141–145 of 145 posts
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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.
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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'.
For example, today we can sit for hours and thrive, while a hunter-gatherer or farmer would starve sitting around all day. Our bodies protest, but we manage to reproduce, and treat or palliate the ailments that come with sedentarism. We surely are evolving to better tolerate sedentarism, but it's slowed down because medicine allow the unfit to sedentarism to survive and reproduce instead of dying early.
You can see the delay of evolution, allowing the biologically unfit to reproduce, at any hospital. Medicine saves or prolongs more lives than ever, and death is the second driving force of evolution. Stephen Hawkins, for example, was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live, and despite that he had three descendants years after. He couldn't do physical work, but could do great mental work, which our society values.
You can correctly argue that our civilization is part of the environment, though. In that case, natural evolution isn't slowing down, it's just going in a different direction than it used to.
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Birth control is older than the Bible[1], it just wasn't as effective. Humanity as a whole was very aware how babies come to be. Ways to have fun without coitus aren't a recent invention either. Human reproduction and raising children is an unusually taxing, time-, and resource-intensive process, which is why we've applied our considerable intellect to plan for that since forever. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi…
I've read that wikipedia article, and I got the impression that to say that birth control just wasn't as effective is an understatement. One more my finding: the idea of planning your family is relatively modern: Malthusians promoted it widely. It doesn't mean people were not thinking along these lines before, but our widespread understanding of how important it is is mostly a modern phenomena. Like the idea to postp…
Weren't these more about "human population planning"?
> the idea of planning your family is relatively modern
The term "family planning" is. The general concept is not, which is why we have two thousand year old papyrus talking about birth control.
Note that at no point I used the word "family" - because just our modern understanding of a family will muddy any attempt to compare to historical fact.
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Sorry, you're claiming that people who lived in a desolate tundra 40k years ago are the same as you and me. Can you be more specific? There's both a hardware and firmware element to this. Perhaps the hardware element is transferable.
The fondamental thing here is that humans 40k years ago could live in the toundra because we can live in the toundra today, and they had a similar behaviour to ours. So they made clothes and fires for the cold, and weapons for hunting the local fauna, just like we do. And they avoided actually desolate areas because they could not live without food. That's why the colonisation of colder areas happened at about the ti…
No we can't. Have you been the tundra? You can't survive there on your own without technology. These people could.
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The fondamental thing here is that humans 40k years ago could live in the toundra because we can live in the toundra today, and they had a similar behaviour to ours. So they made clothes and fires for the cold, and weapons for hunting the local fauna, just like we do. And they avoided actually desolate areas because they could not live without food. That's why the colonisation of colder areas happened at about the ti…
>because we can live in the toundra today No we can't. Have you been the tundra? You can't survive there on your own without technology. These people could.
Archaeologists find blade tools in the Caucasus from 300,000 years ago, and blades and awls were made in Southern Africa during a very cold phase 75,000 years ago.
Northern China had blade tools from 40,000 years ago, bone awls from 35,000 years ago and eyed needles from 30,000 years ago.
In Europe, eyed needles accompanied Homo sapiens toward the coldest part of the last glacial cycle, the last glacial maximum, around 22,000 years ago.
~ https://phys.org/news/2026-03-ancient-needles-awls-survival-...