Recent Human Evolution May Have Been Driven By Self-Selection 448
Slur writes "The New York Times reports an insightful theory of Human evolution that gives credit for our accelerated evolution to the evolving brain. By virtue of our aesthetic and utilitarian preferences we ourselves have been responsible for molding the present human form and consciousness. Applied to other species we call it 'artificial selection,' but the new theory implies we did it all quite naturally, unconsciously, and that the exponential evolutionary acceleration we have achieved as a species in recent time is just what you'd expect. It also suggests that the current lull in our physical evolution is by 'choice' as well."
Re:I would like to see a EUGENICS program in the U (Score:3, Informative)
Re:sigh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ah awesome (Score:2, Informative)
The summary (Score:5, Informative)
Prior to this, evolutionary scientists assumed that the power of culture was so strong that it swamped evolutionary effects by essentially keeping people alive where they otherwise couldn't have. What this says is that no, that is not true, and that the human race evolved to adapt to new environments just like every other species. Essentially what this means is that our brains let us survive in new environments (for example, the arctic, which without knowledge of clothing and shelter would kill a human quick) and then those that did so evolved to adapt to the environment (for example, the way the Inuit tend to deal better with high fat diets like you'd expect living on seals.) This wasn't by any sort of choice. This was because the ancient Inuit who had cholesterol problems all died off.
This is, of course, all something that happened in the past. We aren't entering any new environments, but even if we were, the death rate has become so amazingly low, that any sort of evolution is hard to imagine. Evolutionary works fastest when lots of people are dying.
The name for selection that depends on choice is "sexual selection" and it is found in many, many species and was recognized from the beginning. The extent this happened in humans is unknown. This article says nothing about that.
Nazis vs Darwin (Score:5, Informative)
However, this is ridiculous, because in the theory of natural selection, fitness is defined by survival (more accurately, propagation of one's genes). So it doesn't have to be "enforced"--it happens automatically. So eugenics is actually an attempt to override evolution by applying principles of selective breeding (which of course long predate Darwin) in order to prevent those who are the fittest in an evolutionary sense from predominating. This is probably why the Nazi's banned "Darwinism." [pandasthumb.org]--because an understanding of evolution undermines the Nazi's entire "master race" doctrine.
Re:Actually...No. (Score:3, Informative)
This is part of one of the major misunderstandings of how the evolutionary process works. The survivors aren't necesssrily the ones with the most offspring. If this were true, every species would turn out as many children as they possibly can. But there are thousands of known species that survive quite well with a low rate of reproduction. We're one of them.
The basic explanation in our case is fairly straightforward: One of our oddities is that we're primates, and we're a top-level predator. Top-level predators generally have very low reproduction rates. A good predator can't afford to have too many children, because then you wipe out the prey population, and everyone starves. Our ancestors were competing primarily with species like lions and hyenas, not with ants and butterflies. Like the lions and hyenas, the humans that survived were the ones that produced a small number of strong, healthy, and well-educated children. The other groups of humans that overpopulated their area wiped out the prey, and had a low-protein diet that left them weak and hungry. They were vulnerable to the clan in the next valley that had a few strong children than knew how to use their high-tech killing tools.
Today, the upper classes, which also are usually the best educated, maintain that pattern of having few children, and educating them well. In particular, the upper classes teach their children how to control and live off the lower classes, who are encouraged to breed and overpopulate, to provide a supply of workers that are barely getting by.
The human survival strategy is for a breeding population to have only slightly more than 2 children per female. Those children are trained to run things in the next generation. People who don't understand this and believe that having lots of children is nature's best survival strategy are the ones that the educated population will continue to prey on. That strategy works for mice; it doesn't work for humans.
Re:Probably that's how it REALLY worked (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, what? Mortality is still disproportionately higher in the lower classes. Everywhere on the globe. And that shows not the slightest sign of changing. As a matter of fact I'd be willing to define "classes" along the lines of life expectancy. How else would you do that? Even the lowest hobo can own a DVD player these days. But he can't afford health insurance...
Absolutely nothing whatsoever has changed since the 20th century. The same atrocities are committed right this moment by the same power-hungry tyrants all over the planet for the same reasons.
I do not know where you get the delusion that today is somehow different from the rest of history, but to the people 100 years from now you will just be one of these folks back there in the past and they will not perceive any more of a change in conditions at the turn of the 21st century than we perceive one today at the turn of the 20th.
Re:Probably that's how it REALLY worked (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, right, the USA. In Europe everyone gets healthcare, so sometimes I forget that somewhere an advanced society would leave its less fortunate members just die, out of no other reason than greed. Thanks for the correction.
A) Not on the same scale, buddy. And,
If you look some 2000-3000 years back, going and enslaving your neighbours and treating them like in the nazi slave-labour camps was a lot more common. Some greek city states had slaves as a third of their population.
And while again we remember the nicer parts -- e.g., the clerk or home servant slaves that were freed later by the rich Romans in Rome itself -- the same Roman society used slaves elsewhere as just a long death sentence. The cost of keeping buying new slaves to replace the dead ones, was an integral part of the cost of business for, say, mines. Or the same rich Romans let slaves starve in Sicily so they could export more grain to Rome. There was at least one slave revolt motivated literally by hunger.
So basically wake me up when you have 100,000,000 people in Guantanamo. That's when you'll have the same extent of the problem.
B) Now at least the common people tend to be horrified about it. In times past they actually were part of the problem. The very fact that you seem pissed off and disillusioned about it, is actually a sign of how much we progressed.
If you look as little as, say, 1000 years back in time, the medieval communes (towns whose citizens swore to stand together for their rights against the noble of the land) found it perfectly ok that, when they were wronged grievously by a noble, they'd go kill the noble's peasants. Or burn his crops so, again, then some peasants would starve.
We're not talking about power hungry tyrants. We're talking about ordinary citizens who found it perfectly normal to go kill some peasants to get their point across.
Or if you look farther back in time, you see such examples as Sparta. A relatively small city held a much larger population of hellots in line by sheer terror. Kids' graduation to adult consisted of being sent to terrorize and kill a few hellots for sport and training.
Basically, nowadays it may be the sport of kings, but back then it was a mass sport. That's already some progress.
That's not what I meant, though (Score:5, Informative)
I meant in the sense where predator "selects" the prey. Rabbits evolve to be faster, because the fox kills the slow ones. Gazelles get to be fit and have a working immune system because even the slightest illness is disproportionately more fatal: you get to be eaten by a lion if you're under the weather enough to be slower. Etc.
What I'm saying here is that humans were both predator and prey lately. And inherently both predator and prey evolved at the same rate. The more fit humans who evolved as prey (e.g., the survivors of enemy raids), some of them were then the predators in the next cycle. That's one hell of an evolutionary pressure.
That said, you're probably right that culture played some part too. As I was saying, the ones that managed to climb up the social pyramid, did get a massive survival advantage. I can see how culture would play a part in that.
Re:Probably that's how it REALLY worked (Score:2, Informative)
You also misunderstand "beauty" and imply that sexual selection says that aesthetic judgements of attractiveness will be reflected in evolution. It's nearly the opposite: what tends to be perceived as beauty is the visible suitability of an individual to successfully reproduce. What we see as sexiness is generally the outward signs of a reproductively healthy individual. Altruism also makes sense in those lights: an altruistic man conveys to a woman that he's likely to take care of the children he has with her. And the mere fact that he has the ability to be generous tells her he's capable of generating a surplus above his basic needs.
Re:Probably that's how it REALLY worked (Score:4, Informative)
Also, the Aztecs were decidedly stone age, and were some of the most bloodthirsty people.
American Indian tribes too were only peaceful and nature-loving in romanticized revisionism. The most peaceful tribes there raided their neighbours only about once a year, on the average.
Now I'm not saying that warfare was already a major factor of evolution yet. Just that it already existed.