Calling Darwinists Everywhere!

[Richard Creager]

Natural selection/survival of the fittest does not apply to Humans.

It impossible for this to be true, Kolar, why do you think they call it the LAW of natural selection? By your logic, a standard person should be able to defy gravity on their own by will and produce matter and energy the exact same way, by somehow magically disobeying the laws that govern our universe.

[Epinephrine]

AFP: I didn't like how you called them Eskimos (they're Inuit). And besides -

"Humans are evolutionarily inferior to many things like cockroaches, who have resistance to radiation, and can mate for several days after their head has been cut off."

I don't what makes you think that cockroaches are evolutionarily 'superior' to humans. Evolution does NOT play favorites, no matter what you think. So even if your specific examples had merit, you are still making value judgements in a way that natural selection does not. While I don't want to go too crazy, but say for instance the Earth somehow blew up or something and the only life that survived were humans out in space. Then I guess the cockroaches lose right? That's the thing, natural selection does not say what is 'evolutionarily superior' or 'inferior'. It only states things in statistics in which 'things with higher fecundity have a higher likelyhood of making up more of the genepool in the next generation'.


Eric: I was a biology major remember? I got a 4.0 in first year biology at UofT which is basically a course on evolution with 1700 students and marked on a bell curve :P Not to mention that evolution is the central tenent of modern biology, so that stuff tends to be brought up quite a bit in almost every biology class you take.

Richard Creager: It's still technically the 'Theory of Evolution'. It's just that the word 'theory' means something different in science than in it's colloquial usage, enough so that you may think of evolution as almost being 'the Law of evolution' but not quite.

[Pressure Drop]

Epinephrine

do me do me


what did i say wrong?

[K2Grey]

For myself, I couldn't find anything in Epi's post that contradicted me :P

[Epinephrine]

natural selection does apply to humans, just very very little.

Wrong, it always applies. Whether or not major changes will actually happen within a period of time does not negate the fact that natural selection is always happening.

There is also a case in Africa where sickle cell aneamia offers protection from malaria and in a region rife with malaria the % off the population with these genes is very high compared to anywhere else. So where would you drae the line?

Wrong. Having sickle cell anemia is a bad thing, but since the sickle cell trait is autosomal recessive you need two sickle cell genes to get it. If you only have 1 sickle cell and 1 normal, THEN you are being protected against malaria.

There is no real answer, are we geneticaly weakening our species ... perhaps.

Since we're not doing anything to actively destroy genetic variability within our species, this is wrong.

[Epinephrine]

K2:

Look again at what jesus terrorist said and note that the biological definition of fitness is not the same as the popular culture one.

As long as different people have different numbers of offspring, there will always be people who are more 'fit' than others. Fitness has nothing to do with being incredibly intelligent or productive, it just has to do with reproduction. As such, natural selection has always had and still has effect on humans.

True you are correct. Although technically you should use the term 'fecundity' instead of 'fitness'. Fecundity deals with the POTENTIAL reproductive ability of an organism instead of how much they actually do. It's a predictive measure of sorts.

[Bioture]

I think natural selection is key in physical, emotional, and spiritual evolution. If we can accept the fact that with enough time, humans and animals will adapt to their environment, there will always be constant change in the way we perceive physical beauty, in the way we respond to emotion, and in the way we worship. Most religions follows natural selection in that they branch off, weaker branches tend to die off while stronger ones continue and branches off even more.

Edit: I have no beef with darwinism besides the people who take parts of it in an attempt to disprove parts of something else (hint hint) when they're taken out of context.

[Pressure Drop]

Wrong, it always applies. Whether or not major changes will actually happen within a period of time does not negate the fact that natural selection is always happening.



Wrong. Having sickle cell anemia is a bad thing, but since the sickle cell trait is autosomal recessive you need two sickle cell genes to get it. If you only have 1 sickle cell and 1 normal, THEN you are being protected against malaria.



Since we're not doing anything to actively destroy genetic variability within our species, this is wrong.

pff don't accept :P

1) i said IT DOES apply, when i said very very little i ment(and went on to say) the pressures forcing evolutionary change have been mostly lifted off us which is true.
2)yeah i know that its only the carrier form that helps against malaria but that didn't needed to be said for the point to be valid. i was using it as an example where a gene usualy detremental to our health (the kind of gene that would be eradicated by a super race breeding programe) could have unforseeable benifits.
3) you could argue that giving medicine to sick children who would die without it is letting them get to breeding age where they could pass on weak immune systems to their children. These genes wouldn't be in the population without our direct interferance and some would view that as weakening our genepool. Anyway i said perhaps.

[AFPilot]

AFP: "Humans are evolutionarily inferior to many things like cockroaches, who have resistance to radiation, and can mate for several days after their head has been cut off."

I don't what makes you think that cockroaches are evolutionarily 'superior' to humans. Evolution does NOT play favorites, no matter what you think. So even if your specific examples had merit, you are still making value judgements in a way that natural selection does not. While I don't want to go too crazy, but say for instance the Earth somehow blew up or something and the only life that survived were humans out in space. Then I guess the cockroaches lose right? That's the thing, natural selection does not say what is 'evolutionarily superior' or 'inferior'. It only states things in statistics in which 'things with higher fecundity have a higher likelyhood of making up more of the genepool in the next generation'.

You're the only one trying to sound smart here, writing a complete essay in an otherwise casual conversation, using language the original poster probably won't understand.

The point of my cockroach statement is that a decapitated cockroach in a nuclear waste dump is likely to have more offspring capable of reproducing than a war hero that now is the CEO of a large successful company that can bench press 4 times his own weight.

It's an attack on the original posters notion of fitness being strong and intelligent and my point is that things like alligators/ferns/cockroaches are among reigning champions of this system. I would expect that there are many more possible situations where humans become extinct as opposed to those three or countless others. Is it possible that there are more outcomes where humans survive and other longer lived species don't? Of course, who knows.

For one thing we are the only remaining species from our branch of the evolutionary tree (Oh no! I don't know wether to use Genus or Class or what here, and I'm not going to go look it up, therefore I must lack any understanding of the subject being discussed!) Is that proof that Humans are evolutionarily weaker than cockroaches? No, but there are many types of roaches, and if intelligence and strength are the measures by which natural selection operates, then the loads of extinct homonids would be here today as they are certainly more intelligent than nearly all other life.

If I said Inuits and fecundity the original poster would have likely ignored my post

[Ilya]

i wish i was a cockroach sometimes

[AFPilot]

3) you could argue that giving medicine to sick children who would die without it is letting them get to breeding age where they could pass on weak immune systems to their children. These genes wouldn't be in the population without our direct interferance and some would view that as weakening our genepool. Anyway i said perhaps.

That's a drop in the bucket when you think of all that the human body does. Your cells do countless tasks that are dictated by your DNA. Weakening one variable really does nothing but alter the environment.

And you are not eliminating the variable in question, unless you completely eradicate the disease and the disease is not capable of evolving quickly enough to deal with it, or, you have to administer the same medicine to every single child afflicted with the disease.

If the disease normally affected 1 in 1000, and you make it affect one in a million through medicine, and it has a negative effect on reproduction, it STILL will be selected against in the long run (assuming the disease is hereditary and the mutation that causes the condition isn't too frequent)

I have a hereditary disease that has prevented me from playing SubSpace for years now and I have had a vasectomy. Many others that I've talked with have also chosen not to have children to avoid passing it on. Yet it still exists because the disease is caused by a gene deletion and the gene in question is on a crossover boundary (meaning it is much more likely to be 'crossed out' or even duplicated when you are forming sperm/eggs)

So even if you sterilized everybody who possesses my disease, it would still exist! Even though it is hereditary with a 50% chance of passing it on and there's selection against it.

Point is the biological world is far more complex than one disease being treated. Mother nature laughs in the face of you administering medicine to a child and thinking you've conquered her.

[Tone]

Someday, one will no longer be able to say "Humans are evolutionarily inferior to many things like cockroaches" because the technology will become just so advanced that intellect will turn out to give advantage in ALL ways, not just some ways like today. - Tone

"Within 25 years, we'll reverse-engineer the brain and go on to develop superintelligence. Extrapolating the exponential growth of computational capacity (a factor of at least 1000 per decade), we'll expand inward to the fine forces, such as strings and quarks, and outward."

- Ray Kurzweil

[froedrick]

do you ever realise you're a douchebag? I'm serious, have you ever thought. "oh jesus, I'm a douchebag!"?

[K2Grey]

Tone, you are aware that if computational storage capacity expands by factor of 1000 per decade, then in a few decades a computer will supposedly have storage capacity where if 1 atom represents 1 bit, the computer will require more atoms than exist in the entire universe to make?

[Pressure Drop]

That's a drop in the bucket when you think of all that the human body does. Your cells do countless tasks that are dictated by your DNA. Weakening one variable really does nothing but alter the environment.

And you are not eliminating the variable in question, unless you completely eradicate the disease and the disease is not capable of evolving quickly enough to deal with it, or, you have to administer the same medicine to every single child afflicted with the disease.

If the disease normally affected 1 in 1000, and you make it affect one in a million through medicine, and it has a negative effect on reproduction, it STILL will be selected against in the long run (assuming the disease is hereditary and the mutation that causes the condition isn't too frequent)

I have a hereditary disease that has prevented me from playing SubSpace for years now and I have had a vasectomy. Many others that I've talked with have also chosen not to have children to avoid passing it on. Yet it still exists because the disease is caused by a gene deletion and the gene in question is on a crossover boundary (meaning it is much more likely to be 'crossed out' or even duplicated when you are forming sperm/eggs)

So even if you sterilized everybody who possesses my disease, it would still exist! Even though it is hereditary with a 50% chance of passing it on and there's selection against it.

Point is the biological world is far more complex than one disease being treated. Mother nature laughs in the face of you administering medicine to a child and thinking you've conquered her.

I wasn't talking about any perticular gene mutation or genetic disorder though. There would surely be multiple genes involved in the immune system and if we are treating kids for infections that might kill them without antibiotics you could argue that we are interfering with natural selection by using our technology to compensate for a weaker immune system allowing them to pass on there genes and therefore increase the amount of those genes in our gene pool. Modern medicine and technology could well lead to the average person haveing a significantly weaker immune system than in the past by both helping us overcome illnesses and better hygine practices exposing our immune systems to less bacteria and viruses etc... than in the past. If this were the case then if there was a pandemic of a highly virulent dieases alot more could die than if we had never interfered. So i by no means think we have conquered mother nature.

As you said even if you were to somehow iradicate a heriditary disease gene from our gene pool there is nothing stoping another random mutation happening to bring it back. (unless you screened all fetuses an aborted them)

Anyways by no means i'm i for these things, i'm just trying to say that you could argue that we are weakening our gene pool. I'm not saying its my viewpoint we should with hold medicine or anything like that.