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Humans haven't stopped evolving

harvardmagazine.com

81–90 of 145 posts

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#81
post #21

As far as I was taught in college, evolution never stops, but we're just too short lived to notice that. We _may_ notice some very tiny blip on timescales of several hundred years, but last really noticeable traits happened many thousands years ago. However, cultural/society/educational evolution happens much-much faster (but is also much-much weaker, can disappear on just a few weeks).

also, technology largly exists to remove the discomfort of evolutionary pressure. This doesnt mean the mutations that give rise to evolutionary changes in the population, but it does mean we've removed or mititaged many of the mechanisms which would select for specific traits. Again, we would naturally still change, but not in the the way or at the rate otger organisms continue to or at which we would sans technology…

I think this is a common misperception, but it's not accurate. The general idea is that with technology there is less risk of someone dying or not being able to procreate due to their susceptibility to disease (because modern medicine would likely cure them) or their inability to acquire food/resources.

But even if that were 100% true, that just shifts selection pressure elsewhere. For example, your ability to hunt is probably not selected for in modern society, where it would have been in centuries past. But your social standing (and the genetic traits that are beneficial for acquiring that social status) definitely would be, especially in places where there is a large sex imbalance.

We are currently undergoing a major change in reproduction due to the "severing" of the ties between having sex and having children due to modern birth control. Evolution is what caused sex to be so pleasurable/desired in the first place, because having sex greatly increases the chances of someone passing on their genes. The ability to have lots of sex now without having children as a byproduct means there will be natural selection pressure for another impetus for people to have children.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#82
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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…

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Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#83

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…

They may be honest when they express themselves initially, but their revealed preference later ends up being very tragic. I know several women, and others who are friends of my wife, that did the "I don't want kids" routine only to realize that this was a huge mistake and enter the dating market at 37 to find nothing but a wasteland. People can pretend that their own reason can override their biological reality, but…

So true. "No eggs" https://youtu.be/9he_ZRnZDlk

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#84
the problem is that humans are modifying the environment, orders of magnitude faster than evolution can keep up with, and many of the "features" of our modern technological cities are prouncedly geared towards our worst/best (non) survival instincts, as from an evolutionary perspective we are all living in the valley of infinite plentitude, and survival of the fittest has taken on an entirely other definition.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#85

the problem is that humans are modifying the environment, orders of magnitude faster than evolution can keep up with, and many of the "features" of our modern technological cities are prouncedly geared towards our worst/best (non) survival instincts, as from an evolutionary perspective we are all living in the valley of infinite plentitude, and survival of the fittest has taken on an entirely other definition.

Evolution doesn't find a solution to a problem. Instead, it finds all possible solutions. Ones which don't fit through the problem are culled.

During happy times, mutation creates a variety of individuals. During stressful times, individuals who happen to have traits that help them weather the stress are the ones who survive more. Sometimes much more. That's when the evolution happens.

Both parts can happen concurrently and gradually, like those butterflies who turned black to hide in coal smoke.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#86

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…

They may be honest when they express themselves initially, but their revealed preference later ends up being very tragic. I know several women, and others who are friends of my wife, that did the "I don't want kids" routine only to realize that this was a huge mistake and enter the dating market at 37 to find nothing but a wasteland. People can pretend that their own reason can override their biological reality, but…

Having kids just so you won't die alone sounds tragic too.

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#87
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's such an extreme claim. It defies common sense. You'd have to proclaim that there was some event that _stopped_ evolution in humans, universally. How is that even possible? Especially 50k years ago. I'd be a little more forgiving if the claim was that evolution stopped in, say, 1999.

Sounds like they just meant evolution takes longer than that?

To some degree it's true. We have all sorts of variable parameters that are probably different from back then (eg. Average height) but we still have the same body shape, etc

Re: Humans haven't stopped evolving

#88

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…

also, women and men mostly have the same genes. Anything that affects one affects the other, by default.

This fact is itself subject to evolution. (In birds, it's the women who have the different chromosome.) Mammals may have evolved to share most genes between sexes because that allows either sex to benefit from traits evolved by the other one, and not solely because it's the easy way to store genes.

Did you know men have a genetic breast size?

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