Is Evolution at work in Western Society? If not is that a problem?

If it is, is that a problem too?!?!

Is Evolution at work in Western Society? If not is that a problem?

well everyone is getting taller.i think we'll turn out like massive praying manti.well i hope so.

We are being domesticated. A heard of compliant cattle incapable of surviving without antibiotics, artificial insemination and machine tended foods. Long live technology.

2 people having on average of 2.2 children is not how evolution works. It's a numbers game, and survival of the fittest is the key. People getting taller is not due to evolution, it's more to do with meeting our full potential, like age.
We are not being domesticated. Domestication was achieved by forcing docile animals to breed together, and always selecting for docility and meat or milk. A wild sheep or cow is considerably more intelligent and aggressive than your farmed version.

We are not being domesticated. Domestication was achieved by forcing docile animals to breed together, and always selecting for docility and meat or milk. A wild sheep or cow is considerably more intelligent and aggressive than your farmed version.

Humans don't select for docility?
What do they select for then? Certainly not intelligence. And are you linking intelligence and aggression?

As to domesticated animals being stupid. You're looking in the wrong place. Think dogs. Think cats. Are they stupid? Some are, surely. But not all. Domestication can take place without a drop in intelligence.

What is selected for in humans, to a large part, is social integration. How well one fits in with the social norms of one's peers. How well one conforms to the social norms for one's peers.

What's interesting about this is that at some life stages part of that 'norm' is to rebel and be a 'bad boy' (I'm speaking in terms of men here as it is generally the women who decide is going to have sex and who isn't). So, because of this the domestication isn't entirely straightforward. It is easy to mistake a conformist bad boy with a real bad boy. Someone who is fitting in as opposed to someone who's going to become a career criminal and a social misfit. So, mistakes are made in the decision making process.

Another interesting aspect of selection is that today's age is obsessed with gangsters and thugs. So we have all the conformist gangsters out there mingling with the real thing. This is sure to introduce some wild blood back in the pool. But even so, not as wild as the bush men.

2 people having on average of 2.2 children is not how evolution works.

You're getting your terminology confused.
Evolution doesn't work by any specific means. Evolution is merely change over time. Mutations, natural selection, driven selection, whatever.
The fact that people are not being forced to live or die by their decisions removes us, to a large extent, from natural selection but that doesn't mean we're not evolving.

However, it is possiblet that we aren't evolving. In many cases throughout history, change is not the norm. Populations can stay stable for millions of years without change. The question is what are the circumstances that lead to such evolutionary stagnation. Are we in such a circumstance?

We are having fewer children and are breeding later in life. This causes us to select for traits like longevity, resistence to miscarriages, and anything that will take you out of the breeding pool until very old age.

Evolution happens everywhere there are living things. I think humans are being domesticated, our evolution is happening at an unprecedented pace, compared to animals in the past. One example, the rise of autism, in particular a mild form known as Asperger Syndrome. These people, myself included, are less social, but have a great capacity for specialization in a narrow field of interest. No one is able to explain this mutation in terms of environmental factors, it is inherited mostly through the paternal line, but there happen to be larger numbers of them in places like the Silicon Valley and around universities. The implications are astounding. Some autistic people can calculate complicated math in their heads, some are musical prodigies, many are computer programmers. To be fair, many are also ill-adapted to society, but their numbers are increasing. Someone might mention the rise of mercury in vaccinations as a cause of autism, but that theory has been discredited in a recent Japanese study.

Last I knew, humans as a whole dont select for anything. The environment does the selection. The current theory of evolution goes something like:

Production of individuals with multiple traits and different abilities through sex => environmental selection by means of those who fit the environment better have more children who survive to breeding age.

[Note- I am not a biologist]

What is happening today in many Western countries is that lots of people are not having children at all. Which gets some people worried about only the poor breeding. They were worried about that 80 years ago, and more, there were healthy eugenics movements on both ends of the political spectrum. However there is no real evidence that there is anything to worry about. HUman genetics is rather variable, and there is probably enough interbreeding that things will continue to be nicely mixed up.

Besides, a couple thousand years of human civilization is peanuts compared with the timescales of evolutionary change. Civilization might be a temporary phenomenon.

Of course evolution is at work. Social evolution, natural evolution, conscious evolution... it's all active, and I don't envision it slowing down any time in the near future.

Evolution has been evolving. Beginning about 4 billion years ago on earth, pre-biological evolution was replaced at "center-stage" by biological evolution. Beginning about 15,000 years ago, biological evolution was replaced at center-stage by metabiological evolution (the evolution of culture). Beginning about 100 years ago, metabiological evolution began to be replaced at center stage by an awareness of how things evolve and how we can be involved in that (what Jonas Salk called teleobiological evolution). If not for that era beginning, we would not be having this "conversation" today.

Of course, all the other kinds of evolution are still happening, but not at the same intensity. If we survive this evolutionary era, then we may reach yet another that is harder to describe.

We are being domesticated. A heard of compliant cattle incapable of surviving without antibiotics, artificial insemination and machine tended foods. Long live technology.

*coff*Combine*coff*

Sorry.

Is Evolution at work in Western Society? If not is that a problem?
Evolution is selecting for silly teenage girls who get too drunk and don't know how to use contraception.

if you think as the people who have the most children as the most evolutionary successful of a species the outlook of humanity becomes a little depressing.

if you think as the people who have the most children as the most evolutionary successful of a species the outlook of humanity becomes a little depressing.
Or if not depressing, then entirely missing the point.

Poor people can reproduce at a wicked fast rate, but since they're poor, they really can't do much. Think about it. Rabbits multiply very quickly. Do the wolves have to worry about it? Both parties actually prefer a prey birth rate. The wolves get to eat more and more rabbits make it to maturity.
Just like with poor people. More of poor folk means more people to sell stuff and work for business (and the corporate wolves). Bigger families for poor people mean there are more offspring to take care of the parents in old age. Kids are insurance.

Admittedly, in a democracy, a continually poor group of people, especially if it's growing fast, poses a threat through simple voting power. The poor are fortunately chronically disorganized, and have yet to unite under the banner of "poor" to form a voting block (like Cubanos or blacks or steel workers tend to). In America, class mobility tends to be fairly easy, or at least very possible, so socialism is unjustified in most eyes.

hmm.,i wasnt really refering to the poor but whatever.and that way of thinking about it seems quite depressing anyway.

People from ALL over the world are risking there lives just for a chance to live in "America", so that they can "evolve" into better humans.

The only evolution that can take place with modern medicine (other then those poor enough to not afford it) is memetic evolution.

One obvious thing is that the more different the parents genetics that smarter and healthier (and more beautiful) the child.

Just look at dog breeding, for example. It is common knowledge that the more interbreeding to establish look-alike dogs, the more potential health and intelligence problems with the dog.

That's not necessarily true. They'll only be healthier if parental genetics contain recessive disease that the other parent has a dominant normal gene for. But it also sounds like some people are getting nature and nurture confused. The societal norms that one "conforms" to are acquired traits and cannot be passed on. If you removed the child from such an environment, than their outcome in life could be totally different.

Uh, we're all like already evolved and stuff. We, uh, do reproduction the way our parents and our grandparents did. We get our ladies all drunk and stuff, so they don't know what they're doing, and we look good to them, then we do the dirty deed and they don't know it but boy are they mad when their skirts don't fit them anymore! Then if our babies are too smart, we, uh, take them out behind the trailer house and beat some sense, huh huh, into them. Then they can learn the important things, like making sure that the beer is already open when they bring it to us, and, uh, they can work in Mike's garage and support their old man when they get older.

The problem with modern technology is that it's keeping alive peole who would otherwise die in childhood. Heaven help us if we ever have a crash landing of our civilisation, because if we do there's going to be a whole lot less people around.