Side-stepping Evolution

Let’s set aside, for the moment, the argument between religious folk and scientific folk of whether or not one species can evolve into another.
It seems to me that intra-species evolution can quite easily be summed as the propagation of beneficial traits and reduction of detrimental traits in a species through the process of natural selection.

Now, I am trying to stay away from value judgments and arguing over what is “right” or “wrong” in this thread – just what IS. Please help me in this goal.

With the technological advances in habitat, medicine, communication and nearly every other field to make living and surviving easier and more convenient, where is selective pressure coming from?
Ailment? We can cure it, or at least treat the symptoms for long enough for you to pass on your genes.
Impairment? We have vast and wide reaching social support structures.
Immune deficiency? Take meds, stay home and use anti-bacterial agents.
With rapid and wide communication and media what is attractive changes certainly with each generation – if not monthly – rendering sexual selection random and fairly impotent (pardon the pun – it really was unintentional, believe it or not).
Too weak to hunt or farm? So what? Strength is not much of an indicator of survival ability in the society we have created.
Mentally unstable? We will drug you, take care of you and someone will find you attractive enough to pass your genes on.

It seems to me that we humans may have side-stepped the evolution process (at least for the time being) because we are no longer susceptible to natural selection to ensure the survival and adaptability of the species.
We no longer need to adapt to suit our environment, we adapt our environment to suit us.

Has the gene pool become stagnant?

 

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You hit it right on the head.

Humanity has become utterly stagnant. Our large brains (neo-cortex) have given us an enormous capacity for morality and shame which have resulted in our inability to accept Evolution at its rawest (at least for our species, it has). And while I cannot stomach the notion of "culling" the weaker of our species, I do believe that we're at a stage where we can evolve ourselves into the next stage of evolution.

As you have rightly concluded, evolution isn't some magical process where things just happen to get better. Evolution is dirty business and it, inevitably, takes no prisoners. Because of our "monkey wrench in the works" we have to seek out an alternative. Either we license breeding (very dystopian) or genetically alter ourselves. The big hurdle to overcome here is the wisdom in using such a power correctly. The issue, we won't have that wisdom until we evolve the capacity to have it.

With the advent of non-biological intelligence coming closer and closer, I have always believed that it is preferable to take the leap and risk a sloppy jump than to never take the leap at all for fear of breaking a few eggs. Humanity survived in some form is far better than humanity not surviving at all.

~String

 

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Many would argue that the next evolution will involve bio-technology. It is interesting, and dangerous. Honestly, I fear for humanities future. Our Earth is getting more polluted, our minds are becoming more accustomed to desensitizing stuff on TV.

Some think a "perfect world" can be achieved but are not willing to recognize that without pain there can be no joy. Having only pain or only joy in a life would create a "dead line."

 

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We're in temporary boom, caused by an expansion into new niches - other animals have enjoyed essentially similar booms, "sidestepping" the evolutionary process by getting washed up on the shore of a predator free island or something like that.

The human gene pool is hardly stagnant - it is diversifying rapidly from its recent bottleneck, which is something that really needed to happen from a fan's viewpoint.

 

There are good questions, and the selection pressures have surely changed in the last couple of thousand years. However, modern life is still full of natural selection as well as sexual selection. Medicine isn't perfect over the entire world, in fact most of the world does not enjoy comprehensive medical care. Even among those that do, there are diseases that we cannot cure, genetic defects that lead to early death or at least variable success in passing on your genes. Medicine is still relatively new compared to the timescales of evolution. Our civilization is also relatively new, and may not last, at least in it's present form. We are conditioned to think of steady progress due to 50 years of cheap energy and the industrial revolution, which comes with it's own deadly side effects.

Believe it or not, sexual selection isn't too different than it was in the past. People still look for health and fitness, no outward signs of disease or disformity. It's pure hubris to think that natural selection no longer has a role.

 

I think there is a counter-trend, currently handled, for example, by the mass medicating of Western Civilization with pyschotropics.

I think we will also see huge movements to transform and eradicate homo sapians via genetic modification
to adapt 'us'
to society rather than adapt society to us.

 

I hear you.
I would never condone any type of eugenics program, but I can certainly relate to those who do when I watch TV – especially talk shows, reality shows, and, worst of all, celeb-reality.

I’m not sure we ever will.
There is something amiss about using technology to counteract the effects of technology – or is it just ironic?

I can’t get behind you on that.
That’s a nasty can of worms I don’t want to see opened.
It appears it may just be inevitable, however.

While we already DO have a good deal of bio-technology and certainly more on the way, I don’t see that as evolution at all.
If two people with pace-makers have a child, that child will not be born with a pace-maker. It does not get passed down.
If anything, it serves to separate us further from the natural selection process.
If it weren’t for the pace-makers, those people would not have survived to procreate and would not have passed those genes down.
Our technology is allowing us to make an end run around natural selection.

Please elaborate.

Of course, but the tide is changing rapidly enough to watch it.
Third world countries are developing very quickly, cheap drugs from India are rapidly making their way across the globe, globalization is allowing resource sharing like never before…
Sure, people still die from disease, so natural selection is not completely avoided – and will likely never be – but think about what impact a disease like AIDS may have had in a pre-industrialized world.
We are working very hard to topple nature’s self-regulation, disease eradication and herd-culling and we are succeeding.

If you want to live in an environment where it snows all the time, you don’t have to be hearty, gain fat, lose melanin… You just need to build a nice, warm house and buy an SUV. You want to grow food there? That’s fine – just build a hothouse.

Of course it does.
One of the most evident is forcing environmental pressures on all the animals who can not build homes, grow food, create factories and everything else we do to create that layer of society, knowledge and technology between us and life.
If we do completely destroy our environment (which is a very real possibility) then we will suffer the grave consequences.
As long as our society, knowledge and technology serve us to escape those consequences, there is very little and dwindling environmental pressures on us.

People who would not have lived long enough to procreate are procreating (diseased, infirmed, stupid, lazy) and this throws a monkey wrench in the works.
We no longer have to fight to breed and fight to survive.
The weakest among us can be just as successful as the strongest.
People may prefer healthy, but anyone can have kids.
Even those who can’t have sex can have kids.

I’m not sure how that’s a counter-trend.

I don’t understand.
We create society.
Are you saying that the powerful will determine what they want society to be and will force people to adapt to that?

 

No, we are evolving to have many genes that once would have been culled.

Take teeth for example, skulls of humans pre-agriculture have perfect teeth. After agriculture they don't. So, we evolved to have bad teeth. Probably same for eye sight. etc...
Oh, and it should be noted that evolution is the distribution of genes in a population or at least that's how I remember it. So, it the gene for crappy teeth has a wide enough distribution then we have evolved to have bad teeth..

 

It is part of a paradigm of adapting us to fit the environment (society) rather than the other way around. Genetically its effects may not yet count as a countertrend, because these people can still procreate. They are however pathologized, to whatever degree. Once this 'flowers' in gene modification, however, homo sapians may find itself selected out. The environment will be society in this artificial selection. Or really ideals about what we should be with become the selector. There will be a lot of evolution and development in this. I tend to believe it will be negative, but then I am a homo sapian and a deep hatred of homo sapians, it seems to me, underlies the pharmcological assault on HS, and is likely to underlie the genetic one.

Yes, that is the trend I am talking about. Up until recently force was the only way to do this. Drugs have offered a non-genetic way of modifying people's reactions (and feedback) to society - which is NOT adapting to our needs and is our environment - and genetic modification will allow a new evolution in which I am quite sure the drivers will think is selecting the fittest.

 

You cannot avoid the effects of evolution. Society is just a blip in time compared to geologic history. There is no guarantee it will last. Signs point to the end of cheap oil to be the end of this age of advancement as well. Evolution doesn't only rely on the difference between life and death, it also works on any factor that has a gradient. If only somewhat more stupid people die than smart people (around the age of procreation), the population will tend to become smarter. Currently humans are increasing genetic diversity by interbreeding with races around the world. This increases our potential fitness for resistance to disease.

 

Carcinogenic chemicals introduced into our environment, atmospheric pollution in our major cities, McDonalds and their ilk, peer pressures on adolescents to have state of the art mobiles, work related stress, the credit crunch, the cost of health insurance, Southpark..... Do I need to go on.
Evolution is ongoing, it is accelerating. We do not control our environment on either the gross or the detailed scale. We manipulate and alter it, but not always with the results we intend.

(And for the record religious folk and scientific folk are not mutually exclusive categories.)

 

Humans, as a species, are not very diverse genetically. We went through a bottleneck a few thousand years ago, from which we have yet to recover. That makes us vulnerable to disease, etc.

True, our wide spread and niche expansion counters that - even a plague that extinguished humans from every major continent would have trouble surviving to get all the islands, etc - but from an evolutionary viewpoint we are still in a window of vulnerability.

So the current diversification is not a stagnation, but a historically prudent expansion of the relevant genetic resources.

 

Of course, but any discussion, even remotely related to evolution, generally ends up with the two sides lobbing dirt bombs at each other.


I can accept that our technologically augmented environment still exerts pressure, but there is still something that just isn’t clicking for me.

I am aware that evolution does not seek any particular direction or goal, but the fact is, that a direction is involved.

African people evolved darker skin.
Alaskan Inuits evolved more fat and thicker skin.
The thing is, that evolutionary results, such as these are the result of the recursive nature of Natural Selection.
With our rapidly changing social standards, mores and cultural beliefs, what is preferable one generation is not the next.
There is a “sub-culture” for everything that the dominant culture sees as negative, and in ten years that could be the dominant culture.
It seems to me that with ideals shifting with the wind, any trait that is selected for on one generation is despised the next (and even in the same generation).
With everything going in all different ways at the same time, it seems to defeat the recursive nature of Natural Selection.
This combined with our technologically augmented environments denying a predominant need to evolve to survive (such as dark or thick skin) I can’t see how any results are achieved.

 

evolution ramblings!!

Hmm.. the gene pool is surely very diverse, given our geographical spread of different races and booming population.

One human might be 'superior' in a vast amount of ways to another, but die before getting a chance to pass off his/her genes due to some incident, that would normally be classified as a weakness found by means of 'natural selection', that actually was just a different genetic make-up trying to survive a different specific environment.

I don't believe there is a concious force guiding us to evolve into a better species.. only relatively.. in that we become better adapted to the particular complex elements of an environment at a time by the dyeing off of those that aren't fit for that specific environment... like a fish out of water, if you like

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If you think about it.. no one single organism has the exact same experience with the environment, and thus we can't say that one is a more advantageously evolved organism than another, since one could be killed off by an experience that the other is not exposed to (think of a giant chunk of cryptonite falling out of the sky and killing superman for an extreme example, or more realistically that of overfishing... the bigger more well adapted great white sharks JUST HAPPEN to be targeted as trophies for human fisherman (this is not as comparable to how cockroaches are evolving to be smaller and smaller, because the larger ones are more easily seen and squashed, but is a freak accident in which a major evolutionary advantage within the creatures isolated environment turns into a disadvantage by factor outside their control, though we must also see this from the other side in that humans are now part of the creature's environment, and irrespective of the motives of a human (which would seem irrational from the sharks perspective?) is a factor making smaller size an advantage.. though it could just be the case that some fishermen decide to hunt for the smallest adult fish it could.. and so it is thus not accurate to say that a particular trait is generally more advantageous than any other.. it is only specifically advantageous to an environment(s), which is why there is such diversity in species and why mutations within genetic code are so common... this is the only vestige of the notion of conciousness that I can see within the evolutionary process.. in that it creates the most diverse gene pool possible.


I watched a program recently in which the homoerectus (direct ancestor of humans) was actually genetically inferior to that of the the great ape ancestors that split off to become chimpanzees (sharing 98.4% of our DNA code), gorillas etc with it's jaw.. which due to a freak mutation (the catalyst of evolution in this interpretation) was weaker and so was less potent for hunting it's prey.. this inadvertently led to greater cooperation between the species, as they needed to rely on each other to get their meals, and allowed greater space in the skull for the brain to expand.. pushing us, supposedly, onto the next evolutionary rung (though we haven't outlived these other species so we will see...)

Evolution is just a constant adjustment for the volatile dynamics of the environment in which a species lives..

there can also be no agreement on what a stable healthy level of species life is either, and just because one species is close to extinction (or indeed the extinct) does not mean that it is inferior, and might well become the most well adapted to future environments. As long as life continues with a diverse pool of genes, then life is likely to find a way around the obstacles the world presents with us (of course this is not at all guaranteed either, and every life form on the planet could be vaporised in an instant (asteroids, sun, aliens!, .. and genetic 'advantages' would be meaningless indeed... though of course there may be a mutation of a certain species of tiny cockroach well adapted to fight off the random collision of some meteor (maybe just be in the right place at the right time) that might allow life to survive

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..

we cannot always account for the exogenous variables that come into play with our complex environment.. and so it is impossible to say what is, we only understand the notion of evolution in a very abstract way and although we consider ourselves to be the peak of the current evolutionary ladder it may be that our ancestors would have survived better in different environments.. it just happens to be that our skills are better adapted (to reiterate!).. think about the higher than average physical, intellectual abilities attributed certain races within our own species, and you will see the diversity, and the potential to overcome different threats owing to this.

so yeah.. evolution is just a manifestation of mutations, that give us a wider gene pool and thus a bigger chance of surviving future hostilities..

ahhh, sorry for that.. wasn't quite sure how to approach this but I'm basically arguing against the idea that our gene pool is becoming utterly stagnant as mentioned earlier.. the fact is that we ARE surviving and don't know what lies ahead so the only advantageous thing that can happen is diversity of the species.. the are no intrinsically advantageous traits as such... not saying that im proposing some new speculative theroem as it may have sounded like above lmao

Another example! For obesity, and all the negative effects it has on quality of life.. could be the key to our future survival as a species.. because of a climate change that makes the atmosphere suddenly colder.. like a mild ice age.. that everyone else is not insulated enough to cope with.. its all luck really........ but we'll probably kill ourselves.. hardly the best evolution choice eh?

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and we always will be vulnerable.. survival is not, and never will be, guaranteed, and that is the nature of life.. maybe

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Technology evolves in a more basic need driven way doesn't it?

It takes a static view of the environment, and is used to fulfill a need, constantly evolving to increase it's efficacy and efficiency at doing (although this is obviously a simplification of isolated breakthroughs, often not intended for it's final purpose... nuclear springs to mind)

We evolve in a much more pin ball like fashion, bouncing off the shape of the world around us in different directions in an almost haphazard fashion, the notion of Natural selection seems too simplistic, it almost implies an innate choice of direction for evolution.. it's so much more versatile than that isn't it? the random complexities involved are a prerequisite to that.. we literally are a freak of nature

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I think technology is just another dynamic of that environment, and so rather than looking at it as an obstacle (non-progressive)to our own evolution, our adaptation to technology is surely a natural thing, and could even be seen as an artificial enhancement of our evolution, because our species can utilise it advantageously.

 

So the selection pressures are upon features that are adaptable. To use your dark skin/light skin example as an analogy. If humans found themselves in an environment that was akin to the tropics for a few years, then back to arctic conditions, there would be a selection pressure to acquire the ability to develop (and lose) a really deep tan very rapidly.
Selection pressures now are upon developing rapid adaptability.

 

Well, then the 3rd world is still evolving in a way that should satisfy you. Disease, starvation, war, poor hygeine are all culling. natural disasters are also increasing in frequency, and this too will affect the poor more than the rich. So culling is taking place. If your concerns are correct than one should feel sympathy for the well off West who will be left behind.

 

I'm curious...
Is there such thing as a 2nd world country?

 

So pardon me, I meant

developing country.

(which, logically, should include ALL countries, but there it is)