation... does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
If Chewbacca lived on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests. "
Micro evolution is a term creationists added to the arguement when it was plain they could not deny the facts. Anyone who uses those terms are not biologists, and are almost always americans. I tooks genetics for 2 and half year with 32 credits between me and a major in genetics, and the only time I ever heard about micro/macro evolution was on slashdot talking with creationists/confused commentors.
However the relation is probably backward from what you were thinking. It seems that the poorest (and least educated so maybe that is the deciding factor) members of our society are the ones having children at the youngest ages and having more children over their lifetime.
There are two strategies playing out in the world. One is have many kids, put few resources in them and hope at least 1 lives to reproduce. The other is to invest a lot of resources in a few and hoep they have kids too. Both work. They are however mutaully exclusive. High fecundity in one generation means nothing. If those 12 kids that trailer park momma has only 2 reproduce then she is less effective then a pair of middle class asians who had 3 and had all 3 have kids.
For the human species to really evolve, the 4 major gene types (Caucasian, Asian, Aborigine, Afro-African) must mix as much as possible. The supremme being would technically have all the dominent genes out of each pool.
Dominant != good. Dominant means it tends to happen with hetrogenious parents. Dont' confuse the two. My Alpha thalasemia is dominant but in areas without malaria it's a bad trait.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like how people are so damn stupid about the fact that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually saved lives, and that the Japanese were not going to surrender after the first but before the second.
Saved lives? not really. Thats controversial. The Japanese were preparing to surrender but where going to set terms. The soviets were also preparing to invade japan. To prevent the soviets from moving in the Americans dropped the bombs. After the first one japan was preparign to surrender unconditionally. This sped things up, it might have save a few thousand american lives/ a few dozen thousand japanese lives but it directly killed hundreds of thousands.
I think Japan deserved it and should have had more dropped on them. Almost all their neighbors hate them because they were truly evil conquers. Worse then the Nazi's were. Their neighbors still mostly hate them. While I did think Japan deserved it, I don't think the people that died did. It's a pretty strange idea I know, but the japanese collective psyche deserved the emotional pounding the bombs represented but the citizens of those two cities didn't deserve to go through that. Though if I was in charge in 1945 I'd dropped them too.
Science is complex. More often than not very well-trained and experienced scientists get it completely wrong. That said, somebody with a minimal scientific background (ie. a Journalism major) will very often screw up more complicated scientific articles. But likewise, many scientists dislike writing such articles. So we end up with a situation where those in the know would rather not write, and those not in the know are the ones who do write. And the result is lousy scientific articles.
The thing is, journalists get the vast majority of their facts from hear say/ second hand info. They are always wrong at least once in every article and most of the time their poorly paid and they are basically nimrods with good spelling and grammar. Their own view color their articles, and the fact that all journalists are arts majors shows you exactly why they get the science wrong.
Just nitpicking but few causes of death are not miniscule compared to car accidents. For instance, leukemia has a miniscule death toll every year compared to car accidents. So, should we not try to fight leukemia?
We have an entire department of the federal government dedicated to traffic safety while a few speacialized branches of the medical researchers put time into fighting leukemia, it seems proportionate. Fighting terrorism does not. Just imagine a 250 billion dollar Federal project dedicated to fighting Sudden Infant Death syndrome (3000 - 5000 deaths a year, more then terrorism in the states) and you will realize what this "war on terrorism" looks like in perspective.
All laws should be written in plain language.
That is why it must be interpretted because english is very ambiguious and plain english even more so, as well as linguistic change over tiem muddling things up.
I agree, and it's funny how people almost never think of this. How so many other dangers are more present and deadly than terrorism, but aren't seen as important. Where's our war on smog, bad driving, and gun proliferation?
Before the 2004 US elections I saw quotes by people saying things to the effect of 'who cares about the economy when we're at war with terrorism'. Yet far more children are going to die from poverty induced things like exposure and malnutrition than from any acts of terror.
I agree. Terrorism is a insignificant problem, 3000+ at the world trade center, a few hundred in london. Compared to car accidents this is a minicule death toll. Also compared to violent crime, pollution, heart disease, cancer, ect... The roots of these terrorism is as much about ideological differences as they are about foreign policy. The only thing you can do about it is to tighten security and make it hard.
A war on terrorism is stupid, because it's a war on a tactic. you can't have a war against flanking, you can't have a war on spying, so why is there a war on terrorism?
It's a threat they threw at the american public to justify their current impearlist ideas and to throw off of the fact that the current administration is incompetent from beuracrat to president.
As a financial conservative/social progressive I find Bushes policies compeletly offensive. He is not a financial conservative and he's pretty backwards on social policies. He's runnigng up debt and introducing regressive policies on science and religion.
Wrong.
The rights are granted by God or by birth. The Constitution gives our government very restricted enumerated powers. Government grants us no rights.
Technically yes, unfortunatly you can only keep those right which you claw back from the power that be. Because they want you to have less right because it makes their jobs easier. So unless you vocally protest (peacefully or otherwise) you right are trampled and diminished.
The constitution is a interpretted piece of paper, if you haven't notice one select group of homogenious individuals (lawyers) have control over this interpretation. The lawyers have created a legalist state with needless complication to re-enforce their niche and to entrench their power. Many of your senators and presidents in the past have been lawyers. They are one of the leats trusted professions so why do you let them run/ruin your country?
The racial differences in IQ are a whole other matter. Very policitally charged, unfortunately, which makes them difficult to talk about. Unfortunately, the evidence that at least some of the difference may actually be genetic is fairly strong. I dislike the fact that we cannot talk about this openly, but that is simply a reality in today's political climate.
It makes sense from a genetic standpoint, both ashkenazi jews and east asians have a history of valuing intelligence and education and have had some selection for it (chinese beuracratic tests and the restiction of jewish careers.). The stats do support it but other factors could be the cause aside from genetic but even the diaspora have unussually higher averages, so it is at least cultural.
I like human space travel however humans are inferior to robots in one important area: cleanliness. You simply can't sterilize a human you send onto another planet like you can a robot, unless they never leave their habitat/lander (if nothing else then because dragging such sterilization equipment to mars isn't feasible).
The only "fossils" we're likely to find on Mars are microbes, and even those are probably rare which means w need every advantage in finding them. Humans simply increase the risk of contamination orders of magnitude which makes finding such microbe remains a much greater challenge.
Thank about it as doubling the known number of planets with life. Scientifically it may be bad to do this but in the long view of things, it won't matter that much.
Robots do a better job. And they can stay and work there longer than humans.
I would only agree with it if it were permanent . That's right . Build a station with robots first and then send people to live there for 5 or 10 years.
That would make sense. A short term trip is stupid and just flag waving , index finger pointing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism .
Real science please.
Expendable and capable robots will require 20 to 50 years of reserach, but expendable people are here now! lets start shipping lawyers, and middle management to mars first.
They might be micro, but even microbes can still kill if the immune system that can stop them. Do you want to go first, be my guess.
They can onyl kill you if they have some way to itteract with you. The reason why most plant diseases don't harm people is because they have no significant way to interact with our biological systems.
I can see why a country would want to go to Mars. There is always the national honor, staking territorial claims, etc. for a Mars landing. I just can't see spending billions of dollars for no financial return at all.
How much money has a business made from the US landing on the Moon?
If you count the techonology the US had to invent to get ther,e billions upon billions.
and I think that "we see changes in gene frequency, therefore (since microevolution, by definition, is a change in gene frequencies over time), the brain appears to be evolving" isn't much of a stretch.
And I think that saying something isn't much of a stretch is funny when in the post you are responding too people with visible credentials (more visible and transparent then yours at least ) state :
Another geneticist, David Goldstein of Duke University, said the new results were interesting but that "it is a real stretch to argue for example that microcephalin is under selection and that that selection must be related to brain size or cognitive function."
Let's see if we can microevolve your point out of here.
I understand what you are trying to say with the first quote I don't understand what you are trying to say after that?
Micro/macro evolution isn't a scintific idea. The theory of evolution does not distinguish between the two. The idea was added to the arguement by creationist/ID camp. This is a fact. There is no point in argueing it.
It's not my fault that you were never taught about macro and microevolution :) It's part of the regular curriculum in the parts of Canada where I've lived... and I have NEVER had a teacher or prof mention creationism or intelligent design except in passing. We're just not taught that kind of fake science.
Also, having the same mechanism does NOT mean we can't differentiate between large and small-scale changes. That kind of classification makes our lives a lot easier.
I live in alberta, the bible belt. I went to a catholic high school. Not one word about "micro evolution". I graduated 2 years ago. The idea is a red herring. It isn't a scientific idea.
Well, no. You wouldn't have to stop having children. There's no reason that both groups wouldn't still exist. However, there would definitely be more 'trailer park people' than 'middle-class asians'.
Ultimately in this scenario, you'd see speciation, I believe. You'd have 'trailer park people' and 'middle-class asian' people with different and incompatible genes.
Perhaps one day, there is soem social barriers keepign the two groups from breeding. But one will not win. The "middle class asian" and the "trailer park trash" will cohabitat until there is a reaso for one ot die. Winning is about # it's about the binary states of "alive" and "exstinct".
time?
You had better ask all those tens of millions that starved just a couple of generations ago, and the hundreds of millions that are still impoverished today.
You can still see the effects of WWII in Japan tody, where I live. People born in that era are far shorter than people younger than them - a clear sign of poor nutrition. Young Japanese are close to the same height as Americans, as far as I can tell.
Also, the Flynn effect seems to be leveling off in advanced countries, which is perfectly consistent with the nutrition model, for reasons you noted.
[ Reply to This ]
Temporally local and short. The starvation in china was due to gross incompetence of the administration and last a decade before the ruling party was disposed by another group.
The average height still differs because the genetics of the groups are different, nothern chinese are close to the average height of americans but southern chinese are not. Japanese people still seem shorter from the exchange students I've met but both our anicdotes needs some stats to back it up.
In either case IQ doesn't seem to correlate since the 2nd highest IQ ethnicity is east asian (chinese vietnamese japanese korean). They are close to the ashkenazi jews and signifigantly higher then caucasians who generally had better nutrition during the 50's and 60's.
Nothing I said contridicted your points. I merely said things are not being selected for or against anymore in humans.
I made no conclusions about whether that was good or bad. You've just said why it's good.
True enough. I also must point out that there are selective factors but they tend to be more subtle then in the past.
Typically.....the 'trailer park mamma' with 12 kids will probably have kids that reproduce early and often themselves.
Thus, we can sort of conclude what strategy will probably win in the end.
You can't, just because they out number you doesn't mean yours is dead. They have to out compete you and make you stop having children.
Ant out reproduce us, are we welcoming our ant overlords yet?
I was a biology major for a year and a half. All through highschool biology, as well as first and second year biology classes (two of the second year classes being Ecology and Genetics), I was taught about microevolution. I think it's important to differentiate between things happening on a small scale vs. things happening on a large scale... at least in part because the former is much easier to reverse than the latter. For example, there were the moths that almost completely changed colour in response to pollution and then changed back when the pollution was cleaned up (I'm sure you know the example I'm thinking of) because the required genes had not been eliminated from the population and no speciation had occurred. With macroevolution, however... well, I suppose it's possible that a chickadee may someday evolve back into a dinosaur, but I suspect that it would require an awful lot of mutation rather than a simple gene shift within the population.
Can I assume yoru from america? I didn't hear anything about it until I started posting on slashdot 3 years ago. There is no difference, the mechanism is the same. A chicadee will never evolve into a dinosaur, but given a long regimen of selection you could make it a very large carnivore.
Average IQ is indeed rising world wide but it's not at all clear that it's due to the world being "so complicated now it selects against those who can't cope." There are multiple competing theories explaining the Flynn Effect of which by far the most credible, IMO, is that the largest cause has been improved early childhood nutrition due to the spread of modern farming techniques.
True enough, but the lack of a declining intelligence in the western world also support the fact that we're not getting dumber. We've had fair nutrition for about 5 generations now, IQ is still risin here. How about China, huge sampel size. IQ is also rising. Their agriculture has been fairly optimal for a long time.
As others mentioned, half of the evolution process is missing.. there is no selection of better traits. Everyone lives, thrives, and reproduces regardless of their genetic adaptations (or quality).
I've posted about this 6 times tonight, actually there are selective factors. Evolutuion trudges on.
Lower fatality does not equal lack of selection. It occurs, slowed a little but variation is great for long term survival. It means your successful and are more diverse. Diversity means you have a population has a higher chance of havign the "right gene" for a particular instance.
Evolution selects favorable traits and removes unfavorable ones from the gene pool. Modern medicine and science all people who would be weeded out by evolution to live fairly normal lives and remain a part of the gene pool.
If you surviev you are okay. Weeding out is undesirable. We want as much variation as possible so when a really bad selective factors comes along our chance to adapt to it is higher because we have more variety. Specialization is a locally opitmal but globally sub optimal strategy. Your idea of "fitness" is a certain type of specialization (ie. good looking, smart, athletic) however it is a local maxima and may not be what is most fit latter. (for instance a virilent parasite that feeds on mussle mass but is only fatal when you have X number of them.)
I wonder how long it would take us to devolve via natural selection. Since there is an inverse relationship between education level and child rearing, then if one assumes more intelligent people tend to have higher educations and that higher intelligence when breeding contributes to intellectual evolution, then we may well be devolving because stupid people disproportionately reproduce. Of course, we'll probably genetically engineer our own brainpower up before too long, and solve that problem while opening up a whole new can of worms.
This is untrue, more intelligent people have fewer children, but these children almost always survive to reproductive age. It's simply a diffeerent strategy. one economic echulon (my spelling sucks) goes for a many children, few survivors method. whiel another goes for few children, but immense resources put into each.
But... that's how evolution works. Microevolution anyway, and that's generally what we're talking about when we describe a change within a species. Ok, so technically, they just found a certain set of data, but based on the best theories we have (and the wealth of data that supports them), they can draw at least some conclusions based on their findings.... and I think that "we see changes in gene frequency, therefore (since microevolution, by definition, is a change in gene frequencies over time), the brain appears to be evolving" isn't much of a stretch.
this is what you are doing:
" Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, Chef's attorney would certainly want you to believe that his client wrote "Stinky Britches" ten years ago. And they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself!
But ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider: Ladies and gentlemen this [pointing to a picture of Chewbacca] is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. THAT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE! Why would a Wookiee--an eight foot tall Wookiee--want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!
But more important, you have to ask yourself, what does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!
Look at me, I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense!
And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation... does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
If Chewbacca lived on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests. "
Micro evolution is a term creationists added to the arguement when it was plain they could not deny the facts. Anyone who uses those terms are not biologists, and are almost always americans. I tooks genetics for 2 and half year with 32 credits between me and a major in genetics, and the only time I ever heard about micro/macro evolution was on slashdot talking with creationists/confused commentors.
However the relation is probably backward from what you were thinking. It seems that the poorest (and least educated so maybe that is the deciding factor) members of our society are the ones having children at the youngest ages and having more children over their lifetime.
There are two strategies playing out in the world. One is have many kids, put few resources in them and hope at least 1 lives to reproduce. The other is to invest a lot of resources in a few and hoep they have kids too. Both work. They are however mutaully exclusive. High fecundity in one generation means nothing. If those 12 kids that trailer park momma has only 2 reproduce then she is less effective then a pair of middle class asians who had 3 and had all 3 have kids.
For the human species to really evolve, the 4 major gene types (Caucasian, Asian, Aborigine, Afro-African) must mix as much as possible. The supremme being would technically have all the dominent genes out of each pool.
Dominant != good. Dominant means it tends to happen with hetrogenious parents. Dont' confuse the two. My Alpha thalasemia is dominant but in areas without malaria it's a bad trait.