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Humans haven't stopped evolving

harvardmagazine.com

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Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#131

Post by vinceguidry »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #130
gweinberg wrote: post #118

"Most research during the past two decades hinted that human evolution has largely slowed or changed so subtly that existing tools couldn’t detect it; evidence seemed to suggest that civilization put humans beyond the reach of natural selection." There has never been the slightest shred of evidence to that effect, anywhere, ever.

It's logical. Survival of the fittest was initially driven by the environment; then we formed civilizations, and culture influenced what "fittest" was. Now we have technology that defines the "fittest" further. The urban fittest of the future could end up being people succesful enough to pay for advanced medicine. Evolution still happens when creatures reproduce at different ratios, but civilization and tech allows p…

I love it. Claim gets made, it's pointed out that there's no evidence for said claim, claim gets justified anyway with some version of "it's logical / rational / stands to reason."

All it amounts to is 'sounds good to me'.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#132

Post by aldonius »

jiggawatts wrote: post #58
Terr_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > just an elaborate mating ritual. You might find the book Blindsight interesting, since... Well, to avoid spoilers, I'll just say the story doesn't put our concept of intelligence on the usual top-of-creation pedestal.

Read it twice already! Something I noted -- trying to avoid spoilers here -- is that Rorschach is awfully similar to LLMs, but the book pre-dates ChatGPT by several years, which I feel says everything you need to know about how well the author foresaw the future.

Mmm, yes, some real parallels between Blindsight's conception of consciousness and LLM chain-of-thought reasoning.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#133

Post by cubefox »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #110
cubefox wrote: post #73

The most terrifying evolutionary trend is that nowadays fertility is negatively correlated with intelligence. That is, there is a strong selective pressure for humans to become dumber.

Maybe AI will fix this. We'll all be out of work, surviving off our own wits, and ability to survive and thrive will go back to being based on things we judge as desirable.

I don't see how this would fix IQ decline.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#134

Post by inigyou »

nozzlegear wrote: post #125
inigyou wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't talk to them, so we don't know how they feel, so of course they don't have any known internal feelings. If you observed humans from a distance in their natural habitat for a while you probably also wouldn't find any gender.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here, you seem to be repeating my point that humans are the only animals we know of with genders. Am I misunderstanding?

Direct quote:

> Humans are the only mammals with genders at all.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#135

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #129
ninthcat wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution happens even without any selection pressures, for example with genetic drift.

That requires isolated populations and we don’t really have that anymore.

Global travel has no doubt caused the gene pool to become more homogenous, but yet there are still clear differences between people from many parts of the world.

Isolation (really meaning tendency not to inter-breed) doesn't have to be physical - it can be cultural too, and it seems this isn't limited to humans - many animal species that are on the cusp of speciation (lions/tigers, horses/donkeys, etc) share the same habitat and are just choosing to avoid each other.

In any case, "isolated" populations are only necessary for speciation, not for evolution. Even a single drifting gene pool is going to evolve to adapt to the changing environment, since individuals will still differ genetically. Whatever the environment throws at you will cause some individuals to do better than others (e.g. you survived the Ebola outbreak, others didn't), and these fitter genetics will then spread in the gene pool.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#136

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

cubefox wrote: post #133
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe AI will fix this. We'll all be out of work, surviving off our own wits, and ability to survive and thrive will go back to being based on things we judge as desirable.

I don't see how this would fix IQ decline.

I'm half joking, but what I meant was that self-sufficiency seems to be more demanding than many jobs, so success might be more dependent on characteristics that used to be more important in the past, and got us to where we are today.

On reconsideration, it's not clear how much of our increase in intelligence over the last few million years is due to the greater success of more intelligent individuals, or rather the greater success of more collectively intelligent populations, based on language and communication etc.

Again, half-joking, but it's interesting to consider if AI as an "intelligence leveler" could eventually have an effect. If we all have access to super-intelligence, then does our own individual intelligence matter that much? You could even speculate that the invention of AI puts a cap on the intelligence of a species since then perhaps the success of the species depends more on the intelligence of the AI, not of the species itself.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#137

Post by thrance »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #122
thrance wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you just assume there are genes that predict "not wanting children"? It's happening uniformly all around the world, and is much better predicted by things like wealth and freedom than anything else: cultural reasons, not heredity.

I think you've misunderstood my point. To clarify, there was strong selection pressure in the past to "make sex desirable" (and obviously I'm oversimplifying a lot here, but the premise still holds) because that was enough to ensure that passing on your genes was the result a large percentage of the time. Now, though, birth control has broken that connection between "having sex" and "making babies", so now "making se…

I think my point still stands? For selective pressure to select anything, there has to be preexisting genes that predict how much someone wants kids. And again, cultural and material factors are so much more important than genetic ones on the matter, that I don't believe the latter has any quantifiable effect.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#138

Post by cubefox »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #136
cubefox wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this would fix IQ decline.

I'm half joking, but what I meant was that self-sufficiency seems to be more demanding than many jobs, so success might be more dependent on characteristics that used to be more important in the past, and got us to where we are today. On reconsideration, it's not clear how much of our increase in intelligence over the last few million years is due to the greater success of more intelligent individuals, or rather the…

I think our intelligence is crucial to make sure that we won't get replaced by AI.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#139

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

nobody9999 wrote: post #126
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, seems like either a clickbait title, or maybe they believe their readership is so misinformed as to believe that human evolution could and has stopped. I'd not be surprised if, especially in the US, a large percentage of the public does actually believe this.

>Yeah, seems like either a clickbait title, or maybe they believe their readership is so misinformed as to believe that human evolution could and has stopped. I'd not be surprised if, especially in the US, a large percentage of the public does actually believe this. When the belief is that of "creationism"[0], it's not so far to go to reject evidence of, well, anything that runs counter to the narrative espoused by a…

Sure the US only comprises 5% of the global population, so insignificant in terms of global thought trends. I only mentioned the US since this is an American magazine and the title is probably chosen to appeal to an assumed mostly American readership.

I was referring to scientific illiteracy/denial rather than creationists (who don't believe we're the product of evolution in the first place).

I don't think Hanlon's Razor applies here. The author of a Harvard Magazine article is unlikely to be stupid, especially given the article in question, nor can choosing a clickbait title be considered as "malice". One can wonder what was the exact thought process in coming up with the title - perhaps more charitably they just thought that many people might think that human evolution is slowing, if not actually stopped, or maybe there really wasn't much thought put into it at all !

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#140

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

cubefox wrote: post #138
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm half joking, but what I meant was that self-sufficiency seems to be more demanding than many jobs, so success might be more dependent on characteristics that used to be more important in the past, and got us to where we are today. On reconsideration, it's not clear how much of our increase in intelligence over the last few million years is due to the greater success of more intelligent individuals, or rather the…

I think our intelligence is crucial to make sure that we won't get replaced by AI.

Yes, but we seem hell bent on creating AI that is smarter than ourselves, and putting it into embodied robotic form as well - humanoid robots, automated factories, AI driven cars and trucks, autonomous fighter planes...

With AI already able to hack into our human-written computer systems, now being trusted to write much of the new code itself(!), it certainly doesn't take a Sci-Fi fantasy to predict an AI agent wreaking major damage or taking control over some system/factory it was able to hack into, in pursuit of the goals it was given.

It really would not be surprising to discover that, even today, some vibe coded system has an unrequested backdoor built into it, that the agent thought (without malice) it might be useful to add.

Right now we truly are building paperclip maximizers. Idiot-savant RL-trained goal-seekers that we're hoping can be controlled via quaint means such as prompts and guardrails.

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