Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
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Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#2Talking about how we are going to evolve in the next thousands of years is a waste of time. Artificial interference is going to kick in long before that. I believe we will be very different 300 years from now.
Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#3I hate to sound unimpressed, but does biological evolution strike anyone else as rather irrelevant, now? I doubt we will be held hostage by these mortal coils for much longer.
Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#4At the rate biological research is progressing, anything beyond this century is impossible. In a couple of centuries, we'll have replaced carbon with silicon in our bodies and be living a couple millennia.
Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#5It seems to me that natural selection is, for the most part, broken now for humans. Intelligence and other positive characteristics don't seem to get involved in whether they have surviving offspring today the way I imagine it did a few thousand years ago. Is it true that natural selection for humans is mostly dead? Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but it's something that interests and concerns me.
Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#6I hate to sound unimpressed, but does biological evolution strike anyone else as rather irrelevant, now? I doubt we will be held hostage by these mortal coils for much longer.
Anyone that thinks their smartphone and self driving car will in any way impact the evolutionary pressures is very self deluded. Evolution will act on our species' population for many hundreds of centuries before any significant impact from technology is seen.
Also I am not sure you understand what "mortal coil" means:
Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#7It seems to me that natural selection is, for the most part, broken now for humans. Intelligence and other positive characteristics don't seem to get involved in whether they have surviving offspring today the way I imagine it did a few thousand years ago. Is it true that natural selection for humans is mostly dead? Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but it's something that interests and concerns me.
Just because Natural Selection(tm) isn't selecting for attributes that you regard as important doesn't mean it's dead. What it takes to have a better chance of survival now might be different than it was decades/centuries/millennia ago.
If "having what it takes to climb the corporate ladder" is what gives your offspring a better chance of survival, then that is what is being selected for.
Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#8I hate to sound unimpressed, but does biological evolution strike anyone else as rather irrelevant, now? I doubt we will be held hostage by these mortal coils for much longer.
Anyone that thinks their smartphone and self driving car will in any way impact the evolutionary pressures is very self deluded. Evolution will act on our species' population for many hundreds of centuries before any significant impact from technology is seen. Also I am not sure you understand what "mortal coil" means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_coil
> Evolution will act on our species' population for many hundreds of centuries before any significant impact from technology is seen.
You don't think that, say, genetic engineering will change the genome? I'm betting we'll be primarily artificially designed by the end of the century.
Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#9Talking about how we are going to evolve in the next thousands of years is a waste of time. Artificial interference is going to kick in long before that. I believe we will be very different 300 years from now.
> Artificial interference is going to kick in long
> before that
Re: Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
#10It seems to me that natural selection is, for the most part, broken now for humans. Intelligence and other positive characteristics don't seem to get involved in whether they have surviving offspring today the way I imagine it did a few thousand years ago. Is it true that natural selection for humans is mostly dead? Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but it's something that interests and concerns me.
I can't stress enough how important it is to read Darwin's original work. Contemporary understanding of evolution outside of academia is deeply flawed.
There are two forces at work in evolution. Natural selection (survival of the fittest) and sexual selection (reproduction of the sexiest). Out of the two, natural selection is by far the weaker force.
> Intelligence and other positive characteristics don't seem to get involved in whether they have surviving offspring today the way I imagine it did a few thousand years ago.
You're thinking very narrowly in the "survival of the fittest" mode.
You're ignoring sexual selection entirely.
It doesn't matter how hot, strong, or brilliant you are, if you have zero kids, from an evolutionary perspective ... it's the same as if you were killed and eaten by some wild animal.
And, of course, the quality of your offspring matters as well and is determined by mate choice.
There's plenty of evolutionary pressure around today. Actually, I would say it's far more extreme today than ever before, especially in our urban areas.