Calling Darwinists Everywhere!

[Tone]

The technology will come on gradually and be gently eased into society so you cant fight it. you wouldnt want to fight it if it were devoloped as a good and ethical thing rather than a brave new world thing anyway. everyone wants to feel good. i think ill just list some random words now instead of typing more sentences.

pleasure, motivation, happiness, focus, concentration, content, peace, love, social, unity, empathy, high, good, positive, euphoria, clean, balanced, calm, energy, purity, clearity, beauty, perception, good vibe, imagination, diversity, harmony, warm, enhancement, drive, success, dulcet, orgasm, functionality, fun, enjoy, intelligence, psychedelia, synaesthesia, wonderful, amazing, joy, tranquility, easy, reward, friendly, heart, lighthearted, open, openhearted, communication, connection, great, nice, real, sucure, dream, tweak, stimulation, confidant, freedom, accomplish, expanded, consciousness, perfection,

[Subjugation]

i think ill just list some random words now instead of typing more sentences.

Sad, pathetic, crazy, paranoid, impotent, abnormal, non-threatening, crazy, dull, unimpressive, nuisance, crazy, pitiable, sick, uninspiring, pitiful, irritating, crazy, wannabe, insane, unrealistic, flaccid, poseur, crazy, unstable, delusional, insipid, defective, lacking, and very, very crazy.

Fixed.

Edit:
Whoops, I forgot plagarist---and did I mention crazy?

[AFPilot]

Natural selection and survival of the fittest is different from adapting to your enviroment. We are animals, no doubt about that but within 30,000 years no evolutionary changes have taken place in humans, and in a small amount of time our a majority of our civilization has changed to not rely on such things like hunting or relying on mating through winning competitions.

If the definition of survival of the fittest is: organisms best adapted to existing conditions are able to survive and reproduce. then I would propose that our enviroment now does not have hold over us as it once did. We abuse and control our world like no one ever has (excpet for the freaky space aliens or so Tone tells us). With changing nessities of this life and of our own eivroment I would say it does not apply, we are not in compeition with other creatures nor is anything tradionally stated as survival of the fittest apply to our current situation being that this is a knowledge economy, not a physical one, the social network allows for almost anyone to survive because we do take care of the sick and the poor because we have a a sense of ethics.
We're above the system as any 9th grade phy class text book will tell you but we are still at the will of evolution.

You're wrong about just about everything there

I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you, find somebody who has studied the subject in question and ask them if humans are subject to natural selection just like anything with genetic variation is or not.

[K2Grey]

Look, the definition of "fittest" is "whatever survives and reproduces", and "whatever survives and reproduces" is what is "fit".

The existing conditions at the moment happen to _be_ the social network.

[DoTheFandango]

shtu up.

[Tone]

If you smoke crack cocaine, you interfere with the natural evolution of that part of the brain that regulates how much pleasure you experience, that part of the brain that has to do with negative feedback mechanisms, motivation, and reward/pleasure. then your dopamine receptors downregulate to try to compinsate and you end up feeling like severe depressives do naturally 24/7, in extreme dysphoria and dysfunction because your natural dopamine levels arent high enough to stimulate receptors that have desensitized in order to compinsate from the increased pleasure stimulation of crack rocks. What is one to do? Interfere with evolution, play god, and alter DNA so that the part of the brain that controls pleasure, motivation and basically how you feel, can be enhanced. what could be a more noble and important use of biotechnology? enhanced red blood cells will make you run twice the distance without running out of breath, but this purpose gets to the root of your entire being.

[Twerp]

the mammalian brain evolved long after the reptilian brain and is responsible for higher emotions that mammals have and reptilians do not.

Duh. Every kid knows that. Looks like posts that you don't quote somebody is full of crap.

The reptilian brain is still very dominant in humans

How's that work? We're mammals.

[Tone]

Duh. Every kid knows that. Looks like posts that you don't quote somebody is full of crap.


How's that work? We're mammals.

because people are still slaves to it, their behavior shows so. theres work to be done, or progress to be made

[Theif of Time]

You're wrong about just about everything there

I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you, find somebody who has studied the subject in question and ask them if humans are subject to natural selection just like anything with genetic variation is or not.

In order for a certain gene to become dominant, there needs to be some sort of population bottleneck and population pressures. Since the human population is massive, and not isolated, any one group is not going to diverge genetically from any other group (Unless they're undergoing some sort of Eugenic program... the last one of historical note is the nazi Eugenic program)
So while humans are subject to Natural Selection, it doesn't have a very noticeable effect.

[BleakFuture]

Duh. Every kid knows that. Looks like posts that you don't quote somebody is full of crap.


How's that work? We're mammals.

Don't we share similar characteristics in our cerebellums or something? Im not sure exactly, but I do believe that's right.

[Epinephrine]

Ouch, it's almost painful at how little all of you know about evolution. Even those of you that claim that you know something and try and sound smart are in fact wrong. In fact no one on this thread has got it right yet, so I will have to explain it all for you.

First of all, evolution is always happening whether you like it or not. It's true that while you might not see any changes for hundreds of years, it still is happening all the time right around you. Natural seleciton simply tells us that those with the highest fecundity (basically the ability to produce the most viable offspring) will on average, be the ones that pass on their genes onto the next generation. It's a statistical measure that explains the average change in a genetic pool over generations. While it's true that modern science and modern medicine means that most people in most first world countries will live on no matter what, that's not the issue here because that has nothing to do with natural selection and it's attempt to explain trends in statistical changes of the genetic pool.

Many of you ASSERT that humans are beyond evolution, but that is simply not true. People who don't have kids won't pass on their genes. Their genes will be lost to the gene pool of humanity. Similarily, people who have 10 kids will pass on more of their genes than people with say 5 kids. Basically people with more children who have children of their own (aka have a higher fecundity) will be more evolutionarily successful.

This actually leads to an interesting outcome, because while modern technology has not negated the effects of evolution, it certainly has changed the game as it has been played for all of history. Currently first world countries are facing stagnant birthrates (or in the case of Italy and Japan, shrinking populations), while developing countries have massively expanding populations. Even though a lot of kids die in poor countries each day, the population in poor countries has still risen much faster than rich countries. Thanks to modern agriculture being able to feed them and modern medicine being able to help even a small proportion of them, the developing world's share of the world population is increasingly larger.

So you want to ask where natural selection is taking us then? Well, since those people are making up more and more of the gene pool of the Earth, then perhaps one day we'll all look African, or Indian or Chinese (or perhaps a mix of the three). In an example closer to home, perhaps redneck trailer park America with it's 5 children each will eventually take up more of the population than the yuppie 1 or no child east/west coasts and we'll all end up looking like rednecks in a few generations or more.

But in the end we'll never really know. That's the beauty of natural selection, the fact that you never know. Whatever selection pressures that might arise in the future (changing birth rates, some kind of natural disaster, wars, famine, disease, etc) are completely unknown to us. The only thing that we do know is that whomever survives in the future will have been the ones who in a manner of speaking were the 'fittest'. Even the speed of evolution is completely unknown. While it appears right now that the human race is just so large and so mostly the same that evolution is not really happening or is at a standstill (because one birth here cancels out a death there), yet again natural selection cannot predict the speed at which things will change unless you have it a selection pressure that ensures such a change will happen. Natural selection will really only be able to explain why the genes of the future were shaped the way that they were because of what happened in the past.

---

As for the original question, because natural selection does not make any judgement calls before the fact (it only states that what survives survived because it had the highest fecundity AFTER THE FACT) it's impossible to say whether we could 'improve the species' by letting anarchy reign. Of course the theory of evolution does give us insight if we indeed have every variable measured. Certainly in a closed system where everything could be controlled, natural selection, much like a computer program running in a perfect digital world, could spout out an answer about exactly what would happen and how many generations it would take and so on. But we never know that much, and the most we can do is make vague guesses, guesses which are never quite useful in anything larger than small controlled experiments, and certainly not a very powerful predictor of the future of the entire human race. But then of course, what exactly IS 'betterment of the species' supposed to mean?

I come finally to the central crux of this post. What exactly does Send mean when he writes 'betterment of the species'? What value system is he using to gauge 'better', and why is he asking it? What makes one person 'better' than another? What makes one species 'better' than another? Natural selection will never tell you this answer, because it only explains to you the statistics of how genetics change from generation to generation. 'Better' is a philosophical question best left outside the realm of science, and with that I conclude.

[Tone]

trust me, modern technology will negate evolution in time. drugs and surgery are one thing, and generic engineering and nanotechology are an entirely other thing on a whole new level. darwianism will become obsolete as sure as some crazy guy from the year 1900 talked about the future of pharmacuticals and surgery. it wont be long before this discussion is useless.

Science News and Essays:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/

The Post-Darwinian Transition
http://www.post-darwinism.com/

[Subjugation]

You're completely wrong

I can think of three cases.

We have black people and white people. Having dark skin protects a woman's fetus from being killed by the sun. But having dark skin lowers the amount of vitamin D produced, which is important.

They have shown that the amount of genetic variation in an average population of humans, and the actual danger of being not of optimal skin color for your environment, means that if you took everybody from finland and moved them to the equator, in about 20,000 years they would have dark skin, and vice versa.

Another case is that Eskimos don't have cholesterol problems like most humans. This is because they almost nothing but Marine mammals which are extremely high in cholesterol and natural selection has made quick work of those who can't handle it.

Also, Blacks have higher incidences of sickle cell anemia which lowers oxygen efficiency, but provides protection against malaria. Africa has the largest exposure to malaria. This trait, which obviously would normally be selected against, is selected for when everybody else is dying of malaria.

Also to the original poster: you don't quite understand what evolution is about. We are not the final product of evolution, it does not exist to create something smart and what you think is physically fit. 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.

Also, thinking along these lines is what leads to things like Naziism. They were obsessed with this stuff. And modern-day Nazis still are. You can listen to Varg rant on about how women being in the workplace and not raising babies is making the population dumber as the smart women are working more. True or not, this is common discussion amongst Nazis.

The problem I have with your examples is those phenotypes you mentioned---skin color, cholesteral tolerance---have been the result of several hundred thousand---maybe millions----of years of selective pressures. However, in the modern world, Kolar is correct about natural selection having much less of an influence upon humans.

For example, take the first four laws of Darwinan evolution:

1. All species are capable of producing offspring at a faster rate than their resources increase. Since humans have learned to control their resources through agriculture and energy production, this very basic evolutionary law no longer applies to first world nations.

2. There is biological variation within all species. Of course, this still applies to humans in obvious ways---for example, some people have darker skin than others, some have different colored hair, some have greater resistance to different diseases...etc. This is a relatively uncontroversial statement.

3. In each generation, more offspring are produced than can survive relative to their avaliable resources, ---(again, this does not apply to humans living in 1st world communities, but does apply to humans living in severely impoverished 3rd world regions, like those in Africa, Asia and Latin America, for example)---therefore, there exists competition for resources---again, this does not apply to humans in 1st world societies, since people do not generally die of starvation anymore due to altrusitic programs like non-profits and welfare.

4. Individuals who possess favorable variations or traits (for example, athleticism, immunity to certain diseases, exceptional beauty...etc) have an advantage over those who don't have them---this sounds like it would apply, however, since ugly, sick, stupid, retarded, crippled and fat people still get laid and have plenty of kids, it actually doesn't apply. You might be thinking, "Wait! It's obvious that athletic or beautiful people have advantages over everyone else!" Well, we're talking about FITNESS, which means the ability to reproduce and create offspring that are also able to reproduce. And if you look around you, you'll see plenty of fat, ugly and stupid people who are able to fuck and have lots and lots of babies.

So, what have we learned?

Some evolutionary laws still apply to humans (like genetic variation, and inherited traits being passed down from generation to generation), but there are several traits that humans have learned to bypass due to their superior intellect and adaptability. Natural selection has much less of an influence on humans than they have on our primate cousins, or any other living things on this planet, for that matter. In another million years, this might change if our civilizations collapse. But right now, natural selection does not really apply to humans in the first world.

But I do agree with you about what you said to the original poster. Evolution does not seek to achieve an end, or a result. It's simply a force exerted---like gravity.

[Eric is God]

Looks like Epi finally found a use for that 3rd year elective he took back at UofT (I'm guessing) :grin: Interesting discussion though.

[AFPilot]

epi: how is my post wrong? Just because I didn't write a book on the subject? You said nothing in your post that contradicted anything in mine

jesus=terrorist: Humans can reduce the effects of some variables but there are so many it really does nothing to put humans above natural selection. Think of all the things your body does. Regulates fat/growth/water usage/deals with polutants/diseases/digests food/sleeps/thinks/runs/drives/sees

Think of just about any verb and not every body does it identically. There's variation on just about anything we do that can cause tiny advantages for some given our environment. We are probably being selected to deal with things people think put humans above selection, like air conditioning, cell phones, polution, mercury we have put in the water to insane levels, driving skill (lots of people die driving)

If anything, technology making life easier increases the genetic variation by being kinder to mutations/excesses/deficiencies that can then be selected for in our modern environment