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Geneticist Claims Human Evolution Is Over
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Oct 08, 2008 11:27 PM
from the flame-on dept.
from the flame-on dept.
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."
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How convenient! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Funny)
MEIN FÜHRER! I CAN WALK!
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Interesting)
One way of seeing this is that a man that has become older and is still healthy means that the genes provides less risk of inherited disabling diseases and therefore is a better mate from that perspective. An older man is also likely to have gained a better position in society.
Evolution is still going on, but it is also circumvented by modern medicine. I would rather claim that medicine is the limiting factor for evolution.
Today we have a large number of diseases that is caused by our lazy living and sugared diets. So evolution will pick off the ones that aren't able to live lazy by heart attacks and similar defects.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is always that people assume that the only evolution is disease/lifespan related.
Healthcare that removes selectors like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc, just pushes selection in a different direction, and it becomes more about who you can convince to mate with you, rather than whether or not you'll be picked off by a disease.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Interesting)
You seem to be working under the delusion that evolution is something that someone has control over. Other than the women, I mean. Face it, being highly intelligent and creative and socially supportive may be really desirable, but unless the WOMEN are looking to screw men like that (or the men screw women like that), it ain't gonna be.
What's going to happen is that women will continue to screw the same guys they've been screwing, and the highly intelligent, creative, socially supportive guys will continue to spend time in their basement trying to justify why women should be chasing them in droves.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's difficult to see how a geneticist could actually make such an absurd statement. I suspect either there is major misrepresentation going on, or he's about to have his proverbial testicles handed to him by any number of researchers showing that the claim is factually false and conceptually retarded.
All sorts of species evolve in spite of any particular start or length of reproductive capacity. Since the vast majority of what diversity between members of a population happens during conception, the evolutionary engine is largely fueled at that point.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
As an FYI even the original claim is incorrect as the number of mutations in the population is overall increasing, due to the fact that the effect of natural selection is reduced. If anything we should be worried that the increase in harmful mutations in the general population is going to result in increased birth defects / genetic diseases.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
But if anything, mutations should be increasing with all the potential nuclear devices. That should keep the evolution going.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
but you're missing one important point. Say that someone comes up with a treatment for some serious problem with the atp cycle (for an extreme example). Sure it would mean that when civilisation falls a lot of people who need the drugs will die but there's also a chance that you can get a 2 stage mutation which otherwise would never have been possible.
Think in terms of
Change X: you die.
Change Y: you die.
Change X and Y: new extra effecient solution to a problem.You live.
It doesn't really matter if 99% of the population dies after civilisation crumbles due to genetic problems etc since 1% of 6 billion is still loads.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>"modern social customs have lowered the age at which human males have offspring"
That makes no sense. Men have been marrying later (or not at all). Heck Romeo married when he was 16, and that was customary at that time... in the 1800s most americans married at 22.... you don't see that happening today. A lot of people are waiting until their 30s.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest driver of evolution will always be catastrophic changes to the environment. Evolution advances rapidly when space in made available for mutations develop into empty spaces within the food chain in specific locals. It is very likely that the biggest driver for human evolution has been the relatively frequently recurring ice ages in recent geologic history.
Just as in future, the major drivers for human evolution will be those same ice ages recurring or, on own impact upon the environment being so great as to alter the environment sufficiently from the conditions under which we evolved as to force evolutionary adaptation to the new altered environment. Other changes in bacteria or viruses could also force associated changes in humans and, of course not to forget catastrophic impact.
Although evolution occurs across millions of years, there will be numerous periods, millennia, where evolution is accelerated fro particular species due to particular environmental conditions, so not much gradual change, but periods of relative stability interspersed with periods of accelerated change.
So as it has occurred in the past, a catastrophic event will either accelerate human evolution or end it, extinction being the only reason for a species to cease evolving. Crazy short haired rock throwing monkeys are really going to have to get over the idea that this universe needs or wants them to survive ;D.
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you never saw this? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6057734.stm [bbc.co.uk]
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)
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Interesting)
You think that's absurd? Read some of the comments. From a quick reading of about twenty, there were four or five who simply don't believe in evolution at all!
Here are a few examples (because I *know* you're not gonna RTFA):
It seems that there's still lots of randomness of _belief_.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Interesting)
Read some of the comments.
That is of course true. Humans did not evolve from apes but from a common ancestor.
If you think I'm nitpicking, I find this common misunderstanding to be one of the best ways to tell whether I'm going to have a useful discussion with someone or whether I shouldn't bother in the first place.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that nowadays boys do not regularly become fathers as soon as they start maturing sexually; if anything, the onset of reproduction is moving forward, to mid- or late twenties.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well yeah, the mechanism by which evolution has always worked is having lots of mutations; and ensuring that the 'faulty' mutations don't reproduce.
Nowadays our advanced medicine is ensuring that people with many of possible genetic defects are able to live a more or less normal life. It is very good for those people and their relatives; but it does mean that such defects will be becoming much more common in future.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
You think there is no selection pressure? It may not be based on the same criteria, but there is still definitely pressure for males and females to meet certain criteria before they will be allowed to mate successfully. As any geek should well appreciate!
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Obligitory: 'You must be new here!' (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Re:How convenient! (Score:5, Insightful)
"There was a time where the life expectancy was my current age"
There was a time when _average_ life expectancy was your current age, because average life expectancy is calculated on figures that include infant mortality, which was (and still is in some parts of the world) around 90% for much of our history. Those who survived to the age of twelve years did however live just as long as people do today.
"We are getting older"
We're getting older _on average_ because birth rates in nearly all Western countries (and some Eastern ones such as Japan) have dropped below the levels required to maintain historic age ratios, so their "native" populations are declining. This does not however mean that our typical maximum ages are longer than they were historically, hence the Old Testament passage which says that men (no figures are given for women) live 70 years, and some reach 80 or more, "but they have little joy of it", i.e. men who live more than 70 years were likely to suffer from age-related health problems, just as they do today.
"Also, our collective cognitive skill (as measured by IQ) is steadily increasing."
IQ tests only measure the ability to pass IQ tests. There is a correlation between that ability and intelligence, but it's nothing more than a correlation, so an increased IQ in a population over time could just as easily be due to changes in the tests themselves as changes in those being tested.
"IQ is influenced by environment to some degree"
But intelligence isn't, otherwise we'd be able to produce environments that turned every child into a genius (note here that I'm referring to true geniuses such as Newton and Einstein, not those who fall into an arbitrary statistical IQ region).
"I'd rather we go along with slow evolution until we can do some genetic engineering on ourselves."
There's no such thing as "slow" or "fast" evolution, because organisms only change permanently when doing so makes them better at surviving in their environment than those without the new traits. There's a distinct body of evolutionary theory (based on evidence) which suggests that it actually happens in distinct spurts rather than by the slow accumulation of changes, which if true, would mean that the next phase in human evolution will be a distinct "jump" whose nature cannot be predicted by our current knowledge of genetics.
"by using our hands and frontal lobes, we have this great ability to adapt our environment to us instead of the other way around."
And this may be the ultimate result of evolution, whose only goal is after all to perpetuate a bunch of genes. What better way of doing this is there than by evolving an organism that can first make its environment suit it, and later come up with ways of changing itself at will to suit new environments? So perhaps it's time for geneticists to consider human technology as being a part of evolution just like our genes are, because it's those genes which produced our technological capability, including the emerging science of genetic engineering which will eventually allow us to modify our genetic makeup in a single generation in ways that would take millions of years otherwise.
So perhaps we should stop thinking of human technology and evolution as being separate things, something that's IMO hypocritical when we treat the technology of other animals such as species of ant that farm crops or livestock as being an evolutionary adaptation.
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Ugh (Score:5, Funny)
"I for one welcome our old men banging young women overlords."
Keep on dreaming buddy.
Re:Ugh (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, like a young woman could be an overlord... (not counting if McCain wins and has a heart attack)
No, we're not counting a 44-year-old bit^H^H^H as a "young woman".
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Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Interesting)
And I don't know about "de-evolving", but for me it seems like people "with low IQ" (I don't know how to say it without being offensive) are breeding more than smart people, because usually smart people leave having children for later, or even not even have them, for the sake of their careers. I don't have anything against pursuing what you wanna do with your life, but I'd rater have more smart kids being born.
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Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your radical new ideas have already occurred to Mike Judge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or more accurately, his ideas have been studied/proposed since the early 1900s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but OTOH smart people have more opportunities to meet each other that they didn't have in the past. If you were born on a farm in 1900, chances are you'd stay there all your life, even if you had an IQ of 160. Now, most reasonably smart people have the opportunity to go to universities, and work in environments where they're going to meet other smart people. Of course, the children of smart parents tend to regress toward the mean, so genetics may play a lesser role in intelligence than you might think.
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Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
-its hard to measure 'smart' and there are multiple kinds of 'smart'
-'smart' parents may be poor at bringing up children properly
-'smart' may require certain things to 'trigger' it which differs as well as the age range etc
-many genetic traits we know about skip generations etc. This could be more complex than the simple stuff we know about now
-developmental problems could contribute; where infant health could inhibit brain development or indirectly impact it
-'smart' people could just be lucky and there are more than we realize (even they don't realize it) I'm not just suggesting environment, but also luck, and timing. There are plenty of physically capable people who just lack the diet, exercise, motivation, where there is clearly SOME genetics but its also other factors
-LONG TERM trends were what got us here
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Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Informative)
He's talking about the specific case where both parents are high intelligence. If it's recessive both must be II, so all the offspring will be.
It's similar to blue eyes (the simplified version, in practice it's a liitle more complicated).
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Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Informative)
The aptly titled book "The blank slate" by Steven Pinker is a really good overview of the research that has evolved our understanding of the nature and nurture debate.
There are genetic factors that influence intelligence, as well as environmental factors. The notion that everyone is born equal is unfortunately not true. (people are much more accepting that physical differences are genetic, but not mental...)
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Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Having good genes does give you an advantage in life - just like having a predisposition to creativity, good motor skills, not being born a psycho or any number of traits with genetic components. Having good parents (also an unearned privilege) is a massive advantage in life. Likewise being born a haemophiliac or with down syndrome is a disadvantage. However that is life, and you have to make the best of what you have.
As for your notion that this is how things should be all I can say too bad. Life is how it is, and pretending otherwise doesn't change anything. http://xkcd.com/240/ [xkcd.com]
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Re:Darwinian evolution? (Score:5, Funny)
Modern medicine may SAVE people that "should have" died and not passed on their genes.
Hell, I do that all the time when I slam on the brakes for idiot pedestrians. I feel like such a traitor to Darwin. I'm screwing up the whole system.
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Seems a little strange (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Seems a little strange (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Seems a little strange (Score:5, Insightful)
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I accept my fate (Score:5, Funny)
I accept my fate. I will propagate with younger women, if for nothing else than to save our species. :)
Right for the wrong reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Right for the wrong reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not devolving, there's no such thing. People will evolve to best adapt to the environment over a long period of time. If the best way to survive is have the "talking shit and lying out your ass" trait then you'll start to see it more. If rich & smart people aren't reproducing as much then apparently there is a level of stupidity and poverty required for reproduction. Though that is not necessarily a bad thing. Nature doesn't give a fuck about money or intellect, only the ability to survive the longest and create the largest amount of progeny.
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Evolution doesn't just "stop"... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The article is worth reading. (Score:5, Informative)
This is absolute rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
Idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Insightful)
This is absolute garbage science of the highest order and I'm surprised it is even mentioned here.
Idiotic (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution of a species only stops with extinction. Period.
He is almost right (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Problem is Natural Selection (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The Problem is Natural Selection (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not evolving because why? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [scienceblogs.com]
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.
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Re:Not evolving because why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Re:Dysgenics (Score:5, Insightful)
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