Slashdot Log In
Human Species May Split In Two
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Oct 17, 2006 05:37 PM
from the if-we-don't-destroy-ourselves-first dept.
from the if-we-don't-destroy-ourselves-first dept.
gEvil (beta) writes "According to an article at the BBC, an evolutionary theorist in London suggests that humanity may split into two sub-species within the next 100,000 years. From the article: 'The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.'" No missing link here, we already have the troll-like humans to prove it.
Related Stories
[+]
Slashback: IceWeasel, Online Gambling, GPU Folding, Evolution 214 comments
Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: The facts about Debian Iceweasel; A closer look at Folding@home's GPU client; David Brin's lament; Online gambling ban may violate international law; Human species may do whatnow?; and Another RIAA lawsuit dropped. Read on for details.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
So to be clear... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes and the Brits will make revolting sausages out of the Swedes and eat them with bacon and eggs.
Parent
On a serious note, .... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the "modern" system in the USA, economics imposes a different sort of evolution. As people become richer, they have fewer children. As people become poorer, they have more children. Those with the wits to become rich essentially become extinct, leaving a nation of teaming poor people.
In short, the socio-economics of free markets kills of the smart people by voluntary extinction.
Parent
Re:On a serious note, .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Education is not a genetically-passed trait. So while this has interesting implications for societies, it will have little or no effect on species.
Parent
Re:On a serious note, .... (Score:5, Interesting)
The rich people are much more selective about the number of children that they have. They are willing and able to invest more into each child that they produce.
The poor have always had many children. For one thing, they don't have the access to birth control that allows the rich and middle classes to have unlimited sex (without barrier-style birth control methods like condoms, crevical caps, and diaphrams) without pregnancies. Two, historically about half of the children of the poor die before productive maturity in mid adult years. And, three, the poor have been indoctrinated by culture and religion to have as many babies as possible.
It has only been in the recent historical era, about the past hundred years, that most of the children that the poor have reach 'productive maturity'. By that I mean not only adulthood, but also get past the self-destructive cultural brainwashing like military 'service', reckless driving, and binge intoxications that kills so many young males.
This present era with so much population growth is directly dependent and resultant from massive amounts of cheap energy, primarily oil. As we pass through Peak Oil, when half of all the oil on Earth has been found, refined, and burned, we will find that it is increasingly difficult to keep the poor people alive and well, regardless of how much they breed. As the oil era passes and the price of oil climbs each year, more and more of the poor sections of the Earth will become like present-day Palestine. That is hopelessly overcrowded; with no resources or solid government; endlessly locked in a civil war that prevents the economic growth needed to sustain its population.
The rich are not engaged in an unforseen policy of extinction, they are enacting an understood but unspoken policy of population sustainablility at lower levels than at the present. It is the poor that are breeding themselves into unsustainable levels. Levels that will inevitably result in a massive 'die-off' in the not-too-distant future.
Parent
Re:Correction to Last Sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
But I would argue that the only impetus to become rich is poverty. When you have nothing, you have more drive to succede, and liberal capitalism allows that. If you are born rich, or already rich, what drive is there to create anything new? Some people obviously have it, and never are satisfied, but they are the very rare exception. The most innovative ideas come from the ranks of the "poor and stupid" as you call them. Think of the founders of Google, or Andrew Carnegie, or even Jim Carrey. At one point in his life, Jim Carrey lived in a station wagon with his family. Now he makes $20 million+ a movie. If Jim were rich, or even just upper middle class, would the drive been as strong?
I think history proves that the overall condition of society constantly improves, with a setback here and again. There may still be a huge gap between today's rich and poor when it comes to looks, money, talent, education, whatever. But compare today's poor with the poor of a hundred years ago, and things are marginally better (thinking in industrialized countries... Africa is another story). I think the socio-economics of free markets kill off the rich caste, because they become complacent. Is this a bad thing? I think not. Look at the Forbes 400... not a lot of inherited wealth there. When it comes to being rich, ideas and drive count more than beauty and status.
Parent
Poor (Score:5, Informative)
Are you kidding me?
India has seen the end of a caste system and has moved into a knowledge-based economy. Their poor are becoming literate, and taking "our" IT jobs. The prospects for the average Indian are getting better as the days go on.
Ditto for China. The front page article of the Oct. 17 Investor's Business Daily is "Chinese Wage Growth Surging, But Hasn't Fueled Higher Prices." Although the focus of the article is on urban China (where unskilled/semiskilled workers have been seeing wage increases between 5 and 20 percent each year since 2000), it also mentions how efforts to "exploit" rural farmers for labor have also driven up their wages.
Although the "Cultural Revolution" was definitely a setback for the Chinese economy, things have been going wonderfully for them since. Consider that in the 80s, Proctor and Gamble researched expanding into the Chinese shampoo market - only to realize that there wasn't any. The average peasant could only afford a bottle the size you find complimentary with your hotel room; and even then, only once a year, for a special occaision. McDonalds and other fast food places ha da little more success, but mostly with the wealthy and tourists - as in Russia, peasants would make pilgrimages of sorts to a fast-food restaurant that they could only afford to eat at once a year.
Now, the standard of living in China is rising rapidly - people can not only feed themselves, but they have cars and consumer electronics! They have computers and internet - remember that big firewall China has? Their standard of living is rapidly approaching western standards - a far cry from when Mao Zedung encouraged peasants to smelt steel in their backyards.
Parent
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Insightful)
Read Aldus Huxley's Brave New World
Parent
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Informative)
Time Machine by HG Wells, anyone?
Parent
I'm confused... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Informative)
There's this book called The Bible (author; disputed, age; roughly 2500 years?) that tells the story of an ancient nomadic race of goat-herders called the Hebrews. One of their laws was to discourage marriage outside their own race. Only the Hebrews were the Creator's favored race, and the rest were damned.
Parent
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our futuristic tall, slim, attractive, intelligent and creative sauna loving meatball munching copyright infringing swashbuckling pirate blonde overlords. May death come quickly to their enemies. Yaaaaar!
Parent
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Funny)
after all...you are who you eat...
Parent
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:So to be clear... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Confounding factors (Score:5, Insightful)
In all seriousness though, there is nothing new here as this certainly plays off any number of sci-fi subjects going back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. People have been obsessed with this sort of thing for years and in fact, was the basis of racial profiling, discrimination, murder and genocide by the Nazis in the 1930s through eugenics.
The funny thing though is that even though many folks are obsessed with image and "beauty", people will choose mates for a variety of different reasons, that sometimes boggle the mind in their complexity or pathology and as long as you have people that are..... less than attractive with large amounts of financial reserves, you will always have confounds in the system. Other confounds are simply human relationships. For instance, my wife and I decided to date and then marry only after we had been good friends for some period of time. The fact that she is physically attractive [utah.edu] was only incidental which brings up a whole other category of people who meet and then fall in love over the Internet without ever having met in person.
Oh, and speaking of confounds, the increasing use of plastic surgery among those that 1) have real reason to use it (true disfigurement) and 2) are just vain enough to want it (lips, cheeks, chins, breasts) will have an effect on this as well, leading to a whole new aspect of relationships. What is false advertising when it comes to body modification? Breasts are pretty easy to detect, but what about that nose which might have been bobbed? Straightened? What about those cheekbones? Teeth? All of these mods and others will confound any selection pressure and likely will increase in their statistical impact the more important "beauty" becomes to societies.
But hey, you know..... The Clone Wars will take care of all of this sort of nonsense..... or will it be Skynet?
Re:Confounding factors (Score:5, Interesting)
Lest people think that Eugenics could only happened under the Nazis, various mental health places in America and other countries were practicing forms of it until the 1960-70s with practices like sterilizing the mentally handicapped:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Eugenics_an
"Despite the changed postwar attitude towards eugenics in the U.S. and some European countries, a few nations, notably, Canada and Sweden, maintained large-scale eugenics programs, including forced sterilization of mentally handicapped individuals, as well as other practices, until the 1970s. In the United States, sterilizations capped off in the 1960s, though the eugenics movement had largely lost most popular and political support by the end of the 1930s.[27]"
If you ever watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", there seems to have been other practices (Lobotomy) that lived until recently as well that seem barbaric today....
Parent
Re:Bush Family Trees (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bush Family Trees (Score:5, Funny)
"I...am your father's...father's...law partner's...and home state's...and boss's...ad hominem."
"So what does that make us?"
"Absolutely nothing. Which is what your argument means!"
Parent
Re:Did you read the article you linked to? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The central charge against Prescott Bush has a basis in fact. In 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act, the U.S. government seized several companies in which he had an interest."
Bush funding Thyssen's 1920s Nazis wasn't an accident - not when the Nazis were working on the same fascist and racist program as Bush. After the US was at war with the Nazis, after the Nazis had taken over most of Europe and their Japanese allies the other half of the planet, there was no pleading ignorance of what their earlier clients had become.
There is no benefit of the doubt left for these people. They are thugs.
Parent
Stereotypical Predictions from Dr. Curry ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Men: "... bigger penises"
Women: "... pert breasts" (and presumably larger/fuller too)
I gotta wonder how valid this "research" truly is - sounds like something Dr. Frankenstein or Homer Simpson [komar.org] would have written - D'OH!
Well done ScuttleMonkey with the "Missing Link" addition.
Re:Stereotypical Predictions from Dr. Curry ... (Score:5, Funny)
Boy, he really hasn't studied human beings enough, has he? First he expects smart people to be beautiful (or the converse) and now he expects large boobs to be pert?
Parent
Re:Stereotypical Predictions from Dr. Curry ... (Score:5, Funny)
Hush up, you. They may have taken away our dreams of flying cars and houses on the Moon, but breasts that are both large and pert is a future worth fighting for!
Parent
The problem with this is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The problem with this is (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we are more likely to end up with intelligent goblins and beautiful brainless fairies, if there will only be two groups.
Parent
Re:The problem with this is (Score:5, Funny)
In order to dissuade you from this dellusion, I direct your attention to my dearest of college discoveries: Sexy art chicks.
Parent
Good timing... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey!! (Score:5, Funny)
Stats? (Score:5, Funny)
wait, that sounds familiar.. (Score:5, Funny)
Fox (Score:5, Funny)
(You can't call it a troll if I don't say which one becomes the upper class
Re:Fox (Score:5, Funny)
Sure I can! I'm libertarian, you insensitive clod!
Parent
Morlocks and Eloi, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
This ignores history (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This ignores history (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Umm... (Score:5, Funny)
if i recall my "time machine" properly (Score:5, Informative)
but why anyone would seek sustenance by eating a bag of antlers like lindsay lohan is beyond me. utter science fiction, on that point alone
100000 years?? humans?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, we all know that the cockroaches will rule by then..
I, for one, welcome them..
Rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
It assumes that rich people will stop having sex with poor people. Anybody see any logic flaws here?
This is based on *what*? (Score:5, Insightful)
No one alive today knows what the next 100,000 years hold for humanity. No one. It's just too complex a subject and too long a time period to make any reasonable predictions about. Heck, no one even knows what the next 10 or 100 years hold, let alone 100,000.
This is just a typical sensationalistic "news" story designed to attract eyeballs. It's not based in science or reality. You can make up your own long-term predictions with just as much authority.
Contraception (Score:5, Funny)
Wait....
A Warning that Must be Heeded (Score:5, Funny)
Yet another dire consequence of too much time playing MMORPG's. As if the recent South Park wasn't warning enough.
eLoi Dreams (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans have been dependent on "technology" to reproduce for many thousands of generations. Tech is freeing us ever more from any selection criteria except infectious disease (just more unevenly). Current tech trends make genetics ever less important to using tech, which further decouples it from evolutionary mechanics.
Curry just wants smooth-skinned women with big eyes and "pert" breasts, who he thinks will prefer "graceful" nerds like him to the exclusion of the "robust" people who like tech less. So what? So he thinks HG Wells' The Time Machine [gutenberg.org] is a prediction of our future more than a social satire on Wells' Victorian classist society. He should stick to hack SF rehashes, and leave the genetics to people who are realistic enough to actually get laid.
Wasn't this... (Score:5, Funny)
And IIRC, some of them (her) wasn't ugly at all!
Besides, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Each new race might find themselves quite attractive.
(Slashdot Rule #17: Any post mentioning Star Trek the original series is to automatically be modded Insightful.)
I think there will be 10 sub-species (Score:5, Funny)
*ahem*
Anyway, aren't there already 2... males and females... might as well be completely different species sometimes
Or, to take the controversial line, perhaps the two will be natives and immigrants
Re:It's already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not evolution - that's steroids.
Parent
Re:It's already happening (Score:5, Interesting)
That is mostly due to better chemistry, primarily the use of steroids, not genetics. The benefits of steroids aren't propagated through reproduction. Better diet has also led to both taller, healthier, athletic people and overweight, unhealthy people. Abundant cheap, subsidized, high fructose corn syrup alone is creating millions of overweight diabetic Americans.
I doubt you will ever see dramatic genetic changes over the space of two generations especially when mating choices are fairly random in modern society. Slavery did produce dramatic physical improvement in the gene pool in American blacks but it was over the course of a number of generations, with brutal breeding constraints enforced by slave owners coupled with selectively in the harvesting of slaves from Africa by slavers.
An interesting paradox that will work against this proposed genetic "upper class" is the fact that there is a pronounced trend for highly educated, affluent, beautiful people to reproduce in relatively low numbers while the uneducated and poverty stricken are usually reproducing at a dramatically higher rate in this world. Now maybe the "upper class" can preserve well protected islands of affluence where they dominate and survive, but they could just as easily be swept under when someday the underclass figure out that the world order is concentrating the world's wealth and well being in the hands of a tiny often undeserving minority while the rest of the world lives in grinding misery. Maybe the "upper class" can hold power though economic, political, technological and military means but I wouldn't count on it.
To be honest I really don't expect the human race to survive in tact another thousand years, let alone a hundred thousand years. A few basic factors working against us:
- Our inability to control our population growth, religions in particular pour fuel on this fire by trying to maximize the growth of their flock by obstructing birth control
- Our dominant economic system, capitalism, simply isn't sustainable because its predicated on maximizing growth which is devastating our finite habitat and again its concentrating ever more wealth in ever fewer hands and that probably isn't sustainable, before there is revolt.
- Our technological advances are dramatically outstripping our wisdom in applying and controlling them. Biological manipulation and weapons alone are a grave threat to survival of our species, along with nuclear proliferation.
Another factor that works against the creation of a genetic upper class is that people raised in affluence and without adversity often end up being complete losers. People who succeed in the face of adversity and serious obstacles are much stronger people than those raised with a silver spoon in their mouths. You need to look no further than America's two biggest dynasties the Kennedy's and the Bush's to see the deficiencies that develop in generations raised on a silver spoon.
A thousand years out I imagine we will have rendered most species on the planet extinct including our own, through cataclysmic climate change and decimation of land and oceans alike in a vain attempt to feed billions more people. It took millions of years to sequester carbon dioxide in the ground and cool our climate, and we are going to unleash it all in the space of a couple hundred years and the results will be cataclysmic. It took hundreds of millions of years for earth to develop its diversity and abundance of life forms and again in hundreds of years we will have decimated all of them.
I wouldn't mind if the human race took itself out, but its unfortunate its going to take out the rest of the planet thanks to our rampant hubris and avarice.
Parent
Generally, yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, athletic bodies are often damaged or disfigured with massive hormone imbalances and other severe (and occasionally fatal) problems. Gymnasts, for example, do not mature correctly and often suffer from muscle and bone disorders. Body builders, weight-lifters, etc, can disfigure their hearts - I would not expect life-expectency to be nearly so high. Rugby players - well, I can see them evolving into a whole new species that has less to do with class and more to do with causing sheer terror when barreling down the playing field. Soccer players can suffer damage to hearing or their pre-frontal lobes, from a mixture of heading and smashing into the ground at high speed. It's usually not lethal, but if you look at the various team managers for the England squad, it's clearly harmful to thought processes.
Parent
Re:Why just two? (Score:5, Insightful)
Troll 1: Hey Biff, I just banged a Homo Tallenperty
Troll 2: Unga bunga
Seems like this would be repeated on both sides until we'd all be back to our mildly ghoulish yet mildly attractive selves of today.
Parent