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."
Who needs evolution with technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Broken circularity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Heard on the evolutionary kickball field... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who needs evolution with technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:i was just arguing with some guy (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize this is how evolution works right? That's EXACTLY what every other complex organism does.
Honestly, what is the benefit to our species as a whole to continue to create genetically wrong humans, that can't survive without depending on society the rest of their life? Other animals leave the unfittest behind because otherwise the ENTIRE group will perish. Empathy in any other species would spell the end of that species.
Thank you (Score:3, Insightful)
You could have wasted our time but all it took was a 7 word comment and a three word sig. Ten words.
Re:i was just arguing with some guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution works by *differential* reproductive success. This does not require in any way that we leave the "unfit" out in the snow. Their own genetic disadvantages will see to it that they simply leave fewer offspring.
By intervening directly (the "leave them out in the snow" school) you run the very significant risk that you mistakenly identify as "unfit" individuals whose genomes contain significant survival advantages that would otherwise be passed on in the gene pool.
IOW, not being omniscient, people are likely to identify as "unfit" individuals who they simply don't like, feel threatened by, etc., and prevent from reproducing people who are, in fact, carriers of genes with significant survival value.
It's called "natural selection" for a reason: the inevitable expression of each individual's genome will of necessity result in some individuals leaving more offspring than others. These individuals are, *by definition* the fittest. No need to intervene - it's already taken care of.
Note that in artificial selection, breeders can only select for heritable traits that they observe. In the process they often end up with breeds that carry significant deleterious traits because the breeders were not aware that they were inadvertently selecting for these as well.
It all comes down to humility about our lack of omniscience. Anything short of a complete understanding of all the complexity of the human genome, epigenetics, and how these interact with various past, present and yes, even future environments, will lead to the unintended, but potentially disastrous reduction of variation and loss of genes of significant fitness.
The system (natural selection) works well precisely because there is nothing driving it except the objective reality of navigating the myriad vagaries of life successfully to the goal (from evolution's standpoint) of reproducing. Let's not pretend that we understand all of it fully and interfere with it.
Re:i was just arguing with some guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me?
How about the geniuses with perfectly sound minds but unsound bodies? Like Stephen Hawking?
Are you saying the only value humans have is their ability to survive independently of each other? That children who cannot hunt down a buffalo without the help of a parent, or even a peer, is useless? Yet what is cooperation to achieve things greater than an individual (the space shuttle, the pyramids, the aqueducts of Rome, raising a single child) except "depending on society for the rest of their life"?
Perfectly FIT people depend on society their whole lives! Can you generate your own electricity, recycle your own trash, smelt your own steel, craft your own furniture, etc?
So even genetically wrong people can offer things, such as their minds, their voices, their arts, etc, to humanity. On top of that, their survival broadens our genepool; what if the AIDs resistance virus lies in a mildly autistic child? Or the resistance to the next bird flu pandemic lies in a mildly retarded child?
The environment always changes, tech does nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Eugenics doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
And besides, evolutionarly speaking, life evolves by trying new and weird things. Maybe fat and ugly is the next phase in human evolution. Do you know? Do you think anyone knows enough to direct human evolution? Then shut up.
Oh, and there's the fact that you'd have to be one immoral bastard to decide that certain groups arn't allowed to have kids.
Re:Physical lull. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who needs evolution with technology (Score:4, Insightful)
However, mental and social evolution continues.
Any further biological evolution of humans will only be on the "resistance to disease" level, and that which we do ourselves. Transhumanists are gonna love this news. Augmentation's always getting closer.
Re:O rly. Humans are evolving? (Score:2, Insightful)
Medical science kills natural selection (Score:5, Insightful)
Nature determines that weak and premature infants should die, yet they are kept alive and become adults. Nature determines that some adults should not be breeding, yet fertility drugs override this. Nature determines that various people should die by heart failure etc, but drugs keep them alive.
Sure, these are all good from the emotional point of view of keeping people alive and making childless couples happy etc, but does it really help the human gene pool? Perhaps Mother Nature had a good reason to kill off a weak child or prevent that infertile couple from breeding. The long term impacts can only be known in a few generations.
Re:Eugenics (Score:4, Insightful)
The root of the problem is that someone really has to know what traits are going to be best for the entire species, otherwise they're just extinguishing genetic diversity in pursuit of a goal which may turn out to be a stupid goal.
There is an economic equivalent to eugenics; communism. The idea there is that the government is smart enough to be able to decide what everyone should be producing and what everything should cost. It's an utter disaster...Whenever you add free market reforms to a communist country you can watch their economies go nuts.
The reason for this is simple. Having a few thousand people making decisions about what will benefit millions doesn't work as well as all those millions making those decisions about what will benefit themselves...No matter how smart or well informed that minority is, they can't be reliably informed about the minutiae of every member of the majorities' positive and negative qualities.
What is dating but a process by which you weed out people whom you believe to be inferior to share your genes with? It's a long term research project carried out by literally billions of people, and you really think that a few people with an idea of what the "perfect" person will be like can do it better? That's some serious arrogance.
Re:you seem to lack human empathy (Score:5, Insightful)
Empathy so extreme that it hurts society, such as allocating resources away from growing our numbers to extending the lifespans of the severely disabled is NOT evolutionary altruistic.
Actually...No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Couple that with a vastly increased species population, representing a staggering amount of genetic diversity, I have no problem believing that we're still evolving, and indeed, that the rate may very well have increased.
Re:Who needs evolution with technology (Score:5, Insightful)
We are changed our tools, while our tools are changing us. Granted, our tools are changing at a much faster rate...
Re:sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that college students spend years studying the scientific discoveries of men who have been dead for centuries is something of a testament to that. Much of what we know about math, physics, chemistry, and philosophy was explained by the likes of Euler, Newton, and Descartes.
Not to say we haven't come a long way since then, but stop and think about that -- much of what your average highschool graduate has learned has been public knowledge for centuries.
Re:you seem to lack human empathy (Score:3, Insightful)
What if the severely disabled (with the ability and the inclination to reproduce) have the genes for AIDs resistance? Bird-flu resistance?
You don't know a priori which genes are important until a selective pressure makes them important. Early optimization is a bad choice in that case. It is a question of degree; how disabled is too disabled?
Can we end this BS now? (Score:1, Insightful)
And don't get too smug. Soon it will be all the humans slipping back. I've seen this coming for 20 years. Nature has no use for exceptional brains, beyond knowing how to feed yourself and stay alive long enough to ejaculate or spew out a kid, nature doesn't give a damn.
Yes, it's an awful truth, but face it anyway.
Re:Medical science kills natural selection (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy [wikipedia.org]
Re:The environment always changes, tech does nothi (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is, there are equal numbers for the sexes. Girls like tall guys, so attractive girls will get the tall ones. Unattractive ones will get the short ones. Since there are as many women as men, everyone finds someone to mate with even if they aren't ideal. Since everyone breeds successfully, we *won't* get taller, though you might see a flatting of the bell curve of men think tall women are attractive. There is no "survival of the fittest" as everyone, tall or otherwise, survives to breed.
As long as humans a serial monogamists, this is the way it would go. For animals that are polygamous, it would happen as you say.
Re:Medical science kills natural selection (Score:3, Insightful)
A huge evolution experiment is sadly taking place in Africa, with the Aids epidemic.
The flu pandemic of 1918 was a significant evolutionary event, estimated deaths of up to 40 million people worldwide. http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/ [stanford.edu]
The next big flu pandemic will also cause evolutionary change. Read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond for many examples of pandemics in recent history - including the 95% wipeout of North and South American natives who had never been previously exposed to the many diseases brought over from Europe and Asia.
If we end up with something like Aids or SARS that spreads from a simple sneeze, then we just might find that natural selection favours a society completely isolated from air travel.
The individual cases you mention in a rich western society are just a noise floor in the bigger picture.
Re:The environment always changes, tech does nothi (Score:1, Insightful)
My 27 years of life without sex or even a partner seems to show a flaw in your model. And I'm above average height and attractiveness. Granted, I've got a lot of life left to go, but the safe bet would be on things not changing for me any time soon--if ever. I suppose I'm also just one case, and statistically insignificant, but you're using words like "everyone" and since I'm part of everyone...
Re:Eugenics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The environment always changes, tech does nothi (Score:3, Insightful)
My 27 years of life without sex or even a partner seems to show a flaw in your model. [...] I suppose I'm also just one case, and statistically insignificant, but you're using words like "everyone" and since I'm part of everyone...
There are several social factors at work, here:
1) Less financial pressure to look for a mate, since people can afford living without a family. You don't necessarily need a partner or children to care for you when you're old. (Although it would probably be nice to have someone who'd visit you...) Also, women do not depend on marriage to survive anymore.
2) Less social pressure to seek a mate, since it's become socially acceptable to be single for both men and women.
Both #1 and #2 contribute to a shrinking market of potential mates, since people have less reason to look for one in the first place, and even if they do they'll be more discriminating, since their survival doesn't depend on finding a partner.
3) Less opportunities to meet people. Imagine the world before TV: If you didn't want books or crafts to be your only source of entertainment in your spare time, you had to go outside and meet living, breathing people. With TV, your home offers more entertainment than any theatre, but without the fellow audience. (Actually, the internet may lessen this effect, since it's obviously a very social medium, although without actual physical presence.)
4) More ways to spend your time alone. This is closely related to #3: With more solo activities available, shy people will have more ways to avoid human contact, thus they'll have less opportunities to develop their social skills and overcome their shyness. Again, social contacts via the internet might counter that effect to a certain extent.
With relationships being much more optional than ever before, the natural advantage of sociable people is amplified, and quieter, more reclusive people are less likely to find a mate. However IMHO, this state would need to stay like that for quite awhile in order to have any significant evulutionary impact, especially since all of this only applies to societys that are roughly similar to our western culture, of course. I have no idea how things work in other cultural regions.
genetics, evolution, and eugenics (Score:3, Insightful)
After Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, people just took what they were doing before and rephrased it as pseudoscience. Now you have Hovind and other creationists saying that the eugenics crowd were motivated by evolutionary theory. The movement had much less to do with evolution than it did Mendelian genetics--does that mean genetics is a fraud? Does the idea of inheritance lead inexorably to Nazi eugenics experiments?
Or can we safely say that people have always been tempted, here and there, to wipe out anyone whose existence they found distasteful, and they'll tack their bigotry onto any pseudo-science they can just to lend their efforts a patina of legitimacy?
Re:Eugenics (Score:4, Insightful)
Longevity is an evolutionary dead end.
Physical immortality is easy. Bacteria figured it out. That's why they're still bacteria.
If you keep hardware around for too long, it'll be yesterdays hardware very quickly. And thus be obsoleted by tomorrows hardware.
Planned obsolescence of hardware keeps the means of production busy and allows for constant incremental improvements to the layout of the product.
Re:Eugenics (Score:2, Insightful)
True, but I wouldn't mind being immortal and obsolete.
Re:Probably that's how it REALLY worked (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, something seems to have touched a nerve there. So, you don't like the thought about being nice as a selective force? No problem.
Your reasoning isn't entirely wrong; but then again it isn't entirely true either. You seem to want to make evolution something that only favours violence and selfishness, which is a rather one-sided view of the world. I haven't read this particular article, but I am familiar with this topic - it isn't as if this is an entirely new idea.
What is evolution really, when you think about it? One component is the fact that in each generation of organisms, some will survive and have descendants and some won't. It is worth remembering that you don't have to be particularly 'fit' in any way in order to produce desendants, you may just be lucky. The thing about 'fitness' only comes in when you look at it statistically - over time, and over a large population, it makes sense to say that the ones that kept surviving and reproducing had traits that made them more 'fit for survival'. This also means is that at any given point in time there is likely to be a proportion of traits in the population that are not advantageous, just to make that point clear.
Another factor that is worth keeping in mind is that the environment is not something seperate from the population. In the case of human evolution this becomes especially important as our numbers grow; it is not surprising to see that genes that influence our social abilities seem to have evolved rapidly since we began to live in larger communities than the typical family groups we see with other primates. Another area where our sheer force in numbers has been important is in diseases; the more people and the close they live together, the more they will contaminate their environment and the more they will pass on infections etc, so we are under a large pressure when it comes to evolving resistence against infections.
The examples you mention, on the other hand, don't seem to make too much sense. Humans are apes; our great advantage has been adaptability; our teeth and gut are general purpose, we are able to both walk and climb, and we have learned to work together - and it is that cooperative ability that has been our greatest asset, and it is probably also the single greatest factor contributing to the evolution of our intelligence. It has also made us the most efficient hunters on the planet - quite well done for a species that is not a predator.
As for what you call 'bogus shiny-happy fairy-tales' - I assume you mean the idea that things like beauty and altruism play a role in evolution. Well, I'm sorry to upset your view on the world, but they do. Altruism is still one of the things we don't entirely understand from an evolutionary point of view, but we can see it happen, even amongst chimpanzees; ie. it is a FACT. Beauty, on the other hand is not difficult to understand - beautiful people are people who look healthy (ie. likelier to produce good offspring), whose facial expressions are mostly kind (probably better at bringing up succesful offspring) etc etc. Our ide of beauty is a result of evolution and therefore important in evolution. The same goes for our morals - our moral rules are the ones that have been valuable for our survival as species.
You refer to some historical facts or factoids about the Romans etc. However, our written history doesn't stretch much more than about 5000 years, and large scale evolution doesn't happen quite as fast as that, which tends to invalidate your arguments. You may not like the idea that physical beauty is important, so you try paint an ugly picture of mankind; yes, even an ugly man or woman can have sex and thus offspring, but looks are after all only one factor in this - an ugly person may have other traits that make him/her very attractive, such as a caring personality, or high social intelligence. But physical beauty is an important factor f
Re:Eugenics (Score:3, Insightful)
Hitler used the state to promote his own personal theories of eugenics. That's "arbitrary" selection, not "natural" selection.
"Libertarians . . . prefer to blur the distinction between Nazism and Communism."
If that's true, I think the primary reason would be that both of those systems are fundamentally based on the supreme power of the state and(typically brutal) suppression of the individual. The core belief of Libertarianism is limiting the power of the state and promoting the freedom of the individual.
"the Commies were despised by the Nazis exactly because of the refusal to embrace survival of the fittest"
That's completely ridiculous. You're suggesting that Hitler attacked Russia because Communism didn't include an appropriate amount of social Darwinism? The fact is that Hitler, again based on his PERSONAL and ARBITRARY theories of genetic superiority, viewed the Slavs as an inferior people. He planned on military conquest and large scale ethnic cleansing in order to create a larger Germany populated by his "master race". That's not "Darwinistic" in any sense of the word.
If you want to do a hatchet job on Libertarians, try something a little less convoluted than Libertarians==Nazis and Atlas_Shrugged==Mein_Kampf.