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Humans haven't stopped evolving

harvardmagazine.com

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Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#51

Post by Terr_ »

jiggawatts wrote: post #49

It is well established that evolution is driven not only by fitness in the trivial sense of "survival or death", but in large part by mate selection. (Disclaimer: The rest is a personal theory with zero scientific support.) This begs the question: selection based on what ? In many bird species it is the complexity of the male's song, or the colourful beauty of his feathers. There are "dances" and courtship rituals in…

> > 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.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#53

Post by PretzelPirate »

gblargg wrote: post #31
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #18

Given that fertility rates are currently plummeting worldwide, the principles of natural selection would dictate that humans are currently undergoing very high selection pressure for specific traits. Basically, any genetic trait that causes people today to think "You know, I think I'm going to remain childfree" is specifically selected against, and any trait that causes people to want more children will be selected f…

[flagged]

I'm almost 40 and never wanted kids. As a kid, everyone would say things in the context of "when you have kids of your own..." and I always knew that I didn't want them.

If I lived in a world without reliable birth control, I may have ended up with kids I didn't want, but I'm lucky that I have other options.

Kids shouldn't be raised by people who don't want them, and not everyone is born with the biological drive to reproduce.

Your view that [most] people are born wanting kids may be biased from societal pressure and a historical lack of options.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#54

Post by Jach »

delichon wrote: post #9
derektank wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have definitely run into the belief that humans aren’t evolving anymore (though not among scientists). I think people with an incomplete understanding of evolution look around, see most human beings survive to adulthood, and assume that there must be no more evolutionary pressures on us (perhaps with the phrase “survival of the fittest” tinging around inside their head). I honestly don’t blame anyone who hasn’t bee…

There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Spice of Life", 2000 Gould was an evolutionary biologist and Harvard professor, and one of the most prominent popularizers of evolution since Darwin, but somehow believed that it doesn't apply to modern humans.

One should not read or pay much attention to anything Gould wrote or said. (http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html) The amount of damage Gould has done offsets any positives. It's not just even being wrong, indeed you can charitably read that quote as being almost correct (the phrase is "anatomically modern human"); the worst thing he's done is probably to mischaracterize the rest of the field as scientists believing things they don't (or haven't for many decades before he ever tried to address them).

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#55

Post by skissane »

dachris wrote: post #37
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #18

Given that fertility rates are currently plummeting worldwide, the principles of natural selection would dictate that humans are currently undergoing very high selection pressure for specific traits. Basically, any genetic trait that causes people today to think "You know, I think I'm going to remain childfree" is specifically selected against, and any trait that causes people to want more children will be selected f…

True, and here's an interesting twist: as you wrote, this is mainly happening due to "I think", so it's primarily on a memetic level. Humans also pass on lots of thought/behavioral aspects to their children (memes). Therefore I'd expect that selection on the behavioral level is happening much faster than on a genetic level. Idiocracy's "stupid genes win" likely won't happen, my theory is that selection will remove me…

> my theory is that selection will remove memes (behavioral/thought/cultural patterns) that cause childlessness from the meme pool much faster.

The sociologist Eric Kaufmann wrote a book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, arguing that traditionalist religious groups (such as ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish) will become demographically dominant in the long-term (decades and centuries) due to their greater fertility and high retention rates (>80% of their children stay in the group as adults)

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#56

Post by wahern »

delichon wrote: post #9
derektank wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have definitely run into the belief that humans aren’t evolving anymore (though not among scientists). I think people with an incomplete understanding of evolution look around, see most human beings survive to adulthood, and assume that there must be no more evolutionary pressures on us (perhaps with the phrase “survival of the fittest” tinging around inside their head). I honestly don’t blame anyone who hasn’t bee…

There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Spice of Life", 2000 Gould was an evolutionary biologist and Harvard professor, and one of the most prominent popularizers of evolution since Darwin, but somehow believed that it doesn't apply to modern humans.

Despite being so famous, I feel like his ideas haven't aged well. His ideas were contentious yet embraced by popular science writers, and there's never been a reckoning.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#57

Post by ordu »

chmod775 wrote: post #45
derektank wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People aren't born not wanting to have kids, since all their ancestors did. What evidence do you have that all their ancestors wanted to have kids? I can think of a lot of reasons why people may have had kids without necessarily wanting them. They wanted to have sex in an era before birth control. They were pressured into it by the social norms of their local community. They were raped. Etc. I have a lot of criticis…

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 postpone a marriage and reproduction was not very popular before modernity. We've applied our considerable intellect to invent these things and to make not so smart people to be aware of our findings, but these are very recent ideas. In agrarian world you need a lot of people to feed your armies, so any attempts at birth control would be deemed illegal, amoral or whatever. Kings and popes would do anything to stop people from slowing down their reproduction. Which they did, witch hunt clearly stated that witches are guilty of killing yet unborn babies, ie abortions.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#58

Post by jiggawatts »

Terr_ wrote: post #51
jiggawatts wrote: post #49

It is well established that evolution is driven not only by fitness in the trivial sense of "survival or death", but in large part by mate selection. (Disclaimer: The rest is a personal theory with zero scientific support.) This begs the question: selection based on what ? In many bird species it is the complexity of the male's song, or the colourful beauty of his feathers. There are "dances" and courtship rituals in…

> > 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.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#59

Post by jl6 »

adrianN wrote: post #27
lomlobon wrote: post #2

Isn't this obvious? Why on earth would it stop? I don't actually believe that 'humans stopped evolving' was ever a widespread belief among scientists. This article has gotta be lying to me.

There are a couple of species that remain essentially unchanged for the last couple million years. Why can't humans become one of them?

Good question, with a couple of possible answers:

1) maybe those species aren’t as unchanged as we think, because our evidence of the past is limited to things like skeletons, and maybe the skeletal structure of the shark didn’t change much, but other aspects did.

But more likely…

2) maybe unchanging requires a stable environment with stable selection pressures - but humans have had a rollercoaster of change in selection pressures, possibly more than any other species.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#60

Post by _nalply »

skissane wrote: post #55
dachris wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, and here's an interesting twist: as you wrote, this is mainly happening due to "I think", so it's primarily on a memetic level. Humans also pass on lots of thought/behavioral aspects to their children (memes). Therefore I'd expect that selection on the behavioral level is happening much faster than on a genetic level. Idiocracy's "stupid genes win" likely won't happen, my theory is that selection will remove me…

> my theory is that selection will remove memes (behavioral/thought/cultural patterns) that cause childlessness from the meme pool much faster. The sociologist Eric Kaufmann wrote a book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? , arguing that traditionalist religious groups (such as ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish) will become demographically dominant in the long-term (decades and centuries) due to their greater fert…

I think the possiblities that a minority can leave the group is an important escape valve for them. Now assume that in the future they are going to be not such a minority anymore like today, then what happens? Maybe some oscillation like for Lotka-Volterra situation, perhaps a bit different?
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